be home tonight?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head. “He’s in Washington.”
“My place?” Ben asks even more quietly. “In an hour?”
I hesitate, nodding toward the coroner’s van, into which Marti is being loaded now. “Don’t you have work to do?”
“The sheriff’s in charge out here. And there’ll be a countywide task force.” He looks at his watch. “I have a couple of hours.”
Once, I would have gone with Ben out of reckless abandon, even revenge. What’s sauce for the goose. I was still angry with Jeffrey then. Now my husband and I barely talk. We live under the same roof out of expediency, pretending at marriage while leading vastly separate lives.
My only thought at the moment, therefore, is to feel Ben’s arms around me. To slip between his cool, familiar sheets and forget.
Thank God for Ben, the safe one, I think. In all the madness of Jeffrey’s unfaithfulness, Ben has been here, a good friend, steadfast as the day is long. He’s the one I can trust not to betray me. Ever.
“I want to see her again,” I say, my voice thick with sorrow. “I never really said goodbye.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged.” Ben stands behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, the two of us staring out his living-room window at the leaden sea.
“Where is she now?”
“She’ll be at the coroner’s office for a while,” he says. “An autopsy, you know.”
I shiver. The coroner will take his bloody knives and saws and cut into my friend. He will break her breastbone to get at her heart and carve out her stomach to get—
“Can I see her before they do all that?”
“I’ll check, okay?”
He lifts my hair, planting a light kiss on the back of my neck before going to the telephone in the kitchen. Across the breakfast bar I see him pace as he talks, the long cord wrapping around his slightly thickening waist. Though Ben is tall, and was gangly as a teenager, his fortieth year has found him with what most charitably might be called love handles. I’ve always liked them; they give me a secure feeling, something to hold on to when the world goes topsy-turvy all around.
I can hear the kinds of grunts he usually makes when talking with others in law enforcement. Right, yeah, sure, fine. They seem to have their own language, an abbreviated one for talking on police radios that carries over into everyday life.
Coming back, he says, “Tonight, around ten. They should have her…she should be all right for you to see her by then.”
He is trying to be careful, but I know what he means: my friend won’t be in pieces. At least, she won’t look that way.
“Hey, hey,” he says softly, pulling me into his arms. “It’ll be all right. I’ll go with you.”
Gratefully, I put my arms around his neck and stand on tiptoe to kiss him. One hand pulls me toward him while another pushes my blouse aside and covers my breast, squeezing it so hard I can almost feel pain. I am instantly aroused, everything in me screaming to know that I, at least, still live and breathe.
After that, he needn’t do a thing. I am all over him, my passion swinging from tender to nearly vicious, and he allows me that, knowing the anger and hopelessness that sit in my heart, the utter futility and rage.
Spent, we lie naked side by side in Ben’s king-size bed. A tall, wide window frames a Carmel Highlands scene that has been painted by ninety percent of the artists in town: charcoal cliffs, emerald pines and hillsides dotted with seven-figure homes. Beyond them lies a cerulean sea with wild waves crashing.
Ben’s home is simple, a bachelor’s hideaway. The view, however, can take one’s breath away.
Ben sighs and stretches. “That was quite a work-out, lady.”
“You know it.”
“Feeling better?” He pulls me to him.
“Well, I haven’t got much energy left for anger.” A cloud crosses my mind. “Not right now, anyway.”
He turns on his side to face me. “You’re thinking of tonight. You don’t have to do it, you know.”
“See her? Yes, I do.”
“What can it accomplish?”
“I can say goodbye.”
“I thought you did that out on the hill.”
“It’s not the same.”
He takes my hand, which lies on the pillow between us. “You want to talk about it?”
I start to shake my head, then pause. If there were ever anyone I could tell about Marti, it would be Ben. And I need to get it out, all those old memories, the pictures of those days that have been surging through my mind since I saw her hanging there.
“It started out as one of those silly schoolgirl crushes,” I say, licking my bone-dry lips. “Marti and I went to the same high school, Mary Star of the Sea in Santa Rosa. It was an all-girl school, and neither one of us was self-confident enough to flirt with boys. So when they came over from St. John’s, say, for sports events or dances, we both sort of stayed in the background while the other girls fell all over them.
“Marti was into journalism, and so was I. We worked on the school newspaper together and became friends. Marti was the brighter star, however. She was the one who championed all the causes, from ending global war to preserving the planet. She wrote articles for the paper, gave speeches and marched for peace. I pretty much tagged along behind.”
I pause. How to tell the rest of it? Even to me it isn’t clear how everything happened, right to this day. “In our senior year,” I continue, “we talked about what we wanted to do with our lives. The nuns were pushing us to become nuns, of course—they always did in the Catholic schools. But it wasn’t till our senior year that either of us considered it seriously. We knew we wanted to give our lives to a larger cause, so to speak. We just didn’t know what.”
Licking my lips again, I swallow against the bile rising in my throat, the morning’s breakfast of scrambled eggs tasting like copper now. “The thing is, neither of us felt inspired by what was going on in the world. The eighties were almost upon us, and we could see the writing on the wall. The self-indulgence, the materialism. And there was…oh, I don’t know, a coldness about the world. It was getting too big, and it seemed that people had stopped caring about people. We felt—foolishly, of course—that everything that was ever going to happen had already come and gone. The two big wars, Vietnam, the hippie era. More than anything, we figured the world was going to pot, no pun intended, and we didn’t want to be part of it.”
I brush my hair back from my forehead, which is still damp from the exertion of making love. “So we were running away, I guess, more than anything else. And there was one nun—Sister Helen—who kept urging us to enter the order she was in. She had us cleaning out votive candles in the school chapel and pressing altar cloths. You name it, we got caught up in it. ‘Serving the Lord’ came to look so much better than
