and Trista was the no-nonsense person, the base of everything.
That was certainly true, he reflected as he gathered up the plates. Trista was the one that both he and Martine consulted before they made a move, the reliable anchor in their lives. Which was probably why she’d been promoted so quickly to her position at WCIC–TV; her crisp but serious reporting of the news gave it weight and meaning for the thousands of viewers who regularly tuned in.
Trista took cut-glass bowls from the cabinet, and he scooped the ice cream. They sat at the kitchen counter to eat it.
“You’ll be glad to have Martine back home,” Trista said as she concentrated on scraping chocolate chips off the side of her dish.
What could he reply but, “Of course,” but he averted his face so that Trista wouldn’t read anything into his expression.
“I’ll change the bed linens tomorrow, and—”
“Don’t bother,” he interrupted much too sharply. “Esmelda will do it.”
“I’ll leave a casserole in the freezer for you. Martine won’t want to cook once she gets home. Did you like the chicken tetrazzini I made at the cottage last summer?”
“The best. Better than your mom’s chicken and noodles.”
“That’s saying quite a lot,” Trista offered with a smile. She got up and rinsed her bowl off in the sink. “I believe I’ll turn in early,” she said, but he couldn’t help wishing she’d stay in the kitchen and talk awhile. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for human companionship.
“Hey,” he said. “How about a walk around the block?”
Trista shook her head. “Not tonight,” she replied offhandedly. “Catch you in the morning.” She touched his shoulder briefly before retreating down the hall and closing the guest-room door.
Words sprang unbidden to his mind: Such a shame that Trista has stayed single so long. She’d make a fine wife, a good mother. He entertained the fleeting notion that it might be partly his fault that she’d never married, his and Martine’s, but he didn’t linger on it. There was no point in allowing even more regrets to enter his consciousness; no sense in twisting this situation into something it wasn’t.
Still, he minded that Trista couldn’t stay for a few more days. On the other hand, if she were here, neither he nor Martine would be likely to initiate a discussion of the intimate details of their marriage. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out if that would be good or bad.
He stared down at the melting ice cream in his dish. For a moment, it seemed like a metaphor for his life at present. Melting away, becoming something he didn’t recognize anymore.
In the morning, he expected Trista to show up in the kitchen for breakfast and intended to suggest running together before she headed for the hospital. But she’d already left in Martine’s car, so he gulped two cups of high-octane coffee, scribbled a note saying he was sorry he’d missed her and went to work.
He only saw Trista briefly on Sunday morning before she left for the airport. He would have driven her himself, but she’d already summoned a cab before he woke up. She seemed subdued, worried, but this scarcely registered with him. All his thoughts were focused on springing Martine from the hospital.
The night before, Martine had quizzed him thoroughly on the phone about what time he’d be there to pick her up. She’d remained all too quiet on his previous visits, barely replying when he spoke to her, but now he entertained the tentative hope that Martine was willing to give their marriage another chance. Maybe a couple of weeks at Sweetwater Cottage, just the two of them, would smooth things over.
As soon as Trista’s taxi disappeared around the corner, Rick started for the hospital. He bought a bouquet of flowers from a roadside vendor, and when he reached Martine’s floor at the hospital, he bounded off the elevator, smiling at the nurses and aides at the nurses’ station. Martine’s room was only a couple of doors down the hall, and he rounded the corner prepared to kiss her hello.
The bed was empty.
A cold hand clenched his heart. Of course he thought the worst. Visions of emergencies straight from TV dramas sprang to mind, all punctuated by doctors running down the hall, their lab coats flying, and someone yelling, “Stat! Hurry, she’s coding!”
He rushed back to the nurses’ station, losing a couple of daisies in the process. The flowers skidded across the highly polished tile floor as they scattered. Oblivious to his panic, one of the aides, a young girl named Kitty, glanced up from her coffee and doughnut. A scrim of powdered sugar trailed unheeded across her upper lip.
“Where’s my wife? Is she all right?”
“Yes, Mr. McCulloch, she checked out about an hour ago.”
This stopped him in his tracks. “She did?” He was incredulous. They’d discussed on the phone last night how he would be there to pick her up as soon as Trista left. He’d told Martine jokingly that he’d drive her directly to Star-bucks for a chai tea latte because she claimed that she was going through withdrawal; she usually treated herself to one every day.
“A man came to get her.” Kitty took another bite of her doughnut.
“A man—?” For one horrifying moment, a new picture of Padrón forcing Martine out of the hospital at gunpoint flashed through his mind. But Padrón was dead.
As this irrational vision faded, one of the nurses sitting behind the counter extended her hand, and in it was a white envelope. His name was scribbled on the front. It was Martine’s handwriting, distinctive and easily recognizable by its wide lower loops.
“Mrs. McCulloch left this for you,” she said.
He accepted the envelope, slitted it open and walked slowly to the waiting area in a nearby alcove, where he sank onto one of the chairs to read the message.
Rick,
I’m sorry, but I can’t go home with you. Steve is taking me to his apartment for now, and I’ll send someone to our house to get my things as soon as I can. I want out of the marriage, and we’ll have to talk about it. I can’t face hashing things over now. I need to heal first, and then I’ll be in touch.
Martine
Steve Lifkin, an attorney in the law office where Martine worked as a paralegal, was the guy who had written Martine those love notes. The letters had left no doubt in Rick’s mind that Martine and Steve enjoyed an intimate, ongoing relationship of almost a year.
He glanced up when Kitty passed by. “Mr. McCulloch? Are you all right? You’re so pale.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said tonelessly. He stood, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, but shoved it back in again. His first instinct was to call Martine and ask her what the hell she was doing. If she was with Steve, though, she wouldn’t talk to him anyway. He wondered how she could have gone from joking about chai tea lattes last night to moving in with Steve today. He wondered what he was going to do with himself for the rest of his life, and he wondered why he cared.
In the days that followed, Martine’s belongings disappeared mysteriously, piece by piece, from their Kendall home, as well as furniture that she’d brought into the marriage. The grandfather clock
