Chapter 46

Saoirse’s body smashes into the ground. The world goes white. A second later, Emmit is on top of her, pinning her with his thighs and holding her down with his hands. His fingers dig into the flesh of her underarms, and she’s surprised to find that she can feel more pain, more torture, in this world of ceaseless tortures and myriad agonies.

Her flashlight lies on the floor where she dropped it. She and Emmit are spotlighted in its beam like actors in a play, poised to deliver their closing lines. Emmit’s face is a twisted mix of rage and relief. He’s breathing as heavily as she is. So heavily, in fact, it takes Saoirse a moment to realize his incoherent rambling has morphed into laughter.

“Every time,” Emmit says, mouth jumping in a series of manic half smiles. “Every time I think you have nothing left, you give me more. You give me this .”

Saoirse squirms beneath him, succeeding in moving her arms several inches closer to the lower half of her body. A thought occurs to her: How many hours had they spent in this position, him inside her, whispering into her ear, telling her how similar they were, how much he loved her? She wants to go back in time, take every moment of it back. She wants to make him feel her pain. She wants to kill him.

“Thank you,” Emmit says.

Saoirse stares up at him, waiting.

“This last mad dash. Your refusal to give up. Your belief that you were going to make it. This was better than my pit-and-the-pendulum scheme. Now, when I kill you—and I do have to kill you, I hope you know that—I can be certain that I took everything. Every emotion. Every dream. Though—”

He pauses and runs the back of his hand down her cheek. Saoirse recoils and tries to turn away. Her arms move, like wings on a downswing, closer to her body a few more inches.

“I’d still like to carve you up a bit,” he continues. “For my writing. For the details that will stay with me, that will inspire me, for years to come.” He releases her arms and wraps his hands around her throat. “But I can do that after you’re dead. Goodbye, Saoirse. My Helen.”

“Wait,” Saoirse says, and Emmit looks at her pityingly. “I have to know. Why me? Lucretia, Mia, they were getting into Sarah’s house regularly for their séances. You had to have noticed. You had to have seen them. Or any of the dozens of women writers you mentored at Brown. Surely one of them could have been convinced to move into 88 Benefit Street, unoccupied and available to rent as it was the last five years. So, why me, Emmit? Why did you choose me?”

A tuft of dark hair falls over one eye. Emmit blinks, considering her, considering the question. Then he smiles. A massive, full-faced smile. “It’s simple,” he says. “Because despite your beautiful mind, your uniqueness, your intelligence, you had one unalterable factor I couldn’t shy away from. Something that would soften you to me, no matter your strength. No matter what.”

“Oh?” she says, urging him to keep talking, dropping her arms to her sides slowly, ever so slowly, every cell in her body at attention, praying her movements go unnoticed. “What factor was that?”

“Death,” he says simply. “The death of your husband. It changed you. Weakened you. Made you into a different species from any other woman I’ve ever met. Ever seen. If the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world, then the torture of her soul is the second. You were like a tall, thorn-choked, dew-dazzled black rose in a sea of identical pale-pink ones. I knew this the night I first saw you, and it was confirmed for me during our first conversation at the coffeehouse.”

“I see,” she says. “And I see that you have to kill me. But before you do, I’d like to tell you a story.”

Emmit scoffs but straightens slightly, his hands loosening around her throat. “A story?”

“One you’ve heard before. But only partly. You were missing the beginning. And the end. And, well, I had to change some parts in the middle too.” She cocks her head. “It’s the writer’s right, you know. Taking a little artistic liberation.”

Emmit looks at her as if she’s surprised him yet again, as if he can’t quite believe she’s daring to speak when he’s promised to silence her forever. He shrugs. “Okay. Tell me the real version of your story.”

Saoirse closes her eyes. If this doesn’t go the way she hopes, it’ll be the last story she ever tells.

“Once,” she begins, “there was a young woman who met a young man in Providence. They fell in love, and they were married. Things were good until they weren’t. Things were good until the woman wouldn’t fall in line. It wasn’t just that she wanted a career, a voice, of her own. He’d allow her that. He was educated, after all, a self-proclaimed feminist. No, it’s that she wanted him to care about her career, her voice, as much as she did his. She wanted him to care about— to see —her as a person, the way she, of course, saw him.

“Years passed, and the relationship became strained. The woman figured they were heading for divorce. But when she brought it up, the husband looked at her like she was mad. He said he thought they were ready to have a baby. He knew about her condition. The diagnosis that made becoming pregnant as risky as cliff jumping or cave diving. But the husband wouldn’t let it go. He dragged her to every cardiologist in New Jersey and half of New York, as well as every obstetrician, including his best friend, Dr. Aidan Vesper. Hoping to get a different answer. A different probability. Some number, a set of odds, that would make her feel comfortable enough to move forward. That would make her change her mind.

“At first, the woman attended the appointments. She listened as every doctor said the same thing: ‘It’s feasible, but dicey. With a diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, delivering a healthy baby while remaining safe is a study in risk.’ Eventually, the woman hit her breaking point. She told the husband the matter was closed. She would not attend another appointment, nor entertain any further conversations about getting pregnant. Maybe, she told him, if their relationship recovered from the strain it’d been under, they could look into adoption. But for the time being, he’d have to get used to the idea of being childless.

“That night, the husband acted like he accepted her decision. He bought a bottle of champagne and cooked dinner. He told her he wanted them to recover, that they were celebrating the next chapter, childless or not. She hadn’t realized how much stress she’d been under, and she drank way more champagne than she’d normally allow herself. She woke up later to the husband on top of her. Finishing inside of her. If she wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, he was going to take it. He made that perfectly clear.

“Why did the woman stay? Why didn’t she tell someone what was going on? She was depressed, for one. She had long since stopped writing. And every day, the husband filled her head with the most horrible sentiments. She was evil. Debased. The very opposite of a woman. She was damaged goods, with her defective heart and her defective brain. That her mind was only as good as the stories it could no longer produce, her body as good as the child it couldn’t create.

“He came into her bed for two years. Not every night. Not every week. But every month, unless he was particularly busy at work. The woman was drowning, dying, until, on a whim, she started seeing a new psychiatrist. With the help of this doctor—and an adjustment to her antidepressant, as well as birth control prescribed for hormone regulation that would help her mental state—the woman started feeling better. The husband’s words stopped seeming like gospel. And then, one weekend, she went to her mother’s home in Connecticut to regroup, planning to demand a divorce when she returned to her husband on Sunday.”

Saoirse pauses, taking stock of Emmit’s expression, the placement of his body on top of hers. He’s engrossed in the story, sitting back now, not even trying to hold her upper body in place. She slides her right hand down to her thigh and slips her pointer and middle fingers into her pocket. Careful to keep every other muscle still, she pinches her fingers around the stopper of the syringe.

“She wasn’t supposed to return until Sunday,” Saoirse continues, “but after speaking with her mother, after committing to her plan, she hadn’t wanted to wait.” She looks hard into Emmit’s eyes. “The woman came home Thursday evening. Not Sunday. Thursday. Around eleven p.m. Three days earlier than planned.

“I drove the three and a half hours back to Cedar Grove from Connecticut without stopping,” Saoirse says, switching from third to first person unexpectedly, wanting Emmit to hear the I ’s and me ’s. “But when I got home, I almost lost my nerve. Rather than leave my suitcase and purse in the car, so that I could take off to a hotel after I told him, I brought them inside, terrified of what I was about to do. The walkway was ice-strewn and muddy. Snow clung to patches of grass around the yard. The key to the front door was cold in my hand. I took a final, deep breath and pushed open the door. The house was silent.

“I dropped my bag in the foyer and looked to the top of the stairs, thinking, I could go up right now and get into bed. Wait until tomorrow to tell him I’m leaving. Instead, I started down the hallway. Toward Jonathan’s office.

“The door was closed, and the light that seeped from the cracks was molten amber. If he was at his desk, he’d be accompanied by a rocks glass of bourbon. He’d be volatile. I was walking into a trap. Still, I’d come too far to turn back now.

“The room smelled so strongly of whiskey it made me dizzy. Jonathan sat at his massive desk with his back to me. I cleared my throat, but he didn’t turn. Intent on dissipating the sickly glow in the room, I moved toward the floor lamp, but my hand smacked against the shade, sending it wobbling. With excruciating slowness, Jonathan raised his head and turned, until he was looking right at me. ‘You’ve come to tell me you’re leaving, haven’t you?’ he asked. I closed my eyes.

“When I opened them, the office felt different. Warmer. No longer dangerous and silent but charged. Something waited for me. Something more than a house haunted with the sound of floorboards creaking beneath my husband’s footsteps, on his way to me in the night. The warmth was the idea of my freedom. Of getting my life back. ‘Yes. I want a divorce,’ I said.

“He grabbed me in one lightning-fast movement, one hand wrapping around my throat, fingers not yet squeezing but the pressure heavy, the pads of his fingers pressing into the cords at the side of my neck. With the other hand, he reached for his bourbon, brought the glass to his mouth, and drained it. ‘Why would I give you something you want when you won’t give me what I want?’ A prescription bottle peeked out from the pocket of his button-up shirt. I couldn’t see the label, but I knew it was one of his ‘nighttime meds’: Ambien, perhaps. Or Valium. ‘I’m not asking for something outlandish or unreasonable,’ he continued. ‘You’re my wife. I want a child. Our purpose for being here becomes diluted if we cannot pass on our possessions, our wealth, our genes. It’s not a difficult concept.’

“His eyes were bleary, despite the laser-sharp focus of his words. ‘It’s not that you can’t give me what I want. That, I could understand. If you were physically unable to conceive, I’d have a different set of decisions to make. Maybe I’d leave you for a woman who could have children. Maybe I wouldn’t. But that’s not the situation we are in here, is it? It’s that you’re a selfish’—he poked me in the sternum—‘brutish, difficult woman who refuses to give me what I want just because she thinks she can. And therefore, I will take—’

“He faltered. The expression on his face became bewildered, as if he’d belched among dinner company and was not quite sure how it had happened. ‘I will take what is—’ he tried to continue, but something was happening. He put a hand to his chest, and his mouth twisted. I knew that gesture. Knew that expression. But I didn’t dare believe—

“He fell to his knees, clutched his chest, and grunted, then looked at me, wincing with pain. He managed to get out a single word. His voice was hoarse, like something that’d been buried for the darkest, coldest, and longest of the seasons.

“‘ . . . miiiiine,’ he said.”