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Wendy laughed, more loudly and longer than the joke warranted.
“You okay there, hon?” Thom said.
“Yeah, fine. I think I’m a little in shock about Alex. Like you said, we didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a huge part of our lives. It’s strange to think he’s just gone.”
“Yeah,” Thom said. “I’m going to go call Marcia. I’m surprised she hasn’t called here yet.”
Thom departed and Jason asked if he could stay in her office and read. She told him it would be fine, and he threw himself down on the throw rug and cracked the book open where his finger had been. Wendy turned on her computer and did a quick search to see if there was any news online about Alex’s death. There wasn’t, of course, not if he’d just been found that morning. Still, she read his Wikipedia entry, surprised he even had one, despite the fact that he’d written two well-received novels in the 1980s, one of which had been turned into a TV movie that starred Blythe Danner. She’d read some of that particular book years ago, just after they’d moved to New Essex. It was some typical shit about a college boy who gets a job with a shipbuilder on the coast of Maine for a summer and has a sexual awakening with a young widow in the town. She’d only read about a hundred pages and would have hurled the book into the trash, but she’d borrowed itfrom the library. What had really bothered her was that its hero, an obvious stand-in for Alex, was presented as this innocent, sensitive kid, when in reality there was maybe a chance Alex might have been innocent once but zero chance he’d ever been sensitive.
Her cellphone rang, the screen telling her that it was Janet Brodie, no doubt calling because she’d already heard the news. She flipped the phone open and said, “Hi, Janet.”
“Did you hear?”
“About Alex? Yes, Thom just got a call from Linda. When did you find out?”
“Linda called me as well, about twenty minutes ago.” Janet was an adjunct professor, but Wendy knew her from when they took a poetry workshop together, years and years ago. “How do you feel about it?”
“How do I feel about Alex drowning? I didn’t like him. You know that as well as anybody, but I’m not dancing a jig.” Jason looked up at her from his comic book at the word “jig.”
“I wonder how Tammy is doing.”
“Now,shemight actually be dancing a jig.”
“I hope she has an alibi.”
Wendy began to laugh, then stopped herself. “Who knows how she really feels. Maybe she actually loved him.” Tammy was Alex’s third wife, half his age, and according to everyone who knew them, they were pretty much separated despite the fact that they still shared a house together.
“Stranger things have happened,” Janet said.
“Look, I should go. Can we talk later?” Even though Jason was now back into his book, she knew he was listening to every word of their conversation.
“Of course.”
She closed the phone and sat at her desk for a moment. The rotating fan that was on low blew something into her eye and she rubbedat it. Jason, flipping a page, said, “How does someone drown if they know how to swim?”
“Oh,” Wendy said, swiveling toward him. “Lots of ways, I guess. He might have gotten a cramp or maybe something else happened to him, like a heart attack or a stroke. He was pretty old, you know.”
“How old was he?”
“In his early seventies, I think. I asked him once but he didn’t tell me. Vain, I guess.”
Jason was reading again, and Wendy found herself thinking about his question, about someone drowning who knew how to swim, amazed for a moment by her powers of compartmentalization. It was something she’d always been good at, putting all the different aspects of her life in boxes and keeping them separated. Different realms, she supposed. It was one of many things that distinguished her from Thom, who saw everything in his life as relating to everything else, one giant mural. She looked at her son, wondered if he was more like her or more like Thom. Right now, he seemed to be like her, asking questions about Alex’s death while fully immersed in his book. She could see the page he was looking at, all those little boxes, most of them filled with images of snow.White compartments, she said to herself, then remembered that they’d given Jason a biography of Hergé, Tintin’s creator, last Christmas. He’d read it in a day then told Wendy all about it. One of the things he’d told her was that Hergé had writtenTintinin Tibetbecause he’d been having persistent death dreams that involved snow and empty spaces.
The sound of the dryer’s alert from the second-floor laundry room pulled her out of her reverie. “Oh,” she said, getting up quickly to make her way to the second floor. Thom never heard the washer and the dryer, let alone helped load and unload, but still, she wanted to make sure she got there first. At the top of the stairs she nearly tripped over Samsa, who must have heard the beep as well and wasprowling around in the hopes that he could disrupt her folding by lying on top of a pile of clean clothes.
She swung the door open and pulled out the warm bundle, then carried it into the bedroom and laid it down on top of the made-up bed. Samsa leapt up to sniff the pile, but Wendy scooped him up and put him back down on the floor. It was mostly underwear in this load, Thom’s and Jason’s, but before she went about sorting those, she quickly pulled out the few items of hers that had been the real reason for running a wash this morning. There was a beach towel, a plain white one, that she put back in the drawer across from the washer and dryer, and then there was her one-piece black bathing suit that had been hung out to dry, which she returned to the same drawer she’d removed it from earlier that morning.
ii
Not knowing what else to do that afternoon, Thom had driven to the university to talk with Linda face-to-face. The English department was located in an old Victorian house on the outskirts of the campus. It was where most of the seminars and smaller classes were conducted, in high-ceilinged rooms with loud radiators and drafty windows. Thom parked on the street right in front of the building and wasn’t surprised to see Marcia Lever’s rusty Volvo parked there as well.
He could hear Marcia and Linda talking as he walked down the creaky hallway to the offices located at the back of the house. “Thom,” Marcia said as soon as he entered Linda’s office, then stood up and gave him an awkward hug.
“I still can’t believe it,” he said.
Linda, who had been in the department longer than any singleprofessor, said, “I won’t be surprised to hear it was his heart. You both know how he ate.”
“I thought he’d live forever, somehow,” Marcia said. “He seemed like the type.”