A shape at the edge of the trees. A man, I think, from the size. Dark clothes, dark cap, standing in the black of the treeline at the top of the service drive, completely still. I can't see a face. I can see the shape of shoulders. I can see that the shape is looking at me.
The relief that goes through me is animal. I slap the window. I slap the window with both hands. I screampleaseandpleaseandhereandhereand I don't know that I'm crying until I taste salt at the corner of my mouth through the wet cotton. I flatten my palms to the glass so he can see me. So he knows I'm alive. He is far. He is shadow. He is a shape at a treeline, and he is the only human being in my field of vision, and my whole body is reaching for him across the dark lawn the way a hand reaches for a railing going down stairs.
The shape doesn't move.
I wave. Both hands, across my body, the way a child on a beach waves at a boat. I pound the window again. I press my face to the glass and I can feel the heat coming off it now, coming through it, the glass a thing that used to be cool and has started to become a hot thing slowly.
The shape watches.
The shape watches me. Count of four, five, six. The shape turns a little, as if looking toward the east wing, then turns back, then watches me again, and then is gone. Not moving away. Gone. Stepped back into the trees in one motion so complete that I cannot tell if I imagined it.
I stop screaming.
I put my forehead against the glass. The glass is warm. I have never felt a window this warm in my life. Behind me in the house something falls. Something large. A chandelier, maybe. A beam.The sound comes up through the floor and into my knees and I put my hand on the wall to keep standing.
He saw me.
He saw me and he left.
I have spent eleven years married to a man who does things for reasons I'm not allowed to ask about and I know the shape of men who do things for reasons you are not allowed to ask about, and the shape I just saw is that shape, and the shape is gone.
I stand at the window and I understand.
Daniel has not been having a good year. I have not been allowed to know why, but the phone calls at three in the morning and the closed door of his office and the new private security and the way he went quiet every time the attorney general came up on the evening news, these are things I was not allowed to know and I knew anyway. I have been the woman in the next room for eleven years and the woman in the next room learns by osmosis. Someone is angry with Daniel. Someone has been angry with Daniel. And tonight someone decided the anger was going to be resolved.
I was not on the list.
I was not on the list and here I am, in the wing of the house that wasn't supposed to be used, and the man at the treeline has looked at me and seen me and turned around and gone back into the dark because I was not on his list and he does not improvise.
I slide my back down the wall. The wool throw from the bed is on the floor beside me and I pull it up over my shoulders even though I am not cold, because the throw is the last thing in this house that my mother gave me, the last thing in this house that smells like a person and not like lemon polish and money, and I want it on me when it happens. The smoke is a ceiling now. It's a ceiling coming down. I watch it come down and I find that I am very still under it.
The thought is very clear. It stands up in me the way cold stands up.
I am collateral.
My knees give out and I hit the rug and the wet towel peels back from my mouth and I cough. Smoke is in the room now, a grey layer rolling along the ceiling and starting to come down. I pull the towel up again. I stay low, the way a child learns in grade school.Get low. Stay low. Cover your face.I crawl to the window. I sit under the window with my back to the wall.
Something in the hallway shifts. The door thuds the way wood thuds when the frame around it has started to warp. I can hear the fire now. It isn't a roar. It's a steady, hungry exhale, the sound of a thing that is eating the house one timber at a time and is patient about it.
I look at my hands. The left one is bleeding. I didn't notice. I hit the window hard enough to split the skin across the outside of my palm and I am bleeding in a thin red line down my wrist onto the white silk of my nightgown. I watch the red and I watch my wrist and I think about how much of me there is and how little is going to be left. I think about the fact that nobody who loves me knows where I am, and then I correct the thought, because nobody who loves me exists.
Nobody who loves me exists.
My mother has been dead for nine years. My father lives on Long Island with a woman he cannot bring himself to marry and he calls me twice a year. I have two friends who are not Daniel's friends and one of them is in London and the other one stopped returning my calls in May because she was, I think, tired of the way I sounded on the phone. My husband is probably dead already and he has never loved me. He loved the idea of me. He loved how I look in an evening gown.
Not even the staff are in the building. The security shift goes home at midnight and the dogs are never allowed inside. There is nobody coming.
I put my head down on my knees and I wait.
The smoke gets lower. The house keeps eating itself. Somewhere down the west hall a door latch gives and I hear the hollow thump of something heavy falling through into a room it shouldn't be in. A picture frame maybe. A section of ceiling. I don't know this house by sound. I have lived in it for eleven years and I have never listened to its bones.
I think about all the rooms I'll never be in again. The primary suite I stopped sleeping in. The rose garden Daniel had installed for me the first summer and didn't let me choose the plants for. The kitchen where I made scrambled eggs twice in a decade because there was always someone paid to do it. The study with Daniel's keys in a drawer. I think that the room I'm going to die in is the room I chose, that I made small and plain and mine, and there is a small cold satisfaction in this that I want to feel something about and can't quite reach.
I sit under the useless window in a wet towel and a bloodied nightgown and I wait to die, and I am not afraid of it the way I thought I would be, and that is the strangest thing I know about myself, that at the end of thirty-six years the main feeling I have is surprise. Surprise that this is it. After all the times I might have considered killing myself, in the end I’m surprised that it's a stranger's choice, and not mine, that's going to end me.
Surprise, also, that I am relieved that someone else has done it for me.
I admit that to myself in the dark of the room with the smoke coming down and the fire finding the frame of the door, and once I admit it I cannot unadmit it, and it is the last honest thing I will ever think in this house. I am relieved. I am relieved to be done. I am relieved to not walk down a staircase in a beautifuldress with Daniel's hand on the small of my back one more time. I am relieved to not sit at the foot of his table one more time. I am relieved to not have my name said the way he says it, like a password he'd rather forget.
