About an hour later, my husband came into our room without knocking.
“Marianne, what is wrong with you?” he asked. The question was not rhetorical. I was silent.
“What kind of a person says something like that?” He seemed on the verge of tears even as he towered over me.
I could not respond. I could not tell him what Ted had done to me, even though it might make him forgive me. But when I looked at his face, I did not see even a scrap of love or affection. He was looking at me like he was trying to figure out exactly how badly he’d fucked up his life for my sake, and how he was going to fix it. He looked like he wanted me dead.
“I’m going for a walk” was all I said. I put on my boots and a coat that was not nearly warm enough and went into the woods. The melting snow made it muddy, but it was still beautiful, a clean blanket placed over the world. So this is why people live up here, I thought.
When I got to the river, I saw a girl, her flesh all white and blue, half-covered in dirt and leaves. I knew immediately that she was dead, but I wasn’t sure if she was real or not. I knelt beside her and took off my glove to touch her face. Then I ran back to my house to call the police.
When I got there, both my husband’s and Ted’s cars were gone. The heat was off. I was shaking so badly it was hard to dial the numbers. By the time the police arrived—two men in uniform—I had not calmed down. Speaking felt as painful and unnatural as pulling out my own teeth. They asked if I could lead them to the body. I said I would try. As they followed me through the woods, I wondered if they thought I was insane. When we reached her, I felt a twinge of triumph. Then I vomited all over one of the officers.
It wasn’t until weeks later, when I was living with my mother, that I learned who it was. She was a college girl named Sara who had been killed by her boyfriend. I was afraid that I would be called to testify, that I would have to tell them how I found her.
If I had, I might have told them: What I felt when I saw that frozen face was not fear or disgust. It was relief. It lasted only a moment, but it was so profound that it bordered on joy.
Katherine
There were parts of Florida that really did look like heaven—Katherine had seen them on the drive from the airport. Paradise Lake Recovery Center looked more like Eden, after God and Man and the more discerning animals had deserted it. The whole property was overgrown with banyan trees—which were also known as strangler trees, according to her cabinmate Rachelle. Katherine found this both appropriate and disturbing. Though the staff tried to maintain suburban-style lawns around each of the cabins and the main buildings, the grass was always patchy and muddy, with strange weeds growing defiantly around the edges.
Paradise Lake’s website had promised a “camp-like” atmosphere, which Katherine did not consider very appealing. She had always hated summer camp. There were six female and five male cabins, each with four residents at a time. Katherine had never been inside the male cabins, as per the strict guidelines, but she doubted that they looked much different. Vaguely rustic, but mercifully clean, with white walls and Ikea furniture. Her cabin included framed paintings of the ocean and decorative pillows embroidered with the serenity prayer. LIVE LAUGH LOVE! commanded a wrought-iron wall decal. Katherine was not the violent type, but she was a little surprised that no one else had ever tried to bludgeon someone with it, considering that it was attached to the wall with nothing but a flimsy hook. It remained there during her entire four-month stay. Even with the lights off, she could still see its vague outline, taunting her.
When she arrived, Katherine was twenty-eight, which was young for an alcoholic. I’m practically a prodigy, she told her parents over the phone. They didn’t laugh. Katherine hated that she came from such humorless people. When she repeated the same line to Blake, he called her the Mozart of Substance Abuse.
If she’d met Blake at a party, or a bar, Katherine would have liked him a lot. It helped that he was movie-star handsome, the kind of handsome that shifted the air in the room when he walked in. Because she met him in rehab, where they weren’t allowed to touch, she loved him right away.
It was weird, the people you ended up liking at a place like that. One of Katherine’s favorites was a fat, red-haired former frat boy named Jimmy, who was in rehab instead of prison after getting drunk and killing a woman with his car. He was from a wealthy family, and the sentencing had caused a huge outrage in the Georgia town where it happened. There was even a petition to oust the judge in the case. Under different circumstances, Katherine probably would have signed it. Of course Jimmy deserved to go to jail. But he was friendly, and told great jokes at the expense of the therapists, and so Katherine was glad he hadn’t.
“You are not a good person.” That’s one of the first things Katherine’s primary therapist, Arthur, had told her. “Once you get over that, you might figure out how to be functional.”
Arthur was sixty years old, but looked older. He looked like he had died of old age and been resurrected for the sole purpose of yelling at addicts. Of everyone at Paradise Lake, Katherine hated him the most, despite plenty of competition. He was a dickhead, and he made her cry during almost every session. He talked to her like she was the worst person in the world, like she had drowned babies in a bathtub or set a nursing home on fire.
She preferred Lucy, who ran her morning group, and who started and ended each meeting with a prayer, even though Paradise Lake was technically a secular treatment center. Lucy had frizzy hair and huge eyes that made her look like she had recently been electrocuted. She rarely gave advice, just listened intently, and occasionally shushed a person who was interrupting someone else’s story. Katherine always left morning group a bit calmer than before, ready to make a collage or go for a nature walk or whatever other preschool-level activity would be required of her that day.
Arthur, however, was known for getting results. At least two former residents had named kids after him. Katherine imagined little Arthurs running around all over the country, shoelaces untied, screaming motivational quotes on the playground.
Some of the people at Paradise Lake were sort of glamorous. There was even a famous country singer, but she left a couple of days after Katherine arrived. One girl around Katherine’s age was an heiress who as a child watched her father kill her mother. He smashed the mother’s head in with the claw end of a hammer. Daddy painted her red, she told the police. Her name was Carmen, and she was exactly as fucked up as Katherine would have expected, but she was also kind of a bitch, always muttering mean things under her breath during group and refusing to share her cigarettes.
Blake was, relatively speaking, pretty similar to Katherine. He had also grown up in suburbia—she in Oregon, he in Maine. He liked to read, and they traded books sometimes. He lent her books by Dostoyevsky and Céline and many other authors Katherine had pretended to read in college. In return, she lent him a biography of Marie-Antoinette, which she enjoyed even though it gave her weird dreams about having her head cut off.
He called her Katie, which she found endearing. Even as a kid, she’d always been a Katherine, sometimes a Kat. He must have thought that it suited her.
Once, when he found her crying after an exhausting session with Arthur, he told her: “If I looked like you, I’d never be sad.”