Chapter 1 - The Anniversary Dress and the Green Light
I lit the first candle at seven.
I lit the last one at seven-twelve, because I had bought three dozen and I wanted them all burning at once, and it took me twelve minutes to get around the table without knocking anything over.
By eight o'clock the dining room looked like a church.
The oak table was set for two. The crystal had come out of the cabinet in the hall where it lived in tissue paper, and I had polished each glass with a linen cloth until I could see the candles doubled in them. In the center of the table sat the heavy cast-iron pot, its lid on, a dish towel folded over the handle so it would not burn the cloth.
Braised veal with roasted garlic.
Six hours. It takes six hours if you do it properly — three to brown it and build the sauce, three in a low oven with the lid on, and then the last twenty minutes with the lid off so the top goes dark and sticky and the whole apartment smells like a Sunday in a house that no longer exists.
Luca used to beg for it.
He would come into the kitchen when he was fourteen and lift the lid and get his hand smacked and lift it again anyway. He would stand there with the steam in his face and say, Clara, is it ready, is it ready, until Dominic dragged him out by the collar.
Luca has been dead for six years.
I made it anyway. I make it every year on the eleventh of October, and every year I set a third place, and every year Dominic pretends not to notice and then drinks too much and stands at the window with his back to the room.
This year I set two places.
Because this year the eleventh of October was also our anniversary — five years — and I had decided, somewhere around the fourth hour of cooking, that we were going to be a married couple for one night. Not a boss and his wife. Not a man and the woman who waited.
I put on the dress.
It had come from Milan in a box with tissue paper and a card in Dominic's handwriting that said For the eleventh. — D. Emerald silk, cut on the bias, with a low back and a hem that pooled. It was a dress for a restaurant with a coat check and a maître d' who knows your name. It was not a dress for a dining room and a cold pot and a phone that had not rung since eight-fourteen.
At eight-fourteen he texted me.
Tied up at the docks. Don't wait up. Happy anniversary, Mio.
I read it eleven times.
Then I poured myself a glass of wine I did not drink, and I sat down at the head of the table with my hands in my lap, and I waited.
The rain started around nine.
By ten it was coming at the windows sideways, and the sound of it against the glass was like someone throwing gravel, and the candles had begun to gutter and lean. I got up and walked the table and pinched out the ones that had drowned in their own wax and relit two, and then I sat back down.
At ten-fifteen I went into the bathroom and took the last pill.
I want to be precise about this, because afterward everyone wanted to know the timeline, and the timeline is the one thing I have never had any trouble remembering.
Ten-fifteen. One capsule, with water from the tap, standing over the sink in a dress that cost more than my first car. That was the last one in the bottle. Dr. Aris had given me fourteen and told me to take two a day, and I had been taking one a day instead, because I am the kind of person who stretches things.
It did not occur to me to be frightened. I want that on the record. I had a bottle of pills and a doctor and a diagnosis, and I thought I had a problem that had been solved.
By ten-forty the candles had burned down to stubs and the room had gone dim and gold, and the pot on the table had stopped steaming an hour before.
I moved to the sofa at some point. I do not remember deciding to.
The velvet was cold. I remember that — the velvet was cold and the dress was cold and I pulled my arms around myself because I could not get warm, and I thought, I'll just close my eyes for a minute, I'll hear the elevator.
The elevator is very quiet. That is the whole point of the elevator. It opens directly into the foyer and it makes no sound at all.
I dreamed about the bakery.
Not the way I usually dream about it. Usually I dream about the ovens and the smell and the way the front window fogged up in November. This time I dreamed about the counter, and about a woman standing on the other side of it with a cake box in her hands, and she was asking me a question I could not hear.
I woke up because my chest hurt.
Not the way it hurts now, when I stand up too fast. This was the other thing — the tightness, the band around the ribs, the ache that goes up into the jaw and makes you think about your teeth. I lay there on the sofa in the dark with my eyes open and I counted, the way Dr. Aris told me to count, and it was not right.
It was not right at all.
And then the front door opened.
I heard it — the heavy mahogany, the click of the lock, the particular way it settles into the frame — and I let my eyes close, because I did not want him to see me lying there like something left out in the rain, and because I had been waiting for five hours and I did not trust my voice.
His footsteps crossed the marble. There was a wet sound to them. Something hit the floor with a thud — his jacket, I found out later, dropped where he stood — and then the footsteps stopped.
I heard him breathe in.
I know what he saw. I have seen it since, in the photographs the police took. Three dozen candles burned down to nothing. A table set for two. A pot of cold veal. And his wife asleep on the sofa in an emerald dress, with her dark hair over her face and her arms wrapped around herself.
"Clara."
His voice was a rasp. He had been shouting at men all night; I could hear it in it.
I did not answer.
He crossed the room. I felt him kneel beside the sofa — felt the shift in the air, felt the heat of him, and he was soaking wet and he smelled like rain and iron and something sharp I did not like.
His hand touched my cheek.
"Clara. Your skin's like ice."
And then he put one arm under my shoulders and the other under my knees, and he lifted me.
I have been lifted by that man a hundred times. He does it the way he does everything, without asking, as if the question were an insult. My head went against his shoulder and my arm went around his neck and I felt the silk slide and gather.
And then his hand, under my knees, pressed against the side of my ribs.
He stopped.
He stopped so completely that for a moment I thought his heart had stopped.
Then he set me back down on the cushions, slowly, carefully, as though I were made of something that had already begun to crack, and he pulled the emerald silk down from my collarbone.
The candles were almost out. It was very dark.
But there was a small green light.
It blinked. Once. Twice.
May you like
Dominic Kretti looked at the three electrodes taped over his wife's heart, and the black box strapped beneath her ribs, and the wires running down under the silk.
The sound he made was not a word.
