“Locked in a safe in the basement,” she said. “Right below the studio. Safe’s as big as you. I’ve seen it myself.” Halley gathered her hair in her hands and twisted it like a rag being wrung. “Now why would Bertie need a giant safe like that? I think something else is in there.”
“Bodies?” I had asked.
“Secrets,” she said.
Now the music in the chapel shifted to more formal, churchy sounds. The ceremony was beginning, and Bertie still hadn’t arrived. By now, I knew she wouldn’t. Everyone in the room grew quiet. Charlie sat in the front pew, joined on either side by his secretary and Mr. Longworth, the family lawyer. At seventy-six, Charlie still had a full head of hair, mostly gray, but with enough dark patches I could still remember what he looked like when I first met him.
Charlie didn’t deliver a eulogy. What would he have said? That Halley was an addict? That she took her own life? Halley didn’t have many obituary-worthy accomplishments—she never went to college or married or had children, though she had been arrested three times, and all three times Charlie was able to get the charges dropped. That was something. The minister offered vague and clichéd condolences.She’s free from suffering.
Maybe good things can come from suffering. The whole point oflife isn’t to escape it but to use it, to turn it into something productive. There’s a whole school of acting devoted to this. Buddhism, too.
After the service, Wyatt kissed my forehead and left. He promised he’d stop by after work. Every time we got together, he wanted to have sex, and I don’t know why I was so agreeable, because afterward he left, and I felt worse.
There’d be no burial. In her note, Halley had requested her ashes be scattered in the French countryside. She said that’s where she felt most at peace in her life, most herself, though she’d only been there twice. In the basement lobby, they’d set out a punch bowl and cookies on a banquet table. The floor was scuffed and the particleboard ceiling hung low, and I ate and drank my sadness until my tongue stung in punishment from all the sugar.
More sugar, I’d tell my mom again, if I could.
I gathered my coat from the rack, and Mr. Longworth spotted me from across the room. He held up a finger, motioning for me to wait.
“I was hoping to catch you,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Recently, Mr. Longworth had contacted me at the behest of Charlie about my marriage. He’d wanted to discuss marital property and a Case Management Plan. When I explained Wyatt and I were just taking a break, he warned me I needed to get out in front of it.
Now Mr. Longworth was wearing a suit with a pink handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He had a Tom Selleck mustache but not a Tom Selleck face. All lawyers look a little smug, and he was no exception. He jangled his keys. “Halley left something for you.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She had only three hundred and fifty dollars in her bank account though, so don’t expect to be retiring anytime soon.” He knocked back his punch. His mustache was wet. “I’ll be in touch.”
I waited long enough to say goodbye to Charlie, then I left. Thewinter wind chilled me as I walked to my car, up a hill so steep that it allowed me a perspective of the church where Halley’s body still lay, of downtown in the distance. The city looked beautiful in the winter, like the backdrop of a movie: brick buildings and red church spires and the concrete dome of Union Terminal, which resembled a giant table clock. Art deco, I remembered my mother calling it, which I used to think was someone’s name. The building was designed to honor the machine age—a sideways funnel, as the designers had conceived, a modern marvel—the largest half dome in the Western Hemisphere. It used to be a railroad station, but now investors were trying to turn it into a mall.
I unlocked my car, and I climbed in, and I closed the door. As an actress, I’ve been trained to contain my emotions, to conserve them for the necessary scenes. I turned off the stereo and snapped on my belt and pulled down the visor to look at myself in the mirror. I stared into my own tired eyes, as though it were a stone-face contest and I was daring this other woman to blink first. Then I smacked my cheek, hard. The sensation needled my skin, like the ice water I splashed on my face each morning. The woman in the mirror blinked. Finally, I allowed myself to cry.
Halley had left me something.
THAT HALLEY HAD A SAFE-DEPOSITbox struck me as odd, from the moment Mr. Longworth had called me with instructions. She didn’t believe in institutions; she had a general distrust of authority. She despised cops and most any worker in a uniform, even the UPS guys. Once, she was kicked off a plane for accusing the flight attendant of putting nitrous oxide in the oxygen masks. Now, weeks after Christmas, the artificial tree was being removed from the lobby of First Star Bank, replaced with a toy telescope and a strand of twinkling lights. Someone had made a cardboard cutout of a comet, but it looked more a like a sperm descending upon an egg.
The woman who met me wasn’t a banker but a secretary of somesort. Horsey face. Wool suit. I followed her to the vault room. Inside, there were no windows, only rows of metal boxes with keyholes for mouths.
The quiet made me uncomfortable. “Can you believe this weather?” I asked.
“Hopefully the groundhog sees his shadow this year,” she said.
She pulled the rectangular box from the wall and led me through a door to an adjacent room with a single table, jarring fluorescent lights, a mirror on the wall. It looked like the kind of interview room you’d see in one of those cops-and-robbers shows. I’d once played a perp on one, and the director had told me to imagine the glass of the two-way mirror was like the mirror inSnow White. It revealed internal truths, our flaws, our fears.
The woman set down the box in the middle of the table. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she said.
When she left, I ran my hands along the smooth edges. Though Halley was part of the richest family in town, she had little herself, her family doling out her allowance like she was a child. Her apartment was spare: orange Aztec rug, plants everywhere, knickknacks from her travels, things like geodes and sand art.
When I lifted the lid of the box, I saw the manila envelope. I recognized Halley’s handwriting on the outside. The contents felt heavy.For you, Nona, she’d written. I took a few stabilizing breaths.I am made of stone.
Life, unlike television, doesn’t rely on tight camera angles, close-ups, or musical scores that draw emphasis to our plot points and tell us: Pay attention! We can only recognize important moments in hindsight, when we can finally freeze the screen in our memories and say that—there—was the moment that shifted the course of my entire life.
I broke the seal with my finger and opened the envelope.
