He could take everything from the shelves—no harm in that, really—and decide what to keep and what to donate. The books that had been Anna’s favorites could get passed on to the kids. He’d make space in this room for something else. Maybe an office of his own. Let the air circulate in this brain of his. Let the air circulate in this room, where nothing but old and dusty memories lived.
But he decided to tackle all the papers first. Now that he was in the office, this moody room where his wife had spent so many afternoons, he could see that there was actually paper everywhere. On the chair, of course, but also on her desk, and atop the filing cabinet, to say nothing of the inside of the cabinet itself, a whole world of documents that Denny had never even bothered to think about. This was her domain, not his. When he was making things and losing himself in the art of production, she was here, surrounded by a different brand of work.
In the bottom drawers of her desk he found more unfiled papers and, beneath those, a few notebooks, all of them full. Removing them, Denny came across a stack of card stock placards with his wife’s face on them. ANNAPLUMMER FORPRESIDENT,they read. She was smiling, hair brushed back behind one ear, diamond earrings sparkling in perfect, soft sunlight. The photo was one he had never seen before. All of this was entirely new to him: His wife was a stranger to him. Anna for President? Living in thehouse with her, he had not known. Had they known one another at all?
The notebooks were full of different people’s handwriting, but he found one that belonged to Anna. He recognized her small, tight cursive, the way it looped along, like she didn’t even have time to get the words onto paper fast enough. Inside, it read almost like a diary. May 2022. Anna described seeing Mimi at Life Time. The pool. Louisa. That was old territory. Denny knew the story so well by now he felt as if he had been there himself.
But there were other stories, too. A garden party in South Hamilton in August. Mimi with a threat—a karate chop to the wrist. The writing was a journal entry, a simple accounting of what had happened, none of it particularly threatened or scared.
She thinks I am winning.September 2022.Mary and Di say that there’s an actual chance that I could be elected.
Around fall, the writing turned to other people. Anna had written a few entries on Ellen Wilson, notes that expanded Denny’s understanding.
I found out from Di that Ellen was an outstanding field hockey player in high school. They competed against each other: Triton and Newburyport. I don’t remember her at all. Di says she tore her ACL senior year and had to quit and all of the players knew about it. I guess she had always assumed she was going to be a college athlete of one sort or another. Her brother was an athlete. Makes sense that she would gravitate toward someone like Mimi after that. How else do you rise to the top after high school?
The brother, of course, was Sticks, another athlete who didn’t make it to the pros. Living in small towns with high expectations had set these kids up for failure, Denny could see. Sticks and hishockey career, turned to dust. Ellen, once a field hockey star, now just the third wheel of the Queen Bee of the PTO. And Mimi, of course, joined at the hip with her best friend Karen, stewing in discontent from the age of fifteen.
But then, a more potent discovery. It came only a week before her death. The entry was specifically dated, unlike some of them: December 28, 2022. It had not been written out in full paragraph form but was instead a series of notes.PTO. Cover operation. Secret society. College admission.And then, in all caps:PAY TO PLAY!!!Whatever it was that the PTO was secretly up to—was secretly covering for—his wife had started to uncover it. Her proximity to it would have put her in danger from the start, Denny now realized, and her success in nearly unseating Mimi Mar would have made her a target.
It broke him apart, to think that Anna had gone through this alone, excavating some hidden world of secret societies and Hamilton demons. But Denny also remembered the feelings he had experienced when he unearthed his wife’s private email cache a few months earlier. Perhaps it wasn’t fair, but he felt it again, that white-hot rage, anger at having been left behind, with this mess, so much of it foreign, so much of it a mystery. He had shared a life with a stranger, he was coming to realize, a woman who had her own world entirely separate from him. True, as far as he knew, she had never been unfaithful, but wasn’t this equally duplicitous, this life of hers, secreted away, unshared? And now, what made him the most angry, if he was honest, was that he couldn’t even ask her why—why she had felt the need to keep these things from him, when he would have supported her through all of it; why she had embraced values she had told him she loathed; and why she had gone to such lengths to conceal parts of herself that were soft and tender and in pain. He could have helped. Hewouldhave helped. Here, in the dusty mess of her office, he could do nothing.
Because sitting in this office around his dead wife’s things made him feel particularly useless and impotent, he texted Di. He needed reassurance that he was useful to someone, and maybe help spotting some of the outliers in his wife’s group of friends.Hey, did I ever ask you about Ellen Wilson?he asked Di. It was an entrée, he figured, a way into a larger question about the PTO, about who they really were and how they operated, about what secrets they held. Di had been a little quiet these past months. A little less inclined to take his calls. He understood. They were grieving in their own ways, and Di and Anna had been practically conjoined, two faces of the same coin. For all the things he didn’t know about his wife, Di held them for keeps, her confidante, the lockbox.
I’m not sure. Anna did. Last year, she texted back.
Thinking back on it, he hadn’t seen Di in, what, three months? Not since before the holidays, he was sure, and maybe not even since Louisa’s birthday, in September.
I feel like Anna was about to come to some conclusion about her, he wrote.
White bubbles appeared in the text field, and then disappeared. Di writing. Erasing. Trying again. As was her style. He put down the phone and picked up the notebook again, leafing through months of his wife’s life, a catalogue of what people wore and what things they said, her observations of the members of the town. Maybe she had been using the book as a tool to remember faces. She must have seen a lot of them. From her notes: appointments each Wednesday with Di and a woman named Mary, an open invitation for anyone from Hamilton to come and chat about the state of the schools and the PTO. He had known about none of this, either, of course.
Denny’s phone vibrated.She wasn’t anyone specific. She was just a field hockey star who had a very unlucky break and got married to a rich guy to make up for it.
That story, though, seemed a lot like Di’s story, too. Di, whohad played varsity field hockey through high school, who had gone on to play Division 1 at UMass Amherst until she, too, suffered a game-ending injury, moved back to the area, and, yes, married rich.
It happens to the best of us, he said, knowing she would understand what he meant.
And also the rest of us.
Denny wondered if there really was a distinction.
The Triton field hockey records were largely available through a basic Internet search. How absurd. All this time, he could have been looking at photos of Ellen Wilson from his own computer. She was the same age as Anna, and, in the ’90s, beautiful, too, with long legs and hair that slid all the way down to the center of her back. In old photos, Denny saw her leaning down to chip away at a ball, long hair flying loose in the wind, topped only with a light blue ribbon.
That didn’t answer any questions about Anna’s last entry.Pay to playandcover operationstuck in his brain as he thought of Ellen Wilson, field hockey stick in hand, her face mutating from adolescence into adulthood. Who had she been? Who had she become?
Ellen had gone to UMass, too. Di hadn’t mentioned that, but aDaily Newspiece on the archive mentioned a scholarship—a scholarship Ellen lost because of the injury. But an interview said she was going anyway. He was halfway down into a rabbit hole on his bedroom computer when he heard a knock at the front door. It startled the dog.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he yelled.
He opened the door and there was a familiar face, Di, staring back at him.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t expect you.”
“Can I come in?” She wore a cropped puffer coat, a fleece headband around her hairline, and a large pair of black sunglasses. She rubbedher hands together. They were red from the cold. “I forgot my gloves,” she said. “A New Englander who will never get used to winter.”
“Warm up, then,” Denny said. It was as if she had read his mind. He had just been thinking about how absent she had been, but now here she was, instantly conjured.
“I just thought maybe you needed some help,” she said. “It sounded like you were trying to piece something together.”
