“Same thing.”
I sat back. “How often do you stop by?”
“Once every couple of months, I guess. I park at the school lot and come through the Zucker path. But there’s more to it than that.”
“More to what?”
“My visits. See, this house still holds my secrets. I mean that literally.”
“I’m not following.”
“I keep trying to work up the courage to knock on the door again, but I can’t do it. And now I’m inside, in this kitchen, and I’m okay.” She tried to smile, as if to prove the point. “But I still don’t know if I can do it.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“I’m babbling.” Dina started scratching the back of her hand, hard and fast, digging her nails in and nearly breaking skin. I wanted to reach out to her, but it felt too forced. “I wrote it all down. In a journal. What happened to me. It’s still here.”
“In the house?”
She nodded. “I hid it.”
“The police went through here after the murder. They searched this place pretty good.”
“They didn’t find it,” she said. “I’m sure of it. And even if they did, it’s just an old journal. There’d be no reason for them to disturb it. Part of me wants it to stay put. It’s over and done with it, you know what I mean? Let sleeping dogs lie. But another part wants to let it out into the light. Like it’s a vampire and the sunshine will kill it.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“In the basement. You have to stand on the dryer to get to it. It’s behind one of the ducts in the crawl space.” She glanced at the clock. She looked at me and hugged herself. “It’s getting late.”
“Are you okay?”
The eyes were darting again. Her breathing was suddenly uneven. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”
“Do you want to look for your journal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to get it for you?”
She shook her head hard. “No.” She stood, gulping air now. “I better go now.”
“You can always come back, Dina. Anytime you want.”
But she wasn’t listening. She was in full panic mode and heading for the door.
“Dina?”
She suddenly spun toward me. “Did you love her?”
“What?”
“Monica. Did you love her? Or was there someone else?”
“What are you talking about?”
Her face drained of color. She stared at me now, backing away, petrified. “You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. By the time I found my voice, Dina had turned away.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
“Wait.”
She flung the door open and ran out. I stood by the window and watched her scurry back up toward Phelps Road. This time, I chose not to follow.
Instead, I turned and with her words—“You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”—still reverberating in my ears, I sprinted to the basement door.
All right, let me explain something here. I was not going down into the dingy, unfinished subdwelling to invade Dina’s privacy. I did not pretend to know what was best for her, what might salve her horrendous pain. Many of my psychiatry colleagues would disagree, but sometimes I wonder if the past is better left buried. I don’t have the answer, of course, and as my psychiatry colleagues would remind me, I don’t ask them for their take on the best way to handle a cleft palate. So in the end, all I know for certain is that it is not my place to decide for Dina.
And I was not going in the basement out of curiosity about her past either. I had no interest in reading the details of Dina’s torment. In fact, I actively did not want to know them. To speak selfishly, I was creeped out plenty just knowing such horrors had occurred in the place I call home. It was already enough in my face, thank you very much. I needed to hear or read no more.
So what exactly was I after?
I hit the light switch. A bare bulb came on. I was putting the pieces together even as I started to descend. Dina had said several curious things. Putting aside the most dramatic for a moment, I was starting to pick up on the more subtle ones. It was a night of spontaneous behavior on my part. I decided to let the trend continue.
First off, I remembered how Dina, when she was still the mystery woman on the sidewalk, had taken a step toward the door. I know now, as Dina herself had told me, that she’d been “trying to work up the courage to knock on the door again.”
Again.
Knock on the dooragain .
The obvious implication was that Dina had, on at least one other occasion, worked up the courage to knock on my door.
Second, Dina had told me that she had “met” Monica. I could not imagine how. Yes, Monica, too, had grown up in this town, but from all I knew of her, she might as well have grown up in a different, more opulent era. The Portman estate was on the opposite end of our rather sprawling suburb. Monica had started boarding school at a young age. No one in town knew her. I remember seeing her once at the Colony movie theater over the summer of my sophomore year in high school. I had stared. She had studiously ignored me. Monica had that whole remote-beauty thing down pat by then. When I met her years later—she actually coming on to me—the flattery turned my head. Monica had seemed so fabulous at a distance.
So how, I wondered now, had my wealthy, remote, beautiful wife met poor, drab Dina Levinsky? The most likely answer, when you consider the “again” comment, was that Dina had knocked on the door and Monica had answered. They met then. They probably talked. Dina probably told Monica about the hidden journal.
“You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”
No, Dina. But I plan on finding out.
I had reached the cement floor. Boxes that I would never throw away and never open were piled everywhere. I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that there were paint splatters on the floor. A large variety of hues. They’d probably been here since Dina’s time, a reminder of her sole escape.
The washer and dryer were in the corner on the left. I moved slowly toward them in the shadowy light. I tiptoed, actually, as though I were afraid of waking Dina’s sleeping dogs. Stupid really. As I said before, I am not superstitious and even if I were, even if I believed in evil spirits and the like, there was no reason to fear angering them. My wife was dead and my daughter was missing—what else could they do to me? In fact, I should disturb them, make them act, hope they let me know what really happened to my family, to Tara.