Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence Read Online Free Page A

objections. Walking often slowed her thoughts, and made her feel better. Tonight, instead of going directly home, she walked up one street and down another, gradually breathing more easily, the spell of despair passing and taking with it those awful, indecent feelings that had brought it on. Yet how could she not blame herself? How could she get beyond the inexplicable?
    A couple of days after Wyatt’s accident, Louise showed up at the house with an envelope—a ticket to Paris and a thousand dollars in travelers’ checks. “Wyatt promised you Paris. See Paris. Everything’s been taken care of,” she said. Louise might have respected Wyatt, but she hadn’t liked him, his pontificating and extravagant ego. When Catherine got to John F. Kennedy Airport, however, she watched her plane board, then depart without her, because she realized she would be alone in Paris just as she was alone in Winslow. It didn’t matter where she went, because wherever it was she’d be without Wyatt. At the time, she didn’t think there was any place her sadness wouldn’t follow, not even in Paris, so she returned to town and she worked and she gardened and she slept. She slept and she smoked and she drank red wine. She drank red wine and she took long walks and she talked to Wyatt. She talked to Wyatt, avoiding the places they’d frequented. She avoided certain foods and songs, anything that brought back memories, and if she had to get from one side of town to another, she skirted the perimeter of the college, never once driving through it.
    A place isn’t your own until you walk the heart of it, Wyatt used to say, and the heart of the town, the real heart, was Winslow College, where he had been an assistant professor of creative writing. Founded in 1862, the college sat like a huge, stationary wagon wheel with six streets radiating from its center. A modest-sized liberal arts college, with about fifty-five hundred undergrad and grad students combined, it came with rolling lawns and ivy-clad brick buildings. This evening, despite having no intention of going there, she found herself crossing the flat plane of Shaddock Green, coming to the empty parking lot that opened onto Mead Hall. The building’s gothic facade was dark and foreboding, even with a couple of the windows lit. She hadn’t been back here for a year and a half, not since she’d packed up Wyatt’s things: his literary journals, his books, his students’ essays, the manuscript he’d been working on, an old windbreaker, a chipped coffee mug, all of which sat in the house, boxed up. She still hadn’t mustered the courage to go through any of it.
    As Catherine stood, gazing at what had been Wyatt’s office window on the third floor, she realized she wasn’t alone; someone was gazing down at her. She thought she caught the glimmer of something—glasses, binoculars?—as the light brushed them. She blinked, and for a moment she put Wyatt in the window again, she put Wyatt in the world again, all of this creating an unbearable sadness. She dropped her eyes, and when she looked up, the figure was no longer there. Had it been a maintenance person or maybe the current occupant of Wyatt’s office?
    Had it been Henry Swallow?
    Once home, she grabbed Wyatt’s novel off the shelf. “Why did Henry send her, Wyatt?” she asked, sitting down on the sofa, the book in her lap open to the back flap. Her husband’s handsome face stared up at her with the same enigmatic smile that he’d worn the day he’d driven away. Even now, Catherine wondered what that smile meant. There were so many possibilities. Smiling, he’d climbed into his car, and smiling, he’d backed out of the driveway. Who was that smile for, and where was it taking him? Was it for someone else, a potential rendezvous? Or—and in the days and weeks and months after his death, she thought about this