He loved her. It was true. That was the mystery, the sad and sorrowful mystery of it all. As he lay now in the dark and cold, he felt the tears coming, rising all the way from his gut. How could anybody ever say he’d done anything to Mrs. Wood when he’d loved her like he did? Because he knew. Knew that even though she smiled and laughed and went about her business, shopping and playing her tennis and taking trips to the salon, inside of her was an empty place, he’d seen it that first day in the car, and his heart went out to this, like he could fill it for her just by wanting to. The days when she didn’t come out to the yard, more and more as time went by, he’d catch sight of her, sometimes, sitting on the sofa for hours, letting the baby just cry and cry because she was wet or hungry, but not moving a muscle: it was like all the air had gone out of her. Some days he didn’t see her at all, and he guessed she was deep in the house somewhere, being sad. He’d do extra things on those days, trimming the hedges just so, or picking weeds out of the walk, hoping if he waited long enough she’d come out with the tea. The tea meant she was all right, that she’d gotten through another day of feeling awful like she did.
And then that afternoon in the yard-that terrible afternoon-he found the older girl, Haley, alone. It was December, the air raw with dampness, the pool full of winter leaves; the little girl, who was in kindergarten, was wearing her blue school shorts and a collared blouse but nothing else, not even shoes, and sitting on the patio. She was holding a doll, a Barbie. Didn’t she have school today? Carter asked, and she shook her head, not looking at him. Was her mama around? Daddy’s in Mexico, the girl stated, and shivered in the cold. With his girlfriend. Her mama wouldn’t get out of bed.
He tried the door but it was locked, and rang the bell and then he called up to the windows, but no one answered. He didn’t know what to make of the little girl, outside alone like that, but there was lots he didn’t know about people like the Woods, not everything they did made sense to him. All he had was his dirty old sweater to give the girl, but she took it, wrapping it around herself like a blanket. He got to work on the lawn, thinking maybe the noise of the mower would wake up Mrs. Wood and she’d remember her little girl was outside alone by the pool, that she’d accidentally locked the door somehow. Mr. Carter, I don’t know how it happened, I fell asleep somehow, thank God you were here.
He finished the lawn, the girl watching him silently with her doll, and got the skimmer from the garage to clean the pool. That was when he found it, along the edge of the path: a baby toad. Weren’t no bigger than a penny. He was lucky he’d missed it with the mower. He bent to pick it up; it weighed nothing in his hand. If he hadn’t been looking at it with his own eyes he’d have said his hand was empty, that’s how light it was. Maybe it was the girl watching him from the patio, or else Mrs. Wood sleeping behind him in the house; but it seemed, right then, like the toad could set things right somehow, this tiny thing in the grass.
– C’mere, he said to the girl. C’mere, I’ve got something to show you. Just a little baby of a thing, Miss Haley. A little baby thing like you.
He turned then to find Mrs. Wood, standing in the yard behind him, not ten feet away; she must have come out the front, because he hadn’t heard a sound. She was wearing a big T-shirt, like a nightgown, her hair all whichaway around her face.
– Mrs. Wood, he said, why there you are, glad to see you’re up now. I was just about to show Haley here-
Get away from her!
But it wasn’t Mrs. Wood, not the one he knew. Her eyes were gone all wild and crazy. She looked like she didn’t know who he was.
– Mrs. Wood, I just meant to show her something nice-
Get away! Get away! Run, Haley, run!
And before he could say another word she’d shoved him, hard, with all her strength; he tumbled backward, his foot tangled on the skimmer where he’d left it on the pool deck. He reached out, a reflex, his fingertips catching and holding the front of her shirt; he felt his weight taking her with him, nothing he could do to stop it, and that was when they fell into the water.
The water. It hit him like a fist, his nose and eyes and mouth filling with it, with its awful chemical taste, like demon’s breath. She was under and over and all around him as they sank, their arms and legs twisted around each other’s like a net; he tried to free himself but she held fast, dragging him down and down. He couldn’t swim, not a stroke, he could sort of bob along if he had to but even that scared him, and he had no strength to stop her. He craned his head to find the shining surface of the water where it met the air, but it could have been a mile away. She was pulling him down, into a world of silence, as if the pool were an inverted piece of sky, and that was when he figured it: that was where she wanted to go. That’s where she’d been headed, all along, since that day under the freeway when she had stopped her car and said his name. Whatever had kept her in that other world, the one above the water, had finally snapped, like the string of a kite, but the world was upside down, and now the kite was falling. She pulled him into a hug, her chin against his shoulder, and for an instant he glimpsed her eyes through the swirling water and saw they were full of a terrible, final darkness. Oh please, he thought, let me. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead. All he had to do was breathe. He knew that as clear as he knew his own name, but try as he might he couldn’t make himself do this; he had lived his life too long to give it up by will alone. They hit the bottom with a soft thump, Mrs. Wood still holding him, and he felt her shoulders twitch when she took the first breath. She took another, and then a third, the bubbles of the last air in her lungs rising beside his ear like a whispered secret-God bless you, Mr. Carter-and then she let him go.
He didn’t remember getting out of the pool, or what he’d said to the little girl. She was crying loudly and then stopped. Mrs. Wood was dead, her soul was nowhere around anymore, but her empty body slowly made its way to the surface, taking its place among the floating leaves he’d meant to clean. There was a kind of peacefulness to everything, a terrible brokenhearted peacefulness, like something that had gone on too long had finally found a way to finish. Like he’d begun to disappear again. It might have been hours or minutes before the neighbor lady came, and then the police, but by that time he knew he wouldn’t tell a soul what had happened, the things he’d seen and heard. It was a secret she had given him, the final secret of who she was, and he was meant to keep it.
Carter decided it was all right, what was going to happen to him now. It felt inevitable. Maybe Wolgast had lied, or maybe he hadn’t, but the work of Carter’s life was over; he knew that now. Nobody was going to ask him again about Mrs. Wood. She was just a thing in his mind, like some part of her had passed straight into him, and he wouldn’t have to tell nobody about it.
The air around him broke with a hissing sound, like air leaking from a tire, and a single green light appeared on the far wall where a red one used to be; a door swung open, bathing the room in a pale blue light. Carter saw he was lying on a gurney, wearing a gown. The tube was still threaded into his hand, and looking at the place where it pulled at his skin under the tape made it hurt fiercely again. The room was larger than he’d guessed, nothing but pure white surfaces except for the place where the door had opened and a few machines on the far wall that looked like nothing he knew.
A figure was standing in the doorway.