Dead to Her(9)
Only after she’d burst into startled tears, full of apologies, did he pat her on the knee, as if reassuring a scolded child, and tell her he loved her. It was a moment of revelation. Now that she’d married him, all the things he’d said wouldn’t matter actually did. He was well respected. He had power. He didn’t want to be embarrassed, not even by her. Maybe especially not by her. He wanted her to be perfect.
She took a deep breath. She could do this. He’ll be dead soon enough, Dolly had said when they’d hugged goodbye. With you riding him every night. They’d laughed at that too, but even the sex was harder work than she’d expected.
It went one of two ways. If he was feeling sweet and sentimental and hadn’t taken a Viagra he simply labored for hours with his head between her thighs, checking she was happy, while she fantasized until she finally came or faked it like a porn star, her sex chafed from his crude mouth. Either way, she made sure she climaxed noisily. A man like William would never understand a true female orgasm. Quiet. Intense. Private. What validation would there be for him in that?
Then there was the other sex. The Viagra sex. Reclaiming his youth. All the things he’d never done with his saintly first wife he wanted to do now. With her. Of course she had to let him while finding the fine line between agreeing and not behaving like a whore. He wouldn’t like that.
Tonight had been that kind of sex and she felt bruised and hollow. She wished her friends from the club—Dolly, Ange, and Sabena—were here. They’d know how to play this better than her. It had all sounded much easier in London.
She pushed the sheets back and reached for her robe, pulling the thin silk around her strong body. She was too restless to just lie there, corpselike, as the hours ticked around until dawn. She needed to move, to remind herself of what she’d won, to shake off this feeling that she’d been duped into imprisonment so far from home and that it might break her.
Downstairs, she went to the kitchen first, draining milk straight from the container to settle the acid burning her chest from an afternoon’s drinking. She stared at all the stupid individual cartons of coconut water that Billy somehow thought would make him young again. It did taste like sperm, however much he may not have liked the comment. She wanted to twist one open and spit in it. She closed the fridge and padded out into the vast hallway.
Eleanor stared down at her in the gloom, her expression unreadable, and Keisha shivered. There was no space for the boy here. It was Eleanor’s ghost who stalked this house. The dead mother of the dead son. Keisha could feel her. She was on the walls and in the walls, her energy the blood that ran through the veins of this mansion. Her clothes were still in the closets of the master bedroom—Billy and Keisha used a different room for now—and her drawers were filled with her trinkets and memories.
Keisha had looked, of course she had. Her need to know about what came before had been overwhelming. Tucked away in a cabinet against one wall were so many framed photos of Lyle, the dead son and heir, that Keisha had been afraid they would tumble out and her nosing around would be discovered. Lyle had died before Eleanor and William had moved into this house—his death and Eleanor’s grief the cause of the move—but it was strange to Keisha that all his pictures were hidden away, from kindergarten and with school friends to the proud young man in his military uniform, the uniform he’d die in, serving in Afghanistan, shortly after. Billy had said he’d been killed fifteen years before. If he’d lived he’d be older than Keisha. Would she have liked him more than his father? He had a sweet face, she thought. Shining eyes. No wonder Billy still couldn’t bear to talk about it. No wonder they’d hidden their grief away.
On the dresser were more photos, displayed this time, old pictures of Eleanor and her friends or siblings maybe as children, and also of the happy couple—Billy barely recognizable as a young man and Eleanor aloofly elegant—and then in the drawers, hidden amid various items of carefully folded clothes, she found some jewelry and a small box containing far more interesting treasure: a bag of grass and cigarette papers and a sealed packet of syringes alongside a vial of morphine. That was a revelation. Perhaps Eleanor had kept a lot of her pain from Billy and her nurses or Iris and Elizabeth and whoever else looked after her. Maybe there had been more to the saintly Eleanor than met the eye. Everything about this world felt like an act.
Keisha wandered through the house, resisting the urge to go back upstairs and dip further into the dead wife’s possessions, instead taking comfort in the endless rooms and fine furniture. Her domain now. The demands of her family were an ocean away. Just the one man to take care of. Keep him happy, she thought. He’s nearly seventy. He’ll be dead soon. It was a harsh and horrible thought, but she couldn’t help it. There had been no prenup. It had all moved too quickly for that, her family pouncing while he’d been intoxicated by her, but he’d made her sign a postnup as soon as they’d landed, maybe the first clue that her knight in shining armor wasn’t so soft. She knew, even when he died, that she wouldn’t get everything, but she’d get enough. Plenty to get her family off her back and then maybe to flee somewhere wonderful where none of them could find her.
Her stomach fizzed as she passed a wall of photographs, black-tie events at the country club with various politicians or local celebrities. There were a few now familiar faces smiling out from some of the pictures, and as her eyes lingered on one, a hand subconsciously floated up to her neck, teasing the skin there, imagining a touch as her heart raced. This was the bright light in her new life. She thought back to the laughter on the boat. Their eyes meeting. The way she felt in the excitement of a flirtation. Never had Billy seemed so old and ridiculous beside her. She’d felt breathless. Girlish. Giddy. Alive. An overwhelming surge of lust.