Killer, Come Back to Me

I let him talk. After Rome it was Vienna and Stockholm, he’d saved thousands of schedules, flight charts and hotel bulletins for forty years; he knew the moons and tides, the goings and comings of everything on the sea and in the sky.

“But best of all,” he said at last, “Anna, Anna, will you come along with me? I’ve lots of money put away, don’t let me run on! Anna, tell me, will you?”

I came around the counter slowly and saw myself in the mirror, a woman in her seventieth year going to a party half a century late.

I sat down beside him and shook my head.

“Oh, but, Anna, why not, there’s no reason why!”

“There is a reason,” I said. “You.”

“Me, but I don’t count!”

“That’s just it, Roger, you do.”

“Anna, we could have a wonderful time—”

“I daresay. But, Roger, you’ve been married for seventy years. Now, for the first time, you’re not married. You don’t want to turn around and get married again right off, do you?”

“Don’t I?” he asked, blinking.

“You don’t, you really don’t. You deserve a little while, at least, off by yourself, to see the world, to know who Roger Harrison is. A little while away from women. Then, when you’ve gone around the world and come back, is time to think of other things.”

“If you say so—”

“No. It mustn’t be anything I say or know or tell you to do. Right now it must be you telling yourself what to know and see and do. Go have a grand time. If you can, be happy.”

“Will you be here waiting for me when I come back?”

“I haven’t it in me any more to wait, but I’ll be here.”

He moved toward the door, then stopped and looked at me as if surprised by some new question that had come into his mind.

“Anna,” he said, “if all this had happened forty, fifty years ago, would you have gone away with me then? Would you really have married me?”

I did not answer.

“Anna?” he asked.

After a long while I said, “There are some questions that should never be asked.”

Because, I went on, thinking, there can be no answers. Looking down the years toward the lake, I could not remember, so I could not say, whether we could have ever been happy. Perhaps even as a child, sensing the impossible in Roger, I had clenched the impossible, and therefore the rare, to my heart, simply because it was impossible and rare. He was a sprig of farewell summer pressed in an old book, to be taken out, turned over, admired, once a year, but more than that? Who could say? Surely not I, so long, so late in the day. Life is questions, not answers.

Roger had come very close to read my face, my mind, while I thought all this. What he saw there made him look away, close his eyes, then take my hand and press it to his cheek.

“I’ll be back. I swear I will!”

Outside the door he stood bewildered for a moment in the moonlight, looking at the world and all its directions, east, west, north, south, like a child out of school for his first summer not knowing which way to go first, just breathing, just listening, just seeing.

“Don’t hurry!” I said fervently. “Oh, God, whatever you do, please, enjoy yourself, don’t hurry!”

I saw him run off toward the limousine near the cottage where I am supposed to rap in the morning and where I will get no answer. But I know that I will not go to the cottage and that I’ll keep the maids from going there because the old lady has given orders not to be bothered. That will give Roger the chance, the start he needs. In a week or two or three, I might call the police. Then if they met Roger coming back on the boat from all those wild places, it won’t matter.

Police? Perhaps not even them. Perhaps she died of a heart attack and poor Roger only thinks he killed her and now proudly sails off into the world, his pride not allowing him to know that only her own self-made death released him.

But then again, if at last all the murder he put away for seventy years forced him tonight to lay hands on and kill the hideous turkey, I could not find it in my heart to weep for her but only for the great time it has taken to act out the sentence.

The road is silent. An hour has passed since the limousine roared away down the road.