Well, maybe not killed. Hawkeye has a fondness for him, he is sure.

  Like a son? Some kind of younger relative. Mikhail thinks so.

  (Maybe Hawkeye is Russian? Mikhail is thinking they have some traits in common.)

  Hawkeye cautions Mikhail to wear clothes like a delivery boy would wear. Not a uniform but nothing to attract attention. Definitely a baseball cap to hide the punk-style blond hair that’s noticeable half a block away.

  Mikhail mutters yeh. Though hurt, the contempt with which Hawkeye speaks of his fantastic new hair.

  Does he think I’m a fag? Punk is anti-fag.

  Hawkeye asks Mikhail to repeat the instructions, which he does more or less exactly for (even in his wasted state) Mikhail is one you can rely upon. No asshole like every other street kid aged out from Saint Vincent’s. Knowing to falter when it comes to the address on Cradle Rock Road not wanting Hawkeye to become suspicious.

  Hawkeye tells him to write it down for Christ’s sake: 96 Cradle Rock Road.

  Hawkeye warns him: deliver the flowers, no conversation, walk away, gone.

  Feeling like a released balloon, when Hawkeye hangs up. Mikhail soaring up to bob against the ceiling.

  Not shaving for twelve days and scarcely washed himself in that time, smelling of his body and itching all over but particularly crotch and armpits (possibly lice?) (he’s had lice before, Jesus!), still he’s feeling fucking good, crash for a long night with a handful of quaaludes then get his ass up early enough to take a shower, shave off the stubble covering half his face, he’s liking his new look, sexy-cool “Mikhail” with platinum-blond hair in spiky tufts shaved at the nape of the neck and sides and with dark roots like the fashionable hookers at the Renaissance Plaza, almost classy-looking enough to confuse with a truly classy rich woman like her.

  Dreamy bobbing against the ceiling thinking of the woman: her.

  The Emissary

  You have come to dwell in my heart.

  Yet her lover has ceased calling, Hannah realizes. Exactly which morning (in mid-November) she could not have said.

  Evidently Y.K.’s pride has outweighed his rage at her. He is resigned that Hannah will not answer the phone if she believes he is calling her; and he will not call at any time when Wes might be home.

  Hannah is grateful to Y.K. for that. He’d never wanted Wes to know about Hannah and himself, she has Y.K to thank that her marriage hadn’t been destroyed by her own recklessness.

  “He does love me, then. He doesn’t want to hurt me.”

  And: “He understands that I am weak, frightened. I am not strong enough for a divorce. I am a mother.”

  (Though wondering what will become of her, the flimsy husk of Hannah, when Mommy has departed: when the children no longer need her.)

  Nor has Hannah noticed recently the dark gray sedan following her when she drives into town or to the children’s school: as sleek and silent as a predator fish, this vehicle. And the dark-tinted windshield through which no face has ever emerged. Pausing at intersections peering anxiously into the side mirror where there appears to be no vehicle behind her and into the rearview mirror where at last, one day, finally, there appears to be no vehicle.

  “Is it over, then? It’s over.”

  She is relieved! She is not disappointed but relieved, relieved.

  Her life returned to her unscathed.

  • • •

  (Her life returned to her unscathed but Marlene Reddick has not been so fortunate.)

  (Hannah hasn’t wanted to ask. Of course Hannah has wanted to ask!)

  (Learning from mutual friends whom she’d quizzed casually that after behaving very strangely for months Marlene has—simply—disappeared …)

  (Having withdrawn six hundred thousand dollars from her and her husband’s joint savings account in cash, disappeared.)

  “Katya! Is your pretty bunny new?”

  In the way of a daddy almost entirely lacking in curiosity about his children’s lives who nonetheless, on the average of once a week, feels obliged to mimic genuine daddy concern, Wes asks Katya this question seeing her cuddling and fussing over her fluffy white rabbit one evening.

  Hannah listens. Not daring to breathe as the child replies yes.

  “And what’s the bunny’s name?”

  “Snowball.”

  “And who gave you Snowball, Katya?”

  A near-inaudible murmur—Don’t know.

  Listening close by, Hannah allows herself to feel relief.

  Of course Katya has forgotten Y.K.’s name, if she has ever known it. And she is as embarrassed at having forgotten the adult name as she would be at having a potty accident at her age, which is four years, eleven months.

  Conor has so many similar toys, Wes never notices the replica of the Vought F-8 Crusader.

  That morning when the doorbell rings.

  Half listening as Ismelda goes to answer the door. A delivery, probably. In the Jarrett household there is a new calm, a distinct diminishing of morning anxiety since telephone calls are being answered now, as before. The threat of unwanted calls seems to have passed.

  Relief! Hannah hadn’t had to explain anything embarrassing or awkward to Ismelda, nor appeal to Wes to have their phone number changed.

  And today, resuming some semblance of normal life: a Friends of Literacy fundraiser at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club which Hannah will attend with two women friends whom she has not seen in quite a while and who (she’d feared) had dropped her since the Zekiel Jones fallout …

  Do you think she really was—raped? By a Black man?

  If she was, she’s been very brave about it.

  Very—something!

  Downstairs at the front door, a raw male voice, and Ismelda’s near-inaudible reply, and again the male voice—unmistakably, what sounds like Mrs. Jarrett.

  Ismelda calls up the stairs to Hannah, it’s a delivery, her signature is required.

  When Hannah descends the stairs she sees, on the floor of the foyer, a large floral display in a wicker basket; wrapped in cellophane, as many as two dozen gorgeous roses—crimson, pink, cream, yellow. For her?

  It has been a very long time since Hannah has been surprised in such a way.

  Thinking—But is it my birthday? What is it?

  Thinking—Because he loves me. He is releasing me.

  Oddly, the delivery man has stepped into the foyer instead of remaining out on the stoop. And instead of asking Hannah to sign a receipt he hands her an envelope with MRS. JARRETT block-printed on it.

  Not a delivery man, more a gangling arrogant boy. In a black leather jacket, jeans and silver-buckled belt, he’s removed a baseball cap as if to display a bleached-blond punk-style haircut, brutally shaved at the sides of his head.

  Hannah feels a kick to the heart, she recognizes this person: the ponytailed boy whose name is Mikey.

  An emissary of Y.K.’s, in her house.

  His face is flushed with excitement, audacity. Behind tinted aviator glasses his eyes are as dark as coals. He is breathing audibly, his hands tremble. Heat wafts from his skin, he is high on a drug, likely cocaine: brazenly smiling at Hannah, a nervous twitch of a smile, fading as he loses his composure.

  “For you, ma’am—Mis-sus Jar-rett …”

  He laughs, awkwardly. He has handed the envelope to Hannah but her stunned fingers fumble it, the envelope falls to the foyer floor, quickly the delivery boy turns away eager to escape.

  “Ismelda! Shut the door.”

  The door is shut. If Ismelda is astonished by Hannah’s agitation, and the odd behavior of the platinum-blond delivery boy, she takes care to give no sign. Like any employee she has learned not to see, not to infer, not to hint at either seeing or inferring, anything that might interfere with her employment.

  Blood is beating in Hannah’s ears. For a long moment she can’t seem to think—the ponytailed boy Mikey, returned to this house. In this house.

  She has all but forgotten him. These many weeks she has given him no thought. Except sometimes passing by the TV room, seeing the leather sofa. Appalled, yet fascinated. For the sofa, the entire room, looks—normal. Attractive furniture, beautiful pale green carpet. No (visible) stains anywhere. Not possible that what had happened between Hannah and a stranger, many years younger than Hannah, on that sofa, weeks, months ago had actually happened …

  And something about Babysitter. Some connection with Babysitter.

  In this house! Him.

  Hannah shudders. Not possible.

  Through a foyer window seeing the vehicle in the driveway—not a delivery van—being driven away, jerkily, too fast. In the exigency of the moment clear-minded enough to register that this isn’t the dark gray sedan she’d seen, or imagined she’d seen, in the rearview mirror of the Buick following her …

  “Ma’am? I’ll take these.”

  With some effort Ismelda lifts the wicker basket brimming with roses, hauls it out to the kitchen. Hannah would certainly help her but is too distracted regarding the envelope in her hand: return address Renaissance Grand Hotel, Renaissance Plaza, Detroit Michigan.

  In no haste, even calmly, as one might open a medical report that might likely contain a death sentence, Hannah opens the envelope, pulls out and unfolds a sheet of elegant Renaissance Grand Hotel stationery upon which, in stilted block letters, is the cryptic message:

  DARLING—

  YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE DO YOU.

  Y.K.

  Delivery Boy

  Rich spoiled bitch, what the fuck do you care about her!

  Fuck her. Fuck both of them.

  Expedite. Get in and out, delivery boy.

  Don’t look back.

  Negative

  Something very strange Wes would call it.

  At his office that day he’d received, via certified mail, a manila envelope containing just a single item: an eight-by-eleven photograph negative.

  “No return address. No explanation. And whatever it’s a picture of, it’s too dark to make out.”

  Hannah laughs, uneasily. Not curious to see what this is, that Wes is removing from the manila envelope.

  A sensation of dread, like black bile, rising at the back of her mouth.

  “It’s an utter mystery! I showed it to people in the office, and at the Athletic Club, at lunch, nobody could make anything of it. Yet it isn’t a mistake, it was addressed to ‘W. Jarrett.’ I had to sign for it.”

  Hannah has no choice but to examine the very dark negative Wes is showing her.

  At first he’d thought it was an X-ray, Wes is saying, there’s this faint cloudy shape that could be a lung … The negative is almost totally black, like an explosion of squid ink. Or, a dark painting that has been purposefully smudged.

  Hannah holds the negative to the light, staring.

  At first, Hannah sees nothing. Then, by degrees her brain, if not her eyes, decodes the scene: a vague horizontal space beneath a tangle of dark shapes is likely a platform, or a bed; if a bed, one with bedclothes so rumpled their creases resemble fissures in the earth; on this bed is a figure, prone, likely a human body, possibly a mannequin, possibly female, unclothed, limbs spread; its face is (mercifully) obliterated in darkness yet there is a glimmer, scarcely discernible, of an open, gaping mouth …

  You, Hannah. Naked in his hotel bed.

  Hannah is stunned. Just barely, Hannah manages to maintain her composure.

  The figure on the bed, the grotesquely spread limbs, the face—these seem clear to Hannah, unmistakable; yet, to another person, like Wes, with no expectation of what the confused image might be, the negative appears to be just a swirl of dark shapes laced with lighter shapes like ectoplasm, a botched photo.

  What it represents, Hannah supposes, with a sinking sensation, is one of a sequence of photographs taken at the same time, from a distance of about ten feet. A darkened room, a badly disheveled bed, a naked woman, unconscious …

  Just a degree lighter, these figures would be clear. The terribly exposed female body. The face.

  “Hannah, you’re holding it upside down,” Wes says, amused, for Wes is often amused by his literal-minded wife; taking the negative from her and deftly reversing it, “see, if you hold it this way it’s more like an X-ray, but one of the men at lunch thought it could be a marine photo, taken on the ocean floor, fathoms deep it’s said to be pitch-black there except for bioluminescent creatures …”

  Hannah makes an effort to look where Wes is pointing. She can barely see, her eyes are welling with tears.

  The thinnest sort of salvation, that Wes can’t (evidently) see what is so obvious to Hannah. He’d shown it to others, none of them had seen.

  “… certain kinds of deep-sea fish, octopus … the strange thing is, I think that some of these fish are blind, yet …”

  The female figure sprawled on the bed so obliviously: Hannah. The legs have been spread in mockery, the fleshy thighs, naked, flaccid, stomach, pubic hair, vaginal area shadowy, smudged.

  The female body, stark-white, slovenly. At its core a hungry mouth that can never sate its hunger.

  Other photographs of the scene, Hannah knows, will not be such puzzles.

  Had he drugged her? How many times has he photographed her? Was someone else in the suite with them? The ponytailed boy?

  Hannah is stricken to the heart, mortified. But what did you expect, that he loved you?

  He’d placed a pillow over her face, he’d played at suffocating her. She has not remembered that humiliation in a very long time. Amnesia has shielded her.

  Of course, Y.K. has always been contemptuous of her.

  She has known, Hannah has certainly known. Telling her he adored her, contempt shining in the heavy-lidded eyes.

  She’d commanded Ismelda to take away the flowers he’d sent. The other day, soon after the delivery, even as Ismelda was dividing the roses into three bouquets, in three vases, for there were too many gorgeous roses for a single display in the unwieldy wicker basket, Hannah approached Ismelda in the kitchen and told her in a quavering voice get rid of them! Throw them in the trash!—eyes dilated as if she were drugged, a ghastly pallor in her face at which Ismelda stared, so taken by surprise.

  But of course, Ismelda understood. In the moment, no need for her distraught employer to repeat the request.

  Never question the employer’s request. However unexpected.

  Though afterward Hannah would wonder: Had Ismelda thrown out the beautiful roses, or had she carried them upstairs in secret, to keep in her room?

  If so, Hannah is annoyed. But in no way is Hannah going to inquire.

  Wanting to run away now to hide, hide her eyes, her eyes that have seen too much. Crouch in a corner in a safe part of the house, a room Wes isn’t likely to enter. Lie on the floor in a fetal position like a worm that has been kicked, curling to protect its contemptible life.

  But you can’t! Can’t even shut your eyes.

  Play out the scene, get through it.

  So much of her marriage, indeed most of her adult life: Play out the scene, get through it.

  Shaking her head as if baffled, intrigued but equal to the puzzle that looks, to her, for she is a resident of Far Hills who often attends gallery and museum openings, like a work of art—“Abstract expressionist. Is it—Rothko? Pollock …”

  Hannah turns the negative sideways: now it is more likely a work of art. The female figure sprawled on the bed has disappeared, even Hannah no longer sees it. Wes examines the negative and agrees yes, it could be an abstract painting, but why would anyone send it to him?

  “Maybe it’s from one of the galleries in the Fisher Building. The one that exhibits avant-garde art, like Andy Warhol, Ad Reinhardt …”

  But it more resembles de Kooning, Hannah should be thinking. Big-toothed female ghouls grinning through layers of pasty paint.

  “Yes, I thought of that, too”—Wes appropriates Hannah’s interpretation with the ease of a catcher lifting his gloved hand to capture a baseball that might have spun past his head otherwise—“except there’s no return address. The negative came in a plain manila envelope. If it’s some kind of advertisement for an exhibit, there would be an announcement but there isn’t.”

  “Oh, but what else can it be? Are you sure?”—Hannah makes a point of checking the envelope, which is empty.

  Wife of the house, mother. In this role Hannah is quick, deft, competent, earnest. A helpmeet to the husband and a model to the children, not a stricken woman resisting the first twinges of headache pain, nausea at the realization that her lover has so exposed her.

  Conor has been clamoring to see what Daddy has brought home but it turns out to be disappointing, no sharks or giant squid that he can recognize. Nor does Katya see anything in the negative.

  “Ismelda?—give a look.”

  Ismelda is preoccupied with kitchen work—(clearing up after the children’s evening meal, completing preparations for the adult meal to come)—but Wes insists upon showing her the negative at which she merely glances before looking quickly away, laughing nervously as if she suspects that Mr. Jarrett is joking with her as often, to her discomfort, and at the most inopportune times, he does.

  Not looking in Hannah’s direction. Not meeting Hannah’s eye.

  Blackmail. How could I not have known.

  How could I have been such a fool …

  Hannah is stunned, the revelation is so blunt, so clear.

  Lying awake through the night. Stinging red ants crawling over her body.

  In loathing of herself ever having imagined that Y.K. had loved her. Her!

  In delusion, an unspeakable happiness. Truly she’d believed. But how was it possible, she’d believed?

  Y.K. has power over her now, Hannah understands. She can’t just refuse to see the man, to answer her telephone. She will have to call him.

  Terrifying to Hannah, to consider the likelihood that Y.K. has much worse, more obscene negatives of her. She doesn’t doubt that he’d recorded having sex with her, his own identity obscured …