Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online Page B

room and automatic cooled air that changes every three minutes? I timed it. But listen to me sitting here talking nonsense about circulating water and I get these moments with you and it’s a thing of glory, just like this, this is all I wanted, Mrs. Seeley, and I just didn’t know how else to make it happen.”
    He drove three miles past Mrs. Gower’s house, would not stop pressing until she turned and let a snarl loose like none she knew was in her.
    “What kind of husband,” she said, “with an invalid wife at home no less, spends his evenings like this, Mr. Lanigan?”
    “What kind of husband is your Dr. Seeley,” he replied, rough as a razor strap, “leaving his wife behind and packing off to savage Mexico?”
    And that was a terrible thing for a man to say, for anyone to say, what did he know of her husband’s sorrows and burdens, and Marion felt it like a hot iron to her chest and she hated Joe Lanigan, she did.
     
    I N BED THAT NIGHT, face greasy with cold cream, she recalled the way, after apologizing and apologizing once more for his harsh words, for his poor behavior, he opened the car door and doffedhis hat and followed her to the front door and his head, the top of it, brushed the porch lamp and his hair shot through with light and his face so grave, long shadows meeting beneath his chin. “I wish you could see, Mrs. Seeley, what this is. This thing that has happened, that is happening still, that cannot be stopped from happening. I wish you could see what this is.”
    “I know what it is, Mr. Lanigan,” she’d said, clipped and abrupt, shutting the door behind her.
     
    T HEN NOTHING FOR DAYS and Marion, head down in work and evenings spent writing a long letter to Mazatlán:
    Dr. Seeley, please do not forget me here. My lungs breathe free and clear, couldn’t I come to you at last? I know you said it would not be right to have babies until you had beat this thing, but you have and now I have babies to give and everything else too. All the dark snarls in my head are gone and I can be the wife I…
    Each day the idea of another evening spent in her room was near too much to bear. And so she threw herself into the girls’ mad embrace and was so grateful for it.
    A midweek supper at Louise and Ginny’s, Louise trying out a new dish she’d created called February Surprise and it was canned cream of celery soup and egg noodles with baking-powder biscuits on top and everyone agreed it was wretched and Ginny tried to throw it out the window and there was screaming laughter. Marion was so glad she’d come.
    Even still, seeing Louise, she found herself worrying about the party at the El Royale Hotel. Had it been Louise, and hadLouise seen her? Somehow, she had come to persuade herself that she had misseen, as distressed as she was.
    But then Ginny, breaking a fever and feeling sour, said, “Marion, do you think it’s nice that Louise leaves me alone so often? I wonder if she’ll go out on the town this weekend, like she did last. I had to entertain myself with Chubby Parker and Pie Plant Pete on the radio instead.”
    “Poor little baby,” Louise said, singsong. “Did you need me to wash your hair, Princess Virginia?”
    And then Ginny broke the onion face and did laugh and Marion said, almost a whisper, “Where did you go, Louise?”
    “Birthday party.” Louise smiled, lifting Ginny’s ankles off the sofa, and settled herself beneath them, squeezing Ginny’s pink-slippered feet.
    “And my, did she tie one on.” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Came home near three o’clock and drank bicarbonate all Sunday.”
    “I’d’ve just as soon stayed in Saturday night, but someone was rattling like a diamondback.”
    “So I drove you out, that it? Drove you to ruin.”
    “Something like, kitten.”
    Marion almost spoke up but didn’t. To say anything would be to admit she was at the party and that she could not do. She could say nothing, not even to her new, her dearest friends. She would have to