white knight

As we sat at my kitchen table, my mind would often wander from the conversation, and eventually settle me into a familiar image. It wasn’t a confused or disturbing one, as those of earlier weeks. It contained nothing rotten, nothing undead. It was me, floating on an inner tube in a lake, with him sitting on a dock nearby. He was reading a book, enjoying the breeze, only occasionally glancing up to smile at me. He didn’t seem to notice that I was slowly bobbing away from the dock, but still, I’d just look back at him and wave. The sight of him so content was comforting, but it felt pretty natural, even exhilarating, to drift away. But what was it I wanted to tell him? Bobbing lazily, often I couldn’t quite remember, until the last minute, when I was nearly out of hearing distance. By then, I’d need to shout it, if I was ever going to say it at all. It was that he shouldn’t ask himself later if he should have reached out and pulled me back. He shouldn’t think back and wonder what he might have done differently. He was, in his way, my white knight. That I would remember, even if the rest was too hard.

44

Warm spot nagged at me. Mona had wondered if Mary Anne had ever told anyone, and this felt like an answer—probably no. Mary Anne longed for a “version” of the story in which she told it to Dan. Maybe her silence was getting to her. Maybe she desperately wished she could tell it. But if they were truly lovers, and if it was truly self-defense—which seemed all but certain now—why couldn’t she tell him?

I had just a few more to go on the W’s. I looked through a couple of piles. Then the lights went out. Someone must have thought the editorial office had completely emptied, and decided to save electricity. Maybe Dan. He struck me as the frugal sort. But there was enough dull winter light from the high windows that I could still squint at the corners of the cits. A cit from the New Yorker. One from a book called Interventions. Reader’s Digest. Glamour. The Broken Teaglass. Another. I held the cit up to the light to read it.