Page 96 of The Identicals
She had laughed in his face.
Dr. Reed Zimmer, a pillar of the hospital, if not the community, found himself caught in a conundrum commonly experienced by lesser men. He was in love with someone other than his wife but unsure if he had the gumption to leave his marriage. To leave would bring pain, shame, scrutiny. He didn’t think he could stand it; helikedbeing held in high regard—which was, he realized, a character flaw in itself.
Reed had allowed himself to believe that he was invincible. Unlike every other unfaithful man in the history of the world, he would not get caught. He would stay with Harper until Sadie left of her own accord, and surely that would be soon. Sadie was as miserable in the marriage as he was. In the spring, she started talking a lot about Tad Morrissey, the Irish carpenter who worked with Franklin. Tad was wonderful, Sadie said. Tad had come to the pie shop to build some new shelves, and he had shimmed the back door, which Sadie always had a hard time closing in the summer.
Reed convinced himself that Sadie was having her own affair—with Tad Morrissey. Was there anything wrong with that? Reed wondered. He and Sadie were both being discreet, keeping up appearances. They went together to the start-of-summer barbecue at Lambert’s Cove with Sadie’s family. Reed liked Sadie’s family: her parents, Al and Lydia; her brother, Franklin. Lo and behold, Franklin brought Tad Morrissey with him to the barbecue as his “date,” he joked—but really, Reed suspected, Tad was Sadie’s date. Possibly Franklin knew about Sadie, and Tad was in on the deceit. Certainly no one batted an eye when Sadie sat next to Tad by the fire or when Sadie jumped up to fetch Tad more potato salad.
“While you’re up, I’ll have a little more as well,” Reed had said. But Sadie had pretended not to hear him.
Sadie only paid attention to him that night when he was checking his text messages—and when he stepped away from the fire to call Harper back.
“Where are you going?” Sadie asked. “You’re not on call tonight.”
“I had a patient die unexpectedly,” Reed said. Lydia heard this and crossed herself. Sadie rolled her eyes, which only showed how much her contempt for him was spoiling her soul. She turned away, asked Tad if he wanted another beer, and Reed was free to talk to Harper.
He should never have met her at Lucy Vincent. In retrospect, that much was obvious. But Billy haddied,and Reed was taken as much by surprise as she had been. Billy had congestive heart failure and myriad other ailments, but Reed had thought he would last weeks longer, maybe even the entire summer. Some people had a dogged survival instinct, and Billy Frost was one of them. He had seemed like the kind of man who could live forever, despite his terminal condition.
Reed had thought Sadie was asleep when he left the house. She had been in their bedroom with the door closed, the lights out. Reed no longer kept any clothes or belongings in that room, so there would be no reason for him to open the door and check on Sadie; if she was awake, she would think he was coming after her for sex. They had both had a lot to drink at the barbecue, and whereas this sometimes led to a fight, on the ride home Sadie had been benign, nearly kind—the result, Reed assumed, of spending an evening in close proximity to her beloved.
He eased the Lexus out of the driveway, feeling like a teenager sneaking out from a house ruled by overbearing parents. Once he hit South Road, he experienced a heady sense of freedom. He was alive. How many moments of how many days had he failed to realize that? If someone had asked him then if he had any intention of going back to Sadie that night or ever again, he might have shrugged and said,What for?
Sadie had trailed him. She had heard the car pull out—or perhaps she had sensed something, overheard part of his conversation with Harper, read some impending deception on his face—and jumped out of bed. Possibly she had been waiting forhimto go to bed so she could sneak out to meet Tad. However it had happened, he had been caught with Harper in the parking lot of Lucy Vincent.
Caught.
At first he thought he could talk his way out of it, using a measured voice and reasonable calm. Sadie had been quite drunk; her eyesight wasn’t reliable. It had been dark, and she was without her glasses.
But Sadie had embarked on a full-blown investigation, which Reed, unfortunately, didn’t discover until after Sadie made the abhorrent scene at Farm Neck. In the days that followed Billy Frost’s memorial reception, the affair between Harper Frost and Dr. Reed Zimmer was all anyone talked about. It made Reed queasy to think about how lurid and trashy his private life must seem, that he had been revealed to be just one more faithless slug. A cheater.
Sadie forced Reed to go to his in-laws’ house, in Katama, to confess. Al Phelps had cast his eyes to the floor, uncomfortable and embarrassed at hearing Reed’s admission of guilt. Lydia had cried as though she were the one Reed had betrayed.
“Shame on you,” she’d whispered.
Reed would have liked to explain how bad things were at home, that Sadie wouldn’t sleep with him, wouldn’t accept a cup of coffee from his hands, wouldn’t kiss him good-bye when he left for work. But what did that matter? There were two kinds of people: the faithful and the unfaithful. He was unfaithful. And he had blithely chosen to believe that his wife was also unfaithful. He had created a whole fantasy relationship between her and Tad Morrissey, which, he realized now, was only for the benefit of his aching conscience.
Greenie, Adam Greenfield, the president of the hospital board of directors, had asked him to take a leave of absence for the summer.
“Go away,” he said. “By September, this will be old news.”
Reed had, initially, considered leaving. He could go to California, Oregon, Washington State, Alaska. He could return to Cincinnati, where he had grown up. He could spend a nostalgic summer driving past the house where his parents had raised him with tall, cold glasses of milk placed at the one o’clock position above his dinner plate, where he had conducted open-heart surgery on a frog he found floating in his mother’s koi pond, where he had learned how to mow a lawn in contrasting diagonal stripes, and where he had played third base in summer-league baseball. Third base had been the perfect home for him, a lefty. He would eat chili from Skyline and ice cream from Graeter’s. He would track down Tracy Sweeten, the girl with blond feathered hair whom he had loved in seventh grade. When Reed bumped into Tracy or other people he’d known growing up, they would say they’d heard he was a doctor back East. A few might remember that he lived on an island, although he doubted anyone would be able to imagine the Vineyard. Cincinnati was flat, midwestern: it was cornfields and trout ponds, as far from the cliffs of Aquinnah, the surging Atlantic, and East Coast elitism as one could get, aesthetically and philosophically.
Reed had chosen to stay because when it had come time to drive his Lexus onto the steamship, second thoughts had taken him hostage. He didn’t want to run away. He turned the car back toward Oak Bluffs and checked into a new hotel called Summercamp; it was so new that the receptionist didn’t display any recognition when he gave his name.
And then, out of desperation, he’d called Carter Mayne.
Aunt Dot’s house was on a road that few people knew about. The first thing Reed did when he got to the cottage—after stocking up on groceries at the Stop & Shop in Edgartown, which was so overrun with tourists that again he went unrecognized—was to shut off his cell phone. And then, because he feared that shutting it off wouldn’t be enough, he threw it into the woods behind the house. He was tempted every minute of every hour to call Harper. Greenie had, somehow, heard that Harper had lost her job and left the island, although even Greenie admitted that this was merely the “word on the street.” Reed had driven by her duplex and had not seen her Bronco out front, but that didn’t mean anything. Was Harper gone? Where would she go? She had never expressed any desire to be anywhere but Martha’s Vineyard. In this they were alike.
Reed’s summer had been quiet—indeed, silent—until Sadie had somehow discovered where he was. She was the one who had wanted him out of the house, wanted him gone—she didn’t care where, just gone—and yet apparently she had called Carter and bullied him into telling her the truth: Reed was staying at Aunt Dot’s house. Or maybe bullying hadn’t been required; Carter had always been weak when it came to women.
Sadie had stopped by the house only once, ostensibly to see if he was “okay,” but she had ended up calling him names, calling Harper names, hurling insults, and then, finally, tear-stained and hiccupy, she had asked, “Do you love her?” She had not been brave enough to ask before, and Reed had been grateful.
He said, “You left a vacuum. And as I’m sure you recall from reading Aristotle, nature abhors a vacuum.”
“That’s not an answer to my question,” Sadie said.
The answer to Sadie’s question was yes: he loved Harper. To say so seemed cruel, but Sadie must have read it on his face, because she turned and left before he could say anything.
Reed lived a quiet, deliberate life in the manner of Thoreau. Being without a phone, without any way to communicate, was rather like ceasing to exist except in the present moment. He rose at four thirty (a benefit of living at the far eastern edge of the time zone, light this early) and biked to Great Rock Bight to swim, returning along North Road by six or six fifteen, before the rest of the island—most of them on their summer vacation—thought to stir. He hermited himself most of the day, reading paperback novels from Aunt Dot’s shelves. He read Elmore Leonard’sGet Shortyand Louisa May Alcott’sLittle Women. He readJawsandThe Caine MutinyandThis Side of Paradise,which put him to sleep four days in a row until finally he gave up on it.
