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The irony was, the only person who believed him was Chloe.
“Because you didn’t have the balls to do anything literal until I put you out,” she had screamed at him eight months into the separation, when her lawyer made noises about adultery during one of their endless mediations on the financial settlement. “You were just going to go on having your stupid little crushes, getting moody for a few months, then rewarding yourself with some new toy when you sucked it up and moved on. So I tell you to get out, and what did you do? You fuck some girl!”
To Chloe’s way of thinking, Dale’s technical faithfulness up to the point she threw him out was just as wounding as a series of affairs would have been. Sharp-tongued and volatile, capable of going months without sex, she didn’t see how his intermittent attraction to women had anything to do with her behavior, and she didn’t see anything noble in his decision, time and again, not to stray. But logic had never been Chloe’s strong point, which was how Kat had ended up with that hideous name on her birth certificate, Katarina.
“It’s important to me,” Chloe said when Dale tried to back her off the name. “Why?” “Because of the 1984 Olympics.” “But Katarina Witt was a skater. You skied.” “You never understand anything.”
Chloe and Dale had been married a year at the time, and her skiing ambitions had been thwarted almost a decade earlier. And it wasn’t as if she had blown out a knee or suffered some other catastrophic injury on the eve of achieving greatness. She just hadn’t been good enough, as she had admitted readily. When Dale met her, she was a hostess at a high-end steak house, talking a good game about graduate school and sports medicine but essentially searching for someone who had the means, or the potential means, to bail her out. Dale had been a city pla
This was fine with Dale, better than fine. If only Chloe had really cha
This was an out-and-out lie, but Dale never challenged it, because the truth was even harder to explain to one’s teenage daughter. Chloe had packed his bags and left them on the porch, a
When Dale looked back on the rest of his marriage, all he saw were petty grudges, the things that couples were supposed to work through. He longed, sometimes, for big problems, for the kind of reasons that made the end of a marriage comprehensible and acceptable. He wished that Chloe drank or had affairs. Or that they had become undone by the fertility problems that had plagued them after Kat’s birth. (Kat had come so easily, and then they couldn’t conceive at all. A mystery, especially given the fact that Chloe was not quite thirty when they started trying to make a sibling for Kat, who yearned for a little brother or sister.) He had loved her once, truly, and she had loved him. And then he didn’t. Some-his brother, for example-had suggested that Dale would have been better off to have an affair, get it out of his system, then go home to Chloe and keep his damn mouth shut. As if everything happened in bed. But it wasn’t just about sex. There was also the intense loneliness Dale felt sitting with Chloe, in their rare quiet moments. Outside of Kat he had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to him. Maybe they never had.
When he saw her today, waiting for him at this middle school-he already knew, of course, had barked at the principal to stop her stuttering nonexplanations and just tell him, precisely, what had happened-it occurred to her that they were now two members of a tiny tribe, the only people who could ever understand each other.
But later, under the gentle questioning of the detectives, she had been cruel again, blurting out, “I wanted to send her to private school.”
“Chloe-”
“I wanted to send her to private school, and you insisted on public school, and now she’s dead.”
“I can’t believe you would bust my balls over that now.”
“But it’s true.”
It wasn’t. Chloe had squawked about private school after the marriage broke up, interested in finding another way to spend Dale’s money. But Kat had been the one to end the discussion, saying she didn’t want to be separated from her friends. Friends-that was good. According to preliminary information, the girl who had shot Kat was her oldest and dearest friend, Perri Kahn. Shot Kat, shot Josie Patel, then shot herself.
“Chloe, that’s not fair.”
She narrowed her eyes, ready to fight, as always, then realized there were witnesses. That was when she had taken his hand, pretended such concern for him, but it was too late. He left her to the detectives, finding a tiny crumb of comfort in having them on his side. Surely they understood now why Kat’s parents had divorced, even if Kat never did.
The drive to Charlestowne was usually torturous, a battle through the worst spots on the Beltway, but the trip went swiftly today, and Dale arrived at his father’s apartment a few minutes past three. A well-meaning resident, a woman with hair only a shade lighter than her lilac dress, held the door open for Dale so he didn’t have to be buzzed through the foyer doors. He wanted to chide her-what good was a security system if the residents let anyone in the building?-but it was probably for the best, as his father would demand to know the purpose of Dale’s mission if he called from the lobby, refusing to grant entry until Dale explained why he was here. (“It’s Dale, Dad. I’m in the lobby, Dad.” “Why?” “Because I have something to tell you.” “What?” “I’d rather do it upstairs.” “I don’t want to spend five minutes waiting to find out what you have to say. Just say it and I’ll digest it, and then we’ll talk about it.” “Kat’s dead, Dad!” “What?” “KAT IS DEAD.” And the women wandering through the lobby would murmur to one another, “Poor boy, his cat is dead.”) No, better to avoid the intercom altogether.