Praying for Sleep

nearby but so far it hasn’t struck me dead.
    “You never said anything.” Portia was clearly amused. “I had no clue.”
    “I was afraid, I guess. That Owen would find out. You know him. That temper of his.”
    “Why would I tell Owen?”
    “I didn’t think you would. It just seemed to me that the more people who knew, the more the chance word would get out.” She paused. “Well, there’s something else too. . . . I was ashamed. I was afraid of what you’d think.”
    “Me? Why on earth?”
    “An affair isn’t anything to be proud of.”
    “Were you just fucking? Or were you in love?”
    Lis was offended, yet Portia’s question seemed motivated merely by curiosity. “No, no, no. It wasn’t just physical. We were in love. I really don’t know why I didn’t tell you before. I should have. There’ve been too many secrets between us.” She glanced at her sister. “Owen had an affair too.”
    The young woman nodded knowingly. Lis was horrified that Portia had somehow learned this already. But, no, it turned out that she’d simply pegged Owen as a man with a wandering eye.
    This offended Lis too. “Well, it was only one time,” she said defensively.
    “Frankly, Lis, I’m surprised you waited as long as you did to find somebody.”
    “How can you say that?” Lis retorted. “I’m not the sort . . .” Her voice faded.
    “Not like me ?” her sister asked wryly.
    “I mean that I wasn’t looking for anyone. We were trying to work it out, Owen and me. He’d given up the woman he was seeing and we were making a conscious effort—”
    “Conscious effort.”
    Lis listened for mockery and believed she heard none. She continued doggedly, “—an effort to keep our marriage together. The affair . . . just happened.”
    She’d begun the liaison at an awkward time, right in the middle of the terrible sequence of last winter: Owen’s affair, the slow death of her mother, her increased discontent with teaching, taking over the estate . . . The worst possible time, she thought, then reflected: As if there’s a convenient moment for cataclysm.
    Lis’s affair, unlike the tidy Hollywood version that she imagined Owen’s to have been, had tormented her mercilessly. It would’ve been far easier, she told herself, if she’d been able to separate the dick from the soul. But she couldn’t and so of course she fell in love—as her paramour did with her. At first, Lis admitted, she was partly drawn to her lover out of retaliation. It was petty, yes, but there it was—she wanted to get even with Owen. Besides, she found, she simply couldn’t control herself. The affair was all-consuming.
    Portia asked, “It’s over now?”
    “Yes, it’s over.”
    “Well, what’s the big deal?”
    “Oh,” Lis said bitterly, “but it is a big deal. I haven’t told you everything.”
    Lis opened her mouth to speak and for an unbearable moment she was about to confess everything. She truly believed that she was going to blurt out every scathing fact.
    And she probably would have if the car hadn’t arrived just then.
    Portia turned from her sister and looked out the kitchen window toward the driveway.
    “Owen!” Lis stared out the window, both overjoyed at his arrival and bitterly disappointed that the conversation with her sister was being interrupted.
    They walked into the kitchen and peered through the sheets of rain.
    “No, I don’t think it’s him,” her sister said slowly. They watched the headlights make their snaking way along the driveway. Lis counted the flares as the beams hit the orange reflectors along the route. Portia was right. Although she couldn’t make out the vehicle clearly through the bushes and trees, it was light-colored; Owen’s Cherokee truck was black as a gun barrel.
    Lis flung open the kitchen door and looked out through the dazzling rain.
    It was a police car. A young deputy climbed out. He glanced at the Acura sitting in the middle of the flood and ran into the kitchen, flicking rainwater from his face in an effeminate way. He was round with the tautness of recent fat and had the face of a man on an unexpected assignment.
    “Lis.” He pulled his hat off. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. We just found Owen’s truck at the bottom of a ravine.”
    “Oh, God!” Lis’s hands flew to her eyes and she pressed hard, as if they stung with smoke.
    “He’d been run into—by that fellow Hrubek, looks like. The psycho. Knocked him off the road. Seemed to be an