The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“What?”

“You’re just not attracted to me any longer.” I sat up straight, while he sunk further back into the pillows surrounding him and kept his eyes on the magazine, as if he were praying that one of the football players pictured would leap off the page and save him.

“I’m tired. Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”

“You always want to talk about it tomorrow,” I whined, a line I knew I had heard and repeated countless times. He reached over and flipped off the light. I hissed, “Get yourself a dick, Henry,” and then curled up as close to the edge of the bed as I could. I didn’t expect to sleep; my whole body tingled as if someone kept pricking me with pins, and I wanted to stay awake until one of us apologized, and then fall asleep with my hand on his chest. But I did sleep, almost immediately, as though I were drugged, before either of us said anything more.

That night, I dreamed of the first time we ever slept together, on a heavy wool blanket spread out at night on a golf course, underneath the stars, when I thought that his soft, bumbling hands were because of inexperience, not the bland constant in our sex life that they were to become. Afterward, we lay naked on the blanket and Henry invented constellations and told me fairy tales to go along with them, just Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast, but with the characters’ names changed. His arms had wrapped securely around me, solid against my body, and I was thrilled by the thought that, if he squeezed just a little too tightly, he could have crushed me.

When I woke up the next morning, I had wanted to tell him about my dream — I always talked about my dreams on lazy weekend mornings, while we sipped coffee in bed — but it was a weekday, and he’d already left for work, where the cops waited in his aquarium-filled lobby to arrest him. One of the victims had recognized him — his picture was in the paper on page B5 in an article about the top five dentists in the city, the same day that the grainy suspect sketch took up half of B1 — and a DNA test matched him up to the semen in a condom he’d left, carelessly, at another girl’s house, at the base of the toilet, neatly wrapped in tissue. Henry kept his books in alphabetical order by author, in a separate bookshelf from mine. He would not miss the toilet.

The judge denied bail, saying Henry’s past travel history and the nature of the crimes made him a flight risk. In the first days after the arrest, our house was a flurry of reporters and police officers, and a high-profile lawyer with a manicure who’d just defended a quarterback in a domestic violence case offered to represent Henry. He pushed the trial through quickly, so that the prosecution would have less time to add to its growing pile of evidence, and for that, I am thankful. The attention at our house has drifted away, and focuses now on the courthouse, and on images of young, thin, tearful victims, all college students of the type who visit the makeup counter in giggling groups of five and tell us they’re getting married so that we will give them a free makeover.