The Broken Ones

by Ren Richards

  Nell tried to remember now what it had been like to hold her own child. Had there ever been a peaceful moment? Surely there must have been. Four years was a long time to go without a second of happiness. All of that time blurred together now, like one long dream. Nell had the sense that if she thought too long on it, her past would reach up like skeletal fingers from the grave and pull her beneath the earth.

  She heard Lindsay clattering about in the kitchen, and then the loud whirr of her Keurig heating the water for coffee. Nell descended the stairs and found Lindsay standing in front of the open refrigerator in an oversized t-shirt.

  The refrigerator was an abysmal display: a bottle of raspberry zinfandel, a carton of blueberries with fuzz on them and half of a fast-food burger loosely wrapped in its paper.

  ‘Good morning, sunshine,’ Lindsay sang. She turned on her heel to face Nell. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘You’re in a good mood,’ Nell said, falling into a chair. She knew exactly what this was. Matthew was so much of a drug that he might as well have been in a syringe. He built Lindsay up only to drain her spirit away, and the only one incapable of seeing it was Lindsay.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Lindsay sat at the table. She cradled her mug in both hands; there was a cartoon cat pouring whiskey from a bottle on it.

  Nell stared at her. ‘Are you going to make me say it?’

  The glow drained from Lindsay’s face. ‘You saw me leave last night.’

  ‘Yes, I saw you leave last night,’ Nell said. She was trying not to raise her voice. As a result, her tone sounded eerily calm. ‘What happened, Lindsay? I thought you left him behind in Missouri. Doesn’t he live there?’

  Lindsay took a measured sip of her coffee, swallowed audibly and set the mug on the table. ‘Nell, you seem to be operating under the belief that I haven’t given these things any thought. I have. I just don’t think you’ll like what I have to say.’

  Nell waited for her to go on. She had the sense that any response she gave would be the wrong one anyway, and if Lindsay blew up into a defensive rage, there would be no bringing her to reason.

  ‘My marriage to Matthew had nothing to do with you,’ Lindsay said. ‘I know you think that the mannequins in my car and in my back yard were meant to send you some message, and if you want to know the truth, I think that’s shitty of you.’

  ‘Shitty?’ Nell balked.

  ‘Yes,’ Lindsay said. ‘Shitty. You think everything is fodder for one of your goddamned books and you’re the omniscient narrator who gets to tell us about it.’ She pointed her mug at Nell, spilling a few drops of coffee onto the table. ‘That’s right. I know big words too. It hasn’t even occurred to you how I might be feeling about this. I’m Matthew’s ex-wife, Nell. Me. Not you. Someone was trying to scare me, and it worked.’

  Lindsay broke eye contact to stare out the window, at a world buried in autumn leaves.

  ‘Wait,’ Nell said. Her chair scraped against the tiles as she pushed it back. ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Matthew has been visiting you in Rockhollow this entire time, and he might have something to do with all of this?’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about the time I was married to Matthew,’ Lindsay went on, her voice quieter but still with an edge. ‘Not because I was deliberately keeping it from you, but because it didn’t seem important, especially with all you were dealing with that year. It was right before your trial.’

  Nell reached across the table and took Lindsay’s hand. Her way of apologising. Lindsay was right. Nell couldn’t argue. She had made this all about herself. ‘Like what?’ she asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lindsay’s effort to sound nonchalant contradicted her words. ‘He had a couple of affairs. One of them was his secretary – how clichéd is that?’ She laughed coldly. ‘Anyway, I guess she was under the impression that he’d leave me and go be with her. She couldn’t let it go. She scooped a dead squirrel out of the street and put it in our mailbox. She smashed in my car windows while I was getting a hot stone massage. Might have gotten away with that one if someone hadn’t seen her running out of the parking lot.’

  ‘Lindsay, oh my God,’ Nell said.

  Lindsay rolled her eyes. ‘It was nothing. You were dealing with the press and the … fucking Eddletons. This kind of shit wasn’t worth worrying you over.’

  ‘What happened to this woman?’ Nell said. ‘Where the hell is she?’

  ‘Matthew handled it,’ Lindsay said. ‘I thought.’ She shrugged. ‘It isn’t the first time she’s done something crazy. That’s all I’m trying to say.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Nell pressed. ‘What else has happened?’

  Lindsay heaved a theatrical sigh. She threw back the rest of her coffee and then moved to the sink with the empty mug. ‘She moved in with Matthew after I left him. Good riddance, right? She can have him. But a dog’s a dog, and eventually he cheated on her and left her too. She had it in her head that it was because of me.’ She sat in her chair again, never managing to meet Nell’s eyes. She made a production of how unconcerned she was with what she was saying. She straightened the stack of napkins in the apple-shaped holder.

  ‘It’s been a few years since she sent me any surprises. The last one was a hate letter smeared with what I’m going to assume was period blood.’

  ‘Lindsay, what the fuck?’ Nell said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because you were finally picking yourself back up,’ Lindsay said. ‘You took those night classes to get your diploma and then you went to college.’

  ‘Don’t act like you did this for me,’ Nell said. ‘You shouldn’t have kept this to yourself.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Lindsay said. ‘I think the mannequin nonsense is coming from her.’ Her voice went soft, all her edge and steel giving way to something softer, more human. ‘That’s what I told the police. They’ve been investigating it. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to freak out. And, Nell, she isn’t the one who ran you off the road. That had to have been a drunk driver. This woman’s crazy, but the police checked and she has an alibi that night.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Nell asked.

  ‘Candace something, I don’t know.’ She surely did know, but Lindsay never liked admitting how much thought she gave to things that troubled her.

  Nell reached across the table to take both of Lindsay’s hands in hers. Lindsay stared down at them. Her expression was guarded and she was trying too hard to look unfazed, but Nell could see how upset she was. What else had she overlooked?

  ‘Linds.’ Her voice was gentle. ‘Tell me her last name.’

  ‘Nielson.’ Lindsay spat the word like a piece of gum that had lost its flavour.

  Nell tried to picture it, like words being drummed into a sheet of typewriter paper: Matthew’s jilted lover destroying Lindsay’s life. If Candace Nielson truly hated her, she would want Lindsay to feel the same injustice she felt. So she resorted to her old trick of leaving a bloody animal for Lindsay to find, only this time it was the mannequins. It wouldn’t be the gore that scared Lindsay. It would be the fact that Candace had been able to break into her back yard, leaving no trace. It was a show of power.

  ‘Lindsay,’ she murmured, finally understanding. ‘I’m so sorry. You’re right. I’ve made this all about me because Reina’s anniversary messed with my head. I wasn’t even thinking about you.’

  Lindsay sniffed. Her eyes were wet with tears she was too stubborn to let out. ‘You’ve been kind of selfish, yeah.’

  ‘But there’s something I don’t understand.’ Nell squeezed her hands. ‘Why would Candace do this to you now? You’ve been divorced for years. Matthew’s surely had a thousand other little liaisons since then.’

  Lindsay lost her nerve again, lowered her gaze, turned red. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Nell said. ‘What more do you know? Tell me.’

  ‘Because I’m pregnant,’ Lindsay burst out. It was almost a scream. ‘It’s because I’m
fucking pregnant, okay?’

  32

  THEN

  It didn’t take the press long to find Nell at Matthew and Lindsay’s address.

  Nell awoke, panicked, to the sound of fists pounding at the door. She looked out of her window and was greeted by flashing cameras and what seemed like a thousand people crowding the front lawn.

  ‘Penelope!’

  ‘Ms Wendall!’

  Nell’s heart was pounding when she burst into Lindsay and Matthew’s bedroom. It was empty, the bed already neatly made. Nell looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was nearly 2 PM. After a fitful night, Lindsay had given Nell one of her Ambien, and it had apparently rendered her comatose for the entire morning.

  At this hour, Matthew would be at work. And Lindsay – God only knew where she was. Lindsay had abandoned Nell the second she’d married Matthew; apparently this was true even when they were living under the same roof.

  Nell paced through every room of the house, calling Lindsay’s name, screaming it. Her brain was still hazy from the Ambien. Reporters were still pounding on the door, and it felt like the entire house was shaking.

  Her reflection in the ornate hall mirror was skeletal. She sat at the marble table under the mirror and picked up her phone. The world moved in slow motion as she scrolled through her contacts list looking for Lindsay’s number.

  It rang for an eternity, and then there was only the sound of a beep, followed by silence. Lindsay used to have a playful outgoing message that began with the song ‘Spiderwebs’ by No Doubt, singing, ‘I’m walking into spiderwebs, so leave a message and I’ll call you back’ followed by a giggle and Lindsay saying, ‘Leave a message, bitches!’ But Matthew had disapproved, and now it was just a beep.

  Nell left a message for her sister, and she didn’t remember all of what she said. It was a torrent of obscenities, she knew that much. And ‘How could you leave me?’ topped off with a shrill ‘I hate you!’

  The rest was a blur. Nell was swimming in a world that had gone underwater with her tears. It was only in that state, lacking clarity, that she was able to face the reporters outside. She stormed through the cloud of them. Two or three of them followed her down the street, shouting, ‘Penelope!’ ‘Did you murder your daughter? Penelope Wendall!’

  She broke into a run. She cut between two manicured lawns and into the woods behind them. She ran until there were no longer footsteps coming after her, and she didn’t stop until she reached the road on the other side. There was a divided highway, blurred by speeding headlights.

  Later, Nell would learn that she had been walking through the woods for hours before reaching that overpass. But in the moment it only felt like a handful of seconds. How could she be expected to feel the passage of time? She didn’t even feel the cold as it raked her lungs.

  She only knew that she was tired. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry, Reina.’

  It was the last time she ever intended to say the child’s name. In her four years as Reina’s mother, she had often dreamed of her being gone. She had dreamed about leaving the party at Ethan’s house, rather than staying behind and giving him her virginity. She had dreamed of taking Lindsay’s money and having an abortion. She had been stupid to think there was anything redemptive about motherhood.

  She could have forgiven herself if she’d had the abortion. She would have cried a little, been angry with herself and spent the rest of her life wondering what might have been. Years would make the memory of it smaller and smaller, though, until it was just a ghost. But once Reina was here, that was another matter entirely. Reina Eddleton would never be erased from this world like some bloody pieces in a medical waste container. She would forever have existed. She would forever be in Nell’s nightmares.

  I don’t want Reina to disappear, she realised. I want to be the one to disappear.

  She stopped and gripped the railing of the overpass. Below her, cars sped towards the city on one side and away from it on the other. Between the cars there was the road, shining with moonlight and rain. That was where she would jump – for that gleam of brightness in the black. It would hurt for a second, but then she would be gone.

  She hoisted one leg over the railing and pushed herself forward.

  Something reeled her back. In her daze, Nell thought it was God.

  It was Lindsay. She slapped Nell hard across the face, creating a blossom of starbursts, and then she grabbed her shoulders. She was shouting, but Nell couldn’t hear the words. Her breath came in loud rasps. Her only chance at escape was gone.

  33

  NOW

  Pregnant. Nell’s mind went black for a moment. Her brain was trying to disregard the word. It was too impossible.

  Getting answers out of Lindsay was a delicate balance. Nell knew that she couldn’t press too hard. That sort of thing would get her thrown outside like a stray cat. But she also knew that if she didn’t push at all, Lindsay would manoeuvre her way out of discussing it.

  ‘Linds.’ Nell’s voice was gentle but not placating.

  Lindsay raised her eyes in a stare that could be mistaken for mean but that Nell knew to be resignation. ‘All right,’ Lindsay said. ‘Okay. I’ll talk about this, but your mouth stays shut unless you’re pouring coffee into it.’

  Nell’s silence was her agreement.

  ‘I ran into him at the country club,’ Lindsay began. ‘He was in town for the week, rubbing elbows with his lawyer friends for some legal convention. It was a year ago. I know you don’t think it’s possible for people like him to change. Maybe you’re right, but we started talking and I figured it couldn’t hurt to let him take me out to dinner. It wasn’t anything much. Robert has also been “taking me out to dinner”.’ She emphasised her meaning with air quotes.

  ‘I made sure it was a shitty diner with no ambiance. I wanted to see Matthew’s face in the harsh lighting. I thought it would show me all the sun spots and the wrinkles and pores and remind me that he’s a piece of shit. But he just’ – she tugged at a piece of her hair and twined it around her fingers – ‘looked like the man I used to be in love with. And he started seeing me whenever he was in town.’

  Nell’s ability to remain silent was a testament to how much she wanted to hear the rest of the story. She regarded Lindsay the same way she had regarded the Widow Thompson when she described killing all eight of her children and then laying their corpses on her bedroom floor so she could sprinkle them with holy water.

  She had many questions, and if she was patient, she would have her answers. But not now. Some would take days to coax out of Lindsay.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell him I’m pregnant,’ Lindsay said. ‘I was just going to get rid of it. I got in the car and I drove to the doctor, and then I don’t know what happened. It’s like I had a stroke. My hands wouldn’t let go of the steering wheel and my heart started racing.’ She was staring past Nell, trapped in her memory. ‘I had this thought that if I went through with it the ugliness would never go away. I’d never feel good again.’ Her eyes moved to Nell and she let out a bitter laugh. ‘So much for that, right?’

  Nell thought of the nursery upstairs. Had the basket of baby lotion always been under the crib, or was it a recent addition? No, it hadn’t been there six months ago, when she’d last spent a night at her sister’s house. It wasn’t like Nell to miss a detail, but then Lindsay was so good at making them blend in. She was a chameleon of deceit.

  ‘You’ve decided to keep it,’ Nell said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘I told Matthew earlier this month. I wanted it to be right before he left for his trip, so he wouldn’t smother me. He’s started getting clingy.’ She squirmed as though there were spiders crawling up her back. ‘That was a mistake. I should have told him it was someone else’s.’

  Lindsay was right. Telling Matthew was a mistake, but the true mistake was conceiving a child with him in the first place. Now she was forever tethered to this horrible man. This sinister tarp of skin and violence and poiso
n. Years ago, Bonnie had said that Matthew would be the death of Lindsay, and she was right. As long as he was in Lindsay’s life, it was only a matter of time before he killed her.

  ‘Lindsay—’

  ‘You don’t get to say anything,’ Lindsay snapped. ‘That was the agreement.’

  Lindsay was pregnant. The idea wouldn’t register. Nell thought back to the wine Lindsay had uncorked the other day at her apartment – had Lindsay even taken a sip of it? Nell could only remember her swishing it in the glass and taking the occasional sniff.

  Lindsay was looking at her. A chunk of blonde hair fell across her face and clung to the corner of her mouth.

  In that moment Nell realised it wasn’t just teenage girls who were intimidated by positive pregnancy tests. There was something about the entire fiasco that could make anyone feel small. Even a woman who kept knives and hammers under her couch cushions.

  Lindsay had never seemed small before. Even when Matthew nearly killed her, she picked herself up like a boxer rising from a blow with seconds left to spare.

  ‘Is there any way that it isn’t Matthew’s baby?’ Nell asked. She felt nauseous at the thought of that man being back in their lives, this time with a permanent tie to her sister. ‘What about Robert? How can you be sure?’

  After a long pause, Lindsay nodded, staring down at the table. ‘The timings line up. You could be right, but I just … have a feeling, you know?’

  Nell reached across the table and took her hand. ‘That doesn’t mean you have to let him back into your life, Lindsay. You don’t owe him anything.’

  ‘Please don’t turn this into a fight, Nell,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to fight.’

  ‘You already know I’m on your side,’ Nell sighed, resigning herself to holding her tongue. ‘And until that psycho woman is in jail, you’re not staying here.’