Growing up, we were fiercely different in our personalities: she was always more feminine, preferring dolls and dresses, whereas I liked video games and sweatpants. In high school, she was a cheerleader and I played soccer. The boys drooled over her, as she inherited my mother’s Grace Kelly looks. I inherited my looks from god-knows-whom and was the fiery, freckled redhead who looked like she’d start a bar fight, given the opportunity.
Cora and I were closest before she turned ten. Then our closeness diminished, year by year, as she grew into her own world and I sought out mine. Whatever affection we still had for each other disappeared in the course of one night, a long time ago.
Tonight, she and her family have come for dinner, and as I look at Cora in the foyer of our childhood home, I wonder if any of that affection will ever come back. The probability is low.
Cora removes her hands and whisks past me. Her husband, Peter, is close behind, carrying a bottle of red wine. Nature, grooming products, and likely Botox have finely sculpted Peter into the perfect accessory for my sister. He looks like one of those Scandinavian actors trying to play an everyman role but looking a bit too perfect to be ordinary.
I don’t have anything against Peter other than he’s enchanted with my sister, but admittedly, that’s a pretty big character flaw. Truth is, I hardly know him, and I can only imagine what she says to him about me.
We don’t hug, but Peter gives me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. Like Cora, he smells amazing.
My niece enters the house last. I see photos of her from time to time on Cora’s social-media accounts, and Willow has developed into a frail-looking, sinewy, pale teen who mothers fear and fashion editors love. Her beauty is striking, despite the fact that she’d likely snap in two if the wind picked up.
“Willow, you’ve grown so much,” I say.
Willow lets me hug her, which is as satisfying as embracing a corpse. Like mother, like daughter.
“I was, like, four when I last saw you,” she says. “So, yeah. I’ve grown.”
I call out for Max, who shuffles his way down the winding staircase to reacquaint himself with the Yates side of the family. The McKay side is entrenched in Arizona, where Max’s paternal grandparents are slowly declining in an assisted-living facility. They came to their son’s funeral, and I never saw either of them cry, as if the death of their firstborn at the age of thirty-nine was almost expected.
I look at my boy, who suddenly appears so out of place and alone, like a stray dog spending its first night in a shelter.
Max mutters hi to everyone but avoids physical contact, and no one but Cora even attempts. She gets within a foot before she realizes his arms are staying at his sides, then opts to give him an awkward rub on his shoulder.
“And look at you,” she tells him. “If I hadn’t seen pictures, I wouldn’t even recognize you. You’re twelve now?”
“Eleven.”
“Willow’s thirteen,” Cora says.
“No one cares.”
“Willow, attitude,” Peter says.
“It’s just hard to believe we haven’t all been together in so long,” Cora says. “It’s crazy, right? We’re a family. We shouldn’t let time slip away like that.”
“You knew where we lived,” I say. “You could have visited anytime.” I’m careful not to say she was welcome anytime.
My comment registers the smallest of glancing blows on her face. “Well, as I recall, I invited you out for Thanksgiving a few years ago, and you declined.”
“I wasn’t ready to be here then,” I say. “I am now.”
Cora puts a hand on my shoulder. “Oh god, of course. And I’m so glad you’re back so we can help you. I just couldn’t believe when we heard about Riley.” She looks only at me as she talks, as if Max has faded into the background. “I was shocked. Simply shocked. I mean, so young. Not even forty, right? What a terrible, terrible thing. I just can’t imagine.”
Riley’s name slides like cold steel into my guts, and I wonder if that will always be the case.
“It’s been hard,” I say instead of thanks. I reach for Max’s hand and squeeze it. I hope I’m grounding him as much as he is me.
Peter takes a small step forward and makes eye contact with me first, then with Max. “You know,” he says, “I’ve taken sleep medication from time to time. Stress of the job and all. But I’m always careful not to mix it with alcohol. Too much risk.” He seems to hear what he just said and scurries to demolish and rebuild his point. “I’m just saying I know how easy it is…you know, to overdose by mistake. Happens all the time, at least that’s what my doctor says. Anything we can do to help. Seriously, anything. Just let us know.”
I let out a practiced sigh. “I think being in a different place will be good for both of us.”
Willow steps around her father and right up to Max. She’s a good five inches taller than him. “Did you see the body?” she asks.
“Willow Sofia,” Cora says. “How can you ask that?”
Cora is horrified, as am I, and both of us for reasons beyond the shock of the question itself. The moment produces a surge of electrical current through my body, jolting me to a sudden, surprising, and dissonant thought:
I miss my sister.
So odd I feel that right now, in this moment. It doesn’t last long, but enough for Cora and me to make eye contact and have what I think is a shared moment.
Max squeezes my hand a little harder but gives no other indication he’s upset. He doesn’t react. He doesn’t retreat.
Instead, he simply says, “Yes.”
I’m amazed he answered.
Willow’s eyes widen. “What was it like?”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I say.
“Quite enough,” Peter adds. “Behave yourself, Willow.”
“I was just asking.”
Before Willow gets another scolding, Max says, “He looked peaceful.” Max shifts his focus and looks directly at me. “He didn’t look angry anymore.”
His answer sucks the air out of me. Max has never talked about the few seconds he saw Riley’s body in the bed, and now that he does, he describes it…this way.
He didn’t look angry anymore.
“Did you cry?”
I turn and see my father, who’s just walked into the foyer with a drink in hand. Single-malt whiskey, if habit holds true.
“No,” Max mumbles. “Not right then.”
“That’s because you’re a Yates,” my father says. “And Yateses don’t panic. Don’t lose their nerve in a crisis.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
My father barrels right over me. “In fact, I’d wager none of us were as young as Max when we first saw a dead body. Any takers on that?”
My entire body stiffens with an old, familiar dread, one so heavy and instant it’s as if I’ve been cast into stone.
“Stop it, Dad,” I say.
Willow chimes in. “I’ve seen lots of messed-up stuff on YouTube.”
“No.” My father points in her direction with his drink. “I’m talking real stuff. Live, so to speak. You had to be there. See it in person.” He doesn’t pause long enough for anyone to interject. “I saw my first dead person when I was twenty-one. Wasn’t even a funeral, though I’d been to a few of those already. But they were all closed-casket.” He takes another step closer, locked in on me. “Cory Levitz. Senior year of college. I didn’t know him, but his car wrapped around a lamppost right outside my apartment. After midnight on a Friday. Drunk as a skunk. I was the third or fourth person there after hearing the crash. Car was crumpled like a beer can. His blood all over the windshield. Someone had a flashlight, and I couldn’t even fathom the fact his arm was no longer—”
I snap. “Dad, what the hell is wrong with you?”
That stops him. He doesn’t look angered. He seems amused.
“Well,
fair enough,” he says. He reaches out and ruffles Max’s hair. “I’m just saying your boy is a tough son of a bitch.”
Then he turns and walks back from where he came, jingling his glass, the clinking ice the only sound among us.
My god, we haven’t even made it past the foyer.
Seven
Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin
Back home, Colin found Meg with a book in bed, covers pulled up to her waist.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked up. “How was she?”
“Numb,” he said.
“Did you talk?”
He nodded. “A little. Usual stuff, mostly.”
“Did you tell her we want to hire someone to check in on her?”
“Yup, as always. And as always, she said no.”
Meg let out an exhale, and Colin identified it. Meg’s exhales all had fingerprints on them, and Colin could gauge her state of mind by which exhale she used at any particular time. His guess was confirmed with her next sentence.
“We uprooted our lives, and all we’re doing is watching her slowly kill herself. We could have done that from Madison.”
“Let’s give it a little more time,” he said. “We haven’t been here all that long. We’re adjusting, she’s adjusting. Besides, it’s an easier conversation to have in the daytime with her.”
Meg looped a strand of her shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I just don’t know what good we’re doing here. And when the baby comes, we’ll have even less time to spend with her.”
“But maybe having the baby will help turn her around,” he said. “Maybe our child is the spark she needs.”
“If she makes it until then.”
“We’re family,” Colin added. “Just being close by, it means a lot to her. We don’t have to solve every problem right now. We just need to be here.”
Colin walked up to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Meg on the cheek. As he did, he reached with his left hand and lightly traced his fingertips along the base of her neck, down over her breasts, and finally up and around her stomach, which was only half-covered by one of his loose-knit tank tops. He thought once again of their child, though this time, Colin didn’t picture a baby but an adult, a person his own age. He pictured a man, Colin’s son, forty years old and grappling with the same issues Colin faced now. Was Colin destined to end up like his mother, old and rattled, a collector of junk, alternatingly lucid and crazed?
And would Colin’s child be there for him?
He hoped the answer to the first question was no. But if history was going to repeat itself, Colin liked to think the answer to the second was yes.
Meg gave him enough of a smile to let him know she didn’t want an argument, either, and then went back to her book.
Colin stripped to his boxer briefs and joined Meg in bed. After leaning over and kissing her shoulder, he grabbed his own book from the nightstand. It was a novel, but although he was enjoying it, he wasn’t reading it for pleasure.
He looked at the cover again.
The Broken Child by J. L. Sharp.
He’d never heard of the author before a couple weeks ago, though that wasn’t unusual, considering he didn’t pick up a whole lot of books, and when he did, they were usually of the true-crime variety. But he had to admit Sharp’s books were well written, intriguing, and not too full of flowery descriptions. Colin hated flowery descriptions.
In fact, Sharp’s writing was so well honed that Colin had torn through her first two books in a week before starting The Broken Child a couple of days ago. Each book centered on a female protagonist, Detective Jenna Black, who investigated cold-case files in Missouri, cases most often involving children.
The reason for this recent literary quest was that J. L. Sharp was the pen name for Rose Yates, a thirty-seven-year-old ex-Milwaukee resident and recent widow. Her husband, Riley McKay, had recently OD’d on alcohol and sleep medication. The coroner’s report didn’t rule it a suicide but rather an accidental overdose. Colin wasn’t so sure; Riley McKay’s toxicity levels suggested he must have had significant trouble sleeping to ingest as much as he had.
The Yates case was a small one for the Milwaukee PD and one that Colin, as a member of the Special Investigations Unit, would normally never have seen. But Riley McKay died right as the assigned detective, Bertram Cooper, was about to retire. Cooper worked the case for a week but his retirement day came before the case was closed out. Colin, with the least seniority in his new department, was told to deal with it. Put the case to bed, his sergeant had said.
Colin assumed it would be a matter of routine paperwork, but it hadn’t taken long before he had questions.
Why was there no extensive interview with the wife?
Why wasn’t the doctor who prescribed the meds consulted?
Why were there no notes about the family dynamic, any notes of mental illness or depression history, or observations from friends or family about the relationship between Riley McKay and Rose Yates?
The likely answer to all these questions was because Detective Cooper, on his way out, had seen the Riley McKay death as a simple overdose, perhaps suicide, and nothing more. Maybe in his anticipation of sailing the world or doing whatever he had planned, Cooper had been a little sloppy with the McKay case. Or, perhaps, he was just a mediocre detective.
Colin had planned to talk to Rose Yates, only to find she and her son moved to New Hampshire just a few weeks after her husband died. A little town called Bury.
Then, when Colin had discovered Rose Yates wrote novels about detectives, that piqued his interest, so he’d bought her first three books and read them. He hadn’t known what, exactly, he was looking for in these books but figured he’d know when he found it. He’d read through the first two books with interest, but it was the third book that grabbed him. One chapter in particular.
Now, in his bed, he thumbed open Sharp’s third book and opened to page 108.
Chapter 12. He’d just read it for the first time earlier in the day.
All in all, a seemingly inconsequential chapter, unless it ended up taking on greater importance later in the book. In the chapter, Detective Jenna Black recounted an old case of hers to a work colleague. A case she was proud to have finally solved after it had gone cold years ago.
The case involved the death of a forty-year-old man. Turned out, Black told her colleague, he’d been killed by his wife.
The colleague inquired about the method of killing.
And this was the part that sent a thousand-watt jolt right through Colin when he’d first read Jenna Black’s answer in the pages of chapter 12.
A mixture of alcohol and sleep medication.
Eight
Bury, New Hampshire
August 12
I jolt awake, sweat basting the back of my neck. It takes a few seconds to orient myself.
I’m in a bed. Nighttime. I’m at…Dad’s house.
It was a dream.
It was the dream.
I throw the sheets off and jump out of bed, not wanting my mind to replay that last scene, over and over. My limbs are weak, but the horror soon releases a nice shot of adrenaline in my system. Nature’s methamphetamine.
I can’t. Not again.
Bedside table. I flip my phone over. It’s 3:22 a.m.
Tonight’s dream was worse than normal. So vivid, as if I were reliving it all over again. From experience, I know it’ll take at least two hours to fall back asleep, at which point it will be close to my alarm time. And I’m not going to lie there and let the imagery eat me. Not tonight.
Into the bathroom, light on, the harshness of which hits me like high beams from an oncoming truck. I see myself in the mirror, wince against my reflection. I don’t want to be real, to exist. Not right now.
God, how good it would feel to smash my fist into the glass, see my
image burst in a thousand shards. I can taste it. The pain. The blood.
I resist. It’s not easy.
I allow one long stare at myself, my gaze full of accusation, diminishment, maybe even hate.
I spring into action, needing to do something with this burning self-loathing, needing to sweat the toxins out of me. Hair pulled tight in a ponytail. Throw on running shorts, sports bra, Dri-FIT tank, HOKA sneakers. Down the stairs to the main level. Punch the code into the keypad, disarm the house. Out the front door. No phone, no headphones, no Fitbit, no water, no headlamp, no plan, nothing.
And I run.
Streetlights glow against my wishes. I want to run in complete darkness. Maybe then I could fall off a cliff or smash headfirst into a tree. Then they could tell my son my death was an accident.
I tire quickly, because jumping out of bed in the middle of the night and sprinting is a foolish idea.
But I keep going, wanting to puke. Wanting my heart to burst. Wanting to feel pain, longing for punishment.
Distance is immeasurable. Only not as far as I want, but farther than I should.
I reach the point where I capitulate to reason and turn around. That’s the hardest part of all. Making that decision to come back. How much easier to let the night take me, swallow and digest me, and excrete me into the afterworld.
Still, I turn and begin walking toward home.
A few steps in, I see his face. That face. Helpless.
It’s all I see.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the night. Tell him.
I close my eyes. I see his.
There’s an eternity in this moment.
“I’m so sorry.”
Nine
August 30
I’m on the fourth mile of my morning run. It feels good to run for exercise, not just to escape nightmares. I haven’t had the dream for over two weeks, so maybe my return to Bury is starting to provide the therapy I need.
Last night’s heavy downpour washed away the humidity, leaving the morning crisp, a rare hint of a fall that’s still a few weeks away. Despite the cool, sweat flies off me with each step, and I’m already tapping into my second water pouch.
The Dead Husband Page 3