Forty-One
The snow begins an hour later as I wait in the school car line for Max. Heavy, wet flakes, melting as they hit my windshield. But if this pace keeps up, the roads will soon be a mess. It would be a perfect night to be cozy at home, maybe play a few board games with Max by the fire, do a little writing after he’s in bed, then go to sleep early. Those are all things a person not riddled with stress might do. Mine will be a different evening altogether, because I need to talk to Cora.
Two minutes until the school bell. A red blur to my right, and I look over and see Tasha Collins walking up along the car line sidewalk. She’s ensconced in a cardinal-red winter coat that extends to her knees, and thousands of snowflakes swirl about her, jostling as if they’re trying to avoid her path.
She never has a smile on her face, but her expression now is even more severe than usual. Eyes focused straight ahead, hands in pockets, head tilted forward.
I see her and shrink into my seat, thinking of her dog. What that must have looked like. The horror of finding such a thing. Of having to tell your child what happened to the family pet. I wonder if she—
Tasha suddenly stops just as she reaches the front of my car. She tilts her head, and that deathly gaze bores right into me. All awareness of the cold and snow has surely left her consciousness; the only thing that registers with her is my presence.
The way she looks at me.
She thinks I did it.
Of course she does. She spread rumors about me and thinks I killed her dog as some kind of retaliation. She killed her husband, Tasha is thinking, so it must be nothing to kill a dog.
This, of course, is what Cora wants.
Tasha finally breaks her glare and continues walking, leaving me with a chill that doesn’t warm. If she does think I did it, she must have shared that with the police. Is it just a matter of time before I get another knock on my front door?
A minute later, Max hops in the car. He’s big enough for the front seat, but ever since Riley’s death, he’s chosen the back. When I asked him about this, he said he just felt safer back there. I had no reason to argue the point. It’s always safer in back.
“You see the snow?” he asks.
“Hard to miss it,” I say. “How was your day?” I lean my head back, and he leans forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek.
“Okay. Can we go sledding?”
“Not today, sweetie. The sun sets early this time of year. Only going to be a couple of hours of light left today.”
“That’s plenty of time.”
“But it just started snowing,” I say, pointing at the patchwork of white and green on the nearby field. “Nothing to sled on yet.”
“Oh yeah,” he says, surveying the landscape. “I’m dumb.”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “You need to love yourself. All the time.”
“What? I am dumb, you know.”
“No, Max, you’re not.”
“With some things I am.”
This incessant argument. The low self-esteem has been particularly pronounced in the last couple of months. The kid will be reading Faulkner by age thirteen, and he can’t give himself a break.
I don’t respond. Instead, I pull away from the car line and from Tasha Collins, easing into the snowy afternoon.
At home, things turn ugly. After a quick snack, Max falls into a mood, and now instead of himself being the target, it’s me. We’re in the living room and he refuses to do his homework, even though he has all of five math problems to complete. Normally, that would take ten minutes. Now, he acts as though I’m asking him to explain string theory to me. I reason with him. You know this stuff, Max. It’ll take no time at all. I threaten him. No screens or books until you’ve finished. I promise a reward. We can play a game before dinner if you finish it.
After an hour, I plead with him. Can you just do this? I really need you to do this. Ninety minutes later, I give up on him. I don’t know what to do with you. I’m trying my best, but you’re not letting me help you, and I can’t do this anymore. Not tonight.
Perhaps this was the stage he was waiting for me to reach, because the moment I give up on him, the assault launches. And Max doesn’t fire warning shots. He goes straight to nuclear.
“Sometimes I wish you were also dead.”
What. The. Fuck.
His verbal attacks have worsened since Riley’s death—understandable—but he has never said this to me before, and as patient as I am, and as much as I love him with all that’s left of my soul, his words stab as if I were being knifed by a back-alley assailant. And I respond in kind.
I hit him.
In his life, I’ve never laid a hand on my boy. My beautiful son.
But now, when he says what he does, staring directly in my face and only a foot away, I react. I’m not even aware I’m doing it. I’m watching from above as this crazy woman reaches out and open-palm slaps Max’s face so hard he falls to the floor. Falls to the floor. He catches himself, catlike, landing on his hands and knees, and the thunking of his bony kneecaps against the hardwood is gut-twisting.
I immediately crouch next to him on the floor, touch his shoulder. Max looks up to me with wide eyes that narrow after a second.
He doesn’t cry.
I think that’s the worst part.
Max is a crier, always has been. Always held his emotions on his sleeve. But in this moment, as he looks up at me from the floor, his face tells me nothing. No anger, no fear, no sadness. Just like Tasha Collins earlier today, just an emotionless stare, an assessment. He’s judging me in an entirely new light, as if suddenly realizing he’s been raised by a monster.
“I’m…I’m sorry,” I say, wanting to cry the tears he doesn’t. “I didn’t mean that. It just happened. But what you said. Max, you can’t talk to me like that. I can’t hit you, and you can’t talk to me like that. Ever. Okay?”
He says nothing, and now it’s scaring me a little, as if I’ve knocked him into some kind of new reality. I sit on the floor and pull him in toward me. He doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t hug back. Limp as a puppet.
“Are you listening to me?” I whisper, and the first tear falls down my cheek. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes,” he says.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m so sorry. You know that, right?”
“I know.” His voice is robotic.
“Look at me,” I say. I pull back and he makes eye contact. It usually takes me asking him a few times before he does, but not now. A faint red glow blossoms on his left cheek, deepening my shame.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He nods, keeping his gaze fixed.
“Did you mean it?” I say. “What you said. Did you really mean that?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s somewhere else now, far distant, but inches away.
“Sometimes our anger gets the best of us,” I say. “We say or do things we don’t really mean, and then it’s too late to take it back. We’re both wrong here. All we can do is promise to be better with each other and move on.”
Max remains silent, gaze both at and beyond me.
The housekeeper, Abril, walks into the room and looks over to us on the floor. I forgot she was even in the house and wonder what she’s heard.
“Oh, hello, Miss Rose.”
“Hi, Abril.”
Max moves his gaze from me to the floor.
“I’m leaving for the evening,” she says. “Anything else you need?”
So many things, I think.
“No, thank you. Have a good night.”
“You too.”
She swishes out of the room, and I run my hand through Max’s hair. “What just happened was awful,” I say. “For both of us. I want to make sure you’re okay.”
Now he speaks. “I’ve been through worse.”
&n
bsp; That one hurts.
“I know you have.”
Then he turns to me, and there’s a bit of fresh life in his face. His eyes glisten enough to show me some emotion, which is a relief.
“It’s not supposed to be this way,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just us now. We can be whatever we want. But I don’t like how we are.”
“Me neither,” I say. “We just have to keep on being there for each other. Working with each other, not against.” I give him another squeeze, let go, then stand.
“I just want us to be okay,” Max says, his voice squeaking. He shouldn’t have to say such a thing, and it guts me that he does. I reply with a mantra I’ve used before during meditation, one that calms me, assures me, instills me with a confidence that doesn’t usually last long but comforts me in the moment. When I say this mantra to my son, I change it from the singular to plural, making it encompass us as a family.
“Our lives belong to us.”
He swallows, looks at me, so desperately wanting to believe those five words. Then he nods. “Okay.”
“If you want,” I say, “you can postpone your math homework. You still have to do those five problems, but not until tomorrow, okay?”
Max stands and walks over to the table where his homework binder rests closed. “I’ll do them now.” He then causally opens the binder, picks up his pencil, and starts doing exactly that.
This produces a mixture of emotions. Pride that we got through this horrible moment and he’s taking responsibility. Anger that we had to go through all that just for five stupid math problems. For the millionth time, I project my son into the future and wonder how he’ll cope as an adult with real responsibility and real problems.
I push the conflict away. He’s working through the present the best he can. The future can wait.
I leave the room and head into the kitchen, nerves still raw. I pour a glass of Chianti and do the one thing I’ve been needing to do all afternoon.
I text Cora.
We need to talk, I write.
Seconds later, a ding.
About what?
You know, I reply.
It takes a few minutes, long enough that I think she’s not going to respond at all. Then she does, encapsulating everything she needs to convey in a single word.
Woof.
Forty-Two
It’s just after 8:00 p.m. and I’m sitting in my car, ignition running, the only vehicle in the parking lot of the Chester Woodall trailhead. Oh, right, I think. Chester Woodall, that’s his last name. The guy Bury was originally named for. They took away the town name and gave him a hiking trail.
Snow swirls and coils around my car, and I think this is perhaps what the inside of a genie bottle looks like. The outside winds make this short of a blizzard but more than just a snowfall. The dashboard tells me it’s twenty-three degrees, and I wonder for another time why Cora wanted to meet out here.
Moments later, headlights slice through the falling snow and illuminate the inside of my car. Seconds after that, Cora eases her Land Rover into the space next to mine. Ours are the only two vehicles in the lot.
She turns off her car, kills her lights.
For a moment, I’m watching this as I would a movie. Trying to understand the motivation of the character in the adjacent car. Why are we meeting out here, in this weather, at night? Is it for the privacy, or something else?
Woof.
I do a mental inventory of everything in this car. My father keeps it clean, so there aren’t random items lying about, but I don’t know what could be in the closed-off areas. I quickly check the center console and the glove compartment, finding them empty save the car registration and manual. Typical for my father, who despises anything considered clutter.
I check the pockets behind the front seats. Again, empty. In the trunk, there has to be a spare tire, and thus a tire iron.
If I need a weapon, that’s my only hope.
Weapon. Against my sister. This is where we are in our lives.
She raps on my window, making me jump. I didn’t even see her out there. My fingers find the button on the door and I lower the window. A burst of snowflakes immediately seeks asylum in the car, only to meet their deaths by the heated air vents.
“Outside,” she says. The scent of her perfume yanks me back twenty-two years. Smell is the most powerful memory, and I know with certainty she’s wearing Calvin Klein’s CK One, just as she did as a teenager. Just as she did that night.
“It’s awful out there.”
“It’s perfect,” she says.
If a character in one of my books didn’t want to talk inside a car, it would be because they were afraid the car was bugged. And though I’m pretty sure Cora doesn’t suspect this, the thought does spark an idea. I should be recording our conversation. In fact, I’d be crazy not to.
I roll up the window and wait until the interior light dims, then quickly unlock my phone and launch the voice recorder app, which I use for story notes. I press Record and then slide the phone into the snug front pocket of my jeans.
Deep breath. Then I get out of the car.
She’s standing a few feet away. Three halogen lamps account for all the light in the lot. Beyond that and onto the trail, darkness reigns. It’s snowing harder now and the flakes are dense and wet, the kind that bring down trees with enough accumulation. I flip up the hood of my jacket against the onslaught.
“I wanted to talk, not catch pneumonia,” I say. “Why are we out here?”
“You don’t like it here?”
“No, not particularly. Not in the moment.”
“So you don’t know what’s special about this place, then.”
“Should I?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, my sister says, “I think you want to be careful how you talk to my family. Willow told me what you said to her. You said things you had no right saying.”
If this is what she wants to talk about, I’m happy to engage, because my ammunition stockpile dwarfs hers. “You told her I killed Riley. And she was telling Max that while you were upstairs having sex.”
This catches her off guard, but only for a moment. “Did you like what you heard?”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“He likes to be dominated, you know.” With her bright eyes gleaming in the amber streetlight, her smooth skin, perfect blond hair, and freckles of snow collecting on her baby-blue wool hat, Cora looks right out of an L.L. Bean Christmas catalog. “You wouldn’t think it,” she continues. “So tall. So strong. Confident. But he’s not happy unless he’s bleeding. You know, just a little.” She winks. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
“Your family is so messed up.”
“Our family,” she corrects.
I know my sister isn’t right. I’ve known that for a long time. She’s a broken toy glued and painted over so it still gleams from the outside, but if you were to shake her, you’d hear the loose parts rattle within. “Cora, did you really kill that dog?”
She looks me up and down, smiling. “Now why on earth would I do something like that?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“I don’t have anything against Tasha. I mean, I hardly know her. It seems to me the only person who would want to threaten her is you, Little Sister.”
This was what I expected her to say and what I hoped she wouldn’t. I wipe a thin layer of melted snow out of my eyes. “You killed her dog so she’d suspect me. Everything you’re doing is to set me up. Make me look guilty for Riley.” I lean in, whispering in the absence of any others. “For Caleb. Jesus, Cora, after all I did for you. For all the secrets I’ve kept.”
“I don’t think you have anything to be afraid of,” she says. “Unless, of course, your prints are on a missing steak knife f
rom Dad’s kitchen.”
This hits me with an unexpected right hook. “You used one of Dad’s knives and left it at the scene?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure whoever did such a terrible thing would’ve kept the knife as insurance. Ready to plant it at any time.”
“There’s a higher likelihood Dad’s prints are on there than mine.”
She shrugs. “All I know is mine aren’t on it.”
I take a small step back, almost expecting a flash of that same knife thrusting into my stomach. “You lured that animal out of its yard and slit its throat. You’re a monster.”
“No, sweetie. I’m a survivor. And everything was fine until you moved back to town. Now bad things are happening, and it’s all your fault.”
As I stare at my sister, I try once again to reconcile this woman with the little girl I knew. My big sister, who I can remember smiling as a child. Cora didn’t change overnight. It was a gradual shift, one I didn’t notice, until the seventeen-year-old version was the person she was meant to be all along. This person standing in front of me is the true Cora. I don’t understand it, don’t like it, but I can’t change that simple fact. Imagining my sister as an adult version of the sweet, happy child I once knew is like picturing Hitler dying of old age after an uneventful life as a painter.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask her. “Do you want me to move away? Is that it?”
“I don’t really care what you do, Rose, as long as it doesn’t involve disrupting all I have here.”
“And what is it you have? Some vapid, plastic existence? Your daughter has a poster of Lizzie Borden on her bedroom wall. Does that make you happy?”
“I’m letting her be the person she wants to be,” Cora says.
“And what if she turns into you?” I ask. “Is that what you want? Are you counting the days until she’s seventeen? Are you waiting to see if she’s capable of doing what you did? What would you do then?”
This lands a punch, but her reaction is subtle. A couple blinks, a tighter smile. But rather than answer me, she turns and walks a few steps away, closer to the trailhead and the surrounding woods.
The Dead Husband Page 18