The Dead Husband

by Carter Wilson

  Her figure is backlit by a solitary streetlight, and she glows like some kind of fallen angel. The snowfall is lighter now, and through the flakes, I watch as she reaches into her purse and retrieves something. Facing away from me, she lowers her right hand and I see the silhouette of what she’s holding. A knife. Thin and long. She just holds it at her side in her gloved hand, loose. Stares out into the dark, into the distance, as still as a mannequin gathering dust.

  I have no idea if the knife is for effect, but she’s surprised me, which is the last thing I wanted. Cora is ten feet away and I ease a few steps backward. This scene should be as improbable as a bad horror movie, but if I drew a line through all the moments of our collective past, it’s obvious that this is where it all leads.

  “This place is special because he’s out there, somewhere,” Cora says to the night.

  That statement alone chills me more than the snow. Scares me more than the knife.

  “Caleb?” I say.

  “Daddy told me once. Said this is where he brought him.”

  Revulsion of the memory of that night overcomes me, but I can’t back away. In fact, I reverse course, start walking toward Cora because I don’t know if the recorder on my phone is picking up what’s she’s saying. I slide the phone out of my front pocket and palm it against my thigh.

  “Dad buried Caleb out on this trail?”

  She answers my question with one of her own. “Don’t you remember that morning when he finally came back home? It was nearly daylight. We hadn’t slept. You pissed yourself, just another stain we had to clean.”

  “No,” I tell her. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Daddy walked in the house, nearly passed out from exhaustion. Covered in dirt and sweat. Grabbed a drink and collapsed in the big leather chair. Didn’t even change out of his clothes.”

  This part is all blank to me. I remember my father telling us to go get a tarp, and the next thing I recall is waking up in my bed sometime the next day.

  “I must have blocked that out,” I tell her.

  She turns and the sudden movement startles me, causing me to drop my phone, which clunks on the parking-lot asphalt. Instead of reaching for it, I remain upright. Cora is a few fast strides away.

  “You were nearly catatonic at that point,” she says. “Daddy told us to sit on the floor next to his chair, and we did.” The hand holding the knife sways like a sunflower in a gentle wind. “He patted us on the heads, like dogs. Said he’d been out on the Chester Woodall trail, and what he’d done was the hardest thing in his life. Physically, emotionally. But he said he did it because we were a family, and no matter how sideways families got, they stuck together.”

  I remember none of this. I glance at the ground and see my phone, screen pointing up. I’m horrified to see the recorder app visible, counting away the seconds as it captures our conversation.

  “He never supported me,” I say.

  “That’s because you left, Rose. Sticking together means being together, all the time.”

  I almost ask what happened to her to make her who she is, but the moment I part my lips to speak, they are shut by a horrible, blinding thought. A thought so distorted and perverse it can’t be tethered to reality, but it invades my brain as if planted there in a microchip.

  The thought is this:

  My father molested Cora.

  Maybe for years. And this is why she’s who she is. Why she did that to Caleb Benner. I have no evidence of this, or even an inkling of it, but it’s forcefully real and possible.

  I gasp. She takes a step closer. I hold out my arm and kneel to the ground, scooping up my phone.

  “You’re overcome,” she says, taking another step closer.

  “Stay away from me.” I rise.

  “Daddy was so loyal to us. How he protected us when the police came and asked us questions.”

  I’m dizzy with fear and adrenaline. “I barely remember talking to them.”

  “You didn’t talk to them for long. Neither did I. And Daddy was there the whole time, putting an end to things before we said anything stupid.”

  “God, stop calling him Daddy,” I say. “You never call him that.”

  She moves closer. Slow, like a statue animating. “You never appreciated him like I do. You never saw all he did for us.” Another step.

  “Stay back,” I say.

  “Why? What do you think I’m going to do?”

  “Just stay back.”

  Cora brings the knife in front of her, takes one more stride forward, and stops. She’s now ensconced in shadows, as all boogeymen are.

  “I’m not like him,” she says. “Not as loyal. I’ll do whatever I need to, to whomever I need to, in order to make sure secrets remain secrets. Even if that means family.”

  I take three steps back, sliding the phone back in my pocket, wanting both hands free. My car is unlocked, and I’m guessing I’m faster than Cora. But would I have enough time to pop the trunk and search for the tire iron before she attacks?

  I decide the best move, if it comes to it, is to just get to the car, get inside, lock the doors, and get the hell out of here. Out of the park. Out of my father’s home.

  Out of Bury.

  “Don’t be so skittish, Rose. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “You have a knife,” I say.

  “This isn’t for you. I’m leaving this here, out on the trail, somewhere in a safe hiding space. Safe, like Caleb. This is the knife you don’t want found.”

  “That’s what you used to kill the dog?” I ask.

  “I’m just saying you don’t want this knife turning up with the police. Nor do you want the police talking to me, because I have a very distinct memory of that night that’s probably very different from yours. I can be pretty convincing, you know. And when they realize what you were capable of when you were only fifteen, they’ll easily believe you killed your husband, too. It all fits together.”

  I’m horrified by how right she is, but I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.

  “You’re the one who wrote about these very coincidental things in your books,” she continues. “And you and I know the scene about the boy is true, so why wouldn’t the wife-killing-husband scene also be true?” Cora tilts her head to one side. “That’s your weakness, Rose. Your ego. You just had to write about the past, didn’t you? You had to brag about it.”

  “Brag? Do you know how many nights I wake up in horror because I dream about what happened?” My voice is far from a whisper now. “I wrote that to help release it from my brain. I’m not like you, Cora. I live in constant shame and guilt over that night.”

  “Well, then, I’m surprised in the last twenty years you never went to the police.”

  “There’s still time for that.”

  She walks up to me but I hold my ground. The simmering fear I’ve had all night suddenly vanishes, replaced by a desire to inflict pain. This is what soldiers must feel at the brink of a battle, the moment they finally push forward through fear and into the fray. Violent destiny.

  “I don’t think so, Rose. You’re more like me than you care to admit. We’re sisters, after all. Raised in the same environment together. Same stimuli.”

  I swallow, then ask the question I’m not sure I want an answer to.

  “Did he touch you? When we were kids, did he touch you?”

  Her face is stone cold, and I notice for the first time it’s stopped snowing. For a moment, everything is still and silent, a funeral home at midnight.

  “We grew up in the same house,” she says. “You tell me.”

  “I…I never saw.” I try to think of my childhood, of any time I felt there might have been something off at home. Amiss. “He never did anything to me,” I tell her.

  “So why would you think that about me?”

  “Becaus
e I’m trying to understand what it was that made you…” I glance down at the knife in her hand, the tip pointing to the ground. “What you are.”

  She leans in and I can smell her. Smelling like adolescence.

  “A dog is just a dog,” she whispers. “No one asks why it tears the rabbit apart.”

  With that, she turns and starts walking away, down the parking lot and toward a trail covered in a thin layer of snow. After she disappears into the night, a glow emanates and I realize it’s the flashlight on her phone. She navigates the trail into the distance, disappearing into the trees, her light distant and intermittent. Firefly.

  I head back to my car, where inside I find an ounce of warmth. I leave my sister to the dark, absorbed by the cold, the wet. Leave her to this place of bones.

  Perhaps it’s the one place she finds peace.

  Forty-Three

  Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

  November 12

  Colin drove home later than usual, already two hours past sunset. He navigated the streets of Whitefish Bay, guessing he had two minutes left before he was in his house. Three until he was on his couch, beer in hand, fire turned on. It was his night to cook, but he wanted to sit for a little while. Fifteen, twenty minutes. Sit and do nothing. Allow his brain to slow down.

  But he wasn’t home yet, so on the drive from downtown, he’d allowed himself a few thoughts about Rose Yates. He considered her the way someone would a brain teaser they couldn’t solve. A little bit every day, hoping the answer would suddenly reveal itself. He had no solution for Rose Yates. He had theories but no answer, and theories didn’t do him a lot of good.

  On the drive, he also pondered the Yates family in totality, which led to him thinking about family in general. How there are some good families in the world, some bad ones, but mostly all those in between, the mixtures, the good kids and the black sheep. Which one was Rose? he wondered. Did the Yates family all share the same characteristics, or was there something about Rose that deviated from the others?

  And what, Colin wondered, will my family be like? Will my baby grow up to be like me, like Meg? Neither? And after seven or eight decades of my own life, will I become like my mother, gentle during the daylight, confused and vitriolic after sunset?

  The more time Colin spent ruminating about the past and fearing the future, the more he realized there wasn’t a damn thing tos be done about either of them. Why, then, waste so much energy dwelling on both?

  Perhaps that was the real puzzle to solve. How to be in the now. The here. Maybe owning the present was really the key to happiness.

  Later, months later, years later, Colin would remember this thought. He’d remember back to this specific moment, driving the streets of Whitefish Bay, two minutes from home, three minutes from his beer and couch. This thought about the dwelling on the past and the future he’d remember with equal doses of irony and pain. And then, when he was much, much older, with a sad and crushing acceptance. Only with this acceptance would he ever finally own the present.

  His cell phone buzzed. The display on the dashboard showed Meg’s face, a picture he’d taken two years earlier on their trip to Bermuda. Meg had been standing in their hotel room, getting ready for dinner, putting her earrings in when Colin told her for the millionth time he loved her. When she’d turned and smiled, he’d taken her picture, capturing a look on her face that he wanted to always remember. The way she looked at him with such a subtle understanding that only he could see it.

  He pressed the Answer button on the screen.

  “Hi, baby. Almost home.”

  The voice that came back wasn’t Meg’s. It was female, older, and carved with confusion.

  “There’s been an…oh, just something horrible. An accident,” his mother said.

  “Wait, what…Mom? What accident? Where’s Meg?”

  His mother didn’t reply.

  “Put her on the phone,” Colin said.

  “Oh, dear. It’s just terrible. She can’t talk.”

  Every nerve ending in Colin’s body burned. He’d had plenty of moments of pure adrenaline as a cop, but he never knew what it felt like when it was simultaneously steeped in dread. Now he did.

  “Mom, where are you?”

  “At the house. Oh, it’s so terrible. She was just helping me clean up.”

  Colin hit the gas. “Listen to me. Don’t move. I’ll be right there. Tell her I’m coming. Just tell her I’ll be there in a minute. Less.” He didn’t wait for a reply. Colin disconnected and called into dispatch, requesting emergency medical services at his mother’s address. He didn’t even know what had happened, but all his mind could picture was Meg having gone into labor early. Maybe she tried to lift something too heavy. Damn it, he told her she shouldn’t be moving things around at his mother’s house. But Meg had insisted, saying she wouldn’t carry any big boxes. Saying she just wanted Jackie’s home a little more in order by the time the baby came, and she knew Jackie wasn’t going to clean anything herself.

  Oh god, he thought. Oh please god. Let the baby be okay. Meg would never get over losing the baby.

  Colin wasn’t sure he could, either, but he knew it would destroy his wife.

  As he tore down his mother’s street and came to a skidding stop in front of her house, all Colin could picture was Meg in the bathroom, sobbing, blood on the floor.

  Not the baby. Not the baby. Not the baby.

  That was all he could ask.

  Up the sidewalk. Hurdled the three steps to the porch. The door was unlocked and he burst through it.

  And there was Meg.

  Right at the bottom of the stairs, boxes spilled next to her body. Those fucking empty Tupperware containers, a plastic red lid next to her face.

  Colin knew his wife was dead the moment he saw her face. Her contorted body. He’d seen a lot of death in his life, death that came in just about every form it could. He knew what a person looked like once all life had evaporated, and Meg was that person now.

  Eyes half open, glazed. Hair spilled like cream cola on the hardwood floor. Chest down, right arm awkwardly splayed, lower torso at an angle that just shouldn’t be. Everything Colin had learned about death was on display right there, on the floor of his mother’s house, the house Colin had grown up in, embodied in the woman who had been his anchor, and now no one would be able to stop Colin from drifting out to sea.

  Colin broke in that moment. Broke so much he couldn’t even comprehend how many pieces to him there were. He collapsed next to Meg on the floor, his blood pumping so violently within, thinking if he could only give his heat to her, bring her back, if only she could absorb him. Distantly aware of his mother, broken in her own way, saying how Meg had tripped and fallen, so sudden. Tripped on a silly box of empty Tupperware, a container holding more containers, and was that ironic or just stupid for such a thing to cause a fall. As she told Colin of his wife’s death, his mother picked up the Tupperware and placed the containers on a nearby heap of magazines, too late to do any good.

  Colin was aware how cold Meg was, that she must have been dead for some time, and why didn’t his mother call for help earlier? He heard himself shouting the baby the baby and how maybe their child was still alive, kicking, gasping, and clutching to the death around it, like a young child suffocating inside a dry-cleaning bag. Colin saw his hand reach for Meg’s phone on the first riser of the staircase, and as that finger dialed 911, he heard the sirens outside.

  Of all the times he’d responded to an emergency over his career, of all the control he had to exude as he walked into the tragedies of others, Colin, in that moment, did indeed drift away, yielding all responsibility, all control. There was a sickening relief to it, not to be in charge, and trusting others to sweep in and manage the scene. Maybe time would pass and he’d come out of his fugue and be told everything was fine. The baby was fine. Meg was fine. Looked worse than it was.r />
  But the drop of logic he still possessed told him that wouldn’t be the case. There would be no good news. Not now. Maybe never again.

  Shaking. Someone was shaking him. Arms.

  Lights.

  Sirens.

  None of it mattered. Colin kept drifting, and soon the sea in front of him became vast, flat, and endless. No breeze. No movement. A world above, a world below, and just the speck of him in between.

  His second-to-last thought as he floated into some other consciousness was of Rose Yates. No specific thought, just her. What a fucking shame to have that woman’s face come to my mind in a time like this, he thought. A goddamn, fucking shame.

  His last thought was that his baby was a girl. He didn’t know how he knew it, but Colin was certain. A girl. Little girl.

  That was the thought shattering the very last piece of him, smashing it into a fine powder and blowing it up into the sky, where it drifted, becoming a part of everything else.

  Everything and nothing, all at once.

  Part III

  Forty-Four

  Bury, New Hampshire

  September 18

  Twenty-Two Years Earlier

  Then I see her.

  Cora, in the doorway. Materializes like a ghost.

  And this thing. This tiny little thing that’s scarier than the blood or the gurgling, the lunging or the prints. Even more horrifying than the scream.

  It’s the smile.

  Cora’s smiling. Gentle, genuine.

  As if posing for her yearbook photo.

  Caleb stumbles toward me and falls over just a few feet away. My fifteen-year-old brain can’t do the math, can’t derive the logic of the situation. Therefore, this must not exist. Must not be happening.

  But when Caleb reaches forward and grabs onto my ankle with his right hand—nearly toppling me—there’s no pretending this is simply a bad dream.

  “Please,” he gasps, “she’s c-crazy.”

  Then I scream. Loud and fierce.