“He see you?” she asked, when she returned to the kitchen.
“He was still in the bathroom. He locked the door.”
“Any way he can off himself in there without the gun?”
“No.”
“Pills, razors, anything?”
“I cleaned everything out the last time.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Lucy tore off a small piece of paper towel, then another, and collected them in her lap.
Sam put the teakettle on to boil. She always put a kettle on when she had to do some hard thinking. The night she decided to go to L.A., the kettle’s steam coated the windows until she couldn’t see out. Before she wiped the glass clear, she wrote her name, Sam Clarkson, then wiped the away the son.
It had made so much sense; she didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before.
“I should go,” Lucy said. She didn’t move. She went on tearing the paper towel.
“He ever do any counseling?” Sam asked.
Lucy lifted her eyes for the first time since Sam put her in the chair. They were full of rage.
“Not Glen. Glen’s too good for that. Too smart, to hear him tell it, and I heard him tell it over and over and over. I wish to hell he’d get fired or something, so he’d have to face the fact that—”
He’s nuts?
“Getting fired would only put a financial strain on you and the kids. The man needs help.”
A swift kick in the ass is more like it.
Lucy shook her head and cried. She used the paper towel to wipe her nose. Sam was at a loss. Seeing her cry was the worst yet.
“You know, it really would be better if he just died,” Lucy said.
“Come on!”
“He’s so miserable. And when he’s miserable, he’s mean. The other day Benny said, ‘Mommy, Daddy’s meaner than Oscar the Grouch.’”
“Who the hell is Oscar the Grouch?”
“From Sesame Street.”
“Gotcha.”
Lucy was weeping now, and put her head down on her folded arms.
“Wait here,” Sam said. She turned off the stove and padded across the street in her bare feet. A small stone cut sharply, and she cursed under her breath. She’d have preferred to yell but figured there’d been too much of that already tonight.
She entered by the back door. The kitchen smelled of fried food, yet was spotless.
Lousy ventilation.
The dining room was tiny. Sam had been there before many times, but then—in the dark, silent, almost empty house—it was unfamiliar and sad. The living room was large, with plastic bins full of toys stacked tidily against one wall. The wood floor creaked. The house was old, like Sam’s, built in the twenties when wealthier townspeople thought it was stylish to live in the country and have farmers for neighbors.
“Glen, it’s your neighbor, Sam!”
The hallway leading to the bathroom was also dark, and Sam wondered if Lucy had had the presence of mind to shut off all the lights before she ran out or if they’d been carrying on in the gloom, which seemed more likely.
A dim light seeped from beneath the bathroom door. Sam put her ear close. She heard nothing. Then there was a brief movement within.
“How you doing in there, Glen?” she said in the same overly cheerful voice she used to address the residents at Lindell.
“Leave me alone.”
His voice was heavy.
“Open the door, Glen,” she said. To her amazement, he did. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet. The room was small enough he could have turned the doorknob without getting to his feet. He was in his officer’s uniform, even down to the thick-soled black shoes. The holster on his hip was empty. The collar of his undershirt was stained with sweat. He stank of it, too. His black hair was thinning on top and looked greasy. So did his skin. Sam had never seen him up close. When they’d first moved in, she’d waved at him across the road. He’d nodded in reply. Sam remembered that nod. It was dismissive, cold, hostile. Or maybe he was just shy.
“What say you and me go sit where it’s a little more comfortable?” Sam said.
“Where’s Lucy? Do you have her?”
“She’s at my place, but I don’t have her. Now, come on, up you go.”
“Get out of my house.”
“Can’t do that, Glen.”
He lifted his head and stared right into Sam’s eyes. The anguish in them was chilling.
“What did she do with my gun?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
Sam wondered then how Lucy had managed to get it away from him. Glen wasn’t particularly tall—in fact, Sam was sure she was taller than he was by a good couple of inches—but he was wiry. Maybe he had just let her have it. Maybe he just gave up.
“Look, you can’t sit on the can all night. Come into the kitchen. I’ll make coffee.”
“I need a drink.”
“A drink’s the last thing you need.”
Glen put his face in his hands and sobbed. She’d never seen a man cry.
Well, they’re not any better at it than we are.
“Look, you got a lot to live for. Those kids, for one thing. They’re enough to keep anyone going, right?”
Sam regretted her words when Glen cried harder.
She went into the hall, lined with framed shots of the kids. She took down two and brought them into the bathroom.
“Glen, look at these precious faces. Come on, look. You really want them to grow up knowing their dad didn’t love them enough to stay alive?” she asked.
Glen looked at the pictures without seeming to see them. Sam put them on the small counter.
“Glen, you don’t come out of this bathroom, I’m going to have to haul you out. Now, don’t give me the rap about being a big strong cop and all that. I’m big and strong, too, and you’re in no shape to argue, so what do you say you stand up and come with me, okay?”
Glen didn’t move. He wasn’t crying then.
Sam put both hands under one arm and pulled. She got him on his feet. He leaned on her as she shuffled him slowly across the hall and back the way she’d come to the kitchen, where she loaded him into a chair. She turned on the overhead light. Glen’s face was blank, his eyes glassy.
Christ, I hope he didn’t get his hands on something and took it after all.
But then he straightened up and focused.
“Go tell Lucy to come home,” he said.
“Not until you and I have a little talk.”
“Nothing to talk about.”
Sam sat down across from him. The surface of the table was covered with one of those thick pads that protects the wood underneath. The thought of Lucy trying to keep her furniture from getting scratched moved her. That woman worked her ass off, and for what? To listen to this slob bitch and moan?
“What’s got you so down on living, anyway?” Sam asked.
Glen stared at the surface of the table for a long time, so long that Sam was about to ask him again.
“She doesn’t love me,” he said.
“Of course she does! She’s frantic with worry this very minute.”
“She just feels guilty.”
“About what, for God’s sake?”
“Being in love with someone else.”
“Who?”
“Someone she used to know.”
“And she told you this? ‘I’m in love with so and so.’”
“I can just tell. I see it in her face. I
feel it every time I touch her.”
He pounded his fist on the table, toppling the saltshaker and causing some dried rose petals to fall from the aging bouquet leaning in a vase. Sam had seen Glen get out of his car with the flowers in hand and thought maybe it was their anniversary. Then she’d recalled that Lucy had said they’d been married in the summer, and it was fall, then. In that moment, watching Glen carry the flowers along the stone path to the back door, Sam thought how nice it would be to have someone in your life who brought you something pretty, just because, just to remind you that you were loved.
Except these flowers were a plea to be loved in return.
Sam righted the saltshaker.
“I’m no expert, believe me, but there’s got to be a way to work things out. You’ve got four kids,” she said.
“You think I don’t know that? I begged her to break it off. Time and again.”
Sam was exhausted. She went into the kitchen and took a plastic glass from the cabinet. She knew where they were kept. She’d helped Lucy with the dishes more than once. She poured herself some water, drank it, rinsed the glass, and put it in the dish drainer. The glass was decorated with several laughing dinosaurs, green and yellow.
“I’m going to go home now and talk a little bit with Lucy. You have to promise me not to do anything stupid,” Sam said.
Glen said nothing. She stood, put her hand briefly on his shoulder, and left.
Though the sky was still dark, the presence of light was near. Sam sensed it in the stillness, the deeper quiet of the hills whose gentle tops would be the first to warm.
Lucy was where Sam had left her, at the table, staring through the window into the night. Sam sat. Her stomach was on the warpath again. The folks at Lindell sometimes complained about heartburn, so she figured it was basically an old person’s problem. If true, she’d aged decades in that one evening.
She waited for Lucy to ask how Glen was. She went on sitting, looking out. Then she turned her head, and Sam saw in her eyes the same blank expression she’d seen earlier in Glen’s. Whatever the bullshit was between them, it was killing them both.
“Who’s the guy?” Sam asked.
Lucy’s face tightened.
“There is no guy. There never was.”
“Glen said—”
“I know what Glen said. He’s been saying it for years. Every time he messes up and I call him out, he starts talking about the guy who doesn’t exist, deflecting onto me his own crappy behavior.”
“Huh.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
Lucy put the pile of torn bits of paper towel on the table.
“Well, it doesn’t matter, one way or the other. It’s my problem,” she said.
So why the fuck did you wake me up in the middle of the night?
Sam took a deep breath. No point in going down that particular road at the moment.
Lucy got up and let herself out. Sam stood and went to her front window to watch her go slowly across the road. She didn’t retrieve the gun from the ditch. She’d have to before the kids came back. Maybe Sam should go remind her, because she might not remember in the morning.
“Fuck that,” Sam said, and took herself to bed.
chapter twenty-three
Flora demanded to know why she was so down, if something had happened at work, if one of the residents Sam was close to had died. Sam said she was fine. Everything was fine. Flora let it go but watched her in a way that was long-standing and deep between them.
Sam hadn’t talked to Lucy since that night, two weeks before. She saw her come and go, with the kids and without, returning with groceries or not, just living her life as if nothing had happened.
At work, Eunice was in the dumps, too. She was worried about Constance Maynard lying in bed all day, though it was fairly common at this time of life. On top of that, her mother had fallen at Lakeside, Dunston’s Medicaid facility. She’d broken her hip. That signaled the beginning of the end for her, too. Eunice told Sam about her Grandma Grace, who’d suffered the same fate. She went on and on about her, how great she’d been, how she alone had been the person in Eunice’s young life who’d given a damn about her.
When Sam’s interest in Grandma Grace, or anything else except the specific chore right in front of her, failed to materialize, Eunice asked her what on earth was wrong.
So, Sam mentioned Lucy and Glen, and Glen’s failed suicide attempt.
“And this guy’s a cop. That’s super scary,” Eunice said.
They were cleaning Katherine Foley’s room. She was one of the few residents in the skilled nursing wing who’d put her own touch on the place. Her dresser was crowded with crystal figurines, which Sam was very careful not to break. The giraffe was her favorite, though the seahorse dangling from a gold wire was also sweet.
Suki and her little treasures.
The thought made her even sadder.
Katherine was propped up in bed, working on a crossword puzzle. She’d had polio as a young woman, which meant her mobility was very limited, otherwise she wouldn’t be in that wing in the first place. Her mind was sharp. She liked listening to Sam and Eunice talk.
“Very scary. Very scary indeed. Though I have to believe that emotional stress of all kinds is very common for first responders,” she said.
“Goes with the territory, I expect,” Eunice said.
Sam stuffed Katherine’s dirty clothes into a drawstring bag.
“My brother was Sheriff of Tioga County. The things he saw! Now this was years and years ago; the country was much more rural than it is today. A farmer’s pig got loose. Dug herself out, or someone left the gate to the sty open, I don’t rightly remember. But this pig, she had such personality, such wit. Pigs are witty creatures. Never forget that. Anyhow, this pig, Beulah, was pregnant. Don’t know why she took herself a notion to go roaming when she was expecting and her teats were practically dragging through the dirt, but she did, and so off she went. The lane the farmer lived on never got much traffic, being way out, and all, but this one driver was going along, drunk as a skunk, right at the moment Beulah decides to cross the road. And of course he runs smack into her. He ends up in the ditch, Beulah ends up dead as a doornail, and her piglets choose that moment to be born, right there on the road, in the middle of a starry summer night, crawling out of the tear in their mother’s stomach. My brother gets the call, made by the fellow who lived by the ditch the drunk slid into, and gathers up the piglets before he even checks on the driver, who turned out to be just fine and didn’t remember a thing about it! My brother was an animal lover, and the sight of Beulah put him in a bad place for quite a while. Then there were all the dead deer over the years, and people’s dogs. Really took a toll on him. After a while, he said he couldn’t take it anymore, and asked for a desk job. He was dead the next year. All that stress had just built up inside him with nowhere to go but his heart, and that was that.”
Katherine picked up her crossword puzzle. Sam threw the laundry bag onto the cart. Eunice emptied Katherine’s trash basket.
“That’s quite a story,” Sam said.
Katherine looked up from her paper and over the top of her glasses.
“I was trying to make a point, what was it?”
“About the stress of being in law enforcement?” Sam asked.
“Yes, yes. Exactly. Though it sounds to me as if your friend is a little more than stressed out if he’s threatening to kill himself. He needs serious help.”
Sam thought Glen would benefit from spending some time with Katherine and her firm words. So could Lucy, who seemed to have taken Sam’s eff
orts completely for granted. Sam had expected either an apology from her or an expression of gratitude.
I don’t know what I would have done without you.
But nothing came, and Sam realized that their friendship had passed some wretched frontier from which it was unlikely to return.
At four o’clock, when Sam’s shift ended, she looked in briefly on Constance, who lay in bed as usual and might have been asleep. It was impossible to tell. Meredith had been by recently, judging by the faint aroma of perfume she’d left behind. Sam had heard nothing more from Constance about her. Their last exchange, however, was still fresh.
She’s not my daughter.
She thought of the evening ahead. Flora would cook, Sam would do the dishes, Chuck would watch television with Flora by his side on the ancient couch. Chuck would tell her to buy a new one, and she’d shake her head. Her part-time job bagging groceries, plus the remains of her parents’ insurance policy, didn’t stretch very far. They left Sam alone, didn’t make demands, yet she felt like an outsider in her own home.
Before things got more serious with Chuck, Flora’s attention had always been on Sam. Usually that attention was negative, informed by anxiety, layered with criticism, and surely reflecting her own frustration, but now Sam wondered if maybe all the time it had been informed by guilt.
Rape victims carried a lot of guilt, or so she had heard. They wondered if they’d done something to invite the attack or misled the attacker before the fact, pretending an interest that wasn’t really there. Sam had tried to imagine her mother thinking these things, suffering from them, being accused of them by her parents.
How had it all come about? Not the rape itself, about which Sam had given considerable thought, but afterward? Flora would have come home in a state of bruised disarray, and would have tried hard to hide it. She would have been shaken, terrified that she would run into Henry Delacourt again, and then relieved when he left town. She would have begun to recover, to heal, to feel as if there was a life almost worth living from then on, until she discovered that she was pregnant.
Women Within Page 21