You Made Your Bed: A Novel

by Cornelia Goddin

  I reach into my bag and pull out a small plastic bag of dried Amanita phalloides. The wire rack over the radiator did the job quite efficiently. It strikes me that Wilson would appreciate the name of this mushroom, and I regret not being able to tell him.

  I finish my drink and suck on the lime section. Oh, you think I don’t see you narrowing your eyes at my glass, like I’m some kind of baby-killer? All things in moderation, said the Roman playwright Terence, sometime BC. So back the hell off. This will be the last drink I have for a long time, I promise you.

  Wilson is gazing at the plastic bag, curious despite the effects of the midazolam.

  “So the plane trip is such a bore,” I say lightly. “Figured I’d pop a ’shroom before going to the airport. Finally found a dealer for some prime psilocybin.”

  I don’t offer any to him. I don’t have to.

  But he turns his glassy-eyed expression towards the front door. “Fun. But I’m expecting shum-one,” he slurs.

  Someone other than Rebecca, obviously. See, all this talk about wanting so desperately to change, and he’s still exactly the same hound dog he’s always been. “What time is she getting here?”

  “Few hours.” He looks at his bare wrist as though there is a watch on it.

  “Okay. Well, here goes!” I take a button and lift it to my mouth, careful not to touch it with any part of my lips or tongue. Rather expertly, if I do say so myself, I palm it and pretend to be chewing it up. (I practiced for some time in my bathroom at home.) I leave the plastic bag on the counter.

  Wilson is staring at the front door. I can practically see the drug shutting down various brain functions as the minutes tick by. “Okay then,” I say cheerfully. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom, if that’s all right, and then head out. I’m glad we had this talk. Better to be already at the airport when this thing hits, right?”

  He swivels his head toward me. “Riiight,” he says, the word taking about five minutes to get out.

  “Which way?” I have been to Wilson’s house only once before, last spring, when he invited me out to a concert and we stayed up all night doing coke, so my memories of the layout are dim. He waves a hand in the air, which tells me nothing, but after opening the door to a coat closet, I find the tiny half bath and go inside and close the door. Taking my time, I wash my hands thoroughly with soap and water. There’s a bottle of hand sanitizer and I slather that on after. I look at myself in the mirror.

  Don’t hesitate, I order myself. It’s him or you.

  I’m sleep deprived, pathologically so, and until a few days ago have been overdoing drugs for weeks, even months. A flower of doubt blooms somewhere in my mind—perhaps it’s the little Dutch boy waving to get my attention, trying to tell me that my judgment might be awry. Staring at myself in Wilson’s bathroom mirror, I look deranged. Not on the brink of madness but five miles past the exit.

  For an instant I have second thoughts, but it’s too late for that now. I wash my hands again as carefully as Lady Macbeth, change into Kayley Ann Barker’s clothes, then take some toilet paper and wipe down the faucet where I touched it, and the toilet seat too.

  When I go back, I see the plastic bag has three buttons instead of five, and Wilson is chewing slowly, his gaze on the ceiling.

  I like psilocybin, don’t get me wrong. But there is no way in hell I would eat any before going to an airport and getting on a plane. For one thing, I’d end up staring at a piece of trash on the floor and never make it on the plane at all. And Wilson would surely know this were he not in a state of brain-melt thanks to midazolam. That stuff is a wonder drug in its own special way—he’s awake and calm, but not comprehending much about what is going on. And as I said, he will remember nothing about my visit, which is obviously crucial.

  After I see him chewing, he lies down on the sofa in a kind of junkie doze, and I’m able to get out of there in a hurry. I check my Kayley gear in the bathroom mirror and start the walk down the hill where I can hail a cab. It would be so much faster to call Uber or something, but I didn’t bother to get Kayley Ann Barker her own credit card. Not that it would have been that difficult. But the fewer moving parts the better, right?

  Cab to the Oakland airport, flush the rest of the mushrooms down a toilet, red-eye home, cab back to the Upper East Side—all as uneventful as I could wish. I’m chatting away with the driver, talking to him about my nonexistent friend who teaches at Berkeley, about how burritos are different in California, about the weirdly warm weather. Way way way in the back of my mind is this kernel of a thought: I may have just killed my brother. And the thought sits back there suspended somehow, unfelt, as though it is encased in amber or ice or something where I can see it but not feel it. I know it’s there, but it’s contained, dormant.

  It was appalling, even gruesome, yes. But I had to do it, you see—for the little bean if not myself. You will likely never understand, and I will have to live with that.

  A small voice tries to say that Wilson is the one who took the mushrooms, and I did not ask him to, offer them, or force him to eat them. But come on, really? I killed him, or made it likely that he would kill himself without meaning to. There is no dispensation I can award myself to avoid the consequences of what I’ve done.

  Perhaps it is the fact of that thought, if not the thought itself, that allows my attention to fail at a crucial moment: I do not do a proper job of scanning the pedestrians before getting out of the cab on Madison a few blocks south of home, and practically run right into Katie Luxton, a classmate of Natalie’s and mine from Spence.

  “Um, Caroline?” she says, looking at me with a mixture of disbelief and excitement. I don’t know how she recognized me in this outfit, but seeing me in this wig and unfashionable clothes has gotten her all excited. Excited and thrilled.

  “Sorry, wrong person,” I say, jamming my hands in my jeans pockets and then taking them out again, my smile brittle. This is not a good development. I try to get past her but the sidewalk is crowded and the way forward is momentarily blocked.

  “Is that—wow, I like the color,” she says, gesturing at my hair.

  I want to push her in front of traffic. Katie was always the kind of girl who feasted on schadenfreude any chance she got, and I have just given her the banquet of her dreams.

  I shift my bag onto my other shoulder and hustle up Madison, doing my best to get lost in the crowd. I know it’s taking a risk, but I go into a coffee shop and take a seat in a booth in the back. The jeerlings have been oddly sedate the entire flight back, as though they’d gotten into some Xanax, but now they’re screeching in my ears, the cacophony so loud that the words streaming through my head are garbled and blurry.

  I order coffee and hurry into the bathroom to change. Scraping the rough paper towel over my face, I get the minimal makeup off and follow up with a cucumber towelette from my bag. Change out of the jeans and oversized sweater. I stash the wig, comb out my hair, put on lipstick (a good red, not loud but forceful) and get back in my booth.

  Shut up, I tell the jeerlings, almost shouting out loud. If I could only have quiet inside my head for five fucking minutes!

  If Katie Luxton turns out to be the weak link that gets me arrested, I will be inconsolable.

  When the coffee comes I keep a close eye on the waitress, but she appears not to notice that her customer looks entirely different. Thank God people are almost always worrying about their own shit and not really paying attention to anyone else.

  It’s then, when I am Caroline Crowe again, alone in the back of a coffee shop, that what I have done begins to sink in. I wonder how Wilson is doing. And I hope I have not made any more mistakes that I do not know about.

  40

  Caroline

  As I believe I have mentioned, I used to lie in bed watching the light in the city shift from nighttime dark pink to gauzy yellow-gray as dawn broke, alone in my bed, all the time thinking about how I would shrink the family to a more tolerable size if the time ever arrived for action. What I�
�m saying is: committing murder is not a whim I only recently settled on, a sudden impulse newly arrived at. It took years to get here, but deep down I think I always knew this is where I would end up.

  Granted, Wilson’s turning out to be the target is a surprise. An unexpected turn of events. You could say…quite a regrettable turn of events. And I was rushed into it, which is unfortunate; it’s not easy to think clearly when various threats are nipping at your ankles, when the jeerlings prevent you from stringing two coherent thoughts together.

  It will take many hours, probably days, for his liver to fail. Perhaps you think it selfish—you believe if I was willing to take such a drastic action, I should have forced myself to watch the consequences. Maybe, in some world of morality, I should have. But you should have realized long before now—that is not the world I live in.

  I lie back on my bed, hands on my belly, and will myself not to reach for the vial of coke. I don’t ask myself to throw it away—I know I would fail—but at least for the moment, I stay put, I stay sober.

  Amanita phalloides is a badass, alpha mushroom, a sort of star in the world of mycologists for its proven record of adaptation and willingness to change. Let me explain. The fungus is what’s called ectomycorrhizal, meaning it forms symbiotic relationships with trees by way of underground mycelium, a kind of secret web of connectedness that benefits both organisms. It is native to Europe, and its host tree—its best pal, with whom it shares food—is the European oak. Yet at some point, no one is exactly sure when, trees were transplanted to the United States, some with fungus-containing soil. Amanita phalloides looked around, saw no European oaks, and decided it would make do with the live oaks of California.

  Apparently jumping hosts in this way is uncommon, to say the least. Amanita phalloides is a goddamn winner. And that is partly why I chose it, of all the things I could have chosen. I admire its drive. Not to mention its rather grandiose degree of toxicity. For the sort of person who has spent years of sleepless nights contemplating murder, Amanita phalloides is a kind of Holy Grail, a deliciously unusual yet effective way to hustle your target off the stage.

  It is said to be the tastiest of mushrooms, a cruel joke of nature that makes it even easier to use as a poison, since intended victims are more likely to savor it than spit it out. After consumption, as I think I have mentioned, symptoms don’t occur for some time, even as long as twenty-four hours. The first hint of trouble is diarrhea, which only serves to increase the chance of misdiagnosis or failure to seek treatment, since so many innocuous things can cause that usually minor complaint. While the victim is shitting his brains out, thinking his biggest problem is dehydration and the need for more toilet paper, the amatoxin is circulating through his liver, which, I don’t imagine I need to point out, is not a good development.

  Rapid organ failure, coma, the curtain falls.

  I keep going back and forth on this point—and I acknowledge that it is a mark of immense self-absorption, the amount of time I have devoted to such ruminations—but truly, am I a sociopath after all? Would it be possible to consider killing someone in this way if you were not? Dispatching someone who, to be honest, is not so much a terrible person but rather unable to demonstrate the control necessary for the situation and shut up when he should?

  Of course, it’s far more than that. I’m well aware of how things look from the outside.

  But what is being left out? That is the question to ask. Everything in this world, including Amanita phalloides, looks simple on the surface. But under the surface—that’s where truth lies. To understand, you must follow the underground mycelium to see who is feeding on what, who is a parasite and who the host. You cannot skate along above ground and pretend you know everything that’s going on.

  41

  Wilson

  What the fuck.

  I’m starting to wonder if something is seriously wrong with me. I passed out yesterday on the sofa, in the middle of the goddamn afternoon, for no good reason. Anne-Marie was coming over. She texted me, furious as hell, saying she rang the bell and banged on the door, and I didn’t answer.

  I didn’t answer because for reasons I can’t explain, I was out cold on the sofa. Heard nothing. Don’t even remember deciding to lie down.

  So she’s all pissed at me and I can’t convince her to come back this morning, before Rebecca shows back up. It’s not like we get golden opportunities like this every day, right? We could spend some time in the hot tub, smoke some weed, take our time. But Anne-Marie’s too busy being huffy just because I took an unexpected nap. It wasn’t personal.

  But so I’m not feeling so hot, probably coming down with something. A touch of the runs that’s showing no sign of slowing up. I’m gonna do my tried and true thing of going for a short run to sweat it out. I swear, every time I start feeling sick, if I just exercise hard enough to get a real sweat going, it scares off illness like you wouldn’t believe.

  I’ve got some new trail shoes I’m looking forward to testing out, so I put those babies on, along with one of my high-tech shirts that isn’t even clean, I’m in such a hurry to hit the trail and knock this thing on its ass.

  Uff, my stomach feels like a bunch of angry snakes just hatched in there.

  I lock up and put the house key in a special pocket in my shorts, and do a slow jog over to Tilden. Getting outside totally helps, and I even start thinking a little about Anne-Marie in the hot tub, her skin all wet and shiny. I get into a little argument with Sandie over that, because thinking isn’t doing, after all. The rhythm of my feet slapping the trail feels good.

  Then I realize I’ve lost track of time somehow and the sun is starting to go down already. The trail is going up and up and the sweat is starting to pop and for sure—for the moment—I think I do feel better. I keep going.

  And then, I don’t know, I’m way farther up the trail, like I’ve run a pretty long way in a kind of haze. It’s almost dark. And my guts are in knots, I have to step off the trail and let loose, with no toilet paper for miles.

  One of my cardinal rules about running is: don’t stop. Because if the possibility of stopping is on the menu, you’ll be stopping all the time. Straight out of Gordon’s playbook, yeah, but it works. But tonight, forget it. I take some leaves and clean myself off as best I can, and keep going, hoping that the toxins have gotten cleaned out and I’ll be feeling better any minute.

  At the crest of a hill, I slow down, then stop again. I need to swallow but it feels like there’s too much saliva in my mouth to get down without choking, so I lean over and let it drip down to the ground. Then I look up at the moon and say hello to it even though I’m aware that it’s the moon and not someone I know.

  Something is very wrong. I have to get home.

  I want to turn around and jog back, but my first problem is just getting my feet pointed in the right direction. The pain in my stomach is intense and my feet aren’t doing what I tell them to.

  A wave of something really bad breaks over me and I am on the ground, writhing, and those snakes in my guts are eating me from the inside.

  After the spasm passes, I look up and see a mountain lion standing on a rock, looking down at me.

  I have no idea what is happening except that it is not good at all. I am pretty sure that mountain lion is trying to decide whether to eat me with mustard or catsup.

  This is the worst fucking dream I have ever had in my life.

  42

  Caroline

  Natalie is looking at me like I have two heads. “What do you mean, you forgot about Marecita? You were sitting in that exact seat literally three days ago telling me your life was ending because Gordon was firing her.”

  The tiny little Dutch boy is letting leaks spring up all over the place. He had better get it together before I completely lose my shit. I forgot I even had that conversation with Natalie. I forgot about Marecita entirely. I’ve got bigger problems at the moment. Which obviously I cannot share with Natalie or anyone on this earth.

 
The birds from the Black Forest mantel clock have escaped through the door to the terrace, swooped down the avenues and found me here at the coffee shop, where they are pecking at my ears and sitting on my head and letting out squawks that would chill you to the bone. It’s not the same as the jeerlings. It’s way worse.

  “Caro?”

  “Sorry. I’ve been…sort of been through something lately.” I cast my eyes down at my uneaten plate of fries and hope to strike a sympathetic nerve, if Natalie has one.

  “I was wondering,” she says, her voice now brimming with sympathy. “But maybe now it’s all good?”

  I nod slowly, trying to figure her out. I’m not showing, there’s no way she could know…but Natalie’s been known to have a touch of the idiot savant about her in the past. She might have sniffed out the little bean somehow, some way.

  I asked Natalie to lunch because I wanted for half an hour to feel like I was living a normal life again, just out to the coffee shop with a friend, ordering plates of greasy food that we’d barely touch. I wanted to talk about boots, about memories of chocolate chip cookies, about where to go on vacation. Just normal, happy things.

  Not the things that are actually happening.

  I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can’t really anticipate how you’ll feel after you’ve tried to kill somebody. I knew the emotions would be something of a wild card. But I didn’t expect to feel quite this untethered. I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve done to Wilson, about being seen on the sidewalk yesterday by that idiot Katie Luxton. About what Sandie might or might not do when her client fails to show up for his next session.

  If he fails to show up. I can’t be sure things turned out as expected, not yet.

  Then, with a sharp slap to the head, I realize that the Kayley Ann Barker rig is still in my bag, in my room. My bedroom door is not locked and anyone could stroll in there and find it.