Four long steps to my left and I feel the partial wall of the storage cupboards. We used to keep bins full of Christmas decorations in those cabinets but they are gone now, the wall is boarded up. I take out my phone and turn on the flashlight option. The light centers on the wall. It has been fixed in a rudimentary way with a piece of plywood and nails, but there’s no paint or stucco. A Band-Aid at best. My first instinct is I know if I take that plywood down, I’ll find a large gaping hole behind it. I want to make this go away—all of it, the letters, the hunch I have—but I can’t, it’s too late, I knew that when I—
A door opens and light enters the garage. In my panic I can’t find the button to turn off the flashlight. I press the phone against my chest to cover the light. I step behind the car and squat. My hip crunches. The pain is coming on searing hot, intense, like someone gored a hot poker into my groin all the way to the hip joint. I want to pinch my eyes shut in a childish notion, put my hand in front of my eyes, if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
Something globular comes at me from another direction, hovering above like a full moon. I avert my eyes, cover them with my hands, but there’s no escaping from the beam that burns into my retina, as bright as fresh snow accompanied by a momentary fear of going blind. I attempt to see what’s in front of me but the world is a negative, light and shade reversed from the original, black is white and white is black.
My vision clears. Edward. Flashlight in hand.
“Donna?” Scowling, with a shaky voice. “I knew there was someone in the house.”
I remain cowered. The beam lowers to the ground, illuminating Edward from below. He looks like a ghost.
Then, “You’re here. You’re really here.”
It sounds more like a fact than a question, which takes me by surprise.
“What did you think was going to happen?” I ask. Edward doesn’t respond. He’s taken aback by me, I can tell, but I’m not particularly on solid ground myself. “Did you think I was just going to go away? Like that?” I snap my fingers.
Something odd is happening to me, something unexpected. The fact-finding mission and the need for confrontation have turned into something else entirely. A doggedness. A realization. When I leave here, I’ll know what needs knowing. Something I should have been after all along.
“I know things, Edward, I know things. And you do, too. We both know. And I’ve come . . .” I take in a sharp breath. “I’ve come here to find out what happened. To Penelope. To us.”
“I’m worried about you, Donna. You don’t look well,” he says and cocks his head in a dismissive way.
“How does well look, Edward?”
“I mean, you look . . . Never mind. Do they know you’re here?”
“They? Who are they?”
“I was told you couldn’t walk. I was told you were recovering from your injury.”
“I manage. I’ve been working hard on getting better. I’m much better now.”
“I’m not your doctor. I wouldn’t know.”
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“Afraid?” His brows furrow.
“Edward . . .”
I started out with so much confidence, but now I falter. All those weeks, months, all those questions and then not a word comes out of my mouth. All this buildup, all this preparation, all this pondering, this weighing every single argument. But perfect lives don’t end this way so what did I miss? Once my mind forms this hypothesis, what did I miss, it’s clear suddenly.
“I need to ask you something,” I say. “I need to ask you something about Penelope.”
32
DONNA
We end up in the kitchen, Edward leading the way. After I’ve been navigating through the house in the dark, everything is now bathed in lights. The kitchen counters expose fingerprints and flakes of food, stark and shameful. No one vigilant about wiping them down.
When I turn, Edward has taken a chair and placed it facing me. He has aged, his hair is grayer than it used to be, his eyes lie hollow within his head. I wonder if I look as old as he does. I hope not but I haven’t really made an effort, not like I used to.
I tell him about the housewarming party. The horses. The boy, Gabriel. It all topples like Jenga blocks. I keep tugging but I’m determined to keep the tower steady, and before I know it I compromise the foundation and we both sit in front of a heap of wooden blocks.
“Stop,” he says. Just like that. Stop. Edward stares at me. “Just—”
“I’m not sure you understand what’s happening here,” I interrupt with a tone I hope carries authority. “I’m telling you there’s something wrong with Penelope. I need to understand what has happened to her. To us. I need you to fill in the blanks.”
“Me? You need me to fill in the blanks?” His voice is measured and taut and looming. “I think you are the one who needs to fill in the blanks.”
I shake my head. “Where’s Penelope?”
There. Finally I said it though it doesn’t carry as much weight as I thought it would.
“Donna—”
His eyes are blank.
“Don’t Donna me. You’ve been ignoring my calls. You had me shipped off like I was no longer needed and you turned my daughter against me. She hasn’t called or visited or made any kind of contact with me. I don’t blame her for anything, I need her to know that I don’t blame her for anything. And I’m so much better than I used to be. Believe it or not, even my hip is well. Here.” I prance around. I take long strides, jump up and down, an almost-attempt at jumping jacks. Edward stares at me and I freeze. He’s a doctor, he might call my bluff. Does he know that the problem with hips is range of motion and sudden movements, and jumping isn’t all that difficult? Am I fooling him? I can’t tell. “I’m well,” I emphasize. “But I need to see Penelope. Edward, you don’t . . .” How do I make him understand? How do I explain to him that . . . I don’t even know what I’m trying to explain. “Every day, every single day I ask Marleen if Penelope has called and every single day the answer is no. I’m her mother, Edward. And you too, you can’t even return a phone call? Where is she?”
“What does Marleen say when you ask her?”
What a cruel and menacing comment. What does the housekeeper say when you ask for your daughter.
“She says whatever you tell her to say, I assume?”
Edward swallows hard.
“Where’s Penelope?” I insist.
I watch his Adam’s apple, its up-and-down motion, and I know what’s about to happen. He’s about to choke on his own spit. A blockage of his airways keeps him from sucking in air and it sounds terrifying as he’s forcing in a wet breath, saliva seeping down his trachea. Even he can’t erase my decades of familiarity with his every move: he’s about to lie to me. My heart might be racing and I have to wipe my sweaty palms on my thighs to keep them from leaving imprints on the black marble counters but Edward coughs and coughs until tears run down his face.
“What did you do, Edward? What did you do? To Penelope? To me? This house? Our life?” I want the evil part of him exposed, want him to bare his true self, the one who did our family in.
“I think I’m going to call—”
“The police?” I interrupt him. “Why?”
He pauses, recognizes the absurdity of it all.
“Why why why why why,” I say as I slap the marble countertop with the palm of my hand. “No crime has been committed. I’m in my own house. An ambulance? No one is sick. No one is injured.”
I need him to admit fault. Knowledge. Responsibility. But still, so much is missing, feels wrong. The oddity of it all. He doesn’t act like a guilty man, he’s more taken aback by me. I thrust those thoughts into the back of my mind to be dealt with later—but there’s this rage, it prickles in my throat like acid. I want him to admit to something so I know I’m not the guilty one because only one pers
on can be at fault. Right? And it has to be him.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Edward says.
Edward doesn’t curse, not normally.
“Wrong with me?” I ask.
“Normal people don’t forget what’s happened to their child.”
33
DONNA
The last solid memory I have of my daughter Penelope, solid as in if prompted I could give the date and time, was April first. I was reading one of those planted newspaper stories people take for face value until it dawns on them it’s April Fool’s Day.
Penelope came downstairs, looking disheveled. I remember thinking that a grown woman shouldn’t be in public like that, stretched-out sweats, an oversized hoodie, hair matted, leftover mascara smeared. Her energy had been raw and frightening in the days prior and I insisted we go see somebody.
We drove to the hospital. Penelope turned on the AC and ran it on full blast. When I shut the vent—I knew better than to say anything—she rolled down the window. At the hospital, a resident, who didn’t look a day over twenty, did an exam. I sat in a blue plastic chair while Penelope answered his questions.
He told Penelope she suffered from anxiety.
“She’s on medication for that,” I said.
“Her dose is pretty high,” he said. “If she skipped one, it’ll do a number on her. She needs to be seen by a therapist,” he said.
He handed Penelope a prescription and sent us home with a list of counselors and doctors and urged us to follow up with her primary care provider.
* * *
• • •
See, I want to say, I have not forgotten. I took her to the hospital. She hadn’t refilled her medication. There wasn’t much more to it. I feel myself crumbling. Why is Edward acting as if there’s something wrong with me? I don’t have the energy to make a fuss, I came here for one thing but somehow now feel I lack the tools to finish this task. My resolve is gone, all that buildup, all that steadfastness I’ve had, just disappears. Poof. Gone.
How terrified I am of the thoughts in my mind. Not remembering everything I did or didn’t do, and there are blank spots and being unable to fill them frightens me. I want to share all those questions that have been jammed like an old door but I don’t dare.
Edward is watching me. He’s so still, he doesn’t even blink. I’m crumbling, and he can tell.
“Donna, you’re a piece of work, you know that? I’ve about had it up to here.” He waves his hand around eye level. “Come, come, come,” he says and pulls me by my upper arm into the foyer. “How do you not remember?” He points down at the checkered floor then meets my eyes head-on. “Are you telling me you don’t remember what you did?”
His eyebrows are raised. He doesn’t know a thing. Thirty years of marriage, I’m no fool. I close my eyes. Images from that afternoon crowd my mind: Penelope’s anger, her resolve, her bloodshot eyes. I can’t bear another second of my heart beating like a runaway train.
“I want to know what you did,” I say and poke a finger in his chest. “You go first.”
34
EDWARD
Edward Pryor looked up from a book he was reading, a presidential biography Donna thought to be interesting. He’d never admit it but he’d been stuck on the first third of the book for days. He preferred crime fiction and an occasional Western—that, too, he would never admit—but everyone was going to talk about this book, according to Donna, so he thought he’d see it through.
It was eleven when he heard a noise, indistinct and faint. Edward exchanged a quick look with Donna, puzzled, as if to say you heard that, too?
Donna flipped through Architectural Digest and ignored him. She had called him earlier in the day just as he was going into surgery, and he had all but ignored her calls. She had had an argument with Penelope, she had alluded to as much, but when he had pressed her on the details earlier, she had clammed up. Little did she know that he had caught the very back end of the argument that morning, eavesdropped on his way out the door, and it wasn’t so much the words they exchanged—those he could barely make out—but the tone of the conversation. Mother and daughter under one roof and all the arguments that came with that, but sometimes Donna cut Penelope to the bone. Donna knew better, it wasn’t a note she wanted to hit but they pushed each other’s buttons. A verbal roughhousing of sorts.
Donna and Penelope had been fighting since forever. For those two to get along was an abstract notion, an unimaginable thing. The older Penelope got, the worse the fights had become. It was like a boxing match, he was the referee, and he was tired of sending them to their corners between rounds. It was time to end this, time for them to be apart for good.
Edward listened for a follow-up noise. A knock, something falling down? A bump, boxes toppling in the garage, somewhere beneath them? Edward shut the book and stared at the TV. A rerun of Law & Order, the episode he had seen before—four high school girls make a pregnancy pact so they can raise their kids together—the occasional chung-chung indicating a progression in time, a fleeting bleat, unidentifiable, a sound that could be so many things.
There it was again, this time high-pitched, more of a shriek. His daughter, Penelope, coming home, maybe, but still, something about this was off. Edward stared off into the distance as if his hearing might improve if only he didn’t focus on anything in particular. Maybe a deer had come through the clearing through the back of the property and got trapped underneath the awning with all the outdoor furniture. He imagined its slender legs and long neck trapped in a lawn chair, dragging it along the patio, bumping into things. Or those damn cats. He had told Donna so many times not to feed them, dammit, dammit, dammit, but did she ever listen to him? They had multiplied according to the amount of food she put out.
Edward muted the TV and chose his words carefully. “You just heard that, right? Those cats,” he said to Donna. “We’re going to have to do something about them.”
He knew Donna had set out shelters, which were collectively frowned upon in Preston Hallow, and she had continued to do so even after she had been told multiple times not to. Someone had pulled some strings and the city had contacted her and told her not to interfere with the cat colony. Once he had come home late at night and as he turned on the high beams, dozens of eyes had reflected back at him. Someone claimed that entire hordes of cats, hundreds even, lived in the neighborhood. He thought that to be exaggerated but he couldn’t be sure.
Donna continued to ignore him. It was mainly about him not taking her call this morning but she had been snubbing him for a while now, ever since she had booked a cruise to Italy for the summer without consulting him and he had told her to cancel.
“Just take three weeks off, there are other doctors at your practice. They all go on vacation. Don’t be difficult about it.”
Everything is so goddamn easy for her. Edward held those words back, didn’t want to be rude, but Donna knew nothing about responsibilities. Taking weeks off would take just as long for him to prepare for and make the necessary adjustments to his schedule.
“You should have asked me before you booked,” he’d said.
Before he could add anything else, she read from the brochure. “Charming villages, pristine beaches, and legendary cities, picturesque pastel towns from the Amalfi Coast to Sicily and Elba, and off to smaller ports and beautiful harbors, then off to Rome and Venice.”
Truth be told, Edward didn’t want to spend an entire month without his schedule of getting up at six, going to spin class, performing surgery in the morning, consulting in the afternoon, charting in the evenings. He took solace in the predictability of it all, needed to return every night to a pristine home where Donna handed him his favorite drink—two ounces of Old Tom gin, one ounce of dry vermouth, and a dash of Peychaud’s Bitters—but Donna was relentless. She was working her way up to her final demand; soon there’d be talk of retirement and he imagined
constant trips and charity functions and parties and he bristled at the thought of it all. He didn’t even have time for the very thoughts he was having right then, it was eleven and his alarm was set for six. He had a full surgery schedule tomorrow. Eyes heavy, he shut off the TV and flipped over.
The pages of Donna’s magazine rustled as he fell asleep.
* * *
• • •
Just on the border of sleep, he woke to a commotion. Disoriented, he reached for the lamp switch to check the time. A crash below—no more ifs and buts about it; a crash—made the walls shake. Not in a figurative sense, but the walls literally trembled as if the foundation of the house had been compromised. Those weren’t cats or deer.
Edward Pryor reached for his phone, unable to decide what to do. Nine-one-one was a hassle, being put on hold and having to explain what was going on was nothing Edward cared for. After all he was on a first-name basis with the police chief, they played golf together—he hated golf but was fairly good at it—and they had an occasional cigar, and Edward could easily reach out to him. He decided to not do anything at all, someone would be here within minutes, he was sure. Their ADT account was up to date and the neighborhood was patrolled by a security guard.
Donna tossed the magazine to the side, put on her slippers, and threw on her robe, a silky silver thing that complemented her blond hair. Edward could sense her mind at work, the dominion of her logic which was off but predictably so: she didn’t care to be robbed at gunpoint in her nightgown. She always thought of such things, even though it had dawned on him quite some time ago that her thoughts were the mental equivalent of a Tourette’s outburst with flailing limbs and mental tics.
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