And so it began. Fracking was the first thing Donna went on about. She switched to the possibility of the hot water tank exploding—it had happened to a neighbor of theirs not too long ago—telling Edward to listen for water rushing through the pipes. Or maybe a small airplane from the nearby Skylark Field Airport had crashed into the side of the house? If he didn’t know better, he’d wager that Donna was losing her mind, slowly but surely she was going off the deep end a bit more each and every day. None of this was normal. Her convictions manifested in random thoughts and she followed every rabbit hole offering itself, like the argument with Penelope that very morning. Donna was the adult, she ought to know better, and how often had he told her not to engage in those tiffs.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t altogether impossible about that airport. He had to admit that even though Donna had a vivid imagination, there were sometimes small Cessna planes airborne overhead flying to a football game or a hunting trip, no more than six people. There wasn’t a commercial flight route over his property but there was an airfield for small, private planes nearby.
Edward dressed in khakis and a shirt and slipped on his shoes.
“Maybe we’re being robbed,” he said but knew it was cruel to upset Donna even further.
“Shouldn’t we stay here and wait for the police?” Donna called out and pulled the robe tighter around her shoulders.
Edward made his way out of the bedroom. “You stay, someone will be here any minute,” he said in a hushed tone and closed the door with slow and focused movements to prevent it from slamming shut. He was pretty sure it had to do with that hobby airport, otherwise the alarm would have gone off. He realized he wasn’t completely sure it would, ADT might just be one of those remote warning systems. He didn’t know much about the system, Donna handled such things but she was worthless in her state. It was good to know this neighborhood was one of the safest in the area.
He looked down from the third-story landing into the foyer. There was no light, no sounds, nothing but darkness and silence. Short and lean, he religiously went to his biweekly spinning classes, was fit by all accounts, in shape and limber for a man his age, but there was something he was not: a hero.
Edward paid people to do his gardening, the cleaning, and the cooking. He felt he had no choice but to investigate the noise, though he hoped the police would show up soon.
On the first floor he stood in the foyer and listened. In the kitchen the icemaker churned and the fridge motor kicked in. The moment his hand touched the front door handle, he heard a popping sound from the garage. It reminded him of a bicycle tire after you pull out a nail. He hadn’t thought of that sound in decades, yet it returned to him as if to remind him of his childhood and happier times, or maybe, so he thought later, to brace him somehow as if fate whispered there are good memories in life, still. Hold on to them.
The motion sensor lights in the hallway lit up and he opened the door leading into the garage. He didn’t move much farther into the space, stood on top of the stairs leading down into the three-bay garage, and his heart didn’t have time to skip a beat, his intestines didn’t have time to drop down.
Penelope had crashed her car into the back wall of the garage. The grill and part of the hood stuck in the wall. Edward peered through the driver’s side window. Penelope looked disheveled. Her hair was unkempt, and she was staring straight ahead. Not so much as a scratch on her, as far as he could tell. He didn’t have time to react because he heard the woop woop of the police car pulling up outside.
She must have been drinking, he thought. He pondered for a second if he should hit the garage door opener, to tell the police to take her away, to have her face the consequences. He wondered if neighbors stood by their windows gawking by now, not that they were bad people, but concerned about a prowler being on the loose after a police car appeared. Between the cats and a possible intruder they got worked up easily, they had talked about this at parties, their fear of burglars, the riffraff catching up with their way of life.
Woop woop.
He saw the blinking lights of the cruiser through a gap in the garage door.
Edward turned, walked up the stairs, out of the garage, and rushed out the front door.
It was all but dark outside but for the lights by the side of the driveway illuminating the landscaping. Making his way down the driveway, he waved at the officer in the cruiser. There was a brief conversation between them, a handshake, and the police car continued down the circle driveway and out into the road. He watched the brake lights come on, then it disappeared in the distance.
He knew without having to turn and look up that Donna was standing in the window, watching. By now she probably wondered if she ought to get her purse from downstairs but she’d be too confused to comprehend what was going on, given the fact the police had come and gone. Edward waited until the lights had completely disappeared and not until then did he turn and rush up to the bedroom, taking two stairs at a time and busting through the bedroom door.
“What’s going on?” Donna asked. “Was there a robbery?”
Edward didn’t answer.
“Why did the police leave? Did you send them away? Edward, what—”
Edward pushed past her, knocking into her shoulder, making her tumble backward.
Ever since they’d known each other, Donna had never heard a harsh word from him. Edward had never so much as raised his voice at her. His ways were the subtle digs and passive aggressive taunts, never anything physical.
“Edward, will you tell me—”
“Oh my God, oh my God.” His words came out in short bursts, he was unable to catch his breath.
“What happened?” Donna shrieked as he darted past her and into the bathroom.
Edward bent over the toilet and vomited.
Donna followed him into the bathroom but didn’t flick on the light, didn’t dare expose him that way. Instead, she stood in the doorway, taken aback by Edward crouching in the darkness, heaving.
He rose and slammed the door shut in her face. He rinsed his mouth and flushed the toilet.
“I saw the police drive up. What was that noise and what’s going on? I don’t understand,” Donna said, her voice hollow with her mouth so close to the door, her fists knocking and knocking, but she never entered.
“Get dressed,” Edward said through the door. As if he knew she was still standing there doing nothing, he raised his voice. “Did you hear me? Get dressed.”
Edward rushed past her and to the window and drew the curtains, didn’t want neighbors to see them hastily rummage through the house, you never know who’s about, even at that time of night, and he watched Donna as she gauged his outfit and slipped into a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a windbreaker. She put on a pair of boating shoes—she didn’t own any boots—and flicked some cotton off her pants. She looked up and Edward stood a mere inch away from her.
“Why are we getting dressed?” How timid her voice was. He began to feel sorry for her.
“I need you to listen to me, Donna.”
“I’m listening but I don’t—”
“Now isn’t the time to ask questions, okay?”
“You’re scaring me. What is it? You’re freaking me out. I don’t understand? What’s going on?”
His breath tasted sour and minty all at once. Edward was aware of the fact that in thirty years she had not seen him in this condition: unshaven, unkempt, boots haphazardly tied. He watched her put her cupped hands over her nose and mouth, partly because she was scared, partly because her throat closed up on her, the smell of vomit not something Donna was able to tolerate.
Edward took her hands and drew them off her face, squeezed them. He turned and pulled her with him, out of the bedroom, across the landing and down the double staircase, then along a hallway and into the garage, where Donna lost her footing on the steps leading down. Edward thought about this mo
ment later and the best explanation he could come up with was that he wanted Donna to see what he had seen—he wanted her, in some small and petty and cruel way, to feel what he had felt.
The first thing Edward tuned in to was a hissing sound coming from the water heater. A stench of oil and gasoline, and everything was covered in a layer of something and he knew the water heater was spewing water. How funny, he thought, did Donna not just tell him to listen for water rushing through the pipes?
So much he hadn’t seen earlier, hadn’t paid attention to. Everything made perfect sense, but then it didn’t: his daughter’s car, the red Grand Cherokee, had hit the back of the garage, had crumbled the wall that separated the parking space from a storage area, and had hit the water tank.
“What’s going on? Why is Penelope’s car like this? She—”
“I need you to talk to her, Donna. I need you to talk some sense into her.”
“Where is Penelope?”
“In the car. She’s in the car.”
Edward watched Donna step closer and wipe the condensation off the driver’s side window with her right hand.
“Penny, baby, open up.” There was no reaction. “Penny, unlock the door for me. It’s okay. Just a little accident.”
“Talk to her, talk some sense into her,” Edward pleaded, knocking on the window.
He felt like that time at Whole Foods when a bagger had put the wrong bag in Donna’s trunk and when they unpacked the groceries at home, they had stared at the items, knowing that they would never buy such things. That moment of not comprehending, the questioning of one’s own faculties—this was such a moment.
Edward made his way around the car to the passenger side. The door was locked.
“Penny, open the door for me. It’s okay. Everything is fine. Please open.” With a wide swipe Edward cleared the passenger window from condensation and looked inside the car, cupping his hands against the glass. “Penny, please open up.”
There was no reaction.
“Talk to her, Donna. She won’t listen to me,” Edward begged. “Penny, unlock the door for me. It’s okay. Just a little accident.” He found himself mimicking Donna’s words.
On the other side of the car Donna kept pleading, “Penny, open the door. It’s okay. Everything is fine. Please open.”
Penelope’s hand moved in slow motion, hovered over the door, and then lowered itself. A sound chirped twice. Edward ripped open the door and stared at the passenger seat. Penelope wasn’t alone in the car. There was something next to her. Something scrunched together as if stuffed into the seat. A dummy? One of those mannequins in store windows? Edward stood and beheld what he knew deep down inside were not the distorted limbs of a plastic figure but a human. A woman.
And next to her sat Penelope. Crying. Crying so hard.
And there was blood.
So much blood.
35
EDWARD
Edward watches Donna like a hawk. As he relays the story to her, as she takes it all in, he fixates on her eyes, a series of saccades and intervening smooth anticipatory movements and then there are stationary periods. He wonders how well she is. He’s no expert but he can’t imagine, not for the life of him, that she can’t remember. As a physician, he knows it’s within the realm of possibility but he doesn’t trust her.
He struggles to find the right words, doesn’t know how to make Donna understand how terrible it was, even for him, a man trained to keep calm under the most difficult of circumstances, how he struggled to express the extent of the panic that had overtaken him that night, for that split second during which he believed that his only daughter had gone mad, had completely lost her faculties, had finally gone off that edge she’s been teetering on for the longest time.
The stray cats, the ones Donna set shelters out for, they would sometimes bring a mouse as some sort of trophy. They’d fling the dead body around, catch it and paw at it, just to carry it off a few feet and watch it twitch. Edward couldn’t help but think of the woman’s body that way: an offering by his daughter. A reminder. This is who I am.
36
DONNA
I assemble the details of that day into bento boxes, neatly arranged and in perfect angles, separated and aesthetically pleasing. I can’t commit myself to his madness quite yet. Another crack in the story I thought I knew? Now that it’s told, it sounds plausible. But the question remains: is Edward a liar or is he telling the truth? I can’t say he ever lied to me, not that I recall. At the most, he’d try to sway me in a direction. What do I know? Maybe misleading is a better word. He was good at that.
* * *
• • •
When Edward proposed to me, I had no idea what it meant to be the wife of a doctor nor did I spend any time thinking about it. It wasn’t until he took me to his hometown that I caught on to his intentions. The town had a historic district and an art community selling landscapes to tourists, a picturesque civic square with a statue of a general on a horse, the kind of living that makes some sort of list for best places to retire.
He parked the car in front of an unassuming building and said, “I’ve got a surprise.”
I hope he didn’t buy this dump, was my first thought but my heart sank when we went inside. A practice with industrial linoleum and pencil drawings in crooked frames of a jolly man in a white coat with a head mirror illuminating a child’s nasal passages. Stuffy noses and gout, I imagined, an occasional blood clot, and referrals handed out to specialists.
The waiting room was filled with elderly people, one person on crutches, a caretaker keeping an eye on a man barely in his sixties. A woman who was oddly dressed, her hair uncombed. People coughed and I turned my head. I saw myself having to pitch in, schedule appointments and keep files up to date and maybe Edward even expected me to learn how to draw blood? This was what I had spent all these years on, being frugal and living in mediocre apartments as he finished medical school? This was what was at the end of all the sacrifices I had made?
The months leading up to that, there was the pressure to have children. I was only in my late twenties but Edward had been pushing the issue. I wasn’t opposed but wasn’t focused on children quite yet, for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on—there were no logical resentments there, it wasn’t as if I had to raise siblings or anything like that, but it was just how I felt, or maybe I just hadn’t given it any thought.
I was afraid of what we would become if this was our future. The waiting room made me nauseous, the queasiness from those smells. I had a hunch. I hadn’t even seen a doctor yet, hadn’t taken a test, but I knew, I knew though I didn’t tell Edward. It only took me mere minutes and I considered the pregnancy a miracle, a sign. A microscopic cluster of cells, and I suddenly wanted more for this life inside of me. It was still an it then, too early to know, really, but this small-town-doctor’s-wife thing, this I couldn’t do. He couldn’t possibly want this for me if he knew, could he?
Long story short, I talked Edward into plastic surgery by highlighting the advantages. “Think of all the people you can help,” I said. “This is not about vanity. Mangled limbs need restoring, all those cleft palate babies. You’d do a lot of good.” I laid it all out, how he was going to focus on his career and I was going to concentrate on the baby and that we could revisit the practice at a later point. “I won’t say a word if you still want this ten or fifteen years from now, Edward,” I said and meant it.
We moved to Boston and Edward started his residency at BMC. The move was easy enough, our belongings still fit in one moving truck then, we didn’t own four sets of china but one which was still incomplete, there was no breakfast room or formal dining room furniture, and we hadn’t filled two guest rooms to the brim yet.
I had never lived north of Oklahoma and the suburb we lived in was quaint, but the seasons felt different with winter showing up late and snow all through March and I was stuck in
the house because I wasn’t used to driving in snow, and the cold arrived in full force and winter never seemed to end.
Penelope was born and she was an easy baby, by all accounts, though I had nothing to compare her to. There wasn’t a milestone she didn’t hit or excel at, it wasn’t a matter of her being slow or behind, nothing like that. She was different. And I had thoughts. I often wondered if I was explaining this well to Edward. I couldn’t find the words to tell him that there was something off with her. If I told him that at birthday parties she was the one who wandered off and went from room to room while the other children played games and ate cake, that she had difficulty engaging with other children, that she pulled a girl’s hair for no reason at all, and had a screaming fit after and snatched an entire table setting to the ground—would he have listened?
The years passed by quickly, in the blink of an eye sounds cliché, but there’s much truth to long days and short years and before I knew it, we were in Florida and I enrolled Penelope in school. We lived in that shabby little house and it was then she stabbed that kid with a fork. Edward thought we should intervene, but I played it down like it was an isolated incident. I had this one job, raising this little human being, and I was clearly failing. Edward became more critical of me than he’d ever been. Everything was a point of contention: Penny’s grades, how I didn’t manage to stay on top of her schoolwork and if I just made her do things, everything would be so much easier. I spent those years doing what I was good at; I threw parties and organized charity functions, and along with that I reared the hope that Penelope would grow out of it, whatever it was. The less I told Edward about Penelope, the less critical he became. The house was a success, straight fringes on the rug, and I became relentless in my pursuit of the perfect family.
If Edward was the catalyst, if his name and his work was what had carried us to Hawthorne Court, it was my determination, my will to be extraordinary, that made us the envy of everyone. People were eager to attend our parties, to stand on the expansive lawn with the sun going down, pretending to be us. Colleagues, neighbors, friends, acquaintances—they eagerly ate off my china and wallowed in the luxury that I put forth before them. Edward knew nothing about the floor that needed replacing (can we just patch it up?), the money it took to keep up the landscaping, and I doubt he had ever heard of a retaining wall, and what kept the water from flooding the basement was nothing he concerned himself with. What he created, I sustained. And it wasn’t an easy feat.
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