• • •
This was the gist of her every breakdown: I messed up, help, sorry but not sorry. Until that night. Suddenly she couldn’t take another moment of her guilt. I have to confess, I can’t live this way, I can’t do this. I. I. I. Suddenly she had to make things right?
We were part of it. Though in my mind I had created this safety net: if all else fails, the lawyers will figure it out, that’s what they’re there for. They’ll get paid a king’s ransom and we won’t ever have to speak to the police. We will insist on a period of time to get our minds straight, during which we will bicker back and forth about where to meet with the detectives. We will hire our own polygraph expert. We will employ lawyers for each one of us, more than one lawyer if need be. We will hire lawyers for the lawyers if we have to.
But something I couldn’t argue with, one fear remained: there will be nothing left. Not our name, not our reputation, not Edward’s practice. We will sign everything over to the lawyers and we will be penniless when this is all over. But above all, the fact that we’ll end up in prison was likely, a possibility, no longer remote but conceivable.
And so it began.
I wanted to convince Penelope to let us make the decisions. She had never been equipped to see around corners, it was our job to do so. Isn’t that what parents are for? My mind struggled for where to begin. That her father was the one used to pressure, that he was out disposing of the woman’s body and that Penelope should trust him? If she didn’t trust me, she could count on him to do the right thing? But Edward wasn’t here. I was and I had to do what I had to do.
I’m not proud of what I did next.
I dissolved every last Xanax I found in water and made Penelope gulp it down. I held the bottom of the glass and when she lowered it, I raised it back up, watched the chalky residue slither past her lips.
And I tried to reason with her. I told her, We will make this go away, take my word for it. No one knows. No one ever has to know.
I know, Penelope cried. I know what I’ve done. You can’t make that go away.
That’s what I kept repeating over and over and over. We can do this. This is not the end of it all. Trust me, I said, this is not the end. You don’t understand what you are about to do, to yourself, to us.
I jammed the chair under the doorknob from the inside to keep her from leaving.
I’m getting out. You can’t keep me here.
A screaming match of filthy, hurtful words followed, words I don’t want to remember. She flung her arms around, punching, scratching. I was in the crossfire. A punching bag. Holding her down like I used to when she was a child didn’t work, she was like a wet bar of soap, slipping away from me. I took her blows, every single one of them.
Like an animal trying to escape a cage, she raged on and on. And so I let her have her wrath. I allowed her to destroy what needed destroying and I hoped she’d tucker out. Tucker out like she used to, collapse onto the bed, cry, sleep it off. Half of her childhood she’d spent tuckering out, what was good enough then was good enough now, I thought.
She stripped off the bedding, pulled the curtains from the walls.
None of this, I want none of this.
There was nothing left whole in the room but the furniture. But as always, she took it one step further. She ripped open the closet doors and tossed everything out: floorboards and wooden slats and a toolbox with nails and drills and bits and tape measures and wood glue. When she spotted a hammer, she grabbed it and began to strike the walls. She banged and bashed until the room was speckled with marks of her frenzy.
We fought for the hammer. I won and she struck me with her fist. How she had the strength and faculties, I didn’t understand, not after the amount of medication I had given her. I remember thinking, all those meds and still she rages.
By then her screams were so loud, I covered my ears. I closed my eyes for just one second. I should have known better than to drop my guard. She tore at the door and the chair screeched, dislodged from underneath the knob, and the door gave way and opened. I pulled her back into her room. What a silly thing to do with a door that opens outward, to prop the chair from the inside, I thought. What was I thinking?
She rammed against me, her body flew past me. Her screams reverberated through the house and soon they’d echo through the neighborhood—a vision of her running across the front lawn in her nightgown screaming bloody murder, telling everyone what she’d done. That was what was going to happen next.
My hands clung to the doorframe, my body the only barrier between her and the door and the stairs and the outside. I gripped her upper arm but she pulled me onto the landing. There, we bumped against the banister. I stood my ground, railing against my back.
A push, a shove, a gasp, a scream. Who is to say who pushed and shoved and gasped and screamed? I don’t even know who is to blame.
My heart was beating so fast, so fast, fast, fast, fast. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
In my story, in the story that is part of me, I held on to her to save her. I can honestly say that my only intention was to save her from herself.
We floated, but still I held on to her. I held on to her so she wouldn’t get hurt. Floating. Floating. I braced myself. All those images, so quick, so sharp, what have I done, what have I done. Were those my thoughts, my words, Penelope’s thoughts, her words, who is to say who spoke and thought? We were one.
It’s done. This is it.
We hit the ground and it felt as if something was knocking the life out of me. Such pain. Searing. That hip is ruined. I will never walk again.
We lay scattered on the black-and-white checkerboard floor. I was still conscious then, must have been, because a thought bobbed up: look at this floor, a design from a fifteenth-century Roman painting, so geometrical, so perfect in its angles and contrast. It had cost a fortune. Imported. The floor was curved like in that movie . . . what’s that movie . . . Alice in Wonderland. Distorted and twisted.
Not one sound but humming humming humming in my ears. Nausea. Head pounding. I opened my eyes and there was Penelope’s body beneath me, as warped as the floor.
Penny. Penny. Penny.
* * *
• • •
“Why did no one tell me?” I ask Edward.
“Donna . . .”
“Donna what? What?” My voice is shrill, piercing. I don’t mean to sound unhinged, yet here I am. Hysteria. Do people still say that? “No one told me about Penelope? No one?”
“I told you,” Edward says, deflating somehow. “I told you many times.”
“Tell me again,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “I need to hear you say it.”
“Penelope is dead,” he says.
46
DONNA
A sorrow so intense that for a moment I can’t breathe. Penelope is dead. On the edges of my awareness I have thought it all along, but I didn’t know it all along. I didn’t know but now I do. That’s the proper way of putting it.
What kind of platitude is this? I’ve told you many times.
Something flashes beneath the surface of my mind and I want to follow the flash, investigate it. It’s too late, it has disappeared before I can identify it, like reaching desperately for a balloon that has long escaped, turning into a dot in the sky. The falling part, the one where Penelope fell to her death, makes me anxious. I can’t elaborate on that quite yet, it’s some sort of mental discord, but I’ll get there eventually.
One step at a time.
I can’t say I knew what happened, I can’t say I was lying to myself either. I more or less kept the truth from emerging, if that makes any sense. The fact that my daughter took a life is hard to digest, a deed that seemed insurmountable at the time. I don’t want to call the woman, Rachel, a deed, she was a human being, had a family, a life, and people who loved her, but in Penelope’s mind her remorse must have been overwhelming. But why
the guilt? All the things she’d done, if this was just an accident—though her actions after were negligent—it wasn’t serious enough to take her own life. Was it?
I’m not sure if I should tell Edward the truth. The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Poor Edward. I have always done my best, been the best mother I could be. I don’t know if he can say that about himself as a father but I don’t tell him that, it’s not something I need to say out loud. He’ll arrive at that conclusion in due time.
Penelope is dead. What am I supposed to do with that? It’s like ending up in a story so much bigger than myself, a story that boggles the mind but Edward claiming he told me, every single day he said he told me, I wonder how often did my daughter die in my heart and in my mind?
“I need some time. Please give me a minute to take this all in,” I say.
* * *
• • •
I step out on the back porch. Leaves and garbage have blown into the corners. Flattened paper cups and candy wrappers have accumulated, the outdoor furniture is covered in bird droppings and spiderwebs. Walking past the outdoor kitchen, past the bricked fireplace, past a dusty garden hose forgotten in a messy heap, I find a muddy bowl flipped upside down, unused for months. I step on something cushy and it squeaks, the sound digs into my brain as annoying as nails on a chalkboard. A torn piece of a Styrofoam box, a chest I used to set up for the stray cats as a shelter. Looking closer, I see what Edward has done, see the footprint from the rubber clogs he wears in the operating room. The wavy pattern so familiar.
He could’ve cared for the strays, could have had them trapped and picked up, but no, he abandoned them, left them to their own devices. I loved those cats, the softest pads you’ve ever felt, but still they were so scrappy, so feral, how they hissed and clawed at me, afraid for their lives all the while I was trying to save them. I imagine Edward stomping on the chest, ripping it apart. I look and look and look but there isn’t a single cat out here. If I wait until morning, or maybe if I switch on a flashlight, will their eyes glow bright green in the dark? I feel rage bubble up as I imagine Edward dropping poison bait in the corners of the patio. Did he collect their stiff dead bodies, put them in a lawn bag and sit them out on the curb?
I jerk around when I feel his hand on my shoulder.
“The cats are all gone. I told you this was going to happen once you stop feeding them.”
I search for words, any words, anything, but there’s just an empty space in my head. My fickle mind refuses to participate. I turn and walk back in the house, away from him.
Inside, a sound in the distance makes us jerk. A clatter.
“What was that?” I ask.
Edward’s eyes are focused. He stands still as if discomfort has frozen him into place. Another noise, above us, muffled in intensity. Barely a screech but it’s something.
“Someone’s up there,” I say and make for the stairs allowing access to the second floor and the half floor above that.
I expect Edward to step in front of me but all he does is say, “Donna, don’t—”
“You son of a bitch,” I spit at him.
I’ve never cursed in Edward’s presence, not even under my breath. I’m as surprised as he is about those words coming out of my mouth.
Be quick, think think think. What’s above the kitchen? A room, a guest room.
Struggling to keep my balance, I reach for the black iron rail. I raise an unsteady foot onto the first step. My stiff hip keeps my legs from responding the way I want them to, but my brain keeps insisting go go go, and they move, do what I want them to do. I sway but catch myself, and I reach and clear the landing, rush down the hallway. The first room on the right. That must be the origin of the noise. I rip open the door and it slams into the wall.
Behind me Edward screams my name and other words I can’t make out.
I rip open the door. The curtains are drawn. It’s hard to see.
* * *
• • •
I’ve never seen a room with so much furniture cramped in every corner. Barely a path remains—chairs stacked, tables pushed to the perimeter of the room, a table propped sideways against a desk, a nightstand upside down on top of that. One wall is covered in framed photographs, not to display them but more for storage, haphazardly and crooked they hang next to one another. A baby in one photograph, a smiling child, a birthday cake, and balloons in another. Below them, countless frames lean up against the wall.
The chaos keeps me from taking a step without worrying about knocking over a chair, a painting, or a vase sitting dangerously close to the edge of a sideboard. Dressers and bedframes leaning randomly against one another. Is Penelope hiding from me underneath a table, behind one of the headboards, a dresser—some of the furniture is draped in sheets and I can’t make out what they are—I’m reminded of the mirrors I shrouded at Shadow Garden.
I venture between a dresser and a chest to get to what looks like a person hiding underneath a bedsheet—a silly thought—but I pull at it. As it drops to the ground, dust swirls in a dance: a coatrack with an umbrella stand. The dust settles everywhere like winter’s first snow. Another sheet, this one reaches all the way to the floor, the outline beneath an oval shape like a small bathtub. I rip at the sheet. It’s stuck. I pull it, then yank at it, and the sheet lets go as if I have won the tug-of-war. A white rattan bassinet.
My body seems to extend either farther out or doesn’t quite reach to where it should, my spatial awareness the equivalent of a clumsy child reaching to catch a ball. I attempt to step over a gaudy decorative flower planter. It has scratches, discolorations, and signs of repair along the bottom edge, it’s dented—who would even keep this thing? My heel grazes against it. I keep my balance by holding on to a shelf. It’s unsteady, slides and tumbles. A crash. I shield my eyes. It’s not over yet. A crystal bowl falls and shatters. Then a glass lamp base—I see it slide off with my own eyes—and I want to scream. No one is here, this is nothing but untidily placed items toppling over in what looks like a cramped and overstocked consignment store.
“What’s this? What’s all this stuff? Why is it all in here?”
“Donna, don’t—”
“Penelope’s here, isn’t she? She’s hiding from me? Is she mad at me?”
“Donna, no, it’s not—”
“Tell me where she is. Tell me what’s happened. I don’t understand what’s going on. What’s this room, what’s all this?”
“You know, Donna. You know she’s dead. You tell me what happened. You tell me how it happened.”
“You lie,” I scream. “All you do is lie.”
47
EDWARD
Edward returned home after dumping the body. He entered the house and expected, like so many times before, to walk into the middle of a blowup between mother and daughter, blotchy faces and red-rimmed eyes. There was this hope they’d had, all those years, that those were just rebellious teenage years and that they’d pass. Yet here he was, the bloody purse in hand, and what he saw didn’t compute.
There was no shouting. No slamming doors. Something eerie above him. A metallic sound, an unpleasant screech, high-pitched, followed by a squeal. Words failed to describe the sound but it reminded him of the chung-chung in the Law & Order episodes he watched every night before he went to sleep. Or was it dun-dun? What was that sound anyway? It occurred to him in that moment that it could be the sound of a jail cell locking.
Edward looked up and saw bulbs and fluted glass arms on a cable. He took a step and a crunching sound beneath his feet made him stop in his tracks.
It all happened at once. There wasn’t one realization after the other, but an amalgamation, a fusion of images, his mind tumbling like collapsing blocks. On the ground in front of him, a jumble of limbs, of legs and arms, broken crystals, blood. More blood. How much more blood could he take?
The bodies seemed
staged, Penelope perfectly underneath her mother, almost disappearing. He ran to Penelope. Her eyes were open and broken and he could tell, he could just tell. The fact that three times in one day, outside of an OR, he had frantically searched for a pulse, struck him as fated. Out of all the options he had weighed since he found Penelope in her car earlier, this hadn’t been on his radar at all. The house might as well have been blown over by a storm while he was gone.
A voice in his head. Detach. His hands no longer shook. He placed his index and middle fingers on Donna’s wrist. There was a heartbeat. A faint quiver, not a strong pressing outward. He wanted to snap, wanted to scream, wanted to perform CPR but he was afraid he’d just start pounding Donna’s chest with a force that bordered on violence. And how was he going to explain that? He didn’t render aid, he didn’t check airways or wounds. He had the blood of three people on his hands not including his own. There’d be no sorting this one out. By then his hands were cut up by sharp pieces of glass and crystal, his blood and Penelope’s blood and the woman’s blood and Donna’s blood all mingling into a concoction of guilt. What would they make of it: the police, the crime scene investigators, whoever else was going to be involved?
The chandelier chain above rocked back and forth, at least what was left of it.
It caught his attention, the way Donna was wrapped around Penelope, the way she was holding on to her. He wanted to think she had tried to keep her from jumping but his mind went to another place.
Detach. Death is the consequence of a disease, not your care.
He ran upstairs to Penelope’s room. Holes in the walls gaped like wounds. The bed was stripped, the window nailed shut, covered with a board. Nails jutted, half in, half out, crooked, in a desperate attempt to shut out the world. It dawned on him, the strange scene he was looking at—something that hadn’t occurred to him thus far—wasn’t so strange at all. He had never understood his daughter, never understood the dynamic between her and her mother, but this room, this room in its chaotic state was the manifestation of their relationship: boarded-up windows and iron nails with pointed ends and crushed heads.
Shadow Garden Page 22