by JoAnn Chaney
So it wasn’t really a question of what Jesse knew—she had to assume he’d seen and heard it all, or at least enough to get them into big trouble.
So the real question was this: How was she going to fix it?
“I have to go,” she said, picking up the dead girl’s purse and giving it a brisk shake. There were car keys jangling around inside. “For chrissake, Matt. You’re fine. Quit being a fucking baby and finish this. I’m going to my mother’s house.”
She nudged him, not gently, with her foot and ran outside. Her mouth was bleeding, badly, and she turned her head to spit so she wouldn’t drown in it.
Jesse was still out there, stumbling away from the house with a numb look on his face. It was simple enough to convince him to get in the girl’s car and to drive away with her. He wasn’t scared. Jesse loved her, and he didn’t think he had anything to be worried about. Even though she had a gun, even though he’d watched her shoot her husband. That pissed her off a little. Don’t worry about that woman, she’s harmless—she won’t shoot you in the back of the head so the police will think you’re a killer.
But she did shoot Jesse—although she screwed that whole thing up royally, didn’t she?—because Jesse was only a guy she knew from work and Matt—although he was a scumball who’d probably picked up crabs from a hooker and passed them on to her—was her husband. And they’d taken vows, and those vows meant something. Till death do us part, for better or worse. As long as we both shall live.
So there really wasn’t a choice at all.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
She was at the city limits, heading toward her mother’s house, when she pulled the little car over to the side of the road, clambered out, and went down a gentle slope to the shores of a pond to wash the blood off. There was a lot of it, and she had to scrub, using grass and weeds yanked out of the ground to slough away what had dried on her skin. She was finally clean, wet and cold, too, and opened up the girl’s purse to look for a comb or a brush, anything to help her look less like a drowned rat, and she instead found the girl’s wallet. Inside was her state ID and a bank card. A few dollars in cash. Marie, that had been the girl’s name, and so now she was Marie, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
And what exactly brought Janice and Matt back together, even though she’d thought she’d never see his face again? Janice had planned on staying with her mother and giving birth to the baby—what an awful surprise that’d been!—and maybe moving somewhere warm, close to a beach. And all that might’ve happened if her mother hadn’t twisted her ankle and Janice hadn’t been forced to go into town for food, where that old cop had recognized her. She’d gone straight home and told her mother—who’d never once asked questions and would’ve done anything for her only child—who jammed her hand deep into the tin flour canister she kept on the kitchen counter and dug out a handful of powdery cash. Told her to go, to stay safe.
Fear made Janice run, and there was only one other person she knew to go to.
Matt.
So she went to Denver and enjoyed the surprise on her husband’s face when he opened his front door and saw her there, belly round with their daughter, and it wasn’t as if he could turn her away. Not if he wanted to keep her quiet. When two people share something as intimate as murder it’s sure to bring them together, like two powerful magnets, drawn violently to each other. It was their secret, and it pulled them together. The Law of Attraction is when two similar energies are inexplicably drawn toward each other—Loren would say two sick fucks will always find each other in a crowd, and that’s not wrong.
It’s science, folks, but it’s also life.
CHAPTER SIXTY
They lived normally for a long time. They bought a house and had the girls. She’d had an easy pregnancy with Hannah, and an easy birth. Easy, everything had been easy until Hannah went to school, heading to preschool in pigtails and a navy-blue jumper, a Disney princess lunch box swinging from her hand. No one had told Marie how it might be, that Hannah might hate school, that she’d refuse to learn the alphabet and how to read, that the only thing she was interested in was recess and what they were having for snack time. Marie could remember going to the school, fat and sore and still uncomfortable from giving birth to Maddie, who wasn’t an easy baby like Hannah had been. No, Maddie screamed for at least three hours a day and couldn’t be calmed down, and vomited constantly, it wasn’t spit-up, nothing as simple as that, but actual vomit, projectile and chunky, and Marie wouldn’t have been surprised if her head had spun in a full circle as well.
Hannah’s teacher was polite but condescending in that way so many women who work with the very young or the very old are—speaking extra loud and slow, their voices bright and overly cheerful. Hannah needs help, the teacher had said. She’s behind the other students and isn’t catching up. We may want to consider holding her back a year. And Marie had left the school with her eyeballs pounding in their sockets, nearly vibrating, and when had she last been so angry?
She knew the answer to that question, didn’t even have to think about it. She’d last been that angry when she’d been thinking about Matt in bed with that woman. Bad things had come from that rage. And here she was, angry again, and over what? Over nothing, that was the worst of it. Angry over nothing at all, except that Maddie wouldn’t stop crying and Hannah couldn’t seem to figure out her goddamn alphabet and Matt was always at work, and Marie would sometimes be sitting beside the tub, washing down the girls, and she’d catch herself fantasizing about holding them under the water, about watching them struggle through the iridescent soap bubbles, and once they went still and stiff letting them float in there, facedown. She thought about hurting them, making them scream. That’s what her thoughts were full of. Shaking them until their heads whipped around on their thin necks, throwing their little bodies into corners and seeing the sick looks on their faces, taking pleasure in it, and she would’ve cut the thoughts out of herself if she could’ve, scooped them out and threw them away, she loved the girls more than anything, but those thoughts wouldn’t stop, she’d be watching TV or taking a shower or making dinner and it would happen, and she’d cringe away from them, squinch her eyes shut and try to make them disappear, but there was still some attraction there, some horrifying lure. Like driving past a bad car accident and slowing down to get a better look. Once, she’d tried to talk to Matt about it, and he’d looked disgusted, shook free of her hand on his arm.
“Are you trying to get attention?” he’d asked. “Stop being dramatic. If someone else heard you say things like that, they’d think you were crazy.”
Crazy, he called it. If she’d gone to the doctor they might’ve called it postpartum depression, but she never did go, didn’t think she could bring herself to sit in an office and repeat those thoughts to some stranger in a white coat. You kept things like that to yourself, that’s what she’d learned. You kept your mouth shut about the time you killed a woman and shot a man in the back of the head, and you didn’t tell anyone you’d been fantasizing about hurting your kids and yourself. You couldn’t tell your husband, either; even that wasn’t safe, because he’d think you were faking, trying to get attention, that you were crazy. Her hands shook and there were occasional flashes of light in the corners of her eyes and she’d sometimes hear screams in the grinding motor of the garage door opening, but after a few months things calmed down and those bad thoughts stopped coming as often, until finally they were gone completely.
Well, maybe not completely.
And here’s the thing: maybe she was crazy. After all, what woman did the things she’d done? A crazy woman, that’s what she thought, a woman probably not fit to be a mother. Or a wife. That’s what people would say about her if they found out what she’d done, and it was true. Motherhood was never her thing, not like some women, who’d breastfed and made crafts and played games with their kids all day. She’d tried hard, sometimes too hard, and she’d always ended up with a headache, the kind that started behind her eyeball
s and stretched all the way down her neck. Was she automatically a bad mother because she’d rather watch TV than carve pumpkins at Halloween? Was she a bad wife because she sometimes had trouble following what Matt told her about his job, all the complicated ins and outs, and he’d end up walking away when she asked ignorant questions, disgusted and not willing to explain?
Yes, it seemed. She was a bad wife and a bad mother. What exactly do you do all day? he’d ask her. That question came more and more often over the years. What do you do all day? Why isn’t dinner ready? What have you been doing with your time? Those kinds of questions made her feel stupid and lazy, even though she was the one holding the house together, even though she made sure the kids got to school and there was food in the fridge and there was always clean underwear in everyone’s drawers. But there was no glory in that, she guessed. Matt went out every day, he worked in an office that looked out over 16th Street Mall, he sold things. He made money, and that was important to him, not that she’d gotten down on her knees and spent hours scrubbing all the baseboards in the house, or wiping down every window, inside and out. Matt didn’t see any of that, and he didn’t care. She’d once been in school, she’d been smart and useful, she was going to be someone, and then she’d married Matt. She began to understand why so many women took antidepressants. She almost started taking them herself, actually filled the prescription, but then tucked them into the back of the medicine cabinet, unopened. It was better to deal with things like she always had. A clear mind.
But what bothered her the most was that everyone wanted something from her. If you walked down a street in downtown Denver you’d run into a panhandler on a corner sooner or later, asking for spare change or food, and at least they were honest about it. They wanted something from you, and it wasn’t as if you’d get anything in return. That was the unspoken contract. But the people in her life were the same way. Her family, the neighbors, the members of the PTA. Everyone had their hand out. They wanted her time, her work, her attention. But the thanks were few, if any, and Marie supposed that being taken for granted was to be expected. But it was exhausting to be constantly giving and never getting anything back. Especially from Matt, and she started to resent him without even realizing.
Matt wanted her to keep the house clean, to cook meals, to listen to him ramble on. He’d also like his back rubbed, please, and his dressy shirts buttoned all the way to the collar before she hung them in his closet—his mother had always done that for him and it helped them keep their shape. He’d also like to sleep in on his days off and to have his coffee ready when he woke up and maybe receive a blow job in the afternoon, and while Matt had always been generous with others, he hadn’t gotten her a single Christmas or anniversary or Valentine’s gift in the last ten years, because, as he explained to her, isn’t it better to just go out and buy what you want for yourself? Then you get what you like.
There were times she felt like she didn’t even exist.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
“Your mother murdered a woman once,” Matt said one night over dinner. It was a Saturday night and they’d had a good day together, lingering over breakfast and reading the paper over their coffee, but then this. A surprise waiting for her like a trap hidden in tall grass. “Then she shot a man. Framed him for murder.”
He was sitting at the head of the table, she was at the foot. The girls, both home from college for a long weekend, sitting between them, looking back and forth between their parents as if they were watching a tennis match.
“Yes, it’s quite a story,” she said, dabbing at the corner of her mouth with a napkin and standing. “But what’s more interesting is when I caught your father in bed with another woman. Matt, I’m sure the girls are dying to hear that one.”
He shot her a sour look. More than twenty years of this, baiting each other, and it was only the girls who kept them from actually killing each other. Matt was a terrible husband but a good father, and as long as the girls were around they’d managed to keep civil. But soon enough they’d be both be back at college, and then what? It wouldn’t be an empty nest—the nest would explode into flames. Fire in the hole.
Marie went to the kitchen then and came back with chocolate pudding dotted with candied violets. She went around the table and set down the bowls, ending at Matt.
“I made this one special for you,” she whispered to him. “Added in a little extra something. Do you remember how much the cat enjoyed it?”
Matt’s face had gone pale, and he hadn’t taken a single bite. Later, Marie had laughed and eaten every bite of it in front of him.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
For Christmas two years before, Matt had a Jacuzzi hot tub installed in the backyard. At first Marie had hated it—the stupid thing was an eyesore, and when the motor turned on twice a day to cycle the water it always startled her, and it was costly to maintain. But mostly she hated it because it was another one of those things Matt had done himself, without discussing it with her—like the time he’d flown in that woodworker from New Mexico, a hippie who smelled like patchouli and BO, and paid him an obscene amount of money to carve a desk from reclaimed wood.
“What does it matter to you?” Matt had said after she’d blown up about the desk. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“It’s our money, Matt. It has everything to do with me.”
“You can’t keep me under your thumb for the rest of your life,” he said, and then he’d shut himself in the bathroom. It was the only room in the house he could have peace, he’d say. I’ll take laxatives all day long for a few moments alone.
Maybe she had been keeping Matt under her thumb—it was for the best, wasn’t it? But over the last few years he’d been flexing his independence, doing whatever it was that came into his head. Like the damn hot tub.
“If I want to get in hot water I’ll take a bath,” she’d said, although Matt and the girls enjoyed it plenty. They’d usually go in at night, when the air had turned crisp and cool and the stars were out, and she’d hear the bubbles start up and the sound of her family’s talking and laughter, but she still didn’t join them. She was trying to make a point, and planned on sticking to it until the end.
But she woke up one morning with a kink in her neck and a sore back from sleeping in an awkward position, and Matt convinced her to get in the hot tub.
“The jets will help,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Aspirin and a heating pad didn’t help with the pain, so she gave in. Put on her swimsuit and climbed in. Matt came in with her, and rubbed her feet while she closed her eyes and put her neck and shoulders in the bubbles.
“You were right,” she said after a while. She’d almost fallen asleep in the hot water, her muscles gone slack and relaxed. “This is just what I needed.”
Matt let go of her feet and slid his hands under her body, one under her neck while the other looped behind her thighs, the way a person might cradle a baby, and lifted her off the seat so she was floating in his arms. She leaned against his chest, his chin resting on top of her head. She’d been wrong to complain so much about the hot tub, she thought. She’d tell him after they got out and dried off. Apologize for being such a bitch about it.
Matt’s chin lifted away and his mouth dropped onto her head. A kiss, she thought at first, but she felt his lips move, and she thought he said good-bye, but she’d never be sure.
“What was th—” she started to say, but then she was plunged under the water. And held there. She struggled, flailing and fighting desperately, needing to get her head clear of the hot water that’d felt so good only a moment before and now seemed like a nightmare, going up her nose and down her throat when she sucked in a breath. Matt’s arms had turned to vises around her, kept her from breaking the surface, and through the water she could see the vague, blurry image of the man she’d married so many years before. He was watching her, she realized. He was drowning her, and maybe it was a trick of the water distortion or her own mind, but he seemed
to be smiling.
How long did Matt hold her under the water? She didn’t know, but it felt like an eternity. And when he finally let her go and she surfaced, sputtering and gasping in big whooping cries, he was already stepping out of the tub and reaching for the towel he’d brought out.
“What the fuck kind of game are you playing?” she screamed once she caught her breath.
“What’re you talking about?” he asked, briskly drying his hair. “Are you okay?”
But she’d seen Matt’s face. His awful, smiling face.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Twenty-plus years is a long time to be with a person you’d grown to hate, but Matt and Marie made it work. But then, they didn’t always hate each other. There were moments when Matt would say or do something that would remind Marie why she’d fallen for him to begin with, and things would be good for a while.
And then things would do a full one-eighty. Jump right off a cliff, you might say.
It was at the start of the holidays the year before when Marie discovered Matt had started seeing another woman and realized it was serious this time because he’d started dressing differently, listening to country music, and talking about getting a tattoo. Maybe some men changed on their own, but Matt wasn’t that way. When he saw a pretty face, when he fell in love, that was when he changed. His cell phone was full of calls and texts from this woman—not that she was a woman, but a girl. Marie didn’t have to do much detective work to find out about Riley Tipton. A girl only a year older than Hannah, who liked to take pictures of herself to post online with her tongue sticking from the corner of her mouth and her breasts pushed together.