Oh, right. Never.
When was the last time Rio changed them? A couple went out during a party for one of the kids. Must have been Jesse, whose birthday is in April.
My fingers search the Mallomar box in the dark, counting the remaining cookies. Four. I’ve already eaten three. Seven Mallomars will mean a good-size ring around my middle—one of those hang-over-the-top-of-the-jeans rolls of flesh that make it impossible ever to wear a crop top again. Of course, I am too old for crop tops, anyway. Four will mean I’ll have to lie down on the bed to zip my jeans up, but they’ll still close. If I live, I’ll join LA Weight Loss tomorrow. In the meantime, I eat the fourth cookie and fumble in the cupboard for a glass.
“Mom?” I call out when I hear what may be a footfall on the steps. “You up?”
I hear a second step.
Oh, shit.
This is either the price of an overactive imagination or…
“Mom?” I call more loudly. Dark mountains of dirt loom outside, just feet from the deck. I stand in the unlit kitchen, my eyes seeing nothing outside, realizing now that the other backyard light is off, too.
Coincidence? I reach in the dark for the phone and hold it to my chest. Call 911? And say what? That my backyard lights have blown?
I punch in Rio’s cell phone number, whispering prayers that he’ll be there, that he’ll answer.
“Hello?” He sounds as if I’m waking him up.
“Come home.” It is all I can get out.
“Now? It’s…What the hell time is it?”
I look at the clock on the microwave. It reads 11:02. I look at the one on the stove. It reads 2:18. The one on the kitchen TV/VCR flashes 12:00. “I’m not sure,” I whisper into the phone. “It’s really late. And the lights in the yard went out and I heard footsteps.”
“Jesus Christ, Teddi. The cabin is a good three hours away from home and it’s the fucking middle of the night. What lights went out?”
“In the yard. One minute there were two lights on, and then there was one, and now there aren’t any.”
“They both went out? Shit.”
“Shit? That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say that you put them in within minutes of each other, and that these things are probably standard. That they’re made to last a certain amount of time. That the lights are always on together, so sure they’d blow at the same time.”
That makes more sense than someone winding their way around the hole in my backyard at 3:00 A.M. unscrewing my light bulbs. Unless they want to use the hole to dump dead bodies in.
That’s it.
No more Sopranos for me.
“Actually, I changed only the one that went out at Jesse’s party. I meant to change the other this weekend, but…Anyway, you didn’t hear anything, right?” he asks.
I admit hearing a footstep.
“Outside?”
I suppose it could have been, but I don’t think so.
“It’s probably your mother, right?” Rio asks.
“She’s asleep—” I start to say when I hear the flushing of an upstairs toilet and feel like an idiot. “I didn’t think she was up.”
“Okay, this is what I want you to do. Make sure all the lights inside the house are off. That way no one can see in.”
“Who no one?”
“No, turn on the light in the den, but do it from the top of the steps. Don’t go down there, Teddi. You hear me?”
“Come home, damn it!”
“I’m coming,” he tells me, and adds, “What a night for there to be no moon.” I can almost see him shaking his head.
“Are you in the car yet?”
“Almost. Teddi, go to bed. It’s late. I’ll get dressed, have some coffee and be home before you wake up in the morning.”
“Go to bed? Are you crazy? What if there’s someone out there who wants to kill us? Remember that woman who got killed in her bed while her kids were getting ready for school? It happens, Rio, right here on Long Island.”
“I remember,” he says. No words of reassurance, no saying that was different.
“And there was that man in the restaurant on Jericho Turnpike,” I remind him. “And I can see a car going up and down the street with its lights off,” I say as I stand against the wall and peek out the front window.
“Look, I’m on my way, okay? You want me to call the cops and ask them to cruise by?”
“Would they do that?” That would make me feel better. Just knowing they are outside there.
“I’ll call them. You make sure the doors are locked. Oh, sweet Jesus!”
“What sweet Jesus? Do you think the Nose is out there, Rio? Is that it?”
“No. Nothing like that. I just remembered something.” It sounds as if he is fumbling with the phone, maybe getting dressed while we speak.
“What? What did you remember?”
“I told you, it’s nothing. I’ll tell the police this isn’t like the last time. Just ’cause you called them about your father moving your car that time doesn’t mean they won’t come now.”
Look, it was an innocent mistake. Anyone would have called the police if their car was moved out of the driveway. How was I supposed to know that Jesse had given my dad the keys so that he could pull his car into the driveway to unload?
“I told them when they came that it was all a mistake, Rio. They were very nice about it.”
“See? Then there’s no reason to get yourself all worked up.”
“Rio?”
“You have to calm down, Teddi. It’s not good for you in your state. “
“Rio, you’re scaring me to death.”
“Listen. Maybe I should call your doctor—”
I remind Rio that she said something about not being available.
“I’m coming home. Okay? Maybe you should get one of my guns out of the shed, in case…”
“There is one in the kitchen. Come home, Rio,” I say. There is no flashlight beam in the yard, no movement that I can see. “Now.”
“I’m coming. Make sure all the doors are locked. You want me to stay on the phone with you while you check them? Teddi? Teddi? Shit. Can you hear me?”
“Rio?”
“What are you doing down here in the dark?” My mother’s voice drifts down into the kitchen, and then, before I can stop her, she flips on the light, nearly blinding me with its brightness.
“Turn it off!” I shout at her, and then call Rio’s name into the phone.
There is no answer.
“What’s going on?” my mother demands. “I didn’t hear the phone ring. It must be all that Valium. I could sleep through Armageddon.”
I think about Rio’s friend, the Nose. Is he going to leave some message on my back porch? Is Igor, Bobbie’s cat, doomed?
“Why are we standing here in the dark?” my mother whispers.
“So that if there is someone in the yard, he can’t see us,” I answer.
“Someone’s in the yard? In the hole?”
“There’s no one there,” I try to reassure my mother. “I thought I heard footsteps, but they must have been you.”
She makes her way across the room and from the shadows I can tell that she is crouching by the window. “I can’t see a bloody thing,” she says.
Why my mother chooses that expression, I don’t know. It’s like her, though, to make a bad situation worse without even trying. “I’m sure there’s no one out there,” I say. I was right about bringing my mother back to the house. With her here, I can’t fall to pieces. “Let’s go up to bed.”
I turn on the light, mumbling something about just being silly, and lead my mother toward the stairs.
And then I hear it. A scraping sound, like someone dragging a ladder against the vinyl siding.
“Oh, my God!” my mother says, digging her nails into my arm. “Someone is out there.”
“Go up to my bedroom and call the police,” I say. My mother takes two steps and then turns back.
“What a
re you going to do?”
“I’m turning off the lights,” I say, flipping the switch and then crawling on all fours to make sure that the back door is not only locked, but that the bolt is thrown. Didn’t I check it before? Not once, not twice?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder. What a time to develop that. The truth is that after all the years of being terrified that something awful is going to happen to me, it simply doesn’t seem possible that it will. The lights, the noises, the car across the street—they’re all easily explained away.
For a moment I am calmer, feeling my way along the door frame, rising to the dead bolt and checking that it is straight across. But as I begin to let my hand drop—no, before it actually drops—the bolt turns itself, as if someone is moving it from outside.
Shit. If someone really is breaking into my kitchen, the first thing they are going to find is me. I imagine Rio getting home at daybreak to find my raped and mutilated body splayed across the terra-cotta tiles, my mother on the phone telling my father that Angelina will have to come clean up the mess.
I reach up and turn the lock again, letting them know there is someone awake in the house, in the kitchen. “I called the police,” I shout through the door, starting to scramble back and knocking something over on the way.
My hand traces the barrel of Rio’s rifle.
“Don’t come in here!” I shout. “I’ve got a gun!”
And then the door bursts open, and instead of everything happening in slow motion, the way it does on TV, everything happens too fast for me to understand. There is a man in the doorway, a light beam that crosses the kitchen and shines in my eyes. There is a grunt and a thud and sirens and lights, all at once.
And there is blood, everywhere.
And in the distance, through some fog in which I feel lost, I keep hearing my mother’s voice.
“Oh, my God!” the voice keeps saying. “It’s Rio!”
CHAPTER 24
There are three police cars parked in the circular driveway outside my house. I know this because I can see the lights dancing around in the glass doors on my kitchen cabinets, reflecting in the window over the sink, shimmering on the shiny red stains that splattered the walls. And then again, it isn’t the first time police lights have ever swirled around a home I’ve lived in.
Or even the second time, when a month after they came to take Markie away in a body bag, they came back to escort my mother—first to North Shore Hospital, and then eventually to South Winds. But never, in all the intervening years, did I think that the police would come for me.
Uh, not. Haven’t I actually always thought they would? A shrill laugh escapes me, and I cover my mouth with my hands, but the policemen have heard. Rio has heard.
“Just let me talk to her,” Rio keeps saying, pulling away from the cops, who are still leaning over him, still assessing the damage I’ve done. “I’m all right. I’m just damn lucky it was the paint gun. I don’t get why she…”
The shrill laugh comes again, unbidden, unstoppable. I love his paint gun. Adore it! Imagine that! All these years of complaining about his war games, and now I am thanking God and Mother Nature and anyone who might listen for inventing guns that don’t kill husbands who aren’t expected home.
“He was in the Catskills,” I say to no one in particular, though one officer, a woman who seems a little younger and a lot firmer than I, is crouching beside me and patting me gently every now and then. “And I heard a noise. I thought I was crazy, hearing noises, you know?”
“She’s seeing a shrink,” Rio explains to the cops, as if the noises I heard were all in my head.
I direct my words to Rio. “No. There was a noise. You were the noise. I’m not crazy, Rio. You were in the yard. Only I don’t understand how you got home so quickly.”
“I called her from the cabin—my friend’s got a cabin up in Wunderlaken—and she sounded scared, so I told her I’d come home. I had no idea she was so—”
“What time is it?” I ask. There is a ringing in my ears, and everyone is still talking and moving too fast for me. No one answers me, but it doesn’t really matter. “How could you possibly get home so fast?” I ask. “We hung up five minutes ago.”
Rio is sitting on the floor, rubbing at the area on his chest where the latex paint ball hit him. Several times the policemen have tried to help him get to his feet, and each time he starts to get up, he puts his hand up to signal them to let him be.
“I’m a little woozy,” he tells them. “Close range, no vest…”
“You want us to call an ambulance?” one of the officers asks.
“No, God no!” Rio tells them. “Not for me, anyway. Teddi? You want…”
“I want to know how you got home so fast,” I say. Well, I want that and for everyone to stop taking Rio’s version as the truth. “What time is it?” I ask again, trying to remember what time any of the clocks read before. “I was on the phone with you. Mom? Didn’t you hear me on the phone with Rio right before he came in?”
“My daughter would never hurt a soul,” she tells the cops. Isn’t that the sort of thing the neighbors always say when the police arrest some mass murderer? He always seemed so nice, like he wouldn’t harm a soul.
“Mom,” I say, trying not to sound as though I am coaching her. “Just tell them about how I was on the phone right before Rio came in.”
She looks apologetically at me. “Well, she was holding the phone,” she admits. “And then we heard a noise. I went up to call you. I heard the shots.”
“Shots?” one of the cops asks.
“Three, maybe four,” June says. “Will you look at all that dirt on the floor? We’ll need to call a service, Teddi.”
“I fired four times?” I ask. That, I suppose, explains the paint on the ceiling and on the cabinets.
“Teddi, honey,” Rio says. “You fired half a dozen times. I’d be dead if it’d been one of my other guns.”
“And if she had better aim,” June says. “If she played more video games with Jesse, you’d have probably gotten it between the eyes. And if you’d come home a few hours ago, when she was sure you were having an affair with Bobbie, you’d have probably gotten it in the—” My mother has the decency to blush.
“Ma’am?” one of the officers addresses me. “Were you angry with your husband?”
“Wait a minute,” Rio says, finally coming to his feet and moving toward me. “Where is this going?”
The officer’s notepad is out, and he looks at Rio and then at me. “Ma’am? Did you intend to shoot your husband?”
Rio looks shocked. He takes a step back and stares at me. “You thought I was having an affair?” he asks, incredulously. “With ‘sweet cakes’ next door?”
“When I saw the rifle by the back door,” I say.
“So you knew the rifle was there,” the officer says.
“Don’t you say another word,” Rio instructs me before turning toward the cops. “This looks bad, but it’s not the way it looks. My wife is…well, she’s been…okay, basically, she’s been having a nervous breakdown. I never should have left her this weekend. This is really all my fault. I knew she was on the edge…”
“Then you don’t want to press charges?” the lady cop asks. “This was—”
“A weapon was discharged here,” the other cop says. “We can’t just refer it to family court for counseling, Betsy—”
“It was a paint gun,” the lady cop, Betsy, says. “I suppose, if he won’t press, we could list it as a domestic dispute.”
“I was not trying to hurt my own husband,” I insist. “I thought he was a hit man.”
Rio groans. “A hit man? Jeez, Teddi.”
“Because of the loan,” I say, a small piece of me worried that maybe borrowing money from the wrong people is a crime and that I am implicating Rio.
“The loan? You mean the bank loan? The papers are in the drawer. Remember I showed you?” he asks.
I guess it is a crime, and I nod. “The bank. Right.”
“What I don’t get,” Rio says, “is that after you called me and I told you I was a couple of blocks from the house, why you—”
“You said you were up in the cabin,” I say. “You said you were three hours away.”
“Earlier,” he agrees, and then turns to the police. “I called her around midnight, and she asked me to come home.”
“No, not then. I asked you later. A few minutes ago,” I say.
The police look at Rio.
“She gets confused. Thinks things have happened, thinks she’s done things—bought things, made calls. And she did call me a few minutes ago,” he admits. Aha! “But I told her I was nearly home, not to worry. She’s been a basket case lately. I should have known something like this would happen. I told the doctor that she was getting paranoid, but her shrink thought—”
“I am not paranoid! I was scared to death, a man coming into my house in the dead of night. I thought he was going to rape and murder me. I was glad the kids weren’t here—”
“Oh, my God. The kids. What if the kids had been here, Teddi? What if they’d witnessed this? Or what if one of them startled you and—”
“Stop it!” I put my hands over my ears and begin to hum. “I can’t hear this. I can’t take this.”
“Take it easy, ma’am,” the lady cop says, and her hand clamps tightly on my shoulder. What I haven’t realized until now is that this woman is not on my side.
“Look,” Rio says in a voice that announces how reasonable he is trying to be, despite the circumstances. “What if I promise she’ll get help? What if she agrees to go over to South Winds and—”
“We could take her to North Shore Hospital’s psychiatric ward for evaluation,” the lady cop suggests, crouching and putting her hand on my knee. “Would you like to do that? See a doctor? He might be able to help you calm down a little, you know?”
“I’ve got Valium,” my mother offers. “That’s all she needs.”
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 18