Candlelight flickered across Noreen’s face, bleeding off more of the color from her already pale skin. When she lifted her arm and reached for a slice of cheese, the light fell across her arm, making it appear more frail, a thin flash of white. She wore a black sleeveless top and a gold chain with a gold letter N hanging from it. There were purple and gray shadows under her eyes. It looked as if she hadn’t slept much over the past several days.
“Why did he leave?” I said softly. “It wasn’t because your dog died so tragically.”
“No.”
She pinched the stem of the glass between her thumb and index finger. She slid her fingers up and down the length, staring into the liquid. “Nothing in my life turned out the way I thought it would.”
“I think most people feel that way.”
“Do you?”
“I never considered it. I have a long way to go. So do you. It’s not like you can’t shake things up, change direction.” I kept my voice low and soothing, hoping that between a gentle hypnotic tone of voice and the dulling of the alcohol, the story would begin to ease its way out of her lips. I could feel it right there. She was aching to tell me, to tell someone, but there was a dense lump of fear filling her throat, sealing it off.
“If you think he might hurt you, isn’t it better that someone else knows about it?”
“Why?”
I didn’t know why, I just said it because I was trying every angle to get her talking. The more she held it inside, the more my curiosity gnawed at the insides of my skull, taking tiny bits of bone in its teeth, getting more anxious and demanding. I wanted to take Noreen’s narrow, breakable shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled and those large, bulging eyes jiggled around in their sockets and the story fell out of her head.
It was difficult to imagine Joe…Brian…committing an act of violence. He had an easy, languid style about him. Even when he was having sex, he wasn’t vigorous and driving, his movements were controlled and fluid, very certain. It was disconcerting to realize that he might have been using me for some purpose related to Noreen that I couldn’t figure out. Jealousy didn’t seem likely, unless he planned to reveal our relationship later, holding it for the right moment. Watching her house, biding his time before he approached her was an odd way to handle whatever issues he wanted to resolve with her. Why didn’t he simply hire a lawyer and get his fair share in the usual way? Killing her, if that was a legitimate possibility, would accomplish nothing in terms of getting his money out of the house, unless she had a will granting the whole thing to him. But when someone is murdered, all that changes. There is no easy access to what they’ve left behind. And who has a will when she’s not even thirty years old? I’m sure there are anal, financially astute types that have already recorded their last wishes, but I couldn’t imagine Noreen fitting that category.
“Why is it better if someone else knows?” she said.
I picked up my glass and took a sip. “So he can’t get away with it.”
She pushed her glass toward the candle. “I don’t know if I should drink any more.”
I put my hand on her arm, feeling the bone hard and sharp through the nearly fleshless skin of her forearm. “Tell me.”
“I suppose it doesn’t really matter that I can’t trust you. I can’t trust anyone to do what they promise. And whatever happens to me — it’s probably too late.”
I nudged her glass back toward her. She picked it up, took a sip, and started talking.
54
Noreen’s face looked as blank as one of those stiff, thin plastic masks with painted features. She spoke as if she’d sunk into a cavern inside of her head, and rather than remembering the events, she was actually seeing and hearing the people and things she began to tell me about —
Six months after we moved to Aptos, Brian’s father died of a heart attack.
Before that, his mother had been in and out of the hospital for several years with anorexia. I always thought of anorexia as a teenage disease, that it’s caused by pressure from pop culture, wanting to be accepted by the group, obsession with your appearance. But Cheryl had it. When I first met her, I thought she was stylishly thin. She had great clothes, not what I would choose, of course, but very expensive fabrics and perfect for her age. She wore lots of white and beige, and she always looked sleek and elegant — tunic tops and longish dresses with baggy sweaters and that sort of thing, so I didn’t notice right away that she was just bones.
About two months after Brian’s father died, she was admitted to a new program. When she came out, they didn’t want her to go back to her home by herself. She needed support, someone to make sure she ate. Not that she did…eat. She was so frail, she was bedridden. So she came to stay with us. She stayed in the room you’re renting now. Brian bought a hospital bed so she could sit up, hopefully to eat. For a while, a nurse was coming by to prepare meals, feed her, turn her so she didn’t get bedsores. The nurse gave baths and did all of that stuff.
I hated having Cheryl in our house. We’re young. We were supposed to be a couple. I wanted my own place where I could cook what I chose and make a home for Brian, grow vegetables, decorate in the style we preferred. All the things you want with your first house — any house, really. But especially the first one.
Cheryl was like this ghost in the other room. Always listening, always there. I couldn’t do anything without her trying to pin down where I was in the house. She’d call out to me — Noreen? Dear? Where are you? I can’t hear you. I need to know where you are.
She was like an old woman but she was only forty-eight.
After a while, Brian decided we didn’t need the nurse. Having someone come in was expensive. Every time he paid the bill, he thought about cash leaking out of his eventual inheritance. He realized the things the nurse was doing didn’t require an RN. There were no injections, just monitoring her diet, which he figured was not rocket science and besides, after watching for several weeks, we knew what the nurse advised her to eat, we could figure it out. I was already starting to help prepare her meals. I had a good handle on the appropriate diet.
He decided that since I was around the house all day, without much to do, in his opinion, I could take care of Cheryl. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable taking her clothes off and bathing her and trying to get her dried off properly. And carrying the bedpan into the bathroom without spilling it, dumping her pee and her shit, although there wasn’t a lot of that since she still didn’t eat more than a few spoonfuls at a time.
It was horribly unfair. It wasn’t my job. He reminded me that his mother took me in when my parents threw me out of the house. But they didn’t throw me out. I left by choice. Sure I needed a place to stay. I wanted to be with Brian, that’s all, but he twisted it around to make his mother out to be a saint for letting me live with her family, cooking for me, doing my laundry. He seemed to think his mother was a saint.
Anyway, I didn’t have a choice. The nurse was gone, Brian was at work, and the woman wasn’t mobile. I was her slave. She’d ring this stupid copper bell on the nightstand. Sometimes I think she waited for me to settle down on the back deck with my knitting before she’d ring it. Cleaning her up was awful — wiping her butt. She drank shakes with a straw, the glass sitting on a tray across her lap so the only strength required was to put the straw in her mouth. To get her to eat solid food, I had to spoon feed her.
Brian acted as if he was some sort of hero because he moved her to a sofa in the corner and changed the bedding every few days. But guess who washed it?
It was hard watching her. And infuriating. Pity and fury in a single moment which left me disoriented. She was so weak, but she’d done it to herself! She was still doing it to herself. It wasn’t as if she had cancer or some other terrible disease that took over her body against her will. She just refused to eat. She was vain and wanted to be thinner than all her friends, as if that was some sort of prize. And then she got addicted to not eating. I know anorexia is a disease, there’s s
omething wrong in the minds of people who diet until they’re sick, but it’s not the same as a real disease. And it was so fucking unfair! I hated her. I hated him.
Sometimes I wondered if he was punishing me because of what happened to Terry, him dying in such an awful way like that. Brian blamed me and now he was going to make me suffer. As if I didn’t suffer as much as he had when Terry died.
Finally I figured out that I didn’t need to respond to the damn bell quite so fast. I could let her shout at me, because that’s what she did no matter if it took me seven seconds to get in there, or seven minutes. I started lengthening the time it took to go into the room by a half a minute every day. She sort of got used to me not jumping the minute the clacker hit the side of the bell. She complained to Brian and he gave me a lecture about being kinder to someone who was suffering. By that point, I didn’t care what he thought. He could lecture me all he wanted. It wasn’t as if he could fire me or dock my pay.
Once I got her acclimated to a forty minute response, I started sneaking out of the house every few days. Sometimes I’d just go for a walk on the beach, stick my feet in the cold water and forget there was a woman screaming down at me from the top of the cliffs. It kept me from killing her, I really believe that. Some of those days, I’d drive to a cafe and have a glass of wine, extending my absence to almost an hour. Often, when I returned, she was asleep. I think she wore herself out shaking the bell as hard as she could, as if that would make it ring louder, make me run faster. It was funny she had enough strength to shake that damn bell but not to lift a spoon up to her mouth. She exhausted her lungs calling for me. She didn’t have the strength to spend fifteen minutes shouting.
She should have been in a care facility, but Brian viewed that as sticking her in a warehouse.
Then, she started falling out of bed. She would sort of topple to the side and just slide off. The first time it happened, I went in to feed her lunch and she was on the floor, crying. Some of those hospital-type beds have railings on the sides for just that type of situation, but this one didn’t. I guess we bought the bargain model.
It wasn’t impossible for me to pick her up in my arms and put her back on the bed, she hardly weighed anything. But it made my back stiff and I developed a constant pain right at the center of my lower back.
At least when she fell she didn’t shout at me. I think she was embarrassed and when I picked her up in my arms like an infant, she felt so foolish, it made her consider what she’d done to herself. Not that it gave her any self-awareness of what she’d done to Brian and me. Especially me. But she didn’t tell Brian about the falling. I’m not absolutely sure why, maybe it was the shame. To me, having to use a bedpan would be the worst shame, but the falling is what did it for her. They say everyone has their own rock bottom which you have to hit before you realize you have a problem. Why they didn’t get her to that point in the program she was in, I have no idea. I thought that was the purpose.
Knowing she might fall out of bed, especially when she got herself riled up shouting for me, kept me from going out for several weeks. Then I got an idea, but it turned out to be the worst idea of my life.
It’s impossible to completely describe how trapped I felt. I couldn’t take a shower without turning off the water and hearing Cheryl shouting my name. I couldn’t pee without hearing the bell ringing.
In the mornings, I made buttered toast and coffee for myself and loose scrambled egg beaten with milk for Cheryl. I sat by her bed and fed her one piece of fluffy egg at a time followed by a sip of tea that had to made from loose tea leaves, not a bag. She held the egg in her mouth, puckering her lips around it as if she might vomit any minute. After a while, she’d suck on it, moving it around with her tongue, not chewing. It would slowly turn softer and slightly dissolved and she’d swallow with a gagging sound. She never finished the whole egg. Tea dribbled down her chin because she refused to swallow if I let her sip it before it cooled enough to suit her preference. I’d wipe her face and take the dishes to the kitchen. I’d clean up the pan and put the dishes in the dishwasher.
After breakfast, I gave her a sponge bath and dried her off. I even lifted each arm and rolled on deodorant for her. Touching her body sent chills down my own arms and legs. Her skin was dry and loose. I felt each bone, and could see every single tendon when she moved. I put a clean nightgown on her, brushed her hair, and turned on the TV for her. Then I’d take my own shower, already tired at nine o’clock in the morning. Once a week I’d hold her cold, clammy feet and clip her toenails, take her bony icy hands into mine and trim her fingernails.
The vegetable garden died. I didn’t have the energy or the time for it. My day was consumed by preparing, feeding, and cleaning up her meals, washing her clothes and sheets, keeping her body from decaying right before our eyes.
I hated Brian.
I hated our house. I didn’t want to look at my dead garden.
If I didn’t start going out again, my mind would rot and I’d end up a blathering moron. Brian was working six days a week with his landscaping business, so the only day I got even a partial break was Sunday, and most of the time he complained he was tired from physical labor all week. I still had to feed her. I had to bathe her because he said it wasn’t right for a man to see his mother naked.
And she wouldn’t eat! She would not fucking eat more than a few bites. I wanted to smack her face. It seemed as if she liked being taken care of. She liked being frail and weak. She liked watching me do all the work.
Then, a friend of mine from high school called to say she was in town. She wanted to hang out at the beach, grab lunch at a taqueria. The invitation seemed like something from another life, another woman’s life. I hadn’t been that carefree in a thousand years.
So I implemented my terrible idea. After I fed Cheryl her lunch, I tied her to the bed. She objected but I told her she couldn’t risk falling again and breaking a bone. I didn’t tell her I was leaving. I figured she could scream until her lungs burst. I’d deal with it when I got back home. All I wanted was to lie on the sand and listen to the waves and drink beer and talk to my girlfriend.
It was glorious. We brought our tacos to the beach and sat on a towel with our feet buried in warm sand while we ate. We both had two beers and gossiped about people from high school. We did some body surfing and drank another beer. I was gone for hours and felt like a normal person, almost happy.
When I came home, I found Cheryl. She had thrashed around like a trapped rat, gotten herself completely tangled in the rope, slid over the side of the bed, and strangled.
They ruled it suicide. The police officers that came when I called 911 said the position of her body defied the laws of physics. It was impossible that she’d managed to choke herself like that without deliberately putting herself in that position. I was sobbing, inconsolable with guilt but secretly, so relieved. I was free. They assumed it was grief. It’s funny how people assume you have the same emotions they do.
After Brian came home and they’d taken away her body, he said he didn’t believe it for one second. He didn’t break down. He just started packing up his things.
I did laundry and cleaned up the hall bathroom. I was scrubbing around the base of the toilet. I stood up and glanced in the mirror and she was there. I started crying. I closed my eyes, trying to make her go away, but when I opened them she was still there. I knelt down and put the bedpan and the pads I’d used on the bed to catch urine overflow into a plastic garbage bag. When I stood up, I couldn’t help glancing at the mirror. She was there again, her lips formed into a circle as if she were calling my name. I dropped the stuff on the floor and ran out of the room.
When I told Brian what I’d seen, he got really pissed off. Angrier than I’d ever seen him. He accused me of making it up, trying to torture him. He said I twisted the story to make it look like she’d committed suicide and would never find peace. He refused to believe his mother would kill herself and leave him behind. That she would abandon him, no matte
r how weak and sick she was.
He grabbed me around the neck. He said he wanted to kill me, but he let go and said he’d decide to wait, so I would suffer like his mother had. Like Terry had.
He put his things in the shed and left with just the clothes that fit in a duffel bag. He said he’d be back to take care of me.
A few days later I found that horrible photograph.
The face continued appearing in the mirror and I thought if other people were living in the house, she would leave me alone. I know it’s not really her, it’s probably my guilt, or some weird psychotic breakdown because of all the stress of taking care of her. I don’t know. But she’s still there. Every time I look. Once the mirror was destroyed, it’s harder to see her, but she’s still there.
I’ve been waiting, and I know he’s coming. You and Jared can’t really protect me. I know that. I expect he’ll be here tomorrow because it’s the anniversary of Terry’s death. He thinks I kill helpless creatures and he’s certain it’s only a matter of time before I do it again.
I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t want Terry to die. It broke my heart. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe. With his mother, I shouldn’t have had to do all of that care. She was Brian’s responsibility, not mine. But in some ways I don’t think I’ll mind if he stabs me while I’m sleeping or something like that. It would be better than seeing that woman’s face every time I look in the mirror, for the rest of my life.
The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1) Page 27