The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  Since then there’d been visits to various specialists, diagnoses made and revised, medications prescribed and side effects suffered, afternoons when she’d felt almost human, almost capable of coming out into the light and sharing herself with the world again, only to be foiled by exhaustion, her own inability to form or satisfy an appetite, this dead weight inevitably dragging her back to bed, the blinds pulled against a nocturnal sun, settling into this secondary level of consciousness in which she’d become so comfortable. A place that passed the hours. A place so far from Alaska that it often took several moments to summon herself back.

  It was the pounding at the door. With a baseball bat, she padded out through the kitchen, unsteady because she hadn’t eaten in two days. Dehydrated to the point of hallucination, she at first didn’t believe what she saw, which was a six-foot black woman, dressed in a fur coat over a dirty white corset gown and standing on the porch, grabbing Annabelle’s arm and leading her down to the car parked along the dirt driveway, where Annabelle was startled to see her two children in the backset, both of them filthy and with bloody noses, Max’s face swollen and Maddie’s locked in an expression of shocked hatred.

  She went to them, opened the car door and tried to put her arms around them, but they fought away from her, their eyes blank like stones, Max’s fixed on Maddie and Maddie’s on the floorboard. “What happened?” Annabelle kept asking, because she needed to hear their voices but didn’t know what else to say. “Tell me what happened!” But even when the tall woman told her, she didn’t understand. She sat in the passenger seat in a daze while the woman directed them down the long driveway to the road. She could hear Max whispering in the backseat, could hear Maddie telling him to shut up. Just shut up! But when she turned, they would not let their eyes meet hers. Annabelle’s body began to tremble and she put her arms around her shoulders to stop it. “I have to call Ben,” she said, but then kept forgetting. She couldn’t remember how to get to the hospital, but the woman in the white gown seemed to know, drove them along the silent streets on the outskirts of town in the civil twilight of four in the morning and then up the road to the emergency entrance, where she parked and ran around to the back opening the doors, helping first Maddie and then Max get out, Annabelle standing next to the car that this woman Jasmine claimed to have borrowed from her friend, Jade, and whose trunk held a secret she could not confront or accept.

  Jasmine. Jade. Annabelle knew what kind of names these were. “You’re a—” she said, but she couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Not anymore,” said Jasmine, already climbing back in the car. “After tonight, I’m outta here.”

  It was the Fairbanks she’d witnessed from afar, brought now unmistakably before her eyes, and Annabelle understood she’d been blind not to realize what her children would find themselves involved in, what sort of trouble kids growing up in this environment would inevitably encounter. It had happened downtown, on Two Street, the vile center of alcohol and prostitution Annabelle had given one sideways glance upon their arrival and then turned away from for good. It was a place of almost caricatured debauchery; in her descriptions she’d sent home to her parents—the descriptions that had led them to urge her to get the hell out of there and come back to Simi Valley—she’d pictured sex acts being performed in broad daylight, drugs changing hands in alleyways, alcohol consumed at an unfathomable pace while naked women danced on a stage and a country western band played nearby. She’d asked him a hundred times to reconsider, to please please please tell them that he couldn’t do it anymore, that Fairbanks was not a place to raise a family, that it was a den for itinerant workers out to make big cash and then blow it, for hardened men willing to work fourteen days straight if it meant they got to spend the next seven in a drunken, sex-fueled haze. But he’d always been unwilling to listen, had told her how he’d known all his life he was destined for something big like this. That he’d hoped it would come by the time he was thirty. That when he’d reached that age with no extravagant achievement yet under his belt he’d been certain it would occur during the next decade. How he’d made the same bargain with himself when he’d turned forty. “This is my last chance,” he’d said to her.

  “Your last chance for what?” she’d asked him. “Your last chance to get us all killed?”

  She could not help but think back to what Mary had said—or written, rather. The little piece of paper that his first wife had handed over on their only meeting, a slip of paper no larger than a business card that Annabelle had kept all these years in a shoebox in their bedroom. At last check, Mary still lived in the Santa Jacinta Home for the Mentally Ill, a place Annabelle had visited only once but that had been burned in her memory so indelibly that she could picture every phase of the trip, even now, nearly ten years later. It haunted her still, as she sat in the hospital waiting room while Max and Maddie were led back the hallway, the nurses having asked her what had happened but Annabelle unable to say, able only to endure their looks of disapproval. They recognized her, of course. Knew her from the times her husband had brought her here and stood pacing while the doctors opined and dispensed prescriptions, Annabelle lying on her hard hospital cot finding it difficult not to believe that she’d brought this all on herself.

  She’d known early on what she was doing, that she was sleeping with a married man, though he’d told her it wasn’t true. He’d told her he was divorced, then that they were separated, then that they were in the process of getting a divorce. She’d known all along that those out-of-the-way rendezvous at motels in beach towns far north of LA were evidence of a truth she’d suspected all along, a truth she’d attempted to confront and then turned away from in disgust when she’d learned that she was pregnant. Pregnant with a married man’s baby. Babies. She’d tried to talk to him about their options—he wouldn’t even have to pay for anything—and that was when he’d fallen on his knees in their shaded beachfront motel room and told her how much he wished for her to be the mother of his children. All his children. For he knew it was time he came clean with his wife, was long past time he came clean with her and told her of the life he’d been hiding, of the beautiful, amazing young woman with whom he hadn’t meant to fall in love, but who’d been his only refuge these past months.

  There were complications, of course. The divorce could not be finalized right away. But God! he hoped they could work something out. In the meantime, enough of these dingy hotel rooms! He’d rented her a small house in San Bernardino, had shown up at the hospital and held her hand while she gave birth, had held the babies—a grumpy-faced pair they named Madeleine and Max after her mother and father (a ploy, of course, to win some sort of favor)—and shook hands and unwrapped cigars and stayed with her until she fell asleep. He’d been a sporadic presence that first year, working hard to make the money that paid her rent and settling the final details of the divorce with Mary, who’d agreed to give him everything (including the children) in return for a monthly alimony stipend—so selfish was she, he’d told her, that she was willing to sell her children if it meant not having to work. She’d fought with him, had fought with her conscience telling her this was a bad situation. But what was she to do with two babies? And who could she blame but herself? She’d known he was married all along, had noticed the wedding ring the first day they’d met—the wedding ring that was gone the next time she’d seen him. And then, one day, when she’d thought she was almost ready to leave him—when she’d listened to enough advice from her parents and her brother and her college friends, when she’d finally convinced herself that the only way was to make a clean break, to move and change her phone number and maybe get a restraining order—he’d broken the ground rules he’d so specifically set. She’d heard his car in the driveway, looked out the living room window and there they were, he and his sons, GB and Jamie, aged twelve and seven, their grief-stricken and confused faces softening when he introduced them to the twins, introduced them to their new family, the vision of the four of them sitting then on th
e floor watching television together undermining her intentions, trapping her in emotion as he led her down the hall to the master bedroom where he told her what Mary had done.

  It hadn’t surprised her to discover what had happened to his first wife—though under different circumstances, it might have made her incapable of so much as looking at him. But because she attached so much of the blame to herself, it became a thing she could not run from but instead had to face. What she’d done to this woman, what her sleeping with a married man had wrought. She had never stopped thinking about that day—even in the years when their relationship was at its best, when the twins were still infants and GB and Jamie seemed almost grateful for her presence—she’d never forgotten the day she’d grown so frustrated by his broken promises, so touched by the boys’ constant appeals, that she’d at last agreed to drive them out to the desert to visit their mother. She had never stopped recalling that five-hour trip across California on barren roads through the featureless desert, their arrival in the parking lot, just after one in the afternoon and so hot she was sweating the instant they got out of the car. Coming through the front door of the building to find it freezing, the sweat drying on her neck and shoulders and turning to little daggers of ice, the air conditioning keeping the rooms at a constant 55 degrees, the patients and nurses and doctors bundled in long-sleeved clothing, the two young girls at reception wearing coats and scarves and directing them down a long hallway toward a makeshift elevator.

  She’d thought it her place to stay outside in the hall, unwilling to face the scene she imagined taking place behind the closed door, the two young boys crawling up to their mother whom they hadn’t seen in nearly a year, the woman she’d heard could not speak—would never again speak after what she’d done to herself—a woman sentenced to live the rest of her life out here in this lost corner of the California desert. In all the years that had passed, Annabelle Sanchez-Hill had never forgotten the way she’d waited out in the hallway for nearly half an hour, sitting in an uncomfortable chair next to a padlocked and barred window; the way the door drifted open and she’d breathed a sigh of relief, watching the boys step toward her, thinking it was finally time to leave; the way she’d seen it on GB’s confused face even before he’d jerked his thumb back toward the slightly ajar door of his mother’s room. “She wants to see you.”

  In the car, on the way home, with the boys sitting expectantly around her—GB in the passenger seat, Jamie leaning forward from the back despite her efforts to get him to buckle up—they’d begged and pleaded with her to tell them what their mother had said, only to have her tell them she couldn’t, that it was a secret. She’d driven on through the blazing evening, hotter now at five than it had been at noon, not even feeling the heat anymore. She hadn’t felt the cold in Mary’s tiny room either, whose door she’d pushed open and whose corners she’d scanned until locating the woman, seated in a plastic chair and looking hollowly out at her, her expression not of anger or resentment but more like pity, the long, frail arms reaching out and around her, the embrace cut short and the woman holding her now at arm’s length. Those eyes, more pronounced than young GB’s, looking through her as she took up a slip of paper and a crayon—she was not allowed pens or pencils—and carefully scripted the message that she then held up into the space between them, Annabelle’s eyes playing tricks, making her see the note and the face behind it as the same object:

  Get away from him!

  It was in the car that afternoon—on the ride home through the desert, with GB and Jamie finally drifting off to sleep—that she’d first determined she was going to leave him, only to talk herself out of it by the time they’d arrived back at the city, the knowledge of her compromise a sad weight when she at last turned in at the house. Since then, she’d spent more time during their dozen years together convinced that she should leave him than she had content with their lives together, but then she’d wonder if it was only her guilt talking, if it was only Alaska talking. He’d keep convincing her, continually altering his timelines to make her happy, though his promises never translated into reality. Only nine more months, he’d say, and then the pipeline will be finished and we can move back to California, or wherever you want to live. We can finally settle down and relax. But Annabelle no longer wanted to relax. The last seven years had made the idea of relaxing worse than anything else. And by now she didn’t care whether he said it would be six years or six months, because either one was too long to wait.

  She wanted out. Now.

  At the hospital, she sat cross-legged on a table in the middle of the waiting room, watching a television positioned high up on the wall in the corner, while two nurses looked on from the registration booth. At first they’d taken her for a junkie—a specter new to the area and brought by the pipeliners—but she’d tested negative, and though she was severely undernourished, she was alert. For two hours she’d been watching the breaking news story, which had preempted—to the nurses’ chagrin—The Price is Right, and which had been the only thing you could find on any of the networks ever since nine that morning. Something about the pipeline. Another billion bucks down the tube seemed to be the general gist.

  Annabelle Sanchez-Hill was watching the television and seeing through it to her future and the future of her children. Faulty welds. It meant nothing to her from a construction standpoint. It meant only that whatever hopes she’d had that she’d seen her last Alaskan winter were crushed. The news reporters kept talking about a press conference in Anchorage, scheduled tentatively for three o’clock, the main speaker at which was expected to be Head of PR Operations G. Benjamin Hill. The network flashed a picture of her husband on the screen, a smiling head-on shot of the man whose hotel she’d called that morning at five, whose room had been empty, and at the foot of whose door she’d asked the hotel management to leave a note asking him to call his wife at the hospital in Fairbanks. “It’s urgent,” she’d told them. “Tell him something awful has happened to the children.”

  And yet she hadn’t heard a thing. Not one word. Rather than facing up to it and calling her and telling her the truth—that this business with the pipeline was flat out more important to him than either she or the children or all three put together—he’d done the very thing she’d expected and dreaded he’d do. He’d ignored it entirely. Would arrive up here sometime in the late afternoon, out of breath as if he’d run all the way from Anchorage, saying, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  The newscast had completed its loop. She looked at her husband’s photo and felt herself beginning to rock back and forth. A handful of new patients had arrived, and their family members sat in the chairs along the walls, not wanting to get too close. Annabelle resisted the urge to throw something at the TV. She waited while her children were inspected by emergency room doctors, while the network prepared for the televised press conference to begin, and she thought about what she would do. She considered the possibilities and decided that the best way would be to register each and every one of the reactions he’d hope to find on her face: the reactions a father arriving twelve hours late to a tragedy might pray for but never think possible. She would throw herself into his arms, showing a side so unlike her that he’d be forced to believe it, forced to lower his defenses and accept that—against all odds—he was somehow still in her good graces.

  But it would all be a distraction. In her heart, she was already gone. She was already planning the things she would have to do to finally heed the warning of her predecessor, to finally do the thing Mary had urged her to do all those years ago.

  MAX HILL COULDN’T BREATHE. HE had broken ribs from when the cowboy Lyle Greeley—who was dead, his head bashed in with a piece of rebar—had picked him up and hurled him across one of the upstairs rooms at the French Quarter. His body had collided awkwardly against the edge of a dresser, knocking the wind out of him and making his vision double as he sat paralyzed while the cowboy pushed his sister back onto the bed where she’d been lying, propped on an elbow, looking
stunned.

  Max had been pleading with Jasmine to come upstairs with him. She had resisted, telling him nothing had changed, that he was still too young, but when he’d told her he just wanted to talk, she had relented with a sigh. It was when they’d arrived at the top of the stairs that they had heard the voices coming from somewhere down the hall, soft at first but then increasing in volume, the woman’s voice as it became more argumentative revealing itself unmistakably as Maddie’s. They’d found them in the last room on the left, the room Lyle sometimes rented when he didn’t feel like returning to the welder’s village, Maddie lying on her back and squirming, fighting on the bed while the cowboy leaned over her and held her down, pants around his thighs, a sight that had made Max hurl himself in a strange feet-first kickboxing attack that the cowboy had easily defended, grabbing Max by a shoulder and a shirttail and heaving him across the room.