by M. O’Keefe
No one had been as kind to me for two years.
And I always got stupid around kindness.
But he didn’t seem to recognize me.
I was standing close to him. Closer than I’d been to any man who wasn’t the senator. Close enough to see his eyelashes. His pulse in his throat. And his eyes went to my throat, and I wondered if maybe he was looking at my pulse. If he was thinking of my heartbeat and that was a ridiculous thing to think.
“You changed your hair,” he said, surprising me. And like I was a debutante in a movie, I touched the blonde curl hanging over my shoulder.
“I did.” Nice. Excellent conversational skills. “Your face healed up.”
“It always does.”
That made me smile, that small glimmer of the man from the party. Making light of dark things. I wished I could be that way, instead of this petrified rabbit I’d become.
“What happened to your neck?” he asked, and I realized my sweatshirt had gotten pulled aside enough to reveal the bruise on my collarbone.
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“It’s not a bruise?”
“I fell.” I winced at how terrible that sounded. I put my hand over the bruise where I could feel it, hot and ugly under my skin. The senator had thrown a book at me. It did not escape me that he’d thrown it at my head, and I’d flinched so he’d missed.
And that’s not too far?
“Sure you did,” he said. “Did it hurt?”
I was about to say no, but then I realized what he was asking. What question was buried deep beneath that one. Not ‘did it hurt’? But ‘was I surviving’? Because if it still hurt, if I gave the senator that power over my body, then I would never make it. Maybe I was wrong, maybe that wasn’t what he was asking. But it’s what I heard, and that was all that mattered.
And I wished, god, how I wished I could lie, I lied to everyone else in my life about the senator. But somehow – with this stranger – the lie didn’t come. And instead, the truth slipped out.
“Yes,” I said. “It hurt.”
His lips pressed tight, and he nodded as if the information was just so disappointing to him, but what could you do? And I wanted to ask him how I could make it not hurt. Like what magic was required.
But he turned and left without another word. He left me alone with my empty house and my bruises.
Three months later, my husband committed suicide in his office. Shot himself in the head. A doctor’s record that he had advanced brain cancer splattered in blood on the desk in front of him.
4
Leonard Barrington, Esq., was written in gold on the glass door in front of me. The Q was flaking off. I wonder if the senator knew about that Q. He did not like imperfections. The urge to scrape it all off with my thumbnail was powerful. But I curled my hands into fists and resisted.
“We don’t have to do this,” Zilla said over my shoulder.
We stood at the door of the lawyer’s office in Bishop’s Landing. A cottage building down the hill from the house. I just needed to push the door open. And walk in. There was a cold drizzly rain falling down on us, dripping from my hair onto the bare skin of my neck. The cold of it was an icy pain.
“I’ve put it off twice,” I whispered, the words caught in my throat. The senator’s lawyer had been patient and understanding but putting it off one more time would be ridiculous. The funeral was two months ago, and I was running out of excuses to not meet with him. But still I wasn’t pushing open that door.
“You want to go get a drink? We don’t have—”
“I’m scared,” I said.
“I know.” Zilla put her arm around my waist, holding me up. She’d been here with me since the senator died, doing exactly this. Holding me up. “But it won’t be like when Dad died.”
My breath caught, and I let it out as slow as I could. “It will be worse.” How could it not? The one constant in my life was the senator wanted to hurt me. His being dead seemed unlikely to change that. When Dad died there was no money, and I survived. But leaving me with no money seemed the least of what the senator might do to me.
“It doesn’t matter,” Zilla said. “We’ll be fine. We will be absolutely fine. You can move in with me in New York. You can go back to school—”
“Stop,” I breathed. No dreaming. No planning. It never worked out for me. “Let’s just . . . get this over with.”
I pushed open the door to the office, and Zilla ran interference with a secretary. Soon we had tea I wasn’t going to drink and were sitting in leather chairs in front of a large desk across from Mr. Bennington, the senator’s lawyer who always reminded me of a Keebler elf. He wore a lot of sweater vests and glasses. Nice enough, but looks were deceiving. I never understood why the senator, with all his connections, had this man as a personal lawyer.
“I’m glad you could make it in,” he said. “I have some paperwork for you to take home. The senator was doing some work on the foundation, and he had a trust for his future children, but we never finalized the paperwork. There is also the deed for the house.” He gestured behind him to a box on the edge of the desk.
The future children bit kind of hit me right in the chest, and I sat there silent.
“We can take that,” Zilla said and took the box off the desk and balanced it on her lap. She was clear these days. Present. The summer stay at Belhaven long behind her. She was doing what the doctors told her, and in the months since Jim shot himself, she’d been indispensable to me.
Not because she made me tea and helped me send thank you notes and boxed up the senator’s clothes for donation, but because she went for long walks with me in the cold spring March mornings.
“Do you want to go back?” I’d ask her.
“Nope,” she’d lie through pale lips.
She made dinner out of things I hadn’t had in two years. Pizza delivered to our door. Macaroni and cheese. Veggies dipped in ranch dressing. Goldfish crackers. The food of that summer. Of our childhood.
Freedom.
Because in the middle of the night when I left the king-size bed I’d shared with Jim and crawled into the guest bed with her, she didn’t say anything. She put her arm around me and curled up tight.
And she didn’t ask me if I was all right. Everyone in the world was asking me if I was all right, but she knew that everything I was feeling was so much more complicated than just ‘all right.’
I wasn’t happy or sad. Or relieved. I was nauseous and scared. Jumpy. Unsure. A rabbit out of its cage. I was a mess, and she knew it. And didn’t try to change it.
She just took care of me.
“The will is very straightforward,” he said, adjusting his Keebler glasses on his nose. He left it all to a charity, I thought. To his foundation. He left it to another woman. He left it to another woman, and he sold me to another man.
God, I was really spiraling.
“As his only family and heir, you get everything,” he said, flipping through a file. “The house. The cars. The bank accounts, equalling—” He turned another page. “5.2 million.”
He looked at us over the top of his glasses. Zilla shook her head, and I found it hard to breathe. “Dollars?” Zilla finally asked.
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s standard.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“There . . . ah . . . is no catch,” he said, glancing at Zilla and back at me.
“No.” I stood, panicked and more scared than I was before. “There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.” Every gift from him was a double-edged sword. Nothing was free. Nothing was safe.
“With the senator?” he asked.
“Does it say my name? Show me—”
“Poppy,” Zilla said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Calm down.”
“It’s right here,” he said. Standing up and holding out the paper. “He wrote his will just after you were engaged. He was very clear. His wife would get everything. Are you all right?”
“Perhaps if we could have a second,” Zilla said.
“No. No. Let’s just do this.” I wanted to go home. The rabbit longing for her cage.
I signed paperwork where he pointed as the truth hovered somewhere above real comprehension in my brain. An hour later, we carried the box out with us. I could only sit in Zilla’s car.
“Poppy?” Zilla said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re rich. You’re rich, and you’re free.”
“I am,” I said, watching the rain hit the windshield and splatter.
“You still think there’s a catch?” she asked.
“There always is.”
“Maybe . . . the catch was everything before? Being married to him. Maybe – karmically – you’ve already paid for this. Maybe this is only good.”
I actually laughed at her.
“Pops. You have everything he had. It’s all yours now.”
“Everything,” I said.
“It hasn’t sunk in?”
“Not even a little.”
Zilla started the car. “It will. Just give it some time.”
We pulled out of the small parking lot behind the lawyer’s office and headed for the road up the hill to the mansions. My mansion. Zilla chatted away about dinner and maybe getting a bottle of champagne, and her words flowed over and through me. Until there was only one truth left. The one I’d been pushing away and pretending didn’t exist.
“You need to go home. Back to the city,” I blurted.
“What?” she said, looking at me and then back at the road. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t babysit me forever. I need to move on, and you need to go back to your life.”
“I want to stay,” Zilla said. “I should stay.”
I wanted her to stay so badly I could taste it. The house was warmer when she was in it. I felt less like Jim’s widow and more like . . . I don’t know. Something between Jim’s wife and that girl I’d been. But I wasn’t either of those things anymore.
I was something else entirely. And it was time to figure out what that was.
And Zilla finally had her feet under her. I couldn’t take that away because I was lonely.
“It is in fact insane that I would leave you,” Zilla said. “And I know insane.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It is. A little.” She smiled at me, but I didn’t take the bait.
“You have a life to get back to,” I said. “School?”
“Poppy,” she sighed. “It’s my first year of nursing school. I can defer a semester.”
“No. You’re not going to defer anything on my account. You’re just getting back on track.”
“You realize you’re saying Fundamentals of Nursing is more important than the total unravelling of my sister’s life, and I am here to tell you it is not.” She grinned at me. The grin it was impossible not to return. God, Zilla could be so fun, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had fun.
Ronan in the dark at the party, my brain supplied, as if it had been waiting for the chance to remind me.
“Come on, let me take care of you, Pops,” she said. “You fired the senator’s secretary. You fired the housekeeper. You’re alone.”
“I still have Theo.”
“Yeah, and if you knew how to drive you’d get rid of him, too.”
She wasn’t wrong. I studied her profile.
Zilla was a stunner. Olive skin and dark hair cut short and edgy, making the most of her delicate features from my mother’s side of the family. She had a tiny frame she covered in tight shirts, dark denim and high heeled boots. I was a giraffe compared to her. All elbows and hips. Long red hair I dyed blonde because . . . well, because the senator liked it that way.
My sister looked like a punk imp. And not at all like the type of person who’d held a knife to a priest’s genitals after he’d been caught abusing young boys.
But it was hard to guess what that kind of person looked like.
No matter what Zilla looked like, she was a twenty-one-year-old woman in nursing school. A woman with a future she could finally see and grab a hold of, and I wanted no part of derailing that. I was a widow at 22. Full of dust and fear.
“I don’t need taking care of,” I lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. I didn’t need taking care of. I wasn’t injured or prostrate with grief, it was just nice. Nice to be someone else’s priority for a second.
She parked in the long driveway, and we stepped out of the car. I grabbed the box from the lawyer from the back seat.
“We should go through that,” Zilla said.
“Not today,” I said. Maybe never.
“You want me to put it in the office?”
See? I should be stronger. I should be able to say, no, I can do it. But I wasn’t that strong. Not yet. I nodded, and my sister took the box of paperwork to my husband’s office. A room I hadn’t been in since he died and, truthfully, if I had my way, I would never go into again.
I made tea and strengthened my case for Zilla to get back to her life.
We argued that night and for another week, but finally I won and Zilla packed her bags.The day she was leaving, she came into the kitchen with her roller bag, and I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“Don’t,” I told her, thinking I might cut her off. But no one got in the way of Zilla and what she wanted to say.
“Hear me out. You said you wanted independence, and the only person you’ve kept is your driver. Let me teach you how to drive and you can fire him, too! You like firing people.” Her eyebrows were cocked, the devil in her bright eyes. “We can cut your hair. Get drunk. Like really smashed. We haven’t done that. Oh!” she said like she suddenly had a great idea. “Getting laid. How about that? A little rebound action with some random at a bar. I’ll be your wingman. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Okay, you can be my wingman.”
“I would be a terrible wingman.”
“It’s true. But I’m willing to give you a try.”
I laughed until it caught on a sob.
“I can stay,” Zilla said, her voice soft. “I want to stay. My course load this semester is light, and I can take it all online, right here from your kitchen. Let me take care of you. We don’t have to do anything.” She stroked back my hair. “Except get your hair back to its natural color. This blonde is so Stepford wife I can’t take it. Or! Let’s leave. You’re rich now. Let’s go meet randoms in a bar in Tahiti?”
I pulled Zilla into a fierce hug, holding her so hard hoping maybe to absorb some of her fire, hoping maybe she would absorb some of my calm. “I’m all right. I am. I haven’t been alone in years, Zilla. Let me just . . . be alone. Please,” I said. “I will call you if that changes.”
“It feels so bad to leave you, though.”
“I know. I do. But, trust me, please, this is what I want.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. But are you going to be okay?”
“Oh my god, you have hit peak, Poppy. Worrying about me? Now?”
“Habit.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll be worrying about you.”
Theo, my driver, the only employee I had left, opened the front door. He’d taken Zilla’s car to gas it up and top up the fluids. He didn’t say anything or do anything. But I knew by the nearly inaudible scrape of his shoe on the tile. The sudden change in the air. The chill up my spine that said I wasn’t alone.
When was that going to end?
Would it?
I swallowed back my sob and let my sister walk out the door.
And in the quiet she left behind, I immediately felt something like panic. Like . . .emotion. Like a scream I couldn’t scream. I grabbed the tools I used to help work on the house, and I went to the pool deck and finally finished the shower by the pool.
It took so much less time than I thought it would. Too little time, really. I needed it to take hours. A month. But within forty-f
ive minutes I pulled the chain and water poured out of the rain showerhead I’d picked out months ago.
I let go of the chain, and it stopped. The water disappearing down the black drain.
It worked. I built a shower.
This was another skill I could add to the application for the catering company.
Experience: eating canapes, mitigating the physical pain my husband wanted to inflict on me, and making outdoor showers.
“Who wouldn’t hire me?” I joked out loud. If Zilla was here, she would laugh. But she wasn’t, so I just sounded like a crazy woman.
I pulled the chain again, and water came pouring out, splashing over my flipflops and the legs of my pants. I did it. I could still do things. I had enough small power inside of me to make something happen. Even this little thing.
He had not taken everything away from me.
Oh, he’d taken plenty. Some things he’d taken in great handfuls. Giant pieces. My dreams of being a teacher. My education. My autonomy. And some I’d simply handed him, learning quickly that my dignity meant more to him than it did to me. And now I owned this house. Everything that had been his. Everything he’d taken from me, I had a chance to get back.
How? How does someone do that? Like, in what drawer would I find my ambition? My confidence? Was my faith on a bookshelf in his office? I imagined finding those things, putting them on like jewelry. Too-big rings that would fall off my fingers.
Who the fuck am I anymore?
Fully dressed, I stepped into the shower, letting the warm water pour over me until something in me thawed. The ice I’d formed around myself melted.
And then I sobbed bitter angry tears. My husband had been sick and scared and in pain, and he’d killed himself with a gun I didn’t know he had.
Then I cried more, because he’d turned me into someone I didn’t recognize.
Because I was just so relieved he was gone.
And happy. I was so happy I laughed through my tears. I was howling with laughter and sobs. A total mess.
This was why I needed my sister to go live her life. Because I needed to lose my mind a little.