The Woman Inside

by E. G. Scott

  I grabbed the shovel off the ground, stepped into the space in front of the Jeep, set the blade against the earth, and brought my boot down. The impact sent a jolt up my shin. No. Please, no, no, no. I heard a dog bark in the distance and dropped the shovel. My hands felt disembodied, and my stomach was hovering somewhere in my throat, choking me. I fell against the side of the truck and slid down onto the hard earth. It’s all over. It’s all just fucking over. I can’t get under the—Wait.

  I grabbed the lip of the back-door handle and pulled myself up. I had to lean against the door to think straight. There has to be another way. I ran through my options, as well as I could see them. I only had the one. The sun was not on my side. Nothing was on my side. This was my play. My only play.

  I tossed the shovel in the back seat, hopped in the front, and pulled off. I retraced my way to the dirt road and followed that out to a network of back roads. I used trees that I passed on the way in to find the main road. Dogs bathed in the glow of front-porch lights barked in my direction as I passed. I became convinced that I was driving in circles. Finally, I noticed the tree lines receding as I approached the highway.

  It was the last place I wanted to go, but it was the only thing I could think of. I pulled back onto 25, picked up speed, and headed to Cold Spring Harbor. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it would do for now, until I could take care of the situation permanently.

  fifteen

  REBECCA

  After

  THE LINGERING SMELL of carbonite in our bedroom was so evocative I was transported to my eleven-year-old self, standing between my parents’ bodies, my father’s most prized possession, an antique .44-caliber Smith & Wesson, lying next to him, blood pooling on the beige carpet beneath his shoulders and up around his head like a crimson halo. The blood from my mother’s head appeared in red tributaries around my feet on the carpet between them. The gun had been in our family since the time of outlaws and cowboys, when my ancestors had to fight for their lives in the wilds of the West, or so my father had told me a dozen or so times while my mother rolled her eyes.

  He’d let me hold the gun once until she had yanked the surprisingly heavy piece from my small hands and berated him. I’d stolen away to the safety of the closet and read by flashlight until the fighting stopped. There were so many more fights to come before their last one.

  After I realized that my father was still breathing and he opened his eyes and saw me, after I moved toward him and he grabbed my arm and pulled hard, after he stopped breathing finally and I moved away from his lifeless body, I watched the gun on the floor as if it were a snake waiting to strike. I lay on the pillow I’d held close to me all night since slipping out of bed and hiding, and waited. I couldn’t look at their bodies. Barely breathing, I kept watch on that gun. Knowing what it had taken from me.

  * * *

  PAUL’S PISTOL LOOKED STRIKINGLY similar to my father’s. An old barrel model with a smooth walnut grip. I’d never really looked at Paul’s gun for more than a few seconds, but sitting cross-legged on the floor of our bedroom and very much in shock that night, I’d inspected it closely.

  I didn’t know Paul owned a gun until the day we moved out of the city. He was out getting coffee and bagels with Duff while I packed the last of our possessions and happened upon the red-bandanna-wrapped gun in one of the drawers under our bed. It was wedged behind some winter blankets on his side. I knew what it was before I uncloaked it just by the density of its weight in my hand. Before I had time to examine his secret for longer than a few minutes, I heard Paul’s key in the lock as he returned with breakfast, so I hastily rewrapped it and returned it to the hiding place before he entered the apartment.

  I wasn’t a fan of guns and had vowed never to live in another house with one. But I kept silent about finding Paul’s. I did have the fleeting thought that a guy with a temper like Paul’s probably shouldn’t own a gun, but I filed that thought away, never to be said out loud. We were so close to starting our life together with the move to Long Island I didn’t want to make any waves. Up until that discovery, I hadn’t really considered what Paul might be hiding from me.

  On the floor of our room my legs had become numb from sleep. I didn’t know how much time had passed before he returned with a rolled-up tarp; maybe minutes, maybe hours. The stillness of Sheila’s body had frozen time. I didn’t know if he had gone to get the police or just walked out and away from our life altogether. But when he returned with supplies, I quickly realized things weren’t going to be as easy as that.

  Duff had given up on his frenetic circling and barking, and curled up by my feet, his weight and warmth a simple but powerful comfort in the post-chaos haze. My gaze laser-focused on a section of the carpet free of weapon or body. The familiar tableau before me was too overwhelming. The body on the floor, the smell of the gunpowder, the bedroom carpet imprinted by the weight of a slight female body. Hair the color of my mother’s. The throbbing in my shoulder.

  After he’d placed the tarp on the floor and unfurled it, he rolled her over. He looked me in the eye and then at the gun in my lap. He leaned in and took it from me gently. He exited swiftly, to his office I assumed. When he returned his face was unreadable. Yet I’d understood what we needed to do.

  “I need you to help me with this.” He’d spoken carefully.

  “Paul, please, let’s call the police.” Even as I said the words, I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.

  “Madoo, if we call the police, they are going to arrest you.”

  “What about self-defense? She was watching us sleep, Paul! With a gun!”

  “This isn’t going to add up to self-defense. She had my gun.” He was shaky as he riffled through her purse. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he was looking for.

  “She broke into our home! I was trying to protect us.” It took every fiber not to point out that he’d slept through the whole horrifying scene.

  Paul found what he was looking for and pulled out a familiar key chain—our spare key to the front door. I couldn’t compute how this had gotten into her bag.

  “It wasn’t breaking and entering.” His gaze went to the floor as he held up the key.

  I finally understood the phrase “blind with rage.” “Paul, how did this woman get your fucking gun?”

  “Madoo—”

  “And why does she have the keys to our house?!”

  His expression was shame, followed by revelation. “She stole it from my desk.” He said this to himself, and with a sense of disbelief that fueled my anger. “And she must have taken the key as well. I remember when she had the opportunity. I shouldn’t have left her alone.” I watched it dawn on him that his explanation was also a confession, and he flinched preemptively.

  “You brought her into our house?” I fleetingly imagined picking up the hammer and crushing his skull too. But his look of desperation and hopelessness quelled the thought and transitioned into panic about the body on our floor.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry. I ended things because she didn’t mean anything to me at all. I never thought in a million years that something like this would happen. I never thought you would kill her!”

  The wind was knocked out of me; his words were like another assault. There it was. Even though he’d brought this psychotic woman into our bedroom, this was my fault. I felt myself shutting down. I was speechless. Paul took this as a cue to take control.

  “We need to move her.”

  Sheila lay faceup between us, eyes closed and mouth slack. I could see that her beauty was less about her natural features and more about strategic hair and makeup. But even with her well-appointed war paint, the true pallor of her skin was emerging, and the blue of her lips replaced the red of her lipstick. Her rapidly fading beauty fell short of making me feel better.

  On my knees, I moved to the closest corner of the tarp and her feet. I held my breath as I straightened her legs si
de by side and slid my hand under the edge of the thick plastic, rolling her in tandem on Paul’s command. The stiffness of her body was deeply disturbing.

  We were rolling her forever. With every revolution of her body over another layer, we had to pull her toward us to make room for the remaining plastic to spread, and then repeat. Working together, we bound his lover away from us and then close, away and back. I winced with every movement, sickening pain shooting through my body emanating from my shoulder. When her body was completely encased in the thick tarpaulin, Paul motioned to lift the crisp scroll in unison. She felt much heavier than her 125 pounds of skin and bones suggested she’d be. The middle section of the plastic coil started to sag as we moved from the bedroom to the hallway, so Paul and I edged closer to the center with our grip. Duff followed alongside, panting happily at the prospect of going outside. It was the first thing we’d done together as a family in as long as I could remember.

  I’d felt the weight of Paul’s silence as we walked from our room and through the house. It was heavier than his dead lover’s body between us. He left me with her in the entryway while he checked outside to see if any late dog walkers or teenagers were about. I watched him through the window as he opened the back door of the Cherokee.

  As I stood in the darkness of the hallway, Sheila barely visible through the thick plastic wrapping, I’d imagined her shallowly breathing inside the tube, not quite dead. I could almost hear it. When Paul reentered the room I was midshudder, my hand on Duff for support. Fat, silent tears edged down my cheeks and onto my chest. He’d moved to me, wrapped his arms around me, careful not to put pressure on my wound, and squeezed hard.

  “We can do this. We can get through this. Just keep it together.” I knew he’d never allow the tears creeping from the corners of his eyes to fully fall in front of me.

  “I didn’t have a choice, Paul,” I’d cried. I was still furious but also exhausted and in need of comfort.

  “I know. I know. You did what you had to do.” His mouth had felt warm through my hair, in my ear, his tone soft and soothing. My shoulder throbbed. The hallway clock warned us that time was slipping away.

  “I need to get her out of here. I need you to keep it together and clean whatever you can. We’ll burn the bloody clothes. Don’t bother with the carpet; I’ll need to rip it up when I get back. And don’t take any more pills. I need you to stay sharp.” His comment reignited a fresh wave of anger, but I kept control. I was more concerned about taking a painkiller than I was about fighting him.

  He propped the door open while I pulled Duff into the bathroom and closed him in. Paul gestured for me to grab the other side of Sheila. As we moved toward the Jeep, the air around us was crisp and fresh in the waning darkness.

  Headfirst, she’d slid in easily.

  “Where are you going to take her?” The shock was wearing off along with the last dose of opioids. I was desperate for Paul to get on the road, mostly so that I could take another Oxy. How quickly I was already sliding back into my old ways.

  His face had drawn into seriousness. “The less you know, the better.”

  * * *

  WHEN I RETURNED to our bedroom I sat in silence and stillness for a long time. Eventually, I saw the bullet hole in the molding on the wall next to our bed. Beside it on the floor was his phone. It must have fallen out of his pocket when we were moving her.

  Without hesitation I entered his passcode—the date of our anniversary, 0919—and opened his texts right away. With everything that had happened, it seemed silly to be looking for anything else. But I couldn’t stop looking. I couldn’t turn away. I wanted to understand. I longed for the beginning of the story.

  It took me a while to find their exchanges. He’d stupidly held on to the texts instead of deleting them. He’d put her under “dog walker” instead of her name. It was easy to tell that it was Sheila, mostly from her naked selfies. My entire body was locked as I scrolled from the beginning of their flirting to just a few days ago. The full cycle, from seduction to sex to ending.

  She’d refused to just go away.

  sixteen

  PAUL

  After

  I BIDED MY TIME. Each day, I woke from a restless sleep to an empty bed. Rebecca had been getting up and leaving the house early to hit spin class before work, and her absence first thing in the morning allowed for a small feeling of relief. I didn’t want to involve her any further than was necessary, and I was afraid she’d sense my anxiety at the loose end dangling over our heads.

  I got out of bed and checked the weather. The frost on the ground continued to taunt me. I made coffee and paced. The forecast each day was frustratingly consistent. Not a warm spell in sight. And winter wasn’t exactly a hot time to show real estate, so I had nothing to take my mind off the problem.

  Then one day, about two weeks after the incident, the weather broke. A warm front was scheduled to pass through the Northeast. This would give me the chance to take care of the situation before I drove myself completely nuts.

  On that Tuesday, it warmed up as promised. I forced myself to be patient for the next couple of days, to let nature do its work. When I went to bed that Thursday night, I reviewed a mental checklist of the tools in the back of my Jeep. I didn’t bother to offer Rebecca an explanation of where I’d be in the morning.

  In the middle of the night, I slunk out of bed and out of the house. I made the drive out to Cold Spring Harbor, where I pulled onto our property. I parked the Cherokee so that the headlights were aimed toward the concrete staircase to the cellar. I left the engine idling, got out, and opened the hatchback. I approached the raw foundation of what I had promised my wife would one day be our home, and descended the stairs.

  It was still cold in the basement, and the smell I’d prepared myself for didn’t hit my nostrils as hard as I’d expected. I moved the bags of concrete mix to the side and rolled the tarp away from the wall. I crouched down and worked my arms underneath, reminding myself to lift with my legs. As I brought the tarp up off the ground, the feeling of taut, sinewy arm and leg muscle draped against my chest and forearms was sickeningly familiar. I got the tarp into the Jeep and headed back toward Smithtown Bay.

  This time, I didn’t have to race the sun. I got out to the clearing under full cover of darkness, killed the headlights, and let the engine idle for a good fifteen minutes. I pulled back a car length, cut the engine, and got out. I retrieved my tools from the back and got to work on the earth in front of the Cherokee.

  The soil only gave so much against the blade of the shovel, so I switched over to the pickaxe. The ground began to break up nicely, and I got into a good groove. After a while, I felt the burn of taxed muscle in my arms and back, but I could tell that the adrenaline was helping to dull the pain. I had made about three feet of headway into the ground when a connected downswing caused a wave of pain to radiate from my wrists to my shoulders. I realized I’d hit frozen ground. I switched back over to the shovel to clear out the loose dirt and investigate the icy layer. I soon realized that my tools would help me no further. This was as good as things were going to get.

  I attempted to lift the tarp out of the back of the Jeep, only to drop it immediately to the ground. My arms were fatigued to the point where I ended up having to roll the tarp around to the hole and kick it in. I filled the hole back in and smoothed it over with the flat side of the shovel head. I dropped the tools in the back of the Jeep and got inside. I flipped the headlights on as I keyed the engine, streaming light over what looked like untouched land in front of me. I let out a long exhale and dropped the transmission into drive.

  I pulled off the lot and got back on the dirt road heading toward home, where I took a long, hot shower, desperate to wash all of this off of us.

  seventeen

  REBECCA

  After

  EVEN AFTER PAUL had taken her away, it felt like she was still in our house. The w
eeks passed slowly. I resumed my increased self-medicating. March approached April with the fog of what we’d done hanging low, but we made every effort to get back to normal. We returned to some semblance of our lives because there wasn’t anything else to do. My shoulder continued to hurt to such a degree that my recreational pill supply depleted twice as quickly. I reached a point of desperation I hadn’t yet experienced in myself and it started to worry me. I actually needed the painkillers for my shoulder but didn’t dare go to a doctor for fear of exposing the bullet wound and drawing any probing questions or worse.

  I kept going to Lotus Pedal before work to keep up my normal routine. Sheila’s bike was now inhabited by some other nameless woman with taut arms and resting bitch face. The rides were getting harder the fewer pills I had.

  Around the second week, I got desperate and borrowed some sample fentanyl patches from work, stored in a fairly easy to break into closet. The dosage of each patch is five times higher than the Oxys and Percocets I’d been self-prescribing, so I cut them into quarters to begin with. My tolerance was high and I graduated to halves after a couple of days. Pretty soon I was wearing an entire patch with only two left and no contingency plan to support my now fully cultivated dependency. But the patches had side effects that made it hard to discern what was actually happening and what was just chemical paranoia. My subconscious wouldn’t let me forget what we had done. What he had done.

  First it was just small things. A lot of stuff would go missing and inanimate objects appeared to have moved from one room to the next. I could easily write those off as being high and losing time. But then there were the hammers.