House Broken

by Sonja Yoerg

  Turns out the Raleigh man had a bad back. He’d been on the medicine for a while, but didn’t take any more than what the label said he could, except for the night before he died, when he took maybe three times that. He didn’t know he’d done it to himself. By the time the doctors figured out he didn’t have the stomach flu, it’d beat down his liver and he was a goner.

  She read the article again, then folded up the paper and hid it at the bottom of the pile of newspapers in the pantry. Then she put away the bedclothes in the living room, and returned to the kitchen to make the coffee.

  • • •

  She hadn’t realized until she read the article how much she wanted to kill him. For a year or more she’d fantasized about him having a fatal accident—getting shot while hunting or during a robbery, or struck by lightning—but she hadn’t considered taking matters into her own hands. Not seriously. Maybe all those murder mysteries she read gave her the notion that no one ever got away with it. There were too many nosy old ladies and clever detectives, and too many ways to get caught. She had three children aside from Paris to consider, two of them not even teenagers, and it wouldn’t be fair to leave them virtually orphans. They’d go to Eustace’s family, and she couldn’t tolerate that.

  But now she had a method. And the beauty of it was, with very little help from her, Eustace could do it to himself. That seemed right to her, because he’d brought it on himself, defying laws of man and nature both, and perpetrated this abomination upon her daughter. Paris might have been willing, but Helen lay that at his feet as well. A duckling will follow whatever it sees when it first opens its eyes, follow it straight off a cliff or right through the gates of hell. With hindsight, Helen wished she’d seen it and put a stop to it earlier. It was like a white bedsheet that grayed over time. One day you put it next to a clean one and can’t believe you let the old dingy sheet next to your skin. She would live with the result of her blindness to her dying day; that was a cold fact.

  But what was done was done. Putting a stop to Eustace was all that was left.

  The first thing she did was drive thirteen miles to Layton and buy Extra Strength Tylenol. Every little bit would count. She bought a pair of slacks from her favorite store there, so if anyone asked, that was the reason she’d gone.

  Luckily Eustace sent her to get pills and water at night, even though he was up every couple of hours anyway. He liked company for his misery. She’d taken to keeping the Tylenol on the dresser, and filled a glass with water before she went to bed. When she handed him the pills, he tossed them in his mouth without looking, then took a long drink. Couldn’t have been easier to give him an extra one or two every time. After a week of that, she ground some up and put it in his coffee, and added extra cream.

  Wasn’t even two weeks later he started complaining about his stomach.

  “Must’ve been something you ate at the club,” she said, and headed upstairs for the Alka Seltzer. She ground up three Tylenol, mixed it with orange juice, and dropped two tablets in and watched them fizz.

  He made a face when he drank it.

  “New flavor. Don’t you care for it?”

  Helen didn’t want him running to the doctor until she’d finished with him. Knowing bourbon didn’t do his liver any favors, she played her last card.

  Paris called him from Durham frequently, but he couldn’t easily call her in the dorm, as there was only one phone on each floor and Paris was likely as not to be out. To stop them from talking, Helen left the phone off the hook whenever she could, and answered it herself the rest of the time. If it was Paris, she’d say Eustace was out, or lying down, then ask for a good time for him to call her back. Then she’d tell Eustace a different time.

  She managed to stop them from talking for ten days—a record. During that time, she made sure the decanter stayed full and, on the nights he was home, joined him for a drink to help things along. When he groused about Paris “running around too much” and “forgetting her family,” Helen topped off his drink. Once he was good and drunk, she added some Tylenol.

  On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he felt too poorly to attend a birthday party at the club for one of his golf partners.

  “Let’s have our own party, then.”

  She had Florence and Geneva put together some hors d’oeuvres and asked Dublin to pick out the music. Eustace felt right sorry for himself, and sat on the couch with his hand on his belly while the kids ate and danced. But he knocked back the bourbon the way she thought he would. He went to bed early, muttering drunkenly that he might have the flu. Helen followed him upstairs and gave him four Tylenol. He was too tight to notice. Then she went downstairs, turned down the music a bit, and had a cup of coffee.

  At two o’clock in the morning, she woke Eustace up.

  “You had a lot to drink.” She held out four more pills and a glass of water. “Better take these.”

  “I already had some.”

  “No, you didn’t. That was yesterday.”

  And he took them.

  He stayed in bed half of Sunday—probably thinking it was a hangover, which it surely could have been—but woke up feeling dandy on Monday and set off to work. On Tuesday morning she heard him laughing on the phone to Paris and worried she hadn’t given him enough. But that night he lay in bed groaning, then ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  He’d planned to drive to Durham and bring Paris home for Thanksgiving, but he was sick as a dog and Helen couldn’t see him leaving. Paris had to take a bus and didn’t arrive until nearly midnight on Wednesday. When she saw her father in the morning, she wanted to take him to the doctor, but of course it was Thanksgiving.

  “We’ll take him tomorrow if he’s not better,” Helen said.

  Needless to say he didn’t have turkey and dressing with the rest of them.

  His regular doctor’s office was closed and Helen would’ve left it at that, but Paris insisted they go to the emergency room. They were short-staffed on account of the holiday and weren’t looking at anyone too close if they didn’t have a bone stuck in their throat or a bullet hole in their head. The nurse told them it was probably the flu and sent him home.

  On Sunday morning Helen came upstairs from sleeping on the couch. Eustace was lying on his back, his face as yellow as a sunflower.

  • • •

  The blood tests showed plain and clear he’d taken far too much Tylenol. When the doctor at the emergency ward asked him about it, he admitted he’d taken a lot, but didn’t know how much was too much. He’d have asked Eustace more questions, but Eustace took to moaning terribly. The newspaper article didn’t mention that dying of liver failure was painful, but it began to look that way.

  Paris was there, too, and wailed like a banshee when the doctor said there wasn’t much they could do. Either he would live or he wouldn’t, and probably he wouldn’t. The doctor might have had questions for Helen, but she had her daughter to comfort.

  She went to the hospital every day, taking turns with Paris when Geneva and Dublin needed minding at home. Florence came a few times, too, but didn’t stay long. She couldn’t bear the sight of her daddy’s face—a terrible yellow-gray color, twisted up in pain. Helen refused to let the little ones visit at all. She couldn’t see it would do them any good, and Paris provided all the bedside drama Helen could take. Watching Eustace wore on her, too. Day after day, playacting the loving wife terrified of losing her cherished husband, wringing her hands at his bedside, all the while wishing and praying he would hurry up and die.

  If the doctors weren’t particularly suspicious of the cause of Eustace’s death, Paris was. Helen had expected it and stuck with her plan: simple denial. She’d been careful not to leave any ground-up pills or extra bottles around, so she knew Paris would be hard put to do anything more than speculate.

  “How could he take so many pills without you knowing about it?”

  “I don�
��t watch him every minute. I figured he could read a label as well as the next person.”

  “But so many!”

  “He drank a lot after you left, Paris. Maybe he lost count.”

  Guilt ran across her face, then, but she didn’t back down. Not Paris. “You should’ve been taking care of him.”

  Helen knew her lines. “And you can’t know how sorry I am that I didn’t know what was happening. He’s my husband, after all. We all thought he had the flu.”

  But then, after he’d been in the hospital five days, Helen’s mind shifted. Maybe she relaxed her defenses a little, knowing she’d done what she set out to do. Maybe he was different now, no longer a perverted monster, but a middle-aged man in a hospital gown dying a slow, painful death. Under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by cold, hard tile, and machines with dials and tubes, where even the bed—meant to be a place of rest—had levers and wheels and rails, Eustace was vulnerable, not just because she had made him so, but because he was flesh and blood, same as everyone else.

  She got to doubting herself a little. She thought back to what she had seen between him and Paris—the dancing, the tickling, the glances—and replayed the scenes again and again, as if her memory might be trying to sneak a truth by her. Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d had these recollections, but this was another thing entirely. This was reviewing the evidence in front of the jury of her conscience.

  As Eustace moaned and twisted up the sheets, she saw Louisa standing at the door, then running away, and tried to remember exactly how her face had looked, and what she had said. Who said Paris’s name? Had she? Or was it Louisa? She couldn’t now recall anything Louisa said pointing directly at Eustace, aside from that he had fired her. Was it possible Helen had been so desperate to confirm her suspicions about her husband that she’d misunderstood Louisa? While she’d been poisoning him, she’d only thought about ways to get more pills in him. It was a game. Now that the game was over, and she was staring at the ugly consequences of her victory, her confidence wavered.

  She wished she could ask Eustace what he had done, because surely he knew he was dying, and dying, like love, had a tendency to pull the truth out of folks. But the time for confession had passed, because he was delirious now, and didn’t even know who she was.

  • • •

  The psychologist didn’t appear to be more than twenty-five years old, and Helen doubted anyone that wet behind the ears could understand the first thing about a woman her age. But she had to give her credit. After a few questions about Helen’s circumstances, she jumped right in.

  “Did you try to kill yourself, Mrs. Riley?”

  “There were pills left, so there’s your answer.”

  “So you haven’t been feeling depressed?”

  “I’ve had better days.”

  “Are you referring to yesterday, or to a longer period?”

  “I haven’t much cared for going around on a walker and depending on people. I’m used to my independence.” Helen didn’t think she’d said anything interesting but the psychologist scribbled on her pad.

  “And how much do you drink on an average day?”

  “Lately, not as much as I’d like. But yesterday, maybe a bit too much.”

  “And the pills you took?”

  “I bruised my hip the other day, and it was aching. I see now they don’t go so well together.”

  The psychologist smiled a little and handed her a stack of brochures. The one on the top had a picture of a man with his arm around a woman. It read: Addiction Services. “I’ll leave these with you. I hope your circumstances improve, Mrs. Riley, and, whatever happens, you think about your relationship to alcohol.”

  She’d think about it, all right. And then have a drink to it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  GENEVA

  Geneva placed Paris’s letter on the scanner and pushed a button to increase the contrast. She wrote an email to Dublin saying she had found the letter last night but only read it this morning, and asked him to call her once he’d read it. After checking to ensure the document was legible, she attached it. Her finger hovered over the Send button; the letter didn’t belong to her and, while she had found it by accident, she was sharing it deliberately.

  “Oh, well,” she said, and hit Send.

  Immediately she regretted it. She pictured him opening the email during a lull at work and having to rein in his reaction. So he wouldn’t be blindsided, she called him. When he didn’t answer, she sent him a text: Open my email in private only. Love, G.

  Not knowing what else to do while she waited for him to call, she made the bed and changed the towels in the bathroom. Reluctantly, she entered Charlie’s bedroom and surveyed the scene. The paramedics had knocked over the bedside table, and the bed was in disarray, but it wasn’t the disaster she had imagined. Knowing her mother might be coming home later today, Geneva righted the table, wiped up the spilled water, and stripped the bed. She stopped in the kitchen on her way to the laundry and poured the last of the vodka down the drain.

  Tom had not returned from dropping Charlie at school. Geneva told Ella, who was watching TV, she was taking Diesel for a walk.

  “Want me to come?”

  “No, that’s okay. But if Dublin calls, ask him to try my cell.”

  • • •

  The unmarked footpath lay beyond the blackberry brambles hugging the rear wall of the barn. Geneva nudged Diesel to the right, away from town, toward the creek and, eventually, the hills. The sun had no fog to burn that morning and bore down on the path where the arching branches allowed. Geneva called to Diesel to wait while she took off her jacket and tied it around her waist.

  She wished she’d never seen the letter. The day should have begun here. This walk in the woods, her dog trotting ahead, sniffing the air, nosing the dew-laden bushes. This perfect June morning, the bees away from their hive and the possibility of the first larkspur or paintbrush around every corner. If she hadn’t read the letter, she would be who she had been a month ago—a reasonably happy woman with an alcoholic mother and an estranged sister. Although imperfect, that person could enjoy such a morning.

  How she envied Diesel. He could love someone without knowing them.

  It occurred to her she didn’t have to tell Dublin. She would stick her head back in the sand if she could, so why wouldn’t she spare him? Sending the email had been a selfish move, as if sharing the terrible news would halve its impact. But they’d vowed nothing would come between them. If she hadn’t told him, would the secret have moved them apart?

  And she hadn’t decided whether to tell Florence. At least Dublin could weigh in on that. Maybe Florence already knew, although over the phone she had talked matter-of-factly about the rivalry between Paris and their mother. If Florence could manage that sort of duplicity, Geneva didn’t know her at all.

  But she did know her mother had failed to protect her eldest daughter from her husband. Paris was undoubtedly a strange child, but she was nevertheless a child. Incest was not a gray area. Why didn’t her mother shield her? Did she not find out until after Eustace died? Was it, then, shame that drove her to drink?

  Diesel barked at a squirrel running up the path. She pushed the questions away and, turning for home, called Diesel to her.

  A few minutes later, her phone vibrated in her pocket. Dublin.

  “Hi. Did you get my email?”

  “Yup. It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?”

  His calm tone surprised her. “Did you read the letter?”

  “Yeah, it’s creepy, all right. But I’m not sure what it means.”

  “I thought it was pretty clear.”

  “What’s clear to me is both Mom and Paris are completely batshit.”

  “I’m confused. Did you read it carefully?”

  “I’m a good reader. Especially in English. I know some
of it is suggestive, and I get why you’re upset, but you’ve got to consider the source.”

  “Suggestive? What else could ‘unnatural desires’ mean?”

  “I don’t know. Dad’s need for attention?”

  “Then why use the word ‘victim’? And Tom had the same reaction as I did.”

  “Look. I’m not saying it’s completely impossible Dad was an abusive pervert. All I’m saying is that the letter isn’t exactly a smoking gun.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t prove anything. Still.”

  “Are you going to ask Mom about it?”

  “I think so. How could I not?”

  “I get it. The toothpaste is hard to get back into the tube, and inquiring minds want to know, but haven’t you had enough drama for a while?”

  “For a lifetime. But as much as I’d like to, I can’t pretend I didn’t read the letter.”

  “It’s so implausible, Ginny. Think about it. Wouldn’t someone else have known? Florence or Louisa, for instance? And we know Paris is weird. Can’t you imagine her making up stuff about her and Dad just to get Mom’s goat?”

  “Well, I suppose . . .”

  “. . . and can’t you imagine Mom tweaking reality a teensy weensy bit just to put a perverted spin on what was, in all likelihood, only a mildly twisted father-daughter relationship?”

  Geneva sighed deeply. “She was jealous of Paris.”

  “Exactly. But the important thing, kiddo, is for you not to get all involved in it. I’m not going to. Join me over here in the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-those-sorry-Southern-bastards-were-up-to part of the room. Paris is who she is and Mom is, God help us, who she is, and that’s that.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “It’s what you do best, you little brainiac. Any word on Mom?”

  “Nothing new. I think that means she’s alive.”

  “Well, there you go. And once she’s in L.A. again, and you don’t have to see her every day, you’ll say that as if it’s a good thing.”