Don't Believe a Word

by Patricia MacDonald

  DeShaun shrugged. ‘I know it seems strange, but that’s the law. That information is still considered confidential between doctor and patient, until fifty years after a person’s death. But you can inquire. There are exceptions. Probably she will make an exception for you, since you’re her daughter.’

  Eden was distracted, and shaken by the news. ‘Oh. Okay … Although I guess it doesn’t really matter now. It does go a long way to explain … Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  Eden looked at him. ‘This sounds terrible …’ she said.

  DeShaun shrugged. ‘Shoot.’

  Eden shook her head. ‘I don’t remember ever hearing about anyone in the family … But … This sounds so selfish, but, is this type of early onset Alzheimer’s … is it hereditary?’

  DeShaun shook his head. ‘No. Not as far as we know. The cause of Alzheimer’s is unknown, but the only identifiable risk factor is old age.’

  ‘So it’s not genetic,’ said Eden.

  ‘Well, if your identical twin had it, you’d be twenty-five per cent more likely to inherit it than the average person.’

  ‘But I don’t have an identical twin.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, there’s no genetic risk.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ she said, exhaling.

  ‘That’s not to say that you shouldn’t stay aware …’

  ‘Oh, I’ll always be aware,’ said Eden. ‘My God. My poor mother …’

  She shook her head and suddenly she was woozy. She began to see spots before her eyes. DeShaun seemed to recognize this, and jumped up from his chair. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ he said.

  Lightheaded and nauseous, Eden did as she was told.

  DeShaun put a comforting hand on her back. ‘Take deep breaths,’ he said.

  Eden nodded, and tried to follow his instructions. At first she thought she was going to throw up on the floor of the little lounge, but gradually, her stomach quieted and her head cleared. She sat back up.

  ‘Better?’ he said. He poured a cup of water and handed it to her.

  Eden sipped the cup and nodded.

  ‘Do you want me to call Lizzy? She could come over and get you. I know she’d be glad to. Maybe you shouldn’t be driving.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Eden. ‘Really. I’ll be okay. I just need a minute.’

  A nurse appeared at the doorway of the little lounge and grimaced apologetically. ‘Dr Jacquez. They need you in post-op.’

  ‘Okay, I’m coming,’ he said.

  The nurse backed out of the room.

  ‘I have to be getting back to work,’ he said, standing up. ‘I’m sorry, Eden. I know this wasn’t what you wanted to hear.’

  ‘I wanted the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I guess it pretty much answers the question,’ he said grimly, ‘about why your mother might have done what she did.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Eden whispered.

  ‘I always think it’s better to know,’ he said.

  Eden nodded, but could not meet his gaze as she rose from the chair and groped her way, almost blindly, toward the door.

  TWENTY

  Eden left the hospital in a daze, managed to find her rental car, and got inside. She turned on the engine but did not move. She imagined her mother, facing a future in which she would not even be able to care for herself, much less her disabled child. Eden thought about all the times she had wished her mother ill. For the first time, perhaps since Tara had walked out on them, she wished she could take it all back. She was sorry for her lack of forgiveness.

  Maybe while she was at it, she thought, she needed to look at Flynn in a new way as well. He must have known about Tara’s diagnosis. How much had he suffered? His wife was going to become helpless and demented, and his son needed constant care and would die anyway. He must have wondered why so much misery had been visited on him.

  She recalled him telling her that she did not know everything there was to know about Tara’s suicide. Was this diagnosis of dementia what he was obliquely referring to? If it was, why not just say so? Why not tell the insurance company, so that they would end their investigation and stop hounding him? Why not tell the police? The proof of Tara’s condition was readily available. And anyone could understand why a woman with this laundry list of dreadful problems might want to end it all. She was already stretched thin by caring for Jeremy. Once the Alzheimer’s took over her brain, she would be unable to do anything for him. Or even be certain that anyone else was caring for him.

  Now it makes sense, Eden thought.

  Except for that one puzzling, inexplicable fact. Tara had gone to another room and left her son to die alone. It always came back to that question. No one else seemed bothered by it.

  And then, suddenly, a simple answer occurred to her.

  Tara and Flynn had faced this crisis together. Surely they talked it over and considered all the terrible options. Perhaps Tara had told him that she wished she could end her life. But Tara would never have chosen to leave Jeremy alone, just as Eden surmised. Not in life. Not at the moment of death. So it couldn’t have been Tara who carried out this plan. Someone else had to do it. That was Flynn. But maybe it had nothing to do with an insurance windfall, or another woman, or any other selfish scenario. Maybe it was the desperate act of a loving husband.

  Eden leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  She knew that in the eyes of the law, his motive was not an issue. If he hastened their deaths, it was a crime. No matter what the circumstances, if Flynn was guilty, he had to pay the price. It was the only right thing. He should not inherit that insurance money and live a life of comfort and privilege. He should go to jail for what he did.

  She knew what the law said. But was the law right?

  One of Tara’s last acts on earth was to call Eden. What had she wanted? Because of her own stubborn, righteous anger, Eden would never know. All she would ever know for sure was that she turned her back on her mother at the fatal hour. She had turned away and left her mother’s plea unanswered. In this tragedy, she thought, who was really to blame?

  Eden needed time to think. She drove back to the motel and let herself in to the garden suite. She turned on a few lights and went into the bedroom. She crawled onto the bed and pulled a blanket over herself. She was shivering, despite sufficient heat in the room. For several hours she lay there, going over it all in her mind. At some point there was a knock at the door, and she heard Andy’s voice call out to her. ‘Eden? It’s Andy.’

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she called out.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just need to sleep.’

  Andy was quiet for a minute. Then he said, ‘Okay. Feel better.’

  After her neighbor had left the door, Eden thought about him, and his home in Indiana. A good man. A devoted husband and father. What would you do, Andy? she wondered. If it were your wife and child, faced with those insurmountable problems? What would anybody do?

  Eden replayed it all, again and again, in her mind. Be honest with yourself, she thought. You were no help to your mother. You were too angry to have sacrificed for her. You weren’t interested in their problems. You would have left them to suffer. Flynn loved them enough to risk carrying out her wishes.

  Nonetheless, she reminded herself, Flynn had no right to seal their fates for them. Maybe a jury would be kind to him, and understand the position he was in. Maybe he would not even go to jail.

  She flopped from her back to her front, as if she was being jabbed with a stick. She looked at another aspect of the situation. If there were an investigation Aaliya’s secret would come out. Flynn’s well-meaning but horrible plan to introduce her to the pleasures of lesbian sex would be exposed for all to see, and Aaliya’s world would be torn apart.

  Not my problem. Those are the breaks, Eden told herself without conviction. But she felt sick at the thought of that young woman inad
vertently becoming a target. Eden flopped over again.

  Finally, at nearly midnight, she made up her mind. She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. Examining herself in the garish light above the mirror, she reapplied a little make-up. She could hear the rain pelting the windows of the hotel suite. It was a nasty night out. She couldn’t let that stop her. Eden put on her coat, put up her collar and left the hotel, hurrying to avoid the sleeting rain, and let herself into her car.

  Eden drove to Flynn’s house and parked along the curb behind a line of other cars. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be home for the night. There were still lights on in the blue house, so it was clear that he was there, and awake. Eden turned off the engine and her lights, and steeled herself to knock on that door and confront him. She glanced at the house, mentally rehearsing what she would say to him when he answered her knock.

  Okay, she thought. Go ahead. And at that moment, as she marshaled her forces, the front door of Flynn’s house opened and someone came running out. A slightly built woman, who was wearing a coat with a hood, bolted out across the unkempt lawn and got into a car parked up the street. Light spilled out the front door, illuminating Flynn as he ran after her onto the lawn barefoot. Despite the rain on the windshield, Eden could see him, his hair plastered to his head in the downpour, his wet clothes sticking to his body, as he chased the woman to her car. He banged on the car window, but the woman drove off anyway. He watched her go dejectedly, and then, shivering, he went back into his house.

  Eden’s first impulse was to drive away. But then she reminded herself of her purpose. What difference did it make if her former stepfather was having female company, now that his wife and child were dead? That had nothing to do with her. Eden forced herself to get out of the car. She locked the door and walked up to the entrance of the house. She banged on the door. It only took a moment for the door to open.

  Flynn stood in the doorway, his towel-dried hair standing straight out from his head, the towel still draped over his shoulders. He was wearing no shirt, a hoody hurriedly half-zipped over his torso. He looked at his visitor, his eyes soft and alight with hope. And then he saw that it was Eden. His shoulders slumped, and his gaze became opaque, disinterested. ‘I was in the shower,’ he lied, as if to explain his soggy condition. ‘What do you want?’

  Eden ignored the lie. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘It’s kind of late.’

  ‘It’s important,’ she said.

  Flynn turned his back on her and started down the hall. ‘Come in.’

  Eden walked into the house, which was even more disorderly, and piled high with boxes, than it was the last time she had been here. She followed him into the living room. He gestured to the sofa and she sat down. There were two half-filled beer bottles on the coffee table.

  Flynn sat down cross-legged on the floor, his jeans still damp. The soles of his bare feet were fuzzy from where they had picked up lint from the carpet. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack, struck a match from the box on the table, and lit it. He inhaled deeply, let the smoke drift from his lips, toward Eden.

  ‘So what brings you here at this hour? If it’s about the book, I’m not going to change my mind.’

  ‘It’s not about the book,’ she said.

  Flynn narrowed his eyes. ‘What then?’

  Eden studied him, still baffled, despite his scruffy, sexy looks, that this was the man her mother had given everything for.

  ‘I think I know what happened,’ she said at last. ‘To my mom, and to Jeremy.’

  Flynn frowned and shook his head. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘No guessing games. I really don’t have the patience. I’ve had a difficult evening.’

  ‘I saw your friend running out,’ she said pointedly.

  Flynn stiffened, immediately wary. ‘Are you spying on me now?’

  ‘No,’ said Eden. ‘It’s not my business. You’re free to do what you like.’

  Flynn regarded her through the curling smoke of his cigarette. ‘Yes, I certainly am. Now what is it that you think you know?’

  Eden took a deep breath. ‘Oh, I know it all right. I was able to get a hold of the autopsy report on my mother. I asked a doctor to interpret it for me. And what he had to say was very startling. Stunning, really. I found out that my mother was taking medications for Alzheimer’s. Early onset. The worst kind.’

  Flynn lowered his chin, and stubbed out his cigarette. Even when the cigarette was well and truly extinguished, he did not look up.

  ‘All at once I understood,’ Eden said. ‘She was facing a hopeless situation. An unbearable fate. She was going to lose her mind, little by little, until she didn’t even know who she was. She was going to be unable to care for herself, never mind Jeremy. It was a death sentence by slow torture.’

  Still he did not look up. He shook his head, and wiped the sleeve of his sweatshirt across his eyes.

  For some reason she was surprised by his obvious grief. ‘You knew, of course,’ she said, wondering if she had presumed too much.

  ‘She was my wife!’ he whispered. ‘Of course I knew.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eden murmured, genuinely contrite at the sight of his sorrow.

  Flynn pulled himself together. He began to speak, but he did not look at her. His voice was shaky. ‘It’s just as well that you found out.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Eden asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell the insurance people?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t any of their business. All right, I was just being stubborn. I probably should have told you. But what good would it do? And, if she didn’t tell you …’

  Once again, in a kind of agony, Eden remembered the phone call that she left unanswered, the night before Tara died. Had Tara been planning to tell her? Hoping to explain …

  Flynn wiped his eyes again, and took a deep breath. ‘It seemed to come on overnight. Suddenly she started slipping. Little things at first. Soon she was forgetting things. Getting lost in familiar places. Not knowing … I thought it was all the stress with Jeremy. But then, one day, she said to me, “It’s not just a few things. It’s starting to be everything …”’ Flynn closed his eyes at the memory. ‘I knew then, even before the diagnosis … But still. When it came … That was … a catastrophe.’

  ‘It must have been,’ murmured Eden. ‘What a terrible thing to hear about your wife.’

  Flynn shook his head. ‘You can’t imagine,’ he said.

  Yes, I can, Eden thought. I’m not an inexperienced child. She’d learned a lot about anguish during her father’s illness. But, she reminded herself, this was different. She’d never had to face the loss of her soulmate, her lover. ‘Well, when I learned about her condition, it made a lot of things clearer to me,’ she said.

  Flynn sighed. ‘I’m glad you get it. This is why I had no trouble understanding it. I wasn’t even that surprised. All along, with Jeremy, she had tried so hard to be hopeful. To find the positive in everything. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis just destroyed her. Not for her own sake so much, as for Jeremy. She loved that child …’

  He lowered his head again, and his voice faded. Eden waited patiently for him to recover his composure. Finally, he sniffed and looked up again, avoiding her gaze. Eden resisted an urge to reach out and put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  ‘She was in a panic about the future. I kept trying to tell her not to worry, even though I was in a panic myself. I told her that I would look after her and Jeremy, that we would remain here, close to Dr Tanaka, and that she didn’t need to worry. But all she could think about was what would happen to him once she was unable to care for him anymore. She always said that no one could care for him the way she did.’

  ‘I can hear her saying that,’ said Eden. ‘She must have been terrified. Really. It all makes sense to me now …’

  ‘It was horrible. Just a nightmare.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Eden said. ‘I can’t even … What an excruciating decision. No one can really know what they would do in the s
ame situation. Look, I just wanted to tell you that I do respect the choice you made. If I know my mother, she was the one who brought it up. That would be just like her.’

  Flynn frowned at her. ‘What?’

  Eden grimaced apologetically. ‘I’m trying to be frank here. What I’m saying is that I’m sure you didn’t act unilaterally on this. You must have discussed it beforehand. And I’m sure she didn’t want to know the day or the hour, so to speak. She trusted you to do this for her when the time was right.’

  Flynn peered at her with a combination of wonder and horror, as if she were shapeshifting in front of his eyes. ‘What are you talking about? Are you out of your mind?’ he asked.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Eden was taken aback by his reaction. ‘I’m trying to tell you that I understand.’

  Flynn gaped at her. ‘Wow, I never expected that,’ he said.

  ‘What? I thought you’d appreciate the fact that I get it,’ Eden said hurriedly. ‘I recognize that you were in an impossible position.’

  ‘Let me see if I have this right,’ he said slowly. ‘You think that your mother and I planned the murder/suicide together, and she left it to me to carry out the plan … what? When I felt like it?’

  ‘I don’t know what your plan was,’ Eden said in exasperation. ‘All I know is that once I found out about the Alzheimer’s, it all suddenly made sense to me. My mother’s desperation. The fact that you two were so close, and there was no one else she could turn to. I have a lot of sympathy for you. For the terrible quandary you found yourselves in. And the choice you made … Anyone with an ounce of compassion would find it was understandable.’

  Flynn shook his head in disgust. ‘You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.’

  Eden had expected him to protest, perhaps. Not want to confess it outright. But she had not expected his anger. ‘Hey, sometimes people do extreme things under a lot of stress. I want you to know that I am not judging you for what … happened. I’m sure the letter of the law would hold you accountable. You’d probably go to jail for it. But I have given it a lot of thought, and I want you to know that no one will ever hear about it from me.’