Red House Blues

by sallie tierney

  Suzan took a sip of cold coffee.

  “I came home one afternoon looking for notes I needed for Gothic Architecture and I found the drugs. Later it occurred to me he wanted me to find them . . . anyway, I just lost it. It was as if someone kicked me in the stomach. I called the police and they sent an officer over to talk to me. It was Sean’s bad luck that she was still here when he came home. He went ballistic, shouting at me, out of control. The officer searched him and found a bag in his pocket. That was it. She cuffed him and read him his rights.”

  The officer named Keith joined the conversation for the first time. “We saw that the judge only gave him ninety days in rehab, as he had no priors. Could be you saved him from something worse down the line, Mrs. Pike.”

  Suzan could see in his eyes he realized what he said almost as soon as he said it. There had been no “down the line”, no future for Sean. Sean was dead.

  “You said he left the day he got out of rehab?” said Paula.

  “Yes. Sean said I betrayed him. Those were his words. I betrayed him. He didn’t know me anymore. Didn’t want to know me. Then he was gone,” she said. “I didn’t even try to explain or stop him. I agreed with everything he said about me. I still regret what I did. When I found the drugs I should have waited for him to come home, should have sat him down and talked to him. We might have been able to work through it. I didn’t give him a chance.”

  Only then did the threat of tears sting the back of her eyes. The magnitude of what she had done to their marriage rushed over her like tsunami.

  “I’m sure you did what you thought was right,” said Keith

  “Can you think of anyone else we should talk to, Suzan? You spoke of his friend . . . did you say his name was Tony?” asked Paula.

  “Tony Gabriola. I can get you his number but I can’t imagine what he would have to add. He didn’t know where Sean went either. He’s going to be devastated when he hears what happened.” Oh please, thought Suzan, don’t let it be me who has to tell Tony!

  There wasn’t much else anyone could say. The detectives sipped their coffee and tried to convince her she had done the right thing but Suzan’s thoughts drifted in and out of focus. How had it all fallen apart? They had been so in love. Or so it had seemed. No, Sean loved me once, I’m sure of it. There is not a doubt in my mind. I am the person I have doubts about.

  “How did he die?” she asked at last, because she thought it was expected of her. “You said it was a hit and run but you’re from homicide. That means someone did this to him on purpose. Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”

  Keith shifted in his chair. “Evidence suggests that the driver of the car deliberately veered onto the sidewalk to strike your husband, Mrs. Pike. Suzan. His housemates say they were all together that night at a concert that ended around two. They say your husband decided to walk home from there. We think he was struck around two-thirty, quarter to three.”

  “Someone ran him down on a sidewalk? He wasn’t crossing the street?”

  “That’s right. He was only a block from where he was living.”

  Living. Her stomach lurched. The two police officers went on to relate more about the case, though not all they knew of course, just what they felt she needed to know. Little of it actually registered.

  Suzan later could not remember walking the detectives to the door. Was there someone they could call to be with her, they asked. She didn’t think so. She had had nearly two years to get used to the idea that Sean was gone, that he would never come back. Why was everything suddenly so much more final now? She couldn’t understand it, how numb she felt staring at the closed door. The police had said what they had come to say then they were gone back to Seattle, that mysterious place where her husband lived his last two years with strangers. A house on Fir Street in the heart of the city, they had said. It meant nothing.

  She picked up the coffee cups and took them to the sink. The detectives hadn’t touched the Fig Newtons and she couldn’t blame them. The cookies had gone as hard as ceramic tile. She slid them into the garbage can under the sink and the plate into an already overflowing dishpan.

  It occurred to her she should call her friend Claire after all. Tell her Sean was dead. Really dead. Maybe Claire would come over and keep her company for a while. But she was probably at work and Tony might answer the phone. She didn’t know what she would say to Tony. She couldn’t talk to him yet.

  I might cry. What’s worse, I might not. Later, when I understand how this thing happened to us. When I can feel something again.

  There was nothing left now, she thought, but to bury her husband, do the dishes, take out the garbage. She sank into a chair and did nothing at all as the afternoon drifted away like smoke on a breeze.

  In the end she took the coward’s way out, called Claire at the coffee shop and had her tell Tony before he learned from a chance story on the internet that his childhood friend was run down like a dog on the streets of the big city. Suzan felt like crap about it, but then she already felt like crap about life in general. Why shouldn’t Tony share some of the misery?

  Chapter 2

  In the weeks following Sean’s funeral Suzan painted three more watercolors in a series she was working on that term. Not one of them pleased her. They were conventional, lack-luster. She was going through the motions. Life tears you up and spits you out, she thought, and still the day-to-day machinery chugs along. She was in the studio late most nights, sometimes getting shooed out by security. Her advisor assigned a still life to “round out the portfolio”.

  “I know you’ve done a million of these in drawing class over the years,” he said. “What I’d like you to do this time is stretch yourself. I want you to do a subject you didn’t select but approach it with your own individual style. Make it your own. I don’t want depiction. I want to see what goes on at a gut level between you and the subject.”

  Suzan hadn’t told Professor Evanson about her husband. She didn’t want to endure the same kind of ignorant sympathy people served up when he had left her two years before. Life goes on. At least she hoped that was true.

  It was business as usual on campus as autumn quarter progressed. Red and gold leaves skittered across the brick walks as she trudged between classes. Freshmen didn’t look nearly as lost as they had the previous month. And her advisor was nagging her to get her grad school applications out, put the portfolio on disks, and send it around. He had the illusion she cared. In reality Suzan was having doubts about grad school. It didn’t make much sense anymore considering that after paying her share of the funeral she would need another scholarship and a loan or hit a big win in Lotto if she were to make it to grad school. And after grad school, what? She didn’t need a degree to paint and teaching didn’t appeal to her. She would have to get a job if she was to keep the apartment and manage the bills. Claire would give her a job at the coffee shop if things got dire.

  She didn’t want to think any farther ahead than tomorrow’s breakfast. Nothing was keeping her in Bellingham now that she wasn’t waiting for Sean to return. She could apply anywhere, go anywhere. The knowledge that he was never coming home should have freed her from uncertainty. But free wasn’t what she felt. The weeks remaining in the quarter flowed away, so much pale water. Suzan somehow completed requirements without caring much what the outcome would be.

  Months went by and Suzan didn’t hear another word from Seattle P.D. Sean’s case had gone as cold as Kirk Cobain. He was nothing but pocket change and Jockey shorts sealed in bags in a cardboard evidence box. Have to stop thinking about it, she told herself. They’ll get the creep eventually. But what if they don’t? What if it was just an impulse killing? Someone getting off on the excitement of picking off some poor pedestrian in the night. Maybe the guy was drunk and doesn’t even remember doing it. What if he never suffers for his crime? What happens to me? How do I set it aside and continue? Questions with no answers.

  A few days before winter break she came home to an ice-cold apartment.
Had she forgotten to pay the gas bill? Wouldn’t be at all surprised. Keeping her jacket on, she went to the kitchen and pulled a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle from the shelf. As an afterthought she rummaged around in the cabinet and pulled out the tag end of a fifth of scotch left over from Christmas.

  Not being much of a drinker, she wasn’t sure scotch went with chicken soup and there wasn’t anything in the cupboard to pour it into besides a chipped coffee mug. She decided as long as she was alone and not expecting Martha Stewart it would do. The first gulp seared its way through the ice crystals in her stomach. Just the thing to thaw her out enough to get the soup on, she thought. She took another sip or two to keep the process going.

  “Now, to find that stupid can opener,” she muttered to herself. It turned up under a newspaper at the end of the counter. Now for a spoon. Not a single one left in the drawer. Great. Knew there was something I forgot at the store. Dish washing liquid! Every single item of kitchen gear was in the dishpan under cold scummy water. Suzan would have to go fishing for a spoon she could rinse and reuse.

  The whiskey was working its magic. She pushed up her sleeves and thrust her hand down into the water.

  “Damn!” Suzan screamed. Something had sliced straight through her palm in the cold sludge. Grabbing a dishtowel from the rack to wrap her hand, she knocked the open soup can to the floor. The boning knife. Forgot the damn boning knife was in the pan. The room took a slippery lurch as she felt herself sliding to the floor, unsure whether the dizziness was a result of the scotch or shock. Suddenly there seemed to be blood everywhere and soup spreading out over the floor.

  She didn’t hear the knock on the door, didn’t hear Claire let herself in with her house-sitting key.

  “God, Suzan, what the hell did you do?” Claire ran to where her friend was sitting in a pool of soup and blood, her back against the kitchen cabinet.

  “Hold out your hand and let me see. Damn! You’re going to need stitches,” she said, inspecting the damage. “Can you get up?”

  Claire managed to get her to her feet, sitting her in a kitchen chair.

  “I’m going to get your coat. It’s pouring out there. Will you be okay while I get your coat? We’re going to have to get you to the hospital. ”

  “I can’t.” She buried her face in the bloody towel. All she wanted to do at that moment was curl into a tight ball.

  “Okay, suit yourself but hold onto that towel.”

  Claire retrieved Suzan’s blue jacket from the back of the couch.

  “Let me put this around your shoulders. I’m taking you to my car.”

  Suzan shuddered as Claire eased her into the passenger side of the old Ford Escort.

  “I don’t know what to do, Claire,” she whispered. There seemed to be blood everywhere.

  “No, probably not. For now what we’ll do is get you stitched up, then go out for pizza. Your kitchen is a garbage dump on steroids.”

  “Not much of a plan,” she said, noticing for the first time that Claire was wet from the rain, her face chalky, her lips pinched to a thin line. She’s scared. Claire, who’s always in control. Some friend I turned out to be not to notice.

  “Remind me to give you a piece of my mind after I’m patched up,” said Suzan. “You know, for the kitchen remark.”

  “Sure,” the ghost of a smile returning to her face.

  The emergency room at St. Joseph’s was filled with coughing old men, and a collection of screaming babies wrestling with their frantic mothers. All appeared to have been waiting for hours. Magazines littered every surface including the green vinyl floor but no one was reading.

  Claire filled out the admission forms while commenting on the idiocy of asking people to fill out endless paperwork while bleeding all over themselves and their surroundings. What did people do who had no friends or family to wield a pen?

  Blood must be the magic key to unlock the medical machine, thought Suzan, as a wide nurse in blue scrubs materialized from down the hall to escort her to a treatment room. What followed was a triage nurse, a rapid parade of medical personnel, a pinching blood pressure cuff, a shot of anesthetic and twenty stitches expertly rendered by a very solicitous internist.

  They wheeled her back to the E. R. entrance a few minutes over an hour after she had entered, her damaged hand bandaged and held in a navy blue sling. Claire draped her jacket over her shoulders.

  “I’ll go get the car,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”

  “Funny girl. I’m not sure I can even get out of this wheelchair. I’m up to the gills with pain pills.”

  “Nice rhyme, sweetie. That may or may not be a good sign,” she said. “How about we go get us some pizza? My treat. Your chicken noodle soup is on the kitchen floor back at the apartment.”

  “I’m not hungry, Claire.”

  “It’s the least you can do to indulge your long suffering driver, she famished.”

  “You’re always famished. I think you have a tape worm.”

  Chapter 3

  The pizza was pepperoni with mushrooms and jalapeno peppers. Claire, who ordered with no input from her quiet friend, dived in like a cougar on a Bambi breakfast. Suzan nibbled listlessly at the first slice she managed to tear off with her remaining operational hand.

  “You’re going to make me feel bad if you don’t eat up,” said Claire between bites. “Come on, you have to keep up your strength.”

  “Something’s bothering me.”

  “You think? Hey, I got that part. You sliced and diced your hand. Life has been living hell lately. God, Suze, don’t know how you’ve managed this well with what’s come down the . . . well, pike at you,” she said. “Anything in particular you want to share?”

  “You know the first thing that triage nurse asked me, Claire?” she began. “She asked if this was a self-inflicted injury. I got all smart-mouthed and said sure it was self-inflicted; I jam my hands onto boning knives every day of the week just for kicks.”

  “Jeeze, it’s a wonder she didn’t send you off to the psych unit.”

  “I knew that legally she had to ask the question. But it just ticked me off. Okay, it wasn’t the best thing to say, under the circumstances,” said Suzan. “But you know, it got me to thinking. What if I really did cut myself on purpose? Not consciously of course. Isn’t it possible I want to suffer for what I did to Sean?”

  “You didn’t do a thing to Sean, you moron. He drugged himself up, got busted, then bailed on you.”

  “You think Tony would agree with that?”

  “That’s just Tony. He has his own demons and they have nothing to do with you.”

  “Well sure, I understand that,” she said. “But when the nurse asked me that question I saw myself through her eyes as some pathetic head case. I thought maybe I might have gone a little crazy lately and not realized it until just now. Does that make sense?”

  “Not even remotely. You’re just having a delayed reaction. It’s perfectly normal.”

  “I’m not sure what I know anymore. Today I did something really embarrassing, something I never thought I’d be tempted to do. I gulped down some whiskey just to warm myself up. A couple of glasses. For warmth. At least that’s what I told myself but I think I wanted to get drunk, and fast. I wanted to blot myself out. Isn’t that how it starts? The slippery slope toward alcoholism. That makes me no better than Sean.”

  “That’s a load of bull, Suzan Pike. I did wonder why you smelled like a long night in Vegas,” she said. “But sweetie, everyone feels like that sometimes. Everyone cuts loose and gets wasted once in a while. After all you’ve been through I’m surprised it’s taken you so long to decide to get hammered.”

  “You may be right, but with my history . . . I never told you about my mother. She had a problem with alcohol. It scares me that it wouldn’t take much for me to go that way. She tried to negate herself. I understand now that Sean wanted the same kind of oblivion. It’s a knife-edge and I was that close myself.”

  �
��Knife edge,” said Claire. “Good choice of words in this case. But hell, Suze, not everyone tempted by ‘the dark side’ dives over that edge. You’re stronger than that.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I swear I don’t know anything anymore. How do I know how much it would take?” she said. “Mom didn’t start out a drunk but in the end she just couldn’t cope with being a Navy wife, being on her own so much of the time, moving us all over the world. I was just a kid but I can still see her sprawled on the couch, her hand brushing the carpet where a glass lay on its side. She failed us and she failed herself.” And now I’m failing myself.

  “Did Sean know about your mom?”

  “No. Dad didn’t want anyone to know, even Sean. We told everyone Mom died of cancer. I think he was ashamed of what happened, that she drank herself to death.”

  “Do you think he might have felt partially responsible?”

  The implication hung in the air.

  “You’re saying I’m doing the same thing, blaming myself for something I couldn’t have prevented?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I hate when people answer a question with a question,” said Suzan. “Damn, Claire, I had my life so well planned I thought nothing could derail me. Sean and I used to talk about what we were going to do. We had it worked out to the last detail. I’d complete my masters degree while he worked until we had enough saved, then we’d open our gallery downtown. I took it for granted that it was all settled.”

  Suzan pushed an uneaten scrap of pizza crust from one side of her plate to the other.

  “Well, best laid plans and all that. In my limited experience it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense compulsively planning for the future. Always seems to go to crap when you least expect it.”

  “All I wanted was . . . I don’t know, something to depend on,” said Suzan. “Growing up, all we did was move from base to base. I hated it. I saw kids whose families had been in the same place for generations and I wanted that kind of security so bad I could taste it. Was it too much to ask to have a normal life? Husband, job, home?”