The next day, Edward watched Dr. Price’s face hidden behind a medical face mask and a plastic shield, positioning and then dragging the scalpel from shoulder to sternum, right shoulder first, then left, and then down to the pubic bone, exposing her ribs and muscles. He began to snip the ribs with rib cutters that reminded Edward of pruning shears.
Taking out the brain took the longest, a loud whirring saw cut off the top of the skull. There were hammers involved, then came the moment during the autopsy when his senses began to be assaulted: everything reeked. Gallbladder bile smelled sour and acidic, the bowels were earthy, almost muddy. He got light-headed but forced himself to watch one organ after another being removed. The medical examiner point at individual bruises on Rachel Dunlap’s body.
“Cause of death?” Edward asked, attempting to speed it along.
“On appearance,” Dr. Price told him, “a front bumper made contact with her hip and upper thigh region. An SUV probably, not a sedan. That impact caused the rotation of her upper body, the legs turned sideways before her right side made contact with the ground, her chest and shoulder region, to be exact. Resulting in multiple rib fractures.”
Edward waited with anticipation. “I don’t understand,” he said and squinted, barely glancing at the body in front of him. This sounded as insignificant as a fall from a bike.
“She was struck by a vehicle traveling at an approximate speed of ten to fifteen miles an hour. She was not killed on impact. Internal bleeding did her in.”
Edward blinked, trying to understand the implications.
“A perfect storm,” Dr. Price continued. “There are not always outward symptoms to warn injured victims that they are in jeopardy. She probably felt fine for a while. A trip to an emergency room, a trauma center prepared for this type of injury would have saved her life. Once the lungs were perforated and her chest began to fill with blood, the injuries became life-threatening in a matter of—”
“What are the odds,” Edward interrupted.
“Odds? Happens more often than you think.”
“How long until it was too late? Until she bled out?”
“It started internally. See here.” Dr. Price looked up at Edward and pointed at the vena cava. “There’s the rupture. By the time she felt light-headed and had abdominal pain, it was too late. Twenty minutes from that point at the most. Give or take. She could have been saved but like I said, the perfect storm.”
The perfect storm. So little time. How quickly Penelope would have had to act to save her. Calling an ambulance might not have been enough. She could have alerted someone, anyone who was better prepared to handle this situation, yet it seemed impossible to put all this decision-making on his daughter. It sounded so far out of her reach.
“You said an SUV?”
“You are looking for an SUV with very little damage,” Dr. Price continued. “I found no glass on the body so the windshield didn’t shatter.” He had paused and taken in a deep breath. “You hit the right spot at the right angle and that’s all it takes. Probably didn’t know what hit her.”
“What’s the cause of death?”
“I’ll classify COD as vehicular blunt force trauma. The crime scene was a riddle for me at first. Not a drop of blood anywhere and a body void of blood.” He stretched his mouth into a grimace. “That’s the stuff urban legends are made of.” He cocked his head. “If it rained that night, that would explain it,” he said and zipped up the body bag. “Depends on how heavy the rain was.”
“Are there any leads?”
“I don’t understand this, Edward. Is there anything you need to know specifically—”
“No, I just, I’ve taken an interest, ever since, you know . . . they died the same night and . . .” Edward didn’t finish the sentence.
Dr. Price placed his right hand against his chest in what Edward took as an attempt to convey that he understood his pain. His desperation.
“Edward . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m so sorry about your daughter, I know there are no words . . .” He paused as if he’d caught himself in a moment telling a grieving father how to mourn his child.
Edward left and when the door closed behind him, he was glad Price hadn’t mentioned Donna at all. There was no telling what he might have confessed.
He sat in his car in the parking lot and it was then he remembered the tomatoes from his mother’s garden, the way she lined them up in single-file rows with a walking path between each one and how puny they were and had to be left to ripen off the vine because there was never enough sun in Ohio. He attempted to escape from the present with those memories but even his mother’s tomatoes reminded him of blood, and all he wanted to do was rest, pace his thoughts, and he’d be fine but at the same time he knew something was going to trip him up. He began to shake and he knew he’d go home and wash his hands over and over for the better part of an hour. Now that he’d seen Rachel again, he’d try to scrub away the blood he knew he still had on his hands after that night but they’d never feel clean. He was sure of that.
He still knew very little about that night, the state of the woman’s body just a consequence of Penelope’s action, yet what that action was motivated by, he still couldn’t tell. Did Penelope know the woman? That had been tearing at him, the not knowing part a vampire feeding on him, sucking the life force out of him, as if knowing the why of the accident would extend to the why of his very own failings. In his mind he went over it but the gaps were going to claim his sanity, soon.
Though he felt as if he was searching for all those answers at once, he still had some fight in him. Some, not much. But some. Donna would come around so he could sort it all out. She had to.
52
EDWARD
Edward was unable to work. He spilled his coffee every morning. The tremor in his hands, which used to kick in while he was doing something, just to go away when he was not, had turned from intermittent into a steady rhythmic shaking. His fingers were slow, as if weighed down, and felt thick and clumsy.
What happened?
What happened?
What happened?
What happened?
How many more times could he ask Donna and not get an answer?
Weeks passed and Donna didn’t so much as utter a word. Edward’s life had become a never-ending circle of caretaking, of washing and dressing her, bringing her food.
There was a picture on the wall opposite from Donna’s bed, and he saw her stare at it every day, some expressionist garden scene with women gathering around a table. In a spur of the moment, Edward tipped the painting slightly to the right.
The very next day Donna pointed at it. Two months into her silence, Donna had come back to life, gesturing and making demands to fix a lopsided picture on the wall. The day after, it was a chair turned on a wrong angle. The morning after that, Donna woke with a voice as raw as sandpaper.
“Where is Penelope?”
Edward was taken aback at first, thought her to be in a half-sleep state where reality hadn’t quite set in yet. He caught something in her eyes that made him pause—there was no hint of knowing, just a mundane question to which she expected a mundane answer. At work. In her room. Shopping. Out.
Edward held her hand, stroked her cheek. He explained it to her. He told her about the cremation, about how he planned to buy a niche, a compartment within the columbarium at the cemetery, where Penelope’s memorial would be maintained in perpetuity.
He cried. She cried. A burst of emotions, crying and carrying on. Then she descended back into silence.
The following morning she asked again. He stared at her but she wouldn’t break his gaze and he realized she had completely exiled the truth of that night. He couldn’t make sense of it. If she didn’t recall that night, what was she mourning? If she didn’t remember Penelope’s death, who was she grieving?
There was only one logical explanation.
Edward drove Donna to the hospital, consulted a neurologist, the best money could buy. “She’s faking it,” he told the neurologist. “Nothing’s medically wrong with her but she can’t remember? Or won’t? To be honest, she’d been making a lot of strange choices before this all happened.” It was the only explanation he could think of, since any kind of brain injury had been ruled out. He insisted on it. “She’s acting. What else could it be? We’ve exhausted every avenue there is.”
“I have looked over your wife’s file and the doctors have been thorough. I can’t think of a single test I’d run. As far as pretending not to remember, that will prove difficult to diagnose, because it’s not a diagnosis in itself. I want to caution you to not focus on that alone. It’ll take time to figure this out. The decline more so than the state of a patient tells us the direction they’re heading in and the subsequent diagnosis. We shouldn’t jump the gun just yet. There’s a number of things this could be. Or like you said, it’s nothing at all.”
“What else can I do?” Edward demanded. Certainly waiting for new symptoms to appear wasn’t the answer here. He couldn’t take this teetering back and forth between silence and absolute despair for much longer, every time she mentioned Penelope. “There must be something. Anything.”
“Maybe you should take her to a psychiatrist. It might all be psychosomatic,” the doctor said.
A week later they sat in the waiting room of a psychiatrist who specialized in emotional and behavioral disorders, as well as in neurology. Donna entered the office and emerged thirty minutes later.
“How did it go?” Edward asked as he helped her into the car.
She seemed slow to Edward, delayed in her responses, yet she was able to relay questions the psychiatrist had asked. Later, at lunch at a restaurant, their first real outing since Penelope’s death, she complained about the apron color of the waiters and faint stains on the tablecloth. She was Donna, yet there was a sense about her that Edward, for lack of a better word, called improvising. Donna was improvising her life, if there was such a thing. And he waited for her to take a turn either way.
* * *
• • •
As much as Donna disregarded Edward’s need to know, she was relentless in her very own pursuit of the truth. Every morning she posed the same question to him—“Where is Penelope?”—and every morning he relayed to her what had happened. The accident. The blood. His disposing of the body. His return to the house. Their bodies in the foyer. He whispered it to her at first, in an attempt to lessen the blow, but as days went by he changed from an elaborate account to a shortened version just to end up at a bare-bones description and a statement containing only three words: “Penelope is dead.”
Every morning, he killed Penelope again with his words and every morning Donna relived the moment. Every morning she sat in shock, then cried and wailed and buried her face in her hands. Over and over and over. Every morning he showed her the urn on the mantel, and every morning she asked to touch it and she clenched it like little girls hold on to baby dolls.
Slowly but surely Donna came around, was quicker to respond, even began to brush her teeth and take showers on her own. One day, she demanded he dye her roots, and he applied the chemicals and then rinsed her hair while she sat in the tub. He stared at her neck, her vertebrae protruding, and he thought of his daughter and her broken C1, 2, and 3 vertebrae, and as the water ran down her neckline and the towel he had propped up caught the drops, they turned red and he pressed his eyes shut and when he opened them again, they were just water and Donna stared at him with a quizzical look on her face.
“Thank you, darling,” she said and kissed the palm of his hand.
* * *
• • •
Then a phone call came from the police. A detective was coming by to ask Donna some questions.
53
EDWARD
Just finally paying you a visit,” the detective said after the condolences, acting nonchalant as if he had decided to pop by while he was in the neighborhood. Edward had been declining the visit for weeks but there was only so long he could keep the police at bay.
Edward had made rules inside his head for the interview. He didn’t want the detective in the bedroom upstairs, determined to keep him as far as possible from Penelope’s room and the banister, the bare ceiling where the chandelier used to be. He led Donna to the top of the stairs and she held on to the railing with one hand and placed a crutch on the side of the injured hip. It took them forever to get to the bottom of the stairs and Edward had planned it that way. Who would interrogate a woman this fragile, this helpless, he wondered. From there, with the detective following them, he steered her into the living room and toward a chair, where he draped a blanket over Donna’s thighs. She sat angelic and fragile in her blond and privileged beauty, her filled and peeled skin surprisingly holding up well, her perfectly capped teeth, her formerly Botoxed forehead, now frowning occasionally. But she was no longer passing for late thirties. And there were the bags under her eyes.
Detective Lee was in his fifties. Tall. Lean. Ill-fitting suit. Paying a visit. What a polite thing to do.
“Tell me what happened that night?” Detective Lee asked and leaned forward, his hands flat on his thighs.
Donna seemed hard of hearing and cocked her head as if she was listening to a voice coming from afar but didn’t say a word.
“Can you tell me what happened?” The detective raised his voice, not by much, but it came across as strict.
Donna flinched. She wasn’t used to being spoken to in a harsh tone.
“I need to know what happened so we can close the case. Like I said, a formality.”
“Penelope, she, I just don’t know, she . . .”
Edward watched his wife collect herself—the deep breath, the elongated spine, the lifted chin, yet her glossy eyes gave it away. She was approaching the edge of her calm state. Rub some dirt on it, he thought, but then regretted it. They were in this together, he reminded himself. What befalls her, befalls me.
Donna and Detective Lee were getting nowhere. She had paused to pour tea, and Edward wondered what was next. The more Donna got to talk, the more likely she’d slip up. Had he not told her to allude to an appointment or a migraine or something? He just wanted to get it over with, but at the same time he didn’t want the detective to make the trip out again.
Edward watched the detective scan the rugs, the furniture, the paintings, down to the antique tea set with steaming earl or lord or whatever tea Donna had requested. She didn’t brew it herself, he had made the tea and set it down on the coffee table and it was fragrant in a citrusy way, making him nauseous, and he wished she hadn’t insisted on it.
The detective was drawing conclusions about his family, Edward could tell. The items in this room alone were worth more than a detective makes in a lifetime. It hardly qualified as a room, given the architecture, the size, and the ceiling height. The detective stared at the coffee table, at the framed family photograph at a cabin, a wooden sign on the door, Carpe Diem. Seize the day. The word cabin was misleading, the expansive porch with a lake behind them was somewhere between luxury and extravagance. Look at us, Edward thought, what an epitome of a successful family we are. Were, he corrected himself.
“Mrs. Pryor. I don’t mean to rush you, but we are trying to close the file, figure out why your daughter did this. This is really just a formality.”
Edward had to give it to the detective. He was diplomatic, sensitive, and appropriate. He was reminded of his very own bedside manner, something he was good at, there never had been one complaint in all those years. Not one.
It was then that Donna’s composure took a turn. Something in her cracked.
“Wait, just wait,” Donna pleaded, “just give me a minute. I have to think about this. I can’t quite remember. Wait. Wait. Wait.” She bal
led her hand into a fist, beating it rhythmically against her forehead. “I’m trying to . . . you know . . . I don’t really . . .” Donna paused for a second. “All that blood, I had never seen so much blood. It was everywhere,” she stammered, then collected herself. “We thought, you know, Penny sometimes took it too far, and when Edward told me—”
“Don’t get upset. It’s okay.” Edward patted Donna’s back, then squeezed her hand. “My wife is not well, as you can see. I don’t think we should continue questioning today. I’ve tried. A psychiatrist has tried. There’s just no use, not at this point,” Edward explained. “She’s trying to come to terms with everything, I’m not sure how much she remembers, if at all. I’m as confused as you are, as she is. We are going to cut this short.”
“I don’t want to cause any—”
“Detective,” Edward interrupted and paused as if he couldn’t remember his name. It had been coming to this point for a long time and it was only a matter of time until it all went down the drain, all for naught. “Lee, was it? Detective Lee. My wife is hardly in the condition to endure any more questions. She lost her daughter, Detective, her only daughter. Our only daughter. I doubt she’ll be able to tell you any more than she already has. We’ll have our lawyer draw up a statement and you can refer back to it. It will be as detailed as possible and if you have any questions, I’d appreciate it if you contact our lawyer.”
Detective Lee left and Edward sat in the spot where the detective had sat earlier. He looked around, wanting to see this room the way the detective had, wanted to be able to judge what kind of man he assumed him to be as if he was unclear about it himself. He came up empty. Instead he wondered if the cleaning people came in with ladders given the ceiling height of the rooms. A realization: he had no clue. Where had he been all those years? Why did he not know anything? Another one: from now on Edward had to be afraid of someone insisting on speaking with Donna. He anticipated she would one day, out of the blue, tell a random person—a doctor, a nurse, or a neighbor—what had happened that day.
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