by Julia Keller
“I just wondered,” Sandy was saying, “if you saw anybody around here tonight.”
“What? Who?”
“Oh, I just mean—has there been anything—like, unusual?”
She was fishing, but for what? Ellie knew she ought to invite Sandy inside. It was getting chilly out there. But she held back. The invisible wall between them was higher and harder than ever; the hurt Sandy had inflicted upon her—telling their other friends about the problems with Tyler, leading the unofficial neighborhood campaign to isolate the Toppings—was still there, still hot and bristling. They treat us like lepers, Ellie thought, and Sandy here, my good friend Sandy—ha!—is the ringleader.
So—nope. Freeze your ass off, for all I care. I’m not inviting you into my house. Not anymore.
“No,” Ellie said.
“Okay, well. I just thought—it’s just that I was out walking and I thought I saw something.” Her smile looked astonishingly fake to Ellie. “But you’re sure.”
“Yes.”
Sandy nodded. She had abandoned the palm-cupping-opposite-elbow stance by now and crossed her arms, tightly hugging her own torso.
“Well, okay, then,” Sandy said. The phony grin subsided, replaced by an expression of concern that looked equally phony. Ellie knew this expression well; she was fairly sure Sandy refined it by watching Dr. Phil. “Like I said the other day, if you ever need anybody to talk to, we can sit down with a cup of—”
“I’ve got dinner in the oven. Better go check on it.”
Ellie shut the big front door before Sandy could utter even one more pointless, insultingly inane and insincere platitude. The lines were clear: The Banvilles were superior—blessed, even—because their children were thriving. The Toppings were lesser because their son was a mess.
Simple as that.
Ellie stood in the living room, breathing hard, watching the closed door as if she expected it to do something. Fly open, give her sass—something. She didn’t give a damn what Sandy had seen or hadn’t seen in the neighborhood tonight. She wasn’t the least bit curious.
She had a theory: Sandy was probably just snooping. Hoping to catch the Toppings in some dramatic moment, with Tyler raving, Brett threatening, her cowering, a scene that Sandy could then describe to the Blankenships and the Coverdells and the Martins and every other damned family, up and down the block. Everybody knew Tyler was living at home again. Hard to keep it secret, when he showed up on the street all the time, grinning that stupid grin, falling down.
Ellie turned and walked back into the kitchen, wondering along the way if Brett would prefer green beans or salad with his dinner. Truth was, he didn’t like either; what Dr. Salvatore called “healthy choices” made Brett roll his eyes. He wanted burgers and curly fries and milkshakes. All the things that are bad for you. But really—who didn’t?
* * *
Finally, finally, Brett was home. It was long past ten o’clock.
Hearing the front door open and close, Ellie took a deep, grateful breath and unlinked her hands. She had been sitting at the kitchen table, eyes closed, head bowed, thinking about … about what she always thought about these days, which was: the time before.
Before all of this. Back when she was happy.
The chicken breasts had been ready a while ago; the baking dish waited on top of the stove. It wasn’t hot to the touch anymore. She could reheat it in the microwave. Although chances were, Brett had stopped at a drive-through burger place on his way home. That was okay. He hadn’t called in advance of his arrival, either, and that was also okay; she didn’t care.
She waited for Brett’s booming, “Honey? Ellie? You still up?” She was cold, but she knew that she wouldn’t be cold anymore once Brett’s arms were around her. For that reason, she stayed seated. She loved it when he leaned down and embraced her from behind, nuzzling the back of her neck. She still got goose bumps when he touched her.
“Mom?”
It was Tyler.
Ellie stood up abruptly.
It was her son, and he had been using. “Using” was the preferred term; she and Brett had learned that, and now it came to them naturally. At first, it hadn’t. You used shovels and fabric softener and fountain pens, didn’t you?
No. In their family, the word “using” was now reserved exclusively for drugs.
She could tell right away. The “Mom” sounded slurred.
She felt a surge of panic in her stomach, the twist and the gouge.
Tyler ambled into the kitchen and fell into a chair. He lifted his face, sniffing the air. Even though the chicken had cooled, a trickle of its scent was still in the air, the sweetly acidic tang of the marinade. Tyler scowled, as if it was a bad smell, which it wasn’t; the scowl came from his attempt to identify it, which he couldn’t. His brain, Ellie knew, was functioning like a pudgy runner in mud. She knew that because she’d read articles about it.
About what happened to a brain when you marinated it in drugs, the same way she’d marinated the chicken breasts in Italian dressing.
He looked at her and grinned. “Hey,” he said.
His eyes were glassy. There was a large red scrape on his right cheek, as if he’d face-planted into a sidewalk somewhere. Now she saw that the backs of his hands, too, were scraped raw. Ellie wondered where and how it had happened. Tyler, she knew, probably wouldn’t be able to tell her, even if he wanted to; he didn’t remember.
He didn’t look as if he remembered much of anything right now—except for the way home. That, he’d mastered. That, he’d kept intact and accessible somewhere in that mealy-soft, slow-dissolving brain of his. He always found his way right back here.
So that he can torment us. So that we’ll never be free of him. Never.
Tyler smacked his lips. He ran the tip of his ugly, salmon-colored tongue around the rim of his mouth; those lips, Ellie saw, were dry and cracked.
“Hey,” he said. The way he said it—the slow, lazy drawl—infuriated her.
She stood by the table, looking down at him, and she was filled with a disgust that, in turn, repulsed her as much as Tyler did right now. I’m disgusted by my own child. Truly, truly disgusted. If he needed me right now, I wouldn’t want to touch him. I don’t even like looking at him. Being this close to him.
So who was the real monster here?
That was what she asked herself. Was it Tyler—or was it the mother who couldn’t stand the thought of touching her own son?
Now he slumped over, like a puppet with cut strings. His forehead clunked on the tabletop.
She wasn’t worried. She knew he’d just fallen asleep. Boom—just like that. She’d found him this way before. Many mornings she had come downstairs and there he was, her son, curled up on the kitchen floor, snoring and twitching, his skin gray, his clothes torn, his hair filthy, drug paraphernalia scattered carelessly around him like fallen leaves.
Paraphernalia. That was another word they’d learned was the appropriate term. A funny-sounding word, really, if you said it out loud a few times; it sounded like a carnival ride or a fancy hat. She didn’t think she’d be able to spell it.
She watched him for another minute, keenly regretting the fact that Brett was going to come home and find this in the kitchen, along with the nice, healthy dinner: His son, his child, passed out at the table, snoring. A filthy lump.
Welcome home, Daddy.
Unless.
Unless she followed through with her plan. Right now. She had time, didn’t she? Brett hadn’t called. So he wasn’t close.
She could do it. Tonight. Right now. And then she could somehow move Tyler’s body and … Wait.
How? How would she do it? How could she move him? Her son was skinny, but he would still be too much for her to handle, too heavy, too awkward, too cumbersome, too everything. And the cleanup. How would she—
Never mind. Never mind.
She didn’t remember climbing the two flights of stairs—first floor to second floor, second floor to attic—but she must h
ave done that, and then back down again, because she stood where she’d been standing before, right behind him …
And now she was holding the gun.
Everything would be okay.
Tyler stirred. He farted. It was a prolonged, squeaky wheeze that would’ve been funny, Ellie thought, if it had happened around a dinner table with other kids. Everyone would’ve laughed and teased him. Back in the hollow, with her brothers and sisters, a loud fart was a happy excuse for mayhem; there were groans and boos and sisters pinching their noses shut and brothers jumping out of their chairs so they could crumple to the floor, pretending to faint dead away from the noxious odor. Henry always started it; he was always the one who coughed and gagged the loudest, rubbing his eyes and staggering around. He was hilarious.
God, she missed Henry.
Her brother never knew about Tyler and the drugs. That was a blessing. She’d managed to keep all this from him. Henry had died without knowing. He died still thinking Tyler was a sweet boy.
She raised the gun. Aimed at his head.
He had settled down again. He wasn’t moving. He would be an easy target.
As far as what would happen after—who cared? She didn’t. All she cared about was getting rid of this pain. The terrifying conviction that she couldn’t live even a second longer with this sorrow. It was crushing her.
The crown of his head was a scraggly mess of black frizz. When he was a little boy she had kissed him in that exact spot each night, right on the top of the head, after she’d read him a chapter or two of My Side of the Mountain. She didn’t leave his room until he had fallen asleep.
Another long, languid snore.
She moved the gun into position. It always felt heavier than it really was, as if the gun itself was aware of the profoundly grave use to which it was about to be consecrated, as if it channeled a density of weight simply from the implications of its existence.
She took a breath. Calmness suddenly overwhelmed her, a kind of spreading, beatific contentment, replacing the internal chaos, the anxiety.
This was the right thing to do. She knew it. She knew it.
She was ready.
She took another breath.
Now, she told herself. Do it now.
And then she lowered the gun.
She could not do it. She would never be able to do it. She had been fooling herself, thinking she was hard enough and cold enough and brave enough to perform this act.
It had been a fantasy, and for a few precious days, it had sustained her—the idea that she could rescue herself and Brett from all that their lives had become, from the drama and the strangeness and the ravening sadness.
But she couldn’t. Because Tyler was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone.
It was over. She would put the gun back in the box and put the box on the high shelf in the garage, and that would be that.
Now she was truly helpless, and she knew it. There was no escape.
Chapter Ten
“I thought we had an understanding.”
Molly Drucker’s voice was neutral. Not mean, not unfeeling—just not especially warm. She stood in front of Jake, holding the snout of an empty Rolling Rock bottle between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
“Jake? You listening?”
“Yeah.” He rolled his chair back and forth on the living room carpet, just a tenth of a turn each way. Forward, back. Forward, back. He needed to have something to do. Somewhere to funnel his chagrin.
“Then tell me what’s going on,” Molly said. “We had an agreement, right? Two beers a day. Tops. I get here tonight and I start fixing dinner and I find these in the trash. Plus the one you’re working on right now. That makes three.”
He started to make a smart-aleck crack about her counting skills and how impressive they were but he held off. It wasn’t funny. And besides, she had a point.
Molly’s habit was to stop by his house when she had a night off. He hadn’t asked her to. She just did it, falling into a rhythm before he could come up with a plausible reason why she shouldn’t. Sometimes she brought Malik; sometimes not. If she brought him, she had to leave a little earlier, to get her brother home to bed.
In the first few months after he’d gotten out of the hospital, Jake hired a home health care aide to come by each day. It was all paid for by his disability check. But it didn’t work out. Jake hated him. Well, maybe not “hated.” The guy bored him. Judged him. Condescended to him.
Or maybe none of the three, Molly had said, when he complained bitterly about the guy. You just don’t want some stranger hanging around. Even though he means well. And even though you need him. Jake’s reply was needle-sharp and cobra-quick: I don’t need anybody. Molly didn’t bother to soften the blow when she replied: Yeah, you do.
After the first guy there was an aide named Melissa, and then one named Bobbi Rae, and then there was nobody. One by one, he told them all to get lost. He’d go it alone.
A month and a half into Jake’s ill-fated experiment with independence, Molly began stopping by in the afternoons. Good thing: He’d come down with a urinary tract infection because he didn’t clean his catheter correctly. The infection almost killed him. He also had an infected bedsore on his butt that very nearly took him down the same way. And his house was nirvana for cockroaches, because he couldn’t clean the kitchen properly after meal preparation. The sink was too high. Instead of dealing with that problem he’d just stopped eating regularly. He lost fifteen pounds in six weeks. The sweatpants and T-shirt dripped from his pared-down frame.
Molly had made things right again.
She came by two or three times a week to check on him. She didn’t fuss over him. She would replace a lightbulb in the hall or drop off a prescription she’d picked up for him or collect the empty Rolling Rock bottles on the coffee table and take them to the recycling bin in the church lot at the end of the road.
He was sometimes overwhelmed with the depth of the feelings he still had for her, even after all that had happened, all the changes. He loved watching her hands. In his former life he had worked with her for years, arriving at accident scenes and parking the Blazer next to the square white truck with RAYTHUNE COUNTY FIRE RESCUE painted on its sides in blocky red letters, and in all that time, he’d never lost his fascination with Molly Drucker’s hands. They were black, like the rest of her—she and her brother were among the few African-Americans in this part of West Virginia—and there was a beauty to her hands, a strength and a power that made them almost like art objects for Jake. He would never, of course, have said such a silly thing out loud.
“I’m waiting for an explanation,” Molly said. “About the beers.”
Malik laughed. Jake couldn’t get mad at him. Molly’s little brother had been born with profound cognitive and physical challenges. And besides, it was pretty funny: Molly lecturing Jake about drinking too much beer, hovering over him like a spitfire wife in a sitcom. And Jake, sitting in his chair, nicely buzzed, grinning, letting her do it.
“Had a lot to think about,” he said.
“Yeah—and beer’s always such a great help when you’re trying to think clearly.” Molly marched back into the kitchen. There was a brief tinkle of glass as she tossed the bottles into the recycling box under the sink.
“Hey,” Jake called. He wanted her to come back. “Hey. I’ll explain, okay?”
“Just a sec,” she answered. She didn’t need to raise her voice for him to hear her; the kitchen wasn’t that far away in the tiny house. “I’ve got to finish slicing carrots for the stew. I need to get everything in the crockpot before three. So it’ll be ready for your supper.”
He waited. Malik sat on the couch, playing with a deck of cards. It wasn’t a card game—Malik was not capable of that—but it was a game with cards. He pulled six cards out of the deck and placed them faceup on the couch cushion beside him, and then he drew out another six and did the same thing with those, just below the original row. And then he scrambled the cards all tog
ether and started again. Sometimes, Jake saw, he added a third row before scrambling the cards.
Molly came back into the living room. She untied the strings of a red-checked apron as she walked. When she got close enough to the couch, she lifted the apron and dropped it playfully over Malik’s head.
“Hey!” he yelled, and then he giggled. He pulled off the apron and flung it back at her. She caught it in one of her sturdy hands.
Jake liked watching them goof around. He knew how easily a relationship that was permanently out of balance—a relationship in which one person took care of another—could become toxic, with resentment from both ends, from both the beleaguered, overworked caretaker and the helpless, needy recipient of that care. Molly, he’d noted from the day he met Malik three years ago, avoided that trap. She kept their interaction as light and fun as she could. She was in charge, and Malik was a burden—but he wasn’t only a burden. He was her little brother, too.
He wondered how their relationship—his and Molly’s—would evolve, now that everything had changed for him. He wouldn’t be anybody’s damned burden. He’d run his chair straight off a high cliff before he’d let that happen.
“So just put whatever stew’s left in the fridge tonight,” Molly said. “Tomorrow night you can heat it up again. It’ll taste even better.”
“Why’s that?”
“Flavors mingle.” She sat down on the couch, careful not to jostle Malik’s row of cards. Jake understood: For the rest of the conversation, she didn’t want to loom over him.
“So,” she went on. “This thing you’ve been thinking about. This thing that requires the assistance of three beers.”
“Sheriff came by,” he said. Molly nodded, waiting for him to go on, to justify his broken promise. “Job offer,” he added.
A light leapt into her dark eyes. “Oh, Jake—is she going to—”
“No, no, no,” he said hastily. “Nothing like that.” He hadn’t meant to mislead her, even for an instant. But part of him was pleased: Molly knew how much he wanted to be a deputy again, and she really believed it might be possible. If she didn’t believe it, she wouldn’t have reacted that way.
