Dead and Breakfast

by David Crossman

  “Not at all,” Joanna replied, extinguishing the anemic flame of Caitlin’s last hope. “It’ll be like a slumber party.”

  ‘Slumber’ being the operative word,’ Caitlin thought wistfully. “Well,” she said brightly, “I hope you’re not looking for sparkling conversation. I’m afraid I’ve hit my wall.”

  A smile flashed quickly across Joanna’s face and was gone, leaving a mist of sadness and resignation. “Just the company will be welcome.”

  Caitlin adjourned to the bathroom to change for bed. “If it’s company you want, maybe you should think about joining us on our trip tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Perhaps I shall.” The reply came much too quickly, suggesting that the invitation had been discarded out of hand.

  “Really,” said Caitlin, poking her head around the door. Joanna was standing with her head slightly bowed and her hands clasped. She looked for all the world, Caitlin thought, like a Victorian bride on her wedding night. “You should.”

  The brief, ‘thank-you anyway’ smile flickered again. “We’ll have a lovely time.” Caitlin withdrew into the bathroom and began brushing her teeth, talking around the edges through the foam. “The chateau is really magnificent. One of the most photographed in this part of the country. Very historic.” She spit into the sink. “I know you brought your camera. It’d be a shame to go home without using it.” She deliberated before adding: “That’s what Amber paid for.”

  Hoping that the lack of response signified Joanna might be considering the proposition, Caitlin concluded her ablutions without comment.

  Joanna was already in bed and seemed to be asleep. Caitlin crawled in the side nearest the window as gently as a faithless husband.

  “I’m not asleep,” said Joanna.

  “Oh, too bad. I was hoping you’d drifted off. A good night’s sleep would do you a world of good.”

  “It’s not the night I fear.” The words were spoken softly. Privately. Caitlin felt like an eavesdropper.

  For a long time she deliberated. She could say the expected inanities, provide empty consolation and a brief respite for her tormented bed mate, or she could confront the demons head-on. The former course was easy, predictable, and expected. It was also, in the long run, useless. The latter would answer two questions, the first of which had been gnawing at her subconscious for hours: had Amber been telling the truth? The second, contingent upon a positive answer to the first – if Joanna was mad, how mad?”

  She turned over and spoke to Joanna’s back, half hoping she was asleep. “Amber told me what happened this morning.”

  There was no response.

  Caitlin continued. “She felt she had to tell me, since I’m more or less responsible for . . . for things . . . for everyone.”

  The silence that answered was so profound that her heart might have been the only thing in the world still stirring. Joanna’s shallow breathing hinted she was awake. Caitlin had, in her clumsy, obvious way, opened the forbidden door. The rest was up to Joanna.

  Caitlin finally gave up. Her eyes were sandpapery with weariness. She shut off the light and, feeling she had done all she could, surrendered to sleep.

  “I hated her.”

  The unexpected pronouncement, coming as dreams were unraveling the mooring of reality, jerked Caitlin back to the present, and the unwelcome remembrance that she was not alone. She hadn’t perceived the words at first, and when her mind reassembled them automatically, she started. “Hated who?” Had she fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation? She wracked her brain. What had they been talking about?

  A distinctive face floated to the surface of the haze in her brain. “Amber?”

  “Gayla,” Joanna said emotionally.

  “Amber’s sister?”

  “My stepdaughter.” Joanna turned toward Caitlin in the dark. “I tried not to. But she terrified me.”

  Caitlin waited. She was sure there was more to come.

  “She blamed me for her father’s death. I think they both did, at first. It wasn’t hard to do. I blamed myself.”

  “What happened?” Caitlin blinked hard in an effort to wake herself and sat up in bed.

  Chapter Ten–A World Through Bull’s-Eye Glass

  In the pitch blackness, Caitlin could almost hear the mechanism of Joanna’s brain struggling to frame the words.

  “It was an accident,” she began. “I’d been after Philip, my husband, to put the cupola on our barn. It was just one of those things that kept getting put off . . . ”

  Caitlin had to involve herself in a conversation if she was going to stay awake. “Why didn’t you just hire it out? I’d’ve done, if I had money.”

  Joanna sighed deeply. “That’s the worst of it. We’d found the cupola at one of those perpetual roadside yard sales near our place in New Hampshire.”

  Caitlin knew the type of place, wedged between the flea market and the town dump on the economic scale. They covered acres and were comprised of everything that – having outlived the purpose for which it was designed – was awaiting reincarnation as something else. There was seldom shelter of any kind in such a place, so things were left to weather naturally. In the process, they became either junk or antiques, in which case they were shipped off to the dump or moved inside for sale to some bargain hunter with an eye for value.

  “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” she said drowsily. She was too tired to be original.

  “I suppose. That certainly was the case with that cupola. For Philip it was infatuation at first sight. He decided he had to have it.” She laughed at the memory. “It was in terrible condition. The wood was moldy in places. You could pull it apart with your fingers. I suggested he just have a new one built, but no. He had to have that one. He’d fix it up himself, he said. And when he got that gleam in his eye, there was no stopping him. The junkman must have seen that gleam, too.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he did,” said Caitlin, recovering yard sale junky, whose last purchase – a 19th Century horsehair love seat – had gone a long way toward affecting a cure by revealing its darker side as a tenement for fleas and some particularly prolific larval creature for which an entomologist of her acquaintance was unable to find a name. “They can see it a mile away. It’s a gift.”

  “I’m that way with porcelain,” Joanna confessed. “Anyway, he paid a fortune for the thing, and we helped the man get it into his truck and he followed us home.

  “We unloaded it and, as I predicted, it sat in front of the barn for months. I’d mention it whenever he got a little too full of himself.” She smiled. “Amber teased him mercilessly, too. Finally, last spring – the first day the temperature got over forty – he had a severe attack of spring fever and just had to have an outdoor project.”

  “And the cupola was a project-in-waiting,” said Caitlin.

  “I’ve got to give him credit. He worked on that thing for weeks. Read books. Took a woodworking class at the high school. All the while he worked in secret under this little canvas canopy he’d had made.

  “He applied himself to that project like he did everything – obsessively. When the unveiling came, we had a ceremony in the backyard: a catered affair with a tent. The works.” She laughed again, sounding almost girlish. “One of our friends plays tuba for the Boston Pops. He and Keith Lockhart–Philip was a great supporter of the Symphony–wrote a tuba solo in commemoration of the event.” She giggled outright. “Tubola for Cupola.

  “A local construction company had sent one of those big crane things over. A cherry picker? When Philip had whipped anticipation to a fever pitch, the machine lifted the tent.

  “I couldn’t believe it. It was like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon. Beautiful. If I hadn’t seen him laboring all those hours with my own eyes, I’d’ve sworn he went out and bought a new one.

  “He had a little bronze plaque made that said ‘this cupola is listed on the National Register of Hysterical Places.”

  Caitlin laughed. She felt she would have liked Philip Caps
haw, just as she was beginning to like the warm, human side of his wife. ‘You never know about people,’ she thought.

  “Everyone applauded as the crane lifted the thing into position on the roof. It was quite a celebration, which was the reason I wouldn’t let him go up and bolt it in place. I was feeling lightheaded with champagne, and he’d had more to drink than I. Besides which, it was getting dark. The crane operator convinced him it would be all right as it was, so long as there wasn’t a hurricane.”

  “But he never got ‘round to it?”

  Joanna shook her head in the dark. “No. It became another joke. We’d all give the barn a wide berth whenever we walked by, as if we were afraid the cupola would fall on us. He used to say he couldn’t bring himself to fix it, because simple minds needed simple entertainment.”

  Her voice assumed a serious tone. “That went on all summer. Then, late in the season, a hurricane bounced up the coast and was headed right for us. We were watching the weather on the evening news. He said, ‘I guess you’re going to have to buy yourself a book to read this winter, if you want entertainment’. He went out and put the ladders up, but it was too late to do the actual job.

  “That night it started to blow – winds were up to twenty or twenty-five knots by morning. So over breakfast, I told him that he’d better get up and secure the cupola before it blew down and wasted all his work. He said he’d do it when he came back from taking the girls to school.”

  The silence that followed was draped with memories too vivid to lie still. Caitlin sensed floodwaters rising behind a cracked and weakening dam.

  “That was the last time I saw him alive,” Joanna resumed with effort. “After he left to drive the girls, I took my bath. I heard him banging around in the yard a while later. That aluminum ladder made such a racket – then things were quiet, and I figured he must be finished, probably cleaning up in the downstairs bath.

  “I didn’t get dressed, just wrapped a towel around me and I thought . . . ”

  She was struggling with her words, exposing the raw nerve of the memory. A long, slow breath escaped her lips. “When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I looked out the back door . . . ”

  That was as much as she could say, but it was more than enough. Tears of sympathy welled in Caitlin’s eyes, hot and stinging.

  Joanna wept for a while in silence. Caitlin waited, unsure how to comfort someone whose hurt she couldn’t begin to imagine. “And Gayla blamed you?” she said at last.

  “Yes. She never liked me to begin with,” she laughed a single, tear-stained note. “That sounds like something a neurotic teenager would say, doesn’t it?” She sniffed. “But it’s true. She made no secret of the fact. I felt sorry for her, of course. She’d lost her mother in a freak car accident, then she had me to deal with, the new woman in her father’s life. Then this.

  “Of course she was there, too. She could have done something . . . ” The injustice of the girl’s accusation obviously still stung.

  “I thought you said your husband had taken the girls to school.”

  “I thought he had. It turned out Gayla had had a headache and decided to stay home after all.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?

  “I tried everything I could think of but, frankly, I wasn’t coping too well myself. I couldn’t sleep. Finally, I had to start taking sleeping pills. It wasn’t long before they became as much a part of my nighttime routine as brushing my teeth. I wouldn’t even try to go to sleep without them.

  “By the time I got a grip on myself, Gayla had gone off the deep end. Philip knew she’d . . . experimented at school. Drinking. Sex. Drugs probably. But now . . . she just completely abandoned what little self-discipline she had. She was just hurting, I thought. But, I certainly couldn’t get a handle on her.”

  “I don’t suppose that’s an unusual reaction,” Caitlin said softly. When she was a kid, she’d had friends who had reacted similarly when their parents divorced, or one of them died.

  “Perhaps not,” Joanna replied. She got out of bed and began pacing slowly back and forth. During a long period of thoughtful deliberation, Caitlin could mark her progress by the soft rustle of her nightgown. “But it was more than that.” The whisper stopped. “One night, Gayla came down late for dinner. Her eyes were wild – like an animal. I’m sure she was on something. She’d been crying and mascara was streaming down her cheeks. Amber asked her what was wrong, and she picked up her dinner plate and threw it at the wall, then she shook her finger at me and screamed that I’d killed their father – not just by suggesting that he fix the cupola, but that I’d actually planned his accident somehow.

  “It took four of us – including the cook and the housekeeper – the better part of half an hour to get her settled down. I was scared to death she was going to hurt herself.”

  “It must have been the drugs talking,” Caitlin speculated.

  “I wish it had. I asked the help of a therapist, a friend from the hospital where I used to work. I knew Gayla wouldn’t see her willingly, so I invited her over for dinner so she could give me an informal appraisal. I met with her the next day and she told me that, in her opinion, Gayla was bi-polar, probably suffering from post traumatic shock, and that somehow, despite those passionate flashes of anger, she was emotionally detached and unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

  “She suggested we take Gayla out of school – keep her home and lightly medicated until she got through it . . . or would agree to therapy. So that’s what I did.

  “That’s when she started carrying the knife.”

  Caitlin’s heart skipped a beat. If she’d been in danger of falling asleep, she was wide awake now. “A knife?”

  Joanna’s silhouette was faintly discernible against the dark blue rectangle of the window. She nodded. “Philip’s utility knife. She began wandering the halls, humming to herself. At first I tried to humor her. I thought the psychiatrist would deal with the behavior.” She sighed deeply and painfully. “That’s an excuse. I abdicated. I just . . . it was all too much for me.”

  “Then, one day . . . I was on my way to the car to . . . to an appointment . . . and I passed Gayla in the breezeway. She was just standing there with her hands behind her back and a silly grin on her face. I asked her what she was hiding – just kidding, you know? Hoping to make some kind of connection, when all of a sudden she made a horrible hiss, like a snake, and whipped the knife from behind her back.”

  “Good heavens!” Caitlin said involuntarily. “Did she threaten you with it?”

  “I certainly felt threatened at the time.” Joanna sat on the edge of the bed. “But it wasn’t the knife that frightened me as much as that awful . . . unnatural look in Gayla’s eyes. It was as if she was challenging me somehow.”

  “What did you do?”

  Joanna had been speaking in a low murmur, just above a whisper. Now her voice became raspy, constricted. “I told her to put the knife back where she found it, then I went on my way.”

  Caitlin was incredulous. “How could you?”

  “It’s all I could think of. She wanted to provoke me. I felt sure she wanted me to react violently. To panic. Something told me it would be dangerous to give her that satisfaction, so I just left.” She cleared her throat, which was choked with emotion. “That was the longest walk of my life. I could feel her behind me, watching me with those . . . with that hatred . . . that evil look. That knife in her hand. Just as I got to the door, I turned. I think I half expected to find her in midair, pouncing on me. She was gone.”

  In the taut stillness that followed, Caitlin heard the rush of blood in her ears and realized she’d been holding her breath. She inhaled slowly, deeply.

  Joanna was on her feet again, pacing.

  “I missed my appointment that day. I just drove and drove, with no particular destination in mind. I ended up at this little state beach on the coast of Maine. It was beautiful. Quiet. Cold.

  “I remember looking at myself in the rearview mirror and thinkin
g, ‘you don’t know how you got here.’ That frightened me. I didn’t remember anything about that drive. I could have gone through stop lights, or cut people off, or driven through a school zone. That’s when I realized how sick I was.”

  For a long time she paced back and forth. The percussive shuffle of her slippers on the flagstone floor as mesmerizing to Caitlin as a softshoe in the dark. Once again she found herself struggling to stay awake.

  “Nothing happened for the next few days,” Joanna said at last. Caitlin snapped to consciousness.

  “Pardon?”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “No, I . . . No.” To whom was she speaking? She massaged her face vigorously. “No, I . . . who?”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Joanna, crawling back into bed. For a fraction of a second, Caitlin was alarmed and completely disoriented. She knew who she was but apart from that, where she was, who was with her, and what they were talking about, everything was fuzzy. In that instant, all she knew for certain was that something terrible had happened.

  Then she remembered.

  The deranged girl. The knife. The long, lonely drive to Maine. “I’m afraid I did nod off,” she confessed. It was pointless to do otherwise. She may have been snoring, for all she knew.

  “I’m so sorry,” Joanna repeated. Caitlin was startled how close she was, nearly on her pillow. She could feel her breath. “You’re exhausted.”

  “So are you, I’m sure,” said Caitlin. At least, that’s what she hoped she said. She was too tired to know for sure. “Go on. What happened?”

  Joanna was laying on her side, facing her. Caitlin felt the woman’s eyes staring at her in the dark. “For a few days, nothing. Gayla kept to her rooms. I hardly saw her. Then, after a week or so, I woke up one morning and . . . ”

  The bed was shaking as Joanna convulsed with silent tears. When she spoke, her voice was thick and mucousy. “The knife was on the pillow – my husband’s pillow – inches from my face.”