Recalculating
Page 3
Nifty, Maureen had agreed. Still unplugged, the GPS continued to coach her as she made her way home. “Turn left,” it said when she approached Hawthorne, but the Ouija couldn’t know that Jernigan Elementary was letting out right now and if she took Hawthorne home she’d most likely end up stuck behind a school bus. “Turn LEFT,” said the voice as she cruised through the intersection. “Turn LEFT, you stupid bitch!”
“No,” she said … and for some reason she reached down and touched the little lump of chocolate in her pocket. Her voice was a husky whisper. “No, I won’t. I don’t have to listen to you anymore.”
Behind her, a car honked. Maureen put her foot on the gas. The car lurched forward. “Recalculating,” said the voice. “At the end of the road, turn right. Think you can manage that, Dumbo?”
She drove on, ignoring the directions. Her whole body was shaking, hands jittering on the wheel, teeth chattering in her mouth. “Who are you?” she whispered … even though she already knew.
* * *
Tommy had been in a bowling league and had had a monthly poker game, but Maureen didn’t think her husband had friends. To be a friend you had to be yourself, and Maureen suspected that maybe she was the only one who’d seen her husband’s true, wolfish face. But in the weeks after his diagnosis, Tommy acquired perhaps the first real friend of his adult life, a strange, reedy man named John, who was, Tommy told her proudly, a professor at Bucks County Community College, where he taught anthropology and folklore.
John was tall and emaciated-looking. The bones of his wrists bulged, and his fingers were so long they appeared to have extra joints. He had a narrow face, curling gray hair that fell past his shoulders, and long teeth with a yellowish cast—gingivitis, Maureen figured. Poor oral hygiene. Tommy himself was a religious flosser and so, by extension, was Maureen. “A pleasure,” John had said, taking Maureen’s hand but not shaking it, just holding it, like it was some small, stunned animal that he was weighing in his own palm. John dressed in shades of black and gray, and came over to the house only after dark. He and her husband would sit in the den—Maureen having been banished to the kitchen. They’d drink wine and talk in low voices. She’d catch snatches of conversation, phrases here and there. Host organism was one. Parasitic relationship was another. Tommy had always fancied himself a scientist; in fact he had talked about going to medical school, only his grades hadn’t been quite good enough. Maybe, she thought, the two of them were in there playing doctor. Sometimes she’d hear them laughing. Once, she’d heard a kind of singsongy chant. It was probably sports-related. They were probably watching a game. Late one night she’d heard the door slam, but no car starting. Maybe they went for a walk, she would think, but that made no sense. There was nowhere to walk in their brand-new excuse for a town, no path through the woods that surrounded their house, and their street was miles away from any kind of restaurant or bar.
She would tidy the den once they were gone, washing their wineglasses, emptying the ashtrays (neither man smoked, but John was fond of burning strange-smelling incense while they talked). Pleased to have the house to herself for once, she’d heat herself a mug full of milk, pour in a little brandy, top it with cinnamon, and sit on the couch, watching the old movies she loved that Tommy couldn’t stand. Once she fell asleep there, only to startle herself awake, heart pounding, certain that she’d heard something screaming in the woods. A second time she’d jerked awake from a dream in which Tommy and John had been standing over her, both of them in black robes, like monks.
She listened for the voice, the small one that sounded a bit like her sisters. It spoke to her almost every day. Be patient, it would tell her. Your time is coming. Tommy was growing thinner, more drawn, the flesh of his face evaporating to reveal the skull underneath. Thinner and crueler. Instead of once or twice a month, the pinching sessions came once or twice a week, then almost every night. You like that? he would croon, putting the clamps in place, watching her with his cool eyes. He showered every morning, and again at night, but up close, she could smell the rot and decomposition coming from his skin, a bland, almost sweet stink. Tommy was dying … but not fast enough. He had tightened her leash as he’d gotten sicker, taking away the one credit card he’d let her keep, quizzing her about her day and how she’d spent it, watching her as she moved throughout the house.
Little things started going wrong. The dishwasher broke, spewing soap-scummed water over the kitchen floor, and they’d had to replace both the floor and the dishwasher. Someone had stolen her credit card from her wallet while she was visiting the library and had charged three thousand dollars’ worth of stuff at Target and Sears; it had taken her days to straighten it out. One morning she reached for her hairbrush, which she’d always kept in the top drawer in the bathroom, and found that it was gone. She put her favorite blue blouse in the washing machine, but when she took the clothes out to put them in the dryer, the blouse was gone. She would catch Tommy watching her from the corner of his eyes, tracking her from behind his newspaper or magazine, studying her coolly as she cooked and cleaned and drove him to the hospital, like she was some kind of new disease, a mutated cell trapped under a slide slip. Something, most likely a raccoon, knocked over the garbage cans on trash day, and left a half-chewed sanitary napkin stuck in the middle of their driveway, like an accusation, until Maureen, still in her bathrobe, had scurried outside to pick it up. Tommy watched and pinched, and just when Maureen was sure she couldn’t stand it anymore, the voice said, Tonight’s the night, and it told her, step by step, what to do.
* * *
“The number you have called … has been disconnected. No further information … is available.” With a muttered expression of frustration, Maureen shook her head, hung up the phone, and looked at the instructions that had come with her Ouija again. She’d dialed it right, she was sure of it … but she thought she’d dialed correctly the previous four times, and each time she’d gotten the same message. When she’d tried to find the Ouija website, all she got was an error message, telling her that the site was under construction, so no help there. Finally she called Liza and told her what she’d planned on telling the customer service representative, had one of them bothered to answer: that her GPS had adopted the male voice, without her telling it that’s what she wanted. She’d decided that the rest of it, the part about it calling her bitch and Dumbo, taunting her, she must have made up. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately. She’d been under stress, of course, the shock of losing her husband, her life’s companion. She was probably lucky that she hadn’t imagined seeing Tommy himself in the passenger’s seat, dressed in the good blue suit she’d brought to the funeral home, leering at her through decomposed lips.
“It’s talking like a man now?” Liza sounded distracted, as usual. “Did you try to reboot it? Unplug it and then plug it in again.”
“Of course,” said Maureen, and wondered, not for the first time, just how much of their home’s toxic atmosphere her kids had absorbed; how stupid they’d come to think she was.
“I don’t know. Maybe take out the battery, then put it back in? That helps with my phone sometimes, when it’s acting funky.”
Maureen had tried that. No luck. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take it to Best Buy in the morning. They’ll get it straightened out.”
She made herself dinner—shrimp, which Tommy never ate, a bowl of rice, sautéed broccoli rabe, with a glass of good Sancerre, at the table she’d set for herself. The Ouija sat on the counter. Its box was still in the recycling bin. She pulled it out and turned it over in her hands, looking for a price tag or a store sticker. If it hadn’t come from Best Buy, maybe they wouldn’t want to fix it. Weirdly, the box had no sticker, no bar code, no indication of where it had come from or when it had been purchased.
She put the box aside and was cleaning the kitchen when the phone rang. It was Liza again, sounding rattled. “Hey, Ma, listen. It’s Ryden. He’s got an ear infection again.”
“Poor thing.” In the background, Maur
een could hear her grandson screeching.
“Yeah, and Frank’s doing that presentation out in Allentown … I know it’s a long drive, but is there any chance you could swing by with his penicillin?”
“Of course I can,” said Maureen.
“Oh my God. Thanks, Mom. You’re saving my life.”
“No problem,” said Maureen, feeling flushed and pleased as she collected her keys and her purse and walked out the door, past the Halloween decorations she’d put up, same as always, the glowing eyeballs twined around the iron fence, the fake cobwebs, the skeleton’s hand poking out from a pot of scarlet mums, with its desiccated fingers beckoning.
* * *
In the end, it was the shoebox that decided it. She might have been willing to wait it out, to play the long game, if she hadn’t seen something that Tommy had never intended for her to find.
She was looking for her hiking boots, planning on loaning them to Laura, who’d joined the Sierra Club, when her fingertips brushed against a shoebox, one she didn’t think she’d ever seen before. Curious, she’d pulled it off the shelf, and noticed the one word—PRIVATE—written on top in her husband’s firm hand. Dread thudded in her throat, twisting her guts. Don’t look, a voice in her mind moaned, don’t look, don’t look, you don’t want to see.
“Probably just porn,” she’d whispered. Certainly she’d come across enough of that over the years, Playboy and Penthouse and worse. Tommy took no pains to hide them. He wanted her to see those women, he wanted her to see how much her poor slack, stretch-marked flesh fell short of the ideal, as represented in those pages, or on the DVDs he liked to watch after the pinching. She sat on the bed with the box in her lap and her blood pounding in her ears, so scared that she’d laughed when she’d taken off the cover to reveal nothing more terrifying than a wedding picture, a snapshot of the two of them dancing. There was a dab of icing on Tommy’s chin, a look of almost woozy bliss on Maureen’s face, like the man she’d just promised herself to hadn’t pinched her black and blue three nights previously.
She stared at the picture. Then on a whim she’d turned it over and almost screamed when she’d seen what was taped there. A scrap of her missing silk blouse. A few strands of her hair, probably pulled from the brush. And—she groaned softly, barely hearing herself—a scabby patch of blood. Blood that could, just maybe, have been snipped or scraped from a used menstrual pad.
She crumpled the picture in her hand and threw the picture across the room, shaking with revulsion. Then, back straight, moving with a purpose she hadn’t felt in years, she’d gone to the medicine cabinet and fetched Tommy’s bottles of prescription painkillers. He rarely took them—I don’t want crutches, he would say—so there were plenty left. She took four, put them in a plastic bag, crushed them with a hammer, then stirred the powder into his evening martini.
He walked through the door, too thin, too pale. “Hi, honey,” she said, same as ever. She handed him the drink. He took a gulp. Then he looked at her. Maureen felt her heart stutter to a stop. He tasted something, she thought. Oh, God, he knows. But Tommy merely drained his glass, then handed it to her and gave her his suit jacket and briefcase to hang up and put away. Twenty minutes later, he was in his recliner, feet up, eyes half shut.
“Dinner’s ready!” she singsonged. This was a lie. For the first time in all of the years of their marriage, Maureen had taken no steps to ensure that her husband was fed. She hadn’t cooked or called for take-out; she hadn’t made a reservation.
“Sleepy,” he muttered.
‘Then let me help you upstairs,” she said. “You should rest.”
He leaned on her, letting her lead him up the stairs past the bed and into the bathroom, where she got him seated on the toilet.
“What are we doing in here?” The words came out a slurry mush—wha’ we doin’ ’n here?
“A shower,” she said briskly. “And then you can sleep.”
She wrestled him out of his shoes, his socks, his pants and boxer shorts. His penis hung limp between his thighs. She pictured his prostate hiding inside of him, lurking inside of him at the base of his penis, like a decaying black walnut, a rotting brain. She unbuttoned his shirt. “Arms up!” she said, the way she’d said it to Tommy Junior and Liza when they were tiny and she’d given them their baths. Her husband lifted his arms, and she maneuvered him under the hot spray. The bar of soap was where she’d left it, half melted on the tiled floor. She bent and lifted one of his legs, set his foot down on the slippery bar of Dial. Last time, she thought. The last time pays for it all. And with all of her might, all the strength in her hips and her shoulders, the muscles she hadn’t used in years, she shoved him.
The soap squirted out from under his foot, caroming across the tub as if it had been shot. The sound of his head on the lip of the tub was enormous, world-shaking. She heard something break. Then he crashed down on his back, water pounding in his face, his old familiar face, the nose now a sharp blade, the bones almost visible, the hair mostly gone. “What … what did you do?” One of his teeth had gotten chipped in the fall. His mouth was full of blood.
“You slipped in the shower,” she said. “These things happen, you know. Especially when you mix martinis and pain pills.”
She could barely hear his voice over the sound of the water, but she could watch his lips form the words. Didn’t fall. Pushed me. Bitch.
Bending down, making sure to move from her knees, Maureen picked up the washcloth she’d brought and positioned it over the drain. Immediately the tub began to fill with water. Then she knee-walked backward, moving until her face was mere inches from her husband’s. With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she pinched his nostrils together. With the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she pinched his mouth shut. The water beat down. The tub filled, inch by inch. Tommy struggled at first, or tried to, but between the injury he’d sustained, the drugs she’d fed him, and already being weakened by the chemo, he didn’t struggle very hard or very long. Be sure, the voice in her head said, so Maureen stayed there, in that uncomfortable crouch, counting one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, up to a thousand, until the water was past her forearms, then past her elbows, then up to her armpits. Finally she let go.
She figured she had ten minutes, ten minutes before a sensible wife would have noticed something wrong and gone to check on her beloved and ailing spouse. Maureen watched the clock as she stripped herself naked, crammed her clothes in the dryer, along with the wet clothes she’d put there already. She got dressed again, in loose-fitting pants and a long-sleeved blouse, reached to the top of the closet, her fingers groping for the shoebox, meaning to burn the picture she’d found inside, destroying any trace of evidence of Tommy’s secret life, the life she and her husband had led together, in the dark of their bedroom.
The box wasn’t there. “Shit!” Maureen said, then automatically slapped her hand across her mouth. Tommy hated ladies who used foul language, and the s-word or, God forbid, the f-word would earn her a pinching for sure … except Maureen was pretty sure that Tommy’s pinching days were behind him. She could say whatever she wanted, now that he wasn’t there to hear.
She turned off the closet light and walked, barefoot, into the bathroom. The steam was so thick she could barely see her own feet. “Tommy?” she asked, her voice quivering. “Hon? Is everything okay?” He was as she’d left him, floating in the tub. His eyes were open, and they were filled with water. A pink rill of blood swirled next to his left ear. “Tommy?”
You did this, bitch, he said … but the Tommy who talked lived only in her head now. The Tommy who’d pinched her, who’d mocked her, who’d told her she was nothing, was gone.
She bent close, examining his lips and nose. No bruising. Good. Maureen raced across the room and dialed 911. “Please help me!” she sobbed when someone answered. “My husband … I think he slipped in the shower. He’s on his back, and there’s blood, and the tub’s all full of water, and, and I don’t think he’s breathing!”
She told the dispatcher her name and address. When she hung up, she went back to the bathroom and wrenched the taps shut. You did this to me, Tommy accused as he lay there.
“You asked for it,” she said … and both Tommys, the one on the bathtub floor and the one who lived in her head, were silent.
* * *
She hurried to the car, her keys in her hand, and blinked when she saw the Ouija sitting on the dashboard, same as usual. “How’d you get here?” she asked … but there was no time to figure it out. Her daughter and her grandson needed her. She got in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and started to drive.
“Turn right,” said the Ouija. Male voice again. She did. “Proceed for … ” The machine paused, gathering data. “ … three-tenths of a mile to Poplar Lane.”
Maureen drove. She’d get the medicine, head to Liza’s, and be home in time for Cougar Town. Good deal! But then at Poplar, where she should have proceeded straight through the intersection, the GPS said, “Turn right.”
She flicked her eyes toward the screen and saw a flashing red icon of a man in a hard hat. Construction. The Ouija had probably rerouted her without being asked. It was good that way. She turned right. “Proceed for … two miles,” said the voice … and that was all right, but Maureen must have … what? Dozed? Fallen asleep? Blacked out? She wasn’t sure … but when she came to herself again, when she opened her eyes, she found her hands still on the wheel, her foot on the gas, high on a hill overlooking the town, miles away from where she’d meant to go.
“Turn left,” said the voice, and Maureen spun the wheel. Gravel crunched under the wheels of the car as she drove through the cemetery gates and up the hill that would lead her to her husband’s grave.
“Turn right.” Maureen tried to resist, but it was as if her arms, her hands, her fingers, no longer belonged to her. She was a marionette, and someone—the Ouija? Her dead husband?—was pulling the strings. She thought of the picture, the hair, the blood. John teaches anthropology and folklore. She remembered Tommy’s secret, mocking smile, and the way John had held her hand, like he was weighing it, while his eyes measured her up and down. A snatch of song rose into her head: There’s … a … place for us. Only Tommy didn’t want a place for the two of them, did he? She thought not. Tommy wanted a place for himself, a roomy new home with no prostate problems.