I
t was as though I were waiting for an ambush, an attack. When the phone rang again just after Ted and Frankie left for work that next morning, it could have been a bomb going off.
“Billie, Calder’s really sick,” Eva said. “Can you come over and help me?” The phone clicked, and there was only the static of my own breath left. The dial tone hum of my blood.
I grabbed my sweater from the back of the kitchen chair and tugged it around me as I ran out into the bright and cold November morning. I remember how startling the air felt in my breath, the way it made me almost gasp. There is something aching about the advent of winter, something beautifully cruel. The sky was turquoise, a costume jewelry sky, the sun shining like an ornament.
Inside the house, Rose was sitting on the floor watching TV, a dozen wooden blocks around her. She smiled up at me, oblivious. “Hi, Billie,” she said. “I can spell my name,” and sure enough, she had stacked R-O-S-E in a line in front of her.
“You are such a smart little girl,” I said, and something about this made tears come to my eyes. This bright promise, this little glimmer of brilliance.
“Where’s your mommy, Rosie Posey?”
“She’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Calder’s sick.”
I kissed the top of Rose’s head, inhaling the strong scent of baby shampoo.
In the kitchen, everything seemed normal. The percolator sat bubbling on the counter. The breakfast dishes had been washed and stacked in their drying rack. The kitchen table had been cleared of crumbs and spills, any evidence of breakfast wiped away. But Eva wasn’t in the kitchen, and the back door was wide open.
I went outside and found Eva sitting on the ground next to Calder, who was lying on the cold grass.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, squatting down next to the dog and running my fingers across her warm stomach.
Eva shook her head, her eyes full. “I don’t know. Ted fed her this morning before he left, while I was getting the kids off to the bus stop, and after he left, she started acting funny. Like she was drunk. She kept bumping into things, and then she came outside to the grass and now she won’t get up.”
I petted Calder again, peering at her face. She was panting rapidly, her barrel chest rising and falling as though she had just been running.
“Do you think she ate something bad? Could she have gotten into something?”
Eva looked up at me, choking back a sob. “I don’t know.”
“We have to get her to the vet,” I said.
“How? We don’t have a car.”
“We’ll borrow one,” I said. “Just stay here.”
I knocked on Mrs. Boucher’s door, trembling as I waited for her to answer. I had only spoken to her a handful of times. She was elderly, as were the rest of the neighbors on our little dead-end road, and I was worried at first that she might not even recognize me. I knew that I had to be smart about this, if I wanted her to agree to give up her husband’s Chrysler to me.
“Hello, Mrs. Boucher.”
“Mrs. Valentine!” she said, her face lighting up.
“Listen, I hate to trouble you, but Eva Wilson? From across the street? Her daughter is running a very high temperature, and neither one of us has a car to take her to see Dr. Johnson. Is there any way we could borrow your car for a couple of hours? I’ll be happy to fill the tank.”
“Poor little baby. Have you tried an alcohol rub?”
Growing impatient, I nodded. “We’ve tried everything. She really just needs to see a doctor.” And as I fabricated this story, I imagined Rose’s skin growing hot to the touch, her eyes becoming droopy and glassy. I imagined her growing listless as her body fought off whatever germs were invading it. I almost forgot as I stood there at Mrs. Boucher’s doorstep that it was Calder, and
not
Rose, who was ill. My whole life was becoming one enormous lie, and it was surprisingly easy.
I backed the Imperial up to the garage door, and we carefully lifted Calder into the back, Eva keeping an eye out to make sure Mrs. Boucher wasn’t watching from the window. We loaded Rose in then, fussing over her, as if she really were sick.
At the vet’s office, the doctor took Calder in right away. By the time we got there, her eyes were rolling back in her head, and Eva was weeping. She disappeared into the examination room with Calder, and I held onto Rose, trying to comfort her, but she knew that whatever was happening was bad.
After an excruciating half hour, Eva came out, her head hung, her makeup smudged. I looked up at her expectantly, and she shook her head. “They put her down. She wasn’t going to make it.”
My eyes filled with tears. Eva sat down next to me and I held her as she cried. “What happened?” I asked.
“The doctor says it looks like she got into some rat poison.”
“
Rat poison?
How?” I knew Eva kept all of the cleaning supplies and other poisonous things on the top shelf in her pantry, far away from the children and Calder.
She shook her head, but then I felt a sucking feeling at the center of my chest, as though my whole body might just cave in.
“He knows,” I said.
Eva wiped her tears. “Who?”
“Ted,” I said.
Eva shook her head. “You think
Ted
did this?”
I nodded, feeling everything coming together, pieces snapping together like a jigsaw puzzle. The picture coming into focus with each click. “Think about it,” I said. “She was a gift from me. So we could walk together. You said he’s the one who fed her this morning.”
Eva’s eyes widened in disbelief, her mouth opening a little. “That’s
crazy,
Billie.”
“He’s sending a warning,” I said.
“She might have just gotten into the neighbors’ garbage,” Eva said, as though she could change what had happened by simply wishing it untrue. “Maybe she got into the garage somehow.”
But I
knew
Johnny had told Ted, and we’d been fools to think he wouldn’t. But rather than going on a rampage, rather than lashing out with his fists, Ted had laced his wife’s dog’s food with arsenic, put on his hat, and gone to work. Cool as a cucumber, as they used to say. And something about this realization was more threatening and terrifying than anything he had ever done to Eva’s body. He was abusive and violent and filled with rage, but he was also calculating and capable of taking the life of a family pet and then whistling a little tune on his way out the door.
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Eva said as we drove Mrs. Boucher’s borrowed car back to the neighborhood, but I couldn’t stop trembling with both fear and a terrifying fury.
That early November night, I stood in the kitchen washing dishes and waited. I knew it was only a matter of time. I waited as I put the dishes away and mopped the floor and wiped down the countertops. I waited while Frankie tinkered with a broken toaster at the kitchen table, as the wine jug emptied, and his eyes glazed over. As I tucked the girls into their beds and as I sank into the depths of the bathtub, the water filling my ears and eyes, I waited.
The doorbell rang as I was getting out of the tub. I pulled my robe around me, and I checked my reflection in the mirror. I checked in on each of the girls to make sure they were asleep, and then I pulled their doors shut as I made my way down the upstairs hallway to the stairs.
“He said they were hugging,” I heard Ted say. “They were kissing like a man and a woman. Johnny saw everything. You think my kid’s a liar?” And I knew then that there was nothing to do but to go down the stairs. To enter that room and face Frankie, to face Ted, to tell the truth.
My hands were trembling, and though I was terrified, my only thought, strangely, was that Frankie deserved to know. That Ted, even, deserved the truth. And more—that I deserved to tell it. Stupidly, I also thought that now that it was out in the open, Eva and I could finally be free: that our plans would only be hastened by this sudden exposure, that revealing our secret would somehow set us free.
I walked down the stairs, and Frankie and Ted both looked at me, speechless. The absolute quiet, this horrific stillness, was excruciating.
Finally, Ted glowered, breaking the silence, but his voice was low and calm. “If you ever see my wife again, I will kill you.”
Frankie’s voice shook the floor beneath my feet, the walls that held the house together, my very skin. “Get out of my house.”
I glanced toward the stairwell, praying that Chessy and Mouse were still asleep.
“I’ll kill your whole fucking family,” Ted said, pushing his finger into Frankie’s chest. And then he turned and stormed out the front door, slamming it behind him.
The only thing I remember after that was feathers. A thousand red and yellow feathers flying in the air like so many autumn leaves. As Frankie knocked the kitchen table over, with all of the Thanksgiving play costumes on it, there was a storm of feathers.
Frankie’s lips were gray with wine, his teeth gray as well. His breath was sour, and little flecks of spit splattered against my face as he hissed, “I should have known. All these years. You frigid bitch. You
homosexual.
”
I shook my head, trying not to cry. Trying not to cower. Trying not to shatter.
“You’re
sick
. Mentally ill.” He tapped his head hard with his finger, and then he tapped mine. The soft pads of his finger were like bullets against my skull. And I thought of the meetings with the therapist that my parents had arranged. I remembered the hard couch, the smell of antiseptic that hinted at illness. At germs. I had thought then that they were right. I believed them. This was an
illness,
something no different than measles, than mumps, than cancer. That if I followed the doctor’s instructions, I could be cured. I had even worried, for years now, that it might be something I could pass on to my own daughters. That if I touched them, if I held them too close, they would be infected by me and they would suffer the same debilitating longing for that which they could never have. It was only with Eva, only in the last few years, that I had begun to see my feelings not as those of someone afflicted, but rather of someone in love. I had believed, stupidly, that what I felt was not the symptom of a disease. It was good. Pure, even. Something beautiful. But now, here I was, feeling like I was sixteen years old again. Sixteen years old and cowering at my father’s feet as he shouted at me, as he berated and accused.
“You are sick. Filthy. You are disgusting. You should not be around children. What kind of mother are you?”
What kind of mother was I? The question hit me harder than any fist.
Here is the mother I was:
barren,
my body failing me over and over and over again as I tried to bring life into this world. A mother whose own womb rejected its young progeny, expelling them before they could even begin to thrive. I was a mother who pretended that another woman’s children were her own, who kept up the maternal masquerade, always afraid of being found out. I was a mother who neglected her own children, turned them away rather than infecting them with this disease that lived inside her. I was a mother who did not, could not, love her own children’s father. Who could not bring herself to sleep in his arms, seeking solace instead inside another woman’s embrace. I thought of all those mornings in Vermont when we left the children to their own devices so that we could linger, together, alone in the sleeping loft.
I couldn’t stop shaking as he pummeled me with accusations, as his angry words, like angry blows, bruised all of the most vulnerable places inside of me.
“You’re a liar, a dirty whore.”
I sank down on the kitchen floor, wanting nothing more than to disappear. To simply vanish. But when Mouse came to the top of the stairs, I scrambled to my feet, ashamed that I had allowed myself to collapse like this.
“Mama?” she asked, starting to come down the stairs. “Why are you crying?”
I wiped my eyes furiously with the back of my hand and hoisted her, too old and too big to carry anymore, her legs dangling down nearly to the floor, up to my hip. I held her, embraced her, clung to her.
And as I knew he would, Frankie pried her from my arms. “Your mother is not well,” he said. “Now go back up to bed.”
Mouse scurried upstairs, and I could hear her feet pattering down the hallway. I thought about Chessy in her room, didn’t know what I should do,
could
do or say to her if she had heard any of this.
“Who else knows?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No one.”
“Liar!” His words were mushy in his mouth, softened by wine. And I wondered if he would remember this in the morning. Would this moment, like so many moments, become just a hazy, half-remembered dream to him? For once, I hoped so, as if amnesia could turn back the clock. He’d had nearly half the jug of wine that night, drowning whatever demons existed in his own mind. I prayed to a God I didn’t trust that he would simply stumble away, disappear upstairs; I willed him to forget.
And then, as if by my own sheer will, Frankie stood up, and I watched as he reached for the edges of the furniture like a blind man to steady himself as he made his way to the stairwell. His pants hung loose on him, gaps in the fabric where the belt held them up. His white tank top was gray and worn, his shoulder blades sharp. He’d recently been to the barber, and there was a thick, red scab at the back of his head from a nick. All of this made me pity him. He was a child, a wounded child. I had the momentary impulse to go tuck him into bed, to put a cold cloth to his forehead and promise that everything would be better in the morning. But then he turned to me and spat one last time. “You don’t deserve those children. I gave them to you, and I can take them away just as well.” His words suddenly lost their softness; they were less like fists and more like knives. And I knew then that he wasn’t that drunk. He would remember everything in the morning. This was the end of my life as I knew it. I could lose my
children;
he could take them away from me. For the first time since everything with Eva began, I considered the unthinkable: that my selfish needs might wind up making me lose the only other thing in the world that I loved.