The Far End of Happy (11 page)

Ronnie took a good long drink from her water bottle and thought back over all the help she’d tried to arrange for Jeff. “I wonder if forcing Jeff into detox under the threat of jail time would even work.”

“Jail,” Janet said. “I still can’t get over this treating him like a criminal.”

Ronnie decided not to mention Jeff pointing his gun at that cop again. If Janet didn’t think that was criminal, there wasn’t much Ronnie could do about it. She’d also keep that morning’s discovery of the twelve hundred dollars to herself. Who knew where that money had come from?

“Maybe it’s a matter of timing,” Beverly said. “The officer I was talking to this morning said that sometimes people who fail to commit suicide are grateful, that they knew right away they’d made a mistake. Maybe Jeff thought the same thing this morning, when that gun went off. Maybe he’s confused, with all those police around him, and trying to figure out how to end this.”

“That’s what we hope.” Corporal McNichol finished a doodle—or a paragraph—on the page. “But I have to warn you, all we can do is push Jeff into the program. He does not have to engage. He’s only required to sit there for twenty-eight days. But at that point, his head would be a little clearer. Could make a difference.”

How could Corporal McNichol hope to make a difference when Ronnie and a score of professionals had already met with nothing but their own impotence?

When she took Jeff for an intake interview at the outpatient rehab center two days after his hospital release, Ronnie remembered how she’d felt in its cozy waiting area, surrounded by racks with brochures full of information on alcoholism: safe. Safer, in that public space, than she did in her own home. Information led to identifying problems, and problems had solutions. Yet when Jeff came out, he complained that the outpatient rehab was forty-five minutes away, and early in the morning at that. It wouldn’t fit his late-night schedule.

“Can’t you help us either?” Ronnie asked the intake counselor privately after the completion of her part of the interview. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

The counselor put her arm around Ronnie and steered her toward the door. “I understand you’re leaving him. I’m sure no one expects you to support him through this. You need to take care of yourself and your children.”

The more determined Ronnie was to separate herself from the threat Jeff presented, the more she seemed to be stuck with him. Maybe if he found someone he liked and respected, as she had with Anita, he might benefit from one-on-one counseling. She called their health insurance company again to explore this aspect of their mental health coverage, and by the time she hung up, she had amassed a list of counselors, phone numbers, and covered services.

She sat across from Jeff in their dining room, the pendulum of the clock above his head ticking away what Ronnie feared might be the final hope-filled minutes of their marriage. Ronnie slid the list across the table to him. “If you won’t do anything else, please, at least go talk to somebody.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Jeff said, setting the list aside. “I’ll do inpatient rehab, if you’d promise me one thing.”

Ronnie sighed. Always exacting something from her. “What’s that?”

“That you’ll be there for me when I get out.”

As Ronnie tried to smooth the creases in the vinyl tablecloth that had never relaxed since it left the package five years ago, she tried to imagine Jeff emerging from rehab a new person, the two of them falling into a loving embrace to reclaim what they once had. But Ronnie had outgrown her best memory of what they “once had.” While writing in her journal, she had envisioned a new kind of relationship, in which she and a partner could nurture each other into becoming the best that each could be—and not one conversation she’d ever had with Jeff indicated that he had a similar goal. This demand that she be there for him after rehab seemed like another bid for time while he thought up one more way to chain her to the farm.

Yet it took no more than a moment to forgive his strong-arm technique; despite his calm facade, his desperation was palpable.

“What do you say, Ronnie? Will you wait for me?”

Ronnie chose her words carefully. “I will be there as a friend, always. I care about you. I want you to have a better life. I’m the mother of your children, and that will always connect us. But I cannot promise I’ll be there as your wife.”

She stood calmly. Wasting no time, per the psychiatrist’s recommendation, Ronnie went to her office, called her divorce lawyer, and made another appointment for the following week.

To her knowledge, Jeff never placed a call for any kind of therapy.

• • •

“Mom, they’re showing the farm again,” Will said. “Look at the horses. They’re freaking out.”

“Did you climb up and turn the TV on, Will?”

“No. You never turned it off. You just hit Mute.”

Ronnie was ashamed she’d left the television on. Her boys didn’t need to see any more of this. From the looks of it, more news vans had nosed up to the barrier at the edge of their property.

As she reached up to shut off the set, the camera panned back for a full view of the way their property crested the hill. The huge red barn lording over the outbuildings, the rustic split-rail fencing, the snowflake patterns in the newly thinned pick-your-own strawberry field, the brilliant yellows and reds of the fall leaves against the green yard and white stucco house—it was breathtaking. Until the line of black-and-whites in the driveway led her eye to the store. The horses paced in the pasture beside it.

Actually,
pasture
was a kind word for it. It was more like dirt with an occasional sprout of onion grass and broadleaf weed. Jeff thought the smell of earth and onions projected just the right organic image they wanted for their farm store, but Ronnie thought they should keep it looking better, with customers gathering at the fence to pet those velvety noses. The cameras focused again on the horses. The boys’ lame Shetland pony, Horsey Patch, had thrust his entire spotted head through the lower two rungs of the fence to eat the grass at the edge of the road. Camelot and Daydream ran the length of the pasture, raising a cloud of dust that stuck to their lathered necks—right beneath the window of the store’s office.

Ronnie could see nothing through its dusty glass.

Rob White’s lips were moving; a banner said “Breaking News.” How could she turn it off now, when this man had information that might have a grave impact on their lives? She found the volume on the remote as White said, “Correspondent Maura Riley has the latest. Maura?”

The scene cut to a picture of Riley standing by the barricade, her blond hair sprayed into artful layers.

“Thank you, Rob. I’m standing here with a neighbor, Karl Prout, whose house is located up the hill from the Farnham place. I understand that you aren’t able to get home, Karl?”

“That’s right. I work the night shift at a plant in Reading. I stopped to eat, and on my way home, I ran into this here barricade. So me and some of the other neighbors have been standing here talking. We just can’t believe it.”

“What’s the consensus?”

“Like I said, we just can’t believe it.” The camera pulled back to show others nodding their heads. Ronnie recognized a few of the local fire police, pressed into service every time an accident required that traffic be rerouted.

“Tell us what you know about Jeffrey Farnham.”

“I mean, Jeff is a real nice guy. About fifty, fifty-five, I’d guess. Always happy. Plowed me out a few times. His family’s lived on the hill here for a long time and I know ’em all. Never had a problem with any of ’em. Real nice.”

“We understand he may be intoxicated. Did Jeffrey Farnham have a problem with alcohol?”

“Well, it’s not unusual if you work the night shift,” Karl said, chuckling and holding his gut so it wouldn’t spill further over his pants. “Look. He had no more trouble with booze than any of us do. They say he and his wife were fighting too, but I don’t buy it. He wasn’t like that. That stuff is all exaggeration. You know how people talk.”

“Okay, well, there you have it, Rob—”

Ronnie flipped off the set. Until recently, even Ronnie hadn’t realized Jeff had been an alcoholic. What did Karl Prout know about her husband? She wondered if Karl Prout knew that Jeff had once dreamed of opening a rental center for tools and party supplies. That he’d never had a cold in all the years she’d known him. That he was at greatest peace sitting on the porch on a summer evening, after a long day of work, surveying the mowed yards and growing gardens. Of course he didn’t. Why on earth
Action News
would resort to a man-on-the-country-road interview during a situation like this was beyond her.

And no one seemed to get the simplest fact right. Her husband’s age. She could only hope he’d make it to fifty.

“That’s it.” Ronnie pulled the list of media contacts from her back pocket. “Mom, let me use your phone.”

“Oh, honey, don’t bait them.”

“This is family business,” Janet said.

Ronnie left the social hall, turned right, and searched for a phone. Down the hall, she found an office where a couple of uniformed officers were manning radios. Ronnie, so removed from the police operation in the social hall, seemed to have slammed right into command central.

One officer was picking peppers off his sandwich. “My gut won’t take ’em any more. It’s peppers or coffee, one or the other, and you know who’s winning that battle.”

“Some respect, gentlemen?” Corporal McNichol said, coming up behind Ronnie. Both men stood.

Static on the radio. Ronnie caught her breath. “Scopes say Farnham hasn’t moved in a while. Thought we heard him snoring, but it was a chain saw starting farther up the road.”

One of the officers stifled a smile; the other cleared his throat.

“I just want to use the phone,” Ronnie said. “I’ll only be a sec.”

The men turned down the radio. Her rapid loss of bluster left Ronnie’s hand shaking on the keypad.

“Maura Riley here.”

“This is Veronica Farnham.” For once, Ronnie was glad for the added syllables and the gravitas they conferred.

“How are you doing?”

How
the
hell
did
she
think?

“Quit guessing at my husband’s age.”

“We hear you’re divorcing. I’m so sorry. I’ve been there. It’s tough. Is that why he’s so distraught?”

Yellow journalism 101. Delve into the emotional; befriend the interviewee. Tabloids did this all the time to make people spill their friends’ stories.

Ronnie took a deep breath and tried to stay on point. “On a day where many things cannot possibly be known, it seems the very least a journalist could do is get this one fact right.”

“Were your children afraid of the guns their father kept on the property?”

Go
for
the
innocent. Oh, she’s good.

“He’s forty-seven.”

Heart racing, Ronnie hung up the phone and ripped up the list. “Feel free to refuse all further calls from the media on my behalf,” she said, tossing the torn bits in the trash and heading for the door. This was her story that was unfolding. If anyone was going to write about it, it would be her.

Ronnie agreed with Karl Prout: this was overkill. Suicide was such a big, splashy statement. So unlike Jeff, who preferred the invisible periphery of most situations. When Ronnie had been low herself, after college, the notion of self-harm had never once crossed her mind. “Suicide,” with its soft, slippery sound, still felt like a mercurial threat.

She thought this even as her knuckles and jaw ached from clenching, and a nerve was zapping hot down the back of her left leg.

Anyway, the last time Jeff hadn’t acted on it; he’d simply written the note. To scare her into taking him back. Now, it would seem, even the police thought this was a joke.

Yet as Ronnie returned to her family in the social hall, the tinny voice of the hospital psychiatrist grated on her memory:
He
just
might.

The manhunt, the standoff, the airing of marital issues, the public humiliation—the day had pulled on her daughter like an unrelenting winch. Beverly wondered how Ronnie pushed on without snapping.

“Mo-om, we need the TV. We’re bo-ored.” Will always stretched the word to two syllables to underscore his point.

“I have to talk to Corporal McNichol, Will,” Ronnie said. “Just sit.”

“We’ve been sitting all morning. I want to go to school.”

“Sorry, you can’t.”

“Then let us go over to the park,” Andrew said. “You can’t keep us here like we’re in prison.”

“Boys. Sit down. I can’t deal with you two right now!”

Ah, there she blows
, Beverly thought.
At
least
I
spawned
a
human.

The boys’ faces went blank as they stared her down.

“I didn’t mean to yell,” Ronnie said. “Sorry.”

“You’re just going to keep saying bad things about Dad.”

Will had her pegged all right. If Beverly knew one thing about her daughter, she would talk. Ronnie laughed words, cried words. Honestly, you could only stop her up so long before the words came tumbling out. Those words were going to come whether her sons wanted to hear them or not.

What her grandsons needed was a distraction—and that was Beverly’s specialty.

“Come with me, boys. And, Mr. Eshbach, would you like some entertainment?”

Beverly took Andrew and Will to the far end of the room. Sure enough, her daughter was already gabbing away to Corporal McNichol. That girl could go to the end of the drive to meet the mailman and come home fifteen minutes later knowing his son was flunking history and his dog was allergic to his flea treatment. Where had that knowledge ever gotten her? Conversation couldn’t solve everything.

“Let’s sing,” Andrew said. “Mom loves it.”

“Okay, what do you want to sing, sweetie?” Beverly said, a smile always at the ready. Even when she was frightened out of her mind.

“‘On Top of Spaghetti’!” Will said.

“You always say that, and you can never remember the words,” Andrew said.

Yet they started in anyway, not fearing the ragged end of the journey.

Ronnie had no clue what she might be in for. Ever since Beverly had spoken with that policeman this morning, one thought kept pulsing through her mind: someone commits suicide in this country every fourteen minutes. Was this one of those minutes?

Beverly sat looking around the fire hall, so festive when decorated, now so barren. That old mirror ball had seen so many rites of passage in this room, many of which she’d attended through the years. Ronnie was ten years old when they had the reception after her brother Teddy’s baptism here. Beverly couldn’t afford flowers so they’d decorated the whole place with Mylar balloons. Little Teddy had untied some of them from their weights and sent them heaven bound.

Ronnie’s high school graduation party had been held here too. Even though Beverly had decorated the whole front wall with tissue paper butterflies, she’d had a hard time handling her daughter’s transformation. It was back then that Ronnie started rolling and blowing and relaxing her hair in order to look like her idea of an adult. Yet the mirror ball threw its colored fairy lights across faces still innocent; at their age, Beverly already had a one-year-old. She’d wanted Ronnie, she absolutely did, and no matter how tough things had gotten she’d never regretted having her, but at that party, Beverly’s unlived life loomed so close that she could feel it taunting her.

Twice she’d been in this room for Janet’s husband, Jerry. Janet could afford flowers. The place had looked like an indoor garden for Jerry’s induction into the high school sports hall of fame and again, later, for his funeral reception. Both events were crowded. The whole town loved Jerry; as a coach, teacher, and summer playground administrator, he kept grooming new batches of admirers. Janet never seemed to bask in the glow of his popularity nor hide in his shadow, as many women would around a strong man. Beverly admired her independence.

Beverly remembered Jerry’s surprise when some of his former students brought in a freestanding basketball hoop and set it at one end of the hall, then his laughter when one of them made off with his commissioned portrait and climbed up to rest it against the backboard. They reprised the prank at Jerry’s funeral reception, with a black sash across the painting. Beverly had thought it was a touching tribute. Jeff had ranted about it and wanted to take it down, but the players had surrounded the pole with dozens and dozens of huge floral arrangements, creating a fragrant island to guard their beloved coach’s untouchable reputation.

Celebration and letting go, beginnings and endings. Today the hall was stripped bare, as if it hadn’t known how to dress. As if waiting, like the rest of them, to know what kind of event this would be.

Now these sweet boys, belting their little meatball hearts out, had brought a smile to two of the most needful faces: Janet’s and Mr. Eshbach’s. Beverly felt flush with warm pride. These were Dom’s grandsons. The song connected them: Beverly had taught it to Ronnie, and Ronnie had taught it to Andrew and Will, and all of them connected her back to Dom.

Beverly looked back over at her daughter, hoping all those words she was speaking were adding up in some new way. But she was thrilled to see her hair restored to its natural beauty. After so many years, Beverly had feared Ronnie had ironed the life right out of those curls.

She had to believe there was a way for her family to make it through this while still holding a song in their hearts.