The Far End of Happy (18 page)

When Corporal McNichol returned, all three women rose. “It’s clear that the ways we’ve been trying to communicate with Jeff aren’t working. We want to try something new.”

Communicate
with
Jeff.
A concept doomed to failure. How many times over the past few years had Ronnie pleaded with him to talk with her—about the finances, covering the boys’ schedules, or even going for a horseback ride together—to no avail? As if he’d already been walling himself off, brick by brick.

“What have you been trying?” Beverly said.

“We’ve been calling to him through a bullhorn. And in case he disconnected the phone, we also slid a portable phone into the store and asked him to come out and pick it up. He did not. We’re running out of ideas.”

Janet sat back down. Hard. Corporal McNichol turned to Ronnie. “I know it looks bad. But this could still turn around. Do you want to try speaking to him?”

“You mean call him?”

“No. As I said, he’s not answering the phone. An officer would take you back to the store so you could appeal to Jeff over the bullhorn.”

She was about to say that she’d already said everything she needed to say to Jeff, more than once. That she had no influence over him. That she didn’t see the point.

But there was a point: Jeff still loved her. If she stayed with him, she might hold the power to save his life.

Go to the farm. Talk to Jeff. After all they had meant to each other—after all they’d accomplished, as a team—she owed him this much.

Or did she? Working shoulder to shoulder toward a distant dream, they were genial partners, but within the confines of reality and face-to-face, they hadn’t had an effective exchange in—well, she couldn’t recall how long.

She heard Anita saying she’d done all she could.

She remembered the psychiatrist saying she now had to take care of herself and her children.

And the alcohol counselor saying no one expected her continued support.

If only she could have one of them counsel her now. Ronnie felt she had come to the greatest test of her life and she’d have to make this decision alone.

There were only cons to consider. If Jeff died today, what kind of hell would they face? But if he lived, what kind of problems would he still cause? The operation’s focus suddenly shifted, it seemed, and all guns were aimed at her.

She felt Jeff clinging to her now, his fingers laced around her neck, his full weight dragging on her as once again she was charged with a decision affecting them all. If she tried to pull him up with one last heave, at this late stage, how far might he drag her down instead?

Our
words
hang
in
the
air
all
around
him, but they can’t sink in
, the psychiatrist had said.

She’d already tried so many times to get Jeff care from professionals who knew much more than she did. AA. Inpatient rehab. Outpatient rehab. Individual counseling. She’d tried to talk to him, from her heart, about her own journey. She’d toed him up to the healing waters and looked right in, but in their reflection, only Ronnie saw the possibilities. She’d kicked him into the deep end with involuntary commitment, but even that didn’t work. You cannot force a man to drink something life-sustaining if he thirsts for something different. Can’t force him to stay afloat if he won’t swim.

How much clearer could he be? Jeff had no desire to heal.

God, Jeff. Where the hell are you?

The air in the room felt too heavy to bear.

“I won’t lie to him,” she finally said. “Not today, not with so much at stake, and certainly not over a bullhorn with the media and all the world watching. I won’t do it to him and I…” The words, so foreign to her, caught in her throat. “I won’t do it to myself. I can’t live for him anymore. I’m done.”

Janet and Beverly turned away.

Corporal McNichol handed her a tissue. “Is there anyone else with influence? Karl Prout is saying they’re good friends. He wants to try.”

When Ronnie saw Jeff this morning, it seemed he’d been drinking all night. Ronnie tried to imagine what it would be like to be that drunk, that sleep-deprived. Already feeling like the relationships in his life had lost all meaning. And then some well-intentioned guy like Karl Prout comes forward to reach out. Ronnie could feel the pain deep in her own belly. For the first time, she could imagine Jeff actually pulling the trigger.

“You’re the expert,” Ronnie said. “But I’m telling you, Jeff forces himself to be nice to the guy. He thinks Karl is an idiot.” Ronnie felt a twinge in her abdomen and bent forward to relieve it.

“Are you okay?” Corporal McNichol said.

“I’ll be right back.”

Ronnie felt light-headed as she walked to the far end of the hall. Insubstantial, as if the gravity that had been tugging on her so fiercely in recent weeks might release her and let her float away. In the bathroom stall, she found her underwear damp and red. A good ten days before her period was due.

Jeff was able to hold an entire community at bay, but life kept making its demands of her. When she returned to the hall, she pulled her mother out into the stairwell and asked her to go back to Perlmutter’s and get her some supplies.

When Ronnie headed back to the table where she’d been sitting, she saw Corporal McNichol speaking quietly to Jeff’s mother in the corner by the bar.

Ronnie strode over to them, thinking she may have missed some news—and heard Corporal McNichol ask Janet to speak to her son over the bullhorn.

“That’s not a good idea,” Ronnie blurted.

Her mother-in-law looked at her. “Why on earth not?”

Because
he
hates
you.
She stopped short of saying the ugly words Jeff had written in last month’s suicide note. But in her cramping gut, she knew: if the police wanted to provoke violence, all they needed to do was send Jeff’s mother in to console him. “He’s not himself.”

“Well, I hope not. My Jeff would never do something like this.”

She wondered if Janet’s “Jeff” was the same as hers. “He’s drunk.”

“Yes, yes, he’s drunk, he’s a drunk, he’s a drunk. You keep saying that. And maybe he’d been drinking a bit last night, but—”

“No, he’s still drinking.” Ronnie took a moment for her thinking to catch up to her words. “He must be or else this would have ended already. But that makes no sense… We both use that office…”

“He could have taken that whiskey from the car,” Corporal McNichol said.

“Janet.” Ronnie took her mother-in-law’s hands. “What if you provoke him? Mother-child relationships are complicated. What if he hears your voice and—”

“You don’t want him to live, do you?” Janet said, pulling away.

“Of course I do. He’s the boys’ father. I hope he figures things out.”

“And that’s all you want for him? You promised yourself to him for life. For better or worse.”

“Okay, so all relationships are complicated.”

“Well, you can sit here with your complications, but one of us has to do something. And it looks like it’s going to be me.”

Ronnie turned to Corporal McNichol, silently imploring.

“It’s worth a try, Ronnie. I know you’re worried about your mother-in-law’s safety, but we’ll keep her behind a body shield.”

“What?” Janet said weakly.

When she swayed, Ronnie steadied her. “No one will blame you if you don’t do this. You’ve supported him his whole life—”

“And I’ll support him today too,” she said, although her voice lacked conviction and her face had gone slack. Janet was a listener, not a talker—and Jeff was not in the mood to talk.

“We have a squad car waiting downstairs,” Corporal McNichol said. “When you’re done talking to your son, we’ll bring you right back here.”

Ronnie felt as muddled as the room’s glass block windows, which allowed some light but no clarity. She clung to the doorway, unwilling to travel any further into the shadows beyond.

Ka-POW!

The shotgun blast was louder than she’d anticipated. It had more of a kick too. Not that Ronnie had touched it—Carmelle was the gunslinger. She was always bent on keeping up with their new husbands, whether smoking, drinking, changing her car’s oil, or now, insisting she could shoot. She never would have rubbed her shoulder in front of the guys, but the way she stood dazed for a few moments said that despite the padding of her raccoon coat, she was hurting. She hadn’t heeded Jeff’s warning to squeeze the butt of the stock tight to her shoulder. Looking particularly elfish that day, Jeff, orchestrator of these high jinks, relaxed beside Paco against the stone retaining wall at the side of the house, took a deep drag of his Pall Mall, and chuckled. Carmelle allowed a satisfied smile to spread across her face. The makeshift hanger they’d rigged to the mimosa tree was empty, and the hand-painted wedding plate had been shot all to hell.

With the house set well off the road and surrounded by neighbors inured to the sounds of target practice, no one was alarmed by what had transpired. That mix of privacy and freedom was something Jeff loved about their little farm—the perimeter was large enough to keep their animals in and snoopy neighbors out. When thrifty Carmelle couldn’t sell the plate from her husband’s first wedding at their yard sale—what were the chances they’d find a “Paco & Erline” to buy it?—Jeff had invited them down to shoot. Paco was all for it.

Ronnie had a couple of targets in mind as well. She buckled them together and then to the tree branch. The good money she’d made as a cocktail waitress was always offset by pain—Ronnie’s feet weren’t made for high heels. During the last hour of every shift, it was all she could do not to hobble. She never wanted to feel that kind of torture again.

Jeff urged her to shoot them herself. He said it would feel great. Carmelle urged her to do it too. Ronnie was coming off one decision to save her feet, though, and her guess was that Carmelle’s shoulder would be purple for weeks. She appointed a surrogate, but Ronnie was the one cheering the loudest when Jeff turned all John Wayne, closed one eye against the smoke of his cigarette, trained the other down the barrel…and blew the toes out of those shoes.

“Woohoo!” They were all fired up.

“What else can we shoot?” Paco said.

Ronnie knew just the thing. “Let’s get Crazy Fay’s clock!”

While Ronnie usually wouldn’t throw something away that still worked just fine, she’d be happy to sacrifice the clock for her friends’ entertainment. She ran in to get it and strung it upside down from a tree limb by its cord.

Paco cocked his head and contemplated the odd sight. “Should we allow a slow death by hanging?” In answer, Jeff reloaded the gun and handed it over. Paco waved off the invitation. “This one’s all yours, brother.”

The clock exploded, reducing its mysterious inner workings to an assortment of springs and metal shards that speared right into the earth. It was a pain to clean up, but the event was cathartic as all get out.

After Ronnie was done jumping up and down—and Jeff had safely set the gun aside—she ran over and threw her arms around him. Hugging Jeff was always an incredible feeling. When pressed to hers, Jeff’s body was as comfortable as memory foam; he accommodated her as if she were literally leaving an impression on him. He was her hero, unafraid to obliterate their painful memories.

They kissed until Paco and Carmelle complained, then laughed. They were goading them; their friends were always saying that Ronnie and Jeff couldn’t get enough of each other.

Jeff pulled Ronnie inside the house. He’d fix cocktails, and she’d put out the appetizer platter she’d spent the day making, edged with daisies she’d carved from slices of turnip and carrot held together by toothpicks. But first, he pinned her up against the wall and cradled her face in his hands.

“You are so beautiful.” He kissed her hungrily, pulled back, and looked into her eyes—through them, in fact—as if toward a potential beauty Ronnie had not yet recognized. One in which she wanted to believe.

Janet thought she might be sick in the back of the police cruiser. To concentrate on her breathing she closed her eyes, only opening them when the car came to a stop. They were at the barricade. A string of news vans stood by, cameras on tripods, microphones held to faces. Two police cars had their lights flashing as if ready to spring into action.

An officer waved bystanders aside so they could pass. Several dozen people with familiar faces stood around chatting as if they were waiting for the all clear after a grease fire in a church kitchen. These people—blue-collar workers, nouveau homesteaders, artists, horse owners, and, Janet suspected, a meth cooker or two—had their own reasons for living in these hills, on parcels sold reluctantly by the original Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. People kept to themselves; outside of township meetings, she’d never seen so many of her neighbors congregated.

And she’d never passed a police car on one of their roads, ever, let alone a news van. Among those in work boots and dungarees stood a young woman wearing a blazer and scarf whose shellacked blond hair was unfazed by the breeze. Midinterview, she pulled back her microphone and rushed toward Janet’s window as if a mother’s participation in her own son’s life were a major news development. Janet raised her hand to hide her face. The reporter’s knuckles rapped the glass as the car rolled through the barricade.

Janet put her head down between her knees and took a few deep breaths. Then she reached into her purse for a few sips of something to take the edge off.

She’d sacrificed so much to have Jeff.

In the time before Jeff, when she and Jerry first married, their passion seemed to stretch endlessly before them. Heat rose to her face now, thinking of the way her pregnant body used to respond to his. Acting on that urge under her parents’ roof was always a creative challenge, even though, for a wedding gift, Amelia had divided the house in two, even adding another kitchen, so that Jerry wouldn’t have to pay for a new home on top of medical expenses for the pending birth.

One day during Janet’s finals week, when her parents had offered to cook, Jerry was so eager when he got home that he begged off dinner, feigned illness, and pulled Janet right up to their bedroom. She’d giggled the whole way, hoping the sound wouldn’t carry.

“I can’t get enough of you, Mrs. Farnham,” he whispered in her ear. Her sensitive breasts yearned for his touch, her body ready to accept him. They hastily shed their clothes, and he pushed her onto the bed, their excitement growing as he rubbed his hands over her five-month belly and heavy breasts.

With the very first thrust, she screamed. Jerry clamped his hand over her mouth, laughing.

“Mmp ump mee!” She pounded on his chest. “Get off!”

He pulled out amid a wash of blood. “Holy shit.”

Janet lifted her hand to the searing pain on the left side of her belly. “Help the baby.” Jerry looked like he was going to pass out.

The emergency room doctor assured them the baby sounded healthy. He suspected some sort of blood-filled cyst.

“So is everything okay, since the cyst drained?” Jerry said.

“My concern is that I don’t know the source of the blood filling it. Without surgery, your wife may hemorrhage. But we’ll need to open her uterus. There is risk to the fetus.”

“But my baby,” Janet said. She hated the sound of the word
fetus
, a term used when discussing back-alley abortions. This was little Janey they were talking about. Or Jeffrey.

The doctor looked to Jerry. “Time may be of the essence.”

Fighting through the fog of painkillers, Janet said, “Jerry, no, let’s wait a few days,” as Jerry scrawled his name on the papers.

From the time she returned from surgery until Jeff emerged by cesarean three and a half months later, Janet lay on her bed, bored out of her mind, her swelling belly tugging at her inner and outer wounds. She was tended to lovingly: Amelia by day, Jerry by evening. They took meals and drinks up and down the forbidden stairs, brought her library books and inexpensive gifts, told her stories. Jerry slept downstairs on the couch.

After Jeff was born, she held him to her breast, waiting for the rush of connection—but felt nothing. It will get better once your milk comes in, the nurses said. It will get better once you’re up and moving around again, her doctor said. All that inactivity takes a lot out of you, said the gym teacher she’d married.

But Janet knew what she needed. She needed her husband to help her feel like a whole woman again.

Until then, Janet went through the motions of caring for the baby, never feeling the fierce, tigerlike devotion she expected. Breast-feeding was a chore. She took greater pleasure seeing her mother hold her child than she did in holding him herself and kept her shame hidden so deep no one would ever discover it.

When Janet was well enough to take her rescheduled final exams, Jerry had their double bed hauled away. She thought that his disposal of the bloodstained mattress was considerate and his way of coming back to her—until later that day, when the twin beds arrived.

As her angry scars faded to white and puckered the loose skin around them, Jerry began coaching basketball, and Janet got a job teaching typing. She handed her baby to her mother, bound her breasts to stop the milk, and began a career.

Teaching restored her confidence and completed the healing process. After Jeff’s first birthday party, she slipped from her bed into Jerry’s and snuggled up to him. Half asleep, he’d whispered, “This feels nice.” She slid her hand down his pajamas and he jolted awake.

“What are you doing?” He leaped from the bed, yanking up his bottoms.

“Is it so horrible for a woman to want her husband?”

He flicked on the wall switch, as if to better track her movements.

She nestled a finger over her scar. “You find me repulsive.”

“No, no. My goodness, if that were the case, my life would be so much easier.”

“Then what is it?”

“You heard the doctor. Your body won’t hold up to another pregnancy.”

Janet reached into the nightstand that stood between their beds and held up a square packet. “We could use this.”

“Alka-Seltzer?”

Janet erupted into a fit of giggles. “No, silly.” She ripped the packet open and unrolled the rubber onto her thumb. “The pharmacist showed me how to do this—”

“You have discussed our…relations…with Mr. Gregory? Have you lost your mind? He’s a deacon at your mother’s church!” Jerry hissed the words as if someone might overhear talk of their relations even now, as if her parents hadn’t subdivided the house into halves and moved to the other side.

“Come here, honey.” Janet patted the bed beside her. “I know how to put this on.”

Jerry gave her a tortured look. “I’ve had nightmares. Did you know that?”

“About condoms?”

“About hurting you. That day… I hadn’t given one thought to the baby. I just wanted you so badly and—” His composure cracked. He knelt on the floor in front of her, sobs choking off his words. “And then the ER, so much pain, your mother praying… Maybe this is God’s punishment for our eagerness.”

“You’re invoking God? Since when?”

“Since moving here. Jesus watches us from every wall of this house. It’s damnation at the ready.”

Janet looked at the pale rectangle on their bedroom wall and thought of the framed Jesus face down in the bottom of her sock drawer. If God wanted to punish her for anything, it wouldn’t be for loving her husband too much. It would be for not loving her baby enough.

Jerry had remained a kind, upstanding man. A decent enough provider, considering they’d never left the old homestead. And handsome—her attraction to him never died. But attraction has a way of petrifying between mates who won’t touch. They had lived out their marriage as roommates, not lovers.

Love, in Janet’s family, was a distant memory. But her son was in extreme danger. And she now knew, with all the fierce, tigerlike devotion that she had always longed for, that she needed this chance to try to save him.

• • •

The cruiser rolled to a stop at the bottom of the Schulzes’ driveway, across the road from New Hope Farms. The policeman who’d been driving said, “We’re going to sit right here until the others have everything in place, ma’am.”

Janet looked at the farmhouse on the hill and recalled how hard it had been for her when Jeff first took up with that Fay. They might as well have moved to Spain, for all she’d seen him. If the Fay years had caused Jeff to pull away from her, Ronnie brought them back together.

Dozens of police cars were parked along both sides of the road, punctuated with two ambulances, adding an aura of alarm to the otherwise peaceful setting. Janet relaxed a bit, though. She saw no blood on the road, no broken windows, no police tape strapped across the front door. Just the lovely facade of New Hope Farms that Jeff and Ronnie had built, so pleasing to look at with its stained wood siding and green metal roof. In front of the porch roof sat small potted shrubs, some taller hollies, and chrysanthemums in bursts of yellows, reds, and purples. The front door of the store was propped open, and inside, against the back, she could see the large wooden crates holding Galas, McIntoshes, Romes, and Delicious Reds and Yellows. Next to that, the closed door to the office.

Between two police cars, she could see the horses mouthing at invisible stubs of grass. This was all an overblown reaction from police tired of waiting at traffic lights for someone who forgot to signal. She’d have a nice talk with Jeff and he’d come out and hug her. She’d pay whatever fine they’d impose and offer a generous contribution to the Fraternal Order of Police. That should take care of everything.

Except for Ronnie, of course. That woman seemed allergic to money. Maybe she needed a break; lord knows she worked hard, what with the boys and her pet income projects. But eventually she’d come around. They were a family. They had to stick together.

“Okay, here they come,” the policeman said. “Don’t open the door until I say so.”