Die Before I Wake (25 page)

“That’s a lot of responsibility,” I said, “for a twelve-year-old boy.”

“Yes. It was.” Tom got up, rinsed the spoon in the sink and put it in the dishwasher, then buried the empty ice cream container deep in the kitchen trash can. “And I took it on with zeal,” he said, returning to the table, “because I’d idolized my father. Because of him, I wanted to do everything right. I thought it was what he’d have wanted. Looking back, I’m not so sure. But at the time, it felt right.” He grimaced.

“So I was ruthless with myself, setting impossibly high standards. Even after Mom came out of her stupor and rejoined the living, I strove to excel. By that time, it’d become routine. Simply the way things worked around here. And Mom encouraged me in my pursuit of perfection. She had great expectations of me. When I saw how much I pleased her, I doubled my efforts. I brought home perfect grades. Took care of everything around the house. I played football, not because I was interested in sports, but because my dad had been the star quarterback of his high school team, and I wanted to emulate him. As soon as I was old enough, I went to work and started contributing to the family income. I dated the ‘right’ girls, not because I liked them, but because my mother found them socially acceptable.” Tom gave me a sardonic smile. “And,” he said, “when the time came around, I applied to medical school, not because I was interested in medicine, but because my mother—and by this time the whole town—expected me to follow in my dad’s footsteps and become the next beloved Doc Larkin.”

“Oh, Tom. That’s so sad.”

My husband shrugged. “I never thought about it that way. It’s just the way things were. I did it because I felt I had to. And I did it all with a smile.

I held the resentment inside. But it was there. It was always there. I was so jealous of Riley that I burned with it.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because nobody cared what Riley did. Nobody gave two hoots if he stayed in his room with the shades drawn, smoking weed, for a month straight.

Nobody cared how many cars he totaled, nobody cared if he flunked out of school or impregnated half the cheerleading squad. Riley had it made, and I hated him for it.”

Before I could respond, I heard the front door open, and the sound of running footsteps echoed down the hall. Both girls burst into the kitchen.

“Daddy!” Sadie squealed, throwing herself into Tom’s arms.

Taylor, as usual a little more reserved, held back.

Her keen eyes took in our cozy posture and her father’s relative state of dishabille with suspicion. It wasn’t often she saw him in jeans and a sweatshirt at this time of day. “Why are you home so early?” she asked.

Tom swung Sadie onto his lap, and she proceeded to wrap her arms around his neck. “Julie was lonely,” he said, “so I took the afternoon off to spend it with her.”

Taylor’s glance in my direction was reproachful.

She studied her father’s face as if gauging the truth-fulness of his statement. “Tell you what,” Tom said.

“If Julie’s feeling up to it, what do you say we all go out to supper tonight? You girls can even pick the restaurant.”

“Yippee!” Sadie said, clapping her hands.

“What about Grandma?” Taylor said.

“Grandma can come too, if she wants. Right, Jules?”

It would be my first outing since the accident, and although I hadn’t taken a pill since this morning, I was back to feeling queasy and tired. There was nothing that sounded less appealing than going out to dinner with Tom’s mother. But I couldn’t disappoint the girls. It wouldn’t be fair to them. I’d just come home afterward and sleep for a month. “Of course,” I said.

“Can we go to Pizza Heaven?” Taylor asked, the frost gone from her voice. Children, I’d discovered, could be easily bribed. She might still not like me, but if pizza was involved, she was willing to pretend for a couple of hours.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “What do you say, hon?”

The ice cream that had tasted so wonderful just a short time ago now lay like a stone in the pit of my stomach. The very idea of pizza sent waves of nausea crashing through me. But if the girls were determined to have pizza, they’d get pizza. I could nibble on a bread stick and do a little pretending of my own.

With what I hoped came off as a hearty grin, I told my husband and the girls, “I say it sounds great.” The restaurant was crowded and noisy. The jukebox blasted overhead. Amid the din, waitresses scurried around us, juggling heavily laden trays of drinks and steaming pans of pizza. We were seated between a high school soccer team celebrating their recent victory and a family whose six children ran amok, without parental guidance or control, wreak-ing havoc with the salad bar and spilling their drinks so many times their waitress should have demanded combat pay. Ah, the ambiance of a family restaurant on a Friday night! I leaned my chin on my hand, looked deep into my husband’s eyes, and said, “Promise me we won’t have more than four kids. That includes the two we already have.” He leaned over the table and said to me, in a teasing whisper, “Know what the worst thing is? I delivered every one of those kids.”

“Aha! So you’re the guilty party. Aren’t you just a bit ashamed about what you’ve unleashed on an unsuspecting world?”

“Julie?” Sadie tugged at my sleeve. “Can I get Jell-O from the salad bar?”

I turned my attention to her and smiled. “You can have anything you want, lamb chop.”

“Come help us?”

“There’s no need,” Tom said, laying a hand on my arm. “I can do it. Rest your ankle.”

“Is that Dr. Larkin speaking, or my husband Tom?”

“It’s Dr. Larkin. Don’t put undue strain on the ankle, or it’ll take forever to heal. I can help the girls.” He shoved back his chair, dropped his napkin on the table, and followed the girls across the three acres of dining room that lay between our table and the salad bar.

I picked up my glass of ice water and took a sip, hoping it would settle my stomach. Just the smell of pizza was making me queasy. At least I’d gotten a small reprieve this evening. Jeannette had declined to come with us. She’d had a long day, she said, and just wanted to stay in tonight, soak her aching feet in hot water and Epsom salts, and watch the evening news. The girls had been disappointed, but Tom, recognizing the tension between his mother and me, seemed relieved. I couldn’t blame him. Family dinners could be difficult, given his mother’s reluctance to accept me into the family and my own stubborn refusal to be ignored. The nightly battle of wills had to be trying for anybody who witnessed it.

A waitress walked by carrying a huge, loaded pizza. Bile rose in my throat, and for an instant, I feared I’d lose it, right there at the table. I looked around for the restroom sign, spied it near the entrance. Picking up my purse, I tried to catch Tom’s eye and signal to him, but he was engrossed in the salad bar, and I didn’t have time to dawdle. I rushed—as much as a woman in an air cast is capable of rushing—to the restroom door. It swung open and, ignoring the woman who stood primping at the mirror, I headed directly for one of the stalls.

I just made it. Dropping my purse to the floor, I fell to my knees, leaned over the toilet bowl, and lost the contents of my stomach.

I felt better almost immediately. Rocking back on my heels, I reached for the toilet paper, tore off a piece and bunched it up, and dabbed at my mouth.

Behind me, a knock sounded at the door. “Julie?” said a woman’s voice. “It’s Melanie Ambrose. I saw you come in. Are you all right in there?” I flushed the toilet and staggered to my feet—no mean feat considering the plastic contraption that was Velcroed to my leg. I unlocked the door, swung it open, and came face-to-face with Beth’s sister.

“I’ve been sick,” I croaked. “It’s these pills I’ve been taking. For the pain? They make me so sick. I dis-continued them this morning, but they’re still in my system.”

Mel didn’t even try to disguise the look of horror on her face brought on by my appearance. “You look awful,” she said. “Let’s splash some cold water on your face. Do you want me to go get Tom?”

“No. Please. We’re here with the girls, and they’re so excited about eating out. I can’t spoil it for them.” Melanie turned on the faucet, adjusted the water temperature, and I ducked my face under the flow of water. I rinsed out my mouth, spat into the sink, and dabbed at my face with my sleeve.

“I heard about your accident,” Mel said, “but I had no idea it was this bad. Here, hold on.” She went into the stall, returned with a wad of toilet paper. “Wipe your face with this. It’s the best I can do, now that they’ve replaced paper towels in public restrooms with those ridiculous electric hand dryers. You keep hearing speculation about why so many people don’t wash their hands after using the restroom. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that people don’t like to wait in line for one of the two dryers in a twelve-stall restroom. And they call this progress?” I gripped the edge of the counter and didn’t answer. It was okay; Mel wasn’t expecting an answer.

Staring into the mirror, I was shocked by my own reflection. The bruises around my eyes had started to fade, but my face was gaunt and bony, my eyes sunk deep in the sockets over lovely violet shadows. I looked like the pictures I’d seen of Auschwitz survivors after the liberation. Even my hair lay dull and flat, its gloss completely gone.

“Julie?” Mel ventured tentatively. “You really don’t look so hot. Are you sure it’s just your medication?”

I wasn’t sure. Not any longer. The woman who stared back at me from the mirror was nearly unrec-ognizable. But I wasn’t about to admit it to Mel, a woman whose opinion of my husband was less than stellar. She’d probably accuse him of poisoning me.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, “once the medication is out of my system. I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. About your sister.” Some of the warmth left her. “What about my sister?”

I glanced at the door. “I can’t talk here. Can we get together sometime next week? While Tom’s at work?”

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

“Because—” I glanced again at the door, and lowered my voice. “Because I don’t believe Beth killed herself.” I took a deep breath, relieved that the nausea had finally receded. “I think she was murdered.” It was raining again on Tuesday, another dark, blustery day that sent wet leaves scuttling across the yard and set the branches of nearby trees rapping against the windows. Melanie arrived at ten, an hour when I thought we’d have the most privacy.

Claudia had a yoga class, and Riley a new job re-modeling a kitchen for a Falmouth couple, so I knew we shouldn’t have any interruptions. “You’re looking a little more chipper,” Melanie said, removing her coat and hanging it over a kitchen chair. “Are you feeling better?”

“A little.” The bruises had almost disappeared by now, and the purple circles beneath my eyes weren’t as pronounced. It had been four days since I stopped taking the pills, and I was nowhere near as groggy as I’d been. But I still wasn’t myself. Bouts of nausea and spells of—to put it politely—loose bowels continued to plague me. My memory and concentration still weren’t up to par. I could only read a half dozen pages before I had to put down whatever I was reading and do something else. I occasionally had trouble retrieving a word from long-term memory. Simple words, words that were part of my normal vocabu-lary, would simply go MIA. Sometimes, I’d forget where I was and what I was doing. My muscles occasionally twitched or jerked for no explicable reason. And I still felt achy, long after the pain from the fall should have subsided. The continued memory lapses might be due to the concussion. But the rest of it made me wonder what in hell was going on.

Had I contracted some weird strain of flu in addition to all my other woes? It was a little early in the year for flu, but even Tom was starting to wonder. He’d told me that just because flu season hadn’t yet hit, it didn’t mean random strains of the virus weren’t out there, waiting to strike the first unsuspecting person whose immune system had been compromised. And my accident, he claimed, could have been enough to weaken my immunity.

“I wasn’t really comfortable coming here,” Mel said. “I haven’t been in this house for a long time, and I don’t want to run into Tom. I probably wouldn’t have come at all if you hadn’t said what you did about Beth. That you don’t believe she killed herself.”

I’d forgotten that, as Beth’s sister, she’d undoubtedly visited this house many times over the years.

“I’m glad you came,” I said. “I think it’s important.

Can I ask you a favor? Would you be willing to look around and tell me what’s changed since Beth lived here?”

Mel took a second, more critical look around the kitchen. “Her clock’s gone,” she said. “Beth had a kitchen clock shaped like a cow. She picked it up on a trip to Boston, at one of those overpriced pushcarts near Faneuil Hall.” Her voice grew wistful. “My sister had a whimsical sense of humor.” Without knowing quite why I asked, I said,

“Would you mind looking around the living room, too? Just to satisfy my curiosity.”

“The recliner’s new,” Mel said as soon as we stepped into the room. “Beth had an old wooden rocker in that corner. Tom bought it for her before Taylor was born. She nursed both her babies sitting in that chair. And rocked them to sleep.” An image of Beth Larkin was beginning to form in my head, a vision of a loving mother who breast-fed her babies and rocked them to sleep in a special rocker purchased just for them. Hardly the picture of a suicidal woman.

“And the wedding portrait’s gone.”

“Wedding portrait?”

“It was a huge black-and-white framed photo of her and Tom on their wedding day. It used to hang over the fireplace. There were other photos, too. One with her and the girls at Old Orchard Beach. Tom took it, I think. He’s a pretty good amateur photographer.”

One more thing I didn’t know about my husband.

Mel was proving a treasure trove of information.

“Please,” I said, “have a seat. Anywhere. Can I get you something?”

“Nothing. I have to admit I’m dying of curiosity.