House Broken (19 page)

She started to open the letter to read it again, to see whether this time the words it held would shock her less. Maybe if she read it again and again and again, eventually she would no longer feel as if she'd been turned inside out.

But the letter was a Pandora's box. The truth about her father had escaped and was running wild. The only question was what she was going to do about it. Already in the half hour since she'd opened it, the truth had trampled through her memories of her father, memories she had held dear for more than thirty years, and corrupted them like a virus. And Paris was no longer the eccentric enigma, but an abuse victim in absolute denial, a denial cultivated by her father, which made him even more despicable.

And her mother. She had a thousand questions for her mother, but only one mattered: How could you have let this happen?

An image came to her of Paris at sixteen, unwrapping a box and lifting out the nest Geneva had found in a dogwood tree. Paris held the nest lightly, respectfully, and smiled at her. Geneva glanced at her father, to see if he approved of her gift, too, but his eyes were on Paris.

The same age as Ella. Her throat clenched shut and pressure built at her temples. She doubled over to control the sobs racking her body. Diesel poked his nose into her neck. She threw her arms around him and hung there, trembling, until the first birds tentatively heralded the morning.

ELLA

T
here was no way she could go to school today. It wasn't because of the song, though yesterday that seemed like a reason to crawl in a hole and die. (And she still thought if she actually saw Marcus in this lifetime she would, in fact, die.) And it wasn't because of some post-traumatic stress from finding a gun in her brother's backpack, though that had seriously freaked her out. No, the reason she couldn't go to school—couldn't even get out bed, in fact—was because she had almost killed her grandmother.

If only she'd gotten a conscience a little earlier, like before Nana showed up, then her parents would have known the Prince was not a prince after all, but a sneaky little shit. Maybe they would've decided having a crazy alcoholic in the house wasn't
such a hot idea, or would have let her come but kept him on a shorter leash. But Ella didn't say anything and the shit hit the fan, and Nana acted as if it was no big deal but then went to her room and downed a bottle of vodka and some pills, and the ambulance came and her mom said, “Don't worry,” which was adult code for “major disaster,” and Nana nearly died.

Good job, Ella.

The alarm on her phone went off a half hour ago. Usually if she didn't show up in the kitchen by this time, someone knocked on her door or at least yelled down the hall. Weird. She dragged her butt out of bed to see what was up.

Her dad was drinking coffee in the kitchen. He looked like crap. Worse than yesterday, which was saying something.

“Hey.”

“Hi, Ella. I was letting you sleep in.”

“I don't have to go to school?”

“No. I've got to take Charlie in, and maybe pick up Nana later, and I want you to stay with your mom.”

“Why? I mean, sure, but what's wrong with Mom?”

He looked into his mug like there were tea leaves in there. “This stuff with Nana is tough on her.”

She swallowed hard. “I thought Nana was gonna be okay.”

“She is. But it's still tough.”

Great. More collateral damage. “Is she sleeping? Can I go see her?”

“Sure.” He got up and headed for the fridge. “Have some breakfast first?”

“Not hungry, thanks.” She drew a slow circle on the wood floor with a toe. “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Is Mom going to be okay?”

He came around the counter and put his hands on her shoulders in pep talk position. “She's got you, doesn't she? And me.” He smiled a little. “And Charlie.”

For her mom's sake, she hoped one out of three was enough.

• • •

Her parents' door was half open, so Ella stuck her head in. Her mom was sitting in the rocking chair, but she wasn't rocking. She was staring out the window, which was strange all by itself. She wasn't the staring-out-of-windows type, unless there was a new bird at the feeder or a squirrel doing backflips.

“Mom?”

She didn't move an inch. “Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

There was only one chair, so she sat in front of it on the rug. Finally her mom turned to her. She looked worse than Dad. “Are you okay?”

Long pause. “Not really, to be honest.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Like she was a therapist.

She smiled a little. “No. I can't really. Someday I'll tell you about it, maybe. I'm sorry.”

Ella felt half relieved and half left out. She'd had enough truth and drama recently, but she was also sick of secrets. But her main worry was that her mom looked sadder than she'd ever seen her. How could she help her if she didn't know what was going on?

“Have you called Uncle Dub? Maybe he can help.”

Her eyes got all glassy. “It'd be great to call him with good news instead, wouldn't it?”

“Sure. But it's okay. He's your brother.” And not the kind of lying rat fink hers was.

Her mom nodded, then turned to the window again. Ella sat there awhile, to keep her company.

Finally her mom got up and they went to the kitchen to get some food.

HELEN

W
hen she came to she didn't know where she was, but her head hurt so bad she didn't care. Like someone held a splitting wedge along her brow and was smacking it with a sledgehammer. She closed her eyes again and hoped to God she would die.

Someone said her name and shook her. She squinted and saw a black man in a white coat. She tried to tell him to leave her alone, but her mouth was too dry to work. Reaching up to push his arms off her, she got tangled in something—tubes or wires—and gave up. Too weak to put up a fight and too numb to care.

Sleep was all she wanted but they wouldn't let her. Cruel, that's what it was. But she'd messed it up, got greedy with the vodka and then forgot about taking the rest of the pills. This was her punishment, lying in this bed, tubes stuck in her body, head
split in two, being shook awake by a black man who knew her name but not a blessed thing about her. He was making it his job to keep her on this earth, as if he was her creator and the decision was his. She cursed him.

• • •

A woman bent over her and pulled the tube out of her nose, then stuck a straw in her mouth. The water tasted like tin. Her head was better, meaning someone was banging it against the floor instead of cutting it in half.

Hours later, Tom appeared at the foot of the bed. She asked him where Geneva was and he said she wasn't feeling well.

“Same here.”

He didn't smile, but said he might be back later, depending on how the visit with the psychologist went.

This was news to her. “They want to see if I'm crazy?”

He glanced at the nurse who was checking Helen's drip. “Something like that.”

“Tell them the truth and save them a trip, then.”

“It's not funny, Helen.”

“Who's joking?”

He stared at her, like he was thinking about saying one thing, then changed his mind. “Helen, did it ever occur to you that Geneva might need you?”

Now the nurse was staring at her, too. “She hasn't needed anything from me since she was out of diapers.”

“I think you're wrong.”

And he walked out without another word.

• • •

The nurse brought her a tray and told her the food would help her nausea. She ate and watched TV while she waited for the psychologist. Her headache had eased some, and wasn't much worse than an ordinary hangover. Must have been the oxygen and medication and whatnot they'd been pumping into her. That suited her fine. If she was going to live, she didn't want a darn headache.

She had already decided there was no point in fighting the system. What choice did she have? Stay here in the hospital? Volunteer for the mental ward? She didn't have a clear plan, but that was no different from any other day in the last thirty years. She could live with it until she decided not to.

Meanwhile she wanted out. Hospitals brought nothing but bad memories. Most people felt the same, she supposed, but she had her own particular reasons. Hospitals were more alike than they were different, and that was the problem. The week at the Good Samaritan after she crashed her car was bad, but the pain meds had dulled things. Now she was sober—or close enough to it—and everything about this room reminded her of ten days she would give her life to forget.

• • •

Paris had been at college six weeks and Eustace drank hard for all of it. In the middle of October he was playing golf—and drinking—and caught a heel in a divot. Went ass over teakettle into a bunker. Lay there for a good long time, the men at the club said, just staring at the sky. Wasn't until he finally decided to get up that he figured something wasn't right with his arm. Pointed in an odd direction.

His shoulder broke in two places, but he didn't take to being laid up, and insisted on carrying on as usual. He went to the
mayor's office every day, and didn't let up on his socializing—or his drinking. Refusing to rest didn't help him heal, and he experienced considerable pain, especially at night. He thrashed something fierce and was up and down like a fiddler's elbow all night long. Desperate for sleep, Helen went downstairs and lay on the couch. She tried Paris's room once but it gave her the willies.

Between missing Paris, the encumbrance of the sling, and lack of sleep, Eustace was in a foul mood. The children gave him a wide berth and Helen didn't talk to him unless she had to. The last two weeks of October and the beginning of November went like that. Helen didn't know what was worse, Eustace's present condition, or what'd be going on when Paris came home for Thanksgiving.

One cold November morning, Helen picked up the paper from the front walk and sat down to read it before anyone else got up. That was the one advantage of sleeping on the couch—having a fresh paper all to herself before the others made a hash of it. She scanned the headlines for a story that struck her fancy. On page three she found one:
RALEIGH MAN DIES OF
TYLENOL OVERDOSE
. Just last week she'd bought another bottle of Tylenol from Grether's. The doctor had given Eustace some medicine with codeine, but he objected to the way it hung in his head in the morning, so the first week after he broke his shoulder, he switched to plain old Tylenol.

Turns out the Raleigh man had a bad back. He'd been on the medicine for a while, but didn't take any more than what the label said he could, except for the night before he died, when he took maybe three times that. He didn't know he'd done it to himself. By the time the doctors figured out he didn't have the stomach flu, it'd beat down his liver and he was a goner.

She read the article again, then folded up the paper and hid it at the bottom of the pile of newspapers in the pantry. Then she put away the bedclothes in the living room, and returned to the kitchen to make the coffee.

• • •

She hadn't realized until she read the article how much she wanted to kill him. For a year or more she'd fantasized about him having a fatal accident—getting shot while hunting or during a robbery, or struck by lightning—but she hadn't considered taking matters into her own hands. Not seriously. Maybe all those murder mysteries she read gave her the notion that no one ever got away with it. There were too many nosy old ladies and clever detectives, and too many ways to get caught. She had three children aside from Paris to consider, two of them not even teenagers, and it wouldn't be fair to leave them virtually orphans. They'd go to Eustace's family, and she couldn't tolerate that.

But now she had a method. And the beauty of it was, with very little help from her, Eustace could do it to himself. That seemed right to her, because he'd brought it on himself, defying laws of man and nature both, and perpetrated this abomination upon her daughter. Paris might have been willing, but Helen lay that at his feet as well. A duckling will follow whatever it sees when it first opens its eyes, follow it straight off a cliff or right through the gates of hell. With hindsight, Helen wished she'd seen it and put a stop to it earlier. It was like a white bedsheet that grayed over time. One day you put it next to a clean one and can't believe you let the old dingy sheet next to your skin. She would live with the result of her blindness to her dying day; that was a cold fact.

But what was done was done. Putting a stop to Eustace was all that was left.

The first thing she did was drive thirteen miles to Layton and buy Extra Strength Tylenol. Every little bit would count. She bought a pair of slacks from her favorite store there, so if anyone asked, that was the reason she'd gone.

Luckily Eustace sent her to get pills and water at night, even though he was up every couple of hours anyway. He liked company for his misery. She'd taken to keeping the Tylenol on the dresser, and filled a glass with water before she went to bed. When she handed him the pills, he tossed them in his mouth without looking, then took a long drink. Couldn't have been easier to give him an extra one or two every time. After a week of that, she ground some up and put it in his coffee, and added extra cream.

Wasn't even two weeks later he started complaining about his stomach.

“Must've been something you ate at the club,” she said, and headed upstairs for the Alka Seltzer. She ground up three Tylenol, mixed it with orange juice, and dropped two tablets in and watched them fizz.

He made a face when he drank it.

“New flavor. Don't you care for it?”

Helen didn't want him running to the doctor until she'd finished with him. Knowing bourbon didn't do his liver any favors, she played her last card.

Paris called him from Durham frequently, but he couldn't easily call her in the dorm, as there was only one phone on each floor and Paris was likely as not to be out. To stop them from talking, Helen left the phone off the hook whenever she could, and answered it herself the rest of the time. If it was Paris, she'd say
Eustace was out, or lying down, then ask for a good time for him to call her back. Then she'd tell Eustace a different time.

She managed to stop them from talking for ten days—a record. During that time, she made sure the decanter stayed full and, on the nights he was home, joined him for a drink to help things along. When he groused about Paris “running around too much” and “forgetting her family,” Helen topped off his drink. Once he was good and drunk, she added some Tylenol.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he felt too poorly to attend a birthday party at the club for one of his golf partners.

“Let's have our own party, then.”

She had Florence and Geneva put together some hors d'oeuvres and asked Dublin to pick out the music. Eustace felt right sorry for himself, and sat on the couch with his hand on his belly while the kids ate and danced. But he knocked back the bourbon the way she thought he would. He went to bed early, muttering drunkenly that he might have the flu. Helen followed him upstairs and gave him four Tylenol. He was too tight to notice. Then she went downstairs, turned down the music a bit, and had a cup of coffee.

At two o'clock in the morning, she woke Eustace up.

“You had a lot to drink.” She held out four more pills and a glass of water. “Better take these.”

“I already had some.”

“No, you didn't. That was yesterday.”

And he took them.

He stayed in bed half of Sunday—probably thinking it was a hangover, which it surely could have been—but woke up feeling dandy on Monday and set off to work. On Tuesday morning she heard him laughing on the phone to Paris and worried she hadn't
given him enough. But that night he lay in bed groaning, then ran to the bathroom and vomited.

He'd planned to drive to Durham and bring Paris home for Thanksgiving, but he was sick as a dog and Helen couldn't see him leaving. Paris had to take a bus and didn't arrive until nearly midnight on Wednesday. When she saw her father in the morning, she wanted to take him to the doctor, but of course it was Thanksgiving.

“We'll take him tomorrow if he's not better,” Helen said.

Needless to say he didn't have turkey and dressing with the rest of them.

His regular doctor's office was closed and Helen would've left it at that, but Paris insisted they go to the emergency room. They were short-staffed on account of the holiday and weren't looking at anyone too close if they didn't have a bone stuck in their throat or a bullet hole in their head. The nurse told them it was probably the flu and sent him home.

On Sunday morning Helen came upstairs from sleeping on the couch. Eustace was lying on his back, his face as yellow as a sunflower.

• • •

The blood tests showed plain and clear he'd taken far too much Tylenol. When the doctor at the emergency ward asked him about it, he admitted he'd taken a lot, but didn't know how much was too much. He'd have asked Eustace more questions, but Eustace took to moaning terribly. The newspaper article didn't mention that dying of liver failure was painful, but it began to look that way.

Paris was there, too, and wailed like a banshee when the doctor said there wasn't much they could do. Either he would live or
he wouldn't, and probably he wouldn't. The doctor might have had questions for Helen, but she had her daughter to comfort.

She went to the hospital every day, taking turns with Paris when Geneva and Dublin needed minding at home. Florence came a few times, too, but didn't stay long. She couldn't bear the sight of her daddy's face—a terrible yellow-gray color, twisted up in pain. Helen refused to let the little ones visit at all. She couldn't see it would do them any good, and Paris provided all the bedside drama Helen could take. Watching Eustace wore on her, too. Day after day, playacting the loving wife terrified of losing her cherished husband, wringing her hands at his bedside, all the while wishing and praying he would hurry up and die.

If the doctors weren't particularly suspicious of the cause of Eustace's death, Paris was. Helen had expected it and stuck with her plan: simple denial. She'd been careful not to leave any ground-up pills or extra bottles around, so she knew Paris would be hard put to do anything more than speculate.

“How could he take so many pills without you knowing about it?”

“I don't watch him every minute. I figured he could read a label as well as the next person.”

“But so many!”

“He drank a lot after you left, Paris. Maybe he lost count.”

Guilt ran across her face, then, but she didn't back down. Not Paris. “You should've been taking care of him.”

Helen knew her lines. “And you can't know how sorry I am that I didn't know what was happening. He's my husband, after all. We all thought he had the flu.”

But then, after he'd been in the hospital five days, Helen's mind shifted. Maybe she relaxed her defenses a little, knowing she'd done
what she set out to do. Maybe he was different now, no longer a perverted monster, but a middle-aged man in a hospital gown dying a slow, painful death. Under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by cold, hard tile, and machines with dials and tubes, where even the bed—meant to be a place of rest—had levers and wheels and rails, Eustace was vulnerable, not just because she had made him so, but because he was flesh and blood, same as everyone else.