Chapter Sixteen

SIXTEEN

Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep while Katherine was gone. Fredricka broke a few more plates, and it was difficult to tidy up with Angelica and Julian and Charles and Constance crowding around me and periodically chanting, He’s down there. He’s down there. He’s down there. Blythe started making one hell of a racket upstairs, and when I went to her room to shush her, I found her on the ceiling, pounding both fists against the plaster and howling. I yelled at her to quiet down and she unhinged her jaw and shrieked at me before vanishing into the fireplace and I hoped that would be the end of that. While I was up there, I noticed that the black hole in the third guest room had grown considerably and seemed to be pulsing, so I just closed the door and locked it. The wall of the upstairs hallway had started bleeding a little even though it wasn’t supposed to start up again until later that night (really, was I the only person in this house who followed the rules?), so I grabbed the blood bucket and cleaned that up, and just when I finished, five big birds shattered their necks on the back window in quick succession, so I went outside to stay ahead of the curve on body disposal. All this time, Elias was hovering about five feet behind me. He followed me from room to room and hissed. I came back inside and found that Fredricka had managed to move one of my dressers into the living room and stacked the drawers in the dining room, and let me tell you, that took a long time to move back. Afterwards, I tried to take a nap on the couch but Angelica and all her friends lined up beside me and chanted, He’s down there. He’s down there. He’s down there, over and over again until I burst up and through their bodies and felt the phantom pains of stabbings and disembowelings and hammerings and whatever the hell happened to Constance’s face, and this time I actually did throw up all over the living room floor, so I had to grab the blood bucket again to clean up my own vomit and that was it for sleep for the afternoon.

That is to say, when Katherine returned home that evening, I was fairly exhausted. I sat myself on the kitchen floor and stared at nothing as I sipped the first cup of tea I’d had all day. I had finally found the tea bags about thirty minutes before. They were in the upstairs bathtub.

I was somewhat grateful that Katherine was home. The pranksters seemed to calm down when she was around. Like feral cats, they kept their distance around strangers, saving the yowling and scratching for people with whom they were familiar. I’m sure they would eventually grow comfortable with her, as they had with Edie, but for the time being, they saved their pranks until Katherine was out of the room, a welcome respite from today’s chaos. I wondered if it was time to dig up Elias’ mother again, or perhaps cajole Father Cyrus into making another visit. Both of those endeavors would be difficult with Katherine here, but Lord knew that I could use some help.

I heard Katherine coming before she even entered the house, talking loudly on the phone as she turned the lock in the front door.

“Right, and what I’m telling you is, it’s suspicious,” she was saying. “He wouldn’t just abandon his belongings like that.”

There was a pause as whomever Katherine was talking to chattered away.

“Yeah, I get that,” she said. “But he left all his things. If he really snuck out because he couldn’t pay, he would have at least taken his stuff with him, right?”

Another pause.

“I’m just saying, go by and talk to Bill. He was the one that cleaned up the room, and—”

Pause.

“No, he said there weren’t any signs of a struggle, but he’s not a cop, is he?” I could hear Katherine’s voice growing irritated.

Pause.

“Thank you. That’s all I’m asking,” Katherine said with a sigh. “Value Lodge—do you know where that?.?.?. Okay. The name is Bill Franklin. F-R-A?.?.?. Okay.”

Pause. Katherine was walking down the hallway to the kitchen, and I could hear the chirping of her call through her phone’s tinny speakers.

“I appreciate it,” Katherine said. “Thank you, Officer.”

The squeak of the voice through her speakers sounded female. She was talking to Officer Jones, then.

Katherine strode into the kitchen, pressing end on her phone. “What are you doing on the floor?” she asked, setting her purse on the counter, phone still in hand.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly sure why I was on the floor. I had simply found myself there. My best guess was that I couldn’t have been bothered to walk to a chair when it was time to sit down. All I knew was, I was happy for the tea and the sitting, regardless of the location.

I heard myself respond, but I wasn’t really listening. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Katherine was done waiting to tell me her news.

“That guy, Bill,” she said, “from the Value Lodge, he gave me a call while I was out. Said he remembered Dad. Get this—he had read Dad’s books. He’s a fan.”

I made an approximation of laughter.

“I didn’t know Dad had fans,” Katherine said, shaking her head. “Anyway, he had such good information. Since he recognized Dad and all, he paid attention to his comings and goings.” She pulled her notebook out of her purse and started riffling through it. “He said Dad booked a room for three nights and paid cash, like we thought.” She pointed at me as she said this, as if I were a coconspirator with her in the solving of this mystery, the Dr. Watson to her Sherlock Holmes. “He said he saw Dad out and about a lot that first day, hailing cabs, going into town. He said he wondered why Dad didn’t have his own car, being an author and all—I didn’t tell him. Don’t worry. I know how you are about that.” She rolled her eyes, as if family privacy were unfathomable.

I felt my head growing foggy. This was turning into quite the long version of a story I had already heard about half of when she was on the phone.

“Anyway,” Katherine said, “after that first day, he didn’t see any more of Dad. He said he was kind of disappointed because he was hoping to have a conversation with him.” She rolled her eyes again. “Can you imagine—someone actually wanting to talk to Dad?”

I did something like nodding but I had a feeling I got the speed all wrong.

“But get this.” Katherine flipped through her notes. “Dad never checked out. Bill said he thought that maybe he just missed him, that Dad checked out overnight or something, but there was no record of him settling up and the key was never returned. They knocked on the door, and nothing. So they went in. Guess what they found.”

All of his things. I’d heard this part already. I thought about answering her, showing her that I was following. It’s what Dr. Watson would have done. I might’ve responded. I wasn’t sure.

“All of his things,” Katherine said. I must not have responded, then. “A change of clothes, a thing of shaving cream, a razor. Even his goddamn toothbrush. Bill even said that there was a half-eaten sandwich in the mini fridge growing fuzzy things. And a Jack Daniel’s bottle, of course.”

“Of course,” I said to my tea. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but I did.

“They thought that maybe he was still staying there, trying to cheat the motel out of a few nights’ pay, but he never came back. So they gathered up his things, cleaned out the room. Bill said they usually just trash things that guests leave after them, but because he’s a fan, he wanted to keep them, kind of a souvenir.” She gestured with her thumb behind her. “He dropped them off at the motel for me, everything except the moldy sandwich and the Jack Daniel’s, that is. He said he’d ask around with some of the other employees, the folks that worked the night shift when Dad went missing. See if they know anything. Said he’d give me a call if he learned anything.”

“Of course,” I said again, because I felt like I was particularly good at saying it. What was that thing Sherlock Holmes always said? The thing he was famous for saying?

“I’ve got Dad’s things out in my car,” Katherine said. “I’ve already gone through everything—nothing helpful, unfortunately. I was hoping he had left his phone. I guess he took that with him when he left the motel. You can have a peek if you’d like. Maybe you can find something I didn’t.”

“Elementary,” I said.

Katherine raised an eyebrow. “Is that a yes?”

I nodded, sure to get the speed right this time.

“This is good, right?” Katherine asked. “It’s not a lot, but we know he stayed in a motel for a few days. Then something happened. He left. Or maybe someone took him away? Whatever it was, it had to have happened suddenly, right? Or else he would’ve taken his things with him.”

The game is afoot,I thought. That’s another thing Sherlock Holmes says.

“The police don’t seem to think it’s all that suspicious,” Katherine was saying, “but I think it’s suspicious as hell, isn’t it?”

With great power comes great responsibility,I thought. Is that a thing Sherlock Holmes says?

“I mean,” Katherine was saying, “they’re telling me that people leave things in motel rooms all the time. But not all their things, right? Not their clothes and razors and toothbrushes? And certainly not their alcohol? Dad especially.”

“Spider-Man,” I said.

“What?” Katherine said. “Did you say something?”

Shit. I was saying things out loud again. “I’ll go look at his things,” I said, hoisting myself off the floor. I didn’t want to get up—I had been quite enjoying my little sit—but perhaps moving would decrease the amount of nonsense coming out of my mouth for the time being.

“I think this is a real breakthrough,” Katherine said, following me to her car. “I think we’re one step closer to finding the motherfucker.”

There was a thing I said to Katherine when she said words like “motherfucker.” What was it? And what was that thing that Sherlock Holmes always said? The thing he was famous for saying? I had forgotten already.

In the trunk of her car, Katherine had Hal’s things stacked in a box, an empty case of liquor—this box in particular used to carry Jack Daniel’s.

“Yeah,” Katherine said, “the irony is not lost on me.”

As Katherine said, there wasn’t much of Hal’s in the box. He hadn’t taken very much with him the night he left. The toothbrush in there had barely been used, and it wasn’t the one he kept at the house—he must have bought it after he left. Same with the razor (sharp, cheap) and the shaving cream (not his usual brand). He must’ve bought himself a change of clothes as well—the clothes in the box were the ones he had been wearing the night he left. I grazed my fingers over the soft denim of his jeans, the tough leather of his jacket. God, he loved that jacket. I picked up his Cubs shirt. The fabric was baby soft from years of wear, and I could see the trunk light shining through the faded blue fabric. I lifted the shirt to my face, sniffed it. It didn’t smell like him anymore. It smelled like mothballs and old carpet and just a hint of cigarette smoke. I felt a stab of disappointment. I had hoped to smell him again.

Katherine was watching me, her face a mix of emotions I might not have been able to decipher even if I hadn’t been operating on God knows how many nights without sleep.

“I shouldn’t have left,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Today?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “When I was a kid. When you sent me to live with Aunt Noelle. I shouldn’t have gone. I shouldn’t have left you”—she swallowed—“with him.”

I rolled the worn fabric of Hal’s shirt with my fingers. Katherine was forgetting that she almost hadn’t left. She had dug her heels in, as she was wont to do. She chased after us, shouting at Noelle and me as we hurriedly loaded her things into Noelle’s car—mostly Noelle doing the loading, as I was in a bit of a state. Katherine had had plenty to say to me, plenty of questions, plenty of refusals, plenty of opinions about why she ought to stay. That time, however, I wasn’t backing down.

“I always felt bad,” Katherine said. Her eyes were on the trunk of her car, staring at the box of Hal’s things, which barely interested her. “I should have stayed. I should have tried to help you. To protect you.”

Katherine had said all that in the driveway of our old house as well, standing next to Noelle’s idling car as I tried to push her inside. She told me that it wasn’t safe for me there. She told me that the terrible things that had happened, that had been happening for years, would happen again and again. She told me that it would get worse after she left. She told me that she had to stay, that she could help protect me.

Katherine, of course, had been wrong. Yes, these terrible things that had been happening for years were likely to go on happening in her absence. Yes, they might even get worse. These things are cyclical—I knew that. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t safe, and it certainly didn’t mean that it was Katherine’s job to protect me.

“Claire always told me I shouldn’t feel guilty,” Katherine said. “She told me I couldn’t have done anything to protect you—not really, anyway. She told me that standing up to him would have been dangerous. I was just a kid. He was a full-grown man, and an alcoholic at that. He could have seriously hurt me. Still”—she tapped at her head—“it’s there.”

I had lines here, surely. I could’ve told her that Claire had been right—of course Claire had been right. Katherine couldn’t have stayed, couldn’t have stood up to Hal, and certainly not when he was as gone as he was. The sorts of things he had done when he was like that weren’t the sorts of things that Katherine could have been permitted to endure. Nobody should’ve been permitted to endure them, honestly, not unless they knew how to survive. My brain, however, was far too tired to turn any of that into sound. I could only touch at Hal’s shirt, staring at the outline of my fingers through the fabric, my mouth useless.

“If we find him,” Katherine asked, “will you take him back?”

I looked up from the shirt, startled. “What?”

“Would you take him back? Let him come back?”

“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’d be within your rights not to, you know,” Katherine said. “I wouldn’t blame you. Nobody would. He certainly gave you enough reasons not to take him back, what with the drinking, and the?.?.?.” She gestured to my arms.

“He’s my husband,” I said.

“This could be your chance, Mom,” Katherine said, her eyes eager. “Maybe he’s giving you a chance.”

This was all moot, of course. I had already made my choices, and they felt permanent.

Katherine shook her head. “You should have come with me,” she said. “That day. You should have left for Aunt Noelle’s with me. Noelle would’ve let you stay as long as you liked. You know that.” Her eyes were shimmering in the dim light of her trunk. “You could have left, Mom. You could have gotten away from him.”

Katherine was forgetting again. She had said all this fourteen years ago as well, sitting in the back of Noelle’s car, while I did my best to say my goodbyes without tears, which would have irritated my already swollen eyes. She told me I should come with them. She told me that she would share her room at Noelle’s with me or even sleep on the couch if needed. She told me that I could start over, that these terrible things that happened to me wouldn’t happen anymore. She asked me to go. Begged me to go.

For a moment, I saw Hal again, the day he left, standing on the porch not ten feet from where we stood, these clothes on his body instead of boxed up in the trunk of a rented sedan. Looking at me, pleading, Come with me.

Katherine’s eyes were insistent, shining on me in the dark like spotlights. “Why didn’t you leave, Mom?”

Please,Hal had said when he left, we need to end this.

Please,Katherine had said when she left, come with me, Mom.

I’ll end it without you if I have to,Hal had said, but God, Margaret, I don’t want to.

He’ll just keep doing it, you know,Katherine had said. You know you have to leave, Mom.

Why? Hal had asked, his expression almost identical to Katherine’s as he asked me why, why, why. Why in God’s name do you want to stay?

I’d always thought it was a silly question, why I wanted to stay here, in this house. This house was everything I’d ever wanted. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but sometimes it actually was. Or at least as close as anything could come to perfect in this life, which admittedly was not very close. It wasn’t horrible every single day—so few things ever are—and when it wasn’t horrible, it was almost lovely. I knew how to survive here, and I always had the sense that if I just survived long enough, if I just played by the rules well enough, I could make it into a perfect home once and for all. I just needed to work a little harder.

I loved this house. And you didn’t give up on the things you loved.

Katherine was looking at me as if she expected an answer, one that made sense. I tried to shake the cobwebs from my head. “People can change, Katherine,” I said. I nodded towards her. “You can change. You’re changing.” It was true, I realized. I caught fewer and fewer glimpses of the uncontrolled, tantruming child Katherine had once been. The anger was still there, hot and leaping, but I could see her trying to steady it, to keep hold of the reins.

Katherine shook her head. “Barely,” she said. “I’m barely changing, and it’s hard, Mom. Half the time I’m so fucking angry and?.?.?.” She wiped at her nose. “I never put my hands on her, you know. On Claire. I promised myself I’d never do that. It was the one fucking promise I managed to keep, apparently.” Katherine glanced up at me, her eyes red. “You know, when I was a kid, I thought we were the only ones who had problems like this. Everyone else’s parents seemed so fucking happy. No yelling. No mom with mysterious bruises shoving you out of the house when Dad starts drinking too much. I thought that it was just us, that there was something wrong with us. Then I got older and I learned that shit like this happens everywhere. I learned how these stories go. And this little fairy tale you’ve concocted”—she gestured up towards the house, tall and beautiful in the night—“with your house and your healing and your happy ever after—it isn’t real.”

I blinked at her. The house was as real as things tended to get. Too real, if I were being honest. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“That’s not how these stories end,” Katherine said. “Husbands who drink, who beat their wives, they don’t just wake up one day and decide to stop. It was sheer dumb luck that Dad got that DUI, that he was forced into counseling, that he actually decided to listen. I don’t know how well he did controlling his anger, but we all know how his sobriety worked out.” Her eyes darted to the box, in her trunk, boasting the logo of Hal’s favorite pastime. “These stories don’t end happily, Mom. They end with somebody dead.”

“All stories end with somebody dead,” I said. That was how the story of every single person who lived in this house had ended. None of them seemed to be happy endings, but they were endings all the same, and all remarkably similar when it came down to it.

Katherine huffed out a breath, exasperated. “So, that’s your take on it?” she asked. “If he comes back, you’ll just stay with him forever, just waiting for him to beat you to death?”

Fourteen years ago, when I told her that my leaving wasn’t up for consideration, Katherine had been angry. She had cried, sure, but they were angry tears, and her face was pure rage. She had a whole host of things to say to me, various opinions about what an idiot I was: that this was my chance to escape and I was letting it pass me by; that I was choosing to let these awful things happen to me from this point forward; that I deserved these awful things happening to me if this was the choice I was going to make.

I could see the anger coming back today, the clenched fists and the reddening skin. However, today the anger never quite made it to the surface; it sank back down, defeated, as Katherine’s eyes went pink and her mouth tugged into a frown.

She shook her head. “No one deserves to live like this,” she said.

No one deserves to live like this,Hal had said to me that night as he was begging me to get into the cab with him.

No one deserves to live like this,Edie said to me that morning on the porch, watching me sob over Master Vale.

It sounded like a bit of a broken record all of a sudden: people telling me what I did and didn’t deserve. It might’ve been the lack of sleep, or the day filled with blood scrubbing and bird carcasses, or the incessant headache that was pounding against the interior of my skull, but I was a bit done with quite a lot and the words were coming out of me before I could even contemplate their usefulness.

“Of course no one deserves to live like this,” I snapped, although I was no longer certain to whom in particular I was talking. “Of course this isn’t a hell anybody wants to walk through, least of all alone. But none of that exactly matters, now, does it? It doesn’t change reality. And this”—I gestured around myself, waving my arms at the car, the house, the night, only half of which I was actually certain was completely real—“is reality. There’s no sense in bellyaching over it if it can’t be changed. One does what one must. There are rules.”

“But you can change it, Mom,” Katherine said. “Didn’t you just tell me that people can change? You can change.”

I hadn’t the first clue what she was talking about. I changed all the time. I was flexible. I bent. I had changed little by little, steadily over the years, until by all accounts I was a person who should have been unrecognizable but to me was just who I was. I ought to have been a stranger to myself, but it didn’t bother me at all.

“You can do things differently this time,” Katherine said. “If we find him, you can choose not to take him back.” She shook her head, her exasperation returning. “God, Mom—why would you ever take him back?”

The lack of sleep was steadily making itself known to me. My head throbbed, and I was fairly finished with this conversation. “Would you take Claire back?” I asked, knowing the answer.

Katherine’s eyes flashed fire. “That’s not the same.”

“Of course it’s the same,” I said. “It’s love.”

Katherine grabbed at my arm, pulled my sleeve down to my elbow, revealing the scars from Elias’ teeth. “This isn’t love, Mom,” she said.

I looked at the marks on my arms. “Oh, that’s just Elias,” I said.

Katherine blinked, still holding my arm. “Who?”

Shit. I was saying things out loud again. “Everything is survivable,” I said.

Katherine dropped my arm. She seemed finished with this conversation as well. “Not everything,” she said.

I said nothing. I found myself completely out of responses.

I hadn’t said anything more to Hal as he stood on the porch that night either, the cab idling in the driveway. He seemed to have nothing else to say as well, and after a few silent moments, he turned and got into the cab. He looked at me once from the window, then up at the house, his expression changing. Then he turned and said something to the driver. As the cab sped away, I closed the front door behind me. Fredricka made me some tea and I sat in the kitchen and chatted with her as she scrubbed the countertops.

“Do you want any of this crap?” Katherine asked. She had a look like she wanted to light all of it on fire.

I gazed at Hal’s Cubs shirt, his jacket. I might have been feeling something like sadness, something in the same neighborhood, anyway. But the only feeling I could identify with any degree of certainty now was exhaustion. “I suppose not,” I said. I tossed the shirt back into the box.

Katherine slammed the trunk and the last traces of Hal disappeared from sight. That night, Katherine drank from Hal’s partially finished whiskey bottle, which she had retrieved from his office. I watched a thin film of sweat form around her temples and a light sway creep into her gait. She could barely stumble up the stairs by the time the DoZZZe-Rite took hold.