Die Before I Wake (18 page)

“Something went wrong in the delivery room,” I said. “We’re still not sure what happened. Angel didn’t make it.” The words sounded so simple, so innocuous. So detached from the crushing heaviness of the meaning behind them. “My beautiful, perfect little girl, the little girl I’d carried for nine months and already loved with all my heart, died before she could take her first breath.” I stopped because my voice had become tremulous, and I didn’t want to show weakness in front of him. I took a breath to steady it. “So don’t tell me I don’t know about loss.” He rested the bowl of ice cream in his lap and said simply, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking for pity. I just want you to know where I’m coming from. After Angel died—” I closed my eyes for an instant. When I opened them again, Riley’s gaze was fixed on my face as though the world began and ended there. “After Angel died,” I began again, “Jeffrey just couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t look at my face without thinking of her. It was simply too much for him. So he left. He moved on to a new life and left me to deal with my own grief alone. It was just as well. It hadn’t been much of a marriage to begin with. Still, it was one more blow after losing Angel. Then, a few months after our divorce, I lost my dad. So I’ve seen more loss in the last couple of years than most people have. It hasn’t been easy. But I’m not the kind of person to dwell on it. I still get up every morning and greet the day, grateful to be alive. And it’s getting better. Sometimes I’ll go for a day or two without thinking about her. I know that’s a sign that I’m healing. It can be hard to talk about Angel, but I still do, because if I stop talking about her, it’ll be as though she never existed. And that would kill me. So, no, I don’t understand why Tom would be so desperate to forget someone he loved. Because I could never do that.”

“We all grieve in different ways.”

“Maybe so, but certain emotions, certain responses, are universal.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe he feels betrayed? Rejected? Abandoned? Maybe even a little guilty? Your daughter’s death, terrible as it was—and I’m not trying to minimize your pain—

was one of those cruel tricks of nature. A tragedy, but apparently not preventable. You couldn’t have known ahead of time that something would go wrong. It was just a miserable twist of fate. But Beth killed herself. She
chose
to die. Chose to end her marriage to Tom, to leave her family. That’s a pretty strong statement to make about their marriage. If it were my wife who’d done that, you can believe I’d be spending more than a little time in brutal self-analysis, wondering whether, if I’d done something different, said something different,
been
something different, the end result would have been different.”

“You think he feels responsible.”

“Of course he does. It’s human nature. When somebody close to us commits suicide, we can’t help feeling at least somewhat responsible. Because despite what we like to believe, living in this hedonistic culture, we
are
our brother’s keeper.” What he said made sense. It was possible that Tom’s behavior arose from guilt because he hadn’t done whichever random thing might have prevented his wife from stepping off the side of that bridge. Riley’s words should have comforted me. So why didn’t they?

I studied that senior portrait for a long time.

Granted, the photo had been taken many years ago.

But wouldn’t it have shown in her eyes? Wouldn’t there have been some hint of sadness, some intan-gible something to indicate that this young woman would someday choose to end her own life? Maybe I was being fanciful, but I saw nothing of the sort.

The Elizabeth Shickler of the high school yearbook was a straightforward, open, smiling young woman who gave no hint of a dark and troubled future.

There was also nothing in her artwork to suggest that she was troubled. Yes, I’d heard all the theories about the link between creativity and depression.

But there was nothing melancholy about the paintings I’d seen. They’d been full of color, flooded with dancing light. How could a woman paint something so lovely, so light and airy, so
sensitive,
and then go out and kill herself? Suicide just didn’t seem to fit with the image I was gradually building in my mind of Elizabeth Shickler Larkin.

But most of all, I couldn’t see her deserting her family, choosing to leave them behind, choosing to inflict upon them the kind of pain she couldn’t have failed to know they would experience with her loss.

Could the woman who painted those exquisite paintings, so full of heart and emotion, have been so callous in real life that she didn’t care how much her husband and daughters suffered? Suicide is seldom an impul-sive deed. Most people who kill themselves think about it for a long time before acting on their feelings.

Beth’s daughters had to be her whole world. Although I’d known my daughter only for the nine months I carried her, my mother-love was all-consuming. Unless there was something fundamentally wrong with her—

which I had yet to discover—Beth’s feelings had to be the same. It was a universal emotion, the love of a mother for her child. Had Angel lived, I could never, ever have left her. It was my conviction, based on everything I’d learned about her, that Beth Larkin couldn’t have left her girls, either.

Not deliberately, anyway.

Which brought me right back to my earlier conclusion: Somebody else had made the decision for her.

I broke for lunch, wolfed down a Lean Cuisine, chasing it with a bowl of the Cherry Garcia that Riley seemed so fond of. By early afternoon, I reached the last box. Whatever it held would be the final word on Beth Larkin. The last of her secrets—at least the secrets this attic held—would be revealed to me. I tried not to be relieved that it was almost over. I’d been on this wild-goose chase since breakfast, and I wasn’t any closer to the truth than I’d been four hours ago. Sighing, I peeled back the packing tape and opened the flaps.

When I saw what was inside, I considered just closing the box back up without going any further.

The box was crammed with books, and I’d already seen enough of my own books this week to last me a lifetime. But I’d come this far, and I’m not the kind of person to quit. Even when quitting might be the smarter course, I’ve been known to plow on through.

At this point, it couldn’t hurt me to thumb through Beth’s books and find out what she liked to read.

Her collection was eclectic. A fistful of mystery novels. A few cookbooks, some art tomes, a book on digital photography. A couple of coffee-table books, meant for casual viewing instead of serious reading.

And at the bottom of the box, a dog-eared paperback copy of
Dr. Zhivago.
Aha! I knew it! I knew there’d been more to it than just that tinny music. Somehow, I knew Beth had been as enchanted by Yuri and Lara as I was.

I picked up
Dr. Zhivago,
opened it to the first chapter, and began reading. Pasternak’s words instantly drew me into a landscape that was both exotic and brutally beautiful, and I had to force myself to stop reading after a few pages. Otherwise, Tom might come home tonight to find me sitting here in semidarkness, flashlight beam trained on the page, tears streaming down my cheeks and ruining the pages, all because of the unjustness of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lara and Yuri’s doomed love affair.

Enough already.
It was time I left this dark place where day and night were interchangeable, and ventured back out into the sunlight before I turned into a mushroom. I closed the book and was about to drop it back into the box when a folded piece of paper fell from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.

Some people would have returned it to the book unread. But if you know anything about me at all by this point, you’ll realize that isn’t my style. Maybe if you held a gun to my head. Otherwise, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I wouldn’t read whatever was on that piece of paper.

I picked it up, unfolded it, flattened it out on my knee. It appeared to be a note of some kind. One that had been written but never sent.

K,

He’s found out the truth. Don’t ask how; it doesn’t really matter now. Oh, God, what am I going to do? I can feel the hounds of hell closing in on me, their hot breath on the back of my neck. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out. He was so furious, I thought he’d kill me. I don’t know what he’ll do now. I could lose my children over this. Both of them.

What if he tells? If the truth comes out, what legal recourse would I have against him?

Against either of them? I’m afraid the law wouldn’t look too kindly on me right now.

I’m so scared. How did I end up in this god-awful mess? I have no illusions about the ease of extricating myself. I could end up losing everything. To be honest, at this point, I fear for my life. If you’d seen him, you’d understand.

I’ve become paranoid, certain that I’m being followed. But of course, whenever I turn around, nobody’s there. Just the ghosts that I can’t seem to shake. Was it worth the fear and the pain I’m going through now? If I say yes, then I’m a fool. If I say no, I’m a liar. What kind of woman does that make me?

Please tell me it will be all right. Lie to me if you have to. I just need the comfort of hearing it from somebody else’s mouth. Tell me I’ll get through this. I have to, for the sake of my children. If I don’t—no. I don’t even want to go there. But I don’t have a choice, do I? I have to go there. Because this is serious. If I don’t make it through this, you have to swear that you’ll watch over my kids. They’re the only thing that really matters. They have a future ahead of them, while mine is looking less and less promising.

Beth

Whoa. Reading Beth’s words was like being slapped in the face with a wet towel. The snap, the shock, the sting. I reached the end, retraced my steps, reread the letter carefully, every word she’d written, every word she’d left unsaid. Who the hell was K?

Better yet, who was the “he” she referred to? And exactly what was it that he knew?

This wasn’t good. A sick feeling rose in my stomach, and for an instant, I felt light-headed. What was going on here? What had happened to make Beth so afraid? Because that much was clear. She was terrified that she would lose her children. Maybe even her life.

And she had. Damn it, she had lost her life. Was this the proof I needed that something other than suicide had taken place on the bridge that night? That some unknown person had waited for the perfect moment, and found it one summer night in the swirling waters brewing beneath the Swift River Bridge?

The paper in my hand was a crucial piece of evidence. It needed to be seen by somebody. Like Dwight Pettingill. He of the Big Mac and the lite beer.

Newmarket’s finest. Groaning at my internal vision of this particular boy in blue, I could only hope that the Newmarket PD had somebody just a tad finer than Dwight. A tad less provincial. Dare I hope there was a police chief? Somebody who knew their ass from their elbow? Somebody who wasn’t Dwight?

I shoved the letter into my pocket and dragged the boxes back under the eaves. Trembling with excitement, I trotted down the attic stairs, circled around the upstairs stairway railing, and began my descent to the ground floor.

The sun had moved around to this side of the house, suffusing the entryway with a golden glow. I was halfway down the stairs, my mind on the note and what it might mean, when I took a step down and lost my footing. It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to react. One instant I was on my feet. The next, I was pitching forward into empty space.

I hit my tailbone against the edge of a step, bounced off it, and slammed my head into the newel post with a crack that was probably heard in five counties. I landed awkwardly, on my rump, one ankle twisted impossibly beneath me. I lay there gasping, understanding for the first time what the expression “seeing stars” meant. I think I passed out for a minute. Or maybe it was an hour. All I know is that when I finally came to, everything hurt. I felt like I’d slammed headfirst into a concrete wall without benefit of a crash helmet. My tailbone must surely be shattered—it wouldn’t hurt this much if it wasn’t— and my ankle, my poor, throbbing ankle, was starting to swell.

I raised my head and tried to focus on the coatrack that stood in the corner, but I kept seeing two of them.

Considering how hard I’d hit my head, this wasn’t any great surprise. But it still wasn’t good news. I tried to sit up, but it was impossible. My balance was completely gone, and I simply fell back over, betrayed by my own body, which was as floppy as a rag doll. If not for the stairs climbing directly to the heavens right in front of me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell up from down.

“Shit,” I said thickly. “Shit, piss, fuck, damn.” Nobody answered. Nothing moved around me, save for the dust motes that floated in a leisurely manner above my head. I watched them, fascinated by their reflective qualities.
Tsk, tsk.
Looked like Jeannette wasn’t quite the perfect housekeeper she wanted people to believe she was.

My mind wandered. What time was it? I was too whacked-out to know how long I’d been lying here, but not so far gone I couldn’t wonder how much longer it would be before somebody came home and found me. It might be hours. Meanwhile, my ankle continued to swell. It was probably broken. For all I knew my ass could be broken, as well. I’d hit it hard enough on the way down.

I reached up and touched my head, wincing at the pain that went roaring through my skull at even the slightest touch. I didn’t seem to be bleeding; apparently it hadn’t cracked open like a melon when it slammed into solid mahogany. That was the good news, and I took some comfort from the knowledge that I probably wasn’t dying. But I needed medical attention. The sooner the better, if only for the blessed analgesic relief of the drugs they’d surely give me.

Panic set in. I cleared my throat. “Help!” I croaked. “Somebody please help me!” I felt a little foolish, like a cartoon character. Sweet Polly Purebred, tied to the railroad tracks, waiting for Underdog to come and rescue her. Or was it Dudley Do-Right who rescued Sweet Polly? My fuzzy brain wasn’t quite sure. “Help!” I said again, louder this time, and with more conviction. Screw it. I might not like playing the helpless female role, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. Like it or not, when that role is thrust upon you, there’s not a lot you can do except pray to God that somebody comes along and saves your sorry ass.