Blood in the Water(93)

And nobody would be able to tell.

Fanny thought about the fire in the pool house. She hadn’t seen the aftermath of it, of course. Nobody had been allowed inside once the firemen and the police got there. Still, she could imagine it. Nail polish, the news had said—it was nail polish that had made that fire burn so brightly. Maybe no fire burned that hotly unless there was something to make it worse than just an ordinary fire would be.

Fanny looked down at the pile of clothes on the closet floor. Then she turned away and headed out of the master bedroom again. She went down the hall—Josh still snoring, Mindy still singing—and down the front stairs. She went back into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. There was a big box of garbage bags in the cabinet, the kind of garbage bags that came in rolls of a hundred or more. She took one out. She thought about it. She took another. Then she headed back upstairs.

Back in the master bedroom, Fanny threw one of the bags on the floor and kept the other. She went into the closet and opened the bag as widely as she could. She knelt down and started stuffing clothes into the bag, one handful of them after the other.

When the bag was full there were still clothes on the floor, and there were the shoes. She had forgotten about the shoes. She was out of breath, and no matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking. People did things like this all the time. They did them in real life and they did them in movies. How did they get through it without dying?

She got the other bag and started throwing shoes into it, one pair after the other. They fell into the back and hit the floor beneath it with a thud. Fanny wished she could just breathe, just a little. She wished she had the courage to start a fire. She could throw a match on all this and then get the children and get out.

She tried to visualize the world made perfect, the world with all her problems erased. She saw only the memory of a bumper sticker: FORGET WORLD PEACE, VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL.

The bag was full and the clothes were almost all gone. The clothes that were left on the floor were not important enough to pick up.

She had no idea what to do next, or why she would want to do anything.

There was a noise in the room and she looked up to see Mindy standing in the doorway.

Mindy was wearing Strawberry Shortcake pajamas. She should have been carrying a Teddy bear, but she wasn’t. Mindy didn’t go in for teddy bears. She only wore Strawberry Shortcake because she liked the color.

Mindy looked down at the two enormous black trash bags full of clothes and said, “Everybody at school says Daddy is dead.”

2

Eileen Platte had been in the hospital most of the day, and most of the day she had been in this room, which was very carefully designed to have nothing in it that she could use to try to kill herself again. She had tried to tell the psychiatrist they had sent in to see her that she hadn’t really been intending to kill herself, no matter what it looked like. Yes, she had stood on the chair. And yes, she had made a noose from a rope she had found in the garage, a rope Stephen and Michael had both used at one time or the other, to lash things to the roof rack of the bigger car. Of course, they weren’t cars anymore. That wasn’t what you called them. They were SUVs, or trucks, or “recreational vehicles.” Eileen couldn’t keep track of it all anymore. It made her tired.

For a while this afternoon, she had been able to hear Stephen, his harsh, booming voice traveling down the hall, saying things that should have embarrassed her.

“Always been a little off her nut,” was one of the things he said, and “telling the police crazy stories that are likely to get me arrested.”

It was obvious, though, that he hadn’t been arrested. She didn’t see why he ought to be. If they were going to arrest somebody, they should arrest her. Wasn’t it always the mother’s fault if the child turned out badly?

That was what she had been thinking about, sitting here all these hours. Michael had turned out badly. That was the conclusion she had reached this morning. But if Michael had turned out badly, it had to be for a reason. People were not just born bad. She must have done something. She must have said the wrong thing at the wrong time and turned some switch in his head, and now she ought to be grateful that it hadn’t been worse.

“He’s going to say I imagined it,” she told the psychiatrist. “He’s going to tell the police that I just made it all up, that it never existed, that the shoe box never existed, that the money never existed. I think he wants to keep the money. I think that’s what that’s about. He kept the money he found before.”

The psychiatrist hadn’t said anything. Eileen had read enough women’s magazines to know that he wasn’t supposed to. She wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.