For the first time in years, Patricia doesn’t take a sleeping pill, and she does not sleep well. She wakes up after midnight and watches gardening shows until non-emotional, fully physical tears dribble down her cheeks because she wants so badly to fall back asleep. She turns off the TV, turns it back on, tosses and turns, rearranges the horrible cushions, swallows more ibuprofen with water from the tap. She paces and fiddles with her bandages and takes a long shower in an upstairs bathroom. Hot water coursing over her hurt places wakes her up all the way and she grits her teeth as she soaps the wound and feels the detached chunk of meat with pruney fingertips. Blood courses down her leg and swirls pink around the drain. There’s no way around it—she’ll have to call Dr. Baird tomorrow and make it clear that this is an emergency on her own behalf. Maybe Randall won’t swallow the cost of two vaccinations for wayward children, but surely he doesn’t want his not-yet-ex-wife to die of sepsis before she can sign the divorce papers.
It’s two in the morning, but she feels like it’s noon. The house is silent and dark as she limps back to the pantry and goes through the ritual of treating her wounds again and binding them back up even though she knows it’s a job badly done, which she hates. She has a cup of herbal tea that only makes her feel more awake—Sleepytime, my ass—and pulls out her sleek little laptop, a gift from Randall after she lightly, breezily complained about a few too many harassing calls from one of his women. It reminds her of a seashell as it opens, a delicate rose gold. She’s been so busy with Brooklyn that she’s neglected it.
Her inbox is a shambles. Dozens of emails about the auction in the last two days alone. The earlier ones are delicately pressing and the most recent ones are indignant and stiff and frosty. She’s been removed from the auction committee and, on Karen’s recommendation, has been declared unacceptable for reelection to the board due to gross negligence.
“For failing to satisfy commitments,” Patricia murmurs to herself. “You bitch.”
She clicks the little boxes down the left of each email, click click click, and deletes them all.
“There. That’s better.”
There are other emails she’s missed—mostly from Randall’s secretary, Diane, first information regarding their Iceland plans, and then increasingly chilly ones that include documents for her to e-sign with her e-signature so that Randall can easily e-divorce her. She opens one, reads a few paragraphs, and deletes the email. If Randall wants to go through with this, if he’s really the kind of person who wants to destroy her life in the middle of a pandemic, then he can damn well subpoena her and make her sign in person at one of his big conference tables with a policeman standing over them both once he’s gone to the trouble of returning from his icy paradise. She’s not going to make it easy on him, she’s decided.
Because he’s not made it easy on her.
If he’d like to offer her some money like he does his discarded mistresses, perhaps she’ll go back to being pliant and not troublesome.
Email, she thinks, as she scrolls through, was a bad invention.
Requests, demands, sales that she missed—there’s nothing here that benefits her current reality.
Opening a new tab, she’s forced to stare at her destroyed manicure as she tries to figure out the correct combination of words to type into the search bar that will produce the information she desires.
The Violence cure.
Well, that gets a lot of garbage.
Funny how she didn’t research a thing when she got the vaccine herself, but now that her granddaughter is infected and living in her closet, she wants all the information she can find.
Much to her surprise, very little of what she sees online is accurate. It’s mostly conspiracy theories, although it turns out the one about the vaccine only being available to the wealthy is actually true.
How many paid professionals, she wonders, are awake right now, scrubbing the internet for any mention of the reality of this vaccine to keep the general populace from rioting? She knows there are people who fill that job position; Randall has paid them to remove his own unflattering information and images before elections. But to the rest of the world, the vaccine is a Loch Ness Monster, something they’d like to believe in but can’t quite prove. Her scar is an open secret, now. Tomorrow, when Dr. Baird stops by to tend to her wounds, she’ll play on his sympathy for little children, tell him about her granddaughter’s difficult life, her abusive father, runaway sister, and violent, missing mother, and try to convince him to give Brooklyn the vaccine, too. Hell, she’ll offer him every jewel she has left, her wedding rings and diamond studs and tennis bracelet. It’s not the cache she had before she was robbed, but it’s certainly enough to make up for one measly little vaccine rubbed into the child’s arm—half a dose, if that. The man took an oath, for heaven’s sake. He must have a heart.
She googles “David Martin,” but there are so many hits that there’s no way to sift through them all. Homer told her an angry man in a Lexus had been stopping by the neighborhood gates, so David must be out of quarantine or prison or whatever they call it, but he won’t find his way to her house.
Then she googles “Chelsea Martin” and is so scandalized she gasps and turns her laptop away, as if Brooklyn could possibly be sneaking up behind her and able to read.
Patricia’s daughter really does have the Violence, and when she finds pictures of the crime scene in an online gossip mag, she feels nauseated.
Chelsea has truly hit rock bottom, and even if she had all of her former wealth and power, there’s very little Patricia could do to help her. She’s quite certain the judge would need to distance himself from this crime, and—
Yes, of course.
No wonder the emails from his secretary got so snippy and demanding. As long as he’s married to Patricia, this is a smear against him, isn’t it? His daughter-in-law is an embarrassing murderess.
Patricia smiles, chuckles a little.
“That bell can’t be unrung, can it, Judge?”
She has no idea where Chelsea is now, and neither does anyone else. Ella is likewise out of her reach, and good riddance to the bad rubbish that was Randall.
Brooklyn is all she has left, and they will find their way together.
Patricia falls asleep on her sunroom couch, laptop balanced on her lap as she googles “squatter’s rights” and “property law.” If Randall wants her out of this home, this place she decorated and refurbished to suit her like a hermit crab selecting a new shell, he can by God show up and pry her out himself. Legally, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. No wonder she’s still here with all the utilities. Of course he knows the law. His threats were empty, but he’s still an asshole.
She wakes up to sunlight and a loud thump that puts her right into panic mode.
“Nana! Where are you?” Brooklyn shouts as she crawls over the fallen ottoman that Patricia used to block the door.
Annoyed, still half asleep, fingertips prodding what must be Birkin-sized eye bags, Patricia stands up and limps down the hall.
“Nana, why was that thing there?” Brooklyn holds her arms up, and it takes a confused beat before Patricia realizes she wants a hug.
“The ottoman? Well…I thought we might play Obstacle Course today.” She opens her arms, a little awkward, and the child throws herself into Patricia’s middle. It’s not awful, but her leg does hurt, and, well, she’s just not accustomed to being touched quite so much. She pats Brooklyn’s back and pulls away. “But first, would you like breakfast? I found some fresh fruit.”
Brooklyn’s eyes light up, the ottoman forgotten.
Once the child is installed at the counter with her tablet, Patricia notes the time and calls Dr. Baird.
“Patricia,” he answers, curt but not unfriendly. “What a surprise.”
“How are you, Doctor?” she replies. She learned long ago that calling a man by his earned title will get her farther than calling him by his first name as if they’re equals.
“Busy. What can I do for you?”
She smiles and bats her eyelashes. Even if he’s not right there with her, she knows it changes her voice. “I had a little accident yesterday, I’m afraid, something that needs stitches, and I’m really trying to avoid the hospital. Are you still taking house calls?”
He pauses with a soft, drawn-out, “Hmm.” Not a good sign. “I am, but my girl had a call from the judge’s office. Sounds like you’re no longer on his plan. But there’s a nice little urgent care just two miles down the road—”
“Dr. Baird, I hope you’ll forgive me for interrupting you, but you know Randall’s…secretaries…can’t be trusted. I do believe they’re rather forthright when they need certain antibiotics or…procedures…but in general, they do not look so fondly upon me.”
They have a long history, Randall and the doc, and Patricia knows for a fact that certain frowned-upon procedures to get rid of unmarital surprises have lined the doctor’s pockets over the years. Her eyebrows are raised as if she’s waiting for a little boy to confess to having put a frog in her boot.
“I’m sure that’s true, Patricia.” He used to call her Mrs. Lane. “But I’m afraid Randall has me on retainer, and thus he calls the shots. I believe he’s in Iceland now with…Donna, is it? Or Alexis? I handled the vaccine for her right before they left.”
She hates his tone—smug and self-assured, greasy as a rat that knows he can’t be caught or punished. If he were here in person, she’d slap him, but he’s on the phone, impossibly far away.
“Well, then. Tell me, what is the going rate for an hour of your time?”
“More than you have currently. Good day, Patricia. And good luck.”
And then the cocky bastard has the balls to hang up on her.
On her! After all she’s contributed to his coffers over the years.
Apparently golf outings to the tropics are worth more than a Hippocratic oath.
“Well, fuck you, too,” she snarls, throwing her phone at the pillows.
The knowing little smile, the aristocratically cocked eyebrow, the careful accent, the learned vocabulary, the sly social games all flee as she realizes there is no way to get what she wants out of the snide little shit.
She opens her laptop again and googles “human bite wound.” Ten minutes and forty tawdry Halloween makeup tutorials later, she’s in her pantry, bare leg hiked up on the sink, tools laid out on top of the dryer: sewing scissors and needle and thread, hydrogen peroxide and gauze. Bright sunlight shines in from the window, and Brooklyn is happily eating carefully sliced chunks of melon and watching her show. Patricia pulls back the bloodied gauze on her calf and nearly throws up from the sight. What she’s read online indicates that once it’s cleaned out and sterilized, she’ll need to hold all the parts of the wound shut and sew it neatly, and she thinks she’s ready, but the moment she gets the needle through the first flap of skin, she almost passes out.
She can’t do this.
Even if she could, the possibility of getting an infection is high. She has no antibiotics.
“Goddammit,” she murmurs, an old word she’d abandoned in her new life, and the worst thing she’s ever felt is the thread pulling through her skin as she yanks it back out.
She wraps the wound in gauze and hobbles back into the kitchen. “Brooklyn, I’m going to go out for a brief errand. Can you sit quietly and watch your show?”
Brooklyn nods vigorously. “Oh yes! I did real good the last time you went away. It was easy!”
A shiver goes up Patricia’s spine.
It was not easy for her—the aftermath. Not of the mirror, and not of last night.
But she can’t think of another way out of this.
She has to go to urgent care. She can’t take a child with the Violence to a public space, with witnesses. If Brooklyn attacked someone, they’d take her away, and Patricia would never get her back. Just a few weeks ago, she was desperate for someone else to take over care for the child, but somehow, now, the thought of Brooklyn in a government facility, alone, confused…
Patricia knows she is cold, but she’s not that cold.
She nods to herself and gets dressed—khaki shorts she doesn’t like all that much, short enough to allow the doctors access to both her wounds with no need for one of those shabby gowns. She grabs one of Randall’s hundred-dollar bills. She has her keys and her wallet full of now-useless cards, and she reminds Brooklyn of all the things she should not do: eat, drink, go outside, touch the pool, open any doors, answer any phones, play with any knives or matches. She realizes for the first time that her home is a vast collection of dangerous items that could cause a small child irreparable harm. There aren’t even covers over the electrical outlets. The cabinets are full of bleach and Drano and rat poison.
But she can’t mention that to Brooklyn now, a mile-long list of warnings that might become ideas. When Chelsea was a child, they weren’t even considerations.
As she sits in a four-car garage in last year’s nicest Infiniti, ecru leather seat cool against her gauze-wrapped thigh, Patricia puts her forehead gently down against the steering wheel and cries. It’s destroying her mascara, but she can’t stop herself. She has never felt this helpless, not even when her mother kicked her out. Then, she left out of spite, fueled by her rage and the drive to prove herself capable. Only now does she leave out of desperation.