Chapter Twenty

JUDE

“Why do we have to go?” Olivia whines. “Mom promised she was gonna make pancakes,” she tells me, rubbing at her sleepy eyes.

I peer at her in the rearview mirror. “You’re just going to stay with Grandpa for a few hours, so Daddy can run some errands— and then we’ll have pancakes…for lunch.”

“Are you and Mom fighting again?” Brady asks.

“Your mom and I—we don’t fight.”

“Right,” he says, and I swear, he’s four going on thirty.

I focus on the road, at the task at hand, and I don’t know how I’ll raise them without you, I really don’t. Brady with his ‘special needs’ and Olivia being well… a girl.

Girls need their mothers. Even I know that. But then, so do boys, and mine was pretty messed up, so there is that.

My father meets me at his door, like always, but his face is pale. He eyes the children and ushers them inside.

I narrow my gaze.

“I just heard on the scanner your neighborhood is swarming with cops. Something about a murder-suicide…”

“Huh,” I say, playing it off, the way I always do when I suspect that anything has to do with you.

“Where’s that wife of yours?”

“She went for a run.”

He shakes his head. “Sure she did.”

“Am I missing something?”

“Sit down, son. There’s something I need to tell you.”

I check my watch, more instinctively than anything else. “I’m not sure I have time.”

“Make time,” he says, and he steps out onto the porch, shutting the door behind him. He looks me in the eye, and he waits. I don’t sit, and when he figures out I’m not going to, he gets on with it. “Did you kill her?”

“What?” I ask, and I wasn’t sure what he was going to tell me, but I can say for sure I didn’t expect him to lead with that.

“Your wife. Did you kill her?”

I do a double-take, as though what he’s just suggested is the most absurd thing in the world, the farthest thought in my mind. “Of course not.”

He studies me for a moment, and then he inhales and lets it out slowly. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, for a long time, Jude,” he says and he rubs at his jawline, making it clear that this conversation isn’t easy for him. “I know this is going to change everything. And I mean everything.”

“Okay,” I say, unable to come up with anything else that makes sense.

“It’s just, I’d hate to see you make the same mistake I did,” he tells me, and I know exactly what he means when most normal people would have doubt. This is his way of telling me my mother didn’t just run off.

“It never leaves you. Never.”

I swallow hard, and I shake my head. But I don’t say anything in return. I head home to you.

Rudy was right. Cops are surrounding our subdivision. It takes some pleading, some lying, telling them I left my dog locked up in a crate he doesn’t really have, and eventually they give me permission to trek in on foot. Just down the block, I run into Sam, the neighbor who lives down the street, the redneck one who made millions selling some kind of hunting gadget. You say he gives you the creeps. He talks a lot, and so I’m pretty thankful to find him standing at the end of his drive in his pajamas.

I hold my hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun and look in the direction of our place. “What’s going on?”

“Man… you don’t want to know,” he says, taking a slow sip from his mug, gazing down the street. Sam is the kind of guy who almost never looks you in the eye.

I turn to him. “Actually, I do.”

He looks up at me then, and he seems taken aback, as though he’s put off someone would address him so directly. “Oh,” he says. “Anne and Stanley… you know, the yuppies down there?” he asks pointing toward their house, which is barely visible around the corner. “Turns out, they had some messed up shit goin’ on in that house.”

“Like what?”

He slurps at his coffee. “Like slaves…”

“Slaves?”

“Yeah… and rumor is, they’re dead in there…”

I furrow my brow. You were right. This guy is weird.

He shifts and turns his head toward me slightly, but he keeps his gaze focused down the road. “You hear anything funny this morning?”

“Funny?” I shake my head. “No. I haven’t been home…”

“I heard gunshots. Two of ‘em. I know a gunshot when I hear it.”

“Hmm.” I say, and he looks at me then.

He juts out his bottom lip. “Which means all those slaves… they died some other kinda way.”

“Kate!” I call out, going from room to room. “Kate!” I yell once more, and I inhale and exhale loudly, annoyed by this game of hide and seek that I hadn’t agreed to. I’ve checked all over the house, and you’re nowhere to be found. Your car is in the garage, but I know you, and that means nothing.

I make my way upstairs again, and check the one place I realize I hadn’t thought to look: the bathroom. I walk in and there you are, eyes closed, soaking in the tub, filled to the brim with bubbles.

“Kate,” I say, and you don’t open your eyes.

“Kate.”

“You’re back,” you murmur, but you still refuse to look at me.

“What in the fuck happened at the Morrises?”

“They died.”

“I heard that. How?”

You twist your lips, and you open your eyes slowly, as though you’re remembering something long forgotten. You look right at me, and you shrug.

I exhale. “Damn it, Kate.”

You look at me then, and I mean really look at me. You tell me what happened in that house, and I don’t know how I missed it. The truth is, I missed a lot of things, you being one of them. But when you offer up the details, I don’t know what to say, other than I’m impressed, but even those words can’t manage to find their way out, so instead I keep them inside, tucked close to my heart.

“You told me I was crazy, about the screams… but I wasn’t wrong. Those people—man, you should’ve heard what they were doing with those girls…some really messed-up stuff. I knew something about that woman was off. I sensed it from the get-go. I just hadn’t imagined it was that bad.”

I sigh, long and slow. “Yeah, I don’t know how I missed it—how we all missed it—I mean, right here on our street, under our noses…it’s hard to believe. Even for me. And I’ve seen a lot.”

You cock your head and narrow your eyes. “Is everything all right?

“Well, since you asked… no. In fact, nothing is all right.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Since when have you ever been afraid of anything?”

“Me?” you say and you do a double-take. “Oh, I’m afraid of a lot of things. I just don’t like to talk about them.”

I don’t say anything in return. Sometimes it’s best that way.

“So, let’s not talk Jude. Let’s just get on with what you came here to do.”

I lean against the counter and cross my arms. “Which is?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not.”

“So you didn’t come here to kill me?”

I offer a half-hearted smile. “What would make you think that?”

“We kill people. It’s what we do.”

“That’s a fucked-up way to see the man you married.”

“It’s the truth…” you say, shifting in the tub. “I’d be an idiot if I didn’t consider it a possibility.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Kate.”

“And why is that?”

“I just don’t.”

“Well, then. What do you want?”

“My father just admitted he killed my mother,” I tell you, and I don’t mean to say it but I find myself offering it up anyway. As the words slip out, my stomach sinks. To be honest, it would be easier just to take you out, and it sure as shit would save me the trouble of explaining. And now that it’s out there, it feels like I’m on one of those amusement park rides that hurl you a thousand feet into the air and I am free falling.

You sit up then, and suddenly your tits are on full display, and it makes everything instantly better. You stare at me, waiting for more, but I know better than to give it to you.

“What did you say to him?” you ask, and then you swallow hard. “Wait…and you left our kids there?”

“Rudy would never hurt the kids.”

“Did you think he would kill your mother?”

“Yes, actually. I did.”

You want to know more than I’m able or willing to share, and you are relentless in your pursuit.

“Jude,” you call, and it takes me a bit, but finally I have just the story to share.

I was nine, when they told me over dinner that they were taking off to Alaska for two weeks, and that they were leaving me with my father’s mother. I didn’t really know her, as she lived in another state. We visited once, that I could recall, for my grandfather’s funeral. Pretty much the gist of what I knew about her was that she was an old woman who had my father late in life. I was aware from that brief visit that she had more money than she knew what to do with, and was paranoid as hell that anyone and everyone was out to get it.

I arrived on a Wednesday. I stood at the curb, suitcase in hand, looking up at the old country home. “You’ll be fine,” my mother said as she studied my expression. “You always are.”

“Why do I have to stay here?” I asked, in an obvious desperate attempt of getting her to change her mind.

“Look at this place,” she said. “It’s the perfect opportunity for a boy like you to run around.”

“Then how come dad never wants to come here?”

“Jude, darling,” she said, adjusting the collar on my shirt. “Don’t be so obtuse.”

“What does obtuse mean?”

She gave me a look I’ve never forgotten. And then she smiled, “Ask your grandmother,” she said. The smile was so big, it lit up her whole face, and in that moment I was happy for her, that she was going on vacation, even if it meant leaving me behind. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in months.

My grandmother lived on a seventy-acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere on what had, at one time, been a profitable farm. I learned this on my first evening there when I showed up for dinner. I’ll never forget the massive table she had in her dining room. It must have sat twenty, easily. I walked into the room, all washed up, that’s what my father told me to do—to make sure I always washed up. The spread on the table was unimaginable to a boy like me. My mom wasn’t much of a cook, and we usually had a mixture of take out and sandwiches. I could feel myself salivating at the aroma’s coming off the table. Mrs. Sue, as she insisted I call her, had three cooks.

When I entered the room, she didn’t look up from her paper, nor did she stop eating. She had four Bassett Hounds surrounding her, and they watched my every move. As long as I’ve lived, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who treated their animals better than they treated people on the scale that woman did, but it’s probably just as well.

I cleared my throat and then I went to take the seat opposite her. She looked up at me as I pulled the chair out. “May I help you?”

I looked around the room. “Is this where I should sit?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Did that mother of yours not teach you the proper way to address a lady?”

I shrugged.

“What happened? The cat get your tongue? Don’t you speak when spoken to? Or did she forget all forms of manners?”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing. Sometimes it’s the best way, and sometimes it’s not. That’s what I learned that night.

I went to pull out a different chair.

“Not that one either,” she said.

I stood and waited, thinking she was going to give me further direction, but she simply went back to eating.

“May I sit?” I finally thought to say.

“You may not.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, actually it would have been nice if you’d never been born. But given it’s clearly a little late for that, let me get Erma.” She picked up her glass of water, took a slow sip, and swallowed, never taking her eyes from mine. “ERMA!”

Erma came running. She turned out to be the help, and maybe the worst of them all. “Show Jude here to the stables. He shall sleep there. And make sure no one feeds him.”

“Yes, Mrs. Sue.”

My grandmother’s eyes bore into me. “There comes a time in every boy’s life where he has to learn to earn his keep. This is your time, Jude,” she said. “It’s such a pity that drunken mother of yours hasn’t done better by you. I warned my son about her; I told him not to marry her. But that’s okay. You’re here now. And we all see the error of his ways.”

That first week was the first time I understood what it really meant to be hungry.

Mrs. Sue was right about one thing—It was my time. It was my time for a lot of things: for learning to sleep in old barns, on dirt floors, and how if you are going to take a risk, it’s best not to get caught. An old rotary telephone taught me that lesson. I was trying to call my mom, even though I had no idea how or where to reach her. It’s hard to think rationally when you haven’t eaten in three days. That night I decided to steal scraps from the dogs, but I didn’t have much success at that either. Every night I watched as Erma fed the dogs whatever was left of the feast that Mrs. Sue had not eaten.

Erma was one of a staff of eleven which my grandmother treated only slightly better than me. And it was Erma who told Mrs. Sue about the telephone call. I remember being struck in the head with the telephone. But I don’t remember much about the days following.

My feedings resumed three days before my parents were to pick me up. I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted after the dogs had had their share, and I ate so much I made myself sick each and every time. I worked in the fields twelve hours a day doing what I was told, and I hadn’t quite known pain until that summer. When you’re a kid, it’s hard to imagine your back aching until your knees buckle, or the tips of your fingers wearing so thin they bleed. Or sweating until you’re dizzy, or the visions that come along with dehydration. It’s hard to imagine and yet impossible not to, once you know the lengths humans can go to, to see others suffer.

I’ll never understand why my mother thought it was okay to leave me there, but maybe she just needed a vacation, or maybe she thought anything was survivable for two weeks. To this day I don’t know, because I never saw her again.

My father, on the other hand, I understood why he left me there. It’s difficult to see how bad a person is when it’s your own parent, it’s as though there’s some sort of unbreakable bond that spans time, as though you share a connection that means if they’re terrible, you must be too, and so it’s best not to admit how bad it really is.

But it wasn’t my parents who came to retrieve me. It was just Rudy.

“Your mother wanted a different life,” he told me when I asked where she was. “And sometimes when you love a person, you have to let them have what they want.”

“But I don’t want her to have a different life.”

He looked at me with understanding. “No one ever does, son. No one does.”

I sucked in my bottom lip. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we’ll probably spend the rest of the summer here with your Grandmother.”

A lump formed in my throat. “I don’t want to stay here.”

“Touché.”

“What does touché mean?”

He placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a hard squeeze. “It means that someday you’ll be older, and you’ll see for yourself, and then you’ll understand why people make the choices they do."

I finish my story, and your eyes are on mine. You switch on the tap and add more bubbles.

“Come here, get in,” you say. And I do.

You wrap your arms around me, and we stay that way until the water turns cold.