He walked toward me, staring, eyes brighter than usual. “You did this,” he said quietly.
“Did what?” It was late and we’d just finished moving into our new house the day before, the one he bought by surprise and convinced me would make us happy. The one I never wanted. I was wearing a tank top and pajama shorts, a loose sweater thrown over.
“What did you do?” he asked.
I stared at him, baffled, my mother’s words only a beat behind his—What have you done?I was five years old again. Confused and culpable in ways I didn’t understand.
And then he screamed, “What did you do!”
He lunged at me, and I tried to run, but he caught me by the hem of that sweater and yanked me to him.
“Henry, please!” I cried. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you mean!”
But he was gone, something demonic filling the pale depths of his eyes. He grabbed my face, squeezing it in his hand, shaking me as he called me names. “This is your fault! You’re worthless. Barely good for a fuck, you know that? She’s dead because of you! Because you can’t give me a child. You can’t do anything right!” He punched me hard in the stomach and I doubled over, unable to draw a breath.
I hadn’t confided in Henry that I’d had an IUD inserted the year before. I didn’t realize when we married that he’d want children so soon, but I had no intention of getting pregnant yet.
“Please, Henry. I’m sorry. Please let me help you,” I wept.
“I don’t need your help,” he growled as he shoved me down, grinding the side of my face into the carpet. “You can’t even help yourself.”
I slept curled up beside the coffee table that night, where he’d left me. When I woke, he was gone, but there was a blanket over me and a note that read,Dinner at 7:00.
THE CAFÉ ERUPTSin chaos. Myrtle shouts at Ed to call 911 before tearing across the room and getting one of the Drunken Moose regulars to help her roll the man over. “Start chest compressions!” she orders him. “It looks like an allergic reaction. I’m going up to the storeroom to see if I have an EpiPen.” Her eyes fall on the sobbing woman who came in with him. “Someone get this woman some ice for her face,” she barks and the other Drunken Moose guy heads for the freezer. “Anything to calm her down.” She looks down at the man doing chest compressions. “Don’t let him die,” she breathes.
He looks up. “But, Myrtle, it’s too late.”
“Then bring him back!” she shouts before spinning toward the back stairs.
By now, I’ve made my way inside, skirting the mess and the madness with wide eyes.
Myrtle grabs me by the hem of my shirt and I instinctively wince. She lets go but takes my hand. “You’re coming with me,” she says under her breath, herding me to the back and up the staircase in front of her.
Once in the storeroom, she slams the door behind us. “What did you do?” She shakes me by both arms, and I crumple, my face washing with tears as my heart races through my chest. I suddenly find it hard to breathe, and my inhales sound like I’m sucking them through a sieve. I’m hyperventilating.
Myrtle backs me toward the futon and sits me down. She kneels before me. “We only have a minute,” she whispers. “This is very important. Do you hear me, Piers?”
I nod my head.
“I have to go back down there soon. That poor bastard was dead the second you laid eyes on him; they won’t bring him back. But that’s neither here nor there. I need you to empty the cabinets of all the jars, do you understand?” She rises and swings open the far door, the very same one I was in last night. “Bury them in the salt,” she tells me, pointing to the large plastic bin I helped her fill. “Bury them deep. You hear me? No one knows about this. Dry your face, and when you come back down, stay calm.”
I feel like a small child being scolded. I cover my face with my hands. “I spit into his coffee,” I tearfully admit. “That’s all. I—I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand.”
Myrtle pulls my hands away. “Piers, look at me.”
My eyes meet hers and in them, past the fear and the panic, I see strength. She may be the first person in my entire life I can truly lean on. “This is not your fault.”
“Okay,” I whisper through rattled breaths.
She goes to the door. “Remember, bury them deep,” she says over a shoulder.
“Myrtle?” I ask, shaken. “How do you know? How do you know it wasn’t me?” If I’m not to blame this time, then maybe I’m not to blame for Don or the man when I was five.
She turns to me before she leaves. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she looks proud. “Oh, honey, this may not be your fault, but you killed him sure as I’m standing here.”
Her words wash over me in a tide of anguish. Don’s panic-stricken face flashes through my memory. The salt lick of flesh in my mouth at five. I keep seeing the man downstairs stumbling, his belly swelling impossibly large, the sickly golden change in his skin, the sudden drop. I force myself to breathe through the terror. I did this. I killed a man. A bad man, to be sure. But there is something calleddue processin this country, something calledinnocent until proven guilty,something called ajury of your peers.And if I am responsible for that dead man lying downstairs, then I am responsible for Don, too. For that man when I was just a child. I am a criminal, hapless but deadly. An accidental murderer.
One could argue that as a child I was innocent by default, that Don was self-defense, but the man downstairs, that arrogant prick who liked to beat up on women, never laid a finger on me. And that makes me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
