Sheriff Nillson believes Maureen stole some of her mother’s heart medicine, her digoxin, to knock herself out so she didn’t fight the water. If it wasn’t the heart medicine, it was some of her downers.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened all three bottles and dropped a bunch of tablets from each into my shorts pocket. I didn’t have a plan, just a desperate need to figure out Maureen, or to be like Maureen. Or maybe I wanted to escape everything for a moment, not forever, just long enough to stop feeling so sad, so lost, so sure things were going to get even worse.
And soon.
Help yourself to anything you see that you want,Mrs.Hansen had said.
CHAPTER 36
As soon as I got home, I moved the pills from my pocket to a nearly empty Anacin bottle and tucked it under my mattress. I already regretted taking them. That was apparently what I did now. Stupidly took things I shouldn’t.
After the pills were out of sight, I called Dad to tell him I’d seen Ed. He didn’t like hearing that. He told me to stay away from Ed—as if I needed anyone to tell me that—and then hung up, I assumed to figure out how to make the “running Ed out of town” stick. Maybe he and Sheriff Nillson should have watched some Westerns.
Alone in the kitchen after the phone call, I was smacked by a wave of desperation to talk to Claude. Out of all my friends, he’d stayed steady. Hadn’t started chasing girls, crashing parties, wearing weird clothes. He was simply Howdy Claude, dependable as the sun, steady as cement, and forever trying to get a nickname to stick.
The thought of unloading on him lifted a hot weight off my shoulders. We’d never talked about sex or anything even close, but he could handle hearing what Maureen had been doing now that her reputation was no longer at stake. I wouldn’t show him the creepy photos, but his ears would survive me describing them. I couldn’t tell him the stuff about Ed and Ricky because Dad had made clear that was confidential, but everything else was fair game, including what Mrs.Hansen said about her and my dad having an affair.
I would even tell him about the heart medicine I’d stolen from her.
Claude would help me to flush or return the pills, I bet.
I smiled a little thinking about it. It would be so nice to not have to do all this alone.
No way could I tell him anything over the party line, though, and it was too late to bother the Zieglers. It would have to wait until tomorrow, at work.
The next morning, when it was time for me to leave for Zayre Shoppers City, Junie still wasn’t home from the Fishers’. Mom was smoking in front of the television, her thick makeup unable to hide her paleness. I had a hard time looking at her now that I knew. It hurt, thinking about how vibrant she’d been before Junie was born. She’d cracked like a mirror after, and her pieces were so sharp, none of us could get close enough to put her back together again.
Had Dad’s affair with Mrs.Hansen been what had ultimately broken her?
On impulse, I called Libby’s house on the way out the door to ask if it was okay for Junie to stay longer. Something about Mom being out of her room made me nervous. Mrs.Fisher said that was fine.
Outside, the world was so normal. Mr.Peterson across the street was mowing his lawn like he did every summer Saturday. The burping clatter of his old push mower was comforting, making the air green and fuzzy with juiced grass. A light breeze rippled the oak and maple leaves up and down the block, just enough movement to lift the hair off my neck and make the morning humidity bearable. A gang of elementary kids biked past.
“Hi, Heather!” one of them called.
I waved and hopped on my bike. They were going to play softball. I’d have known it even if I hadn’t seen their gear. The kids played softballevery Saturday in Pantown Park. My home, my neighborhood, whirring like a tuned-up clock as poison rotted it from the inside. Had it always been like this? Bright and happy on the surface, dark and decaying beneath? Was this how every neighborhood was, or was it the tunnels that had cursed Pantown, weakening our foundation from the start?
Thinking of it reminded me of something Dad used to say to his friends more times than I could count. He’d brag about how he never argued with Mom at home because he got enough of that at work. Everyone would laugh. I’d chuff out with pride because it seemed like proof that my parents had the best marriage in town.
But therehadbeen arguments, I now realized. Lots of them. One in particular came to mind.
Junie was a newborn, pink-faced and squally. I had her on the floor and was staring at her, as I often did. Mom and Dad were talking, that’s what I’d thought, their voices background noise until I heard Mom say she was invisible. That demanded my three-year-old attention. Dad said he could see her just fine, that maybe he saw her too much, and that she’d changed since the baby came. I’d traced Junie’s eyebrows with the tip of my finger.
Changed? Mom still had a belly. When I’d asked her if there was another baby coming, she’d cried. Claude’s and Brenda’s moms started coming over regularly after that, bustling around the house, cleaning and cooking, their faces pinched. Mom was sleeping more, sometimes not getting out of bed until lunchtime. Her face always looked puffy. It wasn’t long before Mom saw Dr.Corinth and came home with her first bottle of pills, but whatever they were supposed to fix didn’t take because she burned off my ear soon after.
But not before she attended that one last party at the Pitts’, the one where Dad told Mrs.Hansen that it was the failed Pan Motor Car factory and the prison that put Saint Cloud on the map, and then he’d taken her below, to the tunnels.
I didn’t know if it was the first or the last time Dad had cheated on Mom or somewhere in between, but I had a hard time breathing, thinking about it, like the air had suddenly grown too thick. Dad had known Mom was hurting, and he’d still messed around with her very best friend.
Mrs.Hansen had been a fixture in my childhood up until the accident, and then she never came over after.My dad did that.Mrs.Hansen, too, but I wasn’t mad at her like I was him.
My dad was a cheater.
I kept sipping at the air, trying to draw a full breath as I biked beneath the pulled-cotton clouds, sweat forming at my hairline. It would be busy at Zayre. The air-conditioning plus it being a Saturday guaranteed it.
“Long time no see!” Ricky crowed when I biked up to the back of the store.
He stood in the shadow of the metal trash bin, same place he always smoked. Other than a pimple coming in like a horn on his forehead, he didn’t look any different than he had before my dad had told me about Ed. He didn’t look like he’d killed anyone, at least.
