The almost widow, p.19
The Almost Widow, page 19
“I know.” I leaned both elbows on the table to hold my head. A pain started at my neck and fingered into my brain. I stood and rummaged for a wine bottle, poured myself a glass, took a long swig. My mother eyed the glass as I sat back down.
I let out a long sigh. “All through this, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Owen had something to do with Ben’s disappearance. When Elijah told me he found the controller in the bear’s den, I was so sure Owen had taken it, that he knew where Ben was.”
“And now?”
I stared down into my wine. “I don’t know. Owen seemed confused, like he had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe he’s just a good liar. But then I found those photos of me in Jackson’s office . . .” I rubbed my forehead. “I know there’s more going on here. I just don’t know what, exactly.”
“Maybe that’s the problem, right there,” Libby said. “You have no explanation for what happened to Ben. At least, not one you’re ready to accept. You have no control over this situation. Believing that Ben is still alive, or that there is some kind of conspiracy involving Owen, and now Jackson—” She stopped to cup my hand in both of hers. “Maybe it’s a way you can make sense of things, maintain control.”
I sat back in my chair. Maybe. I did hold two conflicting theories in my head about Ben, that he was somehow alive and, secondly, that someone—Owen or the grizzly or the Green Man or, now, Jackson—had killed him.
I leaned back on the table to hold my head again. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am losing it.”
My mother stood to rub my back. “I see you’re drinking again.” She paused. “Have you been suffering from intrusive thoughts again too?”
“Intrusive thoughts?” I laughed a little, at myself. “Well, I’m thinking my husband is missing, and that somebody may have hurt him, and that someone broke into my house. Oh, and there’s that graffiti on my truck, the window that was bashed in before Ben disappeared. So, yes, I guess I’d say I’ve been having a few intrusive thoughts.”
“I mean, are you having dark thoughts about hurting yourself?”
“I’m not suicidal.”
She patted my back. “Good, good.” And I knew she was thinking of me, hooked up to an IV, groggy and ghostly after a suicide attempt when I was seventeen landed me in the hospital. An overdose of sleeping pills I’d found in my mother’s medicine cabinet. I had never told Ben about that. I didn’t want to scare him away.
I smiled wickedly, trying to lighten things. “I am thinking about offing Owen, though,” I said.
“Piper!” My mother appeared genuinely alarmed.
I threw up both hands. “Seriously? I’m not going to hurt him, Libby.” I pushed away my glass, then clawed it back, finished it up in quick, successive sips. The wine swam up to my brain, warming it, soothing it. The pain of grief, of guilt, lessened. No wonder my mother had lost herself in booze for so many years.
Libby sat again, facing me, her hand gripping my forearm firmly. “This obsession of yours that someone is responsible for Ben’s death needs to end. Do you understand? You’re chasing ghosts.”
I laughed at that. “I am chasing ghosts,” I said. “I see Ben. Sometimes he seems so real, solid, standing there. But at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that he’s still alive.” I looked up at the patio door that led out onto the deck, the snowy night sky beyond. “Even now, I feel like he could walk in that door any moment, stomp the snow from his boots.” I glanced back at my mother. “Am I crazy?”
She sighed. “Crazy? No. But I always thought you were hard-wired differently. Even as a kid you seemed to see things that others didn’t. Remember all those times you thought you saw your father after he was gone?”
I didn’t think of it often now, or rather, I pushed those memories from my mind when they surfaced, as they did now. The ghost of my father at the end of my bed. Or standing outside the house on the lawn. My own mind at work, I knew, trying to process the guilt of what we’d done, what I had done.
“You never saw him, after his death?” I asked Libby. “You never felt haunted by him, by what happened?”
“Only when I was sober.” So she felt haunted all the time, now. She leaned back in her chair. “It’s still eating at you, isn’t it? What happened to your father—I know what that can do to a person.”
What happened—as if it had been an accident.
My mother gripped my hand. “Whatever happened to Ben, and what happened all those years ago to your father—I think they’re all tangled up together in your mind somehow. If you just talk about it, you might be able to let go of Ben.” She paused. “Are you seeing a therapist?” she asked. “I mean, through Zoom? I don’t imagine there’s a good counsellor around here.”
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.” I hadn’t for nearly a decade. The cost. And the therapist I had worked with had gotten too close to the truth, asked too many pointed questions.
Libby hesitated. “Did you ever tell your counsellor about it?”
I spun my wineglass. “She guessed I was holding onto something big, but no.”
“Ben didn’t know?”
“Have you told anyone?” I felt a sharp pang of fear. Had she told someone?
She shook her head. “But hanging on to this secret all this time—maybe that is what’s really going on here, the blame you’re directing at Owen and now Jackson. Maybe Ben’s death was the trigger. Piper, I worry that you’ve reached a crisis point.”
I stood unsteadily. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m okay.”
Libby visibly flinched at what should have been an innocent phrase. But I knew it wasn’t, for either of us. Dad’s last words to us were I’m okay.
“I wanted to tell Ben,” I said. “But how could he stay with me, how could anyone stay, if they knew?” If they knew who I really was.
“What happened to your father—” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag. “I wish I had found another way.”
“You said there was no other way.”
She put a cigarette to her lips, lit it. “There’s always another way.”
I waved to disperse the smoke, and she took her cigarette out onto the deck, closing the patio door behind her. I stood to pour myself another glass of wine.
Had there been another way? Maybe, but maybe not. When I was eight, Libby had tried to take me away, bustling me into the car while Dad was on the night shift, but he tracked us down in a glum motel through her credit card, and dragged us home. My mother had phoned the cops on him twice after that. But the officer who turned up at our door the first time knew him. Dad convinced the guy to drop the matter, saying Libby was overreacting. The second time, when I was ten, it was a female cop. Dad knew her too, but didn’t even try to sweet-talk her. He told her the truth: he’d been out drinking in a bar after a particularly difficult shift, where he’d been forced to shoot a man, though not fatally, and when he got home, the stress, the pain of the matter, had gotten the best of him. When I gave him lip, he had slapped me. When my mother had intervened, he’d hit her.
He was charged with assault, diagnosed with PTSD and required to go to regular counselling sessions with a therapist, like so many other cops and emergency workers. There was nothing new about his story, except that it was happening to us.
During and after the counselling, he still drank off and on. He still yelled. He still hit and pushed my mother and me around.
Until, when I was thirteen, Libby finally pushed back.
I heard them arguing in the kitchen just after Libby and I got home from shopping. I had carried in the groceries, but when I saw that Dad was home, and that he’d been drinking, I dropped the groceries on the kitchen counter and escaped to my room. His shouts and angry accusations began almost immediately. I could hear Libby’s quiet voice trying to soothe him. And then I heard the smack of skin on skin, and my mother shrieking in pain. I rushed out just in time to see him take another swipe at her. But he was clumsy with drink, and when Libby pushed him away, he lost his balance, and the back of his head hit the corner edge of the granite counter with a sickening crack before he slid to the floor. He struggled to get up and slurred, “I’m okay,” even though he clearly was not okay. Blood streaked down the side of his head from a gaping wound. “I’m okay,” he said again, and then he slumped back down and was still.
Libby and I both stared down at him.
“What do we do?” I asked. “He’s not moving.”
“He’ll be all right,” she said, but her hand shook as she reached for mine and led me to the kitchen table.
“But Dad,” I said. “He’s hurt.”
“I’ll deal with it. Sit.”
But she didn’t deal with it. She poured herself a shot of whiskey and sat at the kitchen table opposite me. Her face, where he’d smacked her, raged red.
I stood. “I’m phoning 911.”
“Just give it a minute.” She took out a smoke, lit it. As I stood, to phone, she gripped my wrist, stopping me. “It’s the only way,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
To stop my father. To stop him from hurting us.
“He’s hurt. He’s bleeding bad. We can’t let him die.”
“It’s the only way,” she repeated. “Just give it ten minutes. Ten minutes will make all the difference.”
I pulled my wrist out of her grip and rubbed it as I watched the pool of blood grow on the floor. Was this really the only way out of the constant battles, the fear? It seemed so at the time, when the police and mental health system had done little to help us. I went back to my chair opposite my mother’s and sat with my hands in my lap, staring at the clock above her head, watching the seconds tick by. After ten minutes had passed, Libby picked up the phone, called 911 and told them my father, drunk, had fallen and hit his head. “I only just found him,” she said. “I don’t know how long he’s been out.” She sobbed as she gave them the rest of the information.
I don’t know if those ten minutes made a difference or if I could have saved him by phoning for help when he first fell. My father was still alive when the paramedics arrived. Libby didn’t have to tell me to lie to the police. I simply repeated what she had told the paramedics. That my father was struggling with a drinking problem brought on by the trauma he experienced at work, that he’d been drinking more than usual recently. That we had come home from shopping to find him on the floor, bleeding out. The groceries were still on the counter. She had started the car again to make sure the engine was warm. They believed her. She was a police officer’s wife, after all.
My father lived the remainder of his life, a matter of days, in a coma in a hospital bed, with tubes going in and out of him. Libby spent nearly every hour at his bedside, crying intermittently, drinking from a flask she kept hidden in her purse and holding my father’s limp hand. And then, when he passed, and we were allowed to sit alone with his body for a time, she pressed his hand to her forehead, to her cheek, weeping.
I didn’t understand her grief, not after what she’d done. And Dad had been so cruel to both of us. I felt nothing in that moment.
“You killed him,” I said, quietly.
“I did not!” she said. “Why would you ever say that? He was drunk. He fell.”
“We both killed him.”
She carefully laid my father’s hand on his chest and took mine instead, squeezing it so hard the pain brought tears to my eyes. “You didn’t,” she said. “Do you understand me? He was drunk. He fell.” Then, still squeezing, she shook my hand. “Tell me, tell me again how your father died.”
“He fell.”
“He was drunk.”
“He was drunk and fell.”
“We phoned for help as soon as we found him.” She nodded, encouraging me on.
“We phoned right away.”
She let go and I nursed my bruised hand.
“You are not to blame,” she said. “For any of it. Not his death. Not the way he hurt you or me. Don’t take this on yourself, or you’ll be plagued by guilt. You’ve got to find a way to let this go, Piper. If you don’t, it will control you.”
My mother had been right about that. She had been absolutely right.
Friday
30
I spent much of the night in a thick, intoxicated sleep haunted by vivid dreams of being trapped in a black space that smelled of earth, a grizzly den, perhaps.
But then I heard Ben’s voice. Piper. Piper!
I woke with a start to an icy cold room, my heart hammering in my chest. The patio door was open and winter air rushed in. It had snowed heavily in the night. A heap of snow had collected on the deck. Heavy cloud obscured the early-morning light.
And there was a shadow in front of the glass, the silhouette of a man.
“Ben?” I sat up as the figure approached my bed. “Ben, is that you?” But this was no ghost. Whoever it was had opened the door. My voice rose up a notch as I recognized that bush of hair, the stench of unwashed human. “Elijah?”
I groped for the bedside light, knocking over my empty wineglass in the process. It rolled to the floor, shattering. The Green Man, Elijah, stood there at the foot of the bed, only a metre or so away. He was dressed, as always, in camouflage and covered in green face paint, his hair and beard littered with leaves and twigs. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder.
I shifted back on the bed, yanking up the covers. “Elijah? What are you doing here?”
He held up Ben’s drone controller, then placed it on the foot of my bed and stepped back.
“Tell me where you got that,” I said. Then I raised my voice. “Please, tell me!”
“He told me to give it to you.”
“Who?”
“You’re the wife. Wife. Life. Happy wife.”
When we both heard Noah step out into the hall, Elijah suddenly fled outside.
“Piper?” Noah asked through the door. “Are you okay? Who are you talking to?”
“Shit!” I sidestepped the broken glass and jogged out onto the deck, ankle-deep in fresh snow, to see Elijah racing toward the water. A second boat bounced on the waves at the dock, next to Ben’s. “Elijah!” I called out.
Noah appeared at the bedroom patio door. “What’s going on?”
I ran down the deck stairs, the snow cold beneath my bare feet. All around, snow fell in big, chunky flakes. “Elijah!” I called out. “Come back! Please, talk to me. Who told you to give me the controller? Was it Ben?” But he had already jumped in the boat. He started the engine and, after swinging the skiff around, careened across the dark water, disappearing behind the curtain of snow.
“Damn it.”
Moments later Noah was out there with me, still in his pyjamas, but wearing his thermal boots. “Was that the Green Man?”
“Elijah. He was in my bedroom.”
“Seriously? What did he want? Should we phone the police? Did he steal anything?”
“I don’t know. He brought Ben’s controller back.” I started to head to the house, but then, remembering, stopped to wipe the snow off the inukshuk Noah and I had built, to make sure my necklace, engagement ring and wedding band were still hanging on it. Noah’s knife, a gift from his father, was also still there. “Check your room,” I said. “See if any tech is missing.” Noah’s gaming console, his phone and many gadgets.
Once back inside, I made sure my purse was hanging off the hook on the back of the bedroom door, and that Ben’s change bowl and my few pieces of jewellery were still in place, though Elijah would have little use for money or silver earrings in the woods. The drone was still there, on the dresser. But something wasn’t right: our wedding photo was gone.
I slid the dresser back from the wall, thinking the frame may have slid down behind it, but it wasn’t there. I got down on my hands and knees, running my hand in the narrow space between the dresser’s feet. There was nothing there but a layer of dust, and a toonie. I searched the whitewashed and scratched hardwood floor around it, the dust bunnies under the bed near Ben’s slippers, behind the night table, stepping carefully to avoid the broken glass. But there was no sign of our picture.
“Noah,” I called across the hall. “Have you seen the photo of Ben and me, our wedding photo?”
“What?”
“The photo I keep on my dresser.”
He opened his door. “No. Why?”
“It’s missing.”
Where could it be? Something else was off, though it took me a moment to register what it was. Ben’s nightstand was bare, but he always had a book there, to read before bed. His latest was a thriller with a man in red on the cover. And he had left his favourite mug there the day he disappeared, one Noah had given him. World’s Greatest Farter. I hadn’t moved it. I was certain I hadn’t moved it.
The walls slid away from me in all directions as the sensation of déjà vu hit me. The wedding photo, the book, the mug. There was something oddly familiar about all this, like I’d lived it before. What was it?
“Noah?” I called again. “Did you borrow Ben’s book?”
“What?”
“The novel he was reading. Did you take it?”
There was a pause, and then he stepped into my room. “No. Why?”
I put my fingers on Ben’s nightstand. “It was here, where he left it.” Then I pointed at the chair in the corner as it occurred to me what else was missing. “And his sweater was over the chair. I put it there.”
“That ugly green sweater?”
I opened the lid of the laundry basket and rifled through the laundry in case I had absent-mindedly tossed it in there. Nothing. I rummaged through the closet, the drawers of his bureau for it. “Elijah. He must have taken it.”
Noah cocked his head at me. “Why would he take that sweater?”
Or a crappy thriller. Or a novelty mug. Or our wedding photo. The feeling of déjà vu flooded back, and I finally remembered. When Elijah was in the hospital, Ben had taken him a novel to read, one of his thrillers, and he’d arranged with Elijah’s landlord to get a few items from Elijah’s apartment for his extended stay at the hospital: a sweater, as Elijah had complained it was cold in his room, a photo of Elijah and his young bride, taken on their wedding day, and his favourite mug, which read Cavers Rescue Spelunkers. Ben had thought the mug was funny, as anyone calling themselves a spelunker was an amateur, bound to get themselves into trouble underground. In the search and rescue world, cavers really did do the saving.
