“I think I’m going to call—”
“The police?” I interrupt him. “Why?”
He pauses, recognizes the absurdity of it all.
“Why why why why why,” I say as I slap the marble countertop with the palm of my hand. “No crime has been committed. I’m in my own house. An ambulance? No one is sick. No one is injured.”
I need him to admit fault. Knowledge. Responsibility. But still, so much is missing, feels wrong. The oddity of it all. He doesn’t act like a guilty man, he’s more taken aback by me. I thrust those thoughts into the back of my mind to be dealt with later—but there’s this rage, it prickles in my throat like acid. I want him to admit to something so I know I’m not the guilty one because only one person can be at fault. Right? And it has to be him.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Edward says.
Edward doesn’t curse, not normally.
“Wrong with me?” I ask.
“Normal people don’t forget what’s happened to their child.”
33
DONNA
The last solid memory I have of my daughter Penelope, solid as in if prompted I could give the date and time, was April first. I was reading one of those planted newspaper stories people take for face value until it dawns on them it’s April Fool’s Day.
Penelope came downstairs, looking disheveled. I remember thinking that a grown woman shouldn’t be in public like that, stretched-out sweats, an oversized hoodie, hair matted, leftover mascara smeared. Her energy had been raw and frightening in the days prior and I insisted we go see somebody.
We drove to the hospital. Penelope turned on the AC and ran it on full blast. When I shut the vent—I knew better than to say anything—she rolled down the window. At the hospital, a resident, who didn’t look a day over twenty, did an exam. I sat in a blue plastic chair while Penelope answered his questions.
He told Penelope she suffered from anxiety.
“She’s on medication for that,” I said.
“Her dose is pretty high,” he said. “If she skipped one, it’ll do a number on her. She needs to be seen by a therapist,” he said.
He handed Penelope a prescription and sent us home with a list of counselors and doctors and urged us to follow up with her primary care provider.
* * *
• • •
See, I want to say, I have not forgotten. I took her to the hospital. She hadn’t refilled her medication. There wasn’t much more to it. I feel myself crumbling. Why is Edward acting as if there’s something wrong with me? I don’t have the energy to make a fuss, I came here for one thing but somehow now feel I lack the tools to finish this task. My resolve is gone, all that buildup, all that steadfastness I’ve had, just disappears. Poof. Gone.
How terrified I am of the thoughts in my mind. Not remembering everything I did or didn’t do, and there are blank spots and being unable to fill them frightens me. I want to share all those questions that have been jammed like an old door but I don’t dare.
Edward is watching me. He’s so still, he doesn’t even blink. I’m crumbling, and he can tell.
“Donna, you’re a piece of work, you know that? I’ve about had it up to here.” He waves his hand around eye level. “Come, come, come,” he says and pulls me by my upper arm into the foyer. “How do you not remember?” He points down at the checkered floor then meets my eyes head-on. “Are you telling me you don’t remember what you did?”
His eyebrows are raised. He doesn’t know a thing. Thirty years of marriage, I’m no fool. I close my eyes. Images from that afternoon crowd my mind: Penelope’s anger, her resolve, her bloodshot eyes. I can’t bear another second of my heart beating like a runaway train.
“I want to know what you did,” I say and poke a finger in his chest. “You go first.”
34
EDWARD
Edward Pryor looked up from a book he was reading, a presidential biography Donna thought to be interesting. He’d never admit it but he’d been stuck on the first third of the book for days. He preferred crime fiction and an occasional Western—that, too, he would never admit—but everyone was going to talk about this book, according to Donna, so he thought he’d see it through.
It was eleven when he heard a noise, indistinct and faint. Edward exchanged a quick look with Donna, puzzled, as if to say you heard that, too?
Donna flipped through Architectural Digest and ignored him. She had called him earlier in the day just as he was going into surgery, and he had all but ignored her calls. She had had an argument with Penelope, she had alluded to as much, but when he had pressed her on the details earlier, she had clammed up. Little did she know that he had caught the very back end of the argument that morning, eavesdropped on his way out the door, and it wasn’t so much the words they exchanged—those he could barely make out—but the tone of the conversation. Mother and daughter under one roof and all the arguments that came with that, but sometimes Donna cut Penelope to the bone. Donna knew better, it wasn’t a note she wanted to hit but they pushed each other’s buttons. A verbal roughhousing of sorts.
Donna and Penelope had been fighting since forever. For those two to get along was an abstract notion, an unimaginable thing. The older Penelope got, the worse the fights had become. It was like a boxing match, he was the referee, and he was tired of sending them to their corners between rounds. It was time to end this, time for them to be apart for good.
Edward listened for a follow-up noise. A knock, something falling down? A bump, boxes toppling in the garage, somewhere beneath them? Edward shut the book and stared at the TV. A rerun of Law & Order, the episode he had seen before—four high school girls make a pregnancy pact so they can raise their kids together—the occasional chung-chung indicating a progression in time, a fleeting bleat, unidentifiable, a sound that could be so many things.
There it was again, this time high-pitched, more of a shriek. His daughter, Penelope, coming home, maybe, but still, something about this was off. Edward stared off into the distance as if his hearing might improve if only he didn’t focus on anything in particular. Maybe a deer had come through the clearing through the back of the property and got trapped underneath the awning with all the outdoor furniture. He imagined its slender legs and long neck trapped in a lawn chair, dragging it along the patio, bumping into things. Or those damn cats. He had told Donna so many times not to feed them, dammit, dammit, dammit, but did she ever listen to him? They had multiplied according to the amount of food she put out.
Edward muted the TV and chose his words carefully. “You just heard that, right? Those cats,” he said to Donna. “We’re going to have to do something about them.”