His breathing was rapid and shallow. He felt clammy. He wasn’t worried then, his lipid panels were perfect, he had just had a calcium scan. His lips must have turned blue or somehow he gave the medic reason to suspect a cardiac arrest because they put him onto a stretcher, moving slowly with all the blood and shards and glass on the floor.
He passed his daughter’s body in the foyer. More pain in his chest. Ripping and searing, so strong he couldn’t bring a single thought to completion. How could . . . ? Why did this . . . ? Into an ambulance where the odors of chemicals numbed his nose, speeding off as the drip and metal parts of the stretcher rattled.
Edward followed their commands. He opened his mouth when prompted and they sprayed nitroglycerine under his tongue. He took an aspirin, felt a prick in his forearm where the medic inserted a line. He wanted to cry, to lament what he had done, what they all had done, but all he could think of was how, if prompted, in answer to the question where were you when your wife and daughter fell, he’d say I had a heart attack.
Something tore at him. The image of a heart enclosed in a sack of tough tissue, the pericardium, attached to the breastbone and the diaphragm. Why did it feel like it was being ripped from his chest?
48
EDWARD
They stabilized Edward Pryor and the cardiologist confirmed his excellent health—any kind of cholesterol level or triglyceride value or any ratio thereof was in perfect range—and called it a stress heart attack.
“This was a lot to deal with, Dr. Pryor, you have our sincerest condolences. Your wife’s recovering. You can see her as soon as she wakes up. Her hip was shattered but they were able to fix it. Brand-new part, top-of-the-line technology. It’ll last forever. The orthopedic surgeon will brief you on that. It’ll be a long recovery but she’ll be fine.”
The doctor didn’t mention Penelope but for the condolence part. No one questioned him regarding that night. Not until the police showed up. A young man in a crisp suit appeared. A bulge on his right hip, under his jacket. A holstered weapon. Edward looked down at the detective’s polished shoes and chose his words carefully; a troubled young daughter, the overwhelming grief, he used words like gutted and beside ourselves.
“Please don’t talk to my wife just yet, she’s in no condition,” he added, well aware of how this could go wrong right then and there. What if there was an officer at Donna’s bedside at this very moment questioning her?
But the detective didn’t ask for details, it’s all just a formality, nothing criminal, he assured him. They could talk some other time, it was not necessary to get into it just now. Edward thanked him. And just like that the encounter was over.
An hour later, they pushed his wheelchair into Donna’s room. Her lower body lay elevated, her hips propped up. There were tiny cuts on her cheeks and the palms of her hands which would heal in no time. When the door closed behind the nurse, he leaned in.
“What happened while I was gone?” Edward asked quietly.
There was this implication, while I was gone, that unspoken part of that day, while I drove the lifeless body of a woman away from our house. What did you do to Penelope?
They looked at each other as long as either one of them could stand and then looked away.
49
DONNA
After I was discharged from the hospital, I returned to Hawthorne Court and a cloak hung over me. That’s how I thought of it, a heavy cloak weighing me down, keeping me from moving. Aside from the hip injury, there was this fog. My mind was a black hole and it was difficult to make sense of anything. When I did get out of bed, those few steps from bed to bathroom and back, I’d pass by a mirror and wonder who that woman was.
Edward cared for me. Clumsily he brought me food I didn’t eat, stacked books on the nightstand I wouldn’t so much as touch, opened windows to air out the bedroom. His facial expression was dead, not like a poker face but lifeless, his eyelids drooping, his face beginning to melt like wax. Unshaven and slouching, drunk with fatigue night after night, caring for me.
My hip improved. I learned to sit up, then stand, then walk. Though the joint healed as expected, my limbs were no longer mine. They were too heavy for me, like I was straining against far more than gravity.
“Donna, talk to me,” Edward said and held my hand, trying to pinpoint the cause for my behavior, trying to reason with it but always coming up short. His touch felt foreign to me. My mouth wouldn’t move though my thoughts tumbled.
He went on and on.
Tell me what happened that night?
Try to remember, Donna.
Tell me, please.
I need to know what happened, please try to remember.
Donna. Donna. Donna.
It was like a game Edward played, all those demands, then he abandoned them just to repeat them the next day.
I had no words for him. My thoughts were foggy, his questions forceful and tedious. The answers in my head were unassailable. What was I to do? I lay there and rolled my tongue over my teeth, one at a time. I tasted the gold cap on the top left molar, metallic, like a piece of iron candy in my mouth.
As I learned to walk again, everything, including myself, was a puzzle I didn’t know how to solve.
50
EDWARD
The longer Edward studied Donna, the more apparent it became that something wasn’t right. Unlike the house, which had been restored to its former glory—minus Penelope’s room, which remained unaltered behind the closed door—Donna’s nicks, cuts, and bruises had faded, her hip had healed, but she refused to speak.
Donna ruminated in her room, only got up to go to the bathroom, and the woman who had always been so put together, who sat ramrod straight on the couch in heels to read a book, who had never missed a nail appointment or skipped a root touch-up, lay in bed and couldn’t be bothered to take a shower. There were moments it hit him that she was a mother who had lost a daughter, and he understood how she might be unable to shake that.
The doctors were as flabbergasted as he was; other than the hip, Donna was physically unharmed. It seemed as if the biohazard company had cleaned the house and scrubbed the floors and cracks in the marble tile, that floor the only witness of what had happened that night, had taken her tongue.
“Donna, tell me what happened while I was gone?” he’d ask her over and over. He couldn’t bring himself to be more specific. What was he supposed to say . . . while I was out disposing of a dead woman’s body?
He gave her an account of that day, blow by blow, as if he could lead her to the truth by concentrating on the facts. He told her the minute details of the day leading up to a certain point but what he wanted to do was ask the hard questions. What happened in that room? Why were the windows nailed shut? Why were there holes in the walls? I was gone for two hours, what happened in those hours?