coming close to another ‘breakdown’) until nine thousand was gone and only eleven thousand remained of what was to send her brilliant son through medical school.
It was spring, a fragrant afternoon in May, and such days were magnificent in New York’s Hudson Valley; such days had helped Will convince her to move, from her beloved Manhattan with all its cultural advantages, sixty miles north to the outskirts of Fishkill. At three o’clock he came home in a frenzy and said she had to give him the entire eleven thousand ‘or the business is lost’.
She said she would put a second mortgage on their jointly owned home before robbing their son. He laughed wildly, clenching his fists (and she watched those fists, fighting the fear, the need to give him whatever he asked for). He said he had already put a second on the house, forging her signature on the bank papers; said he would forge her signature on a withdrawal slip the next morning if she didn’t ‘come to her senses and save the business’.
‘The business is beyond saving,’ she said. ‘I spoke to Mr Lowell at the bank . . .’
He slapped her, swiftly, before she could see it coming. He slapped her again, and though she anticipated this second slap she didn’t move, held by the strange lethargy his violence produced in her.
He pushed his face into hers, whispering, ‘If you make trouble, I’ll kill us both, I swear it. That business is my life. My life, understand, you stupid, selfish bitch?’
He would apologize later. He would cry and kiss her hand. But right now he was clenching his fists, and she said, ‘Yes, all right. In the morning we’ll save the business.’ When she knew the business was finished. When she knew he was a weakling unable to face a new start.
When she knew she hated him for what he was doing to their son; and even more for what he was doing to her.
She made dinner. Roger came home and they ate together and he went to his room to study, her brilliant son who, all the teachers said, was destined for medicine.
He had changed after his father’s death. He had lowered his goals, his dreams. He’d become an instructor in the New York State college system. He was now an associate professor . . . but what he could have been!
She hadn’t seen him since coming to California three years ago. She never heard from him unless she phoned. And those calls had become too unpleasant because of his long silences.
Just before she had flown from Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles, he had asked her, ‘Did you kill my father?’
She had laughed shrilly and burst into tears. He had muttered an apology, saying it was a ‘paranoid delusion’ of his. At the last moment, boarding pass in hand, she had kissed him, clung to him, feeling she would never see him again; that she didn’t deserve to see him again. Because the answer to his question was yes, she had killed his father.
That beautiful spring day of the slapping, that mild May evening and later, during the cool black-morning hours, she had searched desperately for a way to avoid handing over her son’s inheritance. And there was no way, unless she went to the police. Even that might not do any good because Will wouldn’t let her out of his sight until after they went to the bank and she gave him the money and he took it from the cashier’s window to the loan department, so that he would have a few more months in which to lose everything.
Would she get the eleven thousand back if she went to the police after he made the loan payment?
Could she go to the police; tolerate the shame of accusing her own husband of forcing her to hand over money?
Would anyone believe her after all the years of model marriage?
She didn’t know what she was going to do until she did it. He was in the shower. She was at the sink, staring at her face with the little white scar at the left eye, at her mouth with the new caps on the front uppers. She saw the back of the counter-top heater reflected in the full wall mirror. She wondered if it could shock him into unconsciousness and so give her time to talk to the police.
She didn’t allow herself to think it could kill him.
She went to the bedroom and found the extension cord in the dresser. She returned and plugged in the heater, and now it reached the shower tub. She hoped he had the water running full blast, because then it would form two or three inches at the bottom of the tub, coming up over his ankles, the sluggish drain needing replacement, not Draino. She pulled the curtain aside at the back end, just a little, and remembered at the last moment to throw on the heater’s switch. There was a soft whirring sound as the fan started. He must have heard it over the shower’s hissing because he began to turn.
She dropped the heater, coils downward, into the few inches of water. There was a sizzling sound, a little flash, and he screamed and fell backward. He hit his head with a fleshy thump on the tub’s rim, and almost immediately began to bleed from the mouth and nose. The bathroom lights had gone out and the heater had stopped sizzling in the water, lying half under his left arm.
She wanted to run, but forced herself to disconnect the extension cord and take the heater out of the tub. She put the heater back on the counter and the extension cord back in the drawer, drying both with a towel. She went downstairs where the remains of Roger’s breakfast were on the table. She went into the little service area where the washer and dryer stood, and opened the circuit-breaker box. She found the lever Will had sticker-marked Bth. It was tripped. She reset it, and when she walked upstairs, the bathroom lights were on and the heater was working away with just a little sizzling. She waited until it stopped sizzling and turned it off.
She went downstairs and had coffee and a cold piece of toast Roger had left on his plate. She cleaned up the kitchen and swallowed two aspirins for the very nasty headache that had crept in behind her eyes. Then she returned to the bathroom and took a good look at her husband. He was a big, fleshy man and now he seemed enormous, filling the tub. He lay with one leg twisted under him, the other straight out, his eyes wide open, his lips slightly parted, looking very naked and very surprised. She couldn’t be certain, but she felt he was dead – his penis had never been that shrunken before.
She walked slowly to the bedroom and lifted the phone. By the time she reached Dr Levin, she was hysterical, begging for help. The hysteria was real, as she feared they would find signs of the electrocution – but they didn’t.
Dr Levin later explained that Will could have died of two separate causes. ‘He either had a heart attack and fell backward, striking his head and dying of a subdural haematoma caused by a depressed fracture of the skull. Or he slipped in the tub and fell, striking his head, and died of a resultant myocardial infarction – heart attack – brought on by shock. Or he died of more or less equal portions of both. If it’s any consolation, he couldn’t have had more than a few seconds of pain.’
In bed Monday night, a few hours after having spoken to David Howars, she asked herself how she could have been so wrong about Will; how she could have loved him; how she could have married him. Which, with variations, were questions she’d asked herself about several men since Will.
Time was running out. She was almost fifty. She prayed she wasn’t wrong about David Howars.
TWO: Tuesday, 11 December
Carrie smiled broadly when Mr Howars’ girlfriend, Vanessa Brooks, walked into the office.
Vanessa said, ‘Hey, howya doing?’ and complimented Carrie on her new nail polish and her bulky sweater.
