Isabella Moon (47 page)

“I’m so thirsty,” Paxton said. “Let me have your water, Mother.”

She held out her glass. Both of their hands were unsteady, and some of the water sloshed on the table.

He drank half of the water and put down the glass. Fine beads of sweat had broken out across his forehead. She had put four times as many drops of Oxycodone in his daiquiri and the timbale as she would have used on a bad day, before her pain became so persistent and deep that the doctor had given her Fentanyl patches as well.

“What is it?” she said.

“I have to go to Francie,” Paxton said, trying to stand.

“No,” Freida said, holding onto his arm.

“I have to tell Francie that it’s going to be okay,” he said. “She has to be here.” He was sounding breathless, afraid.

“Wait until you’re feeling better,” Freida said. She didn’t want him to collapse in his chair. She wouldn’t be able to move him, and there was something wholly undignified about dying in the dining room.

She rose. “Let’s get you up to bed, Paxton. You can call Francie when you feel better.”

“I feel like shit,” he said, holding his arm across his stomach.

In the close quarters of the elevator, Freida could smell her son’s sour sweat as he leaned against her. It took all her strength to support his six-foot-plus frame.

The elevator had a manual door switch, and she felt something in her shoulder tear as she reached for it with the same arm against which Paxton leaned. She cried out, but Paxton was too far gone to notice. It was her own fault, but now she just wanted to get him into his own bed. What she was feeling, physically or emotionally, didn’t matter.

They made slow progress toward his bedroom, with Paxton mumbling incoherently against her. But it soon became apparent that they weren’t going to make it all the way to his suite.

“This way, darling,” she said, steering him toward the celadon guest room, which was nearest the stairs. “This is a good place to rest.”

“No,” Paxton said, suddenly sounding wide-awake.

The deepened timbre of his voice frightened her. But his eyes closed as he slumped onto the tall mattress, his legs still hanging at an angle off the side of the bed.

Freida sighed and sank into a nearby chair, putting her head back and closing her own eyes. Here they were. It was too late to turn back. Her decision had been so sudden—only today. Or
had
it been only today? Hadn’t she always known that she was, ultimately, the one responsible for her son? Something inside her had made him the way he was. She had thought that she’d feel philosophical, or guilty, or sinful at this moment. But she just felt tired. Her shoulder screamed with pain, her chest felt as though it would cave in. Her oxygen was far away, in the living room. She hadn’t thought so far ahead as to bring it, and now she was trapped without it.

Paxton’s breathing became shallower as she sat listening. She remembered how Millar would stand over his crib at night, waving her out of the room so he could hear his son breathing as he slept. They had never stood there together. It was always Millar, alone.

Eventually she was able to get up and lift Paxton’s legs onto the bed. A thin line of drool ran from the side of his open mouth. His body was still.

Freida closed his mouth gently and brushed his blond hair from his brow. So much like his father, and his father’s father. All Birkenshaw. He’d never looked like her or anyone in her family. It was as though she’d given birth to someone else’s child. But he
was
hers, and always had been, even if she hadn’t really wanted it to be so. She kissed his damp forehead, her lips lingering just a moment.

In the light from the hallway she carefully opened three of the Fentanyl patches from her generous prescription. Hers was a compassionate, old-fashioned doctor, and they were both realistic about her pain.

Freida rolled up the sleeve of her son’s shirt and stuck the patches, one by one, on the soft, pale skin of the inside of his arm, running her fingers over them to make sure they were smooth. Then she rolled the shirtsleeve down and arranged the coverlet over her son’s sleeping form. Tucking the coverlet against his chin, she again kissed her son and left the room.

Freida made her way down the hall to her own room and sat on the bed with a labored sigh. Her chest was tight. She slipped off the velvet slippers—she had loved wearing them, but her feet hurt badly and she missed the sensible clunkers that sat waiting in her shoe closet—and lay against the bank of pillows that Flora kept fluffed for her on the bed. Her cane fell to the floor. Fumbling in her pants pocket, she found the other three Fentanyl patches. Her hands trembled as she opened them, and by the time she was finished, bits of wrapper lay about the bed. She quickly gathered them up and dropped them onto the bedside table. There was no need to leave a mess for Flora.

When the patches were safely stuck onto her arm, she lay back beneath a quilt that the farm manager’s mother had made just for her. Its slightly ridiculous pattern of fences and steeples appealed to her less than its peaceful green and blue background, which reminded her of hills beyond the Quair rising up to meet the sky.

Freida panicked a moment when she remembered that she had forgotten to decline a party invitation from the priest’s wife. It lay open on her morning room desk, waiting to be answered. She thought briefly that she would get up and scrawl a quick response, but she decided against it. The woman would just have to understand.

Somewhere in another part of the house she heard a cell phone ringing and knew it must be Paxton’s. He was beyond hearing it. After five or six rings it stopped.

All she had to do was lie there and wait and hope that she didn’t suffocate before the drug killed her. She was a little afraid of dying. It occurred to her that she had probably better pray. She knew that her suicide might be excused, given that she was already dying a slow and painful death. But murder was another matter. And she was murdering her own son; there was no question of that. Could He forgive her that, the way she had forgiven Paxton everything that he had done? Finally, the tears came. If God was, indeed, waiting for her, she prayed that He would be merciful.

50

“
I THOUGHT WE’D TAKE
the scenic route home,” Miles said.

His Mary-Katie sat beside him in the passenger seat, her head resting against the window. It had saddened him to hit her, but she just wasn’t seeing reason.

“Hey,” he said, pushing her hair behind her ear with one hand while keeping the other on the steering wheel. Ten minutes out of town and the landscape was already getting hilly.

He would’ve preferred some enthusiasm, perhaps some gratitude for getting her away from Podunkville. Few things annoyed him more than ingratitude. A purple bruise had bloomed on his Mary-Katie’s cheek, but he expected that it wouldn’t last more than a couple of days. They would be holed up in the house for a while anyway, getting reacquainted. After that, a few days relaxing on the beach—it would be temperate enough for another month or two at least—would bring her around. He hated to see her so pale, as though she’d been hiding out in a cave for two years. Perhaps he would order a tanning bed for the house so she could get some color back.

“Listen,” Miles said. “There may be someone at the house when we get there, but I don’t want you to worry about her. I told her to get out before we get home. She’s stubborn, though. Thinks she’s my new wife.” He laughed.

When his Mary-Katie didn’t respond, he worried that she had decided the silent treatment was what he deserved. He didn’t want to get their reunion off on the wrong foot, and it had already presented a number of challenges.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Cammy is out of there. I knew from the day I caught her trying on your jewelry that she had the wrong idea about our relationship. I mean, hers and mine.
You
are my wife. Till death do us part, Mary-Katie. I’ve always been serious about that. I hope you’ve never questioned that about us.”

It was a big change for her, he knew. She’d left all her belongings behind her. Attachments. He should probably try to be kind. Since he had decided to forgive her and take her back, he was going to make a conscious effort to be nice to her. Forgiveness was important.

The road was quiet. They had about fifty miles to go before they’d even get to a four-lane highway. He didn’t care much for the back roads, but they needed the time alone together.

“What was with that loser, Mary-Katie?” he said. “I’ve got to say that I’m disappointed in your recent taste in men. Was he a lumberjack, or what?”

This time he got a response. His Mary-Katie blinked several times, as though she were keeping back tears.

“A man’s got a right to defend his wife and property, babe,” he said. “He was definitely trying to appropriate you. Very uncool, taking another man’s wife.”

He was about to tell her that she needed to concentrate on being
his
wife once again, when she suddenly made a fist of her two hands and swung at him, hitting him on the chest so hard that the car swerved violently into the opposite lane and they just missed ending up in the ditch on the other side of the road. His Mary-Katie was thrown back against her door and she began screaming, calling him an animal and other unpleasant names. She was ugly when she screamed.

“Shut the fuck up!” he screamed back at her. He put the car in Park, even though it was facing the wrong way, half on the shoulder, half in the opposite lane. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her until she stopped.

She cried then, blubbering on about how
Caleb
had been the only man to be truly nice to her in her life. He shoved her harder toward the door and told her he’d heard enough, that Johnny Appleseed was part of the past and she needed to realize that her future was with him.

“I’m thinking that you weren’t stupid enough to tell anyone in that pissant town about me. The way you left the island, you can’t have,” he said. “My guess is they’ll think that
you
killed the lumberjack.”

She just stared at him, her skin puffy and her eyes an unbecoming red. He did seriously doubt that she’d opened her mouth. If she had, chances were that she hadn’t been too specific.

“I’m going to kill you,” she said. Her voice was still shaky, but he could tell that she thought she meant it.

Miles put the car in Drive and pulled out into the road. “You tried it once,” he said. “How’d that work out for you?”

Dusk was coming fast into the already gray sky. It was still early spring up here, and the cold made Miles all the more anxious to get home. There, the azaleas were nearly finished blooming, but here the trees were only budding and their jagged branches cast long, faint shadows across the road.

“Hey,” he said. He was willing to try again, to really put himself out for her. “Remember that license plate game we played when we drove over to Dallas? You thought I cheated, I was so good at it.”

She wouldn’t look at him. When she tried fumbling in the glove box, he assumed she was looking for a tissue because there was a thin stream of snot running from her nose. Disgusted, he took his own handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her, but she ignored him, choosing to wipe her nose on the shoulder of her own jacket.

“Nice,” he said. “Looks like you’ve really learned something from your new friends.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“That’s pretty, too,” he said. “We’ll talk about that later.”

Suddenly, she sat up straight and looked past the steering wheel to the left shoulder of the road. Miles saw a look of fear, maybe shock, on her face. She was fixated on something, but he couldn’t tell what it was. They were passing a run-down farm operation with a number of busted-up tractors and a crumpled-up silo, but there wasn’t anything remarkable about it.

“What is it?” Miles said. “What’s the problem? Are you sick?”

As they sped on, his Mary-Katie turned her head, straining to look behind them.

“What?” Miles said.

After a moment she turned back around and settled onto the seat. She seemed to go all introspective on him, not realizing that he was talking to her. It was a habit of hers he hadn’t missed.

“However you want to play it,” Miles said. “It’s going to be a long drive. Suit yourself.”

“Are you sorry?” she said.

“I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the past, Mary-Katie,” Miles said. “You know me better than that.”

“Because if you want to tell me you’re sorry, you’d probably better do it soon,” she said.

“We’re going to have a lifetime together, Mary-Katie,” Miles said. “We need to look forward. I’ve got two new projects. One’s over in Louisiana. A big one. We’ll go check out the land together. It’s a sweet, sweet deal.”

“What I don’t understand is why you married me, Miles,” she said. “It’s not like you couldn’t get someone else, someone who was dumb enough to put up with you even if you almost had her killed. Even if you were selfish enough to murder your own child. There are women like that.”

Miles was starting to feel uncomfortable. He hadn’t wanted to get into things that had happened so long ago.

“So, if it was my kid, then I get equal say in what happens to it. Right? Isn’t that the way it is?” He shifted in his seat. “And that’s a big fucking
if.
Don’t you think?”