The Bitter Season (29 page)

The nightmare would go on forever,
Charlie thought as he paced his apartment, working around his swollen lip to chew on the cuticles of his left hand. His fingernails were already bitten to the quick. The trajectory of their lives, his and Diana’s, had been charted before they were even born, without their consent, by women they had never met, and had been moved forward on that line by every event thereafter, hurtling them toward disaster for twenty-four years. This was the life they had been placed into.

What lucky little children they were, they had been told, to be adopted by parents who could give them opportunities and education and life experiences. They had looked like the perfect family from a distance. From within the bubble, their life experiences were learning how to survive in a house where children were not welcome, with parents who had wanted them for all the wrong reasons. They were supposed to be cute and quiet and well behaved, to reflect well on their parents, to be seen only on cue, to speak only when spoken to.

Don’t bother your father . . . Mommy has a headache . . . Be quiet! Never touch the things in your father’s study! . . . You’re dirty! Go wash your face . . . Go change your clothes . . . You’re an embarrassment . . . You’re a disgrace . . . Behave or we’ll send you back where you came from! Slap! Pinch! Go to your rooms!

They had spent their childhoods trying to protect and comfort
each other. Diana got the worst of it because she asked for it. Charlie always came to her defense. He learned to read the moods of all concerned, and worked to circumvent trouble before it could happen. Meanwhile, Diana ran headlong into it.

Their father belittled Charlie for trying. He called Charlie Diana’s minion from the time they were small. Even when Charlie didn’t know what that meant, he knew it was an insult by his father’s tone and by the sneering face that went with it.

Charlie always thought of himself as his sister’s hero—unsung, for the most part. He believed that was his purpose. He had been placed into the life he had to protect her. Diana, more often than not, had no lasting appreciation for his self-sacrifice. She was quick to use him when she needed him, and just as quick to dismiss him after. She used her love as a bargaining chip to get what she wanted from men, including him, and he fell for it every time because she was the only family he’d ever had, the only one who had ever given him any love at all.

There was a part of him that admired her and envied her for her recklessness, her passion, her violence. There had never been a line drawn that Diana wouldn’t step across just to defy authority. She did what she wanted no matter the consequences. Charlie didn’t have that in him. He was the dutiful son, the rule follower. He worked within the system like a good little drone, ever hopeful he would be rewarded for being a good boy. Diana had no system. She lived on emotion and thrived in chaos.

At times, he even envied Diana her mental illness. Her bipolar disorder was the built-in absolution for everything, from her erratic behavior to her hypersexuality. As much trouble as she got into because of it, she got out of because of it.
Poor Diana, she can’t help herself. Poor Diana, the medication has such unpleasant side effects. Poor Diana, she’s trying so hard to be good.

As she moved into her teens, she collected the sympathy and empathy of their substance-abusing mother. She became the key
pawn between their parents, a tool used by the passive-aggressive parent against the narcissistic one. But even as angry and vindictive as their father could be, even he couldn’t resist Diana entirely—nor could she resist him. Even as she defied him, she wanted his approval. Even as their father tried to control her, he was drawn in by her magnetism, which was so seductive and so twisted.

And Charlie was lost in the shuffle, pushed to the side, called upon when needed by one side or the other. Charlie the Minion.

He stopped pacing and looked at his reflection in the mirrored doors of his bedroom closet. He hated that the detective had seen him looking like this. He felt ashamed and embarrassed. Exposed. He looked ghoulish with his battered, misshapen face and bandaged hand, like the survivor of a zombie movie. He felt just as battered psychologically. This was the internal ugliness of being a Chamberlain seeping outward like a stain.

He had gone to Diana’s apartment after the disaster at their parents’ house that afternoon. He wanted her forgiveness. He wanted to set her straight, to get her to see Ken Sato for the user he was. She needed to trust him—Charlie. He was the one who had always loved her. He was the one who had her best interests at heart. He was the one who would keep them together, and keep her safe.

She came to the door, her hair down in a wild tangle that tumbled over one shoulder, her makeup streaked with tears, mascara and lipstick smudged.

“I don’t want you here, Charlie,” she had said, but she stepped back and let him in anyway. Typically Diana, a walking contradiction.

Her apartment was its usual mess, looking like it might house half a dozen refugees from some war-torn Third World country—clothes discarded everywhere, dirty dishes and glasses in the sink and on the counter, open bags and boxes of junk food sitting around. It smelled like she had forgotten to take the garbage out for a couple of days and then smoked a lot of weed to cover the smell.

“I can’t believe you attacked Ken that way,” she said.

“All he’s ever done is use you, Di. How can you not see that?”

“He loves me.”

“
I
love you. I told you not to go to the house, and I was right. It only upset you.”

“I’m upset because of you.”

“I broke in through a door for you. You were on the floor sobbing—”

“I’m in mourning!”

“For what? You hated them both!”

“How can you say that? She was the only mother we ever had!”

“That wasn’t my choice or yours.”

“She picked me, Charlie,” she said, tearing up again. “She came to the orphanage and picked me. And now she’s dead! And Daddy loved me, too. We didn’t get along, but he loved me.”

“Don’t rewrite history, Diana. He loved himself,” Charlie argued. “The rest of us were just there to amuse him or annoy him—you most of all.”

She struck him so fast his cheek was stinging before he realized she’d slapped him.

“It’s
my
story,” she said, eyes narrowed as she leaned over him. “It can be whatever I want it to be. They’re gone now. I can remember them any way I like.”

“It doesn’t change who they were,” Charlie said.

“Yes, it does!”

In the dark labyrinth of Diana’s mind it made sense. Her perception was her reality, as fluid as quicksilver, and just as toxic.

“You were always a problem, Charlie,” she said with disdain.

“
Me
?! I’ve spent my whole life trying to save you!”

“Well, sorry for wasting your time,” she said, sneering. “Why don’t you go save yourself and leave me the hell alone? I don’t need you anymore. I have Ken. He’s a
real
man, unlike you, Charlie. You could never make me happy.”

“Don’t say that!” Charlie cried. “I’d do anything for you. You know that!”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she said, her expression knowing and mocking.

Tears filled Charlie’s eyes. The pain was worse than a knife in his heart.

“Di, don’t!” Charlie begged as she turned away from him and started toward her bedroom. For all he knew, Ken Sato was on the other side, waiting to take his sister away from him forever. He would be left with no one. All he had ever wanted was to be loved and accepted, to belong. Fear froze hard in his chest. He reached out to grab her. “Di, please!”

She spun on him, elbow raised, and caught him hard high on the cheekbone, snapping his head to the left. The second blow exploded against his mouth, the taste of blood like copper on his tongue.

Charlie staggered backward. Diana rushed him, jumping, hitting him in the chest with a knee that knocked the wind from him. He fell hard, the back of his head bouncing off the floor. Colors burst inside his brain, and his vision dimmed.

His sister was on him in an instant, sitting on his stomach, making it impossible for him to get a breath. She hit him again and again, using her fist like a hammer. Charlie raised his arms to block her blows. He begged her to stop, spitting blood and choking on his tears.

Her fury burned out like a flash fire. She got up off him and stood looking down at him as he cried, her eyes as cold and hard as marble. Charlie rolled onto his side and curled into a ball. The pain was unbearable—not from the physical beating, but from within, from his heart. He wanted to die right there.

“You’re so weak,” she sneered, and walked away, leaving him on the filthy carpet that reeked of old cat piss.

She didn’t love him. After all he’d done for her all their lives, that
was the truth: She didn’t love him. She wasn’t capable of loving him the way he loved her.

It wasn’t the first time she’d beaten him. But somehow Charlie felt with terrible dread that it was the last time. He always felt that way, he reminded himself. Every time Diana said she was through with him, he believed her. Then her mood would change like the wind, and she’d accept him as if nothing had ever happened.

It wouldn’t be that way this time, he thought as he came back to the present and stared at himself in the mirror. The common cause that had bound them to each other was gone. Their common enemy was dead. He could feel the last of the bolts loosening as the shuddering vehicle that had held the family hurtled toward the inevitable crash.

With their parents gone, there was no reason for their alliance. Diana didn’t need him. She was no more capable of loving him than their father had been—which was ironic, considering she and Lucien shared not one drop of blood. Perhaps she had been Lucien Chamberlain’s perfect daughter after all.

Charlie felt as if his heart had been crushed inside his chest. He tried to tell himself he was wrong, that he always plunged into the darkest depths of depression after one of these fights with Diana. But the panic was stronger than the logic. He was shaking with it. This was the end.

They would be connected by the funeral, by the disbursal of the estate. Then what? Then nothing. Diana had already begun to plaster over their past in her mind. She would erase him, spin out of his orbit, and abandon him. The story of his life.

He had been her anchor, the hand brake on her recklessness. She wanted to be free of him now. She would destroy herself or be destroyed without him to protect her, and he would be left without the one person he had ever loved. Their family would cease to exist.

The idea terrified him, and yet, in the deepest, darkest corner of
his heart he had to acknowledge what he had always secretly believed: They never should have existed in the first place.

They were four random individuals who had been brought together by whatever unseen force ruled the universe, thrown together by fate or karma; a social experiment in cruelty and mental illness staged for the amusement of some sadistic deity.

And now it was over. Now it would end. They would end.

He didn’t want to live to see it.

Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second
.

How terrible and true that was, Jennifer thought, even if it wasn’t really a quote from the book.

She had spent the latter part of her afternoon helping a twelve-year-old girl search for the origins of the lines she had read in a Facebook meme. The lines had been attributed to Lewis Carroll, but only on social media, which the girl’s teacher would not consider a real source. She was working on an art project that had to reference a literary work, and she had chosen
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
as her inspiration. Even though Jennifer knew of several verifiable references to time in the novel, the girl stubbornly wanted the one they couldn’t corroborate.

When Jennifer suggested that the girl actually read the book first, she was very rudely dismissed.

I hope your teacher makes you read it and it gives you nightmares, you nasty little bitch, Jennifer had thought, in no mood to be dealing with the public. Her visit from the police detective had rattled her and set her nerves on edge.

She didn’t want to think about her childhood or her father’s murder, or anything else from that time. She had worked too hard to pull herself out of the dark place she’d struggled in for too many years. It should have been over by now. People should have left it
alone. Twenty-five years later, what did it matter? No one could bring him back to life. No one should have to pay for his death. That was how she felt.

How long is forever?

Sometimes, just one second
 . . .

One second was all it took to change everything. One second to see the wrong thing. One second to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One second to discover that your deepest-held truth was the darkest kind of lie. Her childhood had been shattered in a series of one-second increments. The second it took to open a door. The seconds it took to overhear a conversation. The second it took for a bullet to end a life.

How long is forever?

One second after the next, after the next, after the next . . .

Her mother had quickly lost patience with Jennifer’s mental fragility after the murder. She believed the mourning period should end as soon as the dirt was thrown on the grave and the last solicitous friends and relatives left the church basement reception. Her mother was not a sentimental person. Daddy was hardly cold in the ground when she officially started dating Uncle Duff. Life moved on for Barbie Duffy. She didn’t understand why it wasn’t the same for her oldest daughter, who was just a child.

She didn’t understand, and Jennifer would never explain it to her. The things she knew, she held inside. The caustic nature of those memories continuously ate away at her. No one tried hard enough or cared deeply enough to pry them out. It took her years to let go, to forgive herself, to climb out of the depression and anxiety that gripped her, and move on with her life. Tonight she felt like she had fallen all the way back to the bottom of the mountain.

She had come home at the end of her workday agitated and upset. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t concentrate enough to lose herself in a book—her lifelong method of escape. She turned the television on, but couldn’t settle to watch anything. All the local
news stations wanted to talk about was the double homicide of the U of M professor and his wife, and the man wanted for questioning. All the news was bad. Violence, hatred, racism, bigotry—everyone was angry, everyone was outraged. The world was a terrible place full of terrible people doing terrible things.

She changed the channel to a decorating show and was immediately confronted by the phony drama and staged arguments of a real estate agent trying to convince his clients to sell their home while a decorator tried to convince them to spend thousands remodeling the dump. Even that was too much conflict to deal with.

Her arms wrapped around her as if she was freezing, she paced her apartment. Her mind was racing. Even earlier in the evening she had been dreading the night. Eventually, she would need to sleep, and sleep would bring the nightmares. Not even sleeping pills would keep them at bay . . . unless she took one too many.

The thought slipped itself into her consciousness surreptitiously, like a snake slipping through a crack in a wall. As she recognized it, it frightened her. She hadn’t thought that way in a long time. She shouldn’t be thinking that way now. People who had never experienced suicidal thoughts didn’t understand the seductiveness, the insidiousness of those thoughts. Her immediate, instinctive response was to distract herself with physical pain. She wanted to go to the kitchen and get a knife and cut herself to relieve the pressure and clear her mind.

Tears welled in her eyes. She had so many scars from cutting in her teens and her twenties that she would never change clothes in a gym locker room or allow a sales associate to see her in a department store fitting room. She didn’t want more scars. She wanted to be free—and that thought took her straight back to the idea of the sleeping pills. The ultimate freedom was death.

The endless loop of destructive thoughts had begun, fueling itself from her fear and despair.

Maybe if she took another Valium.

Maybe if she took three . . .

How long is forever?

Sometimes, just one second
 . . .

The phone on the breakfast bar rang, startling her. She let the call go to voice mail and then dialed out and picked up the message.

“Ms. Duffy, this is Detective Liska. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a couple of additional questions. If you could, please call me back at your convenience . . .”

More questions. As if the questions she had already asked hadn’t caused Jennifer enough upset, awakening memories and stirring up emotions like stirring up the sediment at the bottom of a still pond. When she closed her eyes, she could see the faces of her past: her father, Angie, Jeremy . . . She had very deliberately not thought of them in years. Now here they were, come to haunt her. They would be waiting for her in her dreams, and they would be angry and accusatory and threatening.

You can never tell, Jennifer
 . . .

How long is forever?

The tears she had been struggling to hold back burst forth at that thought, like water from a crumbling dam, taking all resistance, sweeping away everything in its path. Sobbing, she hurried into the kitchen, pulled a paring knife from the knife block, shoved her left sleeve up, and . . . hesitated.

Her hand was trembling, the sharp blade a hair’s breadth above her soft white flesh. She shouldn’t. She had gone a long time without resorting to this. If she started again, she might not be able to stop. Just once always led to just once more to this is the last time . . . The rush of endorphins, the relief of releasing that inner pain was so tempting.

The pressure and the anxiety were just so terrible.

Just this once.

She’d been taken by surprise by the renewed interest in her father’s murder. It was only natural that she was upset. She’d been
doing so well. If she could just relieve the pressure now, she’d right herself, and that would be all. She was stronger now than she had been before. She wouldn’t need to do it again.

The sense of pain was clean and sharp as the blade sliced the delicate skin of her inner arm. The sense of relief followed immediately, followed by a quick, brief high as the endorphins were released in her brain. Then the high bottomed out, and the sense of shame welled up inside her like the line of blood rising on her skin.

Jennifer dropped the knife in the sink and turned the water on. Doubled over, lying against the edge of the sink, she stuck her arm beneath the ice-cold flow and cried and cried and cried.

She cried for her adult self, for the carefully constructed person she had become falling so easily back to the past, for losing all the ground she had fought so hard to gain. She was Alice falling down the rabbit hole and into an old familiar nightmare.

She cried for the nine-year-old girl she had been, the lonely, innocent girl who lived inside books, who witnessed something unspeakable, who listened to a murder . . . who never told anyone anything. The keeper of terrible secrets.

How long is forever?

Every day of her life.