The Housewife(72)

“I told you. You were in my way. You and your porcelain doll face. Oh, yes, I know how he speaks to you. I’m always there, Jodie. Always in the shadows. ‘You look like an angel,’ I heard him whisper to you once. I knew how to fix that. I know my fillers and my neurotoxins and my corticosteroid injections, Angel Face. I knew he’d tire of you too soon enough.”

And just like that, I get it. “It’s the tea,” I say. “You put it in the tea that you bring us every night. That’s why we sleep like the dead.”

Again, she gives me that small self-satisfied smile, as if she’s so clever because she discovered Ambien and can put it in tea.

“What do you inject us with?”

She smiles broadly. “Oh, you know, corticosteroids to cause fat atrophy, hyaluronic acid, PMMA, silicone…you name it.” She laughs. “Oh, Jodie, you have no idea what fun I had. She would wake up and fr eak out, and she’d say to me, ‘Marie, can you have a look? What do you think? That looks weird, no?’ And I’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it. You just got bitten by something.’ And then she’d say, ‘I think he’s doing it to me.’ And you know what I said?”

She grins, her ugly grin.

“I said, ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’ And she believed me!” She laughs.

I study her for a moment. When I was in prison, I looked at a lot of faces to see if I could work out who was evil and who wasn’t. I wanted to know if I could recognize myself in those faces because my mother used to say, ‘If you want to see evil, all you have to do is look in the mirror,’ but I couldn’t see it. When I asked Deb to look at my face and describe the evil part, she would pull me in her arms and tell me that it wasn’t true, that my mother was lying. ‘Why?’ I’d ask.

“‘Because she’s like that. There’s nothing you can do about it.’”

Anyway, I digress. My point is, right now I am looking straight into the face of evil, and I have no problem recognizing it.

“How did she die?” I ask.

Marie narrows her eyes. “She got out. I don’t know how. She was locked up in that room like you saw on the video, and she thought I was working to get the key to let her out. Every day she would ask, ‘When do you think you can get the key?’ And every day I would say, “Tomorrow. I think I can steal it tomorrow.’”

But then she got out anyway when Roy was at work. I was out too, grocery shopping. She went to my room looking for me. She was pretty weak by then. We were barely feeding her and Roy was pumping her full of drugs to keep her quiet. She went into my room and she found my medical supplies. When I came home, she was downstairs, going through Roy’s office. She found my employment file and confronted me. She called the clinic where I used to work. I don’t know how she did it, but she also found out I got fired from there and why. She told me she knew everything about me, and what I’d been doing to her all this time, and that she understood now why Roy believed she was doing it to herself.

I told her she had it all wrong. I tried to explain but she wouldn’t listen. She pushed past me, saying she was leaving, she was going to the police. I pretended to let her, then I used my phone to lock all the doors. I unlocked the cabinet door and got the shotgun—don’t look at me like that. I have every key to everything in this house, as I should. I found her in the hall trying to unlock the front door. I said her name and she turned around. She looked so confused. You have to remember, she didn’t have a phone, and she was so out of it.

I walked up to her and put the gun against her face. She was screaming, trying to kick me away. I used my body to press against the butt of the rifle, to keep it in place while I grabbed her hands and wrapped them around the rifle. She kept screaming, trying to claw at me, to scratch me. Even in her state, it was hard to keep her hands there, but I had to so that when I shot her, there would be gunpowder on her hands.”

And then I pulled the trigger, and that was that. She fell like a rag doll. She had no face left. All that beauty… Whoosh! Gone. It was nice seeing her like that. A bloody corpse with no face. I kind of wished I’d let Roy find her instead of me. It would have been nice if he’d seen her like that, revolting and creepy, if that had been the last memory he had of her, you know? But…” She sighs. “You can’t have everything. “

So I left the house again, through the back door, down the side passage. Then, on the bus I opened the security app and deleted the videos of me coming home. I went to hang out with my brother, came back an hour later, and pretended to find her.”

The whole time she was speaking, I wanted to press my hands on her mouth so no more words could come out. But at the same time, I needed to know, and I guess that’s the part that won out.

She raises her chin. “So you found me out,” she says. “Good girl. Bravo. Sorry I don’t have a prize. So what’s your brilliant plan now? Roy should be back any minute. He’ll find me tied up like this, and he’ll have you arrested. Everybody knows you’re consumed by Deborah. It’s like a fixation with you. Ever since you came to this house, it’s all you ever want to talk about. Deborah, Deborah, Deborah.

I’ll say you’ve gone off the edge, making me wear her dress like that, so you could shoot me and pretend that I was her, because you hate her so much, it consumes you. Trust me, Jodie, when I say that nobody will have a problem believing that. But if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in prison, I suggest you put your gun down and untie me. Then just leave. I won’t come after you. I couldn’t care less about you. You know what I want. Roy, that’s all. So be smart, and untie me before he comes home.