I stared at the monitor to see what was happening inside Mom’s house. The rooms were arranged in a four-by-four grid. I could see the living room, dining room, library, and study in one grid, and the kitchen, music room, parlor, and front hall in the other. There were also two four-by-four grids of the outside: four cameras in the back, showing various angles of the garden, woods, and toolshed, and four in the front showing the driveway, side yard, and front porch.
“There’s no way out of here,” Winnie said as she emerged from the bedroom.
“I know,” I said glumly. “That’s kind of the whole point of this place.”
“Why hasn’t Marcela come to check on us?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I just shook my head like I had no idea. But Winnie knew me too well.
“What’s going on, Charlie?” And I owed it to her to tell her the ugly truth.
“I told her we got the money.”
She looked at me blankly. “And?”
“She thinks with all of us dead, she’s going to be rich.” And her confusion turned to disbelief.
“Are you saying . . .” She stopped. Because she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
So I said it for her. “That she locked us down here? Yes.”
Winnie shook her head. “No way, no fucking way.”
“I told you we were having problems—”
“A lot of married couples have problems—they don’t try to murder each other!”
“A lot of married couples don’t think their husband and his sister just got ten million dollars.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Winnie insisted. “She’s your wife, the mother of your kids.” All that was true, but there was another layer to this that Winnie didn’t know. So I told her.
“She’s having an affair,” I said. I had known my wife was cheating on me ever since she came back from the house of an “overwhelmed new-mom friend” freshly showered and with a botched cover story. My wife hadn’t bothered to notice that I was Facebook friends with that “overwhelmed” new mom and knew not only was she not overwhelmed, she had spent the day at Disneyland.
“OK, sorry, and that sucks, but it still doesn’t mean she would try to kill us.” I didn’t want to believe it, either, but that door was closed, and we hadn’t closed it.
“With the three of us dead,” I reasoned, “she gets her money and a new man. Someone better than me.” I felt like a total dick that I’d let myself believe I could ride my mother’s money to some picture-perfect life—playing in a band, surfing every morning, married to the hottest girl in town. What had I done to deserve any of that? One might argue that being left to rot alongside the mother who only loved me as conditionally as I’d loved her was a fitting end for both Mom and me.
“I’m so sorry, Win.” I could accept my tragic fate, but there was no accepting that I was dragging my sister down with me.
“Oh, Charlie,” my sister said, pulling me into a hug I didn’t deserve. “Before you go thinking you’re the only sorry-ass piece of shit here, I have a confession, too.”
I knew what her confession was, but I wanted her to say it. And, ten years into her addiction, with death’s gnarled hand reaching out to grab her, she finally did.
“I don’t imagine it’s going to be news to you,” she said, “but I’m an alcoholic.”
And there it was—her big secret, which had been hiding in plain sight for the better part of a decade.
“Not news,” I said gently. “But I’m proud of you for owning it.”
“That’s why I couldn’t be Mom’s donor,” she said. “My organs were marinating in eighty-proof sauce.”
I knew how much courage it had taken for her to say that, so I decided to show a little courage, too.
“I did the tests,” I confessed. And her eyes got wide with surprise.
“And?”
“Ninety-eight percent match.”
“Oh, shit.”
“But Marcela . . .” I didn’t want to tell her how we’d fought for three days, that she’d accused Mom of being a monster, and me of being a weak-ass momma’s boy. It was just too humiliating. But Winnie was way ahead of me.
“She wouldn’t let you.”
And I nodded. Because of course my wife wouldn’t want to prolong my mother’s life when her impending death was her main reason for marrying me.