“Help yourself to anything you see that you want,” she said, her back to me. “I’ll end up leaving most everything. Let the damn city figure out what to do with it.”
I navigated the path to the bathroom, still in a daze. I sat on the closed toilet seat, trying to hold on to a thought, but it was like grabbing fish underwater.
My dad and Mrs. Hansen had an affair.
The medicine cabinet was ajar, the sink stacked with orange prescription bottles. I reached for the nearest. Equanil. The next one said diazepam. Mom had both of those. I’d seen them in her nightstand, and I knew they were both meant to relax her. Happy pills? I supposed. The third bottle was labeled digoxin. I heard Dad’s voice talking about Maureen’s drowning.
Sheriff Nillson believes Maureen stole some of her mother’s heart medicine, her digoxin, to knock herself out so she didn’t fight the water. If it wasn’t the heart medicine, it was some of her downers.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened all three bottles and dropped a bunch of tablets from each into my shorts pocket. I didn’t have a plan, just a desperate need to figure out Maureen, or to be like Maureen. Or maybe I wanted to escape everything for a moment, not forever, just long enough to stop feeling so sad, so lost, so sure things were going to get even worse.
And soon.
Help yourself to anything you see that you want, Mrs. Hansen had said.
CHAPTER 36
As soon as I got home, I moved the pills from my pocket to a nearly empty Anacin bottle and tucked it under my mattress. I already regretted taking them. That was apparently what I did now. Stupidly took things I shouldn’t.
After the pills were out of sight, I called Dad to tell him I’d seen Ed. He didn’t like hearing that. He told me to stay away from Ed—as if I needed anyone to tell me that—and then hung up, I assumed to figure out how to make the “running Ed out of town” stick. Maybe he and Sheriff Nillson should have watched some Westerns.
Alone in the kitchen after the phone call, I was smacked by a wave of desperation to talk to Claude. Out of all my friends, he’d stayed steady. Hadn’t started chasing girls, crashing parties, wearing weird clothes. He was simply Howdy Claude, dependable as the sun, steady as cement, and forever trying to get a nickname to stick.
The thought of unloading on him lifted a hot weight off my shoulders. We’d never talked about sex or anything even close, but he could handle hearing what Maureen had been doing now that her reputation was no longer at stake. I wouldn’t show him the creepy photos, but his ears would survive me describing them. I couldn’t tell him the stuff about Ed and Ricky because Dad had made clear that was confidential, but everything else was fair game, including what Mrs. Hansen said about her and my dad having an affair.
I would even tell him about the heart medicine I’d stolen from her.
Claude would help me to flush or return the pills, I bet.
I smiled a little thinking about it. It would be so nice to not have to do all this alone.
No way could I tell him anything over the party line, though, and it was too late to bother the Zieglers. It would have to wait until tomorrow, at work.
The next morning, when it was time for me to leave for Zayre Shoppers City, Junie still wasn’t home from the Fishers’。 Mom was smoking in front of the television, her thick makeup unable to hide her paleness. I had a hard time looking at her now that I knew. It hurt, thinking about how vibrant she’d been before Junie was born. She’d cracked like a mirror after, and her pieces were so sharp, none of us could get close enough to put her back together again.
Had Dad’s affair with Mrs. Hansen been what had ultimately broken her?
On impulse, I called Libby’s house on the way out the door to ask if it was okay for Junie to stay longer. Something about Mom being out of her room made me nervous. Mrs. Fisher said that was fine.
Outside, the world was so normal. Mr. Peterson across the street was mowing his lawn like he did every summer Saturday. The burping clatter of his old push mower was comforting, making the air green and fuzzy with juiced grass. A light breeze rippled the oak and maple leaves up and down the block, just enough movement to lift the hair off my neck and make the morning humidity bearable. A gang of elementary kids biked past.
“Hi, Heather!” one of them called.
I waved and hopped on my bike. They were going to play softball. I’d have known it even if I hadn’t seen their gear. The kids played softball every Saturday in Pantown Park. My home, my neighborhood, whirring like a tuned-up clock as poison rotted it from the inside. Had it always been like this? Bright and happy on the surface, dark and decaying beneath? Was this how every neighborhood was, or was it the tunnels that had cursed Pantown, weakening our foundation from the start?