“The Millers are dead,” he said. “Get over it.”
So this morning she was upset about Micah, and now she wanted to argue about their living situation. And August. She could be worse than a drunk, teasing for a brawl.
He put the fork in his mouth because if he didn’t, he would say something nasty, even though his only true impulse was to protect her. Not that she wanted his protection; Frida never wanted any man’s protection. To her, the whole idea of chivalry was pure self-congratulatory bullshit. She couldn’t even abide the phrase women and children first. The night they met, she had asked, “You know why they don’t say ‘men and children first’?” He said he didn’t. “Because that would be redundant,” she replied.
Cal had let her get away with that one, but only because she was naked, and because they’d just slept together for the first time. It was commencement weekend at Plank, and Frida was a stowaway. Micah was getting smashed with the other graduating Plankers, their families already asleep in their motel beds two towns over. No one was there to see Cal graduate. His mother had died a few months earlier in the big snowstorm that decimated Cleveland, and his father, who lived an hour away from her on his little farm, had either disappeared or was dead, too. Cal tried not to think about it.
When he and Frida met, she asked after his family. “Who’s coming to the ceremony?”
To his surprise, he told her the truth, and she said, “I’ll be your guest.” By then, he had heard so much about this Frida, Micah’s famous older sister: the baker, the badass. And there she was: red lipstick like a glamorous wound, big white teeth, those sparkling eyes. Her strong, pointy chin. Those wide hips he wanted to kneel before, like a vassal. Falling in love with her had been easy. And, now, sitting across from her, eating this wretched meal, the same one they’d had for six nights in a row, he still loved her. He would take care of her, even if she didn’t realize that was what he was doing.
Years ago, his father had hit a deer on the highway. He’d told Cal to stay in the car. “Turn up the music,” he said. Cal did, and like a good boy, he kept his eyes on the air-conditioning vents as his father walked with a tire iron toward the suffering animal. “I put the deer out of its misery,” his father explained later, and Cal felt grateful that he didn’t have to watch or participate. His father had taken care of it.
He’d kept Frida from seeing the Millers’ bodies because it was too horrible. He had taken care of it, but she was resentful. She acted like he’d killed the Millers, even though all four of them were dead in their beds when he found them, the covers drawn up to their chins as though they were waiting for Santa Claus, visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. The rest of the poison sat on the kitchen table, white powder he didn’t recognize in a glass bowl, waiting there like some sick invitation to death. He knew it was poison by its smell—the lack of one.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, Cal had thought.
When they first began spending time with the Millers, Cal had occasionally worried that one day their tiny world would collapse: someone would be attacked by an animal or catch an illness that turned deadly, or maybe fifteen years down the road one of the kids would run away to the nearest city, or whatever was left of it. He didn’t think it would happen like this, though. He had never once imagined suicide. For months afterward, Frida kept asking, “Where did they get the poison? Why not use something natural, like nightshade?” She wanted to know why Cal had gotten rid of the powder before she could see it. As if she didn’t believe him.
He’d dragged their bodies out one by one and buried them. He remembered thinking how much Garrett had grown since the first time he and Frida had met him; the boy was now four and seemed tall for his age. He’d stay that way. The thought had made Cal sick. He’d tried to throw up, but he found he couldn’t.
It took all day and half the night to bury them, and he had injured his back. He’d focused on the pain, imagined it as a thick red belt along his waist, because it was the only thing his mind could handle. He would keep it together.
He had returned to the shed the next morning. Frida was crying, just about out of her mind. She thought something had happened to him. Something had. “We’re moving,” he said, as if he’d simply been house hunting.
They waited two weeks before they dragged their stuff to the Millers’ place; even then Frida thought it was too soon, that it was disrespectful, greedy even. Cal told her it was wasteful to let the house sit empty like that, that Sandy and Bo must’ve wanted it this way.
“They sent me to find them,” he said, but that was all.