CAROLINE
“I don’t want them in the house,” Caroline said. “Don’t let them come into the house.” She knew she sounded hysterical but couldn’t help it.
She felt a panic attack coming on. That happened to her sometimes. Her mouth would go dry and she couldn’t breathe and her heart would beat like a dry moth in her throat, and she would know, absolutely know, that she was dying.
There had been streaks of blood in the toilet this morning—her lungs, maybe, or her liver. Ever since the doctor had lectured her about the possibility of cirrhosis, she had imagined her liver like a dying fish, gasping in the middle of a toxic oil spill.
She needed a drink. But she couldn’t drink with the police in the house. She still remembered the cop who had arrested her after she’d rear-ended that stupid woman, the way he’d hauled her roughly to the car, not caring that she was sick, not caring that Trenton was in the backseat. And the cop who’d called to tell her about Trenton’s accident—a woman, that time. He might not make it, she’d said casually, like a grocery store clerk explaining that a coupon was no longer valid.
Minna stared. “Why not?”
“I just don’t. Make them go away.” She heard the sound of car doors closing, and voices, muffled, from outside. “They have no right. We didn’t do anything. They can’t come poking around.”
“What are you afraid of? They’ll turn up a dead body?” Minna said.
Caroline couldn’t tell her daughter that she had a sense that the police were here about the woman—Adrienne, to whom Richard had left all that money. She couldn’t stand to hear the woman’s name spoken out loud again.
Late last night, Caroline had taken Minna’s laptop into her room and spent hours clicking through links and search bars, looking for pictures, articles, anything related to an Adrienne Cadiou in Toronto. The weight of the darkness, the weak blue light—it had made her feel comforted, somehow, like being in a bubble.
And yet at the same time, she was terrified Minna or Trenton would wake up and find her, and every time the house moved or the radiators hissed, she froze, hands hovering over the keyboard. She wondered if this was how Richard had felt reading porn, or watching it, later, on their shared computer. But no. He had not been embarrassed. Sometimes he even left the videos up, so that when she sat down to type an e-mail—painstakingly, with many errors, because she had never been a fast typer—she was surprised by the sudden vision of labias as pink as orchid blooms, or breasts like Minna’s were now, hard as bowls. She suspected he did it deliberately, to punish her.
She found five Adrienne Cadious in Toronto. One was a college student, nineteen, with a mouth full of braces. A second woman, seventy-four, was mentioned in several articles as being one of the first female runners of the Boston Marathon. The third woman was probably Caroline’s age, with red hair too long for someone in her late fifties. Caroline couldn’t figure out whether she was still alive—several articles mentioned she’d been the victim of a recent hit-and-run and showed her with her arms around a girl, presumably a daughter, with the same pattern of freckles and wide-spaced eyes—but it didn’t matter, anyway. Richard hated redheads.
There were two others: a mother of four, a little fat but not as fat as Caroline was now, and with a pretty smile, who ran a cooking blog called TheGoldenSpoon. Caroline had spent nearly an hour scrolling through recipes, reading about techniques for peeling tomatoes and how to make a perfect omelet, searching all the time for a code layered beneath the surface of the words, a message to her, to Richard.
There were dozens of pictures, not just of meals but of Adrienne herself, and, often, her children: fat-faced, grinning, holding up chocolate-covered fingers toward the camera.
Would Richard have done it? She wasn’t sure. But she couldn’t rule it out.
The last Adrienne was forty-two, and there was a single article that appeared about her on the second page of search results. She had spoken at the Ottawa Regional Breast Cancer Benefit; she was a breast cancer survivor, and she worked as a lawyer at the Canadian Immigration Bureau. The photograph was disappointing—head only, and slightly blurry, and moreover taken from an angle that made it difficult to see her features clearly. Whether she was pretty or not, it was hard to say.
Caroline spent another hour searching for more information about this Adrienne, looking for a better picture, but had found nothing. By then it was two a.m., and she was very drunk and she knew she would sleep, finally. Still, it had taken her another half an hour to figure out how to clear the history so that Minna wouldn’t know what she was doing; Caroline knew about clearing the history because Trenton had spoken about it after she went on his computer looking for evidence that he was developing normally and wasn’t reading about assault weapons or how to make a homemade bomb, which had been suggested to her by a magazine she’d read at the dentist’s. He had caught her, and said, in the annoying smirking way he had recently perfected, “Ever hear of deleting history, Mom?” Then, of course, she was left to wonder whether he’d deleted history because he’d been researching bombs.
Caroline heard footsteps coming up the front path; she could see two men, distorted by the glass.
“Go and see what they want,” she told Minna. “Even better, make them leave.”
Minna rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She left through the garden door.
Caroline heard the doorbell ring once, sharply, and then fall silent. She heard Minna’s called greeting and a burst of overlapping voices, then footsteps, crossing back toward the greenhouse.
Minna hadn’t gotten rid of them.
For the first time since entering the greenhouse Caroline saw, suddenly, what it had become: the sad plastic simulacrum, the withered plants crying out for water, the boxes of old Christmas decorations and dirty wooden shelves, still imprinted with watermarks and ghostly rings where flowerpots and planters had once stood. This had been her place, the only spot in the house that had really belonged to her. She could make flowers grow, could coax even the most difficult orchid to life and make thick coils of plumleaf azalea overspill their planters.
Richard had left the greenhouse to die. Now Richard was dead.
There had been blood in the toilet this morning.