For the first time in years, Patricia doesn’t take a sleeping pill, and she does not sleep well. She wakes up after midnight and watches gardening shows until non-emotional, fully physical tears dribble down her cheeks because she wants so badly to fall back asleep. She turns off the TV, turns it back on, tosses and turns, rearranges the horrible cushions, swallows more ibuprofen with water from the tap. She paces and fiddles with her bandages and takes a long shower in an upstairs bathroom. Hot water coursing over her hurt places wakes her up all the way and she grits her teeth as she soaps the wound and feels the detached chunk of meat with pruney fingertips. Blood courses down her leg and swirls pink around the drain. There’s no way around it—she’ll have to call Dr. Baird tomorrow and make it clear that this is an emergency on her own behalf. Maybe Randall won’t swallow the cost of two vaccinations for wayward children, but surely he doesn’t want his not-yet-ex-wife to die of sepsis before she can sign the divorce papers.
It’s two in the morning, but she feels like it’s noon. The house is silent and dark as she limps back to the pantry and goes through the ritual of treating her wounds again and binding them back up even though she knows it’s a job badly done, which she hates. She has a cup of herbal tea that only makes her feel more awake—Sleepytime, my ass—and pulls out her sleek little laptop, a gift from Randall after she lightly, breezily complained about a few too many harassing calls from one of his women. It reminds her of a seashell as it opens, a delicate rose gold. She’s been so busy with Brooklyn that she’s neglected it.
Her inbox is a shambles. Dozens of emails about the auction in the last two days alone. The earlier ones are delicately pressing and the most recent ones are indignant and stiff and frosty. She’s been removed from the auction committee and, on Karen’s recommendation, has been declared unacceptable for reelection to the board due to gross negligence.
“For failing to satisfy commitments,” Patricia murmurs to herself. “You bitch.”
She clicks the little boxes down the left of each email, click click click, and deletes them all.
“There. That’s better.”
There are other emails she’s missed—mostly from Randall’s secretary, Diane, first information regarding their Iceland plans, and then increasingly chilly ones that include documents for her to e-sign with her e-signature so that Randall can easily e-divorce her. She opens one, reads a few paragraphs, and deletes the email. If Randall wants to go through with this, if he’s really the kind of person who wants to destroy her life in the middle of a pandemic, then he can damn well subpoena her and make her sign in person at one of his big conference tables with a policeman standing over them both once he’s gone to the trouble of returning from his icy paradise. She’s not going to make it easy on him, she’s decided.
Because he’s not made it easy on her.
If he’d like to offer her some money like he does his discarded mistresses, perhaps she’ll go back to being pliant and not troublesome.
Email, she thinks, as she scrolls through, was a bad invention.
Requests, demands, sales that she missed—there’s nothing here that benefits her current reality.
Opening a new tab, she’s forced to stare at her destroyed manicure as she tries to figure out the correct combination of words to type into the search bar that will produce the information she desires.
The Violence cure.
Well, that gets a lot of garbage.
Funny how she didn’t research a thing when she got the vaccine herself, but now that her granddaughter is infected and living in her closet, she wants all the information she can find.
Much to her surprise, very little of what she sees online is accurate. It’s mostly conspiracy theories, although it turns out the one about the vaccine only being available to the wealthy is actually true.
How many paid professionals, she wonders, are awake right now, scrubbing the internet for any mention of the reality of this vaccine to keep the general populace from rioting? She knows there are people who fill that job position; Randall has paid them to remove his own unflattering information and images before elections. But to the rest of the world, the vaccine is a Loch Ness Monster, something they’d like to believe in but can’t quite prove. Her scar is an open secret, now. Tomorrow, when Dr. Baird stops by to tend to her wounds, she’ll play on his sympathy for little children, tell him about her granddaughter’s difficult life, her abusive father, runaway sister, and violent, missing mother, and try to convince him to give Brooklyn the vaccine, too. Hell, she’ll offer him every jewel she has left, her wedding rings and diamond studs and tennis bracelet. It’s not the cache she had before she was robbed, but it’s certainly enough to make up for one measly little vaccine rubbed into the child’s arm—half a dose, if that. The man took an oath, for heaven’s sake. He must have a heart.
She googles “David Martin,” but there are so many hits that there’s no way to sift through them all. Homer told her an angry man in a Lexus had been stopping by the neighborhood gates, so David must be out of quarantine or prison or whatever they call it, but he won’t find his way to her house.
Then she googles “Chelsea Martin” and is so scandalized she gasps and turns her laptop away, as if Brooklyn could possibly be sneaking up behind her and able to read.
Patricia’s daughter really does have the Violence, and when she finds pictures of the crime scene in an online gossip mag, she feels nauseated.
Chelsea has truly hit rock bottom, and even if she had all of her former wealth and power, there’s very little Patricia could do to help her. She’s quite certain the judge would need to distance himself from this crime, and—
Yes, of course.
No wonder the emails from his secretary got so snippy and demanding. As long as he’s married to Patricia, this is a smear against him, isn’t it? His daughter-in-law is an embarrassing murderess.
Patricia smiles, chuckles a little.
“That bell can’t be unrung, can it, Judge?”
She has no idea where Chelsea is now, and neither does anyone else. Ella is likewise out of her reach, and good riddance to the bad rubbish that was Randall.
Brooklyn is all she has left, and they will find their way together.
Patricia falls asleep on her sunroom couch, laptop balanced on her lap as she googles “squatter’s rights” and “property law.” If Randall wants her out of this home, this place she decorated and refurbished to suit her like a hermit crab selecting a new shell, he can by God show up and pry her out himself. Legally, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. No wonder she’s still here with all the utilities. Of course he knows the law. His threats were empty, but he’s still an asshole.
She wakes up to sunlight and a loud thump that puts her right into panic mode.
“Nana! Where are you?” Brooklyn shouts as she crawls over the fallen ottoman that Patricia used to block the door.
Annoyed, still half asleep, fingertips prodding what must be Birkin-sized eye bags, Patricia stands up and limps down the hall.
“Nana, why was that thing there?” Brooklyn holds her arms up, and it takes a confused beat before Patricia realizes she wants a hug.
“The ottoman? Well…I thought we might play Obstacle Course today.” She opens her arms, a little awkward, and the child throws herself into Patricia’s middle. It’s not awful, but her leg does hurt, and, well, she’s just not accustomed to being touched quite so much. She pats Brooklyn’s back and pulls away. “But first, would you like breakfast? I found some fresh fruit.”
Brooklyn’s eyes light up, the ottoman forgotten.
Once the child is installed at the counter with her tablet, Patricia notes the time and calls Dr. Baird.