That was when I realized that I had killed Mrs. Patel.
She’d died from the heart attack I had wished for. The one that had been meant for Raymond. The one I’d tried to take back.
Mrs. Patel died suddenly in her living room, where she was found by her killer and sometime neighbor Maeve Glover, who was shocked and horrified when she realized what she had done—
What had I done? The heart attack had been for Raymond. And then I’d taken it back. I had! But somehow it had still been floating around, and it had found Mrs. Patel.
This was my fault.
Her death was my fault.
Unintentional homicide. But murder nonetheless.
This was a terrible, terrible realization, and I wanted to rewind so badly.
I hadn’t wanted Raymond to have a heart attack. I hadn’t meant it. I hadn’t wanted that awful thing to float out of my grasp before I could pull it back in and throw it away. But it got away from me and made it as far as Mrs. Patel’s house, where it slammed into her while she was just sitting there, watching TV and doing absolutely nothing wrong. It gripped her and set off all those tiny explosions as she clutched her chest and gasped and then slid to the floor and died right there with her slippers on, her scrawny, hairy legs splayed out in front of her.
I felt too dizzy to sit.
It was ridiculous. There was no way to conjure a heart attack. Superstition. Voodoo dolls. Magical incantations. Spells with a strand of hair and a torn picture. It couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be.
No.
Impossible.
But I couldn’t shake the idea.
What if it was true? If so many people could believe in a power they couldn’t see and call it God or Allah or whatever, and if all those people believed that God could make things happen or not happen, maybe this was no different.
I wouldn’t have believed it before.
But now I did.
I set my pencil down and lowered myself to the floor, where I lay on my back and squeezed my eyes shut. My heart—healthy, galloping, robust—thudded faster and faster. It had no right to. No right at all. The drawing of the heart glowed in the small circle of light from the lamp. I stared at it so long that it started to pulse, right there on the page. Terrified, I lunged for the lamp and switched it off, plunging the room into that extra-black darkness that happens at first. After a few moments I could see, but the shadows in the room were even worse. Large and looming and strange.
“Maeve?” Owen’s small voice, exquisitely alive, and tremulous.
“Yeah?” I flicked the light back on.
“I wet the bed.”
I almost laughed. It was such a living-person thing to do that I didn’t mind how gross it was. I didn’t even mind the smell. It was just so basic and real, and had everything to do with being alive. Not like Mrs. Patel, whose bladder had relaxed when she died, releasing one last, passive flood of urine, soaking her nightie and the carpet underneath.
Owen had wet the bed. Normally, I would’ve been so disgusted. Normally, I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with cleaning it up, but right then I was just so glad I could actually do something to help.
“It’s okay.” I turned the overhead light on too. No more shadows. “It’s okay.” He blinked against the brightness, and I helped him out of bed. I gathered up the soaked sheets and the blanket. I handed him his owl, which was still dry. Owen followed me silently to the washing machine. I stripped off his pajamas while he stood there. He yawned and shivered while I loaded the washer. I found one of Dad’s T-shirts in the dryer and helped Owen into it. It made him look even smaller, the sleeves draping down to his elbows, his knobby knees, pale, peeking out. “Better?”
He nodded, yawning again.
I couldn’t find any linens, but there were sleeping bags in the closet at the end of the hall, so I collected two of those and steered Owen back to bed. I unrolled the bags, a blue one with glow-in-the-dark stars on the inside for Owen, and a musty old green one for me. I settled Owen into his and zipped him up, and then I crawled into mine beside him and turned off the light.
“I’m sorry,” Owen whispered, his voice thick with sleep.
“It’s okay,” I said, when I really meant thank you. But he wouldn’t understand how much he’d helped me. He’d pushed away Mrs. Patel and the bloody hearts and the pulsing heart on the page. Not far, but enough that I could finally fall asleep, to the throbbing of my own pulse, angry and exhausted.
I slept for an hour. An hour filled with wretched dreams featuring too much blood and too many samosas and a very loud soap-opera soundtrack. While I was lying awake, trying to go back to sleep, I heard the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door.
It was Dad, coming home at last. At almost four a.m.
I still wanted to see him. I still wanted him to hold me and tell me that everything would be all right. What I really wanted was for him to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, but even just a hug would do. I hurried upstairs to catch him before he went to bed, but I stopped short at the top when I heard him and Claire talking.
“You just threw five years of sobriety down the toilet?”
“Whoosh.”
“This isn’t a joke. Fuck, Billy. Five years!”
“You know the sayings. ‘Keep coming back,’?” Dad said. “?‘One day at a time.’?”
“Maeve needed you, Billy. We needed you!”
“My phone was in my truck.”
“And where was your truck?”
I sat on the second step, the wall hiding me. There was a pause. A long pause.
“Where was your truck?” Claire said again. “Where were you? Where were you getting drunk while your daughter found Mrs. Patel’s dead body? Where were you, Billy? Answer me! Where the hell were you?”
“Stop it, Claire.” His voice was thick, drunk. “You want to know where I was?”
“Yes.”
“Well, here’s a fucking news flash. I don’t have to explain myself,” he slurred. “I’m a grown man. I can do whatever I do without checking with you first, or after. Or ever, for that matter.”
“You’re a grown man with a family.”
“You want me to stand here and grovel?” He dropped his keys. When he bent to pick them up, he almost toppled over. “You’d have a comeback for everything, so why bother? I say one thing; you say another. Back and forth and back and forth. Yadda yadda. Blah, blah, blah. I’m wrong. You’re right. Done. Why not just go to bed instead and save ourselves the grief?”
“Grief?” Claire let out one barking laugh. “Talk to your daughter if you want to know about grief.”
And then her footsteps, stomping up to the third floor.
And his stomping across to the couch.