“It changed on the day that a storm blew a tree over in the garden. Max was on one of his trips and I was alone in the house when the roots that had risen above the surface pulled up the crushed skull of one of the women Max had killed.”
Pausing long enough for those words to sink in, Alice visibly shivered, her eyes clenching shut, her teeth grinding together before she opened her mouth to say, “And that’s when I made the biggest mistake of all. I decided to leave.”
Sitting in the aftermath of a fierce storm that blew over the rural town where Alice and Max lived, Alice surveyed the garden that was now torn apart by the high winds and pounding rains that had saturated the land. Most of the larger oaks that provided shade over the expanse of their yard had withstood the winds and rain, their roots securely anchored in place. Some had lost branches, while one smaller tree in particular, a laurel oak known for its shallow root spread, had tipped from the winds, the large trunk now crushing the rose bushes and hydrangeas that Alice had planted only a handful of months before.
When she’d first stepped outside, her heart had broken to see the disarray of the garden, the plants that had lost limbs and blooms, that would die from the amount of rain dumped by the storm.
Max was away on a business trip and Alice wondered how much of the area she could clean herself without calling in people to assist. Knowing what she knew of the horrors contained inside the house and on the grounds, Alice hoped that Max could handle removing the fallen tree.
Stepping around the chaos of downed branches and debris, she wound her way through the mess to stare at the root ball of the laurel oak that had fallen.
At first, she assumed her eyes had been playing tricks, her mind not registering the grim horror of what the fallen tree had pulled up and out of the ground. Dropping to her knees when realization firmly took hold, Alice stared in open-mouthed terror at the crushed and broken skull, the empty eyes that stared out at her, hollow and accusing that, through Alice’s silence, she had allowed so many women to die.
Pulled apart by the love she felt for Max and the pervasive understanding that what she allowed him to do in the dirty underbelly of the house was pure evil, Alice shattered to look at the stark evidence of the broken lives and shattered families Max, and now Alice, had left in their wake.
Alice felt frozen in place, her eyes unblinking as the screams of the four women who’d died while she lived in the house haunted her thoughts. She doubted the skull she stared at now had been one of those women. The bodies wouldn’t have had enough time to decompose so completely, and the placement of burial would have been impossible given the roots of the tree. However, that knowledge wasn’t enough to appease the overwhelming ache of guilt and remorse that gripped her between skeletal fingers.
She loved him, and since the time she’d acquiesced to his needs and ignored the acts he committed in the basement, she’d been unable to shake the strong feelings she had for Max. Several times she’d considered asking him to stop, but memories of the abuse he’d committed against her would always shoot to the surface of her thoughts.
It was selfish of her to do nothing, selfish of her to remain silent about the death that surrounded her simply because, for once, she wasn’t the person enduring the abuse.
But it wasn’t just herself that Alice fought to protect. Max was so kind when his demons were given their outlet, so generous to her, that she focused on the side of him that was soft rather than condemning that part of him she wanted to believe didn’t exist. She made excuses for him and for herself, she justified their actions as just a means to an end when it came to living with the memory of the cruelty they’d both suffered as kids.
But she couldn’t ignore it any longer, couldn’t find it within her to continue making excuses and telling lies, not with the vacant eyes of death staring back at her, the grim reminder that innocent people had suffered and more lives would be lost.
Picking herself up from the ground, Alice found her way back into their three story home. She managed to pull herself up the stairs and into the bedroom where they’d slept and made love. Unable to cry because she’d run out of tears over the time they’d spent together, Alice went into the bathroom to wash away the muck and mud on her skin that she’d dragged in from the flooded garden.
She’d been conditioned to be clean. Any speck of dust, or smear of mud, that marred her skin had to be removed, wiped away so quickly that the errant dirt couldn’t remind her of the ugliness that enshrouded the house – the ugliness inside her husband and herself.