“Your husband confessed to murdering thirty-one people, Mrs. Seever, right in your own home,” the reporter said. “I find it difficult to believe you had no idea what was going on.”
“The police cleared me as a suspect, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Not at all.”
Gloria stared at her.
“You look familiar,” she said. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Jacky would’ve thought you were pretty,” Gloria said. “He would’ve been interested in getting to know you better.”
The reporter left in a hurry after that.
Inside is cool and quiet, with the musty smell that always happens when a house is shut up for too long. She’s already taken everything she wants out of the house, but she still wanted to come back, to say goodbye. She was happy in this house.
Gloria goes upstairs, slowly, because her knees have begun to ache some in the last few months, and turns into the master bedroom, second door on the left. Here is their big bed with the cherrywood headboard, and the filigree metal lamps she picked up from an antique dealer. She’d read that men naturally sleep on the side of the bed closer to the door, so they’d be able to protect their spouse, but she’d always slept in that spot. She wonders what that says about their marriage.
She gets down on her knees and flips back the edge of the duvet so she can see under the bed. It’s not a comfortable position. The shag is rough on her cheek, and from this close she sees little black smudges caught in the carpet fibers. Dirt, or makeup. Jacky used to always complain when she’d sharpen her eyeliners, and the shavings would end up on the carpet, because they’d never come out, not even after a good scrubbing.
There’s nothing under the bed except a few dust bunnies, a scattering of bobby pins, and a book. The book has been pushed way back, and she has to strain to reach it, her fingers scraping fruitlessly against the spine before she finally manages to hook it. It’s a book for pregnant women, with advice on morning sickness and colic, breastfeeding and choosing the right brand of diapers. She can’t remember buying it, although she must’ve, because no one else knew that they’d spent most of their marriage trying for a baby. Most everyone assumed that they were one of those couples who’d decided to pass on kids, that they’d forever play the doting aunt and uncle to everyone else’s children and spend all their free time and money on travel and good wine. But everyone was wrong; Gloria had wanted children for so long and then it was too late, her insides had dried up and shriveled from disuse, and nothing could be done. Although now, she thinks, she’s glad there was never a baby.
She flips through the book, looks at the pages full of words and sketches of a vulva, which looks more like a strawberry cut in half than anything that might be hiding between a woman’s legs. It’s warm in the house, stuffy, and she lies down, rests her head on the soft length of her upper arm. The floor is hard, but she still starts to doze, because it’s so warm and she’s tired and this is her home, this will always be her home. She was nearly asleep when something under the bed moved, and when her eyes flew open there’s a young woman staring at her, only inches away. A woman with a heart-shaped face and mousy-brown hair, wearing a blue dress printed with sprigs of white flowers. It’s Beth Howard, Gloria knows it. Beth Howard, the girl Jacky kept under the bed, and she’d be pretty except she’s dead; her face has a shrunken look about it, like a softening, wrinkled apple left for too long in a dark cabinet. But her eyes are alive, mad and glittering, two tarnished marbles pushed deep into her white face.
“He took everything from me,” the girl hisses, and Gloria sits up with a jerk, the muscle in her right shoulder wrenching in pain. She scoots away from the bed, her hands scrabbling for purchase against the carpet, until she backs into the armchair she always kept in the corner. From the chair she can see that there’s nothing under the bed, nothing at all but certainly not a dead girl. It was a trick of her imagination.
Gloria leans against the armchair wearily, pulls her legs up to her chest and settles her forehead against her knees. She looks like a girl when she sits like this, young and vulnerable, the girl she used to be. The girl hiding behind the couch while her father held a gun in her mother’s face.
She has her eyes closed and is breathing deeply, trying to get herself under control. In through the nose, out through the mouth, like the gym teacher used to tell them back in high school. And then, she smells it. What others had sometimes complained about but she never noticed. The smell of rot, the cloying, wet scent of flesh boiling with maggots.