28
The word to turn on the lights is control, but although he speaks it three times, the basement remains in darkness. Brady realizes the voice-recognition program isn’t working because he doesn’t sound like himself, and is it any wonder? Any fucking wonder at all?
He uses the switch instead and goes down, first shutting the door—and the beastly sounds coming from the living room—behind him.
He doesn’t even try to voice-ac his bank of computers, just turns on his Number Three with the button behind the monitor. The countdown to Total Erasure appears and he stops it by typing in his password. But he doesn’t seek out poison antidotes; it’s far too late for that, and now that he’s sitting here in his safe place, he allows himself to know it.
He also knows how this happened. She was good yesterday, staying sober long enough to make a nice supper for them, so she rewarded herself today. Got schnockered, then decided she’d better eat a little something to soak up the booze before her honeyboy got home. Didn’t find anything in the pantry or the refrigerator that tickled her fancy. Oh but say, what about the mini-fridge in the garage? Soft drinks wouldn’t interest her, but perhaps there were snacks. Only what she found was even better, a Baggie filled with nice fresh hamburger.
It makes Brady think of an old saying—whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Is that the Peter Principle? He goes online to find out. After some investigation he discovers it’s not the Peter Principle but Murphy’s Law. Named after a man named Edward Murphy. The guy made aircraft parts. Who knew?
He surfs a few other sites—actually quite a few—and plays a few hands of solitaire. When there’s a particularly loud thump from upstairs, he decides to listen to a few tunes on his iPod. Something cheery. The Staple Singers, maybe.
And as “Respect Yourself” plays in the middle of his head, he goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to see if there’s a message from the fat ex-cop.
29
When he can put it off no longer, Brady creeps upstairs. Twilight has come. The smell of seared hamburger is almost gone, but the smell of puke is still strong. He goes into the living room. His mother is on the floor next to the coffee table, which is now overturned. Her eyes glare up at the ceiling. Her lips are pulled back in a great big grin. Her hands are claws. She’s dead.
Brady thinks, Why did you have to go out in the garage when you got hungry? Oh Mom, Mommy, what in God’s name possessed you?
Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, he thinks, and then, looking at the mess she’s made, he wonders if they have any carpet cleaner.
This is Hodges’s fault. It all leads back to him.
He’ll deal with the old Det-Ret, and soon. Right now, though, he has a more pressing problem. He sits down to consider it, taking the chair he uses on the occasions when he watches TV with her. He realizes she’ll never watch another reality show. It’s sad . . . but it does have its funny side. He imagines Jeff Probst sending flowers with a card reading From all your Survivor pals, and he just has to chuckle.
What is he to do with her? The neighbors won’t miss her because she never ever had anything to do with them, called them stuck-up. She has no friends, either, not even of the barfly type, because she did all her drinking at home. Once, in a rare moment of self-appraisal, she told him she didn’t go out to the bars because they were full of drunks just like her.
“That’s why you didn’t taste that shit and stop, isn’t it?” he asks the corpse. “You were too fucking loaded.”
He wishes they had a freezer case. If they did, he’d cram her body into it. He saw that in a movie once. He doesn’t dare put her in the garage; that seems a little too public, somehow. He supposes he could wrap her in a rug and take her down to the basement, she’d certainly fit under the stairs, but how would he get any work done, knowing she was there? Knowing that, even inside a roll of rug, her eyes were glaring?
Besides, the basement’s his place. His control room.
In the end he realizes there’s only one thing to do. He grabs her under the arms and drags her toward the stairs. By the time he gets her there, her pajama pants have slid down, revealing what she sometimes calls (called, he reminds himself) her winky. Once, when he was in bed with her and she was giving him relief for a particularly bad headache, he tried to touch her winky and she slapped his hand away. Hard. Don’t you ever, she had said. That’s where you came from.
Brady pulls her up the stairs, a riser at a time. The pajama pants work down to her ankles and puddle there. He remembers how she did a sit-down march on the couch in her last extremity. How awful. But, like the thing about Jeff Probst sending flowers, it had its funny side, although it wasn’t the kind of joke you could explain to people. It was kind of Zen.
Down the hall. Into her bedroom. He straightens up, wincing at the pain in his lower back. God, she’s so heavy. It’s as if death has stuffed her with some dense mystery meat.
Never mind. Get it done.
He yanks up her pants, making her decent again—as decent as a corpse in vomit-soaked pj’s can be—and lifts her onto her bed, groaning as fresh pain settles into his back. When he straightens up this time, he can feel his spine crackling. He thinks about taking off her nightclothes and replacing them with something clean—one of the XL tee-shirts she sometimes wears to bed, maybe—but that would mean more lifting and manipulation of what is now just pounds of silent flesh hanging from bone coathangers. What if he threw his back out?
He could at least take off her top, that caught most of the mess, but then he’d have to look at her boobs. Those she did let him touch, but only once in awhile. My handsome boy, she’d say on these occasions. Running her fingers through his hair or massaging his neck where the headaches settled, crouched and snarling. My handsome honeyboy.
In the end he just pulls the bedspread up, covering her entirely. Especially those staring, glaring eyes.
“Sorry, Mom,” he says, looking down at the white shape. “Not your fault.”
No. It’s the fat ex-cop’s fault. Brady bought the Gopher-Go to poison the dog, true, but only as a way of getting to Hodges and messing with his head. Now it’s Brady’s head that’s a mess. Not to mention the living room. He’s got a lot of work to do down there, but he has something else to do first.
30
He’s got control of himself again and this time his voice commands work. He doesn’t waste time, just sits down in front of his Number Three and logs on to Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. His message to Hodges is brief and to the point.
I’m going to kill you.
You won’t see me coming.