The Winters(74)

“I bet it was. How much of it did you have, love?”

“Maybe like half a bottle. No, a whole one.”

“What else?”

She shrugged.

I looked at Max, who closed his eyes. He looked helpless, ashamed.

“Dani, I have to know for your own good.”

“One teensy Valium. Three at the most.”

“And?”

“She gave me a little white one,” she said, lifting her limp hand in my general direction. The doctor gave a brisk nod to the attendants, who gently pried Dani from the doctor’s arms and placed her across the gurney, strapping her down.

When they started to roll her away, I grabbed a rail. “Wait. Where are you taking her? Max, we have to go with her.”

Max and the doctor exchanged a look. They’d done this before.

“She needs to be detoxed first,” the doctor said. “Until then there’s nothing for you to do.”

“The rehab’s not far from here,” Max told me. “One of the best in the country. We can visit in a couple days. Dani, honey, we’ll come see you as soon as you’re out of detox.”

Dani found the last reserve of clarity not blotted out by the champagne, or the pills. She twisted her body around the side of the gurney and addressed me as though we were alone.

“You have to believe me. I need you to believe me.”

“Oh, Dani.” I reached for her again. She seemed so lost and alone.

Max came to my side. “Dr. Sherman is going to help you, Dani,” he said, walking beside the gurney to the front door. “You’re a good girl, Dani. We know it was an accident.”

“Noooo!” she wailed, squirming under the straps. “Don’t say that! I know I’m good. It’s you that’s bad!”

Once she was rolled out of earshot, Dr. Sherman turned to Max. “I’ll call you once we check her in. How did the kitten . . . ?”

“Broken neck, I think,” Max said quietly. “She seemed to be in the process of burying it. It might be what set this off. My hope is that she found the kitten that way.”

“I’ve never known her to be violent,” said the doctor. “But anyway, we can talk about a plan in a couple of days, once I’ve assessed her.” She turned to me. “It was nice to meet you. Sorry it’s under such distressing circumstances.”

The wheels of the gurney had a tricky time on the wet driveway, pocked with little puddles from the rain. I thought of the last time I had seen my father alive, how frightened I was navigating the boat around those bloated cruise ships, racing him to the dock and the waiting ambulance. I remembered the white sun glinting off the hot chrome of his gurney and the doomed sense that my entire life had just changed in an instant, and none of it required my permission. That happened to Dani that morning. Her gurney was swallowed into the ambulance like a tongue rolling back into a large steel mouth. She would never live at Asherley again.





TWENTY-SIX


Max closed the front door and gathered me into his arms. We stayed like that for a long time, Asherley thrumming hollowly around us. Even on the days I hadn’t seen Dani’s face I always knew she was somewhere in the house, watchful and coiled. Now the house felt dead inside, the only sounds coming from the morning crows that had a habit of screaming at their own reflections in the east windows. Everything hurt. It hurt to think, to talk, to breathe, to hold on to him, and to finally release him.

“I’m sorry,” Max said.

“For what?”

“I’m sorry about Dani, What she did to you. What she’s going through. I knew she was off, I just didn’t realize how badly she was spiraling.”

“I wish I could have done more, too,” I said.

“Listen, we have plenty of time to admonish ourselves for the mistakes we made, mistakes I made. But you.” He stopped to carefully tug something from my hair. “You need a shower.”

I looked down at my vomit-spattered robe.

“Not how you hoped to spend the morning after your wedding. Listen, I’ll join you in a minute, after I bury that poor kitten.”

“Let me help you. I’m not squeamish. I’d like to see how she died.”

“No. No. I don’t want you to go in there, or see that,” he said. “You’ve already been through enough grief. I mean it.”

“You think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. Go. You’re starting to turn,” he said, scrunching his nose and nudging me towards the stairs.

I didn’t go straight to our room. I went up to the third floor, looking for something that would explain Dani’s state of mind. Her room had been left in shambles, clothes everywhere, empty wine bottles scattered about, an overflowing ashtray on the windowsill—evidence of substance abuse on her part, neglect on ours.

I headed to the turret and was surprised to find the door unlocked. All these months I’d wanted to come up here alone, to lay across Rebekah’s bed, to try on her jewelry, her perfumes, not the way it was with Dani, manipulative, under duress, but leisurely, sensually. I wanted to savor my discoveries, like a girl left in a department store overnight. But now I hated these rooms. Where I once envied the majestic gilt mirrors, the circle of windows bracketed by creamy drapes hanging like long hair, the closet full of beautiful clothes, now everything felt ludicrous and unnecessary. In fact it was here where Rebekah’s memories were stored, in these rooms, not the greenhouse. And it was here where Dani incubated her anxieties and cultivated her delusions, especially the ones about her father and what had really happened that night. Perhaps she needed to hear the truth, needed to know everything there was to know about both of her mothers. Maybe after she healed and got some help, we’d tell her everything, so she could put it all behind her and start anew.