Dead to Her(45)
It was only her imagination but the air felt cooler and unnaturally still in the vast room filled with elegant possessions that waited in vain, abandoned, for a time when their owner would need them again. Keisha found herself breathing shallowly, as if she might wake Eleanor’s ghost more readily than Billy’s snoring, sadly very much alive, body. She traced a finger across the dressing table. The hairbrush, comb, vanity mirror, carefully laid out. Why were the dead so fascinating? Why did they feel more present than the living sometimes? Maybe it was just her. Always surrounded by shadows, that’s what Auntie Ayo had said to her.
You got yourself cursed blood, KeKe, it’s there in the cards, no good will come of you.
She shivered slightly as she remembered her wish at the festival that weekend. Billy gone, gone, gone. There had been nothing good in that. She might not be cursed, but she knew she was wicked. His death was what she wanted, even more so now with her body aching from the weight of him and the echo of his sex present inside her.
She flicked her phone open and idly googled “How many Viagra would it take to kill someone?” Billy was that very male combination of arrogant and insecure enough to maybe take too many one night. The results weren’t encouraging. Billy was vain but not stupid. He’d never take that many, not even if she pretended she wanted him to have sex with her twenty times in a row.
She flopped down on Eleanor’s bed for a moment, imagining her predecessor and Billy fucking in it. Had Eleanor loved Billy? Or had their marriage been one of convenience, both pushed together by their parents wanting to keep the elite with the elite? Inbreeding. What was it Billy had said at dinner? Eleanor knew how to behave and what was expected of her. Had Eleanor sometimes screamed silent frustrated rage into her pillow at night? Not just this pillow, but all of them, from childhood. Dress this way, walk that way, speak this way, be a good girl. Is that how it had been for her entire life? Keisha had been left to run wild and then there had been Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba and all the shittiness and fear and wrong education that entailed, but maybe Eleanor’s youth hadn’t been that much better. More luxurious, yes, but just as imprisoned.
For the first time she felt a nugget of sympathy for the dead woman. She turned the small table lamp on, checking the door was still pushed to, and got up to look at the photos on the dresser. The glass across the surfaces shone. Zelda must still come in and polish them. They were flashbacks through time. Did Eleanor look happy in them as she stood beside Billy at various stages of their marriage? Smiling yes, but happy? Keisha didn’t think so. Certainly not in the later ones. There was a coolness in her eyes and a stiffness in her back. Was this after Lyle’s death?
Keisha looked closer, comparing two, taken at some kind of function but maybe ten years apart. Billy had his arm around Eleanor’s waist in both but in the more recent image there was definitely a wider gap between them as they stood, as if maybe Eleanor didn’t want her husband pawing at her, proprietorial. She looked elegant, yes, and was smiling politely, but something was missing. There was another—this time Jason was in it, looking much as he did now, with a woman who must have been Jacquie, dark and slender with a birdlike brittle beauty. Her hand was firmly gripping Jason’s, making the gap between Eleanor and Billy seem more pronounced. As if Eleanor was maybe trying to pull away and Jacquie was trying to cling on. Was Jason already seeing Marcie when this was taken? So many stories, so much history.
Keisha looked at the pictures in the rows behind, some from when Eleanor had been a child. Most were posed family shots where she’d been taught how to sit prettily and tilt her head this way or that, her parents standing behind her, occasionally with a hand resting on her shoulder, presumably meant to look affectionate but somehow seeming as if she was being held in place.
Only in one did she look like a normal joyful girl. The old black-and-white photo was crumpled in its frame and there was nothing staged about it. Eleanor, recognizable by her blond mid-length curls, was laughing on a swing at the bottom of a vast garden. A boy in knee-length shorts leaned against the frame, and a smaller girl was sitting cross-legged on the grass looking up at her. There were remnants of a picnic on the grass. Who’d taken the photo? Keisha wondered. Someone who didn’t mind kids being kids.
She tracked Eleanor’s life through the pictures, each year older a little more contained and mannered as each year Billy got a little fatter and more red-faced. How ironic that it was Eleanor who was now gone, who’d rotted and died in this very room while her overindulgent husband got to marry again, a fresh young woman to mold. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, that’s what she’d married, and she’d been an idiot to fall for his puppy-dog routine. He revolted her. He scared her. He made her dislike herself. No matter how many cars or pieces of jewelry he bought her, she was always going to be impatient for him to be gone.
She browsed through Eleanor’s drawers again, and this time her eyes lingered on the hidden needles and vial of morphine, wondering how it would feel, before she slid the drawer quietly closed and turned off the lamp, ready to go back to bed. Only when she got to the door did she pause and turn back. From within the dresser she took out a hidden framed picture of Eleanor with Lyle as a child, her eyes shining bright in this one, and placed it in front of the others, out in the open, angled toward the bed.
“Good night, Eleanor,” she whispered into the empty gloom. “I hope that helps you sleep better.” Then she clicked the door shut behind her, leaving the dead and the dark to their own company.