The Light Through the Leaves(7)

The coldness remained in his expression, and it froze her down deep. She understood what it meant. She couldn’t be trusted. He thought the boys were better off with Mary Carol.

“I’m begging you to make her leave, Jonah.”

“I need her help while I’m at work. She’ll leave when you’re able to care for the boys alone.”

“I am!”

“I’m not seeing it, Ell.”

“It’s only been two weeks! They’ve just told us finding her is almost impossible now. Give me a chance to work through it.”

“That’s what this medication is for. To help you recover.”

She looked at the little pill that would “help her recover.” Two weeks ago, she’d been certain she and her children would never recover from Jonah’s betrayal. Now all of that was submerged beneath much deeper grief. She was being consumed by it, sinking too fast. She was trying to grab on to something, anything—even on to him, the one who had opened the abyss in the first place.

“Take it,” he said, pushing the pill into her lips.

So this was all he had to offer. Why did he not take her in his arms? Hold her, give her real security when she was so obviously going under?

She tasted salty tears with the drug’s bitterness. But if it could dull the pain of his treachery, she would welcome it.

He pressed the water glass to her lips. She drank, swallowing the medication.

“Good,” he said, patting her cheek like she was a child. “Now, get some sleep. We’ve got dinner covered. The boys are making pizzas with my mother.”

“No meat! Don’t let her put meat on them,” Ellis said.

He sighed and closed the door.





4


Taking the pills got easier and easier. The medication didn’t so much counteract her anguish as smear it. The brutally sharp photographs of her days became impressionist paintings. Pills, plural, because when she couldn’t sleep again, they gave her another one.

The combination of the two drugs worked. After little more than a week, Ellis believed in them without question. The pain of existence was not something a person should have to feel.

Of course, she wasn’t allowed to drive when she was taking the drugs. Mary Carol and Jonah took charge of the house. Sometimes the eminent senator Jonah Bauhammer II visited, spouting his intolerant opinions in front of the children, stoking the tension igniting in the house. Ellis frequently lost control of her temper with him, even when the boys looked on.

Jonah III would make her go upstairs to stop the fight. He’d been doing that for years, acting as a human barrier between her and his parents. He didn’t support her or contest his parents’ bigotry.

What a coward Jonah was. He’d often told Ellis it was a relief to be with someone who shared his deepest beliefs, yet his parents still didn’t know he opposed their views. But even if they did find out, they’d blame Ellis for corrupting him.

Weeks passed. Mary Carol took the boys to her church every Sunday. Gave them meat. The cleaning ladies came every week.

Ellis wasn’t getting better. She knew she wasn’t because Jonah and Mary Carol no longer trusted her alone with her children. River and Jasper perceived the shift in control. More and more, they sought out their grandmother for their needs. The pain and fury were too much. Ellis took more medication, adding doses of the opioids she’d been prescribed for her back pain. She did have back pain—probably from staying in bed too much—but she’d made it sound worse than it was to get a refill.

Eventually, her five prescriptions weren’t enough. She was secretive when she drank early in the day. But once the clock hit five, she felt no need to hide the martinis and old-fashioneds from her family. That was when she was in her best mood and at her finest with her boys. Joking with them, sometimes playing a board game. Though usually she was too stoned to play the game right.

Ellis learned how to vacate her past. Dissociate from her fears of the future. She could even slip away from the present. She was a ghost drifting around a prison that smelled of floor wax and dusting spray. Sometimes she swore her hands went right through the furniture when she tried to touch it.

Jonah stopped sleeping in the bedroom with her. Ellis understood. She disliked trying to sleep with the person she’d become as much as he did. And her bitterness toward him had grown almost as strong as her self-hatred. When he was in bed with her, keeping to the far side of the king mattress, his presence felt intrusive, as if she were sleeping with a stranger, some shitty guy who was cheating on his wife with his tennis instructor.

Almost six months after Ellis left her baby in the parking lot, the case of Viola Abbey Bauhammer’s abduction was essentially closed. Her recovery was deemed very unlikely by the detective supervising the case.

After Jonah gave Ellis that news, she took an extra dose of her back medication. She didn’t wait until five o’clock to pour a whiskey on ice while her husband aimed his usual reproachful glare at her.

“Do you want some?” she asked. “You look like you need it.”

“That is not what I need, Ellis,” he said bitterly.

He went to the kitchen, told his mother he had to go to work and wouldn’t be home for dinner.

Apparently, what he needed was Irene.

“Go ahead, honey,” Mary Carol said. “I have everything under control here.”