The Spite House(42)



And if Eunice answered honestly, Lafonda believed she would say, Yes.





CHAPTER 18



Max Renner



“You need to eat,” Max said again. His heart was beating so hard he thought he might faint. He’d never had to tell her to eat twice before. He rarely had to give her any instruction more than once.

Jane wasn’t fully catatonic, which was what made her impossible to diagnose. She was more like an old “Hollywood Voodoo” zombie. She would move on her own to obey orders. If you told her she should go to the bathroom before going to sleep, she would do so. If you told her that she needed to eat, she ate. She even used utensils. But if you told her to walk into traffic—which Max did a few months back—she would stare at you like you were a puzzle she was bored with.

That was how she looked at her bowl of stew now.

How does she know? Max thought.

He had ground up peanuts and put them in her food, but he’d seasoned it well enough to mask the smell or taste. At least he thought he had. Maybe she still sniffed them out. There was no way she could see them, and he told her to wait in the bedroom while he made it, to be sure she didn’t see him preparing to poison her.

Eating half of a Snickers bar would be enough to close her throat and send her into shock. Max put about four times that many peanuts into the stew. In hindsight, that might have been overkill. The aroma was too intense and kept her from eating. He only wanted to be sure he put in enough to end her life quickly. There was no guarantee it would be painless, but he wasn’t sure she felt pain anymore.

He could have made it simpler. After trying and failing to have her walk into traffic, he bought a gun. A black nine-millimeter, semiautomatic. Nothing outlandish. Something to end the facsimile of a life she had left, and end his suffering.

It wasn’t just the burden of caring for her. It was what he saw each night in his sleep. Terrible visions too immediate and painful to be dreams. He saw Jane crawling inside the spite house looking for a way out, but confined within its walls. Its windows wouldn’t break when she tried to strike them. Its door wouldn’t open for her or let her pass when someone else opened it. The floating hallway always called her back to it, and she had no choice but to obey, even though it took another small bite out of what was left of her each time she returned to it. How long until there was nothing left of her?

Too long. He hated himself for thinking that, but it was true. As awful as it was to think of her soul being consumed by that place, it was even worse to think of how long that would take, and what it meant for him. Years of tortured sleep and wearying days. He drove as little as possible now, always fearful of falling asleep at the wheel. Last month he pleaded with the landlord to move them to an apartment on the bottom floor, because he’d caught himself on the verge of nodding off while coming down the stairs. How long before he fell asleep with the stove on? Or passed out on his feet in the shower and cracked his head on the way down?

What happened to Jane—her separation—was indirectly breaking him down, too. Eating him up in its own way, months after he thought he escaped the house. Killing her, then, was more self-preservation than pure selfishness, and there was a clear difference between the two, he thought.

So why couldn’t he point the gun at her, even with her back turned? Why did the thought of doing so make him want to throw up? It wasn’t just that a shooting would be messier in every applicable sense. It was that there was no real buffer. No step between. His finger on the trigger, causing a bullet to fly through the back of her head. There was some separation between telling her to get hit by a car and her actually following the order. A smaller distance between putting crushed peanuts into her food and letting her eat it, but a distance, nonetheless. He needed that. She wasn’t going to give it to him this evening.

Max took her bowl away and dumped the stew into the sink. He could always let her starve, he thought. Or die of thirst, that would come faster. Leave the house for a week or so, let inertia be her killer, and deal with the body when he came back. But that was too cruel, and he knew that the part of him that still held out hope for her would override the part that wanted to move on without her. That same part of himself might have taken over long enough to grab her hand if she dipped her spoon into her stew tonight. It would have pulled her out of harm’s way if she had listened when he told her to walk onto the highway.

He went to the fridge for leftovers from yesterday’s takeout. He thought about heating it up, then just gave it to her cold. It wasn’t going to make a difference to her or him. She’d eat it regardless, and a basic courtesy wasn’t going to make up for what he just tried to do. Not even close. His guilt-driven nightmares were already lined up and waiting for him to fall asleep.





CHAPTER 19



Eric



The night arrived too soon, the way all dreaded things do. Eric tried not to dwell on what it might bring. He, Stacy, and Dess cooked dinner together after getting an evening delivery from the grocer. Homemade spaghetti in meat sauce, something simple for their first time preparing a family meal in a proper kitchen, albeit a compact one, in eight months. They still made a bit of a mess, sang some songs while cooking, and laughed together, but ultimately it wasn’t the distraction he hoped for. If anything, it brought the darkest part of the night to them earlier. Time flies and all.

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