The Wife Upstairs(64)
He’d been getting dressed, and I saw the muscles in his back tense.
I shouldn’t have said it.
I’d had to say it.
And then he looked at me and said, “Is that really a problem you want me to focus on, Bea? Do you really want me to think about how I might solve it?”
He left right after that.
FUCK.
* * *
Still no sign of him. It’s been days. Is he just leaving me to die? That would certainly be an easy solution to his “problem.”
For him.
Not so easy for me.
I’ve got my little hoard of food and water, some of it hidden under the bed, and I’ve started counting it obsessively, even though I know the counting is bad, and I shouldn’t.
But I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only thing I feel in control of right now.
* * *
He came back today. Four days he left me on my own. I was so grateful to see him that I threw myself into his arms, breathing him in, and I felt his arms tighten around me, heard him murmur my name against my hair.
He’d missed me, too. But will it be enough?
* * *
JULY, A YEAR AFTER BLANCHE
This is my last entry. Eddie is in the shower, and I have to hurry.
Jane, I know you’ll find this. Eddie cares about you, respects you, and that means you’re smart. I’m putting this book in the pocket of his blazer. It’s too warm for him to put it back on when he goes downstairs, so I’m hoping he won’t even feel that it’s there.
Regardless, I have to risk it. For myself, and for you, Jane. Please. Please find this. Please find me. I can’t survive here any longer.
I’m upstairs. You have to walk to the end of the hall and go through a closet. I don’t know the code to the door, but I think it might be the same as the code to the lake house, my birthday. Eddie isn’t good with numbers.
Jane, I am begging you.
Save me. Save yourself.
Please.
Her childhood was so absurdly Southern gothic she sometimes thinks she must’ve made it up.
But no, she actually made her past blander and more boring, a pastel replica of Blanche’s childhood. That was really for the best, though. No one wanted to know about the Too Big House in the middle of West Alabama. The dad who drank too much, whose fists were fast even when he was drunk. The mom who’d checked out on vodka and Klonopin so early in Bea’s childhood that she couldn’t remember her mother ever playing with or reading to her.
She hadn’t been Bea then, of course. Back then, she was still Bertha. Bertha Lydia Mason. Bertha had been her dad’s mother, Lydia her mother’s, and she’d always thought they could’ve at least done her the courtesy of reversing the names. Being a Lydia would not have been as bad as being a Bertha.
But that was hardly the worst thing her parents did.
She doesn’t remember the first time her father hit her. It’s as ingrained a part of her childhood as the canopy bed in her room, the place in her bathroom where the wallpaper never laid flat. Just there, like background noise. When he was drunk, when he was angry, sometimes, she thought, just when he was bored.
There had been money in her family at some point, close enough that her father remembered growing up with it and keenly felt the lack of it. It was money that had built the house, sometime in the twenties, but by Blanche’s childhood, the house was practically sinking into the red Alabama dirt around it. There was no money for things like repairing the roof, and when a leak started, when the ceiling literally began to rot away in an upstairs bedroom, Bertha’s parents just closed that door and pretended it wasn’t happening.
Bertha learns to do that, too. It’s easier, closing a door, creating a new reality.
She goes to the local public school because there isn’t anything else in her tiny town. Not just a public school, a county school, which, for a reason she never really understands, bothers her father more than a city school would.
Her mother had gone to boarding school near Birmingham. Ivy Ridge. She talks about it a lot, makes it seem like a paradise on earth, full of pretty girls in plaid skirts, redbrick buildings, tall, old trees.
Bertha looks it up on the computers at school, and it is even more beautiful than her mother had made it seem.
It is the easiest thing in the world to fill out an application.
Harder to get financial aid since her parents are supposed to apply for that, and they need tax returns and all sorts of other adult things Bertha doesn’t really know anything about. But she’s smart and resourceful, and one night after her father is passed out in what her mother still insists on calling the parlor, Bertha sneaks into his desk.
His papers are a mess but she finds what she needs, and by the time seventh grade is over, Bertha has an acceptance letter and a complete free ride to Ivy Ridge until she graduates so long as she maintains a high GPA.
It’s the hardest her father ever hits her, the night he learns what she’s done. Later, she’ll lie in her bed, tongue probing the throbbing place in her mouth where her teeth feel loose, but the pain is nothing. The pain is worth it because she’s built herself a life raft away from the sinking ship of her family.
It’s really what starts it all, changes everything—Ivy Ridge introduces her to a new life, introduces her to Blanche, but more importantly, it introduces her to a new version of herself. The one she didn’t know was there, the one who can make things happen.