The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(68)

She found Mrs. Greene dusting the banister in the front hall.

“You don’t believe this, do you?” Patricia asked her. “You know who he really is.”

Mrs. Greene made her face perfectly calm.

“I spoke with Mrs. Cavanaugh and she explained to me that y’all wouldn’t be able to help anymore,” Mrs. Greene said. “She told me everyone in Six Mile are on our own. She explained everything to me in great detail.”

“It’s not true,” Patricia said.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Greene said, smiling dimly. “I understand. From here on out, I don’t expect anything from any of y’all.”

“I’m on your side,” Patricia said. “I just need some time for everything to settle down.”

“You’re on your side,” Mrs. Greene said. “Don’t ever fool yourself about that.”

Then she turned her back on Patricia and kept dusting Grace’s home.

Something exploded red and black inside Patricia’s brain and the next thing she knew she was storming into her house, standing on the sun porch, seeing Korey slumped in the big chair staring at the TV.

“Would you please turn that off and go downtown or to the beach or somewhere?” Patricia snapped. “It is one o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Dad said I didn’t have to listen to you,” Korey told her. “He said you were going through a phase.”

It touched off a fire inside her, but Patricia had the clarity to see how carefully Carter had built this trap for her. Anything she did would prove him right. She could hear him saying, in his smooth psychiatric tones, It’s a sign of how sick you are, that you can’t see how sick you are.

She took a deep breath. She would not react. She would not participate in this anymore. She went into the dining room and saw the Prozac in its saucer and the bottle of pills next to it. She snatched them up and took them into the kitchen.

Standing by the sink, she ran the water and washed the pill down the drain. She unscrewed the bottle, and looked at it for a moment. Then she got out a glass, filled it, set it down, and began to take the entire bottle of pills, one by one.





CHAPTER 23


The sweet reek of boiled ketchup crawled up Patricia’s nostrils, slid over her sinuses, and coated her throat. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, and tasted a bitter film coating her teeth. Her skull lurched as her upper body jerked forward and she opened her eyes and saw a nurse cranking up her bed. It had white sheets and a beige rail. Carter stood at the end of her hospital bed.

“We don’t need that,” he told the nurse.

Patricia saw a burgundy plastic tray on a rolling table in front of her, and a covered dish stinking of boiled ketchup. The nurse lifted the lid and Patricia saw three gray meatballs sitting on a limp pile of yellow spaghetti covered in ketchup.

“I have to leave the meal,” the nurse said.

“Then put it over there,” Carter said, and the nurse placed it on a chair by the door and left.

“Tell me you mixed up the dosage,” Carter said. “Tell me you made a mistake.”

She didn’t want to have this conversation right now. Patricia turned and stared out her window at the late-afternoon sunlight slashing across the upper floors of the Basic Sciences building and realized she was in the psych unit.

“Do I have brain damage?” she asked.

“Do you know who found you?” Carter asked, resting his hands on the bed rail. “Blue. He’s ten years old and he found his mother having a seizure on the kitchen floor and you probably would have brain damage if he hadn’t been smart enough to call 911. What were you thinking, Patty? Were you thinking?”

Hot tears squirted from her eyes, one at a time, tapping her nose, streaming over her lips.

“Is Blue here?” she asked.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Patty, but I swear we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

He made her feel like an essay question on one of the children’s tests, but she didn’t have a right to object. Blue must have been terrified when he found her twitching on the kitchen floor. It would haunt him for the rest of his life. The hot, gristly smell of meatballs made her stomach twist itself tight.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said, her jaw clenched.

“No one’s listening to you anymore,” Carter said. “You made a serious suicide attempt, however you try to explain it away. They have you on a twenty-four-hour involuntary hold, but I’m going to check you out of here first thing in the morning. There’s nothing wrong with you we can’t solve at home. But before any of that happens, I need to know right now: was this about James Harris?”

“What?” she asked, and turned to look at her husband.

His face was stricken, open, and raw. His hands fidgeted hard on the bed rail.

“You’re my whole life,” he said. “You and the children. You and I have grown up together. And suddenly you’re obsessed with Jim, you can’t stop thinking about him, you can’t stop talking about him, and then you do this. The woman I married would never try to kill herself. It wasn’t in her character.”

“I wasn’t…,” she said, genuinely trying to explain, “I didn’t want to die. I was just so angry. You wanted me to take those pills so badly, so I took them.”