Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

Marion nodded quickly, fingering the handkerchief of pills in her pocket.

“Well, that’s fine,” Louise said, smiling broadly. “That’s fine. Do you have them here?”

Marion plucked them from her pocket and handed them to Louise, who smiled like Christmas morning.

They went to her locker and Louise put the pills in the heel of her spare shoe.

“Ginny, she likes to take pills, pills like that?”

“Well, don’t she. She suffers mightily, Marion, and who would hold a little peace against her?”

“Not I,” she said, twisting her ring around her finger. “My husband, he…”

“Oh, I’m sure, as a doctor, he sees such things all the time. I’m sure he understands that in these gloomy days one must pass out glimmers where one may. Isn’t that so, Marion?”

“He does understand that,” Marion agreed, thinking of her husband, hand covering his face, covering it from her as he lay on his hospital bed, sat on the bench in the county jail, walked in from five days missing, eyes hooded from her, not bearing to touch her. “Yes, he does.”

THE DARK SPOT on his brain. That was how Dr. Seeley explained it to her long ago. It was like a dark spot, pulsing. He said were it not for the dark spot the size of a thumbprint, a baby plum, he would be living the life of the man he so clearly was. Intelligent, stalwart, respectable. The town doctor, the trusted citizen. The doting husband. The kindly father.

The dark spot, shaped, perhaps, like a crooked star, a pinwheel, a circle fan.

What it was, exactly, he could not explain, even to her, even as he cried in her arms in hospital wards in three states. It was his private curse.

He had not even known of its presence until age twenty-nine when, while seated in the audience of the Savoy Theatre in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a large eave of plaster ceiling fell upon him, upon his leg and hip, and twenty other audience members. The picture was called A Love Sundae, he always remembered that.

He was in the hospital for four days and, a young doctor himself, he knew his injuries were far from critical. But his body, the way it moved, never felt the same again. And the medicine they gave him, why, it was a wonder, shuttling his body to Kubla Khan, and there was nothing else like it. Nothing at all. He tried. There was nothing.

Shaking hands, some stolen medicine found in his automobile, that little girl’s jaw set wrong. He knew he had to stop. But he could not. That was when he became aware of the dark spot. Its pulsing points, the way it lived in his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.

MR. JOE LANIGAN had many reasons to be at the clinic. His pharmacies, three within city limits, brought him into business with Werden and they knew him well. He was there in Dr. Milroy’s office and there was no reason to be surprised, to be struck. Marion heard his voice first, the big quality of it, like he was on a stage or in a pulpit.

“…that’s the stuff. That’s the future right there. All the doctors back east are using it. Just back myself and that’s what they all said. Chicago. Cleveland. Philadelphia. Boston. Even New York City.”

Dr. Milroy stuttered a reply Marion couldn’t make out and then it was Joe Lanigan again.

“…ammonium chloride with codeine and, if the cough is loose, the heroin of terpin hydrate. Call me old-fashioned, Doctor, but you can use those ultraviolet contraptions till we’re all moon men and it won’t shake the rug without some fine chemical assistance.”

They talked some and Marion stood by the door with her legs trembling and she felt silly about herself, she a grown woman with legs trembling from some big-voiced man. But what could she tell her body? Nothing. Her body knew things she didn’t and it shook like a spring toy and then the door began to open and she saw him there and he saw her.

“Why, Mrs. Seeley, my New Year’s baby,” he said, his eyes dancing, his body, cloaked in brush-soft flannel, still and easy.

She said hello, Mr. Lanigan, and nearly curtsied, seeing him as she had, three days before, under a sugared skein of girl-pink champagne, under the heavy weight of parlor heat, thick on their skins, thick with their own energies, own high spirits. And now here like this, in the cool, bleachy hallways of the blasted-brick clinic, didn’t it look so inoculated? Yet it was a pox, vermin in every sweating pore, sputum lining every crevice no matter how swabbed and brush-scoured it was.

“You tend to all the lungers? God’s work,” he said serenely, so upright, so upright in this place, at this time, amid no popping corks.

She said it was not quite tending and explained her job in ways that didn’t include days filled with her ear to the Dictaphone, with listening to doctors droning on wax cylinders, with stamping ink onto forms with small boxes enfolding smaller boxes enfolding smaller boxes still. She explained it quickly and simply and he nodded, as though listening, as though listening and caring. He asked her about how Dr. Milroy treated her, did he make her work long hours, did he make sure she got home safely, and how did her coworkers treat her, had they made her feel at home here?

Then he invited her to lunch. He said he had some questions about Mrs. Lanigan’s care and hoped she might offer her thoughts, you see, his wife was ill, very ill.

She supposed she had known he had a wife. They all had wives. But hearing him speak of her made something twitch under her skin and her fingers sought, quietly, the effusion scar on her neck, the Golden Stamp, as Ginny called it.

“Well, Mrs. Seeley, will you?” he asked again.

What could be wrong about having lunch with a man who wanted help in matters concerning his wife’s health? Surely anyone would approve, would think it proper, kind even.

THE BRIGHTLY LIT dining room of McBewley’s stretched before her, with crisp white tablecloths and freshly cut petunias and sweet baskets of crumbly breads that came with little glass tumblers small as thimbles of seedy jam that slid on her fingers and under her nails, and she would taste it for hours back at the clinic just flicking secretly her hand along her lower lip, along her part-open mouth.

They served tea in steaming pots dotted with cornflowers and the sandwiches came on porcelain plates and there were tall glasses of tea and crisp-cut lemon wedges.

And Joe Lanigan sat across from her and the table was small and even leaning back, as he tended to do to grant her proper distance, even then his leg crossing still sometimes grazed her skirt. But he paid no notice and talked seriously, gravely, with solemnity, about his dear wife struck down not by lung evils but by kidney ailments and other private disorders, and now confined to bed. Confined to bed now near three years.

Many a doctor had recommended he send her to a clinic for full-time care but he’d have none of it. As long as he could manage a nurse in the home, he would keep her there, keep her with him and their two children, ages seven and nine, who needed a mother, even if that mother seldom left her darkened room, air always thick with camphor and eucalyptus. As long as he could work dawn to dusk making a success of his stores, he would keep her there—wasn’t that the right thing, God’s will? Didn’t she agree?

WHEN HE LOOKED AT HER, she could feel it like his finger, the tip of his finger, was tickling the lace bristles on her underthings. Like it was flicking up and down down there. And she didn’t know where she got this idea because nothing like that had ever happened to her. No man’s fingers there, not like that, light and teasing and slow. Not like Dr. Seeley, whom she only remembered ever touching her underthings as if they were delicate pages of an ancient screed, beginning on their wedding night when he had to coax her for hours with patting strokes or nothing ever would have happened at all, scared as she was that his plan—any man’s plan—was to rip her in two. That’s what her church friend Evangeline, who’d married at seventeen and left school, said it was like. Marion saw her at the Sunday social two weeks after the wedding where Vangy had worn her mother’s heavy dress, weighed five pounds. She and Vangy carried their plates slick with watermelon juice from the tables and snuck down to the Willow Run Creek and Vangy had said, Oh, Marion, wait long as you can. I’m riven in two and I never knew from such pain like a hot poker stuck. Each time like wire sticking in me. Don’t relent till you can’t wait for a baby a moment longer. Once I get two children I’m turning face to the wall in bed each night and just he try and make me lay still for him one more time. Just he try.