Greg Iles - The Devil’s Punchbowl

Terror hits her, gluing her bare feet to the floor. She can hear shoes moving behind the door. They creak as the intruder shifts his weight. Could it be the police? No–they would crash through the door. It might be another junkie, coming to steal Tim’s stash . When the window slides back down, Julia tightens her finger on the trigger and almost fires through the door .

She’s on the verge of bolting for the baby’s crib when she realizes that the intruder must be Tim, because there’s no light on in the guest room, yet the person inside is moving with assurance. She slides back three steps and aims the pistol at the door. If it opens and anyone but Tim appears, she will fire. She hears a muttered curse, and then the door opens .

Tim jerks as though he’s been hit with a cattle prod when he sees the gun pointed at his face. Then suddenly he is apologizing, begging her to forgive him. She’s so angry that she wants to shoot him, but her relief is even stronger .

‘Where were you?’ she cries in a squelched scream. ‘It’s four in the morning!’

‘Hey, hey,’ he says soothingly, throwing some balled-up clothes onto the floor. ‘It’s going to be all right now.’

‘Bullshit!’ she hisses. ‘I almost shot you! You fucking liar! Liar liar LIAR!’

Tim’s forehead wrinkles with puzzlement. ‘What are you talking about? I’ve been with Penn, honey. You don’t want to know more than that.’

Julia wipes her eyes with a quivering hand and looks at him the way she used to when she had to manage every moment of his life to keep him from sliding back into the abyss. She means to ask about the drugs, but what she says is ‘Just with Penn?’

Something in the quick blinking of his eyes tells her that whatever follows is going to be a lie. As she turns away, the fine cracks that have accumulated in her trust over the past weeks give way, and the true fragility of her existence is revealed. She stifles a wail, then goes to the kitchen cupboard and takes out a bottle of Isomil to heat on the stove .

She now knows that what she told herself after leaving her first husband was a lie . If a man ever cheats on me again, I’ll leave him in a second. So easy to say, but with a baby in the nursery things get a lot more complicated .

‘Julia?’ Tim says awkwardly .

If he tries to approach her, she will move away to avoid smelling another woman on him. ‘There’s something for you on the table,’ she says coldly .

‘Huh?’

‘The table!’ She watches the gas flame glow at the edge of the pot .

‘Oh, God,’ Tim breathes. ‘Julia—’

‘Mm-hm?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘It’s not? That’s not dope on the table? That’s not Vicodin and cocaine?’

‘No. I mean…it is, yeah. You know it is.’

‘Let me guess. It’s not yours, right? You’re just holding it for somebody.’

Hearing the floor creak, she holds up a hand to ward him off. He stops .

‘Baby, I know what you think, but that stuff is part of what Penn and I are doing.’

Even Julia is surprised by the harshness of her laughter. ‘Oh, right. I understand now. You and the mayor are using a bag of dope to save the city.’

There’s a brief silence. Then Tim says, ‘Actually that’s about it. Penn doesn’t know about that part of it, but it’s the only way. That’s all I can really tell you now. Anything else would be dangerous. In a few days, though, I should be able to explain it to you.’

‘If you’re not in jail, you mean?’

Tim sighs in what sounds like exhaustion. ‘I just wish you’d believe me. Haven’t I earned that yet?’

Julia grips the pot handle with her shaking hands. Part of her wants to throw the hot water on him, to scald him for lying to her. But part of her wants to believe. Tim sounded like he was telling the truth about the drugs, and she truly hasn’t seen any signs of his being high. But he’s lying about something–that she knows .

‘Julia?’

‘You’re home now,’ she snaps, her eyes locked onto the milk bottle warming in the pot of water. ‘Whatever you’re doing, get it done, so we can get back to living.’

Tim keeps his distance. ‘Okay.’

‘All right,’ she says, cutting off further discussion. ‘Go get Timmy, please. You know what time it is. He’s going to start crying any second.’

The kitchen is so small she can feel Tim nodding in the shadows. ‘Okay,’ he mumbles in surrender .

Julia opens the bottle and touches some hot milk to the inside of her wrist. She knows what’s important .

I come awake swatting at my bedside table like a man battling a horsefly. According to the alarm clock, I got four hours of sleep. It’s all I can do to walk blindly into the shower and stand under scalding spray until my synapses seem to be firing normally. After making sure Annie is awake, I dress a little sharper than usual, since I have to spend at least two hours giving Hans Necker, the visiting CEO, a tour of sites for his recycling plant. Annie gives me a thumbs-up when I walk into the kitchen, a rare seal of approval for my day’s outfit. She’s eating cereal and some garlic cheese grits my mother made yesterday. I finish off the cheese grits, drink the cup of coffee Annie has made me, and follow her out to the car, so exhausted that I forget to glance into Caitlin’s driveway for a car.

Annie is uncharacteristically quiet during the ride to St Stephen’s, but as we near the turn for the school, I discover why.

‘I dreamed about Caitlin last night,’ she says softly.

‘Did you?’ I wonder whether my daughter could have seen or heard something across the street that told her Caitlin might be in town.

Annie nods with slow deliberation. As I watch her from the corner of my eye, it strikes me that the topless teenager serving beer in Tim’s photograph was probably only four years older than my daughter. This realization is freighted with such horror that I have to clear my throat and look away. Annie knows nothing of such things yet, or at least I hope she doesn’t. Right now one of her deepest concerns is the women in my life.

‘Have you ever dreamed about Caitlin before?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Not for a long time, though.’

‘What was last night’s dream about?’

Annie keeps her eyes forward. ‘I don’t want to say.’

Strange . ‘Why not? Was it scary?’

‘Not at first. But then it was, kind of.’

Recalling my own nightmare of the ice field and the wolf, I turn into the school’s driveway and pull up to the door of the middle school building. ‘Sometimes things are less scary if you talk about them.’

Annie looks at me with her mother’s eyes. ‘I just want to think about it for a while.’

Her enigmatic expression tells me she’s already beyond my understanding. ‘You know what’s best for you, I guess.’

She gets out and shoulders her backpack like a younger version of her babysitter, but as she walks through the big doors, I see her mother in every sway of her body. It’s moments like these–the most commonplace events–that hit me hardest, reminding me that widower is more than an archaic word. As my eleven-year-old disappears into the halls of the same school I attended at her age, I wish fervently that the woman who supplied the other half of Annie’s DNA could have lived to see who she’s becoming.

‘Baby girl,’ I whisper to the breath-fogged window, ‘Mama sees you.’