Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

What sort of a drug problem, said the other officer, and I said, prescription drugs of all kinds, I can show you the bottles if you like. And so I did. They said, do you have the original prescription for these, and I said, what do you think?

There’s no reason to get snotty, he said. And that’s when I saw Scott standing in the doorway, with a look on his face of absolute shock and dismay. I could see his heart was breaking. So easily had I come to take the addiction for granted that I had forgotten Scott didn’t know. And I felt very relieved that when it finally happened—almost exactly as I had anticipated, facedown on his laptop with vomit in the keys—it had been none of my doing. Because of course it could have gone very differently.

Life can be ironic that way. They took his body for toxicology tests and then sent him to the funeral home to be cremated. And when I sorted through his desk and found the letters and underpants from the graduate student he’d had an affair with two years ago that I never knew about, I thought, well, we’re even then. You maintained the illusion that you wanted us to stay married, and I maintained the illusion that I wanted you to stay alive.

It all seemed fair enough, in the scheme of things.

On Christmas Eve, three things happened.

I picked up Russ’s ashes from the crematorium. In the morning, because of their reduced holiday work hours.

On the way home, I stopped at the automatic teller machine and discovered my paycheck had bounced. That was when I knew I did not have a job anymore. That my son did not have a school anymore. It still stood in the shadow of trees, set back from the road on its wooded lot, but it was a relic now of a vanished past. No money, no school. Even a fairy-tale kingdom can’t run without gold.

And then there was the note from Scott, saying he had gone to stay with Russ’s family in Virginia, his aunt and uncle. Staying in the house freaked him out now, he wrote. But I knew the house was just a ruse. It was me he didn’t want to be near.

I suppose four things happened on Christmas Eve, really. But the fourth happened because of the three.

My car had no trouble finding the town house development and the woods behind it, driving there as if of its own volition. When I arrived, two rotting wooden posts flanked a newer metal gate, secured by a chain, which blocked my entry. So I put the Volvo in Reverse, rammed down one of the posts, and drove right up to the edge of the trees.

As I made my way into the woods I saw nothing of the lush landscape that had welcomed us barely months before. The trees jutted from the ground like dead sticks, not expansive and multicolored as they had been the day Zach brought me here. Where the crackling leaves had lain there was only a dry, dusty mulch, and the glint of sun through the trees was obscured by the mottled gray sky. Here was the tree he had leaned against, his hands weary as they rubbed his face, worn down by the immensity of his desire. Here was the patch of ground where I knelt above him, offering him a last chance to deny me before the jagged teeth of his zipper bit into the flesh of my inner thigh, before his indulgent grin tricked me into believing he could offer consent as competently as he offered pleasure.

I leaned back against that same tree and squinted up at the tangle of branches. The bark felt rough through my thin cotton shirt, but the panorama of the forest, in all its rotting loveliness, was still enchanting in its way. I dug into my purse for a small bottle I kept there, opened it, and swallowed a few of Russ’s Nembutal pills. The police had seized all the large bottles I had pointed out to them, but I still carried quite a lot in my purse, for reasons that were now irrelevant. I shook a few more into my hand and looked into the middle distance. Not far away there lay a swamp I had never noticed before. The sight of it made my heart lift a little. A body of water would be a good place to be when I fell asleep. I could vanish utterly, pulled back into the earth without a sound or a sign, and with no chance at all of waking.

I walked ahead a little ways and stepped into the swamp. The cold water squelched into my shoes. I bit my lip, but pressed on. Ankles, shins. The mud sucked my shoes from my feet, so I let them go. My toes, already adjusted to the temperature, shocked to the smooth, enveloping grasp of the mud. At the center of the mire I fell to my knees, steeling myself against the shock of the cold. I swallowed the pills that remained in my palm, then lowered my hand into the water to steady my balance against the shifting ground. My fingers came up covered in green and gray, like a swamp creature.

A flash of colored light in the distance caught my eye. It was a police car—no, two—investigating my car at the edge of the forest. I sighed deeply and sat back on my heels. Very soon, they would come into the woods and find me. I had no time to die. They would take me home, or more likely to a psychiatric ward, where I would play sane and soon be sent home with a bottle of Prozac. It would buy me just enough time for the gloom to pass and anger to set in, and I would decide it was better to stay alive. And alive, I was a menace. I had done bad things, and they weren’t nearly as bad as the things I had left to do.

The officers shone their flashlights into the woods: two discs of pale yellow light, like the centers of daffodils bobbing under a child’s hand. From the very bottom of my spirit I wished for only one thing—to speak to Bobbie now, to hear her speak the sorry truths about my dirty heart, to coax me into doing the right thing. But I knew Bobbie was not here to speak with, and if she had been she would have told me to use my liar’s talents for the good of all: to tell the story without embellishment and animation, so the listener’s mind can hear through the make-believe the sound of resonating truth.

Man is both a fallen god, and a god in the becoming.

With difficulty I rose from the dark water and trekked across the forest, my bare feet gathering leaf litter in their coat of mud. At the tree line the two officers looked up at me, their hands instinctively rising to their holsters.

I said, “I would like to confess to the murder of my husband.”

In the dark bedroom Zach’s mother appeared a bent black shape on the sheet, her body curved in a Z around the quilt. Rhianne’s inclined head was a shadow, hair sticking from her ponytail like raveled black threads, her whispers ghostlike.

Zach sat on a chair in the far corner, his usual place when Rhianne was present, a silent watcher. His father, on his knees beside the bed, clutched his mother’s hand and whispered earnestly in a reassuring baritone. If Zach slipped out, no one would have blamed him. The normally cool room was downright hot, the thermostat kicked up to eighty-six degrees, and his mother wore a black athletic bra and nothing else, although at the moment her body lay entwined in the straining sheet. Rhianne’s usually warm and easygoing manner toward Zach was gone, replaced with an edgy impatience that made Zach suspect she was angry at him, or secretly expecting something to go wrong.

But he was determined to be present. This was his sister, yes, but for some other, less explainable reason he felt obligated. It seemed a reckoning, to sit and observe helplessly this other side of passion, to watch how nature accounted for the pleasure. After all his indulgences, he owed himself that much.

Despite the whispering, nothing in that room was quiet; specifically, nothing about his mother. Fighting through what Rhianne called transition, she groaned and sobbed, took great gulps of air, then clutched the corner of the pillow to her face and sobbed even more. Her ankles strained, pulling the sheet tight between them. The white of her face and dark of her hair flashed strobelike as she twisted against the pillow.