They could no longer afford to dine out, and they were living in a gray-shingled, rundown rental house in the wrong end of town. April’s surroundings were hardly calculated to help her escape the depression that held her in a vise, but then neither was their dwindling bank account.
Justice opened the refrigerator and began putting perishables away. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat?”
April shook her head no. “I’m gonna take a pill.”
Justice felt his stomach tighten. To April, taking a pill was synonymous with taking a nap. Unless she took wrong combinations or dosages, which happened frequently. Then she’d be manically active, desperate, and heart-breaking.
She’d once described her depression as falling down a slippery dark well that got more and more narrow and constricting. And as you fell, you knew with increasing certainty that you would never be able to climb back up to the light that now you could no longer even see.
As Justice finished putting away the groceries, he could hear April clattering around in the bathroom. The old house’s pipes rattled briefly as she ran water to wash down whatever in her galaxy of medications she was taking.
Twice she’d mistakenly taken overdoses that would have proved fatal if she hadn’t told Justice about them. Once in bed beside him in the middle of the night, and once by phone when he was working in a twenty-four-hour convenience store that had since closed. Both times he’d called 911 and they’d reached the emergency room in time, where April consumed what they’d both come to refer to as “the charcoal milkshake” that neutralized what was in her stomach, and was then pumped out.
After the second overdose, a doctor had told Justice that April might have taken an overdose deliberately in a suicide attempt, but Justice knew better. April wanted to live. She fed off his own determination that she should live, that everything should return to normal—but a different kind of normal, without their son, Will. It was possible. It must be. It seemed far away at times to Justice, but it was possible.
He went into the bedroom and found April lying fully clothed on the bed that hadn’t been made for days. The old window air conditioner was humming and squealing away, not doing much about the humid St. Louis heat in high summer. The shades were pulled. Even if they didn’t fit well and light leaked in all around them; at least the room was dim. At times April got headaches that were unbearable, and lying perfectly still on her back in the dimness seemed the only thing that might help.
Justice sat down on the bed beside her. “You doing okay?”
She squeezed his hand. “I hate to put you through this shit.”
He smiled. “It won’t be forever.”
“It’s already been forever.”
He sat and was silent, looking at her closed eyes, watching her pupils move beneath the thin flesh of her eyelids, knowing she might be exhausted but she wasn’t near sleep.
“Headache, too?” he asked.
“No. Just everything else.” Her breasts rose, fell. “It’s so goddamned hopeless.”
He pressured her hand rhythmically with his own. “Don’t say it’s hopeless. It only seems that way sometimes.”
“I know what I put you through,” she said, still with her eyes closed. “It isn’t fair.”
“Maybe it’ll even out.”
Her pale lips arranged themselves in a tired smile. New deep lines at the corners of her mouth. “You mean someday you’ll put me through the same thing?”
“You know what I meant. Our life together will be better someday.”
“You believe that? With Will gone from us?”
“It won’t be as good as with Will, but it can be better than it is now.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
She began to cry. He touched the backs of his knuckles gently to her cheek and she turned her head away.
“I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid all the time.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. The future. Nothing and everything. I’m tired of being afraid.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“If I didn’t—”
“What?” He could tell by the tightness around her mouth that she was getting frustrated. With him. With everything. He knew he should think more before he spoke. If she didn’t have to be afraid, she sure as hell wouldn’t be.
“Maybe you oughta take a drive,” she said. It was what he did when they both knew an argument was building like a summer storm on the horizon. “Get some ice cream and bring it back here.”
“You didn’t want ice cream in the store.”
“Go to Ted Drewes. Get me a chocolate chip concrete.”
Ted Drewes was a frozen custard stand that was the most popular place in St. Louis when the temperature got over eighty. And it was over ninety today. “I’ll be in line behind a hundred people,” Justice said.
She opened her eyes, looked at him, and smiled, not the way she usually was with a fight coming on. “The lines there move fast, and only frozen custard can make me feel better.”
“Or ice cream.”
“Not the same.”
Justice leaned down and kissed her cool forehead. “Frozen custard it is.” He stood up, went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face and wrists. When he came back in the bedroom, he was tucking in his shirt. “You said chocolate?”
“Chocolate chip,” she said, with her eyes closed again. She seemed tired now. When he got back, she might be asleep. That would be okay; he’d put both frozen concoctions in the freezer and they could eat them later.
When he left the house, he locked the front door behind him, then drove their five-year-old Ford to the custard stand.
After maneuvering through traffic surrounding the tiny stand, he finally found a parking space in the rear of the lot, near an alley. The car’s air conditioner didn’t work worth a damn, and as soon as he turned off the engine the heat closed in.
He joined a long line at one of the serving windows and stood in the sun and sweated for about twenty minutes before he walked away with two frozen custard specialties in a white takeout bag.
The drive back took another twenty minutes.
As soon as Justice entered the house, he made his way toward the bedroom, where he assumed April was asleep.
Peeking in, he saw her still in bed, lying on her side, turned away from him. He went into the kitchen, put her frozen custard in the freezer section of the fridge, then sat at the kitchen table and ate his own chocolate treat.
Something wasn’t right. Something about the silence in the tiny, stifling house. He was finished with his frozen custard, so he dropped the cardboard container into the trash, then went to the bedroom to look in again on April.
She hadn’t moved. He started to close the door so he could turn on the TV and not disturb her, when it struck him that she was lying exactly as before. On her right side, left shoulder slightly hunched, left hand turned palm out, the tips of her fingers just visible over the curve of her hip.
His heart went cold; his legs numb; even before he knew for sure.
He didn’t want to walk over and examine his wife more closely, didn’t want to step into a new and darker world. But he had to. He couldn’t go back to the kitchen, sit at the table, and pretend it was five minutes ago. So he walked across the bedroom’s threadbare carpet. On unfeeling legs of rubber, he walked. He leaned. He looked.
Her eyes were closed, but her skin didn’t look quite right. Already it had begun to acquire a slight waxiness, and her perfect stillness was that of something inanimate. On the carpet on her side of the bed was a litter of vials and bottles—her stash of untaken prescription medicines the doctors had warned Justice that she might have hidden somewhere in the house. He stared at the lidless, capless empty containers, at the empty water glass on its side nearby. She’d taken everything, every kind of pill, every pill.
In her right hand was a crumpled scrap of paper, a message perhaps to him. But when he detached the object from her hand he saw that it was a photograph of Will, their lost son, taken on his fourth birthday, beaming behind a three-layer cake while a hand that had found its way into the frame—Justice’s own hand—was about to hold a lighted match to four waiting candles. The photo was an instant caught in time that stabbed him like a blade through the heart.