Because I was actually really mad at her.
I still loved her—don’t get me wrong.
I loved every molecule of her.
But I was really, really, really mad at her.
Maybe an answer would let me leave her and still love her and maybe forgive her.
But I didn’t know if I could forgive her. I didn’t know if I should forgive her.
All my life I’d sort of trained myself not to react to how people treated me and to just let go of how they made me feel, no matter how bad it hurt.
But maybe it was wrong not to feel things like that and not get angry and react, and instead just be buried in myself because everybody maybe wanted me to, because it just sort of made me less of a problem for them and somebody they didn’t have to see or recognize or care about at all.
Boy, was I feeling weird.
I was really scared of myself.
I sat there thinking I’d totally flipped.
Downstairs, the maid shut off the vacuum, put it away, and started doing something else; I couldn’t tell just what. She hadn’t let Dobey out of the basement yet, but I was sure I’d have his company in a little while.
I thought I had a few minutes.
I got to my feet and quietly stepped through an open door into another room.
A bedroom.
The master bedroom.
Her parents’.
It was fancy like the rest of the house, sure, but I no longer cared about that. I was sick of seeing all their stuff; they had too much of it. But I was glad there was this big window next to the bed, because lots of daylight came through the filmy curtains and flooded the room, making it easy to see everything.
There was a stand on one side of the bed, with lots of drawers. On top was a crystal lamp and a few bracelets in a little box—I figured it was her mom’s side of the bed.
I wondered what was in the drawers. Maybe something secret. Maybe something to explain why she was so mean to Laura.
I knelt down and opened the top drawer.
The first thing I saw almost made me laugh.
For all her interest in organics, Laura’s mom really didn’t have the right to bitch at Laura about eating wrong, because I saw this whole pack of candy bars stuffed in the drawer, huge chocolate caramel nut jobs—you know, the good kind.
I shuffled around in the drawer and found a pill vial.
I picked it up and read the label. It was prescribed for Laura’s mom. I dropped it back inside and shut the drawer.
Across the bed was another cabinet just like the first one—nightstand cabinets, I guess they’re called. This was obviously Laura’s dad’s side of the bed.
What was in his top drawer? Maybe it would explain why he acted like Laura didn’t exist.
I went over.
When I opened the drawer I froze.
A gun lay there, on a few papers. It was flat and black and had a trigger lock; I’d seen those things in magazines, so I knew just what it was. The whole trigger area was covered in this black plastic blocking device with a weird three-hole key slot.
It just sat there, like—well, I hardly know how to say it—like it was waiting.
I wanted to pick it up.
I wanted to get rid of it.
It terrified me.
I didn’t know why, but it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, and I thought I should just stash it somewhere, hidden.
But I didn’t.
I reached down urgently to grab it, but my hand stopped.
It just stopped.
I just didn’t want to touch the gun.
I guess it scared me too much.
I felt I was crazy.
You don’t have to think that—I did.
I was crazy.
I reached up under the lip of the drawer. Nobody can hide anything from me. I felt around with my fingers. I touched something held by a magnet and pulled it loose.
A weird key.
It was a round cylinder of plastic with three prongs of stainless steel: three prongs for the slot of the trigger lock.
I looked at the key for a long time.
I put it back, closed the drawer, and stood straight. I looked to one side of the room. There was a master bathroom attached, all marble and silver. I slipped in.
I opened the medicine cabinet.
I stood a few seconds, just looking.
I’d figured it. I used to deliver all this stuff for that pharmacy on my bike.
Lots of vials. All psychiatric stuff.
Laura’s mom.
I felt for her. I was such a creep for snooping, but I really felt for her.
I’d lost track of the maid. I listened for her.
There she was, downstairs, going from room to room. She was talking in Spanish on a phone now. She had a pleasant voice. Then she yelled, “Dobey?” With a Spanish accent the name sounded cute, with all the emphasis on the second syllable.
“Dobey?”
I heard old Dobes bark from the basement, and the maid’s footsteps headed for the kitchen.
I couldn’t get that gun out of my head.
I looked back at the nightstand.
It was in there.
It was waiting.
All right, I was crazy.
But I wasn’t there to hurt anybody.
I’d never hurt anybody in my whole life.
I’d never even thought about hurting anybody.
But I already said how all summer everything had begun to feel so difficult, and that after Laura left me I had to sort of control myself, and I worried that if I just let myself go I might do anything.
And you hear stories, you know, about crazy people who just go off half-cocked without even knowing they wanted to, and I thought about that. I thought about how I’d come into Laura’s house and maybe had a sort of plan I didn’t really admit to myself, and how I’d come upstairs and looked around without admitting it was something I’d wanted to do all along. And I’d just poked around in her parents’ private stuff without any, like, compunction or anything.
I’d hidden so much from
