There was no answer when I rang the bell beside the front door. From inside the house I could hear the babble of a talk radio show. I rang a couple more times, but no one answered.
“Maybe we should just leave the plants out front.”
“But she’s got to be here, Johnny. Her car’s here. She just can’t hear us because of the radio. I don’t want Bill to get mad because we didn’t do what he said.”
I tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to show a foyer tiled in white stone. We could have left then, it would have been easy enough to do. We were only dropping off a couple of plants, after all. But there was a feeling about the house that didn’t seem right to me. A car out front, a radio on, someone who should have been home…
Stan and I stepped through the doorway. After the heat outside the house felt cool. From the foyer I could see into a sunroom on my right and, directly ahead, a large living room. It was from there that the radio noise was coming. The blinds in both rooms were down and the light in the house was muted and didn’t fully dilute the shadows that pooled in corners and under furniture. Air-conditioning whispered through vents near the ceiling. There was no one in either of the rooms.
Stan shouted nervously, “Mrs. Prentice, it’s Stan! We’ve got some plants!”
When no one answered we put the plants beside the door and with Stan glancing about apprehensively and holding onto my sleeve we went through the living room and turned right into a long hall that followed the rear wall of the house. On our left, as we walked along it, there were windows that must have looked out onto a back garden, but these were shuttered and I could see only thin strips of sunshine around the inside of the frames. On our right there were three doors. Two of them were closed, but the last was open and it was through this that we found Patricia Prentice in what was obviously the master bedroom of the house.
There were curtained French doors at one end of the room and a large bed with a white cover and a wide space of pale carpet. Against one of the walls there was a writing desk and a chair, and against another a wide- screen TV made a sound like surf, its screen effervescent with static.
Patricia Prentice lay on top of the covers of the bed. She was wearing clothes similar to those she’d been wearing the day I’d seen her with my father-a knee-length skirt, a peach-colored blouse, black patent leather sandals, one of which had fallen from her foot. It looked like she’d gotten up that morning and dressed to look nice.
Perhaps when she lay down on the bed she had composed herself, positioned herself elegantly on her back, her arms folded across her breasts, legs crossed at the ankles. Perhaps… She looked anything but composed now. She was curled on her side and her clothes were twisted about her body as though she had slept through a fever. Her tongue was swollen and dark and stuck obscenely through lips that were drawn back over her teeth. A blot of milky vomit had collected around her neck and the lower half of her face. The back of her skirt was wet.
On a nightstand beside the bed there was a collection of empty Halcion blister packs and an empty half-bottle of whiskey. Beneath the bottle there was a slip of notepaper with a single line of writing:
When my mother died in her car my father had insisted on a closed coffin to spare Stan and me the sight of her injuries. So I had never seen a dead body before, but I could have told anyone who asked that Patricia Prentice was dead beyond any hope of resuscitation. Even so, I checked for a pulse in her neck. Her flesh was too cold and too solid and I had to steel myself against its touch.
“Should we do mouth-to-mouth, Johnny?” Stan was rubbing his hands rapidly back and forth across his chest and his voice trembled.
“She’s dead. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“She killed herself.”
“Looks like it. The pills and everything.”
“Poor thing.” Stan’s voice broke and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Bill’s going to be so upset.”
We were silent for a moment while I worked up the nerve to start calling people. As I was about to reach for the phone Stan groaned and put his hands over his ears.
“That TV noise is freaking me out.”
There were two remotes on the floor by the side of the bed. I picked them both up and hit the power button on one of them. The tray in a DVD player beneath the TV slid out. The hissing electron jumble on the screen went black and quiet. I pressed power on the second remote and turned the TV off.
“Thanks, Johnny. My head was going crazy. She must have been watching a movie.”
Wondering what someone might watch while they killed themselves I checked the disk that sat in the player’s tray, but it had been burned on a computer and there was nothing on its surface to identify it beyond a small smiley-face sticker. I left it where it was.
“Can I go outside, Johnny?”
“Yeah, go wait out front. I’ll be along soon.”
I picked up the phone, called the garden center, got Bill’s cell phone number from them, and called that. When he answered I did it as well as I could, but there was nothing I could say that would make anything any easier for him. He cried out and dropped the phone. I waited a long time but I didn’t hear anything else, so I hung up and called the police. After that I went outside and sat with Stan on a large ornamental rock at the edge of the driveway. He looked pale and stunned. I put my arm around his shoulders.
“I don’t understand how anyone could do that, Johnny. I can’t think how it would even be possible.”
“She must have been very unhappy.”
“Can we go home?”
“Not yet, we have to wait.”
Stan leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. A few minutes later Bill’s BMW SUV skidded to a halt in front of us. He threw himself out of the car and ran for the house. His face was set and he was shouting as he passed us.
“Where is she? Where is she?”
But he didn’t stop for me to answer and ran on through the front doorway as though by his speed he could somehow turn back what had happened. I let him have five minutes alone, then I went inside to check on him.
As I walked along the corridor to the bedroom it seemed to me that the air was not as silent as it had been, that there was an ambience to it, a sense of space, as though the outdoors could be heard inside.
The door to the bedroom was almost closed now. I knocked, not wanting to walk in without warning. Bill shrieked an obscenity and I heard him move across the floor. The sound in the air stopped.
I wasn’t sure what to do, but I felt obliged to at least offer some sort of support. After hesitating a moment I pushed the door open and went into the room.
I thought I might find Bill with his head bowed over his wife, broken, crying, on the point of collapse. But he was nothing of the sort. He was standing near the TV holding the remotes. His light windbreaker, which had been open as he ran from his car, was now zipped closed. I glanced at the DVD player. The disk with the smiley sticker was gone.
Bill’s face twisted when he saw me and he began screaming. The torrent of abuse shocked me but the man’s wife had just killed herself so I put it down to grief. I took a step forward, intending to comfort him, but he raised his fist and told me to fuck off. It was obvious that he was beyond comfort, at least from any I could offer, and, figuring that maybe I was doing more harm than good by being there, I backed out of the room and left him alone.
An ambulance was pulling into the driveway as I joined Stan outside again. A cruiser from the Oakridge police department had already arrived and two uniformed cops were climbing out of it.
They both had mustaches and one of them wore yellow-lensed sunglasses. They asked us briefly where in the house Pat was and how we came to be there, then the one with the sunglasses and the two ambulance men, who’d just pulled a gurney from the back of their wagon, went inside. The other cop got out a pad and took our details and asked more questions and wrote down our answers. In a little while the ambulance guys came back out and told the cop there was no chance of resuscitation. They got into their truck and started the engine for the air-conditioning and sat in the cab making notes on a clipboard. The cop said he wanted us to walk him through exactly what we’d done inside and took us into the house.
