“Grandma bought that one for Mom,” Kelly said. “For her birthday. Remember?”
I didn’t, but that explained it. Fiona wasn’t the type to buy anything but the real deal. She’d be as likely to buy her daughter a knockoff bag as take her to lunch at Wendy’s.
As Twain dropped the bag on the floor, it made a sound. Like something rattling around inside it.
Jesus, I thought. Not another pair of handcuffs. I wouldn’t know what to make of that kind of discovery. But the rattle had not sounded metallic.
“There’s something in here,” he said, grabbing it by the strap.
I reached over and took it from him. “Whatever’s in there was Sheila’s,” I told him. “The bags may be your business, but what’s in them isn’t.”
I left Kelly and Arthur Twain in the living room. I went into the kitchen, undid the clasp on the top of the purse, and opened it wide.
Inside, there were four plastic containers, each one about the size of a jar of olives.
Each one carried a different label. Lisinopril. Vicodin. Viagra. Omeprazole.
Altogether, hundreds and hundreds of pills.
TWENTY-SIX
I returned the containers to the purse and shoved it into one of the overhead cupboards. When I returned to the living room, Twain was looking at me expectantly. But when I offered no details of what I’d found, he said, “Well, thank you for your time.”
He left me his card, encouraged me to get in touch if I remembered anything that might be helpful, and left.
“He seemed nice,” Kelly said. “What was in Mom’s purse?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“It had to be something. It was all noisy.”
“It was nothing.”
She knew I was lying, but she also knew I wasn’t going to say anything more.
“Fine,” she said. “I think I’ll just go back to being mad at you.” She stomped up the stairs and returned to her room, slamming the door behind her.
I took the drug-filled purse from the cupboard and went to my downstairs office. I emptied the bag onto my desk and watched the containers roll out.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to the empty room. “What the hell is all this, Sheila? What in the hell is this?”
I picked up each of the small plastic jars, unscrewed the caps, peered inside. Hundreds of little yellow pills, white pills, the world-famous blue pills. “God, how many of these did you want me to take?”
I remembered what Twain had said, that there was a huge market not only in such things as knockoff purses and DVDs and construction supplies, but prescription drugs, too.
What had Sheila said to me that last morning we had together?
“I have ideas. Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches. I’ve made some money.”
“Not like this,” I said. “Not like this.”
Now that I’d seen what was in this purse, I wondered what the hell might be in all her others. I checked the ones still in the living room, then went back upstairs-Kelly remained behind the closed door of her room-and looked through the remaining bags in Sheila’s closet. I found old lipsticks, shopping lists, some change. No more drugs.
I returned to the basement. The purse Sheila had with her at the time of the accident had-as I’d told Belinda-survived, but not in good shape. It had been lightly scorched, then drenched after the fire department arrived. I’d thrown out the bag-I didn’t want Kelly to see it-but saved everything that had been in it. I felt the need, now, to take a look at all those items.
Everything was stored in a shoebox that a pair of Rockports had come in. The shoes had already been worn out and tossed, but the box would probably last for years to come. I put it on my desk, gingerly, as if it were loaded with explosives. Then, with some hesitation, I removed the lid.
“Hey, babe,” I said.
It struck me as a stupid thing to say. But looking at this collection of Sheila’s effects, it seemed perfectly natural. In their own way, these mementos were close to Sheila in a way I never was. They were with her in her final moments.
A pair of stud earrings, with blood-red flecks on them. A necklace-an aluminum pendant on a leather string- that was even darker with Sheila’s blood. I took it in my hand and brought it up to my face, touched it to my cheek. I laid it gently back into the box and examined the items from her purse that were not bloodied. Dental floss; a pair of reading glasses in a slender metal case; two metal hair clips, each with a strand of Sheila’s hair still caught in them; one of those things from Tide that looked like a Magic Marker that’s supposed to remove stains instantly. Sheila was always ready for any fast-food catastrophe. Tissue. A small package of Band-Aids. Half a pack of Dentyne Blast Cool Lime gum. When we would head out to see friends, or visit her parents, she’d tell me to lean close in the car and catch a whiff of me. “Chew one of these,” she’d say. “Fast. You’ve got breath like a dead moose.” There were three ATM receipts, other receipts from drug and grocery stores, a handful of business cards, one from a department store cosmetics counter, a couple from New York shopping excursions. There was a tiny container of hand sanitizer, some small hair elastics she kept in her purse for Kelly, a Bobbi Brown lipstick, eyedrops, a makeup mirror, four emery boards, a set of headphones she’d bought on the plane when we had gone to Toronto for a long weekend more than a year ago. A longtime hockey fan, she wanted to eat at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant. “Where the hell is he?” she asked. “In the kitchen,” I told her. “Making your sandwich.”
A memory attached to nearly every item. And not a single liquor store receipt to be found anywhere. And no pills, either.
I lingered over many of these things, but there was one thing in particular I wanted to have a look at.
Sheila’s cell phone.
I took it out of the box, flipped it open, and hit the button to turn it on. Nothing happened. The phone was dead.
I opened my top desk drawer, where I kept the charger for my own phone-a duplicate of Sheila’s-and inserted one end into the phone and shoved the plug into the wall outlet. The phone tinkled to life.
I had not yet gotten around to canceling it. It was part of a package deal with mine, and now Kelly’s. When I’d gotten her phone, I could have canceled Sheila’s, but found I didn’t have it in me to do it.
Once the phone appeared to be working, and charging, the first thing that occurred to me was to call it from my desk phone.
I dialed the number I still knew by heart, heard it ring in my ear and watched as the phone rang and vibrated in front of me. I waited for the end of the seventh ring, at which point I knew it would go to voicemail, and I would get to hear my dead wife’s voice.
“Hi. This is Sheila. I’m either on the phone, away from it, or too scared to answer because I’m in traffic, so please leave a message.”
And then the beep.
I started to speak. “I… I just…”
I hung up, my hand trembling.
I needed a minute to pull myself together.
“I just wanted to say,” I said, standing there in the room alone, “that I’ve said some things, since you’ve been gone, that now… I’ve been so angry with you. So goddamn angry. That you’d have done this, that you’d… do something so stupid. But in the last day or so, I don’t know… Things made no sense before, and they’re making even less sense now, but the less sense they make, the more I’m starting to wonder… to wonder whether there’s more to this, that maybe… that maybe I haven’t been fair, that maybe I’m not seeing…”
I sat in the chair and let the feelings wash over me, just let it happen. Allowed myself a minute or so to let it out. Like releasing pressure on a valve. You have to let it off, even just a little, so you don’t get an explosion.
And when I finished sobbing, I grabbed a couple of tissues, wiped my eyes, blew my nose, took a few deep
