Chapter Thirty-Six
The next morning in the garden, Helen squished all the nasty little cabbage worms between her fingers. She wasn’t going to
burn the Brussels sprouts after all. Once she was done tending to all her garden tasks, she returned her garden tools to their
spot without washing them like she usually did. She hesitated when she saw the handgun she’d hidden there. Wade and Isaac
were in the trees again, so there would be no one here to see the gun or hear it fire.
Helen arranged empty cans on the wobbly bench in the side yard. She lined up her shot and pulled the trigger. A miss. It had
been a while since she’d fired a gun.
She had almost twenty-four years to get ready to kill the masked man upon his release from prison. Plenty of time. So it shouldn’t
have bothered her to miss as much as it did.
Helen took a deep breath, steadied her hand, and fired again. This time, she hit the can.
She spent the next half hour shooting cans off the bench, the stump, the rusty wheelbarrow, and the ladder, until she was
confident she could hit a person as well as she could hit a can.
Then she reloaded the gun and hid it in the same spot again. Wade couldn’t be trusted with it.
During the day’s chores, Helen alternated between trying not to think about the kiss with Isaac and reliving it in her head.
Last night, she’d gone to bed as soon as the meds had made Wade sleepy and he’d sunk into the mattress. She’d put on her nightgown
and climbed in next to him so she wouldn’t be “alone” in the house with Isaac. No more secret meetings. She was Wade’s wife;
she needed to remember that. She had lain there in bed for at least two hours thinking about the kiss until she’d finally
convinced herself to write it off as a moment of bad judgment. She was allowed those moments once or twice in her life, wasn’t
she?
She was lucky, really. She lived in a time and place where she could make mistakes and not pay gravely for them. Women in
history—the ones who actually lived the type of life Helen and Wade had contrived—often paid the steepest penalties for small
indiscretions.
Helen had learned about that plenty in her favorite night class she’d taken at the university for her now-abandoned career
change into the museum world. The class, “Victorian Era Mental Health Treatments in America,” had been so fascinating she’d
sometimes curled up in bed at night and read beyond the assigned pages.
Often Tyler would lie beside her and listen as she’d paint him disturbing pictures of electroshock therapy, ice baths, and
lobotomies for women who dared to challenge the status quo. A woman who was mad about the world might be labeled as the other
kind of mad and forced into a treatment. Sometimes Tyler would ask questions or he’d joke that “these aren’t suitable bedtime
stories,” but mostly he just listened as her voice filled their dim bedroom until, eventually, his eyelids would begin to
flutter. She had apologized once. “Sorry, was I boring you?” she’d whispered. Eyes closed, already drifting, Tyler had smiled
softly and said, “Never ever.”
Wade probably wished he could sign her up for a lobotomy. Especially now that he’d finally figured out how to run his own bath.
Dusk was just starting to fall when Helen went into the empty guest bedroom and placed a stack of clean clothes on the bed
for Isaac. He was still wearing what he’d shown up in and would probably appreciate borrowing some clean things from Wade.
Then she went out to the front porch and sat in one of the rocking chairs and waited for the brothers to return as the sky
dimmed from light gray to charcoal.
At last, the truck roared in and parked in a halting screech beneath the alder tree. Even before the doors opened, she could
hear the raised voices of the men inside the cab. They tumbled out of the truck, yelling at each other.
“You aren’t blaming this on me!” Isaac shouted.
“Dad made me whip you because you were a lazy piece of shit!” Wade shouted back as he came around the front of the truck and
got in Isaac’s face.
Helen stood and went to the edge of the porch. She’d only heard Wade this angry a few times.
“I didn’t want to be a fucking farmer like you and Dad,” Isaac spit out.
“There’s nothing wrong with farming.”
“It’s not my fault you were too dumb to do anything else. Even Ma knew you were dumb, she always said it.”
At that, Wade swung his fist. Helen heard it connect with Isaac’s face and saw his neck snap back.
“Wade!” she yelled. “Stop!”
Wade backed away from Isaac. Then he turned and thundered toward the house. He stomped past her and slammed through the front
door.
In the yard, Isaac held his face for a moment before he approached, shoulders drooping.
“Are you okay?”
“He didn’t hit me that hard.” His voice was tight, but he sounded calm otherwise. “I’m okay.”
As Isaac walked up the porch steps, Helen said, “Let me see it.”
He lowered his hand, but in the dimness, there was no evidence of a bruise yet.
“Popped me right here.” He pointed at his right eye and smiled slightly.
“You’ll get a shiner.”
“Probably.” He sank into one of the rocking chairs.
“What was that about?” She sat down in the one beside him.
“He blames me for why he had to sell the farm. Because he couldn’t run it alone. But I wanted to do other things with my life,
you know?”
“I understand.”
They looked out over the land in silence for a minute, and then Isaac said, “I was thinking about what you said when we were
talking by the grave.”
Helen held her breath. The kiss. Was he going to bring it up? She had assumed they were in some kind of unspoken agreement to pretend the kiss didn’t happen.
“You said you feel like you’re outside the present moment,” he said. “Watching things happen.”
“I did say something like that, didn’t I?”
“I feel that way too.”
Helen looked over in surprise as Isaac continued. “I was curious, did you always feel that way? Or just since your first husband
died?”
“Oh. No, I didn’t always feel that way,” she said softly. “Just since he died.”
Isaac nodded slowly. “I think I’ve always been that way. There’s a part of all this”—he gestured widely, as if to indicate
everything—“that just feels like a game, you know?”
“Life, you mean?”
Isaac shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
This was a dangerous conversation. Helen could read between the lines. He was telling her he didn’t play by the rules, and
she didn’t have to either.
She stood. “I’d better check on Wade.”
Inside their bedroom, Helen asked Wade what had happened, and he told her that Isaac had started threatening him on the drive
home.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean just that, Helen. I’ve been trying to be a nice guy. What choice do I have? But he’s just fucking with me. On the
way home, he asked me if I want to find out what it feels like to die at the hands of my own brother. Just like he did.”
She gave him a look. That wasn’t the conversation the brothers had been having in the yard. “It sounded like you guys were
arguing about your parents.”
Wade threw his hands up, exasperated. “We were! Yeah, by the time we got back here, we were. Because I told him he should
go on to the light, or the tunnel, or whatever or wherever it is. Heaven! Go be with our parents. And he said he hates our
dad, and once he’s done here, he won’t be going where Ma is anyway.”
Whether he was lying to her or not, Wade was very agitated. That much was obvious. Helen just didn’t have the energy for it
though. So after a moment, she simply sighed and said, “Should I make us something for dinner?”
With a harsh exhale, he sank onto the bed, dirty clothes and all, and said, “I want my food in here. I’m not in the mood to
have dinner with a ghost tonight.”
Wade lay back against the pillows and folded his arms tightly across his chest. Helen couldn’t tell if she was witnessing
a brilliant act or if he believed his own words.