Chapter 48
Marin
We sit at the kitchen table. Patricia prays.
I bow my head and close my eyes and think about the taser in the drawer three feet from Patricia’s elbow and the man in the basement who is currently gagged and chained to a column while Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm at full volume beneath our feet.
“Lord, we ask you to place your healing hands on Charles—”
From downstairs, “Yes! Yes! YES!”
Mrs. Mather’s eyebrows lift. “Do you have company? Down there?”
“Just Charles. It’s the light,” I say. “The tumor—it’s made him extremely photosensitive.
Even with the curtains drawn, the bedroom was too much.
I tried blackout curtains, aluminum foil on the windows—nothing worked.
He kept having these episodes.” I lower my voice.
“Screaming. Covering his eyes. It was awful. The doctor said the darkest, quietest room in the house. So we moved him to the basement. It’s cooler down there. Darker. He’s much more comfortable.”
Patricia nods slowly. The compassion on her face deepens into something approaching reverence. A woman who moved her dying husband to a basement because the light was killing him. What devotion. What sacrifice.
“You’re a saint,” Patricia says.
I am not a saint. But I smile like one.
From below, muffled but unmistakable: the sounds of a woman reaching climax in a deli.
“I left the movie on,” I say quickly. “Just in case he wakes up. He watches movies. The doctors said it helps with cognitive stimulation.”
“From the basement?” Mrs. Mather says.
“The acoustics are actually quite good down there.”
Patricia nods. Closes her eyes. Returns to prayer.
“We ask that you ease his suffering, Lord—”
Muffled but clear: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
I bow my head lower and pray for the first time in my life. Not to God. To Netflix. Please let the scene end. Please let the scene end.
The prayer lasts four minutes. The orgasm scene lasts three. The longest four minutes of my life, and I once sat through a seven-hour contract negotiation with a man who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.
“Amen,” Patricia says.
“Amen,” I say. Meaning it more than she knows.
Mrs. Mather squeezes my hand. “We’re here for you. Whenever you’re ready for us to meet him.”
Never. “Soon. When he’s stronger.”
They leave. I watch them walk down the driveway—Mrs. Mather whispering, Patricia nodding, two women assembling a version of my life that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a story I told in the bread aisle at Foster’s and just expanded to include a photosensitive brain tumor patient living in a basement.
I close the door. Lock it. Lean against it.
I go downstairs. Charles is exactly where I left him—gagged, chained, laptop still playing. The movie has moved on to a New Year’s Eve scene. I remove the gag.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman orgasm at that volume, come to think of it.”
“It was that or let them hear you.”
“I wasn’t going to make noise.”
“You were absolutely going to make noise.”
He considers this. “Probably.”
I grab the laptop and sit on the floor next to him. Press play. We watch the rest of the movie in silence. When it ends, he turns to me.
“Same time tomorrow?”
I check the cuffs. Check the slack. Make sure the potty chair is within reach.
“Same time tomorrow.”
He smiles. The kind smile. The one I still can’t read.
I close the basement door. Stand at the top of the stairs.
From across the road, I watch as Mrs. Mather sweeps her porch.
She’ll be back. They’ll all be back. Patricia will feel called again.
Someone will bring flowers. Someone will organize a meal train.
The cage I built in the bread aisle is doing its job, but cages don’t just keep people out.
They draw people in. Every lie I told is a thread connecting this house to the town and the threads are tightening.
And kind Charles, sitting in that basement with his real smile or his fake one, is the only person in this house who seems perfectly calm about all of it.
That should comfort me.
It doesn’t.