The Midnight Estate #3
“It’s fine, sweetheart,” Carmen said, tone resigned. “I know how it is. Let’s talk another day.”
After that, Silas saw Marie at the diner almost every day. She was always impeccably dressed, with her hair set and her face
made-up, in pretty skirts in bright colors, and soft cardigans even when the weather was far too warm for her to require one.
She sat in the same place most days, and because he too was a creature of habit, they often ended up at their own booths side
by side but facing one another.
“Nice weather we are having,” he would say, not particularly keen to strike up an extended conversation but also unwilling
to be rude.
“There’s nothing like the sunshine at this time of year,” she would reply, or perhaps, “I heard there’s rain on the way—I
hope so, the gardens could do with a drink.”
She always ordered the same thing—coffee, and she drank it the same way Silas did—black, no creamer or sugar. In Marie’s case,
she never finished the entire cup because she never stayed very long. Occasionally, her brother would come to her table and
speak with her: “How are you?” “Great. And you?” “I’m fine.” Silas was fascinated by this—how the siblings seemed to see one
another almost every day, but there was some sense of distance between them anyway.
He thought about this a lot. When he and Maeve lived nearby one another they couldn’t have been closer.
Silas quietly decided that the sibling relationship was uniquely strong—after all, who else knows you from birth?
—but also uniquely vulnerable. Someone who has known you from birth could be forgiven for thinking they know you better than anyone else, but maybe they know the old you—the childish version of you.
Maybe it’s just not possible to keep up with the changes in a person as they reach adulthood, not without real, sustained effort.
As for Maeve, her condition was unchanged even though she had now been in a coma for several weeks. Every new update from
staff seemed more pessimistic than the last, which had confused Silas at first because nothing seemed to be changing, but
he was gradually coming to understand that the longer Maeve’s coma progressed like this, the lower the chances of her waking
and regaining her previous quality of life truly were.
But all that Silas could do was to wait and to hope. He didn’t dare think about what he would do if she never woke up.
She simply had to come back to him.
How else could he reconcile with her? And how could he possibly live the rest of his life without her forgiveness for not
being there when she needed him most?
There was a lot about her life that made little sense to Marie, but the way she and Irving had grown apart baffled her most.
“It’s your own fault, Marie,” Rupert told her the night Irving left, when Marie could not stop crying. “Irving was miserable here with you nagging him all the time. God, the only reason he didn’t leave months ago was that I talked him out of it. You
know how hard I tried to convince him to stay.”
Rupert had told her all about his efforts to change Irving’s mind, as unsuccessful as they had been, but this was the first time she heard that she was the reason Irving moved out. It was true that after their parents died, her relationship with Irving had changed. It had
to—overnight, she became his guardian, as well as his sister.
But nagging? She honestly thought they were getting on better than ever. Irving had seemed happy until recently.
“But he wanted to go to college,” she whispered miserably. “Dad thought he might become a doctor one day.”
Rupert squeezed her hand.
“It’ll do us good to be alone. I need you all to myself.”
Rupert had always been so pleasant—so smooth. She’d known right after their honeymoon that he had secrets, that he was perhaps
not quite the man she’d assumed him to be. But gradually, over their first few months in that great big house all alone together,
an entirely new version of her husband emerged.
He’d loved her curves, but now she was too curvy, and he didn’t like the way that her breasts strained her blouse, and he didn’t think it was feminine for a woman to
eat so much, and he wanted her to stick to salads—to slim down, so she looked good for him. Didn’t she understand that when
she left the house she represented him? He couldn’t have a fat pig for a wife; he simply couldn’t tolerate it. And he’d loved her sense of style, but now he overruled
her preferences in her clothing, and he wanted her to cover as much skin as she could, but to still look pretty—she had to
look pretty. Even on the days when she was to stay at home for one reason or another, if she so much as took her uncomfortable
shoes off inside the house, he was disgusted by her “slovenliness” when he came home for his lunch.
Marie slowly, ever so slowly, began to adapt to the reality that Rupert’s preferences, his desires, his moods, had to take priority over even her comfort.
Once, Rupert had loved how friendly Marie was, but now she was too flirtatious, and he started to reveal a jealous streak she’d never seen in him before.
He’d always been attentive, but now he called throughout the day, wanting to make sure she was home.
And it was never a problem for her to speak with her friends, until the day it was.
She deduced, eventually, that Rupert had “friends” at the telephone exchange who kept tabs on who she called and even what
she said. After that, Marie started avoiding making calls on the telephone, but she didn’t need to avoid answering them, because
her friends soon stopped calling. By the time their first wedding anniversary rolled around, Marie was disoriented. Rupert
had become her sole source of information, the cornerstone by which she formed all thoughts and opinions, even about herself.
The rages were rare at first, and always more confusing than frightening. Rupert would come home from work in a foul mood
and he would rant at her for hours, talking in circles that only disoriented Marie further. They were arguments with no resolution,
because no matter how she apologized, she only seemed to draw further attention to her flaws. She would find herself clinging
to him, begging him for his favor, terrified at the thought of displeasing him so much that he cast her aside. Marie had learned
by then that she couldn’t survive without him. She simply couldn’t. Someone useless like her needed a husband with a strong
hand, like Rupert.
If she didn’t meet his expectations—and she so rarely did—he had a series of tools he employed to correct her. He was the master of the silent treatment, utterly freezing her
out the minute she stepped out of line. He always said he hated to withhold her “privileges,” like food and the car keys and that one awful time, when she was vacuuming when he called and she took too long to answer, he made her sleep on the floor of their bathroom that night, a space so small she couldn’t even lie flat.
“This hurts me more than it hurts you,” he said gently, stroking her hair back from her face as she lay on the cold tiles
and wept. “But it’s for your own good. You simply have to learn, Marie. You have so much to learn.”
After a while, he didn’t have to speak the chastisements and the insults aloud. Marie could hear them circling through her
head all the time, even when he wasn’t there, because the voice she heard speaking them was now her own.
Her marriage had become a particularly toxic form of quicksand and the more she struggled, the deeper Rupert pulled her in.