CHAPTER SIX
You show up for family.
It was one of the tenets Carol Ames, nee Frick, held to her heart. Not dear to her heart. Her family was not the sort of people who endeared others, even other members of their own clan, but Carol held the truth to her heart all the same.
That was why, at five in the morning on a Thursday, Carol was driving to her sister’s home in Brandywine Village.
Donna was perhaps the least endearing of all the Frick brood, but she was the closest in age to Carol, and the two of them had always shared a bond, even if that bond contained as much vinegar as blood.
Besides, Carol wasn’t always the sweetest apple in the pie herself. Maybe that was why she always found the strength to endure Donna.
Still, for God’s sake, the woman could at least type the word yes and hit the send button. When your sister texts you asking if you’re alive, you can at least take three seconds to do that.
Unless you're Donna, of course, if you're Donna, you do whatever you want and damn anyone who has a problem with it.
Carol shook her head as she turned down 24th Street. If Carol weren't such a long-suffering person, Donna would have damned the whole world away from her. Hell, their last spat, she'd come close.
Carol’s lips thinned. Her fingers tightened on the wheel, and her speedometer crept past thirty. She lifted her foot and took deep breaths until her speed dropped to twenty-five again.
It stung mostly because Donna was right.
Carol had always known that Lloyd saw her as a possession more than as a person, but she’d convinced herself that she was at least a prized possession.
Catching him in his office with his secretary in between his legs hurt.
Not because it was the man she loved enjoying favors from a younger, more attractive woman—any love she’d felt had died after their kids moved out—but because it was just so disrespectful.
She’d given him forty-four years. Forty-four years. Two-thirds of her life. She’d stayed faithful. She'd had opportunities, oh yes, she had, but she had turned them down. Because she'd made a commitment, and that was supposed to mean something.
Donna had told her all of this. Then she’d told Carol that if Carol was too weak to “dump his sagging, philandering ass on the curb,” then she deserved to be cheated on.
“It’s just not that easy, Donna,” Carol said, pulling her Lexus RX350 to the curb in front of her sister’s home. “It’s just not that easy.”
She took a deep breath of the filtered, scented, climate-controlled air of her luxury wagon and stared straight through the windshield, deliberately not looking at her sister’s two-story Victorian.
She was dreading this. Donna was almost certainly being her ordinary, stubborn, vindictive self.
She was probably peering at Carol through the blinds, waiting for Carol to work up the courage to approach the house, thinking up all the spiteful things she was going to say.
That was the core of Donna. Her tongue was an axe. It chopped at everyone around her until they all shrank to her small, mean level. And Carol would endure it. Not for long, only for the twenty or thirty minutes needed to satisfy her obligation.
But she'd endure it. And when Donna asked if she was still enjoying the life of a cuckold, she'd endure that too.
You showed up for family.
She shut off the engine and stepped out.
The temperature was mild this morning, just a hair below freezing and without the fresh morning breeze that typically wafted up from Delaware Bay.
The gentle chill refreshed Carol, and the soft crunch of snow under her feet took her back to simpler times, back when she could still convince herself that life would mostly be all right.
She clung tightly to that feeling as she walked up to the house and knocked on the door.
There was no answer. Carol’s lips thinned.
The sun wouldn’t rise for another two hours, and the sky was lit with only the faintest hint of gray to the east. She didn’t want to ring the doorbell or knock any louder for fear of disturbing the neighbors.
If she didn’t have work later, she wouldn’t have come so early, but she anticipated needing an hour of crying and coffee after this visit, so she was here before dawn.
Donna was probably sleeping. Well, that was fine.
Carol had a key in case of emergencies. She’d let herself in, confirm her sister was still alive, then leave.
Maybe she’d get lucky and take a picture of Donna while she slept, something she could send to her later to taunt her. Probably not, but maybe.
She pulled her keys out and found the correct one.
The frozen lock protested at the insertion, snicking and clicking loudly enough that Carol swore she could hear the sound echo off the house behind her.
She sighed and turned, earning another series of snicks and clicks and even a momentary resistance when she tried to pull the key out.
Finally, though, the key gave way. Carol pushed the door open and stepped into her bitch of an older sister’s home.
She knew immediately that something was wrong. The smell was off. Donna’s home always had a musty, mothball odor due to her sister’s preference for keeping all of her windows, doors, and shades drawn and only rarely running her air conditioning (some of us have to think about money, Carol).
This was different. A cloying aroma, sweet and intensely floral but with a hint of rot, infused Donna's nose.
Carol’s next-door neighbor, Fatima, had a plum tree that she never harvested. The fruit was left to ripen, swell, then fall, bursting upon impact and scattering curdled red flesh across Fatima’s lawn.
This odor reminded Carol of the fallen fruit after a few days of baking in the summer sun. By that time, wasps and beetles had enjoyed their fill of fungus, and flies had arrived to claim their share.
The scent emerging from Donna’s house contained that same rotten, fungal note, and for the first time since the one and only time Lloyd had ever raised a hand to her, Carol was afraid.
She stood in the doorway for several minutes, breath arriving in soft gasps, escaping in rough hitches of her shoulders, bringing a fresh wave of that mold and fruit and fly odor.
When she finally registered how insane she must look standing in the doorway and staring into the house, she swallowed and released a thready call. “Donna?”
No answer. Carol wanted nothing more than to run to her car and leave her sister to whatever grisly fate had befallen her, but you showed up for family, even when you didn’t want to, even when the family for whom you were showing up delighted in belittling you.
She shuffled forward, stumbling a little and steadying herself on the small table Donna had placed in the compact entryway that she insisted on calling a foyer, even though it barely had space for visitors' coats and shoes, and the table made it even smaller.
“Donna?” she called again, and this time, it was only a whisper.
She left the door open behind her. Instinct told her that she would soon be running through that door, shrieking and fumbling for her car keys. Something evil had happened in this house, and once Carol discovered what it was, her fragile constitution would lack the fortitude to confront it.
She walked from the foyer to the kitchen, avoiding the living room because her instinct told her that she’d find the evil thing there, whatever it was.
Her instincts failed her on both counts. The evil thing was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, propped up so that rigor kept it in its chair rather than allowing it to slide to the laminated maple floor.
And Carol didn’t run. She didn’t feel fear. Had she possessed the capacity to understand surprise at that moment, she would have been surprised that she didn’t feel fear.
She didn’t feel grief either. Not exactly.
What she felt more than anything was exhaustion.
She’d run a long race with her sister and made it farther than any of the other participants.
Now she’d come to the end of that race to find not a finish line but a pit, and in that pit, a stiffened corpse.
All of that for nothing. All of that to find one of the pillars on which she’d constructed her life, a cruel pillar but a pillar, nonetheless, had sunk into the mud.
She sat carefully down on the floor of her sister’s kitchen, lowered her head into her hands, and wept.