Chapter 5
They had finally gotten into a pretty good routine of calling early one day and later the next so that everyone had the same share of moving dinner around, and even though Abigail preferred to be the one who moved dinner, she agreed that it was a good idea to share the responsibility. Moving dinner meant that she was given the chance to set up her space and get herself settled in one of her big armchairs in the kitchen or in the living room. She had started reading before the call to help her pass the time, but she had started to really value the time she was setting aside for herself.
It would probably concern some people in her life—Liam most probably—that she was relaxing and unwinding with a series of fairly detailed true crime books that she had borrowed from Bee.
The thought crossed her mind as her phone alerted her to the incoming call, and she deliberately placed her book down with the spine facing away from the camera... Just in case.
“Hey guys,” Abigail said, waving into her camera, “how are we all doing?”
The girls waved back and simultaneously burst into a narration of their days.
“Woah, okay, hang on a second,” Abigail said as she laughed, “let each other speak...”
Which, of course, triggered an argument over who should speak first.
“Rock paper scissors!” Liam said loudly, extending his hands, ready to play.
He dutifully lost first which meant that he would be speaking last, after Sid who lost second, leaving Hannah to speak first—and speak at length she did.
In her daughter’s defense, it sounded like she had the most amazing day of classes ever, but every day at the summer school with one of her musical heroes had been pretty amazing. Sid managed to keep her comments to herself until it was her turn. She showed Abigail some of the things she’d drawn in class, and Abigail couldn’t disguise the wonder in her voice as she told Sid how good they were... They really were amazing. Her daughter had a better grasp of line weight than Abigail had ever possessed, and was developing a real style of her own. Eventually, the girls ran out of steam; they’d both had very long days after all, and they said their goodnights before heading off to bed.
This left Abigail and Liam sitting and staring at each other in silence for a few moments while the girls fussed.
“So,” Abigail said, “has Erika forgiven Sid yet?”
She had been so intrigued by Cleo’s comments the other day and found it suddenly strange that she hadn’t wanted to ask more about Liam’s new girlfriend.
He laughed, “oh she was never really upset with her—not about the bottle, at least.”
“No? Your father made it very clear that it wasn’t something she’d picked up in the liquor aisle...”
This made Liam laugh again—which to anyone other than Abigail wouldn’t have appeared strange but she knew him well enough to know that this was far more open and relaxed than he had been in years.
London seems to be agreeing with him,she thought a little sadly.
“Well no, it wasn’t in the clearance bin,” he admitted, “but she was more upset that Sid had thought she’d insist on us moving if we ever did get married or whatever. She’s been trying really hard with the girls, getting to know them and being really open with them too. They had a pretty good talk about it.”
“Did they? That’s great...” Abigail said, unsure what she was expecting from this conversation, “I think I’d like to meet her, not face to face in person or anything, but it would be good to say hi... You know, be on the same page... Is that okay?”
Liam did turn a shade of worried, but he nodded, “Yeah, I think you two would probably get on—just no ganging up on me.”
He flashed her a cheeky smile that she could honestly say, despite how well they had dealt with their divorce, still made her heart flip flop. No matter how platonic their relationship had become, they still cared for each other and she’d never let herself forget how lucky she was for that.
“So, how’s Newport?”
She sighed, was she really going to tell him all the kind of, slightly, definitely weird stuff that had been going on with her?
“Oh, that’s not a good sigh... Come on, out with it...”
Abigail laughed, shrugged, and recounted the major developments since they’d spoken last. By the time she’d reached the conversation with Doctor Lavender, Liam was giving her his trademark ‘holy cow you need to slow down’ face.
“...what!?” she asked, catching the expression.
“I... You... Abigail, love, you need to take some time and rest,” he said, “you’ve literally been running from one thing to another... It’s not even been two full months and you’re being hard on yourself over not getting everything sorted?”
She shrugged, “I mean...”
“Don’t excuse it, you can take time, you know...”
“It’s just... I feel like if I didn’t have my head messing with me... I’d have finished the house at the very least... Which then makes me feel like I’m just looking for excuses! It’s not even like it’s that bad—I’m just that useless.”
Her sentence broke off; she hadn’t even realized she was feeling like this again—she had been dealing with her emotional response to her injury for years, and it was rare for her to have a dip significant enough to illicit a rant to Liam about it all. It was a different trademark look he was giving her now. This one definitely leaned more towards the ‘are you effing kidding me’ side.
“Abigail, you constantly downplay the injuries you got from that crash just because they didn’t fit the technical classification of ‘severe’,” he said, “you had multiple surgeries, massive swelling, and a laceration that took over six months to heal properly. Not to mention, the fact that you probably nearly drowned, and they even said back then that the trauma of being in that car in the water could have been the trigger for your memory loss. And that was back when that barely accepted trauma as a thing that could happen to people other than soldiers!”
Abigail pulled a face into the camera, “All right, you’re making me feel old; stop it.”
“You know your mom used to say that.”
A spark of annoyance mixed with sentimentality flickered in her chest.
“Yeah... I know. She used it to change the subject too... I hated when she did that.”
Liam shrugged. “Sometimes we can’t help the way our parents affected us. Besides, it’s not like your parents were horrible people with terrible things to pass on to you.”
“That’s true,” Abigail said, smiling, “just a terrible aversion to confrontational conversations.”
“You’re getting better at those,” he said, smiling.
After saying their own goodnights, Abigail sat for a while and contemplated what Liam had just said. The book she had borrowed from Bee mentioned a little-known poisoning in Rhode Island in the ”60s, and she flipped to the chapter it was in.
“If it was ruled accidental, though...” Abigail muttered, settling in to read the chapter.
The chapter title read “A Trend Across the Nation: Oops!” and was accompanied by a black-and-white image from what seemed to be a vintage advertisement for canned soup where a housewife was holding a smoking pot-roast and sporting a vacuous look of surprise. Abigail rolled her eyes and read on.
“Calling it a trend may seem crass, but there truly are waves of copycat killings following a high profile or novel crime. In this chapter, we’re going to take a closer look at what we on the podcast call the “Oops, I Poisoned Him” phenomenon. Housewives of the past had to deal with some pretty messed up stuff by today’s standards, and though there’s a lot we could say about the due process afforded to victims of domestic violence, it is definitely better now than it was then—you know, when it wasn’t actually illegal at all to beat your wife! In the winter of 1959, a Texas woman poisoned her husband with strychnine in his coffee, she claimed it was in a very similar paper packet to the sweetener her dearly departed preferred. The event made headlines and in the eighteen months following the incident, we’ve found dozens of women making very similar claims. Now we know there’s going to be some level of statistical probability there, but from what we could see, this is a three hundred perfect general increase than the baseline husband poisoning rates. One of the most interesting was a woman in Rhode Island who managed to blame her husband’s natural medicine practitioner for supplying him with a health tonic in a glass bottle eerily similar to a bottle of pure peppermint essential oil. This was ruled an accident, though even at the time, there were whispers of just how young and attractive Mr. Engel’s natural medicine practitioner was. Not to mention that a friend of the widow Engel was overheard by a juror saying that no matter what happened, at least he wouldn’t be laying a finger on her or the kids anymore. Lucky for Mrs. Engel, that juror didn’t let it affect her assessment of the evidence. Unfortunately, it had already seemed to sink into Engel Jr, who had already been charged with numerous violent offenses by the time he was twenty and was dead just two decades later.”
Abigail blinked hard and flipped to the back cover to re-read the blurb.
“...Co-authors who host a popular true crime show based out of New York,” she read aloud, “right, well that explains a lot.”
She snapped the book closed and stood up, stretching as she yawned and decided what snack she was going to have instead of cooking a proper dinner for herself. Despite the lurid commentary, she did find herself wondering if she’d ever bumped into the notorious Mrs. Engel. Her childhood had been filled with stern older women and it wouldn’t have surprised her if any of them had offed their abusive husbands… maybe one of them had.