Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 53

Mother’s little helper.

Mother’s little—

Help her.

Help.

Mother, please help her.

Well. Heaven knows I tried long enough to be my mother’s type of Christian woman. I worked myself to the bone, and where did that get me? Fucked. Alone in my bedroom, practically punch-drunk from reading so many slurs and curse words and death threats in such rapid succession.

Maybe it was time, finally, to try the other route.

The bottle of pills was eight years old. I’d found it on my bureau at the Mills estate the day after Amelia caught me in the hallway that day. That’s what family is for! There was no label on the bottle, no name; just a scribbled black-Sharpie message on the plastic: take one every 12 hours.

But surely the medication had expired. I tapped three white pills onto my palm and swallowed them dry. Then I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, back, back until it thudded gently against the bathroom wall. While I waited, I thought about Clementine and how I should punish her for what she had done. I could ground her, or slap her, or lock her in her room. Or I could do nothing, absolutely nothing, I could forgive without an apology and be so kind to her that she would begin to feel unbearably guilty for what she had done. Yes. That option sounded nice.

Time passed. At some point, there was a knock on the bathroom door. I opened my eyes to see Caleb’s head popped around the corner. “Can I come in?”

I nodded. As soon as I moved my head, I felt them. The pills. I watched, speechless, as Caleb floated over to me and sat down, close enough that our knees were almost touching. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” I said, after several moments of trying. It felt effortful, but good, to speak.

“Is—is that why you hate having sex so much? Because you’re a queer, or whatever?”

I smiled. Funny man. “You’re the one who never wants to have sex.”

Caleb gave me a not-unfriendly look. “Come on, Natalie. Be honest. You want to have sex with me like you want to unload the dishwasher.”

“Well.” I chuckled and leaned my head back against the wall, keeping my eyes on him. “Maybe if you could get hard like a normal person, I’d enjoy it a little bit more.”

The friendly expression fell from his face. “Well,” he spat out, mimicking me, “if fucking you didn’t feel exactly the same as fucking a dead body, then maybe I would be able to get hard more easily.”

A delighted sort of terror filled me. It felt like my whole body had been circling the drain for years and was just now finally slipping down into cool darkness. I said without thinking, “Death sounds nice.”

Caleb was frowning at me now. “What is wrong with you?”

I didn’t answer.

“You humiliated me. Do you realize that? What you did with Shannon—it’s humiliating.”

“My dear husband,” I said slowly, “you have been one big humiliation since the day we were married.”

Caleb sprang to his feet, facing me as he backed away, like I might snap if he wasn’t careful. He seemed not to realize I wasn’t capable of standing. “You’ve always thought so little of me.” His voice was shaking. “But you know what? Shannon didn’t. Shannon doesn’t. You heard her today: she thinks I’m smart, and kind, and—”

“Shannon!” I said, and laughed. It really was so funny. “Do you know what Shannon said when I spoke with her? She said she would rather kill herself than go anywhere with you.”

Was this a lie? Certainly the spirit of the message was true, or somewhat true. Caleb processed this information very slowly, then said: “I don’t believe you.”

But he did. I could tell that he did. And so I said nothing, just watched as the light flickered in his eyes, then went out. He whispered, “Are all women as terrible as you?”

I was really feeling lovely, now. Three expired pills had been the perfect dosage. “I’d tell you to ask your mother, but then she might end up taking a single second to actually consider her own life, and do you know what, Caleb? I think if she did that, she’d probably end up killing herself.”

The slap came out of nowhere. He must have stepped forward to reach me, but I didn’t see it, or rather I couldn’t remember seeing it now, as I stared at the bathroom floor tile, the vision in my left eye suddenly blurry. My hand was pressed to my cheek. I couldn’t quite feel anything. I assumed my skin stung. That it was pink. I found myself thinking, for the first time since that phone call with my mother, of my father. I hadn’t allowed myself to think of him until now. Where was he in the world? Had he married? Had more children?

Everything would have been fine if I’d grown up with a strong father figure in my life, I thought calmly. As soon as I thought this, though, I felt immediately certain that it wasn’t true.

“Do you know what they think of you online?” Caleb said, standing over me. “They think you’re a woman who needs to be disciplined. That you’re out of control. That your head is too big for your own shoulders, and I should’ve reined you in years ago, and they’re right. Fucking devil bitch. My father was right: I should’ve divorced you when I had the chance.”

I looked up at him. “Is that what he wants you to do? Divorce me?”

He took a step away from me, breathing hard. “That’s what he wanted me to do, yes. But you know what he wants to do now?”

I tasted iron. My lip was bleeding. “Not in the slightest.”

“He wants to kill you.”

I shook my head slowly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. He said a car accident would be easiest. These winding mountain roads, such a steep drop…” He shrugged. It was his turn to watch me absorb this information. “No one would suspect a thing.”

I slowly got myself back up into a sitting position. This information felt too large for my brain’s receptors, like we were trying to force a couch through too narrow of a doorframe. Still, it barged slowly in, taking the hinges of the doorframe with it. Kill me. They wanted to kill me. How absurd. How funny! And also: how practical. Even if they never actually did it: what a clever way to shackle me to this ranch, to make me never want to leave. Now I would never drive off the property again without wondering if today was going to be the day.

After all: What were good Christian men if not experts at making their good Christian women vanish from the world?

How boring. How deeply and utterly unfair. I did everything I was supposed to. I had the children and married the man and created a universe for all of us to live in, and what was I going to get for it?

Murdered, apparently. Featured in some future documentary about the latest pregnant woman to break her neck in a ditch somewhere. Caleb might go to jail for a year or two. Probably not. Regardless, he would be remarried within the decade. He’d have a second round of kids.

“You don’t want to run for office, Caleb.”

He paused. “What? What are you talking about?”

I repeated myself. “You don’t want to run for office.” I was speaking and thinking more easily now. The shock of the pills’ effect had worn off—or perhaps the adrenaline jolt of my husband’s death threat had created a new chemical cocktail in my body. Either way, I was moving forward easily now. Like switching from walking to ice-skating: all I had to do was push off with each uttered word. “And for the record, you don’t want to move to New York. You would hate New York more than anything.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would.”

He didn’t say anything. He was listening. And what was I doing? Skating free-form. Improvising for my life—which meant I now had to unravel what I had worked so hard to knit together. “What you want, darling husband, what you have always wanted, is to be left alone.”

“You ruined that for me,” he said. “Now I’ll never be alone. Not now that you’ve—and with the whole world—” He dropped into a crouch, his hands over his ears, his face contorted. “My God,” he said desperately. “I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“Let me fix it,” I said, over his panicked breaths.

When he looked up at me, his expression was that of a child. My husband had always been such a child. “How?”

“Let me talk to your father.”

“He’s going to kill you, Nattie. I’m not joking. He wants you dead.”

“He doesn’t want me dead,” I said softly. “He just wants me fixed.”

An hour later, I was walking slowly down the hallway, hand tracing the walls, my feet equal parts lighter and heavier than I was used to. It wasn’t clear to me if I was marching toward my own salvation or toward my own imminent death. Don’t look back, I reminded myself. Don’t look back, don’t look back.

I imagined Caleb and my children turning to salt. The ranch set on fire. My whole world burning, the sky filled with ash.

But what about the women in the Bible who look forward? What happens to them?

A question so much easier for me to answer at thirty-three than it had been for me at seventeen.