Hardly Knew Her

Heloise, happily manless, looks baffled.

“I just wanted to talk to him. I don’t know why I did what I did. But if he’s dead, then it’s over, there’s nothing to be done. But what if he’s not?”

“Maybe he has a head injury. Then if he regains consciousness and starts talking about how you shoved him-”

“I really didn’t mean to.” She’s begi

“You can say it’s the result of the fall. If he regains consciousness. You could have crippled him for life, Meghan. Your husband could be a paraplegic now.”

It takes a second for Meghan to process the horror of this, the idea that she has created an invalid, someone who will require a lifetime of care and provide nothing in return. Dead, Brian is worth a lot to her. Permanently disabled, all he will cough up is a small lump sum, eighteen months of mortgage payments, and then they have to petition to get on the federal system. She knows this thanks to Dan Simmons, insurance agent extraordinaire. He’s been trying to tell her that they don’t have adequate coverage for disability, and she’s been blowing him off.

“Go home, Meghan,” Heloise says. “Don’t leave him there, whatever you do.”

She shakes her head. “I have to go get Mark. The practice ends in less than an hour.”

“But…then he’ll be with you when you go home. Do you want to do that to your son, have him see his father that way? Don’t you at least want to spare Mark?”

Meghan wants to snap: What about Scott? How are you going to feel when someone, possibly me, tells him his mother is a whore? But Heloise is here, she has acknowledged Meghan’s power over her, and there really is nothing she can do to help. What had Meghan hoped, when she called Heloise? She assumed her half sister had some mysterious, nefarious co

“I’ll call in a favor, con another mom at practice into taking Mark home for di

“And then?”

“I’ll figure something out. I’ll do the right thing,” she says, knowing that she and Heloise may not agree on what that is.

Two hours later, Mark safely at the Pizza Hut with the Bo

She’s about to bound up the stairs to call 911, begin her new life as a tragic figure, when she sees something she hadn’t noticed before, a large tufted pillow, one of the decorative ones from her bed. How has this gotten here? What was Brian thinking? There’s a tiny viscous stain. Brian has always been a drooler in his sleep, but this one looks fresh, still slightly damp, and it smells-she inhales-of Brian’s shaving lotion, which makes no sense at all.

Unless someone held it over his face while she was gone, finishing what she started.

She races up the stairs and-after putting the pillow back on her bed-discovers that terror makes it that much easier to sound hysterical with grief when she calls 911.

THREE

Heloise has a strange insight in the church: this is the first funeral she has attended in her adult life. How could this be? Her mother is still alive and she refused to attend her father’s funeral a few years ago, deciding she could never put up the required façade of sorrow. Too bad, she thinks now. If she had attended, perhaps she would have seen Meghan and they could have swapped notes on where they lived, and she would have planted the idea that Turner’s Grove was simply not-what was the word they used now to describe those who wanted to move up, up, up-aspirational enough. Then Meghan would not have moved here, and Heloise would never have confided in her, and she would not be stuck now in a murder conspiracy. Would Brian still be alive? She doesn’t know, and to be unattractively candid, she doesn’t really care. Heloise cares about only one person: Scott. Not Audrey, not her other employees, although she likes them well enough and wants to be a good boss to them. Not her clients, god knows. And not even herself, except to the extent that she’s the only one who can take care of Scott. To compare her to a mother bear or lioness is inadequate because, for all their ferocity, they are spared the constant worry and anxiety. An animal roars to life when a threat is imminent but can otherwise relax. Heloise lives in a state of eternal vigilance, worrying about every aspect of Scott’s life, determined there will be nothing lacking.

And yet, the only thing Scott really desires is the one thing she took away from him before he was born: his father. A father. Any father. Should she have married Brad, the detective who had yearned after her, the man who was more than willing to pretend Scott was his child? But she couldn’t see how Scott’s desire for a father would manifest itself as he grew. She barely had one, to her way of thinking, and had wished she had less of one. She yearned to see him…not dead, but gone. Heloise has made the mistake that so many parents make, assuming her child will want exactly what she wanted, only to be confronted with the fact that her son is a person, too, and he wants what he wants.

She thought about sparing him this farce of a funeral, balancing what was best for Scott against what would cause the least gossip. She doesn’t want to see Meghan’s mother, the other half-siblings, but, of course, Meghan’s mother looks through her, still desperate to pretend that Hector didn’t have another family, and Meghan’s brothers are so much older-Meghan was born after a long, sad string of miscarriages-that they never really knew Heloise. In fact, there’s an uncomfortable moment when one of them seems to be cruising her, and she is almost grateful for Michael’s quavering “Hello, Aunt Heloise.” Yes, she tells the uncle with a look. We have the same daddy. Move along.

Still, hearing that note in Michael’s voice, she wishes the two families were close, that it would be natural to sweep him up in a hug. But while she and Meghan have allowed Scott and Michael to have a friendship of sorts-Heloise even more reluctant than Meghan, more fearful of the complications-the two families have never really interacted. The polite fiction is that Heloise and Scott have established their own holiday rituals-Deep Creek Lake for Thanksgiving, someplace warm and su

Meghan can, has begun to. She has called three times since their meeting at the Starbucks. The first was a simple call of notification, left on the answering machine: “Brian’s dead, Heloise. It’s a horrible accident and things are in a state. Is there any chance you could send Audrey over to stay with the kids tomorrow while I tend to arrangements?” It wasn’t really a question. Heloise sent Audrey over and ran the office that evening.