I ran into Eileen’s husband again in the kitchen, my once-peaceful sanctuary transformed into a sinister unpredictable funhouse—unpleasant surprises lurking around every corner. He greeted me with a broad smile.
“I’m getting paper towels,” I said, unnecessarily.
“Someone have an accident?”
I opened and closed cupboards, ignoring the roll of paper towels on the counter. Eileen’s husband made a clicking noise in the side of his mouth and went off to join the others in the TV room. When he’d gone, I frowned at one of Christine’s finger paintings on the fridge, trying to remember his name. Peter. His name was Peter. I congratulated myself on remembering that much, although I still had no idea what they were doing there. As I reached for the roll of paper towels, my smartphone vibrated in my pocket, repeatedly this time, as from an incoming call. I took it out and the display showed an unknown number. I stuffed the phone back in my pocket. The moment it stopped vibrating, the landline began to ring.
I stared at the cordless on the counter.
“Are you getting that?” Meredith called from the TV room.
I picked it up and cautiously touched the talk button.
“Hello?” I said in soft voice.
No one answered.
“Hello?” I repeated, a little louder.
I could hear a television playing on the other end. Someone inhaled, about to speak. I quickly pressed the end button. Out in the living room, Meredith laughed at something Peter was saying. The landline rang again. I picked up just long enough to hang up on the caller, then left the phone off the hook and tucked the cordless into a drawer. “Who keeps calling?” Meredith asked, as I came out of the kitchen.
“No one.”
I stopped in front of the spilled drink. I’d forgotten paper towels. As I went back to collect them, my smartphone vibrated in my pocket. I ignored it and cleaned up the mess, before sitting down in a chair apart from the main group. Meredith and Eileen pulled their chairs together, talking in low voices, as Christine bounced from one boy to the other on the couch. Peter glanced my way, trying to catch my eye.
“So,” he finally said. “Working on a new book?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Writer’s block, eh?” he said knowingly. I let the comment pass. My cellphone rumbled against my thigh. Peter leaned back to watch Christine. “She’s adorable,” he said, determined to draw me into conversation. I responded with a noncommittal grunt, almost hoping she’d fall and hurt herself so that everyone in the room would see how right I’d been, but as close as she came to the edge, she never went over.
By the end of the night, I’d stopped wondering why Eileen and her family had come, focused instead on the problem of making them leave. The phones had finally quit ringing. My anxiety gave way to exhaustion. Meredith brought in pizza and the boys ate an incredible amount, while Peter got steadily drunker—and louder—regaling me with rambling stories from his youth. When he finally swayed off to bed, Meredith took Christine into the nursery, leaving Eileen and me alone in the living room. Like Peter, my sister had been drinking throughout the night, but unlike him, she seemed relatively sober.
“So,” she said. “How is everything?”
“Oh… fine.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”
She shrugged and looked down at her glass. “It looks like you’ve got a good thing going here. Meredith seems like a nice person.”
“She’s a saint,” I said.
“You’re lucky to have found her.”
“I’m aware of that.”
She looked at me closely, then sat back and sighed. “So how do you want to do this?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The house. How do you want to do it?”
“Which house?”
“Dad’s house.”
“What about it?”
Meredith laughed. “Jesus, Felix. We talked about this just a few days ago. Why do you think I’m here?”
“I…”
“You agreed that it was time to sell.”
“Right.” I had no recollection of saying that or anything else to Eileen in the recent past. She set her drink down and leaned towards me.
“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.”
“Well…” Now that she mentioned it, giving up the house felt like a terrible idea.
“The market’s hot right now. We’ll never get a better price.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I get that. It’s just… Doesn’t it still feel like home to you?”
“No,” she said, without hesitation. “It’s just an old building filled with bad memories. My home’s in Perth, with Peter and the boys. I was never happy in that house, Felix. With Dad moping around and the constant drinking…” She raised her wine glass to acknowledge the irony of the statement. “I’m a pleasant drunk. Dad was a miserable drunk. I don’t think he ever forgave himself for what happened to Mom.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he felt responsible, didn’t he? Like he should have done something to protect her.”
“From the cancer?” I asked, confused.
Eileen sat back and frowned. “You mean he never told you?”
A low droning noise started up somewhere nearby, as if one of the hummingbirds had found its way into the house.
Eileen shook her head. “I thought that considering all the problems you’d had, he’d have at least…” She trailed off. “Mom never had cancer, Felix. That was just a story Dad told us as kids.”
I rubbed at my right ear. “I don’t understand.”
“She was mentally ill.”
I waved at the air beside my head, feeling the hummingbird whirring closer.
“I’m not sure that she ever got a diagnosis,” Eileen continued. “But she had major problems. One day Dad came home from work and found us outside, alone in the snow. Mom was inside, having a bath. It wasn’t the first time something like that happened. She went places in her head. She forgot about us.”
“Dad told you this.”
“Yeah.”
“But if she didn’t have cancer, how did she…”
“She killed herself.”
I stared at her and she gave me a tight smile.
“Sorry. I know it’s a lot to take in.”
I continued to stare at her, no longer sure who I was talking to.
She shifted in her chair. “Felix, I have a confession to make. I’m not just here about the house. You know how I told you on the phone that I tracked you down online? Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Meredith contacted me. She’s been concerned about you. I mean, the house had been on my mind, but when Meredith told me what was happening… Anyway, Peter has a friend at Qantas. He was able to get us reasonable fare under the circumstances.”
I nodded. “Interesting.”
The hummingbird buzzed in my head, tunneling towards my brain. My vision darkened at the edges. I wondered how long they’d been talking behind my back, what they were planning to do. Eileen was still talking, but I was having trouble hearing her.
“They’re going to take her away.”
The words cut through all the noise. A man’s clear voice coming from directly behind me. I jerked around in my seat, finding no one there.
“What is it?” Eileen asked.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“That medication can lose its effectiveness over time. It’s possible that you just need to increase the dose a little. I find that with my thyroid meds…”
My phone, which had fallen silent for the evening, woke up and buzzed in my pocket, not with the usual drawn out rings, but with short, regular pulses, like a drumbeat. My vision continued to narrow. I felt as if I’d been holding my breath for a very long time. I exhaled, letting the air leak from my lungs. Then the room went dark.