The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

his last name, damn it. Within the sea of worshipping humanity that morning, our tour group finally inched inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Self-absorbed fourteen-year-old that I was, I was impressed at only a minimal level. Another big cathedral. So. What.

But then we scuffled over to one side of the vast room, which was so packed you could nearly taste the mix of sweat, perfume, and body odor. I couldn’t even see over the tourists in front of me and was approaching claustrophobia and at the brink of losing my mind when something happened. All of a sudden, there was no one in front of me, and I was staring into a glass wall with a sculpture behind it.

It was the first and only time I’ve seen Michelangelo’s La Pietà. It took a moment to realize what it was, but then it clicked. This was Mary holding the body of her son. I had seen a thousand images of Jesus on the trip, but this sculpture grabbed my heart and squeezed so hard I stopped breathing. At that age, I cared little for art and had no connection with Jesus, but in that moment, I was so transfixed by this sculpture—how could it be so smooth?—that I began to weep. Right there. Tears fell, and I thought I was having some kind of religious experience.

But it wasn’t that. It was the combination of profound beauty and sadness at such an exquisite level that it left me no option other than to cry. I hadn’t experienced anything like that again.

Until now.

This snowfall.

The beauty enveloping the sadness.

With the tears welling in my eyes, I think once again about death. The rainbow in the cornfield. It’s all so gorgeous, and it’s all so tragic. The extremes of human emotion and how ironic that thoughts of dying fill me with such life.

I’m still staring transfixed at the world outside when my father’s voice resonates behind me.

“What a fuckhole of a mess out there.”

And the beauty is gone.

The sadness, however, remains.

Forty-Eight

I turn to my father, who’s dressed for work; he wears three-thousand dollar suits like a second skin. He’s always known how to package himself: crisp and clean, almost vintage. Even in these autumn years of his life, my father remains attractive on the outside, despite whatever ugliness festers within.

“Bobby just called. Said he can’t drive me. Can’t even get out of his own driveway.”

Bobby is my father’s driver, who for years has taken him and Peter to the Yates Capital office in Boston every weekday. I can’t even picture my father behind the wheel of a car anymore. It would be beneath him.

“They just closed the schools,” I say.

“I hate working from home.” He steps into the office and stares out at the landscape. I don’t imagine he sees what I do. He sees only inconvenience. “It’s lonely.”

“So take a day off,” I tell him. “Go back to bed. Enjoy some quiet.”

He looks at me as if I’ve just casually suggested he kill himself.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Can’t you just enjoy the things you have? Or do you want to work until you die, dropping dead during a conference call?”

A grunt. “There’re worse ways to go.” He takes a step toward me and sniffs. “Jesus, you already drinking? I can smell it on you.”

“I haven’t stopped,” I say. “I’ve been up all night.”

“Doing what?”

“Losing my mind.”

His glance scans me up and down, as if looking for cracks. “That’s pretty dramatic.”

I don’t argue the point.

“You were right,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t have written what I did. And now it’s too late. Whatever’s going to happen, I can’t change it now.”

He lets his gaze rest on me a moment longer before walking to the door and closing it. He tells me to sit, which I do. In his chair. I expect a reaction from him, even just a subtle narrowing of the eyes at this infraction, but there’s nothing. He takes the other chair and leans back.

“Tell me,” he says.

And I do.

I tell my father everything.

About Detective Pearson’s first visit to Bury. About Cora and what I suspected she did to Tasha Collins’s poodle. What Willow said to Max, and even her creepy Lizzie Borden poster. I tell my father that Cora is both unhinged and dangerous and could be a threat to the rest of the family. I tell him about the drunken call from Pearson and what he said about Cora’s interview with the police.

Through all this, his face is ice. I’ve never spoken to him this honestly in my life, and there’s a comfort to his steely gaze, as if his tensile strength can withstand all the pressure I’m putting on him in the moment.

I reveal to my father my recurring nightmares. How I relive that night from two decades ago and can’t take it anymore. The final thing I confess is that the weight of the secrets has broken me and how I think about the allure of death more often than I should. Really think about it.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, I finish, drained of everything. I slump in my chair, thinking I could sleep a year and it wouldn’t be enough.

My father is quiet, contemplative. After a silence that stretches for minutes, the first thing he says is “I think you killed Riley.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I force myself to look into his eyes, gaze past the perpetual squint and lock in on him with resolve. I would do this as a kid, in those times he showed enough interest to chastise me about something. I’d lock eyes with him and take his barrage, focusing as deeply as I could into his pupils, those black orbs behind the squint, nearly hypnotizing myself in the process. He could belabor his verbal abuse, never yelling (and never needing to), but as long as I kept my focus, his words lost their impact. He’d eventually run out of steam, and that felt like a victory for me.

I keep my focus on those