CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE SUSAN
No one answered her question, so she asked it again.
“Is she going to be okay?”
Simon finally looked up towards her, but his eyes wouldn’t meet hers. Instead, they fell on the gun held nimbly in her left hand.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked. “So you can shoot her again?”
Susan felt her face crumple. She should have taken her medication today.
She should have taken it for the last month. Her husband thought she was at a spa, “getting better.” Her children had parent-teacher conferences next week. Riley, her second-grader, wasn’t doing well in school and her teachers were worried. Susan needed to be back in time for that.
“What?” Laura asked.
Susan must have been mumbling under her breath. “I have a meeting for my children’s school next week.”
“I don’t understand.” Laura looked dumbfounded.
“Are you serious?” Joyce coughed down her mean laugh.
“I should be home by now,” Susan reminded herself. “I haven’t packed lunches for the week yet.”
“You should have thought of that before you shot an innocent woman,” Simon reminded her. He stood behind her, drying his hands at the sink. Susan waved the gun to motion him back in front of her.
“You think I don’t know that?” Fury flared in her stomach. “You think I don’t understand that all of this was one huge mistake?”
“No, I don’t,” Joyce replied coolly.
“What’s wrong with you?” Laura was trying to sound confrontational, but Susan heard the fear in her voice.
“Nothing is wrong with me!” Susan held her hands up to her ears and pressed them down hard. Sometimes the world buzzed around her too much. So much it hurt.
“I need to figure out the ending.”
Addy moaned below them, and Simon knelt to check on her again.
“Didn’t it seem a little too unbelievable that I showed up to this derelict town where Dermot had been hiding out and found Trina Dell skulking around? What were the odds? Pretty good, I suppose, since a year ago I found Trina in the same place. And that I sent Dermot to seduce her that night at the wedding.”
“Ah, there it is,” Joyce murmured.
“What about the letter? It only arrived a week before he died,” Laura said. “The letter where Dermot got back in touch with you, and confessed that he’d killed Tom?”
Susan was only half listening…
Mom, give me a drink! Mom, why are we out of milk? I don’t like this casserole, honey. Maybe you overbaked it? Stop bothering me, I’m busy working. I have better things to do than listen to you prattle on about your boring day going to the grocery store. Mom, I wet the bed again. Mom, Mom, Mom, pay attention to me!
All of these are things that had been said to Susan in recent months. All of them.
There was something about living a life for others that makes murder seem a reasonable alternative.
“I love my family,” Susan replied. “I just also hate them.”
And why did she have this family? Because of fucking Trina Dell.
And because of her brother. Because of Dermot.
“Okay…” Laura held onto the last syllable. “But the letter?”
Simon was still fussing with Addy. “Get away from her!” Susan barked. “Go stand by Joyce.”
Simon obeyed. Now Susan could see everyone. Addy on the floor. Laura near the edge of the couch. Joyce and Simon around the other side, by Addy’s bandaged shoulder.
“Dermot sent a letter to me, but it was almost a year ago that I received it. He felt himself spiraling out of control, he said. He’d done something terrible. A hit and run. He couldn’t stop—he’d been drinking and driving way too fast. It was after a party with some friends where he shouldn’t have been driving home, but did anyway. Reckless. He couldn’t go to the police. He had his entire life ahead of him. He needed to trust someone, so he came to me. He knew I’d had difficulties in the past. He thought I could help him.
“And all of this I could handle. I was reading the letter, thinking to myself that I could be there for my little brother. I’d help him through this awful thing that he did and help get his life back on track.
“But then, in the second to last paragraph of his letter, he said the man’s name who he’d hit. Tom. And I knew. From the bottom of my soul I knew what he’d done. I’d kept track of Trina and Tom for years. Social media made it so easy to stalk people behind the curtain of Facebook posts and Instagram selfies. Dermot was too young, and then too separated from our family, to remember what happened between me, Tom, and Trina. When I was hospitalized after Tom left me, Dermot was just starting high school. My parents told him I had really bad depression, but didn’t say anything about why I was so depressed. I knew Dermot was living in the same town as Tom, but I had no reason to think they’d ever run into each other.”
A sharp bleat of laughter escaped her mouth. “Run. Hah!”
Susan paused, feeling the four sets of eyes in the room tunneling into her. Something like a siren shrieked in her brain and she shook her head side to side to release it.
She continued. “Plus, Dermot was using my mom’s maiden name as his last name at that point—he was so messed up from my parents that he didn’t even want the same name as them anymore—so Tom wouldn’t link the two of us. That’s why Trina never connected Dermot back to me and who I was in high school. That, or she didn’t even remember me.”
Susan gulped down a sob. “I checked the news as soon as I finished reading his letter. I’d been busy with family stuff that week, and hadn’t gone onto Trina or Tom’s accounts for a while.” She laughed, mixed with her sob. “I actually thought I was getting better. Getting over it.”
“You weren’t,” Joyce interjected, stating the obvious.
Susan shook her head. “No, I wasn’t.” She continued. “But I didn’t blame Dermot. Not really. I blamed Trina.” She paused. “And I blamed you.” She turned her gaze on Simon.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR SIMON
If this wasn’t hell, then Simon didn’t know what was. Blood on his hands that wouldn’t come off in the sink. Blood seeping through Addy’s bandages. So much blood. Susan stared at him from above, telling him this was really all his fault.
He couldn’t wait any longer for Susan to just shut up. “She needs to go to the hospital.” He was begging, and he didn’t care.
“Be quiet.” Joyce’s voice was firm.
Her hands gripped his wrist. Joyce’s hands were icy. “Stop touching me,” he cried out.
Joyce froze next to him. He looked at his wife, and there she was, looking back at him like a dog that had just been beaten, only to realize its teeth were sharper than the stick.
“Don’t you talk to me like that, ever again.” She shifted away from him.
Joyce bent over and picked Addy up from underneath her arms. Addy groaned, and Simon choked back a caution that moving her would cause more damage and rip the stitches.
“Stop it,” Susan commanded. “Stop moving. Stay where you are.” Simon glimpsed the gun moving in the cheap overhead lighting of the trailer.
