Windswept

The plan made sense on every level. Eric Keane stood, watching the strong north wind judder naked tree branches outside the bedroom window. Far in the distance the white cliffs stood sentry along the seacoast. Indoors, he heard the bang-clank of Mrs. Potts’ arrival as she dragged the vacuum up the carpeted stairs. He massaged his eye sockets with the heels of his palms then opened his eyes again. I must hold on, he thought as he dressed.

A tornado of sorts had already swept through the master bedroom: dozens of flung-about clothes, wads of scrunched-up tissues, and a half-dozen cylindrical pill bottles, all bearing prescription stickers for Mrs. Jessica Keane.

Half an hour ago, Eric had bundled up the children for school, harnessing them to their outsize knapsacks. He’d told them Mommy was “at the hospital already getting better.” Little Jake just yawned and blinked. “Do I have to wear this stinky hat?” Emmie asked. “Mommy doesn’t make me.” And with every snap of the jacket fasteners, every stamp of their boots on the wet stone walkway to the bus, Eric had only one thought: Amber.

In the stairwell, the deep sigh of Mrs. Potts signalled she wanted him out. Her job was to clean the master bedroom, coax it back to normalcy, but the man of the house was in her way, forcing her to work around him.

Eric pulled on clothes, frowning distractedly at a photo on his bureau. “Number 1 Dad” said the plastic frame in fake children’s printing. Little Jake was holding a hamster— squeezing it, in fact—and the moment after the cutesy pose was snapped, the beast had sunk its teeth into Jake’s finger. What a stupid shot Jessica had chosen to slap in the frame for Father’s Day. Eric planned to replace it as soon as… well, as soon as other parts of his plan fell into place. He opened a drawer and selected black dress socks. The unexpected sight of a shiny pink corner of a bag suddenly made the day bearable.

Last night, the ambulance arrived when Emmie and Jake were already in bed. They’d slept through the bumpety-bump of the paramedics with the gurney and the intermittent flash of ambulance lights slicing through the curtains. Eric had called Jessica’s sister Amber to come over and babysit while he travelled to Buckland Hospital with Jessica.

He had messaged his boss last night from the Emergency ward, telling her where he was and why. Ms. Travis was compassionate about the Keanes’ situation because she had a brother who was also in and out of the Psych unit. “Eric, take all the time you need,” she’d replied. Later, he’d tapped out another message to her: “I might come in late but I plan to attend tomorrow’s meeting.” To this she had fired back: “Sure thing. Remember: no plan survives contact with reality,” followed with a ha-ha emoji. What a boss, always ready to quote military strategists. He’d sent a thumbs-up right back.

When he’d returned from the hospital in the wee hours, Amber was on the living room sofa curled around a box of tissues, half-dozing through an episode of Outlander. “Jessica’s in a holding pattern,” Eric announced to tears of relief, then Amber had blown her nose and washed her face. She’d left quickly, eyes averted, dodging the awkwardness that tainted their conversation these days. “I looked in on the kids ten minutes ago,” she murmured, as she put on her coat. “Everything’s fine.”

“Super,” he’d replied.

This morning, buttoning his shirt, Eric scowled at Jessica’s meds: those useless bystanders with their goofy white caps. With one swipe he cleared the counter. This is no way to live! The days of vacant stares, the nights of her flinching from his touch. She could not abide his presence, even when he sat a sofa-length away, watching trashy game shows with her in some semblance of affection. He lived in constant dread of misreading her moods, of triggering another downward spiral.

A new life beckoned. The children loved Auntie Amber and she loved them; it was a mutual bedazzlement of enchanted beings. They loved her twisty stories, her Rube Goldberg-type sketches, her slightly scary games. She drew forth Emmie’s innate theatricality (“Look at me—I’m a Viking superstar!”) and Jake’s unbounded curiosity (“Do cockroaches go to heaven?”).

Eric dreamed of the four of them, a couple years from now, say, chasing waves on a sunny day. Running, laughing, hollering—all those un-Jessica-like things.

He braced his wrist against the bureau and with difficulty poked in one golden cufflink. Then the other.

Doctor Pankaj said last night’s incident was an indicator that Jessica’s anti-psychotic dosage needed to be increased. However, he warned, there was a serious side effect: stoppage could be deadly. “The pills cause the brain to shut down its own production of serotonin. Any cessation will lead to an increased risk of suicide.”

Jessica was forgetful about taking her meds because she lost track of the days. Eric and Amber used to take turns supervising her daily dose. Lately the family relied on Mrs. Potts, mother of seven children, all healthy and grown—good old Mrs. Potts, with her no-nonsense air—to get Jessica to “take her vitamins.”

And now: the plan. Eric’s idea had emerged like a self-assembling crystal when Emmie brought back a loot bag from a classmate’s birthday party—the same shiny pink bag he had tucked away in his sock drawer. The bag contained a type of candy, called Bittles, which was identical in appearance to Jessica’s anti-psychotic drug. The plan was dead simple. Jessica would return home, take her increased dose of medications for a week or so, and then Eric would replace those meds with the sugar pills. No one, least of all Mrs. Potts, would know her meds were effectively, dangerously, stopped. By springtime, Mrs. Potts would be shooing Jessica outdoors so she could get on with the intensive house-cleaning. While he was at work and the kids were at school, Jessica often took long walks at the local nature preserve—which included the windswept cliffs.

Oh, goddamn! Eric realized he’d put on his shirt before he shaved. He thundered downstairs to the basement bathroom and stuffed a towel around his collar to protect his shirt. He scraped and rinsed, scraped and rinsed, all the while looking directly in his own tired bloodshot eyes. It’s not as if I’ll be poisoning anyone. No, he would simply be allowing Jessica to return to her natural state, to bend toward her unique inclination. For years they had resisted her powerful and mysterious urge to—

“Done with the upstairs, Mr. Keane?” Mrs. Potts asked in her broad North Country accent. She clutched her cleaning carry-all in one hand, her mop bucket in the other.

“Yes, yes,” said Eric. He emerged from the bathroom, roughly wiping hands and neck.

“Had another of her seizures, did she?”

“Yes.” He turned away. He never corrected Mrs. Potts because he doubted a simple housecleaner could understand his wife’s complexity.

“Poor dear,” she clucked.

Eric sighed. He was fed up with false, cloying sympathy. In the first year of Jessica’s depression, people were worried and genuinely solicitous. After a decade, though, people secretly wished she would get on and done with it. Oh, he knew they did. It was in the way they spoke, in the way they carried on their lives despite the botheration of Eric and Jessica.

“You might have to go overtime on that … mess,” Eric said. “I’ll kick in for an extra hour.”

“One hour?” said Mrs. Potts, letting the implication hang in the air. Then she relented and asked, “And how are the children—”

“Terribly sorry, Mrs. Potts, but—well. My boss is very kind and understanding but I don’t want to… you know,” he said, his sleep-starved mind struggling to find the words. Oh, hell. He wandered off to the kitchen, which smelled of synthetic pine in the wake of Mrs. Potts. Eric grabbed his lunch from the fridge and twisted a banana from the bunch. On the fridge he saw a different handwriting on the shopping list: Graham crackers.

He looked out the window to judge which coat he should take, and was arrested again by the sight of the trees, tiny-budded branches moving like many violin bows in a ghostly orchestra. Graham crackers. He felt faintly irritated; it was presumptuous to write on the family shopping list. Jessica would see that Amber had been over. It would sadden Jessica to think that her sister, with whom she used to fight tooth and nail, was regularly stepping in for her now. Even worse, Jessica might suspect something.

Eric had grown to love Amber more than he’d ever loved Jessica. But Amber had torn herself away. Dear, dear Amber. She was so decent. Their love existed on that terrible knife-edge of wanting someone while knowing it violated every rule. “I love you, but she’s my sister, Eric. I can’t be a rat,” Amber had said through tears. And he respected that.

The wind intensified and the clouds scudded into place, great grey logs sliding in the river of pale blue. Jessica’s weather, it was. He dug in the jumble of coats and jackets near the door.

“What, you’re still here?” said Mrs. Potts, sticking her head in the kitchen on her way to the laundry room.

“I, uh, lost my cell,” Eric said, convincingly patting his suit. His phone was no doubt clogged with messages from work (“when you have a moment…”) and hospital (“patient responding; please donate”) and school (“urgent: head lice alert”). He felt exhausted just thinking about the day ahead. But he would check his email, check every last one of those pestilential messages in the hope that one, just one, would be from Amber.

“Humph. Phones. You Americans. Everybody has a phone for brains.” Mrs. Potts shifted the basket to her other hip. “Try leaving it at the office—and enjoy real life for a change.”

Eric shrugged. Life was so simple to the simple folk, wasn’t it?

He could see Jessica’s dressing gown wadded beside the clump of sheets, which bore a delicate floral pattern and blotches of carmine, sort of a Laura Ashley-meets-chainsaw effect. Each suicide attempt was performance art: shocking to behold but not a lasting thing. He shook his head as if water filled his ears.

Mrs. Potts set down her basket, her brow furrowed, and said, “I ought to pre-soak that linen.”

Eric drew back, suddenly aware of the ugliness she would see, and Mrs. Potts’s outstretched hand. “Oh, never mind. It’s—full of germs. She asked me to throw this out.” He stuffed it in a bag and stuffed the bag in the garbage. “I’m just—my mind just—” His mind was shattered, that’s what.

“For better or worse, in sickness and in health,” Mrs. Potts chanted. “Oh, we fools who marry, we marry the great unknown!”

Eric turned in a sudden impulse of terror. “Gotta go,” he said. He grabbed his keys and fled to the car, where he rammed the heater to high, since he had forgotten to take a coat after all. Ms. Travis sent a message: the meeting had been postponed until tomorrow.

Driving calmed him so he decided to detour from his route to work. Why not; now he had some extra time. He drove near the cliffs and parked, his heart pounding, his blood surging. The plan: Jessica gets a higher dosage; pills get swapped; Jessica goes to the cliffs; good-bye Jessica.

And what beautiful, ragged outcroppings they were! She was a Romantic; she deserved something special. A death on the cliffs, blasted by wind and sprinkled by sea spray, was far more noble than hacked-up arms in the tub or vomit on the wall-to-wall carpeting. She must not die in the house while he was there. It would permanently contaminate the room. Worse, the children might come upon her. He pictured Death, the fat parasite sitting on Jessica’s brain, jiggling the controls, over-riding all maternal compunction. His anger flared. Does she even think of them anymore?

The party loot bag: he must focus on the loot bag. The beacon of hope. He would buy his freedom with a handful of sugar pills.

His head swam; he’d skipped breakfast and now wished he’d taken a banana. He decided to clear his mind with a short walk in the fresh air. Research, it was. He would report back to Jessica something alluring about the cliffs today. Their Byronic majesty had long exerted a peculiar fascination on her.

As he walked, the sun came out and he remembered the picnics they’d had, in the days B.C. and B.D. (before children and before depression). He and Jessica loved to explore the tidal pools at the base of the cliff, then hike the escarpment, singing old marching songs at top volume. “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.” One time they had hiked to the top of the cliff and tried running back down a different path, which turned out to be filled with nettles and scree. Later at home they’d rinsed the gravel from skinned knees and the palms of their hands. Eric: wincing, gasping, swearing never to do that again. Jessica: giddy, grinning, still humming Tipperary.

He continued on a narrowing path, pacing through the steps of his plan once more: pills, placebo, cliffs, crash. It was a steep ascent; his silly leather-soled dress shoes slithered and slid. He was often grabbing at branches and roots to steady himself, but he was glad of the exertion—the climbing warmed him and blew the cobwebs from his mind.

Eric paused and took in a lungful of sea-spray air. He hadn’t been on such a vigorous walk for years. Damn, the air was bracing. He resolved to take Amber here soon.

* * *

“According to the timeline, you were the last person to see Eric Keane alive,” Detective Zantoro said to the woman in the Keanes’ kitchen.

Mrs. Potts puffed up her chest. “Nobody fetched the children. The school called the house. I didn’t answer, of course, I never do, but then they called Mrs. Keane’s sister Amber…” From the hallway floated the indistinct sounds of Amber with the children. “Would you like a cuppa, officer?”

Mrs. Potts fanned out biscuits on a small plate and began filling two mugs before he could decline.

“Thank you,” Zantoro said, waving away her reconstruction of how, exactly, bad news had emerged. Lay people were fascinated by it, as if correcting some misremembered detail would change the outcome. “Did you speak to Mr. Keane this morning?”

“Oh yes. He likes to talk, that man. I’ve me work to do, so I don’t have much time, but oh yes, he was taking it real bad, about Mrs. Keane.” Mrs. Potts settled into her favorite kitchen chair. “Have you spoken to her? She had one of her, ahem, seizures last night, and perhaps she’s feeling … poorly.…”

Zantoro nodded. “Quite right. We spoke to the physician, who asked us to hold back on the news until Mrs. Keane has, er, stabilized.” His eyes darted, as if he suddenly realized he had been tricked into saying more than he should. “What, exactly, did Mr. Keane say to you?”

“He had to get to work right away. His boss is a hard case, you know. He said to me, ‘Mrs. P, you are such a rock’ and I said, ‘It was nothing but what decent folk do.’ The bedroom was such a mess from the seizure and all, you know. He said, ‘Take four hours overtime,’ and also, he said I can have Friday off—my granddaughter’s graduation.”

“How did he seem? Sad? Angry?” The detective tested the tea and found it too hot to sip.

She studied the ceiling. “Scatter-brained, I’d say. Mind you, he always is. That’s why he has me giving her the daily vitamins—else he’d forget.”

“So he’s regularly scatter-brained.”

“Today, much more than usual. He almost forgot his phone, but I said, ‘Stop, Mr. Keane, what if the hospital needs to reach you.’ Thank goodness I reminded him, what with the—the thingamajig in it—or your people would still be looking for him!”

“Ah yes, the GPS locator,” Zantoro said drily. “Did he say anything else—was he despondent about his wife’s health, perhaps?”

“Oh yes,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “He was very upset. He worships the ground she walks on. ‘For better or worse,’ he said to me, ‘in sickness and in health’—that man is, I mean, was, a real gem.”

From the hallway the sound of the children grew louder. “When Daddy gets back, can we go see Mommy then?” came Jake’s plaintive voice.

Zantoro rose and shut the kitchen door.

“It wasn’t just Jessica,” said Mrs. Potts. “He dotes on them all. Little Jake—you likely saw that photo upstairs—first thing Eric wakes up to every morning. And he’s so sweet on Daddy’s girl—he keeps a little treats bag from Easter for her. Even takes care of his old housekeeper. Regular bonuses. Makes sure I have my favourite biscuits for tea.” Mrs. Potts picked up a Graham cracker and snapped it in half. “What a saint that man is. Was,” she said, small crumbs drifting from her mouth. “Tis a real pity he broke under the strain of it all.”

THE END