Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Split/Brain by Joyce Carol Oates

© 2008 by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, was released in June 2008 (Ecco Press); and of particular interest to readers of this magazine, the Ontario Review Press recently reprinted in trade paperback her 1984 Mysteries of Winterthurn, in which detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan is confronted with three baffling cases.

In that instant of entering the house by the rear door when she sees, or thinks she sees, a fleeting movement like a shadow in the hallway beyond the kitchen and she hears a sharp intake of breath or panting, it is her decision not to retreat in panicked haste from her house but to step forward sharply calling Jeremy? Is that you? For she’d seen her sister-in-law’s car parked on the shoulder of the road some fifty feet before the driveway to her house, she is certain it must be Veronica’s Toyota which Jeremy often drives, it occurs to her now that she’d expected to see Veronica at the clinic that morning but Veronica hadn’t turned up, like buzzing hornets these thoughts rush at her even as she calls out more sharply Is that you? Jeremy? For the boy shouldn’t be here in this house, at this time, uninvited, she’d left the rear door unlocked as frequently she did driving into town to the clinic, returning and later in the day driving back into town to the clinic, a distance of precisely 2.6 miles, of which she has memorized each intervening property, driveway, intersecting road and street, to be played, replayed, and run backward in her mind as she drives into town, to the rehab clinic, to see her husband, and returns to the house in preparation for driving back to the clinic, which is, she has come to realize, but the preparation for returning home. For much of this morning she has been at the clinic, tries to arrive precisely at eight A.M. when the clinic opens its front doors to visitors, for she is an early riser, both she and Jim are early risers, rarely sleep past dawn on even bitter-cold sunless winter mornings. And at the clinic, at her husband’s bedside, usually she will remain until seven P.M. when, exhausted, she returns home for the remainder of the day. At Jim’s bedside she reads to him, checks e-mail on her laptop and reads to Jim those messages, ever decreasing in frequency, that seem to her important for Jim to hear; with childlike logic she is thinking If I am a good wife, if I am good, God will spare us, God will make him well again, and so far her prayer which she understands is both craven and futile has not been entirely scorned, for Jim has been transferred from the hospital to the clinic and there is the promise that one day soon he will be sent back home to recuperate and to recover his lost strength. Already he no longer needs to be fed through a tube, already the color is returning to his face that had been deathly pale. Though still he tires easily, nods off in the midst of speaking, friends who come to visit have learned to disguise their shock and discomfort at seeing Jim Gould so changed, poor Jim who’d once been so vital, so energetic, smiling and good-natured and much-loved and now his body seems to have shrunken, he has lost more than fifty pounds, his hands are weak, legs useless, the once-powerful muscles atrophied and now his legs are reduced to bones beneath thin hairless skin, terrible to see. And so she has learned not to see. And so she has learned to disguise her fear. And so she has learned to smile as nurses learn to smile. And when he has asked her please massage his legs, his legs hurt, she smiles and kneads the bone-hard legs, thin now as the legs of a young child, massaging these legs she jokes with her husband, she loves him so, she would die for this man, she believes, and yet: how fatigued she has grown in the past several weeks, how exasperated with her husband’s demands, Jim has become unpredictable in his moods, quick to become angry, this morning hurrying to get to the clinic she’d forgotten to bring with her the latest issue of a professional journal for which her husband has been an advisory editor, seeing she’d forgotten it Jim was visibly disappointed and sulky and she’d said, Darling, I’ll drive back to get the journal, it’s no trouble, and immediately he said no, it isn’t necessary, you can bring it next time, and she insisted yes, of course she would drive back to get it for him, she has other errands in town that need to be done this morning. And anyway, Jim was scheduled for tests this morning. And she kisses his cheek, tells him she will return within the hour, in secret she’s childishly relieved to be able to leave the clinic so soon after arriving, this dour dark dimly lighted place, the smells, don’t think of the smells, the accumulated smells of decades. And the other patients, and the other visitors who are mainly women her age and older, whom she has come to recognize at the clinic, as they have come to recognize her, and dread the sight of one another outside the clinic. She is one of the few who takes pains with her appearance, not a vain woman but a woman well aware of her face, her body, how men regard her, or once regarded her, with more than ordinary interest. On this weekday she is wearing an attractive creamy-pale yellow pants suit that is flattering to her shapely body, she thinks, and around her throat a peach-colored Italian scarf. Through her life she has been a big-boned beautiful girl yet never what one would call fat, the word fat is offensive to her ears, obscene. Her face is round, full-cheeked, her skin slightly flushed as if sunburnt, a classic brunette beauty her husband has called her but now, seeing herself in the rearview mirror of her car on the way home she is shocked by her creased forehead, feathery white lines bracketing her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, the coral lipstick she’d so carefully applied that morning has been eaten off, a little cry of distress escapes her It is unfair! My face is wearing out, I am still young. For she is seven years younger than the stricken man in the rehab clinic. How many years she’d been the youngest wife in their social circle. And in her heart, she is the youngest still, and the one men glance at, gaze at with admiration. And turning into Constitution Hill, and onto Westerly Drive, she sees a familiar car parked at a crooked angle partly in the roadway, partly on the shoulder, her sister-in-law’s black Toyota so oddly parked, this is a car her seventeen-year-old nephew Jeremy has been driving recently. She feels a tinge of disapproval, neither her brother nor her sister-in-law seem capable of disciplining Jeremy who has been suspended from high school for drugs, threatening other students, threatening a teacher, she knows that Jeremy has a juvenile record for break-ins in his neighborhood near the university. Yet turning into her driveway she ceases thinking of her nephew, the driveway is a steep graveled lane bordered by a straggling evergreen hedge, with her husband so suddenly hospitalized, now in rehab, no one has tended to the property, scarcely she thinks of it, seeing that litter has been blown into the shrubbery, old newspapers and flyers scattered across the lawn, the only time she notices the condition of the property is when she’s in the car and as soon as she steps out of the car to enter the house she will forget. Too many things to think of, it’s unfair. And now pushing the rear door that opens too readily to her touch, seeing that fleeting shadow against an inner wall. And she thinks with a rush of anger He believes that I am with Jim, at the clinic and not here. He believes that no one is home. For it has been said of Trudy Gould that she is a saint, every day at the hospital and now at the rehab clinic, she is selfless, uncomplaining at her husband’s bedside for months. She knows how people speak of her, she takes pride in being so spoken of, in fact she is terrified of the empty house, bitterly now she regrets having no children, yes but both she and her husband decided that the risk of adoption was too great, bringing a child of unknown parents into their orderly household. And now entering her kitchen with a deliberate clatter of her heels, expensive Italian-leather shoe boots with a two-inch heel, she feels a thrill of something like defiance, she will not be frightened of her own nephew, tall lanky sloe-eyed Jeremy whom she has known since his birth, Aunt Trudy the boy calls her, or called her until two years ago when so much seemed to change in him, still she thinks that Jeremy has always liked her, he would not hurt her. Entering the hallway now calling in a scolding voice Jeremy! I see you and seeing now that the boy’s face is strangely flushed, he is panting and his eyes are dilated and damp, he is on some drug she thinks, yet even now advancing upon him sharp-tongued and scolding Jeremy! what are you doing here! How dare you as he springs at her panting like a dog knocking her back against the wall, even now she is disbelieving He would not hurt me, this is my house and somehow they are in the kitchen, they are struggling together in the kitchen, a chair is overturned, in his hoarse raw boy’s voice Jeremy is crying Shut up, shut up you old bag, old bitch even as she screams at him to get away, to stop what he is doing. She slaps at him, blindly Jeremy has snatched up a knife from a kitchen counter, a small paring knife, yet sharp, blindly he is stabbing at her, his aunt whom he seems not to know, does not recognize, astonished Aunt Trudy he has known all his life staring at her now with glassy eyes narrowed to slits, helplessly she lifts her fleshy forearms against him, her outstretched hands to shield herself from the terrible stabbing blows, she is not scolding now, her voice is faltering, pleading now No no Jeremy please no don’t hurt me you don’t want to hurt me Jeremy as the short sharp blade flies at her like a maddened bird of prey, striking her face, her throat, her breasts straining at the now-damp creamy-pale yellow fabric of her jacket top, this furious stranger who resembles her seventeen-year-old nephew will back off from her to leave her sprawled on the sticky kitchen floor to suffocate in her own blood, her lungs have been punctured, her throat is filling up with blood, in something like elation he has thrown down the bloody paring knife, I told you! I told you! I told you God damn you leave me alone! He stumbles from the kitchen, runs upstairs though it has been years since he has been upstairs in his aunt’s house on Westerly Drive, wildly he rummages through bureau drawers leaving bloody fingerprints, bloody footprints as in an antic dance in the striking baroque design of his Nike soles, man is he high, flying high, this older girl he’s crazy for, a girl with whom he shares his drugs, has sex and shares drugs, he will boast to her that he hadn’t planned anything of what happened in the rich woman’s house, he’d acted out of sheer instinct, he’d told her he knows a house over in Constitution Hill, there’s a woman who is gone all day at the hospital with her husband, he did not tell the girl that the woman was his aunt, boasting he’d be safe roaming the house as long as he wanted looking for money and for things to take, over in Constitution Hill where the houses are so large, lots so large and set off from their neighbors, no one will see him and if there’s trouble no one will hear it, in that instant of pushing open the door she sees all this, as a single lightning flash can illuminate a nighttime landscape of gnarled and unimaginable intricacy, so in that instant she sees, sheerly by instinct she retreats from the door that has swung open too readily to her touch, in the tight-fitting Italian-leather shoe boots she runs stumbling down the gravel driveway, of course she’d seen her sister-in-law’s black Toyota parked out of place by the road, she’d recognized the Toyota by the pattern of dents on the rear bumper and by the first letters of the license plate VER, no she will not retreat, certainly she will not retreat, instead she turns the car into the steep gravel driveway, at the rear of the house which is the door she and Jim always use she sees, or thinks she sees, that the door is just slightly ajar, still there is time to retreat, with a part of her brain she knows I must not go inside, Jim would not want me to go inside for her responsibility is to her husband back at the clinic waiting for her, but this is her house in which she has lived with her husband Jim Gould for twenty-six years, no one has the right to keep her from entering this house, no one has the right to enter this house without her permission, even a relative, even her shy-sullen sloe-eyed nephew Jeremy, and so with an air of defiance she pushes into the kitchen, clatter of heels on the kitchen tile in that instant seeing a fleeting movement like a shadow in the hall beyond the kitchen, she hears a sharp intake of breath or panting, in that instant a rush of pure adrenalin flooding her veins she refuses to run stumbling and screaming down the gravel drive to summon help, a middle-aged fleshy woman in her early fifties, yet still girlish, in her manner and in her speech, she will not stagger next-door where a Hispanic housekeeper will take her in, in this way save her, dialing 911 as Mrs. Gould collapses onto a kitchen chair winded, panting like a terrified animal, that will not happen, she will not give in to fear, she will not flee from her own house, she will not be saved from suffocating in her own blood, it is her decision, she is Jim Gould’s classic brunette beauty, she has never been a vain woman but she thinks well of herself, she is not a weak woman like her sister-in-law and so she will not retreat in undignified haste from her own house, instead she will step forward with a scolding clatter of her shoe-boot heels sharply calling Jeremy? Is that you?