Misery Loves Company (21 page)

WHEN SHE WAS A KID,
Jules had always thought being in a wheelchair would be cool. It wasn’t. She was having a hard time reaching things she needed and moving around the furniture. She already needed to go to the bathroom again but couldn’t get herself motivated for all the hard work getting there.

Instead, she decided to light a fire, despite Patrick’s insistence that it not be lit. This beautiful stone fireplace had been empty of flame since she arrived, and it was a shame. It was cold in the house, for one thing. And second, who didn’t like to work and ponder by firelight?

She couldn’t reach the matches on the mantel, but she
used a particularly long vase sitting nearby to knock them to the floor. Wood was already in the fireplace, strung with cobwebs. She got rid of those but needed newspaper or something similar.

She found a couple scraps of paper in the mess on the coffee table, plugged them into the gaps in the wood, and tried a match. It lit, but barely. The fire fought its way against a small draft. Jules didn’t think it was going to sustain itself.

She needed newspaper.

She glanced to the doorway. No sound. Maybe she could . . . look around a little?

With great effort, she wheeled herself toward the other side of the cabin, presumably where Patrick’s bedroom was. It seemed like a really, really bad idea to go in there, but curiosity kept her rolling along. When she came to the door, which was shut, she wondered if he’d locked it.

She listened again for any sound. Everything was quiet.

Jules reached up and turned the knob. Slowly. When she started to push the door, it made a horribly loud creak. She squeezed her eyes shut
 
—like that was going to help.

When the door was fully open, she peeked around a small corner.

And gasped.

The entire cabin was as tidy as if it had just leaped out of
Architectural Digest
. But this room was . . . madness.

The bed was unmade, the covers twisted and turned like they’d been tied in knots. There was clutter everywhere
 
—books
stacked in corners, junk in baskets and in boxes. It looked like a basement that hadn’t seen the light of day, or a human, in years.

But more alarming than the junk that accumulated were all the papers. Everywhere. In every part of the room that had space, littering every inch of the floor.

She wheeled forward, trying to comprehend what she was seeing. The papers crunched underneath her wheelchair and she bent down to pick one up. When she looked it over, her heart stung with panic.

It was one of her blog posts.

She picked up another.

Another one of her blogs.

She picked up more and more. They dated back as far as two years ago. Some words and phrases were highlighted and circled and underlined. And not just about Patrick’s books. Other posts she’d written about her town were also marked, but so randomly that she couldn’t make sense of it. Sometimes just a word here or a word there. Sometimes a phrase. Sometimes a paragraph.

She wheeled farther in, scooping up random pages. As she flipped one sheet over, she immediately recognized it as a page from her
Enoch Mandon
manuscript.

But how . . .
how
did he know it was her? The publisher had promised not to reveal her identity.

She eyed the rest of the junk in the room. As she looked closer, she realized it was Amelia’s things
 
—clothes, cookbooks . . . It was as if Patrick knew he couldn’t keep them
any longer but didn’t have the heart to throw them out. So they lingered in no-man’s-land, waiting for their destiny.

One box held photographs. Jules picked up a stack and flipped through them. Wow, Amelia was really beautiful. She’d radiated youth and vibrancy. There was a keenness to her eyes. They were light blue, like an afternoon sky, and her eyebrows were dark and arched perfectly. Her smile was wide and full-toothed, her platinum hair cut pixie short, fitting her thin face and her high cheekbones. She stood just a hair taller than Patrick, always with her arm wrapped around his. In one picture, she looked at him, laughing as though he’d told the funniest joke she’d ever heard.

Jules studied Patrick in his younger years. He had a full head of hair, dark brown and cut conservatively. His smile was always reserved, but his eyes showed a playfulness and even a hint of mischief, seemingly brought out whenever Amelia was by his side.

He was ruggedly handsome in the photos, not as polished as he seemed to become over the years. He sometimes sported a short beard. Wore lots of turtlenecks and occasionally an expensive-looking vest.

Jules looked around the room, trying to take it all in, trying to decide what it all meant. It seemed to be a perfect analogy to Patrick’s state of mind. Mostly tidy . . . but there was a corner that was disheveled in the most disturbing of ways.

How could a man live like this? In this chaos? Especially when he seemed to crave order so much? It was a dichotomy. He was part chaos and madness and part structure and order.
His writing was pandemonium, but he ate breakfast and dinner at the same time every day.

This was where he retreated to every evening? Staring at all this junk? Staring at his wife’s memories?

A noise.

She held her breath and listened.

Nothing.

But then . . . whistling?

Oh no.

Jules quickly turned the wheelchair around, her arms shaking from exhaustion already, and hurried across the floor, rolling over all the paper.

She squeezed through the doorway, using her arms to push her way through. The chair’s armrests scraped against the wood. Once in the hallway, she was out of breath but raced toward the living area. The wheels moved faster on the bare wood floor.

She heard the door opening.

But she wasn’t there yet.

Come on, come on.
Her fingers got caught in the spokes of the left wheel, twisting one so hard that she cried out in pain.

But she had to get there, no matter what.

She could hear his boots against the floor. He was inside the house.

Jules wheeled right to the coffee table as he turned, a small smile on his face indicating that he had just now noticed her.

Her heart pounded erratically, but she tried to hold her breath. She greeted his smile with her own.

“Hi,” she said, though she barely had enough breath in her.

Suddenly the smile dropped off his face, and her heart raced with a sense of danger.

But he wasn’t looking at her.

He was focused on the fireplace, where the fire had actually spread over the wood quite nicely while she was gone.

Jules wheeled forward a little bit, gesturing to it. “Nice ambience, eh? Yes, I got creative with getting the matches. Didn’t break anything.” She grinned.

But Patrick’s expression was rapidly descending into darkness. His eyes glowed as hot as the flames at which he stared. “What have you done? What have you
done
?”

He hurried toward her and Jules covered her face, readying herself for an attack. Instead, Patrick hurtled past her to the kitchen. Jules turned, watching as he pulled a large pot out and filled it with water.

Sloshing it as he returned, he’d soaked the front of his shirt by the time he tossed the remaining water onto the fire. The flames sizzled and crackled in protest but then faded into a dark-gray smoke that filled the chimney and seeped into the room.

Jules coughed.

Patrick turned and threw the pot at her. It hit her in the lap, though she managed to almost catch it. Her fingers throbbed as she grasped it.

“What is wrong?” she breathed.

“What is wrong?” he roared. “Why would you ever do that?
Why
?
”

“Do what? Start a fire?” she yelled back, her whole body trembling. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s freezing in here! I thought it’d be nice to
 
—”

“Shut up.
Shut up
!
” His face, as it had before, turned red with rage. He turned to the fireplace, stomping his foot into the smoke, kicking at the logs. He kicked and kicked some more.

“Stop it!” Jules yelled.

His attention snapped to her. He stood above her, teeth bared.

Then he raised his hand and slapped her across the cheek.

Jules cried out, grasping her face, tears springing to her eyes. Her skin stung, but it was the surprise of what he’d done that hurt even more. She looked up at him, shielding herself with her other hand as he raised his arm once again, high, as though he hadn’t hit her hard enough the first time.

“Patrick!” she barked.

And then he blinked, frozen with his hand in the air.

“Patrick, don’t!”

He stumbled backward, staring at her, slowly lowering his arm.

“Patrick, please. It’s okay. Just . . . take a deep breath.”

He looked at her as if to ask,
Did I hit you?

There was no hiding what was undoubtedly a growing red mark on her cheek.

“What did I do?” he said, falling back into the chair near the fireplace. He stared into the dark, hollow, smoky pit.

Jules tried to calm herself. And him. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”
She had no idea where this empathy was coming from. Maybe she was just trying to keep her enemy close. And subdued.

“It’s not okay,” he said, his face sunken with sadness. He kept staring into the fireplace, never looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” Jules said, rolling toward him, trying to appear as resolute as she could. “I didn’t know that would upset you.”

“There hasn’t been a fire lit in there since . . .”

“Amelia?”

Tears welled in his eyes but he still didn’t look at her. “One late afternoon,” he began, “before dinner, I had fallen asleep in this chair after a long day of writing. Something made me stir. It sounded like there was a bear outside. Happens sometimes around here. I closed my eyes again but still heard it. Like something being dragged. I was so tired. I simply wanted to finish my nap.” The tears fell, dripping onto his hands that lay limply in his lap. He shook his head as though he couldn’t fathom what he was about to say next.

Jules kept perfectly still and silent. Her cheek throbbed, but she hardly noticed.

“And then I woke straight out of a deep sleep. To this day I can’t explain why. It was like a hand grabbed my shoulder and shook me. I remember the hand.”

He glanced at her, then averted his eyes.

“Then I saw her.” He gestured to the floor in front of him. “She was right here, laid out completely flat, and she reached . . .” His gaze returned to the fireplace. “She reached into the flames. Her hand was right in there, burning.”

Tears stung Jules’s eyes again as she pictured the fragile woman.

“It was the only way she could think of to kill herself. She just wanted to die, no matter how painful.” Patrick wept for a moment, covering his eyes. “And I stood and just grabbed her ankles and pulled her. I yanked her. And I grabbed a pillow to smother her hand. It was burned, badly. I could smell the . . .” He broke down again.

Jules was not sure she’d ever seen a more broken man. She tentatively wheeled herself closer to him.

“She died a few days later. In her bed. Without my help.” He looked at her now. She was close, only about five feet away. “I might have helped her, Juliet. I might have. If I hadn’t felt that hand on my shoulder, waking me. It was strong and real. Nobody was there. But I knew what it spoke to me.”

“What?”

“That there is a Creator of life. He gives and takes at will. And life is the purest picture of sanctity. That’s what I knew at that moment.” He wiped his tears. “And why I chose to believe it rather than help my wife with her dying wish, I still can’t explain to this day. But I have never lit a fire since.”

Jules rolled closer. So close their knees were almost touching. She reached out slowly and took his hand. His fingers were cold. She closed hers around them and felt him instantly relax. His thumb pressed into her hand.

“Juliet,” he said softly, “do you want to know why I brought you here?”

“You had something important to tell me.”

“Yes. But I could’ve told you at your home. Or at the grocery store. Or any number of places.”

“True.”

“I began to understand in my solitude that I was unable to assess myself. Was I a horrible human being for letting Amelia die in agony? Was I forever damned by allowing myself to think about ending her life?”

“Patrick, it was an impossible situation.”

“Most people believe we need each other to fill our lives with abundance and blessing. We believe we need people to show us all the good in ourselves. But I don’t believe that’s the case. We need people, Juliet, to show us our selfishness, to extract the ugliness that reveals itself in our hearts.” He looked down, brushing her fingers with his other hand. “I had to know the state of my heart, how dark it was, if there was any goodness left in me at all. Everyone I trusted was dead. So I chose you.”

She leaned forward in her wheelchair. “Patrick, there is lots of goodness left in your heart.”

“I don’t know why that hand came down to me. If I were God, I would not exert an ounce of energy toward a man who has hardly regarded Him in his life.” He gazed past her, into empty space. “The hardest thing to understand about God is why He answers a prayer for a good parking space at the mall but won’t hear the cries of a man desperate to save his wife. Why He wouldn’t hear the plea of such a woman as yourself, that her husband might not die on a sidewalk in the darkness of night.”