Bone on Bone: Read online

  It was the very lack of locks or warnings that probably kept the room safe. Ordinariness, not a crackerjack security system, did the trick. After all, it was just a middle-aged woman’s sitting room, a modest place filled with sunlight and trifles: books, chair, table, teacup.

  It was harmless. Benign.

  That, of course, was a lie.

  It was not harmless. It was not benign.

  The walls had sopped up too much suppressed rage for that. The carpet and ceiling had absorbed too much of her pain, too great a measure of her tightly furled fury. Despite how this room looked to the uninformed eye—soothing, serene, pleasant—in truth it seethed with emotion and chaos. With hatred and pain. Invisible things, but things that caused other things to happen.

  Momentous things. Things that, once set into motion, couldn’t be undone.

  This room is like me.

  That is what she told herself.

  I’m the same way. You look at me and you think you know what’s right there in front of you—but you don’t.

  People saw a toned, polished, well-dressed woman, with a striking smile and an abundance of expensively maintained blond hair. They saw Ellie Topping, the forty-six-year-old wife of Brett Topping, vice president of Mountaineer Community Bank in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia. They saw a person who lived in a nice house and drove a nice car. They saw a fortunate fate, especially when considered in context, juxtaposed with the gritty, hard-luck lives that surrounded her in this tattered and run-down town.

  They saw a calm optimism and a cheerful demeanor.

  They saw an illusion.

  But as long as she had this room to retreat to, she could keep the illusion intact. Keep everything under control. The room was her protector. It enclosed her. Enfolded her. And henceforth, it would keep her secret.

  When she left it later today, when she closed the door behind her, she would seal off the room and what it knew. She’d leave it to reckon with what she had revealed this morning in the dire spiral of her thinking.

  She had arrived here five minutes ago. It was just before 7:30.

  Her husband had left the house at 7:15 on the dot, like always, hoisting himself up and into his beloved black Escalade with a grunt, backing out of the garage and down the long driveway, waving at her when he reached the street. Ellie, watching from the vast living room window, a pretty smile fixed on her face, waved back.

  Again, like always.

  And Tyler—where was Tyler? She didn’t know. Their son hadn’t come home last night, slinking out after the fight in the kitchen. That was nothing new; there were many nights when he didn’t come home. But Ellie didn’t worry about him anymore. Not like she had in the early days, back when they didn’t know what was happening to their sweet, sweet boy. Or what kind of devil had taken over his soul.

  What she worried about now was her husband. And herself, too.

  She stood in the center of the snug little attic room, arms crossed, head bowed, eyes closed. She needed to settle herself. Slow down her racing heart. Get her breathing back under control. Because she was terrified.

  The threat didn’t come from some stranger lurking outside the house.

  It came from the idea lurking inside her brain.

  Maybe if she tried to be quiet for a few minutes—she would never have called this practice anything pretentious like “meditation”—she might be restored to the person she was, the decent, moral, upstanding woman she had always been.

  She took a deep, slow breath. Her shoulders rose. She let out the breath. Her shoulders dropped.

  She did it again. And again.

  Good. It was working. She could almost feel the room’s sympathy and understanding as it drew itself up around her like a blanket, softly, consolingly. No wonder she loved it so.

  It wasn’t fancy, this room in a corner of the attic. It consisted of two simple, flimsy walls put up to make a compact square, a room-within-a-room. Particleboard shelves climbed three of the walls.

  The doll room.

  That’s what the previous owner of this house, a ninety-six-year-old woman named Harriet Kinsolving whose children had finally intervened and shoved her into a nursing home, had called it. The old lady had kept her doll collection up here. The day Ellie and Brett saw the house for the first time and Ellie decided it was perfect for them, almost twenty years ago now, Ellie had called dibs on this tiny slice of the attic with the cheap shelving and the white-trimmed window, watched over by dozens and dozens of dolls. Brett had grinned. “All yours, honey,” he’d said, later confessing that he’d found the dolls to be a little … well, creepy.

  Not that it mattered: The dolls were long gone by the time the Toppings moved in. Harriet’s children had bundled them up and hustled them away. Probably dumped them on eBay, Ellie suspected, and doubtless the kids regretted not having the same option with mom. Nowadays there was no sign any dolls had ever been in this room at all, lined up in their lacy pink or white or orange or lime dresses—sherbet colors—and their shiny black Mary Janes, each face locked into a mandatory smile.

  Exactly the same kind of smile, Ellie thought, I put on every morning when I stand at the living room window and wave good-bye to Brett.

  A year after they’d bought this house, Ellie was pregnant with Tyler. Her happiness was pure, complete, uncomplicated.

  And for sixteen years, it had stayed that way. Oh, there were setbacks—a miscarriage, a year and a half after Tyler was born; Henry’s death; the death of another of Ellie’s siblings, her sister Lillian; and Brett’s health issues, plus their worry over the steady economic downturn in the region. The usual stresses and strains.

  All in all, though, Ellie had felt blessed.

  Blessed.

  Looking back, remembering that golden feeling, remembering the kind of woozy happiness that was her default state then, she was half-ashamed of her reckless complacency. Her willful blindness.

  And her stupidity.

  Because she had never dreamed how quickly it could all come crashing down, how life could go from placid to catastrophic in such a short period of time, and how things that had once been unimaginable—blue-jacketed EMTs on their knees in the living room, jamming vials of Narcan up Tyler’s nose after his latest overdose, plus ambulances and squad cars parked every which way on the broad lawn in the middle of the night, and curious neighbors peering out through parted blinds—could now seem routine.

  The doll room was the place Ellie came when it was all too much. When her desperation surged, overwhelming the sweetness and joviality she had shown the world for most of her life, including the period just after her brother Henry’s death from cancer that was—until now—the greatest emotional and spiritual crisis she had ever faced. Worse, even, than the death of her mother when she was eight. Worse than the miscarriage.

  So hard to believe Henry was gone.

  Ellie came from a large family but Henry was her favorite, no question. She had loved everything about him, but the thing she remembered best was his laugh. He was a genial, good-natured man and he had a scoop-you-up kind of laugh, merry and unfettered.

  There was another laugh she knew well, too. An entirely different kind of laugh. Her son’s laugh was more of a cackle. It had no mirth in it, no joy. It was not about amusement. It was a weapon. Tyler laughed to show them he didn’t give a damn.

  He’d laughed that way last night.

  * * *

  Brett had caught him pawing through her purse. She’d left it on the kitchen counter. She knew better. But it was only for a moment; she had just come in from the grocery store and she needed to pee. Brett had recently arrived home, too, from … wherever. She hadn’t yet had a chance to ask him where he’d been.

  From the bathroom, Ellie had heard her husband’s voice, shaky with outrage: “You’re a thief. Nothing but a damned thief, you know that? Your mother and I work hard for our money. It’s ours. Not yours.”

  Then she heard Tyler’s cackle. Their son was nineteen, and his voice
had changed years ago, but when he laughed his voice went back to a sort of fluted falsetto. A boy’s voice. A naughty, naughty boy.

  “Screw you, old man.” That was Tyler’s reply to his father. And then the cackle came again, barbed this time, threaded with menace despite the childish pitch. Edged with hysteria. Was he high?

  Of course he’s high, Ellie had said to herself, yanking up her slacks and fumbling with the button, trying to finish in the bathroom so she could intervene, keep the crisis from escalating. When is he not high? High or stoned or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days.

  “Put down that purse.” Brett’s voice was low and ominous.

  Tyler laughed again. “Like I said. Screw you, Pops.”

  Ellie was in too much of a hurry to flush. She came running out of the bathroom. She saw exactly what she had expected to see: Her husband and her son, confronting each other across the butcher-block island in the center of the kitchen. Tyler had snatched up her purse from the white-tiled countertop over by the stove. By now he had her billfold out; it hung open like a trout’s mouth, gaping and slack. He had dropped the purse. He was focused exclusively on the billfold. He had already grabbed the twenties and he was digging an index finger into the change compartment. He wanted it all, even the pennies.

  “Stop,” Ellie said. Her voice was weak. She hated her weakness. “Both of you—just stop.”

  Neither of them looked at her. They were focused only on each other, gazes locked like rams’ horns. There was, she sensed, something primal and unprecedented in this standoff, something that made it different from the dozens of previous standoffs on other nights in this same kitchen, since the moment when they’d first lost their boy.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe it was exactly the same as all the others. And maybe it would always be like this: brief, furious confrontations when Tyler didn’t even try to be subtle about his stealing, then a lull, then another standoff. This could go on for years. Years and years.

  Brett was panting, pulling the labored breaths in and out of his mouth. His forehead was buttered with sweat. He was at least thirty pounds overweight and his heart staggered under the strain; this kind of tension was the last thing in the world he needed.

  Did Tyler care about that?

  No. He didn’t. He only cared about one thing: drugs.

  Well, Ellie had instantly corrected herself, two things, really: drugs—and the money to buy them with.

  Tyler’s eyes were shiny-black. His curly dark hair—oh, he’d been a beautiful little boy, with a soft fumble of ringlets always trailing across his forehead, ringlets he would push aside impatiently on his way to go play ball with his best friend Alex—was yanked back and tied with a rubber band, making a thick knob of frizz that perched on his neck like a weird growth, like some fuzzy tumor that she was always tempted to whack off with a pair of scissors.

  Her son looked terrible: skinny, brittle, his skin a color that Ellie could only describe as tombstone gray. His T-shirt was ripped and stained. The stains were the kind that smelled oniony and gross even if you weren’t within smelling range of them; you could sense by looking just how bad they smelled. You could feel the stink. His jeans slouched languidly off his nonexistent hips.

  He had been living with them again for the last four months—it was his counselor’s idea, an attempt to give Tyler stability after his latest stay in rehab, the proverbial second chance, except that it was more like the seventh or eighth or ninth or tenth chance, she’d lost count—and he still didn’t let her do his laundry, which meant his laundry didn’t get done. He wore the same clothes for weeks at a time.

  And he hadn’t changed his behavior at all. Rehab or no rehab, he was still what he’d become.

  Her son, the chipper, earnest little boy who had loved baseball and bikes and fireworks and Harry Potter and hot dogs and judo class—reeked. He wouldn’t wash his clothes and he wouldn’t take a shower. He cursed at her when she brought it up. Not always, though; sometimes he smiled. The smile was infuriating. She wasn’t even worth getting mad at. He’d moved on. She and Brett were tools to him now, things to exploit.

  Because Tyler was an addict. And addicts always did what addicts always do. No exceptions.

  Ellie didn’t have much education beyond high school. Not like Brett with his MBA, his grad work in finance and economics. But she’d loved her single semester in community college, all those years ago. She took a philosophy class. They were assigned to read an essay by a man named Camus—you didn’t say the S out loud, which she discovered when she pronounced it wrong during the class discussion and the instructor corrected her, but not in a mean way—and she learned about Sisyphus, doomed to push a rock up a hill. The rock rolls right back down the hill. Over and over again. So over and over again, Sisyphus has to push and watch. Push and watch. Forever.

  Hey, there, Sisyphus, Ellie had thought, as the extent of Tyler’s transformation became clear to them and they tried first one thing and then another thing and nothing worked. I’m Ellie. I think we have a lot in common. But it was confusing, because at other times, she realized that Tyler himself was Sisyphus; he was the one with the rock and the compulsion, he was the one who couldn’t stop what he was doing, he was the one whose life was now officially hopeless.

  * * *

  Last night’s confrontation in the kitchen had ended without drama. Just like that, Brett gave up.

  Ellie, frankly, had expected it. They didn’t have the stomach anymore to sustain a fight with Tyler. She and Brett had been fighting with him for two years. Going on three. And what had it gotten them? Nothing. Brett usually tried, for the first few minutes of every skirmish, to hold the line, to implore Tyler to treat them decently and respectfully—and to stop stealing from them, for God’s sake—but then her husband would relent. Let go.

  What was the point?

  “Take the money,” Brett had said wearily. “Just go ahead and take it.”

  The crisis was over. Total capitulation had worked. Always did. The tension in the room instantly dropped to zero. Tyler nodded and smiled, as if they’d finally come to their senses and he was glad about it, but he was too nice to gloat, wasn’t he? Yes, he was. Winning settled him down. He had made a clicking sound in his mouth as he stuffed the bills and the change in his back pocket. He side-armed his mother’s billfold onto the counter. It skidded and hit the copper canister labeled FLOUR.

  “Gonna pay you back,” Tyler said. He gave his mother a quick wink. “One of these days.”

  It would never happen, of course, but to call him out on his lies was to court trouble again; any criticism could set him off. Nobody wanted that. When Tyler was around, she and Brett carefully planned conversational routes that would keep them well clear of their son’s temper, the way you arrange a car trip to avoid road construction.

  Once Tyler had cleared the back door, Ellie went over to her husband. His breathing was still noisy and strained, with a rasp. She reached up and put her arms around his thick neck and turned her head to the side, so that she could press an ear to his wide chest. He embraced her. His shirt was damp with sweat. She could hear his heart flailing away, the heart that needed care. That did not need stress. That did not need this.

  Things that would have seemed outlandish and unfathomable at the start of the ordeal—a child stealing from his mother, a child breaking into houses on their very own street, the homes of their friends, and ransacking medicine cabinets looking for drugs, then jail sentences and rehab and promises, promises, promises, never-kept promises—were accepted now, commonplace, part of their daily reality.

  “Next time,” her husband muttered between his heavy-duty breaths, “don’t leave your purse in plain sight. Asking for trouble.”

  She nodded, slowly moving her head up and down against the soft cotton of his shirtfront, still listening to his heart.

  * * *

  Remembering all of that as she stood in the doll room this morning, Ellie trembled. She opened he
r eyes. She reached for the chair, turning it around so that it faced the window. The window was set into the east side of the house; as the sun rose, it filled the room to the brim with a soft lemon-yellow light.

  She needed that light. Desperately. She needed a scrap of abstract beauty in her life, something lovely, something lilting and innocent, a counterweight to the heaviness of her constant sorrow. Today, right now, she needed it more than ever. Because she had made her decision.

  She was going to kill her son.

  Chapter Three

  Mornings were the worst. Nights were bad, too, when Jake Oakes waited, hour after hour, for sleep to do its damned job, when he thought too long and too hard and too clearly about his situation.

  But mornings—morning were unbearable.

  They were terrible because they sometimes included hope. Having no hope was one thing, but having it—and then watching hope leak away throughout the day—was excruciating.

  Some days, there was a second or so just after he woke up in the hot, dark box of a bedroom when he didn’t remember. His mind was blank. That was the place where the hope flooded in, filling the empty cavity. He thought he was still whole. Still fully functional.

  He forgot about the shooting.

  He forgot about that terrible moment of shock when he saw the kid’s hand rising behind the counter and it dawned on him—Omigod—that the greasy black thing in that shaky hand was a gun.

  Danny. Danny Lukens. That was the kid’s name.

  Jake had been told so many times about what happened next that those accounts, based on the eyewitness testimony of Sheriff Harrison and the forensic findings, had merged with his own fragile flake of recollection and before he knew it, he could see the whole thing unfolding in his mind’s eye, every color, every nuance, every detail, including things he couldn’t possibly have seen or truly recalled:

  The store’s front door whips open. Distracted, he turns, and so when the bullet comes it hits him not in the heart, the way the kid intended it to, but in his side, closer to his back than his front.