27 Blood in the Water Read Online Free Page B

one. She had pushed his socks around just the way she did when she was putting them away when she’d done the laundry. Then she’d gone through the drawers of his desk. Finally, she’d done something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. She’d lain down on the floor and pushed herself under his bed. The marijuana was in a clear plastic bag taped to one of the wooden slats.
    It was almost eight o’clock in the morning now, and there had been no sign of him since four yesterday afternoon. He’d been headed over to the Heydreichs’ house then, which is where he always went these days. The job guarding the pool didn’t give him enough to do. She couldn’t blame the club board. With Michael’s record, she wouldn’t have given him anything else to do, either. He was barely managing to handle this. Still, it was true. It wasn’t enough. It gave him too much time to think.
    “I don’t understand what you see in her,” she’d told him, as he was pulling on his windbreaker and heading out back. He’d walk, of course. He couldn’t take the car. His license was suspended, and everybody at Waldorf Pines knew that.
    “She’s such an unpleasant person,” she’d said, although she knew this was the worst possible tack to take. You couldn’t tell your nearly grown-up son that the woman he was spending his time with was an unpleasant person. That was not going to get him away from her and it wasn’t going to get him back to you.
    “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I don’t mean to criticize. But I don’t like her.”
    “I don’t like her much, either.”
    “Then I don’t see the point.”
    “She’s good for me,” Michael had said. “You have no idea just how good she is for me.”
    It was one of those conversations that left Eileen feeling a little strangled. She’d had a lot of them over the years, and not just with Michael. Her father had been like that, in the worst periods of his drinking. Her husband was still like that, and, as far as she could tell, he had neither drinking nor drugs to blame anything on. There were times she wished that she could just turn off the conversation and then turn off her mind as well, letting everything go.
    This morning, she was so tired, the air felt like it had patterns. She thought she could reach out and touch it, and it would feel like a quilt. She had a headache. She had a feeling in her limbs as if all the blood had been drained out of them.
    Michael had stayed out all night before. He stayed out all night often. Once or twice he’d disappeared for a day or two. For some reason, this time did not feel like all the others. She could not make herself do anything but sit here, in this vast kitchen, wondering how she had ever thought it was the answer to her prayers. She prayed a lot. She even got down on her knees and said the rosary, although she did it in her own bedroom, when Stephen was off at work, so that he wouldn’t see her and start railing about religion. Maybe that was why her life had turned out this way. Didn’t St. Paul say something about it in the Bible? It was wrong of believers to marry nonbelievers. It didn’t work out well. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe believers were supposed to stay married to unbelievers, because that would change their minds. She had not changed Stephen’s mind. Stephen had not changed hers, but that hardly counted for anything. She hadn’t stayed true to God out of conviction. She’d only done it because she was afraid to do anything else.
    She had coffee on the stove, but she didn’t want to drink it. She had muffins from the bakery in the refrigerator. She didn’t want to eat them. Michael ate almost nothing these days, and when he did eat what he ate was full of sugar.
    “Listen,” she’d told him once—it was only a week ago now. She couldn’t believe it had been that recent. “Listen,” she’d said, thinking she was desperate. “There’s always one thing I can do. I can always go to the