“Blue. He’s ten years old and he found his mother having a seizure on the kitchen floor and you probably would have brain damage if he hadn’t been smart enough to call 911. What were you thinking, Patty? Were you thinking?”
Hot tears squirted from her eyes, one at a time, tapping her nose, streaming over her lips.
“Is Blue here?” she asked.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Patty, but I swear we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
He made her feel like an essay question on one of the children’s tests, but she didn’t have a right to object. Blue must have been terrified when he found her twitching on the kitchen floor. It would haunt him for the rest of his life. The hot, gristly smell of meatballs made her stomach twist itself tight.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said, her jaw clenched.
“No one’s listening to you anymore,” Carter said. “You made a serious suicide attempt, however you try to explain it away. They have you on a twenty-four-hour involuntary hold, but I’m going to check you out of here first thing in the morning. There’s nothing wrong with you we can’t solve at home. But before any of that happens, I need to know right now: was this about James Harris?”
“What?” she asked, and turned to look at her husband.
His face was stricken, open, and raw. His hands fidgeted hard on the bed rail.
“You’re my whole life,” he said. “You and the children. You and I have grown up together. And suddenly you’re obsessed with Jim, you can’t stop thinking about him, you can’t stop talking about him, and then you do this. The woman I married would never try to kill herself. It wasn’t in her character.”
“I wasn’t…,” she said, genuinely trying to explain, “I didn’t want to die. I was just so angry. You wanted me to take those pills so badly, so I took them.”
His face instantly closed up, and a steel door came down.
“Don’t you dare put this on me,” he said.
“I’m not. Please.”
“Why are you fixated on Jim?” he asked. “What’s between the two of you?”
“He’s dangerous,” she said, and Carter’s shoulders slumped and he turned away from her bed. “I know you think he hangs the moon but he is a dangerous person, more dangerous than you know.”
And for a moment, she thought about telling him what she’d read all those weeks ago. After she’d read that passage in Dracula about him needing to be invited into a home, she’d sat down and read the entire book again and halfway through she’d come across a sentence that brought her up short and made her hands turn cold.
He can command all the meaner things, Van Helsing told the Harkers, explaining the powers of Dracula. The rat, and the owl, and the bat…
The rat.
In that moment, she knew who was responsible for Miss Mary’s death. Rarely had she known something with such certainty. Patricia thought about what Carter would say if he knew that his friend had put his mother into the hospital, one hand stripped of its skin, the soft tissues torn from her face. She also knew with certainty that if she said that to Carter he would never let her out of this room.
“I wish you were having an affair with him,” Carter said. “It would make your fixation easier to understand. But this is sick.”
“He’s not who you think he is,” she said.
“Do you know what is at stake here?” he asked. “Do you know the toll your obsession is taking on your family? If you continue down this path you will lose everything we have built together. Everything.”
She thought about Blue coming into the kitchen for a snack and seeing her convulsing on the yellow linoleum and all she wanted to do was hold on to her baby and reassure him she was all right. That everything would be all right. But it wasn’t all right, not as long as James Harris lived down the street.
Carter walked to the door. He stopped when he