Disintegration: A Mystery Thriller Read online

  Rheinsfeldt closed the magazine she had been reading, unfolded her rubbery legs from beneath her torso, and reached for the cigarette. She put it in her mouth and spoke around its stem. “You must be Jacob Wells.”

  Jacob looked into the hall behind him. “Oh, you’re talking to me.”

  “A sense of the absurd. I like that. Please come in and have a seat.”

  The room had two chairs and a small couch, arranged in a triangle. This was the first and most obvious test. Rheinsfeldt would slide his peg into a certain shape of hole depending upon where he sat. If he chose the chair beside hers, it would reflect urgency and desperation, a desire for an ally. On the other hand, if he sat on the couch, then Renee might be expected to sit beside him in a show of matrimonial support. He decided on the third alternative, the middle of the couch, which left no room for Renee on either side of him. When he sat, Rheinsfeldt’s dark eyes glimmered with satisfaction, as if she had suspected such a move from the start.

  “Most couples arrive for counseling sessions together,” Rheinsfeldt said, removing the unlit cigarette from her mouth and placing it in her small purse.

  “Renee believes in being punctual. I believe in being early.”

  “Ah. All relationships are built on conflict. Why should marriage be any different?”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “What, are you crazy?”

  “Then why should we listen to anything you have to say?”

  “Because, Jacob, I can’t tell you anything. All I can do is help you hear yourself.”

  Jacob looked at the walls. Rheinsfeldt’s gaze was like a hundred needles trying to pin him to a cork board. He looked out the window, but it was small and revealed only a square of boring blue. The room’s walls and ceiling came at him as if he was in a trash compactor, and he closed his eyes.

  Renee’s entrance was heralded by her hair conditioner, a minty brand that used to arouse instant erotic feelings in Jacob. Now it was the stench of failure, as sickening as wood smoke. He forced himself to look at her, knowing those green eyes would remind him of Mattie.

  He realized with horror that he couldn’t quite recall the rest of Mattie’s face.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Renee looked around the room at the incomprehensible art, anywhere but at Jacob’s face. She couldn’t decide if Dr. Rheinsfeldt’s tastes in interior decoration were personal or clinical. The woman herself was squat and toadish, eyes dark with looming advice. She gave the impression of someone whose interpersonal relationships had been dramatic and brief.

  “Where to begin?” Rheinsfeldt said.

  “You’re supposed to ask, ‘What brings you both here today?’” Jacob said. He stank of liquor and a sour rot. “Didn’t they teach you that in shrink school?”

  “Don’t mind him,” Renee said. She could barely stand to look at him. If those police reports were true, she didn’t know the man she’d shared the last ten years of her life with.

  “There you go again,” he said.

  “He’s been drinking,” she said to Rheinsfeldt.

  “Have you been drinking, Jacob?”

  “Maybe.” He crossed his arms and slumped down in the couch.

  “Okay. This isn’t a treatment program,” Rheinsfeldt said. “You can do that later if you need to and want to. Right now, let’s get a dialogue going about this other thing.”

  “The thing,” Renee said. Reduced to a single vague noun, The Tragedy seemed to have lost its power. She tried to see the two of them through Rheinsfeldt’s eyes: a wild-eyed, frantic woman and a drunken, unshaven man in filthy clothes. Renee’s right hand went to her wedding band and she twisted it until her knuckle was red.

  “I read the papers,” Rheinsfeldt said. “Everybody’s heard of the Wells family and the fire. I think that’s where we need to start. That’s where the pain is. The death of a child—I can only imagine.”

  “No,” Renee said. “The pain started before that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Jacob said.

  Renee forced herself to look at him. His jaw trembled, cheeks still pink where the new skin had formed. He looked like an alien, a Hollywood stunt double with a lump of putty piled on his shoulders, broken marbles stuck in for eyes. He ran the back of his hand over his lips and jerked forward, as if wanting to beat her to the punch line of some pointless joke.

  “She’s always been like this,” he blurted.

  “Always?” Rheinsfeldt said. “When was that?”

  “When we first got together,” Renee said. “He pretended to open up, but there was always something hidden away. He didn’t even tell me his family was rich until we had dated for half a year.”

  “She was always after the money,” Jacob said.

  “See what I mean?” Renee said to Rheinsfeldt. “How can he even talk about money when our children are dead?”

  “Jacob? That sounds like a pretty damning observation.”

  “I take half the blame for Christine.”

  “Christine,” Rheinsfeldt said. “That was last year?”

  Renee opened her purse and brought out tissues, ignoring the box of Kleenex on the edge of the table. The box was too perfectly positioned, its calculated alignment not matching the chaos of the room. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Christine was a SIDS baby.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. How was the marriage going before then?”

  “It wasn’t heaven but we were working on it, for the sake of the children.”

  “I hate to say it, but that’s not the only reason for making a marriage work. You’re not just a mother, you’re also a human being, with wants and needs of your own.”

  “I’m not a mother anymore.” Renee felt the familiar pressure in her chest, swallowed hard, and squeezed the damp tissue.

  “And she wants way more than she needs,” Jacob said.

  “I understand your anger,” Rheinsfeldt said. “You have a right to be angry for such a loss.”

  “Jacob hasn’t been himself lately,” Renee cut in, hating herself for defending him. “He was under a lot of pressure in his business. Jacob never talked much about it, but his partner told me the company was burned by a couple of contractors and—”

  “You don’t know anything about land development,” Jacob said. “All you know is a big house and nice appliances, LL Bean and Nieman Marcus catalogs.”

  “Let’s get back to Christine,” Rheinsfeldt said. “I know you’d rather not talk about it, but—”

  “It was a Tuesday,” Renee said, and her hands grew cold even though the room was as stifling as a coffin in hell. Jacob had never let her talk about Christine, and though Renee and Kim had cried together a dozen times afterwards, she still ached to spill it all again, as if the act of psychological spewing would purge the poison from her system. “I’d just got off the phone with my mother. Christine was down for her afternoon nap, she was as steady as a clock, naps at ten and three. I had soup on. I was trying to save money then, figuring with two children we had a lot of college to pay for one day. The soup was boiling over—”

  “She called me at work that morning to gripe,” Jacob said. “Said she was tired of cutting her fingers to get rid of leftover vegetable scraps and why couldn’t she just put some groceries on the credit card—”

  “Let her finish, Jacob.”

  Renee felt a sick but grateful smile slide across her face. Rheinsfeldt was as tough as any prison warden, and she seemed to be on Renee’s side. “I burned my fingers,” Renee said. “That’s what the medics said when they arrived. I don’t remember much after that, but I took the pot off and then went to check on Christine because it was nearly four and about time for Mattie to get home from school.”

  “That’s when she found her,” Jacob said.

  “What did you see?” Rheinsfeldt asked Renee.

  “You have to keep it a secret, don’t you? I mean, patient-doctor privilege or whatever?”

  “Yes. Every
thing you say in this room stays in this room. Except the parts you take with you.”

  Renee looked at Jacob, expecting to see hatred in those stranger’s eyes, but he only nodded in resignation. She would tell it the way he wanted. She’d once promised in front of God to honor and obey him.

  “I went in, and Mattie was standing over the crib. I didn’t hear her, but she must have come through the sliding glass doors in back and up the stairs. She was pale and her lips moved but she wasn’t making a sound. And neither was Christine. You have any children? No? Then you probably don’t know babies are never absolutely quiet, no matter what. Even when they’re asleep, they twitch or sigh or wheeze or kick the blankies.”

  “Christine was way too quiet,” Jacob said. “Blue.”

  “It was the blankies,” Renee said, and the words came easy, just as they had when she talked to the rescue squad and then the doctors and then the police. She’s said them so often that the words were a recitation. “There’s this new thing where you’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs, so I had blankies in there to prop her up on her back. But somehow she turned and got under them. She—”

  “Mattie knew something was wrong right away,” Jacob said. “It was Mattie who called 9-1-1 while Renee tried to revive Christine.”

  “How terrible,” Rheinsfeldt said, and the wrinkled troll-doll face looked almost sad. “Where were you?” she asked Jacob.

  “On a job site. We were clearing for a subdivision. If it wasn’t for the cell phone—”

  “You mean Mattie didn’t call you first?”

  “I told Mattie to call 9-1-1,” Renee said. “What the hell is this? We had enough of that stuff from the police. We’re the victims, remember?”

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Rheinsfeldt said, her eyes seeming to grow a shade darker and more obscure.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Jacob said. “The ME fixed the time of death at around 3:15. Christine must have smothered shortly after Renee put her down.”

  “You know the only thing that’s kept me from losing my mind?” Renee saw that Jacob was paying attention now. If only he’d paid that much attention in the immediate aftermath, when depression crushed her like God snuffing a cigarette.

  “What?” Rheinsfeldt asked. The woman didn’t take any kind of notes. Maybe she was arrogant enough to count on memory, but Renee knew that memory could lie. Memory told you all the lies you wanted to hear. You could count on it to deceive you.

  “Because it seems like it happened to somebody else. I mean, I know I was there, I know I had the baby, but she was gone so fast, I can tell myself she was never born. And don’t preach to me about denial, or the value of acceptance. This is how I grieve—by not letting it have happened, at least not to me.”

  Jacob put his head in his hands and spoke to the floor. “I tried not to blame her.”

  “How did you deal with it as a couple?” the doctor asked. “Focus on each other? On Mattie?”

  Renee pondered the different responses. The truth was not an option. “Jacob threw himself into his work. He pulled away from me, but we each drew closer to Mattie. I took her to visit my parents for a week, and then we took a cruise to the Cayman Islands. The water’s so blue there.”

  “Jacob wasn’t with you?”

  “No. That subdivision deal—”

  “The Realtor balked,” Jacob said. He sounded sober now, as if the hard hammers of business considerations had knocked him awake. “We had a nice row of tract houses, half of them pre-sold. The realty company said we were charging too much, that we were cutting our own throats because we were trying to turn over some upscale houses on the other side of town. The company undercut us and siphoned off some of our buyers, and we took a bath on the mortgages. Never build on spec in this town unless you own the bank.”

  “But what about Mattie?” Rheinsfeldt said, nonplussed by Jacob’s passionate diversion. “How did you relate to her after Christine’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said. “I just felt so helpless. My old man would have told me to pull my balls out of the sand and keep them swinging. When you get a raw deal, you turn it around. So we—me and my partner—decided it was a good time to buy if it looked like prices were dropping. So we went in on a few lots around town, high-end commercial space.”

  “He gave me money instead of himself,” Renee said.

  “I figured the best way to focus on Mattie was to spoil her like crazy,” Jacob said. “And it took money. The cruise, riding lessons, Disney World, shopping trips to Charlotte.”

  Renee didn’t like Rheinsfeldt’s reaction. The counselor’s lips curled as if valuing money was somehow distasteful. She had no comprehension of what it meant to be a Wells.

  “It isn’t unusual to throw yourself into practical pursuits when faced with an emotional tragedy,” Rheinsfeldt said. “But how did you feel on the inside?”

  “Inside?” One of Jacob’s eyelids twitched. “I don’t have any inside anymore.”

  “Please, Jake,” Renee said. “Don’t change into...you know.”

  He stood, paced, stopped at the window. For a moment, it looked as if he were going to snatch up the potted geraniums and hurl them against the wall. He turned, fists clenched. “You could never understand, not in a million goddamned years.”

  Renee wasn’t sure whether Jacob was addressing her or Rheinsfeldt, because his eyes kept swiveling in their sockets. She figured the words were meant for her. She’d heard them plenty enough.

  Rheinsfeldt didn’t flinch, just sat in her chair with professional poise. “How did you feel on the inside?” she repeated.

  “Like my guts were on fire. All the time. I had stomach trouble, diarrhea, pain so intense that Tylenol couldn’t touch it.”

  “Guilt, perhaps?” Rheinsfeldt’s tone was that of a game show host whose contestant was coming up short in the final round.

  “No, the guilt was all mine,” Renee said. The tears were hot in her eyes. She didn’t try to hold them back. Damn, she was getting good at this. “I’m the one who put Christine down for the nap, I’m the one who arranged the blankets. I’m the one who brought her into this awful world.”

  “Do you really believe it’s awful? If so, you wouldn’t have had any children in the first place.”

  “Mattie was an accident,” Renee said, and Jacob stopped pacing by the window.

  “An accident?” Rheinsfeldt sniffed blood in the psychological pool. “So perhaps that contributed to Jacob’s desire to spoil her. Maybe he didn’t think—”

  “He didn’t think. That’s the point. We had it all planned, get the business going and get settled, accumulate some wealth, and then talk about having a family.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Twenty-two,” Jacob said.

  “Twenty-one,” Renee said. “We know which night we got pregnant.” She looked at Jacob and the pain in his face was worth millions. “Tell her, Jakie.”

  He turned to the window again. The sky was dull and blue, limitless, like her love.

  “We always used condoms, even after we were married,” she told Rheinsfeldt, though she was really talking to Jacob, delivering the words as if they were nails in flesh. “The pill gave me migraines, and the diaphragm and foam were so messy. One night in August, Jacob had gone out for drinks with one of his old college classmates—yes, he’d started drinking again around that time. I think it was the fear of success, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, I don’t even know who these classmates were, but it must have been some party, because Jake came in at about four in the morning. It was dark and I was half asleep, but he crawled on me like an animal. I tried to push him away. I’m no prude but I like a little foreplay, plus he didn’t put on a condom. He forced himself in.”

  “Jacob?” Rheinsfeldt interrupted, as if fearing that Renee was gaining control of the session.

  “She liked it,” Jacob said to the window. “It was probably the best night of her li
fe.”

  Renee squirmed. Jacob had been more passionate that night than any other, almost as if he knew he was planting a baby inside her. Almost as if he wanted a child. And some small part of her had accepted it, had pulled him more deeply into her.

  The sex hadn’t been as intense even when they were deliberately trying for the one that would be Christine. Stinking of whiskey and sweat, tongue like an attacking viper, and body like a weapon, his excitement had swept her up and over the edge of the universe. And she hated his causing her loss of control.

  And here he was, about to do it again: make her lose control. She forced herself to think of Christine, small and blue-skinned against the blanket. And Mattie, lost amid the big fire that had burned away the last bridge that connected her to their happy past.

  “Three times,” Renee said. “You wanted to make sure, didn’t you, Jake?”

  “You didn’t fight it,” he said.

  “I’m not supposed to fight it,” she said. “You married me, remember?”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “We made them together.”

  “A Wells never fails.”

  Renee swallowed hard, trying to push the anger down her throat. It lodged there, making each breath an effort. The sudden silence in the room was thick and oppressive. Rheinsfeldt edged forward with serpentine ease.

  “Obviously, you loved each other enough to carry the baby to term,” the doctor said. “And Jacob is a successful businessman. It sounds like you two were getting everything you wanted. What part of your common dream didn’t work out?”

  “After that encounter, Jacob wouldn’t touch me for weeks,” Renee said. “Like I was the dirty one, or maybe he was embarrassed by his passion. He was gone when I woke up and didn’t come home until the afternoon. We fought a few times, threw things, nothing too physical, mostly yelling, then him storming out.”