Freedom [237]
Excepting some months in prison, when Brenda was alone with their little girls, Mitch lived in the lake house continuously until Gene died, six years later. He put a new roof on it and arrested its general decay, but he also felled several of the biggest and prettiest trees on the property, denuded the lakeside slope as a playground for his dogs, and hacked a snowmobile trail around to the far corner of the lake, where the bitterns had once nested. As far as Walter could determine, he never paid Gene and Dorothy a cent of rent.
Did the founder of the Traumatics even know what trauma was? This was what trauma was: going downstairs to your office early on a Sunday morning, thinking happily of your children, both of whom had made you very proud in the last two days, and finding on your desk a long manuscript, composed by your wife, that confirmed the worst fears you’d ever had about her and yourself and your best friend. The only remotely comparable experience in Walter’s life had been the first time he’d masturbated, in Room 6 of the Whispering Pines, following the friendly instructions (“Use Vaseline”) provided by his cousin Leif. He’d been fourteen, and the pleasure had so dwarfed all previous known pleasures, and the outcome had been so cataclysmic and astonishing, that he’d felt like a sci-fi hero wrenched four-dimensionally from an aged planet to a fresh one. And Patty’s manuscript was similarly compelling and transformative. His reading of it seemed, like that first masturbation, to last a single instant. He stood up once, early on, to lock his office door, and then he was reading the last page, and it was exactly 10:12 a.m., and the sun beating on his office windows was a different sun from the one he’d always known. It was a yellowy, mean star in some strange, forsaken corner of the galaxy, and his own head was no less altered by the interstellar distance he’d traversed. He carried the manuscript out of his office and past Lalitha, who was typing at her desk.
“Good morning, Walter.”
“Good morning,” he said with a shudder at her nice morning smell. He walked on through the kitchen and up the back staircase to the little room where the love of his life was still in her flannel pajamas, ensconced in a nest of bedding on her sofa, holding a mug of creamed coffee, and watching some sports-channel roundup of the NCAA basketball tournament. The smile she gave him—a smile that was like the last flash of the familiar sun he’d lost—turned to horror when she saw what he was holding.
“Oh, shit,” she said, turning off the television. “Oh, shit, Walter. Oh, oh, oh.” She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”
He closed the door behind him and slid down with his back against it until he was sitting on the floor. Patty drew breath, and then drew more breath, and more breath, and didn’t speak. The light in the windows was unearthly. Walter shuddered again, his molars clicking as he sought to control himself.
“I don’t know where you got that,” Patty said. “But it was not for you. I gave it to Richard last night to get him away from me. I wanted him out of our life! I was trying to get rid of him, Walter. I don’t know why he did that! It’s so horrible that he did that!”
From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying.
“I never meant you to read that,” she said in a keening high voice. “I swear to God, Walter. I swear to God. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve this.”
She cried for some long while then, some ten