Our Family Trouble: A Domestic Thriller Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Don Winston

  All rights reserved

  Cover design: Steven Womack

  “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas

  From THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Author photograph: Owen Moogan

  contents

  Dedication • Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  One • Two • Three • Four • Five • Six

  Seven • Eight • Nine • Ten • Eleven

  PART TWO

  One • Two • Three • Four • Five • Six

  Seven • Eight • Nine • Ten • Eleven • Twelve • Thirteen

  PART THREE

  One • Two • Three • Four

  Five • Six • Seven • Eight

  NEW YORK

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Don Winston:

  THE GRISTMILL PLAYHOUSE

  THE UNION CLUB

  S’WANEE

  For RW

  re-ve-nant `re-və-nənt n [F, fr. prp. of revenir to return] (1827): one that returns after death or a long absence — revenant adj

  MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

  Tenth Edition

  “And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

  And Horror the soul of the plot.”

  The Conqueror Worm

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  prologue

  OCTOBER

  “And how old is Campbell II now?” the ob-gyn asked with a smile, thumbing through her files. “Nine months, is he?”

  “He’s fine. He’s wonderful,” replied Dillie Parker with pride, holding her son on her lap. “But no ‘II.’ Just…plain ol’ Campbell.” She propped him up straighter, which he didn’t protest.

  The doctor looked up across her desk and winked at the toddler. Then she scribbled the correction on her file. “Hard to believe just a year ago you were in the home stretch.”

  “Seems like a lifetime ago,” said Dillie, laughing. “I definitely remember sweating through the Indian summer. I love the early nip we’re having this year.”

  “That’s an adorable outfit,” the doctor said as she wrote, tipping her head toward the boy.

  “My mother will be thrilled to hear that,” Dillie said. “It’s the fourth one she’s sent this month.”

  “Is that sweater Ralph Lauren?”

  Dillie shook her head. “It’s Khaki.” To the doctor’s confusion, she clarified: “My grandmother. She’s a knitting fiend. If you sit still too long, she’ll knit a sweater up around you.”

  The doctor smiled and said, “It’s a gift to have a knitter in the family.” And Dillie nodded and said, “Khaki is most certainly a gift.”

  “And you, Dillie?” the doctor asked.

  “Me?”

  “How are you doing?”

  Dillie glowed. “I’ve never been happier.”

  “Yes, I can tell. The first few months are typically the most challenging.”

  Dillie tipped her head with a knowing stare. “Truer words are rarely spoken.”

  She and the doctor laughed together. The doctor scanned the file again, made a simple notation.

  “You’re over the first hump,” said the doctor as she scribbled. “It’s especially big with the first child. Until you hit your stride, which you seem to have done.”

  “Oh, it’s still challenging,” said Dillie.

  The doctor looked up. “Yes?”

  Dillie nodded and shrugged.

  “In what way?” the doctor asked.

  Campbell squirmed in his mother’s lap, and she hoisted him back to a sitting position.

  Dillie shook her head, dismissing it. Her fingers fanned across her son’s stomach, keeping him on his perch.

  The doctor sat still, waiting.

  “Oh, you know,” Dillie said with a good-natured wave off. “In the normal way. It’s nothing. It’s just a little different from what I…expected.”

  “What is?”

  Dillie laughed out loud, looking to the ceiling for the answer.

  She opened her mouth, collecting her thoughts. “Well…I don’t know,” she said, searching. “The main challenge, I guess, is that Rupert’s been traveling so much. For work. You know Rupert, right?”

  “Certainly,” said the doctor.

  “Yes, of course. He’s been here with me. And everybody knows Rupert, it seems.” She paused and glanced up at the doctor and then away. And then: “It’s just been such a busy time for him, and there’s really nothing he can do about that. I mean, it’s just his job. But the timing’s bad, and so that’s been a challenge. Which it would be for anyone.”

  “It’s difficult when the husband has to travel for work,” agreed the doctor. “I see that often, as you can imagine.”

  “Right, when the husband and father has to travel for work, and I totally get that it’s a high-pressure job, so I try not to let it get to me. And I shouldn’t complain. I mean, I have Lola…our baby nurse…but it’s just not the same.…”

  “You still have a baby nurse?” the doctor asked.

  Dillie nodded sheepishly. “Extravagant, yes. I’m very lucky that we can…I mean, that we can afford to…well, we had a nanny. Two actually. But they didn’t…” She looked past the doctor, inspecting the far wall and its matrix of diplomas. Amherst. Hopkins. “They just didn’t work out. So we still have Lola, who is really wonderful, and loves Campbell.”

  “That’s good,” the doctor said. “A baby nurse can get pricey.”

  “Yes, and it’s silly, I realize. I’ll have to find another nanny soon. If I…can. But Lola is so attached to Campbell, and Rupert doesn’t mind the extra expense. At least he says he doesn’t. Probably eases his guilt…”

  “I see.”

  “…for traveling so much.” Dillie smiled and shrugged. Campbell squirmed, and she pulled him back up to her lap. She glanced out the window, past the tilted blinds, onto the Park Avenue sidewalk. Two older society ladies in light wraps passed side by side and disappeared. Probably on their way to lunch at Swifty’s, or shopping on Madison.

  “You know, I’m just tired a lot,” she finally said. “I think that’s my problem. I get punchy. Rupert says I should put Campbell in the nursery, with Lola. I mean, that’s why we pay her. So when he cries, it won’t wake me up.”

  “Perhaps you should,” said the doctor.

  “Yes, but he doesn’t cry. He never cries. Which Rupert would know if he paid attention to his son. Or to me, for that matter. He used to…”

  “Campbell doesn’t cry?”

  “I mean, I hear him, but it’s not…at least it doesn’t seem…It’s something else. I don’t…And the other noises, you know. I just don’t get much sleep. That’s the problem, I guess.” She stopped, ransacking for her next thought.

  The doctor sat still.

  “Noises?” she asked.

  Campbell started to slide, and Dillie turned him around and held him against her shoulder. She patted his back.

  “Oh, you know,” she said, rocking him in her seat. “Those old prewar buildings, especially those warehouse ones, no matter how much you renovate and modernize, I mean, the exterminators can’t find them; they insist they see no signs of them anywhere, but…”

 
“What do you hear, Dillie?”

  “…and I can’t put traps around the crib where they…and Rupert’s no help, of course, so I stay up all night looking for them. And I have deadlines, too! I do have a career, you know. You think they care if you…? They just don’t care.”

  Dillie stopped herself. She stroked Campbell’s back, now fast asleep. She forced a single, quiet laugh.

  “Where’s that hump I’m supposed to get over?” she asked.

  The doctor started to scratch on a pad.

  “Are you…happy with your boy?” she asked.

  “I…beg your pardon?”

  The doctor signed her name at the bottom, tore off the sheet, and slid the prescription across her desk.

  “We’ve talked about postpartum depression…,” she said.

  “Oh, this is just postpartum bitchiness,” said Dillie, sliding the prescription back, pinning Campbell with the other arm. “I don’t need happy drugs. Really.”

  “See me in one month,” the doctor said. “Depression is common, of course. But we don’t want postpartum psychosis.”

  Dillie stared at her. Campbell breathed into her neck.

  “No,” she said, holding an off smile. “We don’t.”

  one

  DECEMBER

  “Lola, could you do me a favor and turn down the television? Just a little?” Dillie called out, spiriting through her apartment hallway while the NY1 morning traffic and weather report echoed.

  “Got it,” Lola called back from the kitchen in her unhurried Jamaican patois.

  “Thank you!” Dillie said, and then into her cell phone: “Rupert, where’s this thing you need?” She padded down the gallery hall and into his home office overlooking Grand Street at early rush hour. “Is it still snowing in Chicago?” she asked him as she woke and searched his PC, following his directions. “God, I need coffee before working Windows,” she joked, clicking through folders of data.

  She found and read off the information he needed. “No clue what any of that means,” she said. “Just give ’em hell.”

  She whisked into her own home office next door—clean, white, organized—found and plugged her earbuds into her phone, dropped the phone into her robe pocket, hands free. Then she grabbed her charging iPad, scrolled through e-mails. “How do you pronounce Oliver’s wife’s name again? I’m sure I mangled it last time, although she had the grace to ignore it. She’s bringing their little one today. Do you think I should have name tags?”

  She swept into the corner living room flooded with winter light from the floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. Checked the adjacent dining room and decided the adult food would go on the circular mahogany table and the children’s on the sideboard. The white wine and juice boxes would live together on the bar. She racked her brain for the whereabouts of the oblong, stainless ice bucket. She’d forgotten the last time she used it.

  The cake, of course, would go dead center on the round table, once the waiters had cleared the finger food. She’d lift him up and help him blow out the candle.

  “No, I haven’t heard them the past few nights….The new traps are working, I think….Yes, of course I got the ones he can’t get into. I did all the research.…And I only put them out on the back landing anyway….Can you imagine if one ran across the room during the party?” She giggled at the thought. “Hostess of the year!”

  Abruptly remembering something from her mental to-do list, which had grown the night before when she was trying to sleep, she darted back down the hallway, to a hidden closet between contemporary art pieces, where she reached up to a roll of toilet paper and hurried toward the metallic-glazed powder room off the foyer. She pushed an errant earbud back in, traded out the half-spent roll, straightened the hostess hand towels, and approved the fresh cake of gardenia soap. She frowned at a dead bulb in a sconce, unscrewed it, and scurried back to the supply closet.

  “Yes, he’s still asleep. He was snoring, in his own little way. All bundled up and tucked in. Facedown, like you. Too cute to wake him, but I probably should.” She traded out the offending bulb in the powder room. “He’s gotten so active, I swear he’ll be climbing out of his crib soon, although Dr. Pearson said not to worry about that just yet….Well, don’t beat yourself up. We won’t tell him you missed it. He can work that out with his therapist in twenty years.”

  Another thought struck her, and she pivoted back to the foyer coat closet. She cleared out the Burberrys and parkas, all sizes, and scooped up boots and umbrellas to make room for her guests. Her arms piled, she hurried back toward her bedroom.

  “Booray, what are you so giddy about? You need to go out?” she asked their three-year-old yellow Labrador retriever, who stood in the middle of the living room, facing away, wagging his tail. Back to her phone, she said, “I think the dog’s getting funny in the head. Empty rooms excite him these days.”

  NY1 blared out a report on the latest terrorist attack in Europe. It grew louder to the point of distortion.

  “Lola?” Dillie called out. “It won’t turn down,” Lola called back. “Can you just turn it off please?” Dillie said, having vowed to shield her son from the world’s unraveling as long as possible. Sometimes it seemed futile.

  “The kitchen TV’s acting up,” she said to Rupert. “It’s still under warranty, right?”

  She tiptoed into her room, past the crib, dumped her coat-closet stash on the bed.

  “I hate to wake him, but he’ll never nap otherwise,” she said into the phone, pivoting back to the crib under the solar-system mobile. “Good morning, Campbell,” she softly cooed, bent over his bed, gently rubbing the blanket covering his back. “Such a sleepyhead this morning, aren’t you?”

  Campbell yawned into the mattress, opened one eye and yawned again. “It’s your big day,” she told him. “Do you know what day it is, little mouse?” She loosened the blanket, which was still tightly wrapped around him. He felt hot.

  “I think you’re too toasty in this bed,” she said. “You’re a toasty little burrito.” She unbuttoned the top of his pale blue pajamas, which Lola must have buttoned incorrectly the night before, as they were one off.

  “Let off a little steam. That’s better,” she said as she took the phone from her pocket, tapped the camera app. “Here, monkey. Can we give Daddy a birthday smile? Just a little…?” She gently turned him over onto his back, aimed the camera.

  Campbell beamed up at his mother with alert, happy eyes.

  Dillie yanked back her hand.

  She stood up, dropping the phone into the crib.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Lola!” she cried out.

  • • •

  She found Lola in the kitchen.

  “How did this happen?” she demanded, carrying Campbell in his diaper.

  Lola looked at the child, at Dillie. “You tell me,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He didn’t have that last night,” she said.

  “What are you suggesting?” Dillie said.

  “He didn’t have that last night,” Lola repeated.

  Dillie took a breath, settled. “Lola…if he fell at the playground or something, you can tell me. I won’t be…”

  “He didn’t fall at the playground.”

  Dillie stared at her. The doorbell rang.

  “We’ll…discuss this later,” she said.

  Lola reached for Campbell. “I’ll dress him.”

  Dillie pulled him away, took a step back.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  • • •

  She would have ignored her mother’s call were it not the first birthday of her first grandchild. Instead, she thanked her for the new outfit and toys and pack of educational DVDs, but added: “I have guests coming soon, Mom. For a party.”

  The caterers set up chafing dishes in the dining room. Dillie and Lola were finishing their morning kitchen tasks so they could turn the room over to them. Campbell, dressed in a Christmas-red turtleneck and
little jeans, sat watching his brand-new Baby Mozart in the sitting room by the window.

  “Khaki read about it in your magazine,” her mother, Vivian, informed her. “Develops spatial intelligence, so they say….”

  Lola rinsed and sterilized baby bottles and little bowls and spoons.

  “He loves it,” said Dillie, grabbing a clean bottle from the drying rack. “Thank you. And please thank Khaki for me.” Her tone indicated a wrap-up, which she already knew was futile.

  “I keep looking for your byline,” her mother barreled on. “Aren’t you working on a profile of some luminary? Your own piece, I mean? Is that still in the cards?”

  Dillie pinged from one side of the kitchen to the other. Lola, in the way, turned off the stove, decamped from the room.

  “It’s very much in the cards,” said Dillie, reaching for the Enfagrow soy powder in the cupboard above the range. She double-checked the expiration date on the side and unscrewed the lid.

  “I didn’t see it this week,” said Vivian. “Should I look for it again next week?”

  “You can, but you won’t find it.” She carefully measured the powder with the scoop, dumped it into the bottle.

  “I do think they are underutilizing you at that magazine,” said Vivian, and Dillie said, “Well, that may be.”

  “There’s just no style to what they have you doing. I don’t mean flourishes. I’m all for simple, declarative sentences, but those blurbs they have you writing are so antiseptic, so clinical. Don’t you agree?”

  Dillie filled the bottle at the sink. “I’m sorry you find my pieces antiseptic.”

  “You’re missing my whole point, Dillie. I realize you must pay your dues as you toil through the ranks, but honestly, how many baby steps are you going to take before you venture a full stride?”

  Dillie screwed on the nipple cap. It was off-thread. She unscrewed it and tried again. “Mom, I need to feed Campbell.”

  “Yes, do that. Don’t keep my hungry grandson waiting. Oh, and I gave a deposit to Ensworth Preschool. Just to hold a spot. You’d be shocked how competitive it’s gotten here. It is not the Nashville you knew. It’s not as treacherous as New York, of course, but I declare…”