Page 78 of The Wife Upstairs
What does that mean? Does he love her?
Does he still love me?
Because I think I still love him. In spite of it all.
JUNE, ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
I fucked up again.
Eddie came in today. He kissed me, he took me to the bed, he fucked me, and after it was over, I thought about him going back downstairs, back to Jane, and I said the thing that has been sitting inside me for weeks now.
“So is it hard, having a new girlfriend when you have a wife upstairs?”
He’d been getting dressed, and I saw the muscles in his back tense.
I shouldn’t have said it.
I’d had to say it.
And then he looked at me and said, “Is that really a problem you want me to focus on, Bea? Do you really want me to think about how I might solve it?”
He left right after that.
FUCK.
Still no sign of him. It’s been days. Is he just leaving me to die? That would certainly be an easy solution to his “problem.”
For him.
Not so easy for me.
I’ve got my little hoard of food and water, some of it hidden under the bed, and I’ve started counting it obsessively, even though I know the counting is bad, and I shouldn’t.
But I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only thing I feel in control of right now.
He came back today. Four days he left me on my own. I was so grateful to see him that I threw myself into his arms, breathing him in, and I felt his arms tighten around me, heard him murmur my name against my hair.
He’d missed me, too. But will it be enough?
JULY, A YEAR AFTER BLANCHE
This is my last entry. Eddie is in the shower, and I have to hurry.
Jane, I know you’ll find this. Eddie cares about you, respects you, and that means you’re smart. I’m putting this book in the pocket of his blazer. It’s too warm for him to put it back on when he goes downstairs, so I’m hoping he won’t even feel that it’s there.
Regardless, I have to risk it. For myself, and for you, Jane. Please. Please find this. Please find me. I can’t survive here any longer.
I’m upstairs. You have to walk to the end of the hall and go through a closet. I don’t know the code to the door, but I think it might be the same as the code to the lake house, my birthday. Eddie isn’t good with numbers.
Jane, I am begging you.
Save me. Save yourself.
Please.
Her childhood was so absurdly Southern gothic she sometimes thinks she must’ve made it up.
But no, she actually made her past blander and more boring, a pastel replica of Blanche’s childhood. That was really for the best, though. No one wanted to know about the Too Big House in the middle of West Alabama. The dad who drank too much, whose fists were fast even when he was drunk. The mom who’d checked out on vodka and Klonopin so early in Bea’s childhood that she couldn’t remember her mother ever playing with or reading to her.
