Too Much Happiness Read Free Page B

everything would collapse if she were to bring herself to tell someone exactly how he was, if she were to be entirely disloyal.
    She said that she and Lloyd had got into an old argument and she was so sick and tired of it that all she’d wanted was to get out. But she would get over it, she said. They would.
    “Happens to every couple sometime,” Maggie said.
    The phone rang then, and Maggie answered.
    “Yes. She’s okay. She just needed to walk something out of her system. Fine. Okay then, I’ll deliver her home in the morning. No trouble. Okay. Good night.
    “That was him,” she said. “I guess you heard.”
    “How did he sound? Did he sound normal?”
    Maggie laughed. “Well, I don’t know how he sounds when he’s normal, do I? He didn’t sound drunk.”
    “He doesn’t drink either. We don’t even have coffee in the house.”
    “Want some toast?”
    ·  ·  ·
    In the morning, early, Maggie drove her home. Maggie’s husband hadn’t left for work yet, and he stayed with the boys.
    Maggie was in a hurry to get back, so she just said, “Bye-bye. Phone me if you need to talk,” as she turned the minivan around in the yard.
    It was a cold morning in early spring, snow still on the ground, but there was Lloyd sitting on the steps without a jacket on.
    “Good morning,” he said, in a loud, sarcastically polite voice. And she said good morning, in a voice that pretended not to notice his.
    He did not move aside to let her up the steps.
    “You can’t go in there,” he said.
    She decided to take this lightly.
    “Not even if I say please? Please.”
    He looked at her but did not answer. He smiled with his lips held together.
    “Lloyd?” she said. “Lloyd?”
    “You better not go in.”
    “I didn’t tell her anything, Lloyd. I’m sorry I walked out. I just needed a breathing space, I guess.”
    “Better not go in.”
    “What’s the matter with you? Where are the kids?”
    He shook his head, as he did when she said something he didn’t like to hear. Something mildly rude, like “holy shit.”
    “Lloyd . Where are the kids?”
    He shifted just a little, so that she could pass if she liked.
    Dimitri still in his crib, lying sideways. Barbara Ann on the floor beside her bed, as if she’d got out or been pulled out. Sasha by the kitchen door—he had tried to get away. He was the only one with bruises on his throat. The pillow had done for the others.
    “When I phoned last night?” Lloyd said. “When I phoned, it had already happened.
    “You brought it all on yourself,” he said.
    The verdict was that he was insane, he couldn’t be tried. He was criminally insane—he had to be put in a secure institution.
    Doree had run out of the house and was stumbling around the yard, holding her arms tight across her stomach as if she had been sliced open and was trying to keep herself together. This was the scene that Maggie saw, when she came back. She had had a premonition, and had turned the van around in the road. Her first thought was that Doree had been hit or kicked in the stomach by her husband. She could understand nothing of the noises Doree was making. But Lloyd, who was still sitting on the steps, moved aside courteously for her, without a word, and she went into the house and found what she was now expecting to find. She phoned the police.
    For some time Doree kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own clothing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head. She was given a shot of something, regularly, to quiet her down, and this worked. In fact she became very quiet, though not catatonic. She was said to be stabilized. When she got out of the hospital and the social worker brought her to this new place, Mrs. Sands took over, found her somewhere to live, found her a job, established the routine of talking with her once a week. Maggie would have come to see her, but she was