He stroked my hair and then squeezed me one last time for emphasis. I felt the increased heft of my purse on my forearm.
"I'm here if you need me."
I nodded my head. Words had begun to desert me for the first time.
"Take care of yourself," he said. "I'll wait for your phone call."
"Phone call?"
"About the car."
"Thank you, Hamish. Tell your mother I said good-bye."
I got into the driver's seat and tucked my purse beside me. Only the final click of the car door shutting made me sure that I could go.
I did not look at him again. I put the car into gear and started down the driveway, passing to the right of Hamish's car and onto the grass. As I reached the road, I turned on the radio. Swing music, when I had expected heavy metal or alternative rock. I listened to the muted cheer, then shut it off. I tucked in my chin and made the left toward Phoenixville.
FIFTEEN
It was still early in the evening. The clock on the dash read 7:08, and traffic along the road outside Natalie's was such that I felt the need to concentrate. I saw minivans and SUVs pulling off into driveways and versions of these same cars disgorging men or women carrying grocery bags and dry cleaning. Lamps went on in downstairs windows, and blue lights flickered from large-screen televisions.
When I reached the end of this new prosperity and took the still more abandoned stretch of road toward my old neighborhood, I felt myself calm a bit. Here the land had begun to be sold and quartered like so much meat, but there were also dilapidated houses tucked up between trees or, more sadly, so near the road that they would never be able to escape the influx of population despite shut-up windows or white-noise machines. The occupants of these old houses wouldn't even know what a white-noise machine was. Things such as noise-cancellation headphones or expanded cargo holds were foreign concepts to them. As members of my parents' generation, they sat and suffered until death, and I had reached the age where I glimpsed why this seemed preferable to keeping up.
There was one man who had taken matters into his own hands and built a ten-foot cinder-block wall around his entire property. He regularly sprinkled the top with broken beer bottles, which spilled over the side. No matter how many fines or threats of demolition came from the county, he would not tear the wall down. The war between the city officials and this homeowner had been going on for a decade with seemingly no end, and though he had made the local papers repeatedly, there was never a picture of him. I had begun to think of him as a homunculus who contained within him all the fears of modern man. There were no pictures of him because he looked like all of us. His fear had made him into a phantom who changed shape behind his walls. He was my mother, hiding in the linen closet. He was my father, drawing shadows on sheets of plywood. He was Natalie, afraid of loneliness, or Sarah, stealing change. He was me as I passed his house at 7:23 on a Friday night, going to Mrs. Leverton's. I hoped, as he roared and thundered and fought off every lawsuit or claim, that he would survive forever or, if not, would at least die thrashing and spent long after all our deaths.
I drove into Phoenixville proper, the old part of town, where revitalized businesses still shut down at five p.m. and the streets were empty except for small clusters of activity that revolved around insular community projects. I saw Antipode, the sculpture gallery, all lit up. It was a hub for the arty in the area, and I had gone there more than once. It had been the scene of my drunken date with Tanner. He and the owner, surrounded by people much younger than they were, had engaged in a one-upping concerning each other's relevance.
"That was the saddest display I've seen in a long time," I said as the two of us stumbled out onto the sidewalk.
"Oh, shut up!" he had cried. "What have you ever done?" And our companionable misery began.
Antipode was bright but quiet tonight. I saw movement toward the back. A show was being hung. Down the block, the wheeled carts of the Paperback Shack, which were brought in each night, had been knocked over onto the sidewalk and into the road. The owner, a lone old woman, stooped to pick them up, no doubt regretting her attempt to stay open longer for the sake of attracting after-work customers.
I pulled over into an empty spot and got out. I gathered up a group of tattered romances strewn in the road, their busty cover art faded from long days in the sun. But what caught my eye was a heap of moldy poetry books, seemingly adhered to one another, that had fallen as one. The names appeared Russian to me. Quickly I scanned the titles and knew immediately: these were the books Mr. Forrest had donated to the local library thirty years ago. "They are deficient in their Russians," he had said to me.
I startled the woman when I said, "Excuse me," and held out the two stacks of paperbacks.
She spit toward me, spraying my hand as well as the books.
"I'll put them here," I said, and laid them on the trunk of a stripped-down Lincoln Continental.
As I walked back to my car, I could hear her muttering. I had read about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva and how she had hung herself from a coat hook. How was that possible? I had thought at the time. Ceiling fixtures, trees--yes. But doorknobs or coat hooks?
Shooting yourself in the head was, I'd been told, a message suicide, but what kind of message had my father been leaving? I had scoured the house for a note afterward, looked in his drawers and under his pillow, and ended up washing down the stairwell with old rags, determined to erase the only marks he'd left.
I neared my mother's neighborhood, and a hot wave of dread began to prickle across my spine and back, tiptoeing along my shoulder blades and turning into gooseflesh. I could not explain why, exactly, but I sensed I should not even pass through the place, much less stay the night. I was also tired. It was easier for me to attribute the strange shifts in my body to a forlorn exhaustion--the futility and ruin of the last twenty-four hours taking over my heart, my limbs, my mental firings--than to know I was merely a robot that had gone off the rails and that, after serving its master faithfully for years, had turned back predictably to the place where it was made.
A few of the houses were still dark, waiting for their owners, but most had one or two lights on. There were young couples with children in my mother's neighborhood, but these were not the same sort of couples who bought the faux manses near Natalie's house. These were couples who cleaned their own houses and fixed their own leaks. They set aside weekends to replace the rotting shingles or paint their chimneys, trim their trees, or wash their cars. The children helped and were rewarded with ice cream or special TV shows.
I drove by Mrs. Tolliver's house as I rounded the bend toward my mother's and Mrs. Leverton's. There was no light on, and I wondered where Mrs. Tolliver had gone. It had been a summer night, I remembered, when Mr. Tolliver, screaming at her from his position on the lawn, suddenly clutched his chest.
"He fell over like a pillar of salt," my mother said. "Blam! The sprinkler shifted before anyone had thought to shut it off. They drove him to the hospital sopping wet."
I had seen Mrs. Tolliver six months later, when I was home visiting my parents with Emily and Jake. We were shopping in the Acme. She lit up at the sight of Emily.
"How wonderful!" she said. She was animated in a way I hadn't remembered. Overwhelmed to see me in the deli aisle, she had gestured with a package of boneless chicken in her hand.
I asked after her, her house, how she was feeling.
"It's too late for me," she said at some point. "Not you. It's not too late for you." She looked at Jake and smiled, but the smile contained a wince, as if she were afraid of being hit.
I was lost in thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver when I saw him through his giant, still-uncurtained window. Mr. Forrest sat in his front room, as he always had, for all the world to see. I pulled the car over to the side of the road opposite him. I was not even aware of what was to my right--a house, a horizon, or the pope out for a stroll.
I lowered the window and let the night air of my old neighborhood flood in. I breathed. I smelled
the scent of the lawns and the asphalt. And I heard faint music. It was coming from Mr. Forrest's; he was listening to Bartok.
He and my mother had argued in the months following my father's death. There had been no funeral, and Mr. Forrest found the omission unforgivable; he didn't care whether she could leave the house or not. "And why, Helen," he had asked me, "were those guns allowed to remain?"
Without reflection, I got out of my car and hurried across the road and up the sloped concrete walk. He had never favored vegetation, and decades on there was barely a bush or branch on his lawn. Two chubby untamed boxwoods were the exceptions. They stood on either side of his stoop.
But I did not make it there. Halfway up the path, I stopped to watch. There was something in Mr. Forrest's lap--an animal--and he was petting it. I thought for a moment about all of his dogs, but then I realized that it was Bad Boy, the marmalade tom. He was upside down in Mr. Forrest's lap, allowing himself to be scratched.
How smart Mr. Forrest had been, I thought, how incredibly smart to remain alone as he had.
My knees felt as if they were made from hollow glass, and I knew I might collapse, but I did not move.
I had no doubt why my father had liked him; Mr. Forrest had shared the burden of my mother. He had a way of revealing her beauty to her that she trusted. His conversation was like a sparkling cocktail held aloft. In his eyes, my mother had been the neglected Garbo still in her slip, forever young, unspent.
I wondered if he would look up and see me standing on the path. Over the fireplace, I saw the painting he had bought from Julia Fusk. Finished the same year she'd painted me, the portrait Mr. Forrest had chosen was of a clothed woman whose face you could see. With her eyes shut, she was leaning to the left and pointing down toward the mantel, where my glance now fell. Spaced along it were three almost-perfect wooden globes made by my father. He had become obsessed with how these anonymous globes represented the finest woodwork he had ever done. Sitting in his workshop in the last few years of his life, while I gave birth to children and went to wine-and-cheese parties as Jake's wife, my father would sand these spheres for hours. He came in at night only after he saw the lights in the house go off. He would step quietly across the backyard and into the kitchen, climbing the steep wooden steps to his room, where the guns were kept.
I had blamed my mother. I had blamed her for everything. It was easy. She was crazy--"mentally ill," Mr. Forrest had said.
For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless. I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors' appointments, first with blankets and then towels to hide the world from her. I had even stood and watched her drop my grandchild.
I would not disturb Mr. Forrest; I would not ask him for money or confess my sins to him. I would leave him with his portrait, with his spherical pieces of wood, and with Bad Boy, who had scratched my mother's cheek.
I turned and regained the sidewalk, walked to the car in order to fetch my purse. I could not bring myself to get back in the car. I could not imagine the sound of the engine. It would destroy the music I heard and the hush of the dark, abandoned lawns. I took the keys out of the ignition and walked around to the other side. I would leave them in the glove box.
I reached my hand inside the open window on the passenger side and quickly opened and closed the glove box, tucking Hamish's keys away. I grabbed my purse. From braid to bullets, I thought. How this would have satisfied my ill-fated therapist. He would delight in the alliteration until I would want to smack him silly. Perhaps I would give him a call sometime. A little ring-a-ling from hell.
I heard the Bartok go silent. I placed the purse firmly on my shoulder. I would walk to Mrs. Leverton's, let myself in, and--was it possible?--calmly shoot myself.
As I stood, I noticed that Mr. Forrest had shut off his lights. I saw Bad Boy bounding across the lawn and heard the front door close. I turned and walked at what I considered a normal pace, down to the end of the block.
I did not look at my mother's house--never my father's, though it had been his earnings that had paid for it. His earnings that had set me up, allowed me to raise two daughters on live modeling and occasional secretarial work. I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but just like my father, I had seen the yawning tide that was my mother's need and fallen in. Jake would say I had dived in, that it had been my choice to return.
Mental illness had the unique ability to metastasize across the generations. Would it be Sarah? Would it be tiny Leo? Sarah seemed like the most obvious candidate, but that didn't mean much. And always, always, it had been left undiscussed, as if the geographical cure that Emily had taken would be enough. But I had tried that myself. I thought Madison, Wisconsin, would mean escape, but it did not. Nor did marriage or motherhood. Or murder.
I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother's front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they'd first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father's life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop. Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch's death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge. Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.
I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.
"What do you remember?" she had pressed me.
"Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time."
And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant--not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I'd initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.
"And the guns," I'd murmured.
Natalie had merely nodded her head.
I heard my father say the universal words again: "It's a hard day, sweetheart."
It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown. My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.
He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest's on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter. He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe's Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.
By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun--if he could find it--for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.
My mother came out of the kitchen. She'd taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.
"I slept in," my mother had told the police. "He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings."
I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs. Castle.
He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.
"I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute."
He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.
"Are you done?" he'd asked her. The gun was already at his temple.
"I reached my arm up," my mother told us--and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white--"but he . . ."
I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over her shoulder. I had vowed to hold her more from that day forward and to come and care for her, because we were what remained.
The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier's on Route 29. I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.
Now as I left the border of my parents' property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always--day in, day out--there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn't the two of us sat together for years?
Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied. Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake--Jake had even seen her body and stayed.
There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton's lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.
Unlike my mother's house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton's house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm. But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother's backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.