Susan begged Sean and Bill to be more considerate of Pat. But they just laughed and scraped their plates down the disposal when Pat’s back was turned. Their eyes would meet, and, as if by prearranged signal, the two of them would sneak out to eat in a restaurant.
Susan appreciated having her mother there; she was so weak that she could no longer take care of Adam or the house. Her weight dropped by twenty pounds or more. At first, she only had dark circles under her eyes, and then her eyes themselves appeared sunken in her skull. She had been ill before—those terrible six weeks in Alabama—but not as bad as this.
Pat banned Bill and the children from Susan’s room, warning them that she was far too ill for company, but Sean was crafty at sneaking in to see his mother. “Mom,” he asked her more than once, “do you think maybe she’s giving you something to make you sick?”
“Sean!”
“Well, she did it to people before. She won’t let us see you. She’s down there banging pots and pans around like she’s mad at somebody. When is she going home?”
“I need her, Sean,” Susan explained patiently.
“I wish she’d go home. And I’m not going to eat what she cooks. Neither is Dad.”
Susan was too weak and sick to argue with him. There were many nights when Bill was out on the road and she needed another adult in the house to help her care for the kids. She was too weak and sick to realize that she was actually living her own worst fear. Her mother kept her completely isolated most of the time.
Her mother had taken over her house.
No one came to visit Susan and she wondered why. She didn’t know that Pat refused to answer the door, had drawn the drapes so that the house looked deserted. She passed on no phone messages to Susan. “I found out later,” Susan recalled. “My sister-in-law said she had come over many times to see me, but no one came to the door.”
It was Pat’s way. She isolated people in her care. She had kept Jean away from Paw and Nona, and Bobby Porter from Aunt Liz. And now she had virtually locked Susan up in her own home, shutting her off from everything outside her bedroom.
***
Christmas came and Susan was too sick to cook dinner. Everyone went to Boppo and Papa’s. It was another holiday where everything seemed idyllic. Pat had spent countless hours painting and refurbishing an incredible dollhouse for Courtney. Sean quickly dubbed it “South Fork.” It had four tall columns on the veranda—wrapped with red ribbons for a candy-cane Christmas look—additions on each side of the main house, lace curtains in all the windows, and black shutters. It was the sort of thing Pat loved to work on. Dolls and dollhouses, little worlds of her own creation.
There was no dollhouse for Ashlynne, which was unfortunate since the girls were almost the same age. Courtney thanked her grandmother politely, but she was a little girl far more interested in sports than in dollhouses and miniature furniture.
As they sat down to eat, Adam’s “Grandma Pat” moved his highchair four feet back from the table so that he was sitting against the wall, his view of the family blocked by an antique china cabinet. Susan could see he was about to cry, his face bereft at being banished. She nudged Bill and he moved Adam back.
The food was wonderful and Susan tried to eat, but she felt queasy after a few bites. At home later, Bill took a picture of her sitting in an easy chair in her nightgown. She looked like death itself, her eyes sunken, her skin the color of thin parchment.
Susan hadn’t been able to take care of Adam for a month, and in the months ahead she felt no better. Her hands hurt so badly that she could scarcely use them. Bill insisted that there had to be something more wrong with her than the flu. On January 19, 1990, he took her to the emergency room at Kennestone Hospital in Marietta for testing. Her doctor had no idea why she was so sick, but he listed a tentative diagnosis: “.079.9: Viral Syndrome.”
A complete blood count, a sputum culture, and a urinalysis yielded no information. Susan was dehydrated from vomiting; she was given intravenous fluids to stabilize her condition and then released. Bill wanted more testing. He wanted hair and nail clipping analysis; he wanted testing for arsenic. Susan absolutely refused. “I couldn’t even think of that. I would not believe that my mother would do that to me. Not deliberately. That was too awful to contemplate.”
Pat continued to care for Susan. She wasn’t living with the Alfords in their home in the Brookstone Country Club but she might as well have been; she was there almost all the time. Susan was grateful; she didn’t know what she would have done without her mother. She began to wonder if she had hepatitis or mononucleosis—or even cancer. She had been sick for three months and she just wasn’t getting any better. Adam was such a chunk of a toddler that she wasn’t sure she could lift him. Her mother wouldn’t even let her try. Pat was very, very firm about that. She would not let Susan go near the baby.
Adam missed his mother. And Susan missed him so much she could hardly stand it. One night as her mother moved quietly around her bed, Adam woke up and Susan could hear him down the hall, crying. He played for a while in his crib, and then he started to cry again.
“Mom,” Susan begged. “I’ve got to go reassure him.”
Pat glared at her daughter, exasperated. “Do you want to kill him too? Is that what you want?”
Susan got out of bed and braced herself by holding on to furniture as she moved toward the hall.
“Go back to bed!” Pat ordered. “I’ll take care of him.”
“Mom,” Susan said, “he just wants to see me. I’ve got to go in there and see him.”
“You want to put double work on me, taking care of two of you? How much more am I supposed to take?”
Susan gave up. She crawled back into bed, but she could still hear her little boy down the hall. She waited until her mother was in the other end of the house, then she crept down the hall to Adam’s room and picked him up. “He was so happy to see me. He put his little arms around me, and he just patted my face and looked at me. I think he thought I’d gone away forever.”
Susan didn’t hear a sound beyond Adam’s joyful noises; she was so happy to be holding him again, and he was chuckling with glee to see his own mother. “I didn’t hear a movement,” she said, “but I half turned and she was there—just staring at me. I don’t know why, but it frightened me. I jumped a foot and I said, ‘Mom! You scared me half to death!’ ”
“What are you doing up?” Pat asked coldly.
“Mom, he just misses me. I’ve got to hold him.”
“Go ahead, if you want to kill yourself and kill him. I’ve already got you to look after. Nobody ever thinks of me.”
Susan lowered Adam into his crib and walked slowly back to bed. The house was warm, but she felt chilled. Why hadn’t her mother said something instead of standing in the doorway so quietly, staring at her? Her expression had been so awful, so full of hate. Evil. For the first time, Susan was actually afraid of her own mother.
By morning, the feeling had passed, leaving only a smoky hangover of dread in her mind. She had been sick so long it was sometimes hard to think straight.
***
By March, Susan was still sick. Her feet hurt so much that she hadn’t worn shoes, much less high heels, for four months. And then, ever so gradually, she began to have good days interspersed with the bad. She was far from well, but she was better.
Continuing the tradition of teenage—and pregnant—brides in the Siler family, Debbie’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, was getting married. Debbie asked Susan to take the pictures at the wedding and Susan promised she would, all the time wondering how on earth she was going to get dressed up, wear heels, and stay on her feet throughout the ceremony and reception.
Dawn’s wedding was March 10, 1990. She was a beautiful blond bride, and although she was a little queasy with early pregnancy, she was not as nauseated as her aunt Susan was. Somehow, Susan managed to take a complete set of wedding pictures and stay on her feet. Barely. “I didn’t think I’d make it,” she said. ?
??But I did. I plastered on makeup to give me some color, but I could see it didn’t work in the few photographs I was in.”
Susan wore a white silk dress that was way too big for her, but she cinched the belt over four notches. The circles under her eyes made her look ten years older than she was. Boppo wore a lovely pale pink crepe dress. Pat wore her “marrying and burying dress”—the turquoise dress that had once been Susan’s maternity dress. Debbie wore a very expensive white satin brocade and lace dress. She wore it very carefully; she returned it to the store the next day.
It was, Susan acknowledged, a typical family wedding, at least for her family. On the surface, everything seemed lovely. Underneath, there were secrets, lies, evasions, and fears eating away at the very foundation of the family.
***
Although not one of them would ever have admitted it, Susan and Bill Alford and their children had lived a life style that all of the Siler-Radcliffe clan envied. None of them knew how very close the Alfords had come to losing it all at Christmas, 1988. It was a matter of pride with Susan and Bill that they had handled their own problems, pulled out of their economic quicksand, and gone on.
They almost made it. But by the spring of 1990, there was not much about the Alfords’ lives that their relatives would have wanted to emulate. Bill’s new company was in the midst of a buy-out too, and Bill and Susan doubted that they could survive another job loss—even after Susan’s health improved enough for her to go back to work. They argued continually, and one or the other would storm out of the house. They were scared, worried sick about finances, worried about Sean’s mediocre grades, and worried about the future. The emotional tension was crushing.
“We grounded Sean too much and made him study,” Susan remembered regretfully. “But we thought we were doing the right thing. He was sick of the tension and the fighting in our house—and I didn’t blame him. It was such a bad time.”
Sean was in love, and far more caught up in his girlfriend’s family than his own. He graduated from high school in June, and Bill—who found it difficult to let go of grand gestures—rented Sean a Cadillac to drive to the prom. Sean posed in his prom tuxedo for his mother’s camera.
It was to be one of the last happy pictures. When he turned eighteen, Sean moved into his girlfriend’s family’s home and completely turned his back on his own family. He wanted nothing more to do with them, with their arguments, their worries, their lives. “We wouldn’t let him take his truck, and I felt guilty about that—that was wrong—and I lost my temper and screamed at Sean,” Susan said, her voice full of pain. Sean was her firstborn, her beautiful little boy grown to manhood, and he was gone; he stepped out of his family’s life as if he had never been part of it at all.
Next—and very rapidly next—the Alfords filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition. They had no other choice. The wonderful house in the Brookstone Country Club complex was gone, and Bill was back on the road as a salesman. “We had no place to live,” Susan said. “We had no place to go—except to Boppo and Papa’s. I was depressed. Sean and everything we’d worked for was gone, and I’d had to see Adam and Courtney give up their rooms, their home. When I was a little girl, Boppo was always the one who came to our rescue—but we were grown-ups and it hurt so much to have to move in with them. We were so ashamed.”
Boppo and Papa’s little house in McDonough was already crowded. Pat had her wing, of course—her doll room, her sewing room, her bedroom and bath upstairs. She refused to let anyone walk through her entrance, so Papa quickly built some rudimentary steps of unpainted two-by-fours outside the kitchen sliding doors.
Ashlynne was still living with Boppo and Papa five or six days out of seven, and she still slept in their bedroom. She had a room of her own, but Pat insisted it wasn’t Ashlynne’s room; she called it “the guest room.” There weren’t any other bedrooms. The only place the Alfords could stay was in the formal parlor. There was no privacy, just a room with oriental carpets and all the collected treasures from the Radcliffes’ tours of duty. They would live there at Boppo’s house, the eight of them—Boppo, Papa, Pat, Ashlynne, Bill, Susan, Courtney, and Adam—until Thanksgiving Day. And it would be the prelude to the unfolding of a nightmare.
Susan had always believed in her grandmother no matter what, but this time if Boppo helped her, she would be at cross purposes with what Pat wanted. From the moment they moved in, Pat made it clear that she didn’t want Susan and Bill and the children in her mother’s house. Perhaps it should not have been the shock that it was. But Susan had clung to the belief that a mother—any mother—would help and protect her child. She was wrong. Pat viewed Susan only as an enemy, a competitor for Boppo’s love.
“My mother was outraged when we moved into Boppo’s house,” Susan said. “She didn't want us there. I had no idea how angry she would be. She was my mother, and we needed help. But we were intruding on her territory. Just like Kent had. Just like Ashlynne was. She didn’t want us there. She especially didn’t want me there.”
Adam missed his big brother, and he missed his own room. He didn’t understand why they had to leave his house and all live in one room. He was a very sad little boy. He sat for hours in a chair by the front window, his head on his folded arms, watching for something—or for someone.
Susan was even sadder. Her losses had piled one on top of another over the past year and a half, and she had been mysteriously and dangerously ill for four months. Her body was well—she no longer suffered from crippling pain in her hands and feet—but she could not seem to stop crying.
At first, she tried to help with the cooking and the chores, but she could not please her mother. Pat watched her constantly and criticized everything, from the way she washed a cup to the way she fried an egg. “I just gave up,” Susan recalled. “I finally just stayed in the living room, sat on the couch, and cried. Bill looked after the kids, he washed dishes, he did errands. He would sit around the kitchen table and talk with everyone, and he could still make himself laugh. He was wonderful. I knew that he was feeling terrible too, but I couldn’t help him. I was paralyzed.”
Susan had seen what her mother did to people who invaded her territory. She attacked where she knew they were most vulnerable. She capitalized on weakness, homing in on whatever would hurt the most. Even though Susan had been only a young teenager when Kent committed suicide, she remembered how savagely her mother had attacked him.
And now she herself had become the target.
Susan’s only defense against her mother’s abuse, her sharp tongue, and her constant criticism was to hide in the living room, appalled at how increasingly depressed she felt. When she looked into her mother’s eyes, she saw the same eyes she had seen the night she tiptoed down the hall to pick up Adam when she was sick, eyes full of hate.
Susan was so tremendously sad and so tired that she could scarcely move. She no longer cared to live. But she had children to raise, and she was frightened that she might do something irreversible just to escape the pain she felt. “I checked myself into Clayton Hospital,” she said. “In the old days, they would call what I had a nervous breakdown—but they called it depression. I sure didn’t disagree with them. I was there for five days and I will never, ever forget that day I came home. My mother walked in, glared at me with loathing, and said, ‘What is she doing back here?’ ”
It got worse.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Susan noticed that Adam had a big bald spot on the back of his head. She pulled him over to her and examined it more closely. It looked as if someone had deliberately taken scissors to his mop of curly hair and cut out a chunk of it. She showed Boppo, who peered at Adam’s hair and said, with a straight face, “I don't see anything, Susan. It looks perfectly fine to me. Cliff, look here—do you see anything wrong with Adam’s hair?” Papa didn’t see the big bald spot either. If Susan hadn’t been so depressed, she might have laughed.
On Thanksgiving, as everyone was trying to make the best of a difficult holiday, Pat brought up the
subject of hair. They had just finished their meal when she stomped off and returned carrying two of her dolls. She insisted that Susan had deliberately butchered their hair in the back. There were, indeed, sections of the dolls’ wigs missing. The backs of their heads looked just like Adam’s.
“Susan did it,” Pat said icily. “Susan’s been back there deliberately mutilating my dolls.”
Susan stared at her mother and began to shake her head. And then, with a horrible clarity, she realized what was happening. The dolls were not Pat’s best dolls; they were the cheapest ones. She knew that her mother had deliberately cut off their hair to incriminate her. She knew too that her mother had cut Adam’s hair just as deliberately, the sharp points of her scissors against his tender neck.
“I didn’t know why Mom hated me so much,” Susan said. “But I knew she wanted us out of the house, and I saw what lengths she would go to. Adam wasn’t hurt. But the thought of her doing that to his hair to get at me gave me chills.”
It was the last day the Alfords would spend in that house. Boppo and Papa turned as one to Bill and Susan, and Susan recognized the look. She had seen it before when they had ordered Kent out of their home—because he was upsetting his sister. Now, she was the expendable one.
Bill and Susan grabbed Courtney and Adam and left Boppo and Papa’s house. They couldn’t move far—the only house they could get into immediately was around the corner and on the main street of McDonough. They had saved just enough for the rent. The house was old, but it had a big backyard and a nice landlord.
And it would be their own, with doors to shut and lock.
“I wasn’t well yet,” Susan acknowledged, “but I know I was starting to get well, from that time on. I just didn’t know what I was going to have to face. Our family had had arguments before, but things always worked out. This time was different.”
Susan was still too close for Pat’s comfort. “It began when my mother would pull into our driveway and just sit there,” Susan said. “She didn't get out of the car, and she didn’t come to the door. She would park there for a while staring at our windows, and then she would back her car out and drive away.”