By then it was late fall, almost the second anniversary. That was the very first time I felt safe to leave the house. I’d left before but had been a wreck the whole time until I could get back home.
Clare and I put our feet into the icy water that was now filling Dragon Creek’s pool. Then we lay in the sun, on the prickly dry grass. Despite our dozens of conversations, Clare had never asked me straight up what I felt about the verdict. I don’t know why. I would have told her. Maybe she was frightened to open wounds she didn’t realize were nowhere near closed.
But that day, suddenly, she seemed to draw herself up straight and it all came out, everything she had wondered about for months on end.
“Did you think he should have gone to an insane asylum?” Clare asked.
“Maybe,” I said, “but forever.”
“What if he was cured?”
“What would that matter? If I killed someone because I was sick, and then I got well, would that mean I didn’t kill them?”
“No, it wouldn’t,” she agreed, “but it’s different if you don’t know. Joseph Smith said that God does not look on sin with allowance, but when men sin, allowance must be made for them.”
“I get that,” I told her. “And you sound so prissy, no offense. But what about after you do know? Then you should pay for it.”
“Don’t you think anybody’s ever legally crazy?” Clare asked, checking her top to see if she still had a tan line. “Who’s crazy and gets better?”
“Retarded people,” I said. “Not people who are getting a PhD in pharmacy. People who were insane all their lives—like born that way.”
Clare said, “Huh.”
“What does your mother say?” I asked.
“Same as you.”
“What does your father say?”
“Same as you.”
“What’s the matter with you, then?”
“I just think you aren’t responsible for what you do if you don’t understand it. I think you should try to hate the sin, not the sinner.”
“That’s not very loyal to Becky and Ruthie.”
“Come on, that’s not fair, sister,” Clare said, though we hardly ever called each other by church terms. “I’m totally loyal. I just think that nobody could have done that if they knew what they were doing. Unless they were crazed out on drugs or, like, a paid executioner. That’s why I agreed with what the judge ruled. I didn’t say I liked it.”
I sat up and hugged her.
“At least it’s over now,” I said, “and if I decide to go back to the basketball team, maybe everybody won’t stare at me. Maybe my mother will come out of her daze. Maybe Ruthie and Becky are more understanding than I am, because they had to have known about this.”
“That’s what I think,” Clare said.
I longed so badly to be normal, to sound normal—even though I didn’t feel normal. And there’s only one way a teenage girl can do that, so I asked, “Do you like David Pratt?”
“We weren’t talking about David Pratt. We were talking about forgiving and how you felt about the verdict.”
“I know,” I said miserably. Should I tell her? I thought. What I really think? We’d always been almost each other’s mirror image, since we were little girls in primary. She deserved to know.
“Clare,” I said, “I could shock you so much with what I really think.”
“Nothing you could say could shock me.”
“What I really think is he should die, or even better, he should have his wife killed in front of him, so that he can feel what we feel, now that he’s well enough to understand feelings.”
Clare breathed out slowly through her teeth, “Shhhhhhhh,” and I realized she was doing a singing exercise to calm herself. “Ronnie, that’s wrong,” she finally said. “But it’s also a totally normal way for you to feel. The one thing is, he’s sorry. He repents.”
“What do you mean? I don’t care. I don’t want him here on earth with Rafe. I don’t want him on earth with me.”
“Do you want him in paradise with Ruth and Rebecca? Because if he was truly sorry in his heart of hearts, that’s where he’d go. That would be a release, an escape. Or do you want him sitting there, having to understand what he did and talk about it and think about it every day, every time he closes his eyes? Which would you think would be worse?”
“I never thought about it that way,” I said.
“Well, it seems as though it’s really you who has what she wants.”
“I never thought about it,” I said, “him thinking about it constantly.”
“It must be a torment,” Clare said quietly. “Now, as for me liking David, well, I like all the Pratt kids.”
“I don’t think I can talk . . . friend talk now, after what we said.”
“I think you couldn’t have talked friend talk unless we’d said what we said.” That was Clare. Even when she didn’t approve, she always understood.
Finally, and in a pretty feeble way, I asked, “Well, I meant, do you like him like him?”
“We’re way too young for that, Ronnie-o.”
“I like . . . I like Miko.”
“Are you nuts?” she said, and for just those few moments, we were two teenage girls giggling together. It was so good. “He’s . . . totally out of the question! He drinks coffee. And he’s not at all church material. He’s probably had sex ten times!”
“You don’t know that! Coffee’s not a sin if you’re not LDS. And he only drinks the fancy kind, that’s mostly milk. It probably has about half an ounce of coffee in it. His mom has that machine.”
“It’s still a sin,” said Clare. “That’s like saying if you only smoke one cigarette, you’re a little sinner.”
“It’s not a sin,” I told her. “It’s a lifestyle thing. I’m not saying you can ignore it. But it’s not going to keep you out of heaven! Joseph Smith said that when Judgment Day comes, a lot of people won’t go to heaven, and that some who don’t will be Mormons! Anyhow, he’ll give it up for me. He’ll have decaf mochas. He’ll convert, and do a mission, and then climb to the top of the tower and wait for me to let down my hair and twine a dark red love knot into it, and carry me off, and marry me, and we’ll start a practice together and both be doctors.”
“I, uh, hardly think Miko Sissinelli is going to be a doctor!”
“Why? His father’s a doctor! He’s going to college!”
“Ronnie. He’s a goof-off!”
“Your brother Dennis is a goof-off.”
“He’s only twelve. He thinks putting toothpaste in his hair is a good joke.”
“He’s still good in school. He called it the Morbid Tabernacle Choir, right there, during the Christmas concert,” I said. “And he’s still a smart kid. A goofy kid is still a normal kid.” We always went with the Emorys to the big temple, to hear the choir and take the little kids to the Santa events, every Christmas, except the first one after the murders, when Rafe was only three weeks old. You might have heard records, but you can’t imagine what it’s like to actually hear them. It’s like hearing heaven. The Christmas I was away in California, Clare sang “Silent Night” as a soloist with them, because she was their scholarship student.
Clare said then, “Can you imagine anyone marrying Dennis? Ever?”
“I can’t imagine anyone marrying anyone. I just want to . . . get out of here. Not away from you. But away from everything, including . . .”
“The shed.”
“But not just that. It’s mostly that. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get away from that. For me, Becky and Ruthie and that day are, like, forever. Like a bad knee. I’ve stopped thinking that I’ll ever ‘get over’ it, and around here, people will always see me differently. We’re totally in each other’s pockets constantly—I don’t mean you. Everything feels small. Nothing really matters. I want to move to New York and be an actress.”
“And a doctor.”
“Yes. And a stuntwoman and a detective!”
“I really am going
to move to New York and be an actress,” Clare said; and I would think, ten years later, of this moment, down by the creek, of two skinny girls with potbellies and size AA cups in our bathing suits and sweatshirts, when I got the tickets in the mail and Clare was playing Beth in the musical of Little Women on Broadway. She hadn’t even told me she was up for the role; she let it be a surprise. I could never have held something that big inside me.
“I can do it,” she said. “I can get a scholarship. To Juilliard. If I study hard.”
“Don’t you need a . . . I mean, you’re wonderful . . . but a professional voice teacher to get in places like that?”
“I’ve been saving my baby-sitting money. Your voice doesn’t really start to develop, unless you’re a child prodigy, until you’re . . . you know, in puberty. I’ve saved two thousand dollars, Ronnie.”
“Get out!”
“I have! I made, like, sixty dollars a day dog-sitting the Sissinellis’ Yorkie. And I baby-sit the little Finns with my little brothers every day in the summer until noon, while my mother and their mother do their relief stuff. They insist on paying me.”
“And you’re going to use this . . .”
“To take lessons. I found a studio that a lady has in her house. She’s sung at the Met, in New York. I can take the bus there. She charges twenty-five dollars for a half hour. If I take one lesson every two weeks, and practice all the time, because she lets you make tapes, I can really train.”
“You planned this all out.”
“Since I was eleven. There’s a huge LDS temple across from Lincoln Center.”
“Talk about eyes on the prize.” I was referring to a lesson that Brother Timothy had taught us, during his visit, about determination. “I admire that. I’m just yakking. About me. I’m not smart enough to get a full scholarship to college, much less medical school. I’ll have to take loans it’ll take me until I’m forty to pay off, if I do it. My parents can help some with college, but not much.”
“Maybe you should marry David Pratt, the doctor’s son,” Clare teased me.
“If you move to New York and I move to somewhere like Hawaii, we’ll never see each other again.”
“We’ll have the private planes!” Clare said.
“I forgot, of course,” I told her, almost laughing.
“And we’ll e-mail every day,” she said.
“This isn’t for years, though,” I reminded her.
“But you’ll be the one who leaves first,” said Clare.
I don’t know why she thought so. But as it turned out, I was.
Chapter Ten
The big thing that happened that next spring, when I was fifteen, was that my cousin—named after my mother, but always called “Ceci”—got married.
A month before the wedding, Ceci visited us with her mother, my aunt Juliet, and her fiancé, Patrick-the-Professor. He was handsome, a returned missionary, and already an instructor at NYU. My father said right away, “She hit the trifecta,” and Mama gave him a narrow glance. Though I didn’t know what the word meant, I knew Ceci supposedly had landed a good catch. Everybody knew that returned missionaries were the best husband material, or so the older girls, like Alora Tierney, said. Alora hated school and worked her brains out to get the grades so she could get a scholarship to BYU only to “land her big fish,” as she put it. This infuriated my father, who said BYU was a “meat market” and that if Heavenly Father didn’t intend women to understand economics, why did He give them charge of households, and if women weren’t intended to understand philosophy, why were they the first teachers of the word, and if they weren’t intended to practice psychology, why did the Lord intend they should be mothers?
Patrick came for lunch. He was staying with Uncle Pierce’s family, and Aunt Juliet and Ceci were staying with us. Everyone was so dippy and excited. Ceci was twenty, and “the esteemed professor,” as my father immediately began calling him (but only around my mother and me), was thirty-three. He was also really bossy and had opinions about everything, especially about women and “immodesty,” and “material culture,” and what Ceci would be expected to do for him—which sounded like everything from being a cordon bleu chef to a CPA. He said right away that he had “interviewed” my cousin carefully, as if she were trying out for a job. But because he was handsome and “proven,” my girl cousins and other girls from the ward were all nodding and willing to listen. To me, he looked like a guy wearing a cardboard suit—pretty good, in other words, unless he stood up close in bright light. My mother asked politely what his area of instruction was.
And, poor soul, it was American literature.
Now, you don’t get crosswise of my father on the subject of American literature.
Papa hit Patrick with his Opening Question right away: Did he believe that students should read everything, including Poe, with his dark imaginings, and Hawthorne, with his “morbid emphasis on sin”? Or should text studies be restricted to doctrine-promoting books and poetry, such as those works by Emily Dickinson and Theodore Dreiser? And it was like watching someone walk into a fan. Patrick didn’t believe that Hawthorne and Poe or, for that matter, F. Scott Fitzgerald should be read by impressionable students.
“You think that perhaps their faith is not strong enough to withstand the process of discernment?” Papa asked mildly. “Or are you worried that yours isn’t strong enough to guide them?”
“Not all students’ faith is at the same level of commitment, Brother Swan,” Patrick said. “And in any case, there is so much good literature available to us that to dwell on darkness, to introduce it to young minds, seems itself a risk not worth taking.”
“Risk?” Papa asked. “Isn’t being LDS a risk every day? Isn’t the very existence of our religion based on risk, on bold choices to reject the commonplace and embrace the truth, even if the whole world is wrong? Shouldn’t students be taught to understand others’ points of view, in an environment that promotes inquiry and righteous discernment, or be swayed by them later in life?”
I honestly felt sorry for the guy as Papa invited him to take a walk, because Papa was banging one fist against his open palm by the time they were halfway across the front yard, and Ceci’s fiancé looked like he wanted to sprout wings and fly away.
Still, we were glad to be alone, we women. Ceci had her wedding dress with her, which had been Grandma Bonham’s and then my aunt Juliet’s. All my girl cousins had to try on the wedding dress. It was something else, gorgeous ivory satin, with one hundred covered buttons up the back, each with its own little satin loop. It was also teeny, like a big doll dress, but so was Ceci—she weighed about a pound for every button. I couldn’t even get it up past my knees, and I’m not that big. Clare got into it, but it wouldn’t button. I didn’t think it was totally fair, and actually, I still don’t, that you can’t get married in your wedding dress. You have to wear special temple garments, not too different from those you wear for baptism, except that the jumpsuit thing is a skirt instead. You got to wear your wedding dress afterward, for pictures and for a ring-exchanging ceremony that usually happened in a pretty park or somewhere outside the church—or even on the steps. At a Mormon wedding, most family members don’t even go to the ceremony, because the husband is the priest who marries the wife, and it’s very sacred and private. It also is about three hours long, which would have been enough reason for me not to go, unless it was my own.
The visit was also really good for my mother.
It was the first time Mama had seen her sister since the funeral. She was very close to my aunt Juliet; they wrote to each other, real letters, not e-mails, almost every week. And they would have been closer if my aunt’s husband, Arthur, ever let their family travel. He was afraid to fly and didn’t want to drive all the way from Chicago, where they had lived since Ceci was my age. I guess it was all right with my uncle for my aunt to come alone, since if she died on the plane, there would still be one parent for all the younger brothers and sisters, including my aunt’s other daughter bes
ides Ceci, who was named Ophelia. We called her “Lee-Lee.” I understood the Shakespeare names, but to me, naming your daughter Juliet or Ophelia was like naming her “suicide,” and that, I never got.
My aunt was the first person I ever knew named Juliet.
That night, when my mother and her sister were downstairs talking, I wrote to Clare.
“U think he is so hot?” I wrote.
“CC’s lucky,” Clare wrote back. “MSS love their testimony more than the rest of us. U can’t argue with that. Someone who’s done his MSS has been through the fire. He’s seen the way R faith is treated.”
“In Milwaukee,” I answered. “Come on.”
“Like there R no people who need 2B taught the truth in Milwaukee?” Clare asked.
“Maybe, but it isn’t Rwanda,” I wrote. “He acts like a hero.”
“PU here,” Clare signed off, meaning “parental units” were in the room.
I was just being a pain.
But the way most girls fluttered around guys was still kind of embarrassing. It was okay with other parents, but not mine. Another weird thing about us, about my parents. Of course, we were excited for Ceci. The wedding was going to be held in Salt Lake, in the big temple, and Patrick’s family was wealthy. They had given Ceci a pearl necklace and were planning a catered dinner at a restaurant and a professional photographer—only black-and-white shots, Patrick said, and sniffed—all very uptown for Mormons. Usually a Mormon reception was not as big as Gentile weddings, but nice anyhow. Sometimes, it’s in a church basement, with Jell-O and cheese and crackers, and sometimes it’s at a hotel. Depends on the family. We were all looking forward to Ceci’s, in part because it would be fancy and we’d all have an excuse to make or buy new clothes.
As for Patrick, the more time he spent at our house and church, the more I saw my father’s point. He said all the right things, calling us “cousin” and so on, but he didn’t act like he was really crazy about Ceci. He acted like she’d won the lottery. When I complained about this to my mother one night, she said only, “Marry someone like your father.” She gave me a look with her eyebrows raised and added quietly, “Most girls do. Ceci is.”