Mortal Memory

  I labored to dismiss the disquieting notion that there might have been an edge of cruelty in my father’s description of Nellie, as if he were bent upon making the contrast between “poor Dottie” and a woman of “many talents” as painful as he could.

  “Well, she knew who Nellie was,” I answered casually. “All of us knew who she was, that she was this woman who worked for my father.” I shrugged. “But I don’t think it occurred to any of us that there might have been something going on between them.”

  I thought of all the times I’d seen my father and Nellie together, simply standing in one of the store’s cluttered aisles, or hunched over Nellie’s desk in the back, the two of them trying to straighten out some incongruity in the books. Everything had always looked perfectly normal between them. Neither had ever exhibited the slightest sense of a clandestine relationship, of secret hideaways or kisses stolen behind a potted palm.

  “It always seemed like an ordinary, professional relationship,” I said.

  Rebecca gave me a penetrating look. “Then why did you bring her up?”

  “Just as a possibility,” I answered, dismissing it at the same time. “Nothing more than that.”

  But it was more than that.

  I knew that it was more because of the force with which Nellie had suddenly returned to me. I hadn’t thought of her in years, and yet I saw her exactly as she’d appeared during the time she’d worked for my father.

  She was a short, compact woman with curly light-brown hair, always neatly dressed, her lips painted a bright, glossy red. She had called me Skipper for some reason, and at the little birthday party my mother threw for me three months before her murder, Nellie gave me a blue captain’s cap with a large golden anchor stitched across the front. Her daughter was named May, and at the party she’d stood, looking a bit confused, in a lacy white dress, a small, willowy child with long, blond hair and a vacant look in her light green eyes.

  “Why did this woman in particular come to mind, Steve?”

  “Opportunity, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, they were alone in the store a good deal. It would have been easy for him.”

  “Would that have been enough for your father to have an affair?” Rebecca asked. “Just that it would have been convenient?”

  The world “affair” struck me as an inappropriate one to use in terms of any relationship my father might have had with Nellie. It seemed too worldly and sophisticated a word for either one of them. Had the “affair” existed at all, it would have been carried out in cheap motel rooms off noisy, commercial roads. Or, perhaps, even worse, just a quick, sweaty tumble in the back of the hardware store. As such, it didn’t strike me as the sort of thing my father would have done.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “Besides, he never struck me as being driven in that way. Toward sex, I mean, just for itself.” I thought a moment longer, my father’s face returning to me, clothed in the curling smoke that had always seemed to surround him. “Love might have attracted him, though.”

  “Could your father have gotten that from Nellie Grimes?” Rebecca asked.

  I considered Nellie carefully once again, recalling the round face and hazel eyes, the somewhat large and rolling hips, but more important, the buoyancy of her manner, the uncomplicated happiness and jollity that seemed to pour from her, and which was so different from the general gloominess and withdrawal which characterized my mother.

  I nodded. “Maybe,” I admitted.

  My father kept a small army-surplus cot in the back of the store, and for an instant I saw him lying upon it, wrapped in Nellie’s somewhat flabby arms, his old gray work clothes stripped away and bundled sloppily in a pile beneath the creaking springs of the old metal cot. It was not a vision I could sustain, however.

  I shook my head. “I can’t give you any particular reason, Rebecca, but I just don’t think my father would have been attracted to Nellie Grimes.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?” Rebecca asked. “There’s no indication in the investigation that she was thought of in connection with the murders.”

  “Well, she wasn’t working at the store when it all happened,” I explained. “She’d stopped working for my father by then.”

  “When did she stop?”

  I tried to recall the time exactly, but found that I could come up with only a general approximation. “Toward the end of the summer,” I said. “Sometime in the middle of August, I think.”

  “Do you know why she left?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “I don’t know that either,” I said. “But I do remember the last time I saw her.”

  It had been in the railway station downtown. My father had driven her and May, who was six years old by then, to the train late one summer afternoon, and I had come along with them, May and I bouncing about in the back of the van, along with a varied array of battered old suitcases, while my father and Nellie sat up front, talking quietly.

  My father had been dressed in his usual work clothes that day, but Nellie had dolled herself a bit in a black polka-dot dress to which she’d added a round, pillbox hat with a short black net that hung from her forehead to just beneath her upper lip, and which, though long out of style, had given her an unmistakable air of mystery.

  Once at the station, my father had lugged the suitcases to the appropriate ramp, then we had all waited for Nellie’s train. It had not been long in coming, and during that short interval, my father and Nellie had smoked cigarettes and talked quietly while May and I darted here and there among the other passengers. I caught none of the conversation that passed between them except, at the very end, as the train was already pulling into the station, its cloud of billowing steam pouring over them, I saw my father take a plain white envelope and press it into Nellie’s hand. He said nothing at all, but the look which passed between them at that instant was very beautiful and grave, deeper than a casual farewell.

  For a moment, I labored to bring back those two lost faces. I saw my father peering down at Nellie, his large, sad eyes settling delicately upon her as he placed the envelope in her hand, then gently folded her fingers around it. She was staring up at him, pressing her face closer to him as if reaching for his lips. She seemed to strain toward him unconsciously for a moment, then to pull back, instantly aware that he would not bend toward her, not so much as a single, tender inch.

  Then she stepped away, bent down to me, lifted the black net from her face, and kissed me softly on the cheek. “Bye, Skipper,” she said. She looked at me a moment, then smiled brokenly, and added, “Maybe someday.” After that, she quickly grabbed May’s hand, and the two of them disappeared into the train. My father and I hoisted the bags on after her, but she was not there to take them from us, and I had the strangest sense that she was just inside the first car, standing with her back pressed against its cold metal wall, crying.

  “There might have been something between them,” I told Rebecca, “but only on her side, not his.”

  “So you don’t think that second ticket to Mexico could have been for Nellie?”

  Because there seemed no other, more likely, candidate, I let myself consider the thought once again, probing at it almost academically, using little bits of logic and deduction to piece together my father’s phantom love affair.

  Then a chilling thought occurred to me.

  If it was true that the two tickets to Mexico had been for my father and Nellie, then what had they planned to do with May?

  For an instant, I saw her exactly as I’d seen her that day in the train station, a little girl in a burgundy dress, disappearing into the gloomy, rattling depths of the railway car. A few months later had she died as my mother, Laura, and Jamie had died? In some distant city, perhaps even at the same time, had Nellie Grimes done to her daughter what my father had done to Laura?

  From the grim notion of such a murder, it was easy for me to imagine it in all its awesome detail.

  I could
see May in her room, playing with her doll, a record on the little dark red plastic music box she had carried with her onto the train that day. She was humming along with its scratchy tune while she dressed a pink, rubbery doll whose heavy lids closed each time the head was tilted back. Alone, sitting Indian-style on the checkered quilt that covered her bed, humming to herself while her fingers tugged softly at the doll’s little wool dress, she barely looked up as the door to her room crept open and Nellie Grimes stepped into it as if from a cloud of thick gray smoke.

  I sat back in my seat, startled by the vividness of my own imagination, by the way it had driven me toward a firm and uncompromising denial.

  “No, that second ticket couldn’t have been for Nellie,” I said with absolute certainty, “because two tickets would mean that they’d have had to kill May, and I don’t believe my father would have had anything to do with such a murder.”

  Rebecca looked at me cautiously. “You don’t think he would have had anything to do with the murder of May Grimes even though he had been willing to kill …”

  “The rest of us, yes,” I said. I shook my head at the absurdity of my own reasoning, but I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that, for all he’d done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie, my father would not have brought May Grimes within that murderous circle.

  “He wouldn’t have killed May,” I said again. “He killed us because we’d done something to him. We weren’t like May. We weren’t … innocent.”

  I stopped, stunned by the hard and unforgiving judgment I had just rendered upon my murdered family. I tried to draw my scattered thoughts into a coherent whole. “It’s just that we were unhappy,” I said finally, giving up. “Desperately unhappy.”

  I stopped again, waiting for the next question, but Rebecca knew I’d supply the story anyway.

  “I think my mother tried to kill herself once,” I said softly, “but I can’t be sure.” I drew in a long, weary breath, then continued. “It was toward the end of October,” I said. “I know because it was the night of the fireworks. It was sort of a village Indian summer celebration. The town had this big festival in October, and we always went together, the whole family.”

  It had been a clear, unseasonably warm night, and I was dressed in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The town fireworks display went off at nine, and for a few blazing minutes we’d all watched as the dark sky exploded with brilliant shards of multicolored light. It had lasted for only a short time, certainly no more than ten minutes, and yet, during that interval we’d actually seemed like a family that might endure, taking the days in ordinary stride, weathering the usual storms.

  After the fireworks, we went to a local diner, and my father ate quite heartily, which was unusual for him. So unusual, in fact, that it seemed curiously faked, as if he were acting a part, forcing himself to appear less troubled than he was. My mother sat beside him, and from time to time, while Laura and Jamie and I dined on our usual hamburgers and french fries, my mother and father talked quietly to each other.

  “We got home around eleven that night, I suppose,” I went on. “My mother looked very tired. We all noticed it. Jamie actually took my mother’s arm as she got out of the car. Laura saw it, too. After my mother had sat down in the living room, she went into the kitchen and made her a glass of warm milk.”

  “And your father?”

  “He didn’t do anything,” I said. “He just sat across from my mother until we all went upstairs to bed.”

  As always, Jamie fell asleep almost instantly. I could hear him snoozing contentedly in the upper bunk. Laura was more high-strung, and that night, like many other nights, I heard her walking about in the room next door long after everyone else had fallen asleep.

  But that night, I heard something more than the familiar sounds of Jamie’s breathing and Laura’s rustling about in her own room. I heard the door of my mother’s bedroom open softly, a tiny squeak I had long ago recognized, but had rarely heard at such a late hour. I got up at once, walked to the door of my room, and opened it. In the corridor, I could see my mother as she came out of her bedroom, then, without turning on the light in the hallway, made her way slowly down the stairs. She was all the way down the stairs before I ventured out of my room. I walked down the same corridor, but stopped at the top of the stairs. From there I could see the light in the downstairs bathroom go on, and hear my mother as she opened the white wooden medicine cabinet that hung above the sink.

  “What did you do?” Rebecca asked.

  “I waited until she started back up the stairs,” I told her. “Then I just went back to my room.”

  But I didn’t fall asleep, and about two hours later, I heard the same squeaking hinge that told me my parents’ bedroom door had opened once again. Just like before, I walked to the door of my room, opened it slightly, and looked out. From that position, I could see my mother as she staggered toward the staircase once again. But this time she was weaving unsteadily and moaning softly, her arms wrapped around her stomach.

  I started to move toward her, perhaps to help her down the stairs or to wherever it was she was trying to get to that night, but then I saw my father come out of the bedroom. For a moment, he stood very still in the doorway, watching her silently, his light blue eyes glowing, cat-like, in the moonlit hallway. Then, as if in response to a sudden signal, he rushed toward her, gathered her into his arms, and walked her back into their bedroom.

  I remained at my door for a long time, but I didn’t see either my mother or my father again that night. I could hear my mother coughing and gagging, and I knew that she was in the bathroom that adjoined her room, probably bent over the sink or the toilet. After a while, I returned to my own room and lay down on the lower bunk.

  “At the time,” I said, “I thought it was just a bad stomach.”

  Rebecca looked up from her notes. “Why did you ever come to think it might be something else?” she asked.

  “Because of what happened the next morning.”

  I had gotten up early, just at dawn, a little boy needing to go to the bathroom. The light was pouring through the high window to the right of Jamie’s desk, and some of it spread out into the hallway when I opened the door and headed for the downstairs bathroom.

  It was located to the left of the stairs, just off the kitchen, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I saw my father working furiously inside its cramped space. He was going through all the drawers of the small cabinet that we used to store such things as toothpaste and extra rolls of toilet paper. The door of the mirrored medicine chest that hung above the small white porcelain sink, and which my mother used to store the family’s various medicines, was open. My father had assembled a large number of bottles and plastic pill containers along the rim of the sink, and he was intently reading the labels of each of them in turn, his eyes squinting fiercely as he read. After reading a label, he would either return the container to the medicine chest or drop it into the plain gray shoe box he’d placed on top of the toilet.

  “So from all this, you’ve come to believe that your mother had tried to kill herself that night?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And that the next morning your father had tried to find out what she’d used so that he could get rid of it?”

  I nodded. “Because later that morning, I saw him put the shoe box in his van.”

  Rebecca scribbled a few notes into her notebook, then glanced up at me. “When did you see your mother again?”

  “Later that day,” I answered. “She looked very weak. Like an old woman, frail.”

  But she looked more than weak, more than frail. She looked devastated.

  I had arrived home from school just a few minutes earlier and was busily making myself a peanut butter sandwich when I saw her make her way shakily down the stairs. The house was empty save for the two of us. Neither Laura nor Jamie had gotten back home yet, and my father was still at work in the hardware store downtown.

  “She must have heard me fiddlin
g around in the kitchen,” I told Rebecca. “That’s probably why she came down.” In my mind, I saw her drag herself down that long flight of stairs, still exhausted and probably in some kind of pain, so that she could say the three barely audible words as she drew herself into the kitchen.

  “‘Welcome home, Stevie,’ that’s what she said to me. That’s all she said. Just ‘Welcome home, Stevie.’” I shook my head. “Poor Dottie,” I said. “She died in that same old red housedress she wore when she came down to the kitchen that afternoon.”

  Rebecca’s pen stopped dead. “No, she didn’t,” she said. “She was killed in a regular skirt and blouse.”

  “She was?”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why did you think she’d been wearing the red housedress?”

  I shook my head, astonished and a little unnerved by my own weird conjectures. “I don’t know why I thought that,” I said.

  Rebecca watched me with a kind of eerie wariness, as if, perhaps, she already did.

  TWELVE

  PETER WAS at the small desk in the den, intently tracing a map, when I got home from my evening with Rebecca. It was part of that night’s schoolwork, and he was working at it diligently, as he always did. He barely looked up as I passed, and when he did, a fringe of blond hair fell over his right eye.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said, then returned to the map.

  I nodded toward him as I headed on down the corridor. I could see the light shining in Marie’s office, and some part of me wanted to avoid it, to slink up the stairs, away from her increasingly uneasy gaze. But the stairs themselves rested at the end of the corridor. Only a ghost could have made it past her door unseen.

  She was behind her desk, as usual, a classical piece playing softly in the background, something I didn’t recognize.

  “How’s it going?” I asked casually as I stopped at her door.

  She glanced up and smiled somewhat tiredly. “Fine,” she said. She was wearing her reading glasses, but she took them off to look at me thoughtfully for a moment, her face very quiet, one part of it in shadow, the other brightly illuminated by the lamp at her right.