Confession

  “Do you have a scrapbook of her … baby pictures?”

  “Sure, I do.” And then she finally caught something, maybe in my tone or in my eyes. “You mean those kind of pictures? I hope you know I would never do anything immoral to a child, you do understand that, don’t you? Especially not to my own baby girl. I only did what she liked. Babies enjoy that kind of attention! And besides.” She looked down and examined her fingernails. “They’re way too young to remember anything.”

  “Judy remembered,” I said.

  “No, she didn’t. Not that.”

  “Yes, she did. Before she died, she told someone.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  Judy’s mother flounced off the bed and started to walk out of the room, but I called her back by saying, “Annabelle … who was David’s father?”

  She looked back and laughed at me. “You think it’s only crummy people who like pictures of children, don’t you? You think it’s only people like me and my friends. You think we’re slimeballs and that nobody rich or respectable ever does anything like that. Well, you’d be surprised, sweetheart. Dennis used to make my deliveries for me, and Judy would, too, and some of the other kids on their bicycles. It was a real private service, I never even used the mails, so nobody could ever get me in trouble that way.” She gave me a challenging glare. “Dennis or those kids could walk right up to the front door of any of my customers with a nice white envelope full of photographs.

  “That’s how Judy met Ron and got into that gorgeous house the first time. Delivering my pictures to his father. Before he got religious, Ron’s dad was one of my best clients. Judy met him first, Ron’s father, while she was delivering pictures for me.” Her eyes glinted when she smiled. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

  She went laughing off to her meeting in progress.

  “Why did you start your … religion?” Geof asked Ron’s mother.

  “Our family needed cleansing …” she replied.

  I found my way out through a back door, but not before the man named Percy stopped me, standing between me and fresh air by propping his arm against the screen door, blocking my exit. “This is a private party,” he said, staring down at me under lowered eyelids. “It’s nobody’s business but the people who were invited. Were you invited?”

  “Not exactly. I just dropped by.”

  “What did you see inside?”

  “Nothing,” I said truthfully.

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “That’s exactly right. And who are you going to mention to that you didn’t see nothin’ here?”

  “Nobody,” I told him.

  “That’s right, because you have a family, don’t you? A nice little suburban wife and mother, like you, I’ll bet that’s what you are, am I right? Annabelle will know. She knows who you are. And you care about children, I know you do, just like we care about children, and you especially care about your own kids, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s good. It’ll help you to forget us if you remember them.”

  And with that threat to my nonexistent offspring, he raised his arm high enough to allow me to slip through into the backyard. Once there, I just kept walking to the street, not looking back. I was, indeed, thinking of my family just as he’d advised: of how my own family needed cleansing.

  On my way home, I stopped at a pay phone to call a cop I knew on the vice squad, and another on the crimes against children. I invited them to move quickly to sweep some dirt out of Port Frederick.

  35

  THE CHANGE HAD COME, FROM SUMMER TO the beginning of autumn, from hot to cool, from sultry to crisp, from dry to increasingly wet. It wouldn’t be long until we had the furnace going on all the time, snow tires on our cars, smoke in our chimneys, and ice on our windowpanes. Winter was a cozy season at our house, a season of blankets and cuddling, hot chocolate and cinnamon toast served by one of us to the other one late in the evenings.

  After I fled from Annabelle Baker’s house, I drove home, parked the Miata, went inside the house, and made two more phone calls. Then I moved from room to room, unlocking windows and doors, letting the chill, fresh air into the house.

  That accomplished, I went and stood by a living room window, staring out at the leaves trickling down from the trees, watching for Geof to drive up, and longing for another whiter just like the ones before.

  As I stood there, I thought about how I had quite a bit of experience with betrayal—not to be self-pitying—but never before by him. I felt as if I had been shoved down a well by the hands that I trusted most in the world, the hands in which I would have placed my life for safekeeping. I was looking up from the bottom of the well now, waiting for the one who’d pushed me to appear, hoping he could explain, but knowing there probably was no explanation good enough to excuse him ever.

  “What will we do about this monstrous lie of yours?” I murmured to the glass. “David isn’t your son. Either the tests lied or you did. Why would they lie? Why did you?”

  When I tired of standing and watching, when my own obsessive thought hurt too much, I went looking for Judy’s pink scrapbook, because Lee had returned it to us on her last visit. I found it on the dining room table and carried it into the living room with me, where I slipped down onto the same couch where I had sat with Geof when David first stormed into our lives.

  I stroked the pink cover. “David didn’t lie to us.”

  Now I viewed the scrapbook as an even more loving gift from Judy to her son than we had ever known: For David: Take these videotapes and this scrapbook, and jump to the conclusion that this man is your father. In this way, I will divert your attention from the truth, so you’ll never look any further …

  She had loved her son, and she had underestimated him.

  I heard a car’s tires crunching on gravel, and I looked up but didn’t otherwise move. What could I do, but set the trap and wait? I listened as he put the Jeep into the garage, closed its door. I had left the back door open, so now I heard his feet on our back walk, rustling through leaves, and the sound of the kitchen screen door opening, closing.

  “Honey!” I could hear the good mood, the joking in his voice. “Jenny, were you born in a barn? Why did you leave the back door open? Hey, honey! I’m home!” And then a couple of minutes later, “Jenny? Where are you?”

  “Geof!” I called.

  And then he appeared quickly in the entrance to the living room off the hall. He looked in at me, his expression puzzled and concerned, just as I had felt the day I had stared in at him and David.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

  “I never can hide anything from you, can I?” I said, feeling frightened and sad and angry, suddenly so angry! I hadn’t meant to do it like this, so bitterly, but the words kept coming out of me. “I only sometimes fool myself into thinking I can. But you can fool me, can’t you?”

  His mouth opened, but no words came out. He edged further into the room, and the expression in his eyes had changed from concern to wariness.

  “I think I know what happened, Geoffrey.”

  “What happened?” he said carefully.

  “To Judy and Ron.” I waved at the couch where the boy had sat. “Sit down. Let me tell you about my visit to Judy’s mother’s house today. I learned that when Judy was a very small child, maybe even a baby, her mother used her for pornographic pictures, which she sold. I think she had a little porno business, a little distribution center, you might say, in her house. It seems to me that abuse alone could be enough to account for Judy’s behavior in high school, because children who have been sexually abused tend to act out sexually later in life. I know this, you see, because I have a best friend who’s a shrink and who tells me such things.”

  I never took my eyes off him.

  “Before she died, Judy went to that glamour photograph studio to get her picture taken. The photographer said she came apart at the seams, said it brought back terrible old memories, and she wished that
she had never been born. I think Judy decided at that moment to kill herself. Right before she died, she acted like a woman who is going to commit suicide: She sold her business, she arranged things for David. I think she took Ron out to the farm that day to tape her confession, and then they went home and she killed herself …”

  “There was no sign that she handled the gun, Jenny.”

  “She killed herself,” I continued inexorably as if he hadn’t even spoken, “by making one more confession to her husband and thereby so enraging and overwhelming him that he killed her, just as she wanted him to do. Her last confession; her final penance. And then, realizing all the truths he didn’t want to face, Ron killed himself.”

  “What confession could be that bad?”

  “Oh, you mean besides the fact that she’d starred in pornography when she was a child? Or that she had slept around on him every chance she got when they were younger? Or the fact that she had helped Dennis Clemmons burglarize houses?” I took a breath and then plunged in. “Then how about the one that his son wasn’t really his son? How about that one, Geof?”

  “Jenny!” he said, looking hurt.

  “Yes, how about the truth, which was that the grandfather begat the grandson—”

  Geof shot to his feet. “What!”

  “The truth is that Ron’s father was also David’s father. She didn’t put that on the tape because she left the tape in the VCR for David to find. I think she told her last secret to her husband, alone, so nobody else would know. That’s why she was in the doorway; she was confessing one more thing. One last time.”

  He didn’t say anything; he was clearly too shocked.

  “Stay there, please,” I said when he started to come toward me. “Why did you lie about it, Geof?”

  He found the nearest chair and sank into it. For a long time, he didn’t speak, and I was afraid there was nothing he could ever say that would give me a good enough reason to forgive him for this monstrous lie.

  “Oh, Jenny, I wanted it to be true,” he said.

  “Not good enough!” I shot back furiously.

  “I don’t mean I wanted it to be true for me,” Geof said quickly. “I meant for David. Jenny, I couldn’t take another father away from him.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “But I was already so deeply involved in his life, I felt as if I couldn’t back off!”

  I hated this excuse, the sentimentality of it.

  “The truth is …” Suddenly there was something different in his tone, as if he’d only just discovered an important truth himself. “… I thought the truth was that David could never know who his father was. If it wasn’t specifically me—and that scrapbook suggested that even Judy thought it was me—then that meant it was just one of the guys …”

  He sounded desperate to make me understand the un-understandable. And surprisingly, I was beginning to. A feeling of hope, of warm relief was beginning to flood through me. Please, I prayed, make this good!

  “I was ashamed of us, of all of us, I felt bad for her … and for the boy … I thought, we were all his father.”

  I caught my breath, felt tears come to my eyes.

  Good man, I thought happily. Oh, you good man!

  “I thought I could redeem us, Jenny, all of us teenage boys, with this one boy we had helped to create. We were father to that boy, all of us men, we’re all fathers to all the boys, I guess, or we should be, we could be. I thought … I guess I didn’t have time to think … I just stood there when you and Hardy looked at me and I felt … responsible. So I claimed the responsibility. I was willing. I still am.”

  We sat there for a few moments, with Geof looking over at me now and then, but not pleading with me, not asking my forgiveness, not making any move to influence me. I thought of Hardy and the ever-widening circles of punishment and how somebody had to stop them, sometime, somewhere, by forgiving.

  “What are we going to tell David now?” I asked him.

  “We? Did I hear the beautiful sound of the word we?” He got up from the chair then and started slowly toward me as if afraid that I’d bolt or tell him to. “I don’t know what to tell him. Why don’t we talk about it?”

  “We are still pretty upset,” I warned him.

  “We know.” He slipped onto the couch beside me.

  He put his arms around me, and I put mine around him.

  “Happy birthday,” I murmured, though it had already passed. “Your real gift is outside.”

  He looked up at the sound we were both hearing: a motorcycle pulling into our driveway. Through the window, we watched David get off the cycle, remove his helmet, and attach it by its straps to the handlebars.

  “I called him,” I said, “because one way or another, we have to tell him the truth.”

  “Not all of it!”

  “At least the part where you’re not his father anymore.” I looked up at my husband. “Don’t we?”

  “Yes. I suppose we’ll figure out the rest of it later.”

  Our doorbell rang.

  “He actually came,” Geof said, sounding pleased.

  “Well, I said it had to do with his parents’ deaths.”

  “That’s okay. It does …”

  “And it doesn’t.”

  We saw the boy stare at our windows as if he could see us watching him. I knew he couldn’t, because the light was too low where we stood. But the sunshine was still bright enough outside for both Geof and me to see clearly the open vulnerability on David’s face before he had a chance to hide it from us again. I felt suddenly as if I’d given Geof a child for his birthday, after all, because I sensed that in some important internal way, we would never be “just us two” again. We’d never see the last of this boy; we would have to rearrange our molecules to accommodate his powerful presence. For good or ill, in some deep way, he was going to be “ours” from now on.

  I knew Geof’s heart was large enough to hold him.

  But was mine?

  “You were going to tell me, weren’t you?” I challenged him.

  “Of course, I was!”

  “Yeah, so you say—”

  “I was!” He dared to laugh a little. “I promise.”

  On our front stoop, David Mayer pushed the doorbell again.

  “Well, are we going to let him in?”

  Geof kissed the top of my head and said gratefully, “Let’s do it together.”

  Pocket Books

  Proudly Announces

  TWILIGHT

  Nancy Pickard

  Available in Hardcover

  from Pocket Books

  mid-September 1995

  The following is an excerpt from Twilight….

  There was a strange night last winter when my husband and I were coming home from a party at the other edge of town. Geof was driving the Jeep, his car. I was beside him, in the passenger’s seat. We were both awake, we were sober, but it seemed for a moment like a dream or a hallucination all the same.

  It was after midnight, closer to one o’clock.

  We weren’t talking, and the radio wasn’t on, but it wasn’t exactly quiet in the car. There was engine noise, and the blast of the heater—it was hovering around freezing outside—and the moan of the tires over the pavement. I guess there may have been a whining of the wind too, but I don’t think I was consciously aware of it. There wasn’t time to notice it, or to label it “wind.” It’s only there in my memory, or my imagination. I do vaguely remember the sound of something slapping rhythmically against the car body, maybe one of the mud flaps.

  My ankles were cold—I recall that, for sure.

  And I was tasting onion, from a potato chip dip at the party. It’s funny, really, how the taste of onion dip and the memory of cold ankles are the sensory cement that glue together my memory fragments of that uncanny night.

  I recall that Geof had his gloves off, both big hands on the wheel, his handsome 40-year-old face looking relaxed but tired. He was a cop, a lieutenant in the Port Frederick, Mass., police d
epartment, who got periodically and thoroughly sick of people. Although he had a gregarious nature, it was unusual for him to agree to go out with friends on a weekend night when the truth was that he’d really rather be at home watching a movie with me.

  I was leaning my head back against the seat, staring out the windshield at the yellow lines in our headlights. Every now and then I glanced at my husband, feeling a warm and quiet pleasure in his company. I was deeply aware of how much more safe and secure I felt traveling down the highway with him at one o’clock in the morning than I would have felt by myself. And I was thinking that it was good of him to have gone with me to the party; I would not have insisted—we were enormously close, but we were not clones, after all. I could have respected his desire to burrow in at home, and I would still have had fun at the party, on my own. But I didn’t have to. And so, I found myself savoring the delicious feeling of being encapsulated in a cozy, moving island with him as we traveled toward home.

  Suddenly, I sat up, and looked back down the highway.

  “Was that snow on that truck?”

  “What, Jenny?”

  That’s all I had time to say—and he to respond—when it hit.

  Wham. Snow dumped on us from above, as if the gods had suddenly opened their fists. Big, gloppy flakes immediately pasted themselves to our windshield. Our headlights were full of swirling white. The air, the highway, the sides of the road, the sky—everything changed color. One minute, there was black sky above us; the next minute, there was blowing white. When I turned around in the passenger seat of our Jeep, I was amazed that I could still see dry black pavement and brown grass at the sides of the highway behind us. And then even that vision of safety was gone, and we were in the middle of an honest-to-God, slick and dangerous snowstorm.

  “Damn it!” was my husband’s response.