Brian ran when he heard my name--full-speed-ahead awake. His light hopped over the cornfield, and, for one bright second, there was Mr. Harvey. No one but me saw him. Brian's light hit his back as he crawled into the high stalks and listened, again, for the sound of whimpering.
And then the light hit target and Brian dragged my father up and off Clarissa to hit him. Hit him on the head and back and face with the survival-kit flashlight. My father shouted and yelped and moaned.
And then Brian saw the bat.
I pushed and pushed against the unyielding borders of my heaven. I wanted to reach out and lift my father up, away, to me.
Clarissa ran and Brian swung. My father's eyes caught Brian's but he could barely breathe.
"You fucker!" Brian was black and white with blame.
I heard mumblings in the dirt. I heard my name. I thought I could taste the blood on my father's face, reach out to draw my fingers across his cut lips, lie down with him in my grave.
But I had to turn my back in heaven. I could do nothing--trapped in my perfect world. The blood I tasted was bitter. Acid. I wanted my father's vigil, his tight love for me. But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.
TWELVE
I stood in the room beside him and watched him sleep. During the night the story had come unwound and spun down so that the police understood: Mr. Salmon was crazy with grief and had gone out to the cornfield seeking revenge. It fit what they knew of him, his persistent phone calls, his obsession with the neighbor, and Detective Fenerman having visited that same day to tell my parents that for all intents and purposes my murder investigation had entered a sort of hiatus. No clues were left to pursue. No body had been found.
The surgeon had to operate on his knee to replace the cap with a purselike suture that partially disabled the joint. As I watched the operation I thought of how much like sewing it seemed, and I hoped that my father was in more capable hands than if he had been brought to me. In home ec my hands had been clumsy. Zipper foot or baster, I got them all confused.
But the surgeon had been patient. A nurse had filled him in on the story as he washed and scrubbed his hands. He remembered reading about what had happened to me in the papers. He was my father's age and had children of his own. He shivered as he stretched his gloves out over his hands. How alike he and this man were. How very different.
In the dark hospital room, a fluorescent bar light buzzed just behind my father's bed. As dawn approached it was the only light in the room until my sister walked in.
My mother and sister and brother woke to the sounds of the police sirens and came down into the dark kitchen from their bedrooms.
"Go wake your father," my mother said to Lindsey. "I can't believe he slept through this."
And so my sister had gone up. Everyone now knew where to look for him: in only six months, the green chair had become his true bed.
"Dad's not here!" my sister yelled as soon as she realized. "Dad's gone. Mom! Mom! Dad's gone!" For a rare moment Lindsey was a frightened child.
"Damn!" my mother said.
"Mommy?" Buckley said.
Lindsey rushed into the kitchen. My mother faced the stove. Her back was a riddled mass of nerves as she went about making tea.
"Mom?" Lindsey asked. "We have to do something."
"Don't you see...?" my mother said, stopping for a moment with a box of Earl Grey suspended in the air.
"What?"
She put the tea down, switched on the burner, and turned around. She saw something herself then: Buckley had gone to cling to my sister as he anxiously sucked his thumb.
"He's gone off after that man and gotten himself in trouble."
"We should go out, Mom," Lindsey said. "We should go help him."
"No."
"Mom, we have to help Daddy."
"Buckley, stop milking your thumb!"
My brother burst into hot panicked tears, and my sister reached her arms down to pull him in tighter. She looked at our mother.
"I'm going out to find him," Lindsey said.
"You are doing no such thing," my mother said. "He'll come home in good time. We're staying out of this."
"Mom," Lindsey said, "what if he's hurt?"
Buckley stopped crying long enough to look back and forth from my sister to my mother. He knew what hurt meant and who was missing from the house.
My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. "We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice."
Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley stood warm against her.
"Buckley," she said, "let's go back upstairs. You can sleep in my bed."
He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
When the call came from the police, my mother went immediately to the front closet. "He's been hit with our own baseball bat!" she said, grabbing her coat and keys and lipstick. My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also more responsible. Buckley couldn't be left by himself, and Lindsey wasn't even able to drive. Besides, it made the clearest sense in the world. Didn't the wife belong most at the husband's side?
But when my sister was able to get Nate's mother on the line--after all, the commotion in the cornfield had awakened the whole neighborhood--she knew what she would do. She called Samuel next. Within an hour, Nate's mother arrived to take Buckley, and Hal Heckler pulled up to our house on his motorcycle. It should have been exciting--clutching on to Samuel's gorgeous older brother, riding on a motorcycle for the first time--but all she could think of was our father.
My mother was not in his hospital room when Lindsey entered; it was just my father and me. She came up and stood on the other side of his bed and started to cry quietly.
"Daddy?" she said. "Are you okay, Daddy?"
The door opened a crack. It was Hal Heckler, a tall handsome slash of a man.
"Lindsey," he said, "I'll wait for you out in the visitors' area in case you need a ride home."
He saw her tears when she turned around. "Thanks, Hal. If you see my mother..."
"I'll tell her you're in here."
Lindsey took my father's hand and watched his face for movement. My sister was growing up before my eyes. I listened as she whispered the words he had sung to the two of us before Buckley was born:
Stones and bones;
snow and frost;
seeds and beans and polliwogs.
Paths and twigs, assorted kisses,
We all know who Daddy misses!
His two little frogs of girls, that's who.
They know where they are, do you, do you?
I wish a smile had come curling up onto my father's face, but he was deep under, swimming against drug and nightmare and waking dream. For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness. Like a firm waxen cover it had locked him away tight into the hard-blessed hours where there was no dead daughter and no gone knee, and where there was also no sweet daughter whispering rhymes.
"When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things."
"What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"
She wouldn't answer me.
Len Fenerman had rushed to the hospital as soon as they put the call through. Abigail Salmon, the dispatcher said, requesting him.
My father was in surgery, and my mother was pacing back and forth near the nurses' station. She had driven to the hospital in her raincoat with only her thin summer nightgown beneath it. She had her beating-around-the-yard ballet flats on her feet. She hadn't bothered to pull her hair back, and there hadn't been any hair elastics in
her pockets or purse. In the dark foggy parking lot of the hospital she had stopped to check her face and applied her stock red lipstick with a practiced hand.
When she saw Len approaching from the end of the long white corridor, she relaxed.
"Abigail," he said when he grew closer.
"Oh, Len," she said. Her face puzzled up on what she could say next. His name had been the sigh she needed. Everything that came next was not words.
The nurses at their station turned their heads away as Len and my mother touched hands. They extended this privacy veil habitually, as a matter of course, but even so they could see this man meant something to this woman.
"Let's talk in the visitors' area," Len said and led my mother down the corridor.
As they walked she told him my father was in surgery. He filled her in on what had happened in the cornfield.
"Apparently he said he thought the girl was George Harvey."
"He thought Clarissa was George Harvey?" My mother stopped, incredulous, just outside the visitors' area.
"It was dark out, Abigail. I think he only saw the girl's flashlight. My visit today couldn't have helped much. He's convinced that Harvey is involved."
"Is Clarissa all right?"
"She was treated for scratches and released. She was hysterical. Crying and screaming. It was a horrible coincidence, her being Susie's friend."
Hal was slumped down in a darkened corner of the visitors' area with his feet propped up on the helmet he'd brought for Lindsey. When he heard the voices approaching he stirred.
It was my mother and a cop. He slumped back down and let his shoulder-length hair obscure his face. He was pretty sure my mother wouldn't remember him.
But she recognized the jacket as Samuel's and for a moment thought, Samuel's here, but then thought, His brother.
"Let's sit," Len said, indicating the connected modular chairs on the far side of the room.
"I'd rather keep walking," my mother said. "The doctor said it will be an hour at least before they have anything to tell us."
"Where to?"
"Do you have cigarettes?"
"You know I do," Len said, smiling guiltily. He had to seek out her eyes. They weren't focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on the here and now. On him.
"Let's find an exit, then."
They found a door to a small concrete balcony near my father's room. It was a service balcony for a heating unit, so even though it was cramped and slightly chilly, the noise and the hot exhaust of the humming hydrant beside them shut them into a capsule that felt far away. They smoked cigarettes and looked at each other as if they had suddenly and without preparation moved on to a new page, where the pressing business had already been highlighted for prompt attention.
"How did your wife die?" my mother asked.
"Suicide."
Her hair was covering most of her face, and watching her I was reminded of Clarissa at her most self-conscious. The way she behaved around boys when we went to the mall. She would giggle too much and flash her eyes over at them to see where they were looking. But I was also struck by my mother's red mouth with the cigarette going up and away from it and smoke trailing out. I had seen this mother only once before--in the photograph. This mother had never had us.
"Why did she kill herself?"
"That's the question that preoccupies me most when I'm not preoccupied by things like your daughter's murder."
A strange smile came across my mother's face.
"Say that again," she said.
"What?" Len looked at her smile, wanted to reach out and trace the corners of it with his fingertips.
"My daughter's murder," my mother said.
"Abigail, are you okay?"
"No one says it. No one in the neighborhood talks about it. People call it the 'horrible tragedy' or some variation on that. I just want it to be spoken out loud by somebody. To have it said aloud. I'm ready--I wasn't ready before."
My mother dropped her cigarette onto the concrete and let it burn. She took Len's face in her hands.
"Say it," she said.
"Your daughter's murder."
"Thank you."
And I watched that flat red mouth move across an invisible line that separated her from the rest of the world. She pulled Len in to her and slowly kissed him on the mouth. He seemed to hesitate at first. His body tensed, telling him NO, but that NO became vague and cloudy, became air sucked into the intake fan of the humming hydrant beside them. She reached up and unbuttoned her raincoat. He placed his hand against the thin gauzy material of her summer gown.
My mother was, in her need, irresistible. As a child I had seen her effect on men. When we were in grocery stores, stockers volunteered to find the items on her list and would help us out to the car. Like Ruana Singh, she was known as one of the pretty mothers in the neighborhood; no man who met her could help but smile. When she asked a question, their beating hearts gave in.
But still, it had only ever been my father who stretched her laughter out into the rooms of the house and made it okay, somehow, for her to let go.
By tacking on extra hours here and there and skipping lunches, my father had managed to come home early from work every Thursday when we were little. But whereas the weekends were family time, they called that day "Mommy and Daddy time." Lindsey and I thought of it as good-girl time. It meant no peeps out of us as we stayed quiet on the other side of the house, while we used my father's then sparsely filled den as our playroom.
My mother would start preparing us around two.
"Bath time," she sang, as if she were saying we could go out to play. And in the beginning that was how it felt. All three of us would rush up to our rooms and put on bathrobes. We would meet in the hallway--three girls--and my mother would take us by the hands and lead us into our pink bathroom.
Back then she talked to us about mythology, which she had studied in school. She liked to tell us stories about Persephone and Zeus. She bought us illustrated books on the Norse gods, which gave us nightmares. She had gotten her master's in English--having fought tooth and nail with Grandma Lynn to go so far in school--and still held on to vague ideas of teaching when the two of us were old enough to be left on our own.
Those bath times blur together, as do all the gods and goddesses, but what I remember most is watching things hit my mother while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it reached her in waves. As her firstborn, I thought it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be.
My mother would lift Lindsey out of the tub first, dry her, and listen to her chatter about ducks and cuts. Then she would get me out of the tub and though I tried to be quiet the warm water made my sister and me drunk, and we talked to my mother about everything that mattered to us. Boys that teased us or how another family down the block had a puppy and why couldn't we have one too. She would listen seriously as if she were mentally noting the points of our agenda on a steno pad to which she would later refer.
"Well, first things first," she summed up. "Which means a nice nap for the two of you!"
She and I would tuck Lindsey in together. I stood by the bed as she kissed my sister on her forehead and brushed back her hair from her face. I think competition started there for me. Who got the better kiss, the longer time after the bath with Mom.
Luckily, I always won this. When I look back now I see that my mother had become--and very quickly after they moved into that house--lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.
I was too little to know what she was really saying to me, but I loved to be hushed to sleep by the soft lullaby of her words. One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way I never could have been. I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine.
What she said to a four-year-old about Helen of Troy: "A feisty woman
who screwed things up." About Margaret Sanger: "She was judged by her looks, Susie. Because she looked like a mouse, no one expected her to last." Gloria Steinem: "I feel horrible, but I wish she'd trim those nails." Our neighbors: "An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone."
"Do you know who Persephone is?" she asked me absently one Thursday. But I didn't answer. By then I'd learned to hush when she brought me into my room. My sister's and my time was in the bathroom as we were being toweled off. Lindsey and I could talk about anything then. In my bedroom it was Mommy's time.
She took the towel and draped it over the spindle knob of my four-poster bed. "Imagine our neighbor Mrs. Tarking as Persephone," she said. She opened the drawer of the dresser and handed me my underpants. She always doled out my clothes piecemeal, not wanting to pressure me. She understood my needs early. If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.
"She's wearing a long white robe, like a sheet draped over her shoulders, but made out of some nice shiny or light fabric, like silk. And she has sandals made of gold and she's surrounded by torches which are light made out of flames..."
She went to the drawer to get my undershirt and absentmindedly put it over my head instead of leaving it to me. Once my mother was launched I could take advantage of it--be the baby again. I never protested and claimed to be grown up or a big girl. Those afternoons were about listening to my mysterious mother.
She pulled back the tough-cord Sears bedspread, and I scooted over to the far side along the wall. She always checked her watch then and afterward she would say, "Just for a little while," and slide off her shoes and slip in between the sheets with me.
For both of us it was about getting lost. She got lost in her story. I got lost in her talk.
She would tell me about Persephone's mother, Demeter, or Cupid and Psyche, and I would listen to her until I fell asleep. Sometimes my parents' laughter in the room beside me or the sounds of their late-afternoon lovemaking would wake me up. I would lie there in half-sleep, listening. I liked to pretend that I was in the warm hold of a ship from one of the stories my father read to us, and that all of us were on the ocean and the waves were rolling gently up against the sides of the ship. The laughter, the small sounds of muffled moaning, would usher me back under into sleep.