There was an accident, Mama said the next day. Daddy’s car was forced off the road. She never spoke of the police report, the blood alcohol level of 0.27. I overheard those details on my own. Eavesdropping is instinctual at age eight.
I remember Daddy’s funeral even less than I remember Kevin’s. A bronze coffin topped with a spray of white flowers. Endless eulogies. Muffled crying. Mama supported by two of the aunts. Psychotically green cemetery grass.
Mama’s relatives made the trek in even larger numbers this time. Daessee’s. Lee’s. Cousins whose names I didn’t remember. More covert listening revealed threads of their plan. Mama must move back home with her children.
The summer after Daddy died was one of the hottest in Illinois history, with temperatures holding in the nineties for weeks. Though weather forecasters talked of Lake Michigan’s cooling effect, we were far from the water, blocked by too many buildings and too much cement. No lacustrine breezes for us. In Beverly, we plugged in fans, opened windows, and sweated. Harry and I slept on cots on the screened porch.
Through June and into July, Grandma Lee maintained a “return to Dixie” phone campaign. Brennan relatives continued appearing at the house, but solo now, or in sets of two, men with sweat-looped armpits, women in cotton dresses limp on their bodies. Conversation was guarded, Mama nervous and always on the verge of tears. An aunt or uncle would pat her hand. Do what’s best for you and the girls, Daisy.
In some child’s way I sensed a new restlessness in these familial calls. A growing impatience that grieving end and life resume. The visits had become vigils, uncomfortable but obligatory because Michael Terrence had been one of their own, and the matter of the widow and the children needed to be settled in proper fashion.
Death also wrought change in my own social nexus. Kids I’d known all my life avoided me now. When chance brought us together, they’d stare at their feet. Embarrassed? Confused? Fearful of contamination? Most found it easier to stay away.
Mama hadn’t enrolled us in day camp, so Harry and I spent the long steamy days by ourselves. I read her stories. We played board games, choreographed puppet shows, or walked to the Wool-worth’s on 95th Street for comics and vanilla Cokes.
Throughout those weeks, a small pharmacy took shape on Mama’s bedside table. When she was downstairs I’d examine the little vials with their ridged white caps and neatly typed labels. Shake them. Peer through the yellow and brown plastic. The tiny capsules caused something to flutter in my chest.
Mama made her decision in mid-July. Or perhaps Grandma Lee made it for her. I listened as she told Daddy’s brothers and sisters. They patted her hand. Perhaps it’s best, they said, sounding what? Relieved? What does an eight-year-old know of nuance?
Gran arrived the same day a sign went up in our yard. In the kaleidoscope of my memory I see her exiting the taxi, an old woman, scarecrow-thin, hands knobby and lizard-dry. She was fifty-six that summer.
Within a week we were packed into the Chrysler Newport Daddy had purchased before Kevin’s diagnosis. Gran drove. Mama rode shotgun. Harry and I were in back, a midline barrier of crayons and games demarcating territorial boundaries.
Two days later we arrived at Gran’s house in Charlotte. Harry and I were given the upstairs bedroom with the green-striped wall paper. The closet smelled of moth balls and lavender. Harry and I watched Mama hang our dresses on rods. Winter dresses for parties and church.
How long are we staying, Mama?
We’ll see. The hangers clicked softly.
Will we go to school here?
We’ll see.
At breakfast the next morning Gran asked if we’d like to spend the rest of the summer at the beach. Harry and I gazed at her over our Rice Krispies, shell-shocked by the thundering changes rolling over our lives.
Course you would, she said.
How do you know what I would or wouldn’t like, I thought? You’re not me. She was right, of course. Gran usually was. But that wasn’t the point. Another decision had been made and I was powerless to change it.
Two days after hitting Charlotte, our little party again settled itself in the Chrysler, Gran at the wheel. Mama slept, waking only when the whining of our tires announced we were crossing the causeway.
Mama’s head rose from the seat back. She didn’t turn to us. Didn’t smile and sing out “Pawley’s Island, here we come!” as she had in happier times. She merely slumped back.
Gran patted Mama’s hand, a carbon copy of the gesture employed by the Brennans. “We’re going to be fine,” she cooed in a drawl identical to that of her daughter. “Trust me, Daisy, darlin’. We’re going to be fine.”
And fine I was, once I met Evangeline Landry.
And for the next four years.
Until Evangeline vanished.
Kathy Reichs eBooks available from Scribner
First of the Temperance Brennan Novels.
Deja Dead
* * *
Dr. Temperance Brennan, Quebec’s director of forensic anthropology, returns in a thrilling investigation into the secrets of the dead.
Death Du Jour
* * *
Deaths kindle deep emotions that propel Dr. Temperance Brennan on a harrowing journey into the world of outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Deadly Decisions
* * *
Temperance Brennan goes behind the scenes of a major commercial airliner crash in western North Carolina.
Fatal Voyage
* * *
A bone-chilling Tempe Brennan novel of international black marketeering and murder.
Grave Secrets
* * *
Reichs explores international endangered species trafficking in this thriller that brings Tempe Brennan back to her home base in North Carolina.
Bare Bones
* * *
Tempe travels to Montreal to testify as an expert witness and is soon pulled into a murder case involving Stockholm syndrome.
Monday Mourning
* * *
Temperance Brennan and Detective Andrew Ryan find themselves on the trail of a modern murder and an ancient biblical mystery.
Cross Bones
* * *
For Tempe, the discovery of a young girl’s skeleton in Acadia, Canada, is more than just another assignment.
Bones to Ashes
* * *
Temperance Brennan encounters the occult in her quest to identify two young victims in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Devil Bones
* * *
Tempe regains consciousness and discovers that she is in a very small, dark, and cold enclosed space. Who wants Tempe out of the way, and why?
206 Bones
* * *
Temperance Brennan is called to the scene of a drowning in Quebec, but the corpse is later identified as a man buried in North Carolina 40 years ago.
Spider Bones
* * *
Just as 200,000 fans are pouring into town for Race Week, a body is found in a barrel of asphalt next to the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Flash and Bones
* * *
Tempe Brennan takes on infanticide, murder, and corruption, set in the high-stakes, high-danger world of diamond mining.
Bones Are Forever
* * *
Tempe's examination of a mysterious hit-and-run victim triggers an investigation into human trafficking.
Bones of the Lost
* * *
A Tempe Brennan e-short based on a case in Bones of the Lost.
Bones in Her Pocket
* * *
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Kathy Reichs, Break No Bones
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