by Karen Dionne
I sit up and drag a hand through my hair. The cigarette barely smolders in the ashtray. I use what’s left of it to light another and lean back with my feet on the table and look around the room. It’s strange to think that for everyone else, everything is continuing exactly as it was before, while for me, nothing will ever again be the same. For fifteen years, I was a bad person. I was the girl who killed her mother and caused her father to take his own life; who robbed the world of two talented and insightful scientists who could have gone on to make important discoveries; who was doing the only thing she could think of to make amends by living out her self-imposed penance in the worst place she knew. Take all of that away, and who am I?
I smoke and think and think and smoke until the dinner bell rings. The room empties quickly, not because people are in a hurry to eat the spectacularly bland and overcooked cafeteria food, but because the community room is locked during mealtimes since there aren’t enough staff to keep an eye on both places at once and we have to clear out. I stub out the cigarette and swing my legs off the table, then stick Trevor’s card in my pocket and get to my feet, working my way against the crowd and back to my room like a salmon swimming upstream. No one stops me or questions where I’m going. Skipping meals is only a problem if you have an eating disorder, which I do not, though I’m thin enough it would be easy to convince someone I did if I had a reason to. For that matter, there are a lot of neuroses and psychoses I can fake. Mood disorders are the easiest, but I also do a mean schizophrenic. I used to pretend that I had a different disorder every time I got a new roommate, like trying on a new shirt or coat, which might seem manipulative or maybe even cruel, but was really just harmless fun. All my roommates were going to move on eventually, so what did it matter if they took the wrong impression of me with them? Making them think I was bipolar, or that I suffered from antisocial personality disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or paranoid personality disorder was better than telling them what was really wrong with me.
A diagnosis which apparently no longer applies.
I stagger up the stairs and collapse onto my bed like a drunk. I pick up the stuffed bear toy that’s comforted me since I was a child and rub my thumb over the bald spot on the top of his head. When I first arrived at the hospital unable to move or to speak, my therapists tried to reach me using this bear. Tell me what’s bothering you, Rachel, they’d say in a high, squeaky voice while they danced the bear in front of me and wiggled its arms surreptitiously with their fingers. What are you afraid of? It’s okay, you can tell me. As if a confession to a stuffed animal could erase the memory of what I’d seen. What I’d done.
What I didn’t do.
I sigh and look toward the corner. The spider wisely says nothing.
I roll onto my back and link my arms behind my head and stare at the brown stains on the mattress of the bunk above me. When I was little, I used to look for shapes in these stains the way other people see things in clouds: a bear, a whale, a man and a woman kissing, my father and mother—which, considering that these are merely urine stains contributed by countless bedwetters over untold decades, only shows how desperately I missed them. A kiss like you see in movies, a Rhett Butler–Scarlett O’Hara kiss, the kiss of two people who were madly and passionately in love.
Not the kiss of a man who was about to murder his wife.
My father killed my mother and then he killed himself.
I try the spider’s words out loud. They don’t feel real.
It was an accident. It had to be. Maybe my father was cleaning the rifle while my mother was nearby and he somehow pulled the trigger. Maybe the rifle went off all on its own. Maybe he was startled when a wood rat ran across the floor, or a fighter jet flew low overhead, or by a sudden clap of thunder. The accident could have happened in a thousand different ways for a thousand different reasons. All I know is that my father would never deliberately hurt my mother for all the reasons I was going to lay out to Trevor.
Trevor. I shudder to think how close I came to confessing that I was the one who killed her. That would have been the end of my credibility right there—assuming a long-term patient in a mental hospital has any credibility to begin with. He’s probably kicking himself right now for setting up the interview, thinking how irresponsible I am for agreeing to talk to him and then almost immediately sending him away. I’m sure he only gave me his card out of politeness and has written off the story as a total bust.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter what he thinks of me because there’s no way I’m going to get in touch with him. Why would I want to help him work up a rehash of the same old Rachel’s-father-murdered-her-mother-and-then-he-killed-himself?
My eyes fill. I was so close. I had everything figured out. After I proved my father’s innocence, either through the court system or in the court of public opinion, I was going to take my own life. Not out of despair and hopelessness as my father took his (an act of selfishness I struggle with to this day; how could he leave me when I needed him most? How could he choose death with my mother over life with me?), but with courage and integrity as a final act of contrition. I’d even figured out how I was going to do it, something brilliant and original that no one at the hospital has tried before but that would absolutely work as I intended it to. Now what am I supposed to do?
I clutch my bear to my chest, burying my face in his fur and clinging to him as if he were an anchor, a lifeline, the only thing keeping me from sinking into an ocean of failure and despair so crushing I can barely breathe. Everything I sacrificed was to no purpose. Everything I believed was a lie.
I cry harder than I have in my life, harder than when I came out of my catatonia and realized my nightmares were true and my parents really were gone, great wracking sobs that turn my stomach inside out and convulse my entire body. I weep for the poor eleven-year-old orphan so traumatized by her parents’ deaths she had to be committed to a mental institution, for the desperately lonely and suicidal teenager she became, for the twenty-six-year-old woman I am today, who was so convinced that her life had no value she believed that living in a mental hospital was the best that she deserved. I weep for my parents, for the tragedy that destroyed our family, for all the things that never were that should have been.
At last there are no more tears. I sit up and wipe my face with my shirtsleeve and go to the bathroom for a wad of toilet paper to blow my nose. My eyes are so swollen I can barely see. I lean over the sink and splash cold water on my face, then wet a washcloth to soothe my burning eyes and lie down again on my bed. It’s hard to believe that for fifteen years I could have been so wrong. My visions are so persistent. So consistent. So real.
So, what if I am not mistaken? What if the medical examiner is wrong? I wish I’d thought to ask Trevor to leave his copy of the police report behind. There could be details in it that the police overlooked because they didn’t fit the narrative the crime scene seemed to tell. Details that only I can understand the significance of because I lived at the lodge. These were my parents. I know things about them and their relationship that didn’t even make it into the police report because no one ever interviewed me.
But then what? Combing over the report and identifying conflicting details and inconsistencies won’t change anything because this is the report that convicted my father in the first place. And if reading the report triggers a memory, or I find something in it that I want to look into further, how am I supposed to investigate from here?
I am standing over my mother holding a rifle.
The M.E. ruled that the daughter did not fire the rifle.
Am I a killer, or am I not? There’s only one way to find out. I have to go back to the happiest and most horrible place I know.
Home.
FOUR
THEN
Jenny
I should have seen something. Heard something. I should have known.
If only I had looked out the window
a few minutes earlier, I might have been able to pull our neighbors’ son out of our pool in time to revive him. A few minutes before that, and I might have prevented him from falling in.
The police, the EMTs, my husband—even the Yangs say I did all I could. As soon as I saw the dark shadow at the bottom of our pool and realized what it was, I yelled at my daughter to run next door as fast as she could and tell Mrs. Yang to call 911. I sprinted across the yard and kicked off my shoes and dove into the pool and grabbed a handful of T-shirt and hauled the boy out and laid him on the pool deck and started CPR, though I’ve never done CPR on a toddler and I had no idea if I was doing it right. I didn’t stop until the EMTs arrived and took over, but it wasn’t enough. By then, our neighbors’ only child was dead.
I told the police officer who questioned me that I had no idea how the boy got access to our swimming pool. The pool is fenced, as anyone can see, and my husband and I are extremely conscientious about keeping the gate shut because we moved into this house two months ago and our daughter is only eight and doesn’t yet know how to swim. Yes, the gate was open when I got there. No, I don’t know how it got that way. No, I couldn’t say exactly where our daughter was when the boy fell in. All I know is that when I finished whatever I was doing in the kitchen and went into the great room, Diana was sitting on the floor in front of the television watching a Disney movie.
The officer asked if he could speak with Diana in my presence. I told him sure. Diana confirmed what I’d already said, then sat down cross-legged on the floor at his request to demonstrate how she had been watching television with her back to the windows and her hands folded demurely in her lap. No, she didn’t hear any strange noises coming from the backyard. Yes, the movie she had been watching, Robin Hood, is her favorite, though she also likes Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid.
“Let me know if you remember anything else,” the officer said kindly enough when he finished with us and gave me his card.
The card is stuck to the fridge. I have no intention of calling. Because as much as I wish it could be otherwise, in my heart, I know my daughter is somehow involved. There’s just no way the Yang boy could have ended up at the bottom of our pool without her help. Whether she figured out how to open the gate and was playing by the pool and left the gate open when she came into the house and didn’t see the toddler wander in, or she saw him fall and didn’t think to come and get me, perhaps thinking that the boy could swim, I can’t say.
What I do know, what I didn’t tell the police officer, and what I absolutely won’t tell my husband, now or ever, is that after I came into the great room and before I looked out the windows, I saw that my daughter’s clothes were wet.
* * *
—
The police are gone, as are the EMTs, the fire department, the coroner, the reporters, our rubbernecking neighbors, and apparently everyone else in the city who either owns or has access to a police scanner. The action has shifted to the red-brick mini-mansion next door: lights blazing, cars choking the driveway and spilling into our cul-de-sac, a mountain of recriminating teddy bears and candles and flowers heaped against our shared fence; a spontaneous outpouring of grief and comfort and support to which everyone is welcome but us.
I’m tucked into a corner of the massive brown leather sofa in the great room, a high-ceilinged, dark-paneled retreat at the back of the house with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the yard and the pool. It’s dark. The pool lights are off. Moonlight reflects off the lethal water. Crime scene tape flutters in a light breeze.
Peter is sitting at the opposite end. Normally after our daughter has been put to bed and we finally get a chance to pour a glass of wine to relax and rehash our respective days we sit next to each other on this sofa; otherwise, it feels as though this cold, cavernous room will swallow us up. I much preferred the hundred-year-old farmhouse we rented when Peter was teaching in upstate New York, and the weathered Cape Cod in Swampscott during his stint at MIT. Even the tiny upstairs flat in the shabby bungalow in the declining Detroit neighborhood where we lived when we were first married had more character than this brick-and-limestone monstrosity. Each of those were humble wooden houses with small rooms and big histories: stairway railings polished smooth from generations of hands passing over them, stone walkways so dished from countless footsteps that after a rain birds would come and drink from their puddles. But the realtor promised that this time of year, housing in Ann Arbor was at a premium, and odds were good we wouldn’t find anything else in our price range within walking distance of the university, and because all signs indicated that this was going to be a scorcher of a summer, who wouldn’t want to live in a house with a pool?
I guess we know the answer to that question.
I lean forward and set the glass of wine Peter poured for me on the coffee table untouched. I’m already numb. A child died in our swimming pool. Every time I think the words, I feel like throwing up. Peter’s lawyer friend says we could be charged with negligent homicide even though the boy’s death was an accident. I hope we are.
I sit back and lean my head against the cushions and steal a glance at my husband. Peter looks as wasted as I feel. I try to imagine how we can possibly go forward from here; what it will be like tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, sitting on this sofa, looking out these windows—seeing that swimming pool—watching the seasons pass knowing that poor William Yang will forever remain a toddler because of us.
“We can’t stay here,” I say. “I mean it,” I add when Peter doesn’t respond. “We have to move.”
He tosses back his drink—Jameson on the rocks instead of his usual glass of red wine.
“I understand why you feel that way. This is hard for me, too. But we can’t move. This close to the start of classes, I doubt we could find so much as a room to rent.”
“I’m not talking about moving to a different house. I’m talking about moving to a different city. Someplace where we can walk down the street or go to a park or a store or a faculty luncheon and nobody knows what happened. Where Diana can go to school without people whispering behind her back and pointing fingers.”
“You know that’s not possible. With my job history it’s a wonder U of M took me on at all. This really is the end of the line.”
“There has to be something we can do. I can’t stay here. I just can’t.”
Peter studies the ice in his glass as if the cubes were a crystal ball that held the answer to our problem, then leans forward and puts the glass on the coffee table and sits back again in his corner. I wish he would slide across the sofa and take me in his arms and tell me that everything is going to be all right and that this too shall pass. I feel as fragile as the porcelain vase his grandmother gave us as a wedding present, which sits across the room on our fireplace mantel; brittle and insubstantial, as if the slightest puff of wind could blow me off and shatter me to pieces. The Howard Miller mantel clock she also gave us after she found out how much I love antiques ticks away beside it in the silence.
An idea begins to form.
“Maybe you don’t have to teach,” I say slowly, because my gut says this idea is a good one and I’ll only get one chance to pitch it, so it has to be right. “Maybe you could do fieldwork instead. Up north. At your grandparents’ place.”
I let the words hang between us to give him time to come to the same realization: this really is our best option. Our only option. Peter loves the woods as much as I do. He’s often said that the summers he spent as a boy at his family’s hunting lodge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilderness are the reason that he became a wildlife biologist in the first place. We could be happy there. Or as close to happy as is possible after today.
“What about my classes?”
“You could cancel. Take the semester off and see how it goes. We can rent out the house or leave it empty if we have to. I don’t want to live here. I really don’t.”
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“You know there’s no telephone or electricity at the lodge.”
Of course, I know this. Haven’t we spent every Christmas there with his family since before Diana was born? But I don’t argue the point. He’s only throwing out objections because he is not yet ready to admit that I am right.
I laugh. “You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”
He shakes his head. “It’s crazy,” he says. A pause. “It’s tempting,” he adds.
My stomach tightens. He’s almost convinced. “It’s perfect.”
“I doubt the university would agree.”
“Then quit. We can live off our savings for a long time, especially if your grandparents don’t charge us rent. Think about it. Your family owns this amazing, isolated chunk of pristine wilderness that’s never been studied. Who knows what you might find? And you wouldn’t have to answer to anyone. Imagine being able to focus on whatever you want without having to worry about grants and funding. Then later, after you publish, you could have your pick of any university in the country. Assuming you want to go back to teaching at all.”
“What about Diana?”
“I can homeschool Diana while you’re in the field. Or she can go with you.”
Or with me, I think, though I don’t say it. It’s been a long time since I’ve held a pair of binoculars in my hands. I put my career on the back burner when Diana was born with the understanding that as soon as she was old enough, I’d pick it up again. Unfortunately, our daughter turned out to be a difficult baby, and as she’s gotten older, she’s only gotten worse. The tantrums she throws over something as simple as either of us telling her to put on her shoes or to pick up her toys are epic—punching the wall until her knuckles bleed, kicking holes in her bedroom door—which obviously makes it a challenge to find babysitters and daycare centers that will take her. Diana’s therapist says we give in to her too easily; that we are the adults and it’s up to us to draw the lines if she is ever going to learn what is acceptable behavior and what is not. But her therapist doesn’t have to live with our sweet, charismatic, highly intelligent, super-creative, ultra-manipulative, love-you-one-second-and-bite-you-on-the-arm-the-next daughter.