Blood Secrets

by Jones, Craig

  “And now we come to the question of why the defendant’s daughter has failed to appear in her mother’s behalf. We can’t presume to know all of her motives. Regina Mattison is seventeen years old. Some of you may consider her a child, just as her mother did when it came time to protect her. But child or adult, she is a daughter who has dealt the cruelest blow to her parents—abandonment in time of need. And yet she betrayed her parents long before this. That betrayal began after the first trip she took with Virgil Evans to Vivian Snell’s house. We would all like a ready answer as to why this girl joined this circle, this cult of people, so completely and willingly. Of course, the obvious temptation is to lay the guilt at her parents’ doorstep. But before we succumb to that temptation, let us consider the vast number of parents, many of them good parents, who have lost their children to various cults whose values are alien to those they raised their children with. And let us consider ourselves, let us consider how often all of us, as children, disappointed our parents in our pursuits. Quite simply, there was something inside Regina Mattison that made this group attractive to her, just as there was something in her mother that made them repulsive. When Irene Mattison pulled that trigger, she was doing the same thing she did the day she took a steel brush to the wall of her school. She was wiping out a plague that . . .”

  And on he went until I began to cringe. I knew what he was doing was necessary, but part of me wanted to stand up and shout the real reason Vivian was dead.

  I felt more comfortable during the prosecution’s summary, simply because it put me on the silent defensive. Jack Rand, the principal of Peck, had cooperated with the prosecution. Although he described me as a “competent” teacher, he maintained I was “erratic” outside the classroom and stated outright that I had a contempt for authority. On the other hand, Mrs. Lorimer, our old baby-sitter, worked grudgingly with the prosecution once she found she was in over her head. They extracted from her an account of my terrible temper and my eagerness to return to work while Regina was still sick. They referred to this testimony as often as possible, and I would catch Mrs. Lorimer giving me long, apologetic stares. But of course the prosecution depended most heavily upon Miss McPhee.

  “You have heard from Mr. Rand how on numerous occasions Mrs. Mattison had defied him and sought subtle ways for revenge. You have heard from Mrs. Lorimer how the defendant’s temper on one occasion made a dramatic snap when a minor situation slipped out of her control. And most importantly, Miss McPhee has testified how the defendant discouraged the counselor-student relationship with her daughter.” He paused and stepped backward to the corner of the jury box and pointed at me. “What you see before you is a woman who will do anything to control those around her. When she feels that control threatened, she becomes vindictive. We cannot say for sure what went on in the Mattison household, but it was something that drove Regina Mattison first to Miss McPhee and then to her father’s family. There was something in that household that made Irene Mattison almost a recluse. She has had a strangely limited life. Acquaintances, but no close friends except for Mrs. Malone, who lives two thousand miles away. I submit that the defendant chose this excessive solitude to keep her own violent proclivities in check. She saw Miss McPhee as an intruder and encouraged her daughter to stay away from her. Vivian Snell was the second intruder, and an undeniable danger because she was a concerned relative and knew her brother only too well. That is why the defendant took a gun with her the night of the murder. Her rational abilities were very much intact. She knew that only violence could rid her of this opponent. She knew she was likely to come out the loser if there was a legal battle over her daughter. The murder of Vivian Snell was calculated. And now the defendant is calculating your sympathy. She is standing on the name of motherhood. But I ask you, where is her daughter?”

  The jury went out. I lay in bed in my cell and smoked cigarettes during the six hours it took them to deliberate. I was prepared for defeat, for during those six hours, it wasn’t Mr. Bates’s summary I kept hearing. It was the prosecution’s. During the few minutes I did manage to fall asleep, I dreamed of Vivian. We were holding hands, and although she had her own hair, she had my face, and the jury knew it.

  Mr. Bates was holding his pen in his hand when we reconvened in the courtroom. The room was filled, the way it had been during the opening days of the trial. The jury filed into the box. Every one of them looked tired and empty; for the first time, it occurred to me to feel sorry for them.

  I stood up to face them.

  “We find the defendant not guilty by cause of temporary insanity.”

  I stood numb amid the cheering and booing until the gavel struck and Mr. Bates gently pulled me down into my seat. A sigh whistled through his teeth. “Your miracle came through. You’d better put Wanda Lowell on your Christmas card list.”

  We send our Christmas cards now—the few we do send—from Long Beach. They are plain white laminated cards with “Season’s Greetings” printed in red block letters. I find their simplicity soothing, and I have toned down my formerly flamboyant signature to match. Simplicity is the banner we live under; not even the holiday hysteria will set it aflutter. We have retired as far as possible from the past and past habits. Now time is there to be spent, not saved, and I’ve turned the burden of spending it into a luxury. It takes forty minutes to walk directly from our house to the Safeway supermarket where I work as a cashier, but I allow myself an extra twenty minutes to walk out of my way, to stop and admire a garden or to face the ocean and smoke a cigarette. I find nothing mystical about the ocean. Its surf is just another practical reminder that life is a series of simple repetitions: keep the wind down and storms at abeyance and your surf will continue with its regular rhythm. Of course, there’s always the invisible, sometimes treacherous undercurrent. I feel that undercurrent now and then, unexpectedly, whenever I am taken unawares by a tall girl whose face momentarily resembles Regina’s. Then the resemblance recedes, the undercurrent subsides, and the safe and soothing rhythm returns. . . .

  Endings spawn beginnings, and so quite naturally the conclusion of the trial nudged us into our present routine, our change of place. The board of education dismissed me “with regret” and with the florid jargon bureaucrats use when only half committed to expediency. Public opinion, it seems, did not coincide with the jury’s verdict. But the university made no move against Frank. It wasn’t necessary. The number of girls who signed up for his classes plummeted to five, three of whom thought they would like to brush bodies with depravity and made advances to him. A number of the boys smirked their way through the term and asked pointed questions about the practice of incest among tribal cultures. Frank gave notice for a January departure, and we put the house up for sale. The agent warned us not to get our hopes up: our notoriety would attract a lot of curiosity-seekers not at all interested in buying a house, and once a buyer could be found, he would be certain to feel an advantage in the bargaining. For our own peace of mind, we were asked not to be in the house at all when it was being shown.

  As it turned out, we sold it at a fairly small loss and went to stay with my parents for a month. My mother was valiantly cheerful and supportive and made a dress for me and a sweater for Frank. Her smiling intentions, however, were outweighed by my father, who looked as if he were on trial. His eyes seemed larger, liquefied, unable to focus—not on what he saw but on something within him. He was quiet most of the time, but it was a restrained silence. It broke the night he got drunk and cried in front of me at the kitchen table. He said I should never have married Frank, he had a feeling from the beginning something was wrong, it was Frank’s fault the way Regina turned out, and my life was ruined, our marriage now only a charade. I didn’t bother defending Frank against the insult, because I knew it was the only handle available to my father for expressing his long-term disappointment in me. And although I decided there and then it was time for us to leave, I resolved to wait a few days so my fa
ther wouldn’t think he had driven me away. Two days later, Barry came up from Texas with his wife and kids for a week’s visit. Assuming the role of brotherly protector, Barry spent his first night home making a blatant gesture of avoiding Frank. Later in the evening, Karen, Barry’s five-year-old, crawled onto Frank’s lap and asked him to help her with her puzzle. Under Barry’s watchful eyes, Frank’s hands shook in an obvious effort not to touch her in any way. She sat there smiling and babbling to him while he resisted her by quickly assembling the puzzle. When he finished, he told her to take it and show the others, then got up and played bartender to avoid sitting down again.

  We left the next morning. We drove south, then west. Six days later, we arrived in Los Angeles. Gloria and Pat helped us find a furnished apartment in Santa Monica, but after two months we felt hemmed in. We decided to rent a small house and found one here in Long Beach soon after Frank got his bartending job. It was easy enough for him to get because he wanted to work the day shift.

  Our life here isn’t exactly meager. We play bridge on Sunday night with neighbors and on Friday night with Gloria and Pat. We work in the garden, go to the beach, to the movies, and occasionally drive up to L.A. for dinner and a concert. Sometimes, on weekends, Gloria’s son Brian and his girlfriend come down for a visit. Often, Frank and Brian will lose themselves under the hood of Brian’s 1956 Pontiac, his proudest possession, while Sally and I play gin rummy under the porch awning. During those afternoons, Frank is his most animated, working furiously on that Pontiac or mowing the lawn or joining us in cards. But Brian’s visits are a mixed blessing. When he and Sally leave, I can see the depression settling on Frank as plainly as the Big Dipper settles on the treetop across the street from our front porch. We usually sit on the porch after Brian leaves and have two beers before bed. Rarely do we speak; we just sit and smoke and sip our beer. But it was on one of these nights I learned the truth about Wanda Lowell’s testimony in court. A woman happened to pass by wearing white heels and I thought of Wanda with her dulled, cracked shoes.

  “I wonder if Wanda Lowell’s ever been to California.”

  “I doubt she’s ever been more than forty miles outside of Ridgeway,” said Frank.

  “I wish there were something we could have done for her.”

  “We gave her a day’s worth of revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Two days, really. The day she testified and the day you were acquitted.”

  “What kind of revenge?”

  “She lied, Irene, and they believed her.”

  “Lied? How did she lie?”

  “She came to see me and asked if there was any way she could help. She never came to the shack that night. I just told her the facts and the two of us worked out the story together. Then I took her to Mr. Bates. When I saw that he believed her, I decided it was worth the chance. She was happy to do it.”

  “To perjure herself? Didn’t she want anything—money or . . .”

  “She wanted conspiracy. She wanted to make one big slash at the whole town and get away with it. Besides, she believed us. To offer her anything would have been insulting. It would only have shown we didn’t understand her reasons.”

  I said nothing more about it. I’m in no position to presume or refute someone else’s motives. Not even Regina’s.

  June first will be Regina’s birthday, but since it’s my birthday as well, we will get through the day without mentioning her. We get through weeks at a time without mentioning her, and then one Friday night Frank will stay on at the bar drinking boilermakers and come home to talk about her. I sit and listen and nod and wait for his soft reminiscence to become self-recrimination as he slides into his “if only”s, past and future: “If only we had moved far away years ago, while Regina was still a child”; “If only Regina would contact us just to tell us about the baby.” The first few times he did this, I felt myself being pulled along to share in the recriminations. But now I can refuse because I have my protection: all I have to do is picture that thin, lightning-like scar in Brian’s hair, just above his right ear, the scar he still carries from Regina. And with the rhythm of a reprise, I tell myself responsibility has to stop somewhere, that what a child is taught and what it learns are not necessarily the same thing. The thought has never accomplished a full exoneration, but it keeps Regina at the distance I need in order to go on functioning.

  The mornings after the boilermaker nights, Frank hurls himself into the present. He ferrets out the weeds in the garden or washes the windows or rearranges the furniture in the living room and then takes me to dinner. Regina is not mentioned again until the next boilermaker night.

  Of course, she’s always here, huddling between our thoughts, defining our opposite hopes for the future. Last Saturday, Brian came down and took us to Laguna to look at pottery and antiques. He brought us back and left at dusk, and Frank and I took up our customary positions on the front porch. A few minutes after the streetlamps came on, Frank leaned forward, gripping the arms of the chair, and squinted through his glasses. Coming slowly down the street from the direction of the highway was a green Chevrolet exactly like Virgil’s. My heart backed into my lungs and stayed there until the car passed, revealing an old woman as its driver. I will never forget that momentary look on Frank’s face, as if a prayer were about to be answered. When the car disappeared around the corner, it was my prayer that was answered.

  It’s natural, I know, to wish for hard and exact conclusions in life, and in that respect I am unnatural. Regardless of the consequences, Frank hopes for Regina’s return. He would like to hold his grandchild and see part of himself and me in its face. I don’t want that conclusion, that finality. I am resuming my position as the rock. I want nothing more than to be caressed by daily routine, working the keys of the cash register and then fixing dinner for two. The wrongs Regina and I did to each other may soften the longer we are separated, may evaporate entirely if we never meet again, and I am depending on her to recognize that. For she has my blood as well as Frank’s and I pray that she too has become a rock, firmly planted and unwilling to travel the territory that keeps us apart.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Craig Jones was born in California and grew up in Michigan. He earned a B.A. in English from Michigan State University and an M.A. in Drama & Cinema from New York University. He has taught high school English (in Brooklyn), worked as a copywriter for Barnes & Noble’s Catalogue, written book reviews for a Connecticut newspaper, and served as a caregiver for two longtime friends. He lived in New York City for twenty-three years, in rural Connecticut for ten, and now resides in his home state. His other two novels are Fatal Attraction (not the basis for the film) and Too Late To Be Good. He is currently completing a new work.