The tree in the nursing home lobby stretched to the ceiling, its branches sprayed with white. Every resident’s family had been invited to provide an ornament. After being assured that they would get it back, Gil wanted to contribute the one Joy had made in kindergarten—a wreath of green-colored paper with the painstakingly printed words MARY KRISMIS in the center, surrounded by glued-on cranberry beads—but Susanne wouldn’t let him.
In the Solarium, they sat with Emilia and the other inmates. When his mother pointed at Gil and said, “Where’s your girlfriend?” he did his best to force a smile, gestured at Susanne, and told her, “You mean my wife. She’s right there.”
“No, not that one. The other girl.” Emilia shook her head. “My sister. The one with the black hair but it used to be yellow.”
“You mean your granddaughter,” Gil said, but his voice broke on the word and they had to leave the meal early, barely making it back home before Gil threw up in the sink. Susanne put him to bed and insisted on taking his temperature, as if what he was sick with was a virus or a germ. The reading was normal, but her husband fell into a sleep so deep it might have been a coma, and she watched him with envy until it occurred to her that this would be the best time for the call she’d been waiting to make.
Identify All Parts
Tom and Alison supported Helen between them, each holding an elbow, at Doug’s arraignment. She kept insisting she didn’t need them there, but she was wobbly enough (hungover enough, Tom thought, though he and Alison had not discussed her mother’s breach of sobriety after Helen demanded Tom drive her home the day before, following Doug’s arrest) that Tom was afraid to let her stand when, after Doug pleaded “Not guilty” to the charges of obstruction of justice and witness tampering, the judge announced bail and the bailiff began leading Doug out. Tom expected his father-in-law to turn toward them all, the way defendants did on TV, but instead he kept his steely eyes straight ahead. If he noticed the sound of Helen whispering his name from ten yards away, he didn’t show it. “Don’t worry,” Alison pleaded with her mother. “They’ll bring him home in a few hours; you can talk to him then.”
Alison wanted to stay with her mother until her father’s release, but Tom convinced her that they should leave her parents alone. “Who knows what kind of a mood he’ll be in,” he said. “And anyway, what can we do?”
Doug’s run as the top cop in Chilton, and a pillar of the town’s foundation, had come to an abrupt and unsavory end. Even if he managed to get acquitted on covering up Alison’s arrest for drunk driving and the DA decided not to prosecute for anything else, his reputation had been damaged beyond repair.
But that wasn’t what Tom cared about. Really what he was afraid of was that sooner or later, Doug would find out about Tom’s betrayal. Once he learned that Tom had gone to the DA about him, Alison would find out, too. And though Tom would have given anything to believe she’d side with him if it came to that, he was pretty sure he knew better.
At home, he suggested that Alison help him assemble the crib to distract herself from worrying about her parents. Despite the fact that she considered it bad luck to spend too much time preparing a nursery that far ahead, in the end he persuaded her and they laid out all the pieces on the floor of the extra bedroom. They got as far as the first instruction—“Identify all parts”—before Alison, kneeling beside their future baby’s bed, bent over and began sobbing into her hands.
“It’s okay,” Tom told her, going over to rub her back. Of course it was anything but okay, but he had no idea what else to say. “What’s the matter?”
There was so much the matter that his own words struck him as absurd.
“Why is everything falling apart, right when I’m trying to pull myself together?” She pulled away from him to slump against the wall. “My mother’s drinking again. Fantastic. Every night she went to those meetings with me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Helen, I’m an alcoholic.’ And held hands with those people and said the prayer. A fraud is what she is. A fucking liar.”
There was a time he would have taken heart to hear this. But by now he knew it would not last, her anger at her mother. Helen would apologize, and Alison would forgive her, because to do otherwise meant risking more than she knew how to. “And why are these people persecuting my father?” She gestured across the room as if these people were standing in the corner. “What did he ever do to them?”
Tom lowered himself next to her, understanding that when he stood up again, he would be a different man. “Al, I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it, but all I’m asking is that you wait till I’m finished before you say anything.”
She put her hands over her ears like a child. It was the gestural equivalent of avoiding news broadcasts, which she’d done ever since her father’s arrest. “No. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. Not now, Tom. Please—I’m begging you.”
But now that he’d started, he could not pull it back. And to her credit (he’d always known she was stronger than she herself believed), Alison remained in the room and listened. He began with the day Susanne Enright called to solicit his help in finding Joy and ended with the same story he’d told Nelson Kovak—everything he’d learned from Delaney Stowell after Joy’s funeral.
Alison hugged her knees to her chest as she took it in, but he could not tell what effect it was having on her. When he finished, he leaned back against the wall, exhausted. She heaved in a deep breath. “You’re saying he did those things first because of my mother and then because of me,” she said. “Right? Protecting Delaney’s father, for my mother’s sake, by not arresting Zach Tully when Delaney stole a scrip for him. And then covering up my arrest.” Her voice dropped in shame on the last word.
Well, for his own sake, too, Tom thought, but did not say it. Looks better for a permanent chief not to have drunks in the family, especially when they’ve made such a big deal about being sober.
The night of Joy Enright’s funeral, he’d confronted his wife with what Delaney Stowell had told him—that despite Alison’s best efforts to fool them all into believing she’d been a teetotaler since the night of her first miscarriage, he knew she’d continued drinking, even at school. That the champagne the day of her accident had not been, as she’d told him, the first sip in years—a “private celebration” of the successful pregnancy. That he doubted it had even been champagne she was drunk on, when she drove Keith Nance off Reservoir Road; that the next day, when she was too vague in answering his questions about what she’d done with the champagne bottle, he’d thought to look in the flour canister (as in the old days), and there were six plastic nips of vodka lined up in a circle like toy soldiers in a ring. He’d gotten rid of them without mentioning it to Alison, waiting to see if she’d notice their absence and tell him she knew he’d discovered her secret. She never did, which made him believe that she had not looked in the canister again after the day of the accident. He was certain she had not taken another drink; he was on the lookout—as vigilant now as he had been neglectful before—but besides that, he could tell how profoundly it had shaken her to understand the extent to which she had deluded herself as well as the rest of them, and to come so close to losing her baby, the thing she’d always wanted most.
She did not seem surprised that he’d found out. In fact, she said she was relieved. Tom knew it would make more sense for him to feel angry, but instead he was confused. “If you feel relieved,” he said, “then why didn’t you tell me yourself?”
“I kept thinking I would. I wanted to. But I could never bring myself to follow through.”
With trepidation he asked, “Why did you do it?” When she knew what drinking like that could do to a person; when she’d seen the consequences in her own home. When she knew what she was risking. Was it him? On the last question he felt something like a sob escape with the words, but he managed to turn it into a cough.
She shook her head, and now it was he who felt the relief. There was no single answer, she said. “It’s just t
hese giant waves of dread, and drinking was the only thing that made them smaller, kept them farther away.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I can feel them coming before I actually feel them, but there’s no way to stop it. It’s the scariest thing in the world.”
This hurt to hear: she’d told him once, back when they were in high school, that sitting or standing or lying next to Tom was like being sheltered by a big, soft wall. She felt safe there, she said, and he wanted to tuck her into his side as when he pulled the football close on those rare occasions it was clear he was going to take a sack, all those guys rushing at him in an effort to bring him down, trying to slap the ball out of his clutch.
Her saying this (and his remembering it since) was what had convinced him that they were together because of more than a charitable impulse on her part. But what did it mean that the big, soft wall had collapsed in the years since then, and he was the last to know?
“I get his lying for us,” Alison said, and Tom sensed she regretted having to admit that her father had lied. “I don’t even think that’s so bad.” He waited for her to ask what he thought about it; as it turned out, though, she knew better. “But that other stuff. You can’t honestly believe he planted a mask in the black guy’s drawer, can you? Why would he do something like that?”
“I think he panicked about how the board’s vote would go.” Tom knew she could guess this herself but somehow needed him to say it. “And it might not have been his idea to begin with—he might have gotten it from Cliff.”
“Who?” She looked annoyed, as if he were puzzling her on purpose.
“Pothead Pete. He didn’t like the black guy. So when Joy went missing and the police came to interview him, he said he’d seen Willett wearing a mask. I think maybe Doug just saw his chance and grabbed it.” Maybe it would hurt less, Tom reasoned, if he said “Doug” instead of “your father.”
But Alison was not capable, it seemed, of hurting less when it came to her father. “You knew all this. And didn’t tell me. Instead, you told the DA.” She struggled to lift herself up and he moved to help her, but she waved him away. “Get out.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then I will. Actually, that’s a better idea, anyway.” She left the baby’s bedroom and went to their own, where she began jerking open drawers. Tom followed and caught her gently by the wrists.
“You can’t leave.”
“The hell I can’t.”
“But—I don’t want you to.” He knew how feeble this sounded, but it was the truth.
“You should have thought of that before you went around accusing my father of terrible things.” She barely got the words out before she collapsed on the edge of the bed in fresh sobs.
He sat beside her, feeling encouraged when she didn’t push him away. “But he did those things. I had to tell. You don’t see that?”
“All I see is you’ve always hated my father.” She clenched her fists as she sat beside him.
“That’s not true. If anything, he’s hated me.”
“And the minute you get a chance,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken, “you stab him in the back.”
She’d regret it later when she remembered saying this to him, he knew. Her lip trembled and she took a deep breath that looked as if it hurt her both going in and coming out.
Tom could have pointed out that everything her father was suffering he’d brought upon himself. He could have told her what he’d learned through a text that morning from Natalie—that the state guys had flagged a ten-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal Doug made back in November, the morning after receiving a call from a cell phone registered to Joy Enright, whom he’d arrested at Belle Meadow a few hours before she made the call. Circumstantial, of course. But what was it Doug had said, back when it was Martin Willett’s life on the line? You got the right circumstances, you got a guilty guy.
He could have said all these things, but he knew Alison wouldn’t be able to hear them. Instead, he let her go without a fight.
She remained with her parents for the next two days, without calling him. It was only as he was driving from the shack to meet up with Natalie after her dispatch shift that he heard, on the radio, the news that Doug Armstrong had apparently fled the state with his wife and was being sought as a fugitive.
His heart skidding, he pulled over and called Alison, but she didn’t pick up. He drove to Doug and Helen’s and found her sitting in front of the TV—not the news, but a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and eating directly from a pint of Rocky Road. She looked up and said, “You need to knock now.” When Tom failed to respond because he was in the process of recognizing that instead of being upset and shocked over her parents’ escape, she must have helped them in it, she added, “You need to be invited.”
There were four border bridges within a couple of hours of Chilton. But Doug wouldn’t be foolish enough to try those, Tom knew. Neither would he risk driving to the eastern part of the state and trying to cross there. More likely he’d head south or west, trading in his car as soon as he thought he could do so without being traced.
It was pointless asking Alison if she knew which direction her parents had gone, but he asked anyway. “I have no idea,” she told him, digging into the carton for the last spoonful.
He sat down on the ottoman and picked up the remote, hoping to continue the conversation without the sounds of the television. She reached to take it back from him and turned the volume up so high he couldn’t stand it, and this time he had no choice but to leave her.
What Real Could Be
Three days before Christmas, the tree had had it. There were almost more dried brown needles on the floor than on the tree itself, and Harper was unable to keep up with the vacuuming because they fell so fast. “It’s a fire hazard, Barbara,” her father said at breakfast. “We just timed it wrong this year. But we can’t take a chance by leaving it up.” He asked if she wanted to get another one to replace it, but Harper’s mother shook her head and said, “I think we’ve all had more than enough Christmas, haven’t we?” She refilled her coffee cup and drifted out of the kitchen in her robe, which they all knew she might or might not replace with real clothes at some point before returning to bed that night. Since Harper had discredited herself, there didn’t seem to be any way of telling which kind of day it was going to be when they all got up.
“Nice going, Betty,” Truman said, throwing down an ace of clubs so hard it flew off the table. He had never before resorted to calling her by the nickname she was taunted with at school. But after Harper and her mother returned from the courthouse that day and her mother went straight to her bedroom, she caught the brunt of her brother’s fury.
“What did you want me to do?” she asked him. Their father had moved to the dining room table, where he sat again seeking pieces to the puzzle he’d been putting together for more than two months. “Commit perjury? They could have locked me up.”
“How about not lying in the first place?” Truman said.
“Oh, okay, Mr. Morality. Mr. I-Always-Do-What’s-Right.”
“I don’t give a shit if you lie about other things. That’s not what I mean. But you gave her something to look forward to—that was the problem.”
“But how mental is that? She looked forward to me being part of the case about my best friend’s murder?”
“Not the case, stupid. It was the book.” Her brother flicked his soda can and it fell off the table, too. “You gave her something to hope for, and then you took it away.” She could tell Truman knew he was twisting the knife in her but didn’t care. When she didn’t respond he added, “How about not being mental yourself?”
He refused to help her undress the tree as he usually did. She began taking the ornaments down and packing them in their boxes. Chip ate tinsel and puked, the sound of it worse than the actual mess. In the dining room, her father exclaimed and Harper rushed in, assuming something was wrong.
“This isn’t fair,” he said, gesturing, and Ha
rper saw that although he’d finally fitted all the pieces he’d shaken out of the ziplock bag that first day and scattered across the table, the finished picture was missing a dozen or more. “They’re not all here.”
Harper didn’t remind him of what he’d told her before, that he enjoyed just sitting at the table searching for pieces, not caring how the picture turned out. He may have thought it was true at the time, but obviously it wasn’t true now.
“Most of it’s there. You can still tell what it is,” she said instead, pointing. “A house by a river. That beautiful tree. Somebody doing—something.” She couldn’t actually make out whether the figure on the river’s bank was a person, or not. The missing pieces were needed to fill in whatever it was.
“Maybe it’s an abstract,” she added. She remembered the word from a trip her art class had made to the museum in eighth grade, although if her father had pressed her now to define it, she would have failed. She’d understood it to mean the opposite of real, but Joy explained to her that no, it wasn’t the opposite; it referred to the artist’s idea of what real could be. There’s a spectrum, she’d told Harper. All artists start with reality, and then they add or subtract to create what looks right to them.
“I wasted hours of my life on this,” her father muttered, as if he hadn’t heard her.
Harper thought it best not to tell him that contrary to what she would have expected, she loved how the puzzle turned out, precisely because she had never expected it to add up to anything, and she enjoyed the surprise of seeing that it did.
How Will I Know You? Page 30