“I hope she chokes on it,” he said, sitting down to our own empty table. “Christ.” He pushed his plate away.
“Stop driving past her house,” I said, “if it bothers you so much.”
But I didn’t mean it, not really. The truth was that I, too, savored each detail Rex excised from Cindy Ann’s life with a surgeon’s care: the new pink bicycle that appeared in the driveway; a second cat, another Angora, napping on top of the newly repaired Suburban; the small, pale face in an upstairs window, looking out at Rex until he drove away. Just as he’d feared, the delayed Breathalyzer had worked in Cindy Ann’s favor. At the arraignment, Cindy Ann pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter; jail time was suspended in exchange for community service, driving school, and twelve months of counseling for substance abuse. As far as Rex and I were concerned, she’d gotten away with murder. And, judging from letters to the editor that ran in the parish bulletin, in the Harbor Pilot, in the county paper published in Sheboygan, nearly everyone in Fox Harbor agreed.
Excepting Cindy Ann’s two sisters, of course. They were quick to counter with letters of their own; this was to be expected. What we did not expect was that the worst of these letters, the most hurtful, would come from Mallory herself. It could hardly be supposed, Mallory wrote, that Cindy Ann set out to harm anybody. Yes, she’d had too much to drink the night before, but who hasn’t woken up with a hangover, taken two aspirin, jumped in the car? Who, after all, hasn’t made a mistake?
I’ve known Rex and Megan Van Dorn a long time, and while I feel for the tragedy they have experienced, I don’t see how they can possibly believe that destroying my sister’s life—not to mention the lives of her children—will make up for the loss of their son. What happened was an accident. It wasn’t deliberate. It wasn’t personal.
And then—
The only deliberate, personal attack was the one that took place in court.
Sallow-faced Mallory Donaldson, with her animal rights petitions, her aggressive vegetarianism—the result, we all supposed, of growing up on a farm that raised veal. Summers, she traveled around the Midwest, selling handmade jewelry at flea markets and craft fairs. Winters, she washed dishes at the Cup and Cruller, dressed in flannel shirts and shit-kicker boots, a man’s synthetic cap pulled low over her forehead. Yet, Toby had fallen in love with her. They’d been together for almost two years. Every now and then, they’d even babysat for Evan.
“I can’t take sides on this,” Toby said, after the letter appeared. “Not against her. Not against you.”
Everything, now, seemed poisoned. Pointless. Mornings, I’d wake up, stare out the window at the naked, gray shoreline, littered with fat chunks of ice.
What, I thought, do I do next?
The sun coming up and going down again. The clock tick-ticking on the wall.
Shortly after Cindy Ann’s sentencing, I wrote my letter of resignation to Lakeview Accounting. “Take a little more time to decide,” Lindsey pleaded, filling all the tape on our answering machine. “Let’s talk over lunch, okay? C’mon, I’ll meet you at the Shanty, my treat.”
But I didn’t want to have lunch with Lindsey. And I’d already made up my mind. I was going to do something else, something different, though I didn’t know what that might be. I thought about starting a business. I thought about going back to school. I even thought about working for Toby at the fish store, the way I’d done in high school: keeping his books, doing his taxes, helping him with the charter fishing trips he ran on summer weekends aboard his boat, the Michigan Jack. But since Mallory’s letter, I’d kept my distance—from the fish store and, now that I was driving again, from Toby, too—and, at any rate, I wanted to move forward in my life, not step back into the past.
My mother invited me to Florida. “A change of scene,” she said. She’d stopped asking if I’d seen Toby lately; like my father, she’d decided to ignore the rupture between us. After years spent building Hauskindler Stone and Brick, they’d sold out to a Chicago-based firm. Now they devoted the same fierce attention to retirement that, once, they’d devoted to the family business. Throughout my childhood, they’d worked twelve-hour days, leaving Toby—ten years my senior—to fix my supper, help with homework, read to me, tuck me into bed. He’d been more like a parent to me than a brother. More like a parent than my parents had been. Until recently, I’d never felt this as a loss.
“Rex could come, too,” my mother said. “We’d take good care of you.”
I told her I’d think it over.
But Rex was a partner at his firm; he couldn’t take time now, after all he’d already missed. And I was afraid to leave him on his own, picking at frozen dinners, flipping through channel after channel on TV. Shortly after the criminal verdict, we’d filed a civil suit against Cindy Ann, as well as the city of Fox Harbor, the police department, Officer Randy Metz. This triggered a new round of letters to the editor, fresh arguments at the Cup and Cruller, where everyone, Rex said, fell silent now when he stopped in for his usual to-go. Because this time, he’d hired Arnie Babcock, a friend of a friend, an attorney who was known far and wide for exacting extraordinary damages. In the past, Rex and I had both referred to attorneys like Arnie as ambulance chasers, opportunists who lined their pockets with other people’s grief. Now, Rex called Arnie a genius, and the first time I’d looked into his broad, handsome face, I, too, found myself feeling as if we’d finally found someone who cared about us, who’d fight for us, someone who understood.
Cindy Ann Kreisler, Arnie said, had robbed our home like the worst kind of thief. We couldn’t ask an eye for an eye, but we could demand her assets, teach her to regret what she’d done. Of course, Arnie understood this wasn’t about money; still, why should Cindy Ann continue to enjoy a comfortable life while we, the innocent party, were left suffering, uncompensated, forgotten? We could donate any funds we received to charity. Or, perhaps, start a scholarship in Evan’s name. Only then would we find some kind of closure. We’d finally begin to let go. We’d come to accept what had happened at the intersection of the Point Road and County C, where Evan’s teachers and classmates had erected a small, white cross.
At last, I thought, we were getting somewhere. We had a plan in place. There would finally be justice, resolution, just the way Arnie promised.
And yet, instead of feeling better, Rex and I only felt worse. Night after night, he muttered, twisted, unable to fall asleep, while I sat reading the same page of the same book over and over again. That none of Cindy Ann’s three girls had been injured! It was just so unbelievable, Rex said, so ironic, so goddamn unfair. Even if she lost her house—and she would, Arnie had promised us that—she’d have those girls long after she’d forgotten about us, and she would forget, Rex was sure of this, he dealt with people like Cindy Ann all the time. She was a drunk, she’d had those girls by different fathers, she probably hadn’t even wanted the last one anyway. On and on he went, rising to pace between the bed and the big bay window overlooking the lake. Rex, who was so gentle, so elegantly soft-spoken. Rex, who’d worked as a public defender for his first five years out of law school, protecting the rights of murderers and rapists, drug dealers and thieves. Not that I didn’t understand. In fact, I agreed with everything he said. Mornings, I woke with an ache in my throat, a sourness in my stomach, that had nothing to do with Evan. The truth was that, with each passing month, he was harder to remember, harder to see. I felt as if I were grasping at the color of water, the color of the wind or the sky.
And this only made me angrier. My mind returned, again and again, to Cindy Ann, to what she’d done. When I passed Evan’s room, the closed door like a fist, I thought about how Cindy Ann had destroyed us. When I saw other people’s children, I promised myself that someday, Cindy Ann would pay. When I managed to get myself to mass, I always lit a candle for Evan, but as I knelt before the flickering light, my prayers were for vengeance, my words red with blood. I imagined choking Cindy Ann, beating her with my fists. I had dreams in which I walked up t
o her front door with a gun. I constructed scenes in which she begged my forgiveness, even as I turned my face away.
I would never have guessed myself capable of hating another human being the way I hated Cindy Ann Kreisler: virulently, violently. How can I explain the sheer cathartic power of such rage? Whenever I gave myself over to its spell, I felt nothing but that one, pure thing. The nuances of sorrow, of guilt, of grief, burned away like so much kindling. I was terrible in my anger: strong, and fierce, and righteous. I could have led an army. I could have marched for days without food, bootless, euphoric, mile after mile.
“Maybe you could get some kind of counseling,” Lindsey said, when, at last, I joined her at the Shanty, sliding into my usual seat at our usual table overlooking the harbor. My fish fry had arrived, but I couldn’t touch a bite of it. Until then, Lindsey had been doing her best to hold up both ends of the conversation, chattering about her husband, Barton, the golfing lessons he’d gotten her for Christmas. Bart was an avid golfer, and he was always trying to interest Lindsey in the sport. Usually this amused me, but today I just stared out the dirty windows, wishing I hadn’t agreed to come, wishing Lindsey would do something about the gray, puffy coat and piano keyboard scarf she’d been wearing for the past ten years.
“Why should I get counseling?” I snapped. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“It’s counseling,” Lindsey said. “Not punishment. I just think it might help you feel better—”
“Feel better?” I said. “When the person who murdered my child is walking around, free as air? When we have to face the rest of our lives in this prison, this—”
I was too angry to finish.
“I’m sorry,” Lindsey said, quietly. “It was just a suggestion.” She began looking for her keys, digging around in her oversize purse. “I hate to see you suffering, that’s all.”
Early in May, on our first warm day of the year, I saw Cindy Ann and her oldest girl, Amy, in the grocery store. Five months had passed since the accident. There they were, standing in front of the dairy case, picking out a carton of ice cream. Ice cream. It seemed inexcusable, unbearable, that they should indulge themselves in such pleasures, that they should enjoy themselves, in any way, ever again. I took a step toward them, and with that, Cindy Ann saw me. There was nothing in her face, not sorrow, not guilt or fear. She simply stared at me, hands at her sides, waiting for whatever it was I might say.
“You—” I began, the word squeezed from my throat, and then I was running out of the store, into the parking lot, the asphalt spinning beneath me. I got into my car, another Taurus—it still smelled of its awful newness—and sat for a moment, gasping, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. I could see the double doors leading in and out of the store; Cindy Ann would emerge at any minute now, Amy beside her, the ice-cream carton swinging in its plastic bag. All I’d have to do was wait until she entered the crosswalk, and then—
I blinked. I was sweating hard. There was still no sign of Cindy Ann. I pulled out of the parking space slowly, cautiously, making sure to signal when I reached the end of the row.
That night, I did not tell Rex that I’d fantasized about running Cindy Ann Kreisler down with my car. Instead, I told him about the ice cream, about the way Cindy Ann had looked at me: without remorse, blankly, indifferently.
“Oh, she’ll be remorseful all right,” Rex said. “Her days are numbered, believe me.”
Arnie had hired a private investigator to find out if she was, in fact, still drinking; if she ever raised her voice to her kids; if she drove within the speed limit. This guy was the best, Arnie’d worked with him before, and if Cindy Ann so much as sneezed, we were going to find out about it. By the time Arnie was done with her, Rex promised, she’d wish that she’d died in the crash.
And I said: “That isn’t good enough.”
And Rex said, “Nothing could be.”
The ugliness of those words. I stared down at my hands, horrified, as if they were not my own. At that moment, I began to suspect the truth: we would never be satisfied. We might tear the flesh from Cindy Ann’s limbs with our teeth, strip by bloody strip, and still, it would be insufficient. In the end, we’d be animals, worse than animals. I thought about how I’d felt, sitting in the parking lot of the grocery store, my hands gripping the wheel like talons. I thought about how, whenever I tried to remember my son, I wound up thinking of Cindy Ann’s daughters instead, hating them simply for drawing breath. I thought about Randy Metz, the way he’d looked at me in court.
“I can’t live like this,” I said.
The following morning, I told Rex that I wanted to let the civil suits go.
“You don’t mean it,” he said, scraping butter onto his toast. “You’re tired. So am I. But it’s important that we follow this through.”
There were lilacs in water on the table, bunches of red and yellow tulips on the counter. In the window, the last of my hyacinths were just past their peak, releasing their sweet, sweet smell.
“Since when,” I said, “are you the sort of person who tells other people what they do and do not mean?”
He got to his feet, drained his coffee in a gulp. “We’ll talk about this later.”
I got up, too. “Call Arnie,” I said. “I mean it, Rex. I’m finished.”
“And what should I tell him? That we’re letting a murderer off the hook? That we’re sorry for wasting his time?”
“Tell him I won’t participate. Tell him I’ll refuse to testify.”
Rex stared at me. “You’d sabotage the case. You know that.”
“I do.”
He pushed past me into the hall, grabbed his briefcase from the stand, stood before the mirror to adjust his tie. On the opposite wall hung a framed photo of Evan, bundled into a red snowsuit, laughing. I thought of my father’s belief that the dead were always with us, always watching, and I hoped with all my heart that he was wrong.
“Fine,” Rex said, abruptly. A pale blue vein divided his forehead.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“It means fine.” He pounded his fists against his thighs, hips, chest; it took me a moment to realize he was looking for his keys. “It means that I don’t want to argue with you right now, okay? It means that I don’t fucking want to argue.”
“They’re on the stand,” I said.
He snatched them up in a clatter. “Only think about what you’re saying,” he said. “I’m pleading with you. Because we’re going to have to live with this for the rest of our lives.”
“We’re going to have to live with it anyway,” I said.
“Not if we win.”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“Of course it does,” Rex said. “We live here, Meg. In this town. With people who know everything about us, who will always be looking at us and saying, Remember when their kid got killed?”
I laughed, bitterly, bitingly. “Right. And remember how they sued us because of it?”
“Remember,” Rex said, landing hard on each word, “how they just lay down and took it? How they didn’t have the stomach to make certain the same thing wouldn’t happen to somebody else?”
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
“I don’t want to live here anymore,” I said.
I hadn’t known I was going to say it.
Rex looked at me. “You mean it?”
I nodded.
He nodded, too. “Okay, then,” he said. “Okay.”
We studied each other in the mirror, a middle-aged man and woman, each sallow-skinned with exhaustion. Shadows like bruises beneath the man’s eyes. Abruptly, he reached for the woman. The woman’s hands rose to rest lightly, uncertainly, on his broad, shaking back.
“Okay.”
Later, I put on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt and went out into the garden. The cool mud rose between my bare toes; I bent to clean out the choked iris beds, the daffodils and peonies. But I felt nothing, cared for nothing. I could not concentrat
e. Inside the house, on the answering machine, there were messages from Lindsey, from Toby, from St. Clare’s—would I chair the festival committee again this year?—and I knew that I needed to call people back, get out of the house, make a life for myself. Instead, I sat back on my heels, staring out across the bluff at the water. My ankle ached, but I didn’t change position. It seemed right to me that it should hurt. A single sailboat tacked to and fro, following the outline of the coast, and suddenly, I wished with all my heart that Rex and I were on it, far away from everyone and everything we knew.
Evan was gone. Living with that knowledge was like living with the sound of someone screaming inside my head. By the time we left Fox Harbor, seven months after the accident, I couldn’t imagine silence anymore. It was as if the screaming sound had always been there.
Two
we left Portland harbor on the Fourth of July, entering the Gulf of Maine in fog so thick that Rex sent me up to Chelone’s bow to watch for channel markers. The markers were equipped with bells, in addition to flashing lights, and whenever I heard something, I’d turn my head, shout back to Rex’s gray shape at the helm, and he’d slow us down and down until, at last, the marker materialized. Hunched as a demon. Blinking red eye. The fog warped every sound, transformed the tolling bells into distinctly human cries. As the day passed into evening, we heard the muted thump of fireworks, but we saw nothing, just the gradual seal of dusk, the visible world dwindling close, closer still.
Chelone. Rex had found the name in a book of Greek mythology: Chelone had been one of Zeus’s many nymphs. When she refused to attend his wedding—out of jealousy, out of grief—Zeus punished her by turning her into a giant turtle. From then on she was homeless, forced to roam the world without rest, carrying everything she owned upon her back.
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