Misfortune

by Nancy Geary

  And I’ve protected you, too, Frances thought. Who would look for motive in the psychological impact of Clio’s behavior over the years on now grown children, especially when one of them was in the district attorney’s office? Aurelia had been safe from detection all along.

  Frances felt as if the oxygen had been vacuumed from the room. As she listened to her mother, the caverns of past pains loomed.

  “I’d like to tell you I did this for you, for Blair, but it was for myself. I saw what she had done to you girls all your lives, treating you like second-rate citizens, strangers in your own home, the home that belonged to you before she ever set foot in it. I didn’t want to be married to your father, but I never expected he would remarry someone so cruel. I never realized that I’d be responsible for causing you all the heartache that you suffered through as a child, all the agony of being a hated stepchild. So I did it for myself.”

  An effort to purge her own guilt, Frances thought.

  Aurelia spoke through tears, choking on her words. “My life hasn’t been what I wanted. I’m not what you might call a success. But I’ve finally done something productive, something proactive to protect the world, or at least the people I care about, from her infection. She’ll never hurt anyone again. Not Blair. Not you. Can you understand that? Can you try for a minute to understand?”

  Frances looked down at her mother in a heap on the floor. The folds of fabric splayed out around her body. Her eyes were rimmed in red, and her nose was filled with mucus.

  “I feel great about what I’ve done. It’s the only thing I’ve ever accomplished. If I die tomorrow, I’ll die a happy woman.” She broke into sobs and covered her face with her hands.

  Frances felt strangely detached. Although she heard the words of her mother’s confession, they seemed scripted, surreal. Never once, in the sleepless nights of the past week or in her relentless pursuit of the unhappy people whose lives intercepted Clio’s, had she suspected her own mother of committing the crime. Now her mind simply did not want to process the information it was receiving.

  Aurelia coughed, cleared her throat, and asked, “What will you do?”

  Frances didn’t know how to respond. What choice did she have? Turn her over to the police and step aside? Watch the system she had recently abandoned go to work prosecuting Aurelia? Let Perry Cogswell destroy her mother? Hope that a jury would be so sympathetic to the tormented Pratt family that they would nullify the murder indictment by deciding that Aurelia couldn’t be held accountable for her actions? When that unlikely outcome failed to transpire, watch the bailiff take her away? That was one option.

  Frances remembered less than a week earlier, here in the same house, the scenario she had discussed with Aurelia. What happens if the murderer isn’t caught? Meaty already thought Clio’s death was a suicide. So, after a time, with no new leads, the police, the assistant district attorneys, the media, move on to something else. The case gets closed. The file goes to archives. People forget. Could she?

  Frances shut her eyes and inhaled deeply. She felt air fill her lungs and then listened to the sound of her breath as she exhaled. She nodded at her mother, unsure of what signal she was sending but unable to formulate words. Silently she stepped across the threshold and back down the hall.

  Frances walked along the side of the road, heading in the direction of her father’s house. She dreaded telling him the truth of what her mother had done. Aurelia had deserted him decades earlier, and now she had made sure that he would die alone. Because of her, his family had been torn apart twice.

  Instead of turning onto Ox Pasture, Frances decided to take a detour, to follow Halsey Neck Lane to the beach and return on First Neck Lane. She lengthened her stride and swung her arms, needing to stretch her limbs.

  The grass between the curb and rows of privet was sprinkled with dandelions and other assorted weeds. As she crossed each driveway, Frances looked up at the expansive houses hidden behind the protective fences or hedges. She tried to imagine what lay inside, the differing dynamics of familial emotions. It had always seemed to her that other people’s lives were simpler, that they spent summers around picnic tables and winters in front of fireplaces, content in each other’s company, but that her family had struggled silently to maintain, at best, neutrality. She had been as wrong about all of these strangers as she had been about the people in her own family.

  For all Clio’s faults, for all her hostility toward Richard’s children, she had protected the people she loved. She had kept her mother safe from the world, pampered and cared for by benevolent professionals. She had made her husband happy and then, since his infirmity, had made him safe, too. She had ensured that his privacy and dignity were intact. She had surrounded him with care-givers. Frances hadn’t done that for anyone. She never allowed anyone to depend upon her. She was self-sufficient, and she wanted everyone else to be that way, too. Emotional neediness, attachments, made her want to run.

  In an odd way, Aurelia had also tried to protect the people she loved. She seemed to have the very real sense that, with a single act of violence, she could heal the emotional wounds of her daughters, her friends, perhaps, even unknowingly, the women like Beverly Winters whose lives had been affected by Clio’s cruelty.

  Words she hadn’t heard Aurelia say since her childhood flashed into Frances’s mind. Each time she had skinned her knee, or stubbed her toe, or scratched her forehead, her mother would rush over, embrace her, and gently, reassuringly, say, “I’ll just kiss it and make it better.” It had worked. In her memory, the soft touch of her mother’s lips on her bloody flesh had eased the pain. She craved that comfort now.

  Clouds covered the sky by the time Frances arrived at her father’s house. As she turned into the drive, she could see that the front door was open and that her father sat in the threshold, waiting. His hands clasped the metal arms of his wheelchair. She moved toward him, hesitant. When their eyes met she stopped. His dull eyes stared at her.

  He knew. Aurelia must have delivered the news herself.

  “What should I do?” Frances asked without moving from where she stood several feet shy of the door.

  “Nothing,” Richard replied. His voice was soft but firm. “I don’t want you, or anyone else, to do a thing.”

  At some level, Frances had known her father would say the words he’d just uttered. Nothing could bring Clio back. A trial of Aurelia would only make matters worse, exposing Clio’s secrets, the hidden past that had haunted her. Yet, at the same time, her father’s decision surprised her. The woman he loved murdered by the woman he’d once loved. Didn’t he want to make Aurelia pay?

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  Richard’s head trembled slightly. He seemed to take a moment to mouth his words without uttering a sound, as if to practice formulating the shape of them, but when he finally spoke, his speech was deliberate. “If Justin were alive, I would think differently. But he isn’t. When I die, your mother will be the only family you and Blair have left. I won’t be responsible for taking her away from you. I won’t make you orphans.”

  But she took you away from us, Frances thought.

  “What else is there for me? Revenge? Never a quality I admired in anyone else, I don’t intend to indulge it in myself. Besides, revenge for what? Clio’s death? Aurelia seeking a divorce to begin with? You girls have been through enough in your lives.”

  Her father’s words seemed to echo in her ears. She felt weak and wanted to cry. Richard was willing to let her mother go un-punished for the most horrendous of crimes because he wanted to protect his daughters. “It’s not—not fair to you,” she stammered.

  “Fairness plays little part in this world. You know that, Fanny. I can’t think of anyone who has passed through life getting only what they deserved, no more, no less. Some are lucky. Their lives are unscathed. They don’t have to suffer. For the rest of us, the best we can do is try to live through the adversity, to not get bogged down in whether or not what happens t
o us is fair in some global scheme, and to continue to feel joy in what is good. I’ve been lucky because I’ve known what it is to love, both wives, three children, and my work. You need to find some joy, something to live for. Blair has Jake, the gallery. You, Frances, must find your own peace.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Richard seemed not to have heard. He inhaled several times without appearing to exhale and then continued. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I know that. Perhaps I didn’t want to see my own shortcomings as I went along, how I failed your mother, and how I failed you.”

  “That’s not true.” As she spoke, Frances realized she was lying. She couldn’t bear for her father to suffer anything more.

  “I think I knew all along that you and Blair were hurt, that I had let you down, but I relied on your silence, especially yours, Fanny. It became my protection. ‘They don’t seem unhappy,’ I could say to myself. ‘Look what I’ve given them. Look at the wonderful times they are having here in my house. Look at all they have because of me.’ I needed that to be true.”

  Frances wanted to placate him, assure him that his memory was exactly right. She could remind him of the special moments in their childhood, nights of bingo with their father, pizza and the movies with friends, days at the beach, playing tennis, riding bicycles, all the activities of childhood transpiring in a beautiful, idyllic setting. It hadn’t been bad, Frances wished she could say, but she couldn’t deceive him. She hadn’t been able to deceive herself. Beneath the facade of the Pratt family was a dark reality, one in which two young girls dreaded returning to a home where they were despised because they were the product of a first wife. And neither their father nor their mother had done anything about it. Until now.

  “I look at you, Fanny, my own daughter, who didn’t feel safe enough to tell me how she felt. You internalized your emotions, and I let you do it. Now I wonder whether you can really feel, feel deeply, passionately. You’ll let me go to my grave without hearing a word of criticism from your lips, and that’s the damage I’ve done.”

  Frances’s arms and legs felt numb. She stood quiet, staring past her father into the foyer beyond. Her reflection in the carved wood mirror looked completely unfamiliar.

  “I can’t make it up to you. Even if it were possible, there isn’t time left in my life. You’ll have to help yourself. I can’t make you trust. I can’t make you safe. But you must never doubt that I loved you.”

  Frances felt weak, and she eased herself to the ground. She sat on the threshold for a moment and then allowed her head to rest against her father’s leg. She closed her eyes. Her stiffness relaxed as Richard’s slim fingers, shaking slightly, caressed her cheek.

  “Are you wanting to talk, or shall we just sip our Scotch?” Sam asked, gently resting a hand on Frances’s shoulder as he settled beside her on the porch steps. She nodded in recognition of his presence but said nothing.

  The last several hours had passed in a thick fog through which she remembered calling Sam from Main Street in Southampton. She’d hardly managed to convey where she was, but Sam had somehow found her more than an hour later, leaning against the steps of the white clapboard Methodist church catty-corner from the public telephones. He had helped her into his Jeep Cherokee and tucked an old quilt around her shivering frame. It was possible that she’d fallen asleep on the way home, staring at the underside of the car’s canvas roof, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that the familiar sight of her farmhouse, the smell of her flower beds, the warmth of her loyal dogs as they scrambled down the steps to greet her, had awoken something inside her. She was home.

  Frances turned her head upward and smiled at Sam. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, a strange gruffness brought on by lack of use.

  “I’ve never seen someone so in need of a ride.” Sam shrugged lightheartedly. “A lost orphan,” he added, pushing a stray hair off her face with his thumb.

  “I’m sorry about dinner last night.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve been up to the last couple of days, but you don’t need to apologize to me. Ever. You should know that by now.” He took a sip of his drink. “Nothing like a single-malt to soothe the spirit,” he said.

  Frances took a sip as well and felt a pleasant burn in the back of her throat. She stared at the whites of his eyes and noticed for the first time that they had a slight tint of blue. “Sam,” she said, humming the end of his name.

  “Yes?” His quizzical look seemed a mixture of amusement, curiosity, and concern.

  “If someone you loved did something terrible, illegal, what would you do?”

  Sam furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

  Frances thought for a moment. Although she trusted Sam, she couldn’t share her secret. She couldn’t place the burden of her knowledge on his shoulders, but she needed his advice. “Suppose, for example, your wife had told you that she robbed a bank, shot a guard in the course of escaping with the money. You know if you turn her in, she’ll spend the rest of her life in jail. Would you do it? Would you tell the police?”

  Sam was quiet, perhaps taken aback by the sudden reference to Rose Guff, perhaps pondering the question Frances had posed. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I don’t know. I’d like to think I would, it’s probably the right thing to do, but I can’t be sure. Really loving someone is rare. It’s almost indescribable in its specialness. You feel blessed. Loss of that person is the hardest thing in the world. I’ve been through that, and I don’t think I could live with myself if I had played a part in ruining her life. So I can’t say.” He paused and looked at Frances. “I guess that’s not much help to you with whatever’s on your mind.”

  Frances smiled faintly. “You’re wrong.” She closed her eyes and leaned toward him until she felt the softness of his lips against hers and she could taste his breath. Their kiss lasted long enough to establish that they both wanted it to happen again.