by Torey Hayden
I don’t suppose that’s what she meant when she spoke. I don’t really know. But as I sat in thick and grainy April twilight, those were the thoughts I had.
Chapter Twenty-four
The next morning I came into the kitchen to find Auntie Caroline making porridge for breakfast. No one in the family liked it except Mama. The porridge oats were hers. None of the rest of us ate porridge and Megan in particular loathed it.
I watched Auntie Caroline for a few moments. She was still wearing her bathrobe and she bustled around the kitchen as if she’d been in it for years.
‘Megan doesn’t really like porridge,’ I said.
‘No wonder everyone in this house looks like sticks,’ Auntie Caroline replied.
‘I could scramble her an egg or something,’ I offered. I was not up to the scene Megan would create if she got nothing for breakfast but porridge. Megan wasn’t given to scenes about food, but on top of everything else, I knew she wouldn’t tolerate this.
Neither would Auntie Caroline. ‘I’ve put raisins in it. I’m sure she’s never had it with raisins and she’ll like it just fine.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Well, if she doesn’t, she can just go hungry.’
Hands in the pockets of my jeans, I stood there. Neither Megan nor I was going to school and suddenly the day seemed to stretch out for ever.
‘Auntie Caroline, may I ask you something?’
She turned. One of the curlers in her hair sagged over her left ear.
‘How come you came? I mean, if you don’t like being with us, how come you came in the first place?’
She smiled. It was a soft smile, disarming in its suddenness. ‘I do like being here, Lesley. And I came because your father asked me. Because we’re family, no matter what, and this is what families are for. But I’m not going to treat you special, if that’s what you mean. I’m planning to treat you just the way I’d treat my own children. Just because your mother did what she did, that’s no excuse to feel sorry for yourselves. She did that because of her particular problems. You have your own lives to get on with.’
I turned away and went to the table to sit down. A wave of depression overtook me. ‘I wasn’t asking for special treatment, Aunt Caroline. I just wanted eggs instead of porridge. We don’t like porridge. Nobody does. Except Mama. They’re Mama’s oats and not ours. They’re for her.’
Auntie Caroline re-rolled the loose curler and put the pin back into it. Then she sighed and looked over at the stove. There was a long minute’s pause. ‘Well, I suppose just this once. It’s good for you; mind you, you should be eating it. Skinny as pencils, every one of you. Cowan worse than anybody. Probably anaemic. But I suppose just this once we could skip it.’
The day was intolerable. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, both Megan and I were soon miserably bored. Neither of us could concentrate for long. Twice we got out board games and started them. Twice we had to put them away unfinished. We turned the television on but were too restless to watch.
About eleven Auntie Caroline and I heard a terrific clatter from overhead and went upstairs to discover Megan in the hallway with the sewing machine. She had spools of thread and cloth and patterns strewn all over the floor of the hallway and down into her room.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made.’
‘I was going to set up the sewing machine. Mama said she’d make me a stuffed dog from this pattern, remember? I was just going to cut out the material for her.’
Hands on hips, Auntie Caroline shook her head, then went to relieve Megan of the machine. Megan would not give it to her.
‘Your mother is not going to be in any position to be sewing, Megan. Now, let’s just put this away for the time being.’
‘I want to cut the pattern out.’
‘You can do that downstairs. We’ll get you the scissors and the pins and you can take the material down to the kitchen table. Now, let’s put all the rest of this away.’ Auntie Caroline was still trying to wrest the handle from her.
‘Oh Megan,’ I said, ‘Mama wasn’t even going to do it for you. You know that. She said maybe. And when’s the last time you saw Mama sewing?’
‘She made one of those dogs for you, Lesley.’
‘Cripes, that was years ago. Geez, like 1965 or something.’
‘Well, if she made one for you, then I want her to make me one too.’ She still clung tenaciously to the sewing machine, her face set in a petulant expression. Auntie Caroline gave up and went past her to pick up all the paraphernalia Megan had strewn about.
‘Megan, I was littler than you are when Mama made me that dog.’
‘So?’
‘So, grow up, Megs. You’re nearly ten. You don’t need to bug Mama about making you some stupid stuffed toy.’
‘But I want one. You got all the things done for you when you were little. Mama never does those things for me.’
‘Oh Megan, for pity’s sake. Mama isn’t even here.’
‘But when she comes back, I want her to make me a dog. To go with Big Cattie. You know. So I’ll have a cat and a dog. Mama said she would.’
‘She said she might,’ I replied. ‘That’s hardly the same thing.’
‘Girls, girls,’ Auntie Caroline said, returning to us with her arms full. She put everything back into the hall closet. ‘Don’t argue.’
With rude loudness Megan burst into tears.
‘Megan Mary! I’m surprised at you,’ Auntie Caroline said.
‘Come off it, Megs. What are you crying for? Some stupid dog pattern? Jesus Christ, Megan, Mama is a hundred and fifty miles away in the hospital and not about to make you some stupid stuffed animal now anyway. Don’t be such a big baby.’
Her bawling escalated. Dropping the handle of the sewing machine, she kicked it savagely.
‘Megan Mary O’Malley!’ cried Auntie Caroline in horror. ‘You stop that this instant.’
Still screaming, Megan plunked down right in the middle of the hall floor.
‘Well, I never,’ Auntie Caroline said. ‘Look at you. A great big girl like you having a tantrum.’
‘I want a tantrum!’ Megan screamed back.
At lunch Auntie Caroline suggested that perhaps Megan and I ought to go back to school. We were so restive and disordered that she thought school might help. Besides, she said, it would be better to get it over with, to face the music, as she put it.
I couldn’t bear even to consider it. I just could not imagine sitting in German and answering Mr Tennant’s perennial Monday afternoon question, ‘And what did you do this weekend?’
Megan responded to Caroline’s suggestion by being sick all over the kitchen floor.
As the afternoon wore on, my thoughts grew increasingly troubled. The numbness that had initially protected me from the horror of what my mother had done began to erode. Gruesome reality was beneath it. Images of Toby Waterman with his blind-dog eyes and his brash, vaguely sinister innocence kept forming. Thoughts of the murders themselves had dogged me for some time. They skulked quietly in the back of my mind until I was off my guard and then they returned, the way thoughts of owed money do, dragging with them that weary, inescapable burden of being true.
I could picture the physical minutiae of the killings quite vividly. I pieced together what I’d read in the newspapers, my own knowledge of the Waterman place and my imagination, creating a very realistic-seeming scenario. Mainly, it was Toby that I saw. In my visions he was always already dead, his colourless eyes open, his face covered with blood, like Sissy Spacek’s in Carrie. Intellectually, I knew that, in spite of how realistic these impressions were, they probably weren’t very accurate. But that didn’t seem to matter. Like film in a broken projector, over and over the thoughts played in my mind.
Bizarrely yoked with these horrific visions was an ever-increasing anxiety about what was going to happen to my mama. I was sitting in the living room, watching out the window that afternoon, and
the longer I sat, the more upset I felt. What would they do to her? Where would they take her? Even if they realized she was as much a victim of what had happened as the Watermans, the authorities weren’t going to simply forgive and forget. Not for something like this. Finally, I asked Auntie Caroline as she passed through the room on her way up to see Megan. What did she reckon would become of Mama? I asked. Would they send her to prison or to the state hospital? I asked her which she thought would be a better place to go. Auntie Caroline froze mid-step, her mouth dropped open in a shocked expression, and she told me what a coldhearted child I was to think of things like that so analytically. I started to cry. Auntie Caroline’s features softened in sympathy and she came and put her arms around my shoulders. She told me not to brood about it. She said we didn’t know, did we? So there was no point in worrying before we had to.
I worried anyway. I was nibbled, gnawed and devoured by worry. All afternoon I could think of nothing else.
Two matters kept surfacing. One was that this was going to be the second time my mother had lost her liberty. There seemed something cruelly unjust about that to me, because if there hadn’t been a first time, there probably wouldn’t have been a second. The other was my awareness of Mama’s intense pleasure in mundane things. Mama was constantly conscious of the difference between her life with us and her life during the war. Of all the knowledge that she’d passed on to Megan and me, nothing was more important to her than that we realize what a very special gift an ordinary day was. And Mama so cherished her little freedoms. The big ones didn’t matter as much to her. I reckoned she could survive being confined to a building or grounds somewhere. But she would be tormented by not having the liberty to make a cup of coffee when she wanted one or to wash her hair or otherwise order the small details of her day.
My thoughts were tortured by the innocent cruelty of the system. Her preferences, her pleasures, her feelings would not carry any weight in an institution. She’d be nothing more than just another middle-aged woman to the staff working there. She would be treated much like the ladies I had worked with in the nursing home. Gotten up in the mornings, hurried through the day to someone else’s schedule, fed, prodded, taken to the toilet, watched like a distrusted pet. We laughed at them behind their backs, at their silly, senile ways. Not to make fun of them but simply because they were funny and we didn’t love any of them. They had no dignity in our eyes. They were our work. We treated them well but indifferently, even the best of the girls did.
My father didn’t come home at all that day. Instead, he remained in Wichita with Mama. He phoned to tell us he planned to return in the morning. Then he’d take Megan and me back with him to see Mama. We could stay overnight and come home on the bus. I asked him how Mama was. Better, he said. She was conscious most of the time now. Was she scared? I asked. He said no, he didn’t think so. Then he laughed self-consciously, saying Mama was being stronger about this than he was. Which was probably true.
Auntie Caroline talked with him. She told him about the two news reporters who’d knocked on the door after supper, and about Megan, who had been vomiting all afternoon. It still sounded peculiar to me to hear someone call my father Cowan.
When night came again I was unable to sleep. I was tired enough. In fact, I felt crawlly with nervous exhaustion. But long after getting into bed, I was still awake.
Megan continued to be very sick, which made sleeping even more difficult, because I could hear her every time she went into the bathroom. Auntie Caroline was up with her once, and they stood in the hallway outside my bedroom and talked. Megan was bawling again, afraid she wasn’t going to be allowed to go to Wichita with Dad in the morning because she was so sick. Auntie Caroline, in a gentle, motherly voice, was telling her not to worry about things that hadn’t happened yet and no doubt, come morning, she’d feel fine. Megan obviously was not believing her.
Long after Auntie Caroline had returned to her bed in the study, I could hear Megan still crying in her room. The study was at the opposite end of the hallway, so Caroline probably was not aware of how upset Megan was. Finally, after listening to her get up and vomit again and then go snuffling back by my doorway, I rose to go see about her myself.
I sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Do you want me to get you some ginger tea or something, Meggie? Some Seven-Up?’
She shook her head.
‘Here roll over. I’ll rub your back. That’ll make you feel better.’
‘No.’
‘That’s what Mama would do.’ I reached out to stroke her hair. ‘Come on. Roll over.’
Reluctantly, Megan complied. She had Big Cattie with her, its furry ears pressed against her cheek.
‘You know what?’ she said to me as I rubbed her back.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s my fault.’
‘What is?’
She shifted away from me and pulled the covers up. ‘That Mama did that. That she went out and shot the Watermans.’
‘Oh Megan, it’s not. How did you get such an idea?’
‘I made Daddy take me downtown, remember? He was just going to drop me off and go right home, but I made him come in. I said, you got to come with me, because really what I wanted was for him to see the sandals they had too. I wanted him to buy those and the running shoes both.’
‘Megan, that doesn’t have anything to do with what Mama did.’
‘Yes sir. If I hadn’t done that, he would only have been gone a teeny-weeny bit of time, like he intended. He would have got back before she could have gone out there. He would have caught her. If I hadn’t made him stay.’
‘Megs, that still doesn’t make it your fault.’
‘But if I hadn’t done that, it wouldn’t have happened. We’d be like always, except that I was so selfish.’
‘Don’t think of it that way, Meggie. Mama probably would have done it anyway. She was kind of desperate, Megs. Don’t go blaming yourself, because I think maybe it would have happened anyway. It wasn’t your fault.’
Wearily, Megan rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted. Pressing the tiger cat over her face, she closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them again. ‘Maybe it’s going to be me who’ll go to Hell. For being selfish and making it so Mama could go kill all those people.’
‘Megan, it’s not your fault.’
‘You don’t know how God feels,’ she said quietly. ‘You just never really know about those things.’
Mama died.
At 5.35 in the morning, which was the first day of May, my mother died quietly in her sleep. She had been awake most of the night before, talking to my father about ordinary things, about how Megan was doing at school, which wasn’t very well, about the weather, which was humid in Wichita for that time of year, and about Dad, who was getting a rash from the socks he had on. Her throat was sore from the gastric tube, and he was feeding her hard candies to ease the roughness. The fluid in the suction jar had turned the colour of cherry Life Savers. Then sometime in the wee hours, Mama went to sleep.
My father had believed that she was improving. She was so alert, so talkative, that he’d assumed the worst was behind them. When he reached over to pull up the blankets about five, she felt cold to him, but he didn’t think much about it. The night was chilly. So, instead of calling a nurse, he’d pulled back the covers to steal a few moments in bed with her. I suppose it was the best way for her to die, in the warmth of my father’s arms.
After such a fiery life, she died so quietly that, had there not been a monitor on, they would not have realized what was happening. She was never conscious again; she never stirred, she never spoke. That was my father’s single greatest regret, that Mama’s last words to him had been in conversation about a rash on his feet. But maybe that too was best, that my mother at least could die surrounded by only small, mundane concerns.
My father came weeping into our house the next morning. Walking through the hall and into the kichen, he dropped into his chair at the table. He wept not in
the way I’d thought a man would cry, but in tiny, high-pitched sobs. His shoulders shook, and none of us could comfort him.
While Megan and my Aunt Caroline joined Dad in the kitchen, I walked first into the living room and then eventually outside on to the front steps. Sitting down on the top step, I braced my chin in my hands and looked out across the street. They were all crying, all three of them, including my Auntie Caroline, who probably had never loved my mother a day in her life. I sat outside on the step, empty. I remained there, conscious and breathing, and was without any life whatsoever inside myself.
I sat and wondered where things went now, without my mother. I wondered where I would be in the summer or the next year or in ten years. I wondered how things would ever become ordinary again when it seemed suddenly possible that they never could be. And in a small corner of my mind, I wondered about Mama, about where her irreligious soul had gone. Hell? Did you really go to Hell for not believing in Jesus? For killing people? If you went for anything, it would undoubtedly be for that. I tried to picture her, cold and still. I had seen corpses at the nursing home, old men and women, their mouths gone slack in death. But not my mama.
I thought too about Klaus who had caused it all and had escaped everything, even the sweet agony of loving Mama. It could so easily have been me, if I had simply been born first instead of third. It could have been me, spirited away, living, and loving other people and never realizing the anguish my existence had caused, never knowing people had died for me.
Chapter Twenty-five
My father and I got into an argument the evening of the same day Mama died. It started off over something entirely irrelevant to the events surrounding us. Megan had a dental appointment on Friday. It was Tuesday evening, and I said I didn’t think she should have to go. We still weren’t certain when Mama’s funeral was going to be, and what with all the brouhaha over the murders and all, I told Dad I didn’t think we needed to subject Megs to a trip to the dentist’s on top of everything. My father refused to consider having her miss it. She was just going to have her teeth cleaned and fluoridated, he said, nothing unpleasant, and as hard as that dentist’s office was to get into, he wasn’t about to cancel for no reason at all.