Divorce.
She smiled. “It seems after all I have divorced you, Marcus, in the most irreversible way I could figure out.” Katt recalled moments from their first years, their life together in cramped apartments, Marcus crying as his son emerged from the tight throb of her loins.
“I’m sorry, Marcus,” she said.
That was wrong. Too easy. Too glib.
“What I mean is . . .” Katt paused. She had no idea what she meant. But sometimes meaning only emerged in the attempt to speak it. “What I mean is that doing away with our friend in the woods was just and right.” Her eyes met no one near, and the sounds would probably mean nothing to anyone who might hear them even close by, so in and out of audibility did they drift. “Your dying was not just. I’m not going to pretend it was. It was unjust, an unfairness to you. But somehow it was right."
She fancied Marcus giving her that look through green transparent groundcover, a slight twist of his head.
The dull ache inside her let out a twinge.
“Not right for you. Right for me.” Thin fingertips, idly dipped forward, caressed a tickle of grassblades. “I know it sounds selfish—but some selfish acts are ones you can’t help, ones tied to your survival.”
She thought back to those unsetded days after he and Conner had arrived. Even through the strain of that time, her instincts had been unerring. She’d strayed, for a bad time, into hurting her son; but she’d had the chance to do the right thing, to reverse it before it was irreversible, and for that she was glad. If Conner had died, the guilt, she now knew, would have rooted in her, would have put out shoots and rhizomes and hot black blooms, would eventually have consumed her entirely.
“A new life is starting for us,” she said. “It feels like—no, I know it is—a good one. For Conner and me and for Sherry too.” Unconfined. Enriching. All possibility in play. “I hope you’re at peace, Marcus. You feel as if you’re at peace. I’m pretty much there myself.”
That was a lie. But she’d gotten good at lying; they both had. That’s what happened in relationships gone bad. The lies became so ingrained, you were hard-pressed to see them after a while—even if you were the liar.
The earth held her lightly. Soft air warmed in curls about her face where the sun touched her.
“Guess that’s it. I love you. I’m sorry. And truth to tell, I’m not sorry. But you already knew that, didn’t you?” Sounded flip. “Thank you.” Sounded insincere. “I mean ...”
She stared into the hard gleam of the sunlit granite. His chiseled name stared back, the dates, the words of the inscription: beloved husband and father. Was he beloved? He was. You could kill a loved one, and feel remorse, and also feel that it had been right and proper.
There ought to have been a contradiction there.
But she felt none.
Katt set her fingertips on the warm rugged stone.
“I don’t know what to say, except that I’ll be back.” Marcus in her mind’s eye gave a faint smile. “Blessings on you.”
Then she rose. Turning away from the grave, she went to join her new family.
Conner had given up on his jogger friend. She’d been a once-only thing, an angel dropped'into his life. School would begin in a few days, friends at last. Always seemed like life starting over again, a new school year. And all the changes he’d seen since June would make eighth grade a turning point of special significance—he sensed that that was so. If he chanced on the old lady jogger in Steele’s, pawing at the grapefruit, she’d be friendly but different, and that would be too bad but all right too.
He sat now with Mom at the dining room table. They’d been looking at magic squares, her showing him the secret, how to fill them in so that the numbers added up the same, whatever direcdon you went. But now they were stealing a peek at Sherry in the kitchen, happily absorbed in slicing vegetables on the cutdng board. The visit to Dad’s grave felt like eons, not hours, in the past.
Mom touched his hand. “Isn’t she neat?” Hmmm. Mom’s growing-up jargon. It crept in when she wasn’t looking. Quaint shit, the weird foul-mouthed creep at school last year would’ve called it. He thought to put a cynical backtwist on it, then went nope. “She is, Mom,” he said. “I like her. She’s smart and pretty and kind, a set of qualities neither of us possesses.”
“My jokester!”
Sherry’s face had the perfect profile, not like model magazine ladies, more like, well, just Sherry-perfect, fit right in the space she filled. “And you get to keep her.”
“We both do,” Mom said, playing along with his stupid little possession rave. “And she gets to keep us. It has an air of, um, longevity about it. But we’ll see.”
Uh-oh. A shift in her tone.
“So have you thought about school?”
The Amendment 2 knotheads question, kooks in Colorado Springs harassing nonheteros. The courts had pretty much struck down the bigoted amendment, but there were bound to be unthinking kids parroting their parents. “Yes,” Conner said, “I can take it. And I’ll blow off those who can’t.”
Mom said, “Just don’t go looking for trouble.” Worry lines. “I won’t.” Just exactly anyway how did one go looking for trouble? Wear a T-shirt that said Yeah so my mom’s a lezzie, what of it, so’s your old man?
“There are secrets,” she said, “it’s okay to keep.” “I’m not hiding anything.”
“I’m not asking you—”
“I’m proud of you, Mom.”
“It’s not hiding exactly, it’s—”
“What is it?” he asked her.
“It’s just not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Be what you are, be okay with me and Sherry, but don’t be the first one to bring it up. It’s called tact. Cool. Being the mature young man 1 know you can be.”
People hid things. They were always doing that.
Him too. Like the time he’d hid his ingrown toenail, tried to treat it himself, let it go too long, got it infected. “I promise to do what feels right,” he said.
Mom smiled. “You’ll do fine. There’s bound to be an ugly time or two, I wish I could promise there won’t. But you’ll weather it. And you’ll learn a thing or two in the process about how people really are.”
Didn’t sound too cool. But she was right. His brush with death had left him sU'ong. He loved the chop-chop of the large knife Sherry wielded. He loved her and the warm rich blend of happiness the two of them gave off when they were together.
He missed his dad. Him and Mom’d been okay together, he guessed, roving around the house. There’d been a sense of completeness between them. But he liked Mom and Sherry together too. They were warmer somehow, more in tune with each other than Mom and Dad had been.
It made his home feel right and good, supportive as a wren’s nest. “I’m ready, Mom.” Not Ninja-belligerent but calm and matter of fact.
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
She quick-kissed his hand. Didn’t feel hokey. But he took it back as if it did, gave her a mock-wince, made her laugh.
It tickled her, sitting with Conner and talking about how wonderful Sherry was (and indeed she was!), while into memory flashed her naked dirt-and-blood-besmeared lover as she shoved earth onto her tormentor’s face and stood on it as he died. Two starkly contrasting images, that one then and the one standing near the sink now.
Both of them true.
Made her wonder what other secret lives people lived. Was Lyra somehow debauched behind that saintly facade? In the seemingly normal lives of her co-workers, what stories of abuse or drunkenness or orgiastic excess would never be told? More intriguing, more upsetting still, what lay yet hidden, perhaps forever so, in Sherry’s life, in Conner’s? What might Conner become as, on his own at last, he tested his own limits, explored his own warps? And what might he be even now, unbeknownst to her?
People lied.
Even to their dearest loved ones, they lied.
It might be about small things, secret masturbations, a regretted unkindness unc
haracteristic but forever there, a petty theft from a close friend. But it dwelt in hidden places, made truth ever tainted, walled everyone away from truly intimate contact with anyone else.
She rose, hand brushing by her boy as she walked into the kitchen. Sherry glowed there. She left off chopping, said, “Hello, there,” smiled as Katt held her from behind, purred at Katt’s neck nuzzle.
“Hello, my lethal little Amazon.”
Sherry’s look clouded.
“Sorry,” Katt said.
Her lover softened. “It’s okay,” she said.
The phone rang.
Katt held up a finger, broke from her, went to answer it as Conner appeared in the doorway.
She lifted the receiver, said hello.
“Katt. Hi. It’s your mom.”
Out of the blue, not her normal time to call.
Didn’t close things down, to her surprise. Felt like an opening, a new light on her past. A strange question suddenly rose in her mind, a private question.
“Just a minute, Mom. Here’s Conner.” She covered it as Conner started to protest. “Two minutes. Nod and grin and say yes’m a lot. She’ll love it. I’ll take over from the upstairs phone as soon as I can, promise.”
His eyes were steel. He held out his hand. “Hello, Grandma?” Already she was on her way, Sherry amused by Conner as Katt breezed by her past the breakfast nook, into the hall leading to the front door, upstairs at a fast clip—the question, how best to ask it, formulating in her head. Hall phone. No one ever had hall phones any more but she’d wanted one and they’d put one in. A litde table with a note pad, a vase of bluebells, cream phone in its cradle. She lifted it, squelched her anxiety.
She’d be bold. She would be bold. Astounding. Conner’s voice, something about bike riding— but when he heard his mom click on, he shifted into a hasty goodbye and was gone.
“But wait I. . . well there he goes, I guess! A man of few words. Like my Bill.”
“How’s it going, Mom?” she said. Her mother gave her the short answer, but before she launched into a litany of woes, Katt slipped in again. “Mom, I need to talk to you, I need to ask you something about Grandma Jasper.”
Katt could almost see her mother’s eyelid twitch. “I don’t see the profit in bringing—”
“You so rarely talk about her,” she said. “All I see is an image of her hugging you as the police break in. In fact I can’t ever recall your saying directly that she was the one who . . . who killed your father and your brother. She did, didn’t she?” It was coming out wrong, too inept, too fast, a bumbling.
“Yes, of course she did.” Her affect was flat. This was a cruelty, but it had to be inflicted.
“What I need to know is, Why do you think she did it? And why did she let you live?”
“Katt, you’re causing me discomfort.”
She wouldn’t, couldn’t back down. “I need to know at least how you see it, how you’ve come to understand it.”
There was a pause. Katt feared her mother might hang up. When she started speaking again, her words were thick and slow and true. “As a young child, an uncle visited me once, her brother. He’d spoken to her in the institution. He said she wanted their love inside her and that she also wanted mine inside her but she didn’t have time. I cried. I think that was all he said ... all I remember he said.
“Much later, talking to a . . . talking under ... I think that’s enough, I—”
“Mom, please. I have to know.” Did she really? Was it important enough to dredge up her mother’s trauma after an eternity of forgetting? She wasn’t sure, but the power she felt now—as opposed to the meekness that overcame her in so many of these calls before—was invigorating. Cruel and kind and necessary, then, her insistence.
“Her mouth was bloody, her chin too. Her dress where she held me on her lap and hugged my head to her was cold and wet and sticky. My younger memory had erased all that and made up this tidy little scene. But I got it back. I got back how I screamed at the gunshots and then ...”
“Then what?”
“Then seeing her with the knife. I just stood there. My head was full of light. They were wax dummies. It was no easy chore she was about. But she worked at it and she was weeping a little and then she put her hands inside the big dummy first and then the litde one.”
The hallway felt cathedral-sdll. “What was she—” “She was too full. That’s why I was spared. She had no room. No room for my love. But she would’ve, if she’d had more time, if they’d found us too late.”
“Why did she do it?”
“The eternal mystery.” Safer ground. “I’d guess she got closed up, kept something boxed in. People do that at times. But I think it was severe in her.” Funny. Katt’s view of her own mother was precisely the same. “Who knows what it was? Some secret that tightened in upon itself, a thing my father refused to let her talk about.”
“They can do that, can’t they?”
“Don’t let it happen to you, Katt. Open up and let a ray of sunshine in. That’s what I always say.” She’d not said it once in Katt’s hearing. “You can tell me anything at all. You have friends?”
“Good ones.” Good one.
“Pick one to tell everything to. Don’t hold anything back. Do you have one you can unburden yourself to?”
“Yes.” Mostly.
“Tell her the whole shooting match. It’s a woman, I’d guess. Usually is.”
“Yes, my friend Sherry. She may move in with us.”
“You’ll find another husband soon enough, no rush but when you’re ready—or he’ll find you. But until that time you tell this friend, this Sherry, everything.”
“Okay, Mom.” Almost everything.
“Open up to her.”
“I will.” Marcus’s sweaty forehead, the wastage he’d become, loomed before her.
“Let a ray of sunshine in.”
“Yes, I will.” Except in certain corners that had to remain eternally dark. She vowed no light would ever find those corners.
“That’s my girl,” her mother said. “That’s my girl.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. Sherry appeared. A stranger, a lover. Miming food hand to mouth, beckoning to dinner, standing there.
An open invitation from a heart-whole woman.
Or was she?
“Are you there, Katt? Are you there?”
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