‘Since when? Since then?’ She giggles. I recognize the three sisters, Zoya, Zina and Mother, seated shyly with their parents. The father, bones standing high in his face, his mouth proportioned without generosity. Grandma, eerily young, younger than I am now, unsmiling but beautiful, her eyes penetrating.
‘Sasha will find a place to hang this,’ Aunt Zina informs me, looking doubtfully around the room for wallspace. ‘Zoya discovered this old picture and had it made big for my birthday, perhaps because it particularly flatters her.’
I study Aunt Zoya, the least attractive, even now, of the sisters, and it is true that youth loaned angles to the curious roundness of her face.
‘It was taken soon after we arrived in America and Papa took his first job with the building company. Before Katya and Olya were born. Except Mama looks a little bit pregnant, don’t you agree?’
‘Maybe. So it must have been… 1941?’
‘Or ’42. Zoya is perhaps fourteen, I am twelve. Your mother is nine, no, ten years old. Even then she was beautiful.’
I stare at the smallest of the girls. She is not smiling but receptive to the camera’s stare, her blonde hair curving around her cheeks, the bones of her face already prominent like her father’s, her eyes dazzling although in the photograph they are grey. The girl who grew up to be Mother.
‘We were poor but still Papa paid for this picture. He understood how the ordinary is fascinating when time has left it behind.’
‘You weren’t so ordinary, none of you,’ I tell her but I am still staring at Mother.
When Mother and Daddy decided to marry, only Zina offered no opposition to their hasty, passionate union. Grandma and Grandpa presented alternative candidates from the Russian community. Aunt Zoya pleaded for longer consideration. The giggly teenaged Katya and Olya begged Mother to find someone younger. It was true that he was almost ten years Mother’s senior and already a professor in the university’s geology department. Mother worked in the Russian department. She was a secretary. Like many women of her generation, it did not occur to her to study there. One summer her boss went on vacation and she had nothing to do, so, when the geology department advertised for people on campus to help them move premises, she volunteered. She worked for Daddy for three weeks and at the end of it the geology department was rehoused and they were married.
I like that story, I’ve liked it since I was a small child. Mother told it well. She described how she helped Daddy catalogue rocks. Not one roomful, not two but… and here she waved her arms in a vast, expansive gesture, three, yes three rooms full of rocks! She leaned forward and closed her eyes a little when she told us how she watched Daddy run his fingers around the bubbles of malachite and stroke the rings of haematite. How he labelled each rock gently and handled them with care while she listed them.
She said: ‘I knew then that for Daddy rocks are not lifeless the way they are for most people. And I knew that a man who had enough love even for rocks must have a little to spare for me!’ She beamed and her face, which could look unhappy in repose, was another face, the face of the beautiful woman who reorganized the filing system, who catalogued the rocks, who married the professor. She straightened her hair and then her body. ‘And the geology department held a party for us. They made a cake…’ She giggled girlishly. ‘They made a cake in the shape of a mountain with all the geological layers! They asked me for a joke to identify them but, you see, I had already learned a lot and to their astonishment I was able to do so!’ That laugh again, happy, loud. The laugh of an intelligent, high-spirited woman. ‘Pre-Cambrian, Palaeozoic, Cambrian, Odovician, Silurian…!’ She joyfully threw out each name like a beacon flashing its light across the water.
‘God!’ I exclaim involuntarily. ‘God, where did that woman go?’ The woman who married Daddy. The woman who told us the story of how she married Daddy. The woman with thick fair hair that seemed to spill out of her head. The woman with the blue eyes who laughed loudly, delightedly, who looked as though a light had just clicked on inside her whenever she smiled. One day I walked into a canyon and when I came out she had become another woman completely.
‘Sometimes,’ Aunt Zina informs me, somehow understanding my thoughts, ‘it is possible to find a little of the old Tanya, even today.’
But it is many years since I stopped looking for my mother amid the human wreckage at Redbush clinic. Silently I hand back the picture. In exchange, Aunt Zina passes me a key.
‘For your shining new hirecar.’ Her eyes glitter. ‘It was delivered this morning by a young man. A young man in a uniform. These old apartments have a lack of parking places. Naturally the young man did not know that. It happens he has taken a space Dimitri Sergeyevich downstairs considers his own and this unpleasant person and bad neighbour has telephoned twice about the problem. Sasha finally explained the circumstances and he agreed to allow it to remain but for today only.’
‘When I come back tonight I’ll park in the lot where Mother used to leave the car.’
‘No, Lucia, it is two blocks away. Sasha can park there, you must use his space.’
I have no intention of taking Sasha’s parking space but it is eight fifteen and there is no time to argue. I explain why I must leave at once and Aunt Zina snorts.
‘Why should the police interview you so urgently? It is impossible that you can be of any assistance to them. They are simply wasting their own time and yours.’
It is easy to guess which car in the lot is mine. It gleams with newness. As I climb in I am surveyed by a silver-haired man, bent almost double. It is not clear whether his hands are on his hips to express outrage or to hold himself up. He says something gruffly to me in Russian.
When I arrive at Daddy’s house I find the uniformed officers and the tape at the end of the drive gone. As I swing up the hill something shines at me through the trees, sharp as a knife, bright as chrome, so that when I turn the corner my heart is thumping. I expect to see a big truck but I find only litter, a can top which the police must have left behind. There would never have been litter when Daddy was alive.
The day’s early warmth embraces me. I stand in the shadow of the house and, except for the occasional ticking of the hot car, I feel the completeness of the silence. Nothing moves. Even the leaves are still as though the old place has been waiting for me. Inexplicably, I recall a detail from the story Mother used to tell us about Grandma’s baby boy dying on the train when the family was escaping from Russia. I recall how, when the border guard opened the door of the car, he knew at once from the motionless passengers that something was wrong and that they were waiting for him to notice it. How their very stillness drew his attention to the woman with the dead baby on her lap.
I swing round, convinced that something is wrong, sure that there is something here in the stillness I should notice. But the leaves hang limply as handkerchiefs, the branches are motionless, the house and the barn ring with their own silence, the stones of the drive shine where the sun cuts across their surfaces. The only thing amiss is the can top. I pick it up.
I still have a key to Daddy’s house. In the three years I was away I didn’t take it off my key-ring. I place it in my palm now where it lies flat as a fish. I walk beneath branches to the porch and I like the noise of my walk. The dead bark and knife-sharp leaves of the eucalyptus trees are so dry that they crackle and rustle beneath my feet and overhead the foliage releases a medicinal aroma.
At the threshold of the house I pause to accustom myself to its smell, its coolness, its darkness. Its absences. Impossible to believe that Daddy has entirely vacated this space which was his for so many years. Impossible to believe I won’t find him here.
‘Hi!’ calls a voice. The detective. She is advancing towards me, briefcase in hand, dark under the dark trees. My fingers wind themselves around the can top.
‘What a beautiful day. It’s only March but it sure feels like summer’s here,’ she says cheerfully. Together we go into the house. We stand at the door to Daddy’s den and
she tells me that she has taken Daddy’s computer.
‘We’re still having trouble getting into some documents. You haven’t remembered his password?’
‘I’m sure I never knew it.’
She wants me to sign for this and the other paperwork she removed from the den.
‘What paperwork?’ I ask curiously.
‘Oh, financial stuff.’
‘Like… bank statements?’
‘Exactly that. We need a full picture of your father’s finances.’
I wonder why, but I sign the documents she gives me without asking the question.
‘I’ve copied it, but you still need to sign for it,’ she tells me, putting piles of papers on Daddy’s desk. ‘Scott’s going to need these originals.’
‘Scott?’
‘He’s your father’s personal representative.’
‘His what?’
‘His executor. That’s what executors are called these days.’
‘Scott?’ I echo incredulously. ‘Daddy appointed Scott executor?’
She looks at me.
‘Is that so surprising?’
‘Yes. Scott’s a real smart guy but math isn’t his strong suit. He nearly flunked it in high school and even with a calculator he never gets the same answer twice…’
Her look is keen. ‘You think Professor Schaffer should have asked you instead?’
‘Well…’ Of course he should have asked me.
‘After all, you’re the banker around here,’ she adds, watching me closely. She’s wondering why Daddy didn’t trust me to carry out his wishes. I’m wondering too, but I shrug. I don’t want her to know that Daddy has hurt me.
‘I guess he had his reasons,’ she says at last. I wish she’d stop looking at me. I am grateful when she suggests that she interview me out on the deck and I can turn my back as I lead us across the living-room.
‘At least you’re the beneficiary,’ she says. ‘You and Jane. Did you know that?’
‘I sort of assumed it.’
I pull back the sliding doors. I prepare myself for the shock that is the valley but even so I have to pause a moment to absorb its immensity and flatness, its tidy productivity. It is laid out beneath us like a huge table, groaning with food.
We sit down. The day had seemed still but as soon as the detective draws her notebook from her briefcase the pages flutter.
‘I’m hoping,’ she says, cradling the papers to her like an infant, ‘that by now you’ve thought of someone who can confirm you were home all last weekend.’
I shake my head. ‘There isn’t anyone.’
‘You worked the whole time?’
‘I didn’t see anyone who can confirm I was in New York.’
‘You didn’t leave the apartment?’
‘I took some short breaks for food.’
‘Is work what you usually do on the weekends?’
I hesitate. ‘It’s what I do all the time,’ I say at last.
The detective raises her eyebrows. I look out across the valley. It stretches as far as you can see. On the other side are hills and sometimes on cool, sunny winter mornings you get an intimation of them, the way, when you’re at sea, you sometimes think you can spy land.
‘Do you know anything about your father’s movements over the weekend?’ the detective asks me. ‘Did he talk about any plans?’
I omit mentioning Daddy’s visit to Stevie’s grave. I say that I knew he intended to spend Saturday with Jane and Larry and Scott.
‘Sunday?’
I shrug.
‘I have good reason to be interested in how your father spent Sunday afternoon. I want you to think hard and tell me whether you recall him mentioning that he expected company? Or was there someone who visited him most Sundays?’
I think hard and then shake my head so the valley seems to jump from side to side. Then it is still again and its lines are straight. It is neatly divided into big quadrangles by roads and smaller quadrangles by blocks of fruit trees.
She says: ‘His car’s still missing. Do you have any idea of somewhere he might have driven it early on Monday? Did he like to go into town Mondays? Or was there some friend he met for breakfast?’
‘Well, he might have intended to take some kind of exercise with his friend Seymour. They sometimes did fitness things together.’
The woman does not respond and I see that Jane’s already made this suggestion and Seymour has already been contacted. She asks me more questions about Daddy, about his habits and his friends and his character. Detailed questions, which I find hard to answer. I’ve never analysed what sort of a man he was. I hear myself stumbling and then I fall on the small tributes my aunts paid him last night and offer these to the detective.
‘He always tried to do what he thought was right.’ I sound lame. The detective seems to sense that she is hearing someone else’s words.
‘When you were small, when you went to other kids’ houses…’ she persists. I tense. We didn’t much go to other kids’ houses because it meant the kids would sooner or later demand to visit our house and that was not okay, at least not until later when Mother was in the clinic. ‘Did you meet their fathers? Do you remember thinking that your father was similar or different?’
I nod. ‘Oh yes. Other people’s fathers were sort of scary. They had loud voices and they were too big.’
She smiles. ‘Too big?’
‘I mean, they got in the way. They sometimes wanted to play with their kids but I guess that back then most fathers didn’t really know how. They’d organize a ballgame and then get mad because we made up our own rules. And they’d shout a lot… I mean, if you just went down to the store with them you could be sure someone would get shouted at for something dumb like, say, messing with the bubblegum machine.’
‘Your father didn’t shout?’
I shake my head. Daddy was always kind. He didn’t try to organize games unless we asked him and then he didn’t make some creaking and inappropriate attempt at participation. He expected us to amuse ourselves. Other fathers, hoarse-voiced, frantic after ballgames turned chaotic and toys broke, handed mothers the kids back with obvious relief just as soon as they walked in through the door from shopping or visiting. Daddy didn’t have anyone to hand us to and he gave no sign he wanted to. He never seemed sad when summer camp ended or relieved when school started. I wonder now at how even and unchanging he was. Did he ever feel mad at us and not show it? I try to recall Daddy getting upset or emotional or acting Russian, even a tiny bit. I can’t. I can’t even recall him laughing the way other people sometimes laugh, red-faced, shaking, with their heads thrown back.
The detective says thoughtfully: ‘Jane’s told me about your mother’s problems. I guess Professor Schaffer had to play both mother and father to you. That must have been hard when he had a job as well. Did he leave you alone a lot?’
It seems to me that, once Mother was trapped on her private, hellish treadmill of psychosis, I was always alone. Standing in the canyon, Mother’s shrieks bouncing off its walls, I felt an acute loneliness which didn’t go away, not ever, not yet.
‘Well, there was my big sister,’ I remind her. ‘She did a lot of the stuff Mother should have done.’
‘You and Jane were close as kids?’
I look out across the valley. ‘I don’t know what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for Jane,’ I confess. ‘I mean, I was her first patient. I was always sick and she took care of me.’
‘Maybe that’s why she went into medicine,’ suggests the woman.
‘Because of me being sick? Well, maybe. There was this car crash in the valley when I was just out of high school and she helped me a lot then, too.’
I look down at Sunnyfruit Orchards, to that long, straight stretch of road where the car I was riding in with Robert Joseph turned right over, remembered now as a series of snapshots: the road, vertical instead of horizontal, a fruit tree too close and then another upside down, the grainy proximity of the orchard�
�s dirt. The first person I remember being there was Mrs Joseph, with a friend who happened to be in the house. The friend told me not to move and held my hand, talking to me kindly. Someone must have called the house because Jane, just home for the summer, arrived soon afterwards. She stayed by me and Mrs Joseph’s friend seemed to evaporate. Then the ambulances came. Robert was badly hurt. Jane said I had to stay right where I was while they lifted his body very slowly through the open doors, the stretcher moulded around his shape. She said: ‘No, Luce, he isn’t dead, he really isn’t.’ In the hospital I learned that he was crushed along one side and that maybe they would remove a leg. They released me that same day with a couple of minor fractures in one foot and when I came home I could see Robert’s father’s car still down in the valley. It lay crooked at the side of the road, roof down, like a big insect dead on its back. It was another whole day before the Josephs had it moved. And now, all these years later, I’m staring out across the valley and searching for the car again as if I just graduated from high school and am in love with Robert Joseph. In my left foot, a dull, persistent ache.
‘Lucy?’
I look back at the detective. She’s asked me something but her voice got lost years back. She repeats the question, maybe louder this time. She wants to know whether there were any arguments within the family, what Daddy’s relationship was like with Scott and Larry, whether he had enemies. Mostly I shrug in answer.
‘We’re nothing out of the ordinary,’ I say. ‘Everyone gets along. Nobody hates anyone. Daddy didn’t have enemies, he wasn’t that kind of a man.’
Her voice is sharp. ‘Lucy, why did you leave California?’
‘Career reasons,’ I tell her quickly.
‘There wasn’t some kind of a rift in the family? An argument?’
‘Oh no, no. I was a personal banker but I really wanted to move into investment banking. The only opportunities here are in Silicon Valley. Otherwise you have to go to New York.’
She looks at me, waiting to hear more, as though she already knows there is. She waits so long that finally the words come stumbling out of me.
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