by Lynne Hugo
“But where will Lexie play?” Cora fussed. “It’s all concrete over there.”
“She can ride the bus here, Mom, after school. I checked on it. Then I’ll pick her up after work and take her home.”
“But this is her home, and yours.”
Christine looked around the living room, where Lexie had dumped a wooden puzzle on the carpet, and left a box of crayons open on the chair. Lexie’s small-toothed grin and high pigtails with crimson bows shone at her from the end table across the room. “It’s not fair to you and Dad. Lexie’s not your responsibility, she’s mine. I’m through school, I’ve got a job, it’s time for me to get going. I can’t stay here forever. I wasn’t ready before, but now I am.”
“But, honey…”
Christine leaned toward the other cushion of the couch where Cora sat, picked up her mother’s hand and held it between her two smaller ones. Her body was more slender than Cora’s had ever been, as delicately boned and quietly colored as one of the wrens at the feeders. Lexie would be built like her mother, Cora thought, and pushed aside the notion that her granddaughter’s stature had anything to do with Alex.
“Mom, try to understand. The longer I wait the harder it will be. Can’t you see that? I have to stop waiting around. Everything seemed so unfinished, even after the divorce. It just seems like this is what I have to do to finish. I’m not explaining it very well…”
“No, I do understand. It’s right. Whatever will let you put it…him…behind you, and maybe find someone else, I’m for it.” It was much easier for Cora to say that than to give voice to the shadowy part of herself that once in a while thought of not raising children anymore.
Christine smiled and gave an exaggerated sigh. “Thanks,” she said simply. “Now what furniture can I have?”
HOUSEKEEPING SCALED TO HERSELF and Lexie involved more than she’d anticipated. Christine bought beds, a couch, and a kitchen table and chairs, and furnished the rest sparsely with pieces her parents gave or loaned her. She made a bookcase out of boards and cinder blocks for the living room, and painted it blue in a shade to match her couch. On the wall above the couch, she hung a print of hawks crossing an enormous sky.
She taught herself to macramé from a library book with detailed pictures, and made two hangers for the plants she started from her mother’s cuttings—only ivy and philodendron, but they took root, delighting her with their willingness. Magazines and coasters appeared on the coffee table; plant by knickknack, the sterile white-walled rooms took on the aura of a home. And when Jeff Tricca, another med tech graduate stopped by Dr. Simcoe’s office to say hi and to ask her out for the third time, she didn’t say no. In fact, she had her hair cut a couple of inches and tried it in a flip. She filed and polished her nails before the date, and bought Crystal Mauve lipstick, a livelier shade.
sixteen
“LIFE GOES ON,” Cora said. She and Marvin and Jolene and Bob were playing canasta at a card table set up in the living room. “We couldn’t do this here very well when Lexie was running around, I admit.”
“I know you miss her,” Jolene said.
“I do, but what’s important is that we all get on with it. You know Chris’s seen that Jeff Tricca several times, and she even got a babysitter for Lexie that weekend he and I had the flu.” She gestured at Marvin with her head.
“I still say that was food poisoning,” Marvin grumbled, looking disgusted with the cards he held, or the dinner that had preceded the illness, Cora couldn’t tell which.
“That is so insulting, Marvin Laster. There was nothing in that dinner that could have been spoiled. Do you think I’m not careful?”
They were adjusting. There was a little more bickering than they’d had the attention for when Christine and Lexie were there, but they were adjusting. They’d gone to the movies several times, and Marvin had gone to the grocery store with Cora once, just to keep her company on a Saturday morning. Cora was fixing recipes that Lexie wouldn’t eat, and Marvin could leave a screwdriver on the kitchen table without someone having a conniption because it wasn’t safe for Lexie.
MARVIN WASN’T EVEN home when Alex showed up. It was Cora who answered the front door, expecting the mailman with something too large for the mailbox.
“Oh,” was all she could get out.
“Chris here?” Alex said, just as casual as daylight, as if he’d been there yesterday. In the driveway, a blue pickup truck sagged with age.
Alex had changed, but not in a way that had improved him any, as far as Cora could see. The ordinary magic of his handsome face was obscured by black shoulder-length hair falling from a middle part and a pack of cigarettes plumped the pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. The denim jacket he wore over it couldn’t have begun to keep him warm, even in the January thaw that had begun the last week. Only his eyes—deep brown, lash-scalloped—were the same.
“No,” Cora began, casting for what she should say or do.
“Where is she?”
“I…don’t know.” An obvious lie.
“Where is she?”
Cora, panicked, started to shut the door.
Alex stuck his foot in the way. He was wearing heavy, battered boots, and when Cora looked down, she recognized they were steel-toed, like Marvin’s work boots. The weight of the door wasn’t going to bother Alex a bit.
“You get out of here before I call the police,” she said, frightened and enraged.
“I’m askin’ you where my wife is. And my little girl. Please.”
“She’s not your wife.”
“Look, I just wanna talk to her. What d’ya mean, she’s not my wife?”
“What I said. You’ll have to leave. I’ll call the police…” she repeated through the inches he was keeping the door open.
“Call ’em. I’m not breakin’ the law. Please. I just wanna talk to Chris.”
“And I’m telling you, she doesn’t want anything to do with you.” Cora thought of how far Christine had come, how hard she’d worked, how she’d finally settled into some kind of peace with the past. “Trust me—nobody wants you here.”
Alex used the side of his wrist and arm to push against the door Cora had wedged against his foot. “I got a right to see my daughter. She here? That why you won’t let me in?”
Cora snapped a little, like a runner bean, not loudly, but raggedly around the center string. She heard the little pop inside. “You have no rights here,” she said angrily. Her heart was pounding in her ears. “How dare you come around here talking about rights? You had your last rights a long time ago when you did what you did.”
“What’re you talking about? It was an accident.”
“It was an accident that you ran off and left?” Cora was incredulous. “An accident?”
The two stood, each suddenly confused, staring at each other for long seconds. Cora was the one who put it together quickly enough, the echo of a phone conversation overheard soon after Tina had died clicking into place in a way that let her know she was right. She sucked in a breath and skipped over what she’d not known for sure like a flat stone skimming water. “You hear me, and hear me good. We’ll get the law after you for what you did. Christine’ll testify. Only thing saved you until now was being gone. Get yourself gone again, and we won’t put you in jail for murder.”
Alex was stunned, she could see it. The aggressive insistence slid off his face and he looked smaller. “Please, Mrs. Laster. Can’t you give me a chance?”
“I’m giving you a chance. I’m giving you thirty seconds to be off this property. Then I’m going to get Marvin’s gun and shoot you and say you trespassed and threatened me. And then Christine will go to the police with the whole story. Now get out, and don’t ever come back. Not ever.” Cora had never spoken to anyone like this; she hardly knew the words belonged to her.
Alex withdrew his boot from the door and took a step backward. “Tell Christine I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry.” Then he turned and left. The truck coughed several times in the drivewa
y, and she was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to get it going, but he did and gunned it through its intention to quit again. She watched his wheels kick up the cinders on the road from the last snow, standing and listening until she couldn’t hear the sound from the giving-up muffler any longer. Then Cora shut and locked the front door.
By the time Lexie’s school bus let her off after her half-day of kindergarten, the roar that reverberated through Cora’s head and chest was subsiding. She hugged the girl long and hard before helping her out of her snowsuit, and then hugged her again. She had already decided there was no need to tell anyone what had happened. Maybe she had managed to take care of it. Christine didn’t need to deal with this, and neither did Marvin. Cora’s heart was stronger than his.
CHRISTINE BROUGHT JEFF Tricca to dinner at her parents’ house twice, and dated him for a good three months. When she started to try some activities that included Lexie, though, the six-year-old was whiney and difficult and refused an ice-cream cone Jeff bought her right after she’d begged her mother for one. It wasn’t another month before Christine broke it off, after an outing to the movies was disastrous, Lexie making Christine take her to the ladies’ room seven times during the movie, and overturning the bucket of popcorn in Jeff’s lap.
“I can’t see it, Mom,” she said over the phone. “Lexie hates him. Or she hates sharing me, or whatever. But if it’s not going to work with Lexie, there’s no point in my seeing him at all, because she’s got to come first.”
“How about just dating him so you have something for yourself, you know? Just don’t include Lexie. You know we’ll keep her.”
“Jeff wants to get serious, Mom. It’s not going to work.”
Next, Christine dated a pharmaceutical company representative. Briefly. He was divorced with two children, and not particularly interested in picking up another one. Then there was Ron Meier with whom Christine went so far as to have lusty sex and genuine friendship, but Christine could see he tolerated Lexie because she had an early bedtime. It was always something. Cora said as much to Christine one evening.
“It’s okay, Mom, don’t worry. I’m fine by myself. Please don’t think I have to get married again. I used to really want to be married, you know, and maybe have more children, but maybe I don’t anymore. It’s not just them, the guys—I don’t have much trust in men, and that causes problems, too. This is delicious—of course, I was completely famished. Did Lex eat it? Sometimes she’s picky about onions.”
Cora had already given Lexie supper and saved a plate in the oven for Christine, who’d stayed late at work. Lexie and Marvin were playing checkers in the living room, so Cora and Christine were alone in the kitchen while Christine forked pork chops, potatoes and onions into her mouth. She’d been keeping her voice chipper, but her face had the tired pallor of her white uniform. Christine O’Gara, her nametag said, and Cora wondered for the thousandth time why she’d kept the O’Gara name.
“I picked out the onions for her. I just worry about you. It’s not still…you don’t still think about…Alex, do you?” The subject had been taboo for so long it was difficult to say his name. The three of them had, by unspoken consensus, avoided the subject of what had come between them and what had brought them back together.
Christine started to shake her head. Hair fell across her cheek and a few strands stuck on her lips. She’d had her unremarkable brown color highlighted, and it flattered her. She swiped at her face, missing a couple of times, then got it out of her mouth. “I’m going to cut my hair short, I really am.” Then she paused, and went back to Cora’s question, but this time she didn’t start with no. She thought a minute. “Maybe. I don’t think so. I was such a kid, you know? I still can’t believe he never came back. I know you and Dad never could see what I did in him but he, well, he couldn’t hurt animals, Mom, and I think you and I scared him some about the babies. He wanted to be good. At least once, he did. I can’t believe I was so wrong. I hope you and Dad don’t say anything about him to Lexie.”
“I don’t. And I don’t think your father does. But you’re going to have to soon enough. You always made excuses for him.” Cora abruptly stood and started to clear the table. The overhead light threw shadows into the hollows of her eyes and the wrinkles around them. Her mouth, thin like Christine’s, was pursed, and for a moment her daughter saw her clearly, differently.
“Mom and Dad still hate him, and they only know half the story,” Christine wrote that night. “I told Mom I couldn’t believe he hadn’t come back or called me or something after the amnesty, but I guess he hasn’t got a use for me now. Still, I wonder if we’d have made it—there were a hundred strikes against us, that’s for sure. And I do wonder what happened to him, and what to tell Lexie. So far, she hasn’t asked much, I guess because I’m all she’s ever known, but I don’t expect that’ll last forever. I guess nothing does.”
1988
seventeen
LEXIE’S EYES BURNED. She’d stayed up four nights in a row, first checking dates and putting her mother’s notebooks and journals in chronological order, and then reading them to piece together oblique references. Sometimes Christine hadn’t written exactly what she meant, although other times she had exercised no caution at all, as if she’d been in an undertow of anguish.
Each night, Lexie had made a show of saying she was tired from schoolwork and going to bed early. Cora wouldn’t go to bed until Lexie had, not wanting to leave her granddaughter alone with shadowy memories, and not wanting to be alone with her own.
When Lexie could hear her grandmother settle into a light snore like a distant, idling motor, she crept across the hall to her mother’s old room and shut the door behind her. She put on one of Christine’s sweaters, inhaling the faint scent of her mother—the late-March nights were still cold in the unheated room—covered herself with the blanket folded at the foot of the bed, and picked up where she’d left off. At first, she’d read hurriedly, skimming even, but when she realized that sometimes an entry pointed ahead or back or even at someone, she went back and read slowly, deliberately, as if it were a school assignment and she’d have to explain what the author meant. Except for the parts in which her mother had written about Lexie, upset with or disappointed in or angry at or worrying about her: the guilt of those passages was too much, and she sped up to a skim.
Each night, Lexie propped the picture of Christine in her coffin against the bedside lamp on the table to her left while, leaning back into her mother’s pillow, she sat on her mother’s bed reading her mother’s words. The second night, she sneaked a candle out of Cora’s hutch and lit it beside the picture like a small shrine. “I need to get you a flower, too. You protected him, didn’t you? But you thought he’d come back,” she whispered to the picture.
Lexie reread whole notebooks the fourth night. “You kept him out of it because you didn’t know he was going to run away. That’s it, isn’t it? And then it was too late to get revenge. It’s not too late for me, though. I’ll do it for you, Mom. You said you’d help me, and now I know.” Saying it, she felt better, as if she had a purpose, a direction, a reason. And a way to make it up to her mother for the times she’d hurt her, maybe for all the people who’d hurt her. Beside, there was no way the judge was going to make her live with a baby-killer.
“GRANDMA, CAN WE TALK about something?”
Cora nearly swallowed her teeth. Lexie spent most of her time shrinking from talk with Cora, ducking from room to room as if she were in a great hurry, and claiming fatigue at an absurdly early hour, though Cora was grateful to be able to retire early herself.
“Of course, honey. What is it? Come, sit by me.” Cora was in her bedroom folding laundry on her bed. A large, framed picture of Christine was on her dresser next to one of Rebecca taken when she’d graduated from the University.
“How did Tina die?”
“Well, she, uh, choked on something. What did your Mom tell you?”
“That she choked.”
“Well,
then, that was right.”
“Who was with her?”
“Your mother said she was.” Cora set aside the pieces that needed ironing and turned slightly, toward the pile of clean towels. She lifted the first, a brief curtain between her and Lexie.
But Lexie saw through it. “Do you think so?”
“Why, honey?”
“Because it wasn’t my Mom. It was Alex, and Mom protected him.”
“Goodness. What makes you think that?” Cora, having reached and used the same conclusion herself nine-and-a-half years earlier but never once worded it, was shocked to have it thrown up against the wall like spaghetti to see whether it would stick. She stopped folding towels and sank onto the bedspread next to Lexie.
“I’ve read Mom’s diaries.” Lexie’s tone was defensive, and her light eyes looked ethereal in the fading afternoon light. “You told me they were mine.”
Cora was taken aback. “Of course they’re yours. I just thought you’d wait, until you were older. Does it actually say that in a diary? About Alex, I mean. Did Rebecca…?”
“She didn’t get to read much—remember, I freaked when people were touching Mom’s stuff?”
“Yes,” Cora recalled the scene. “I remember. Does it say that in her diary?” she repeated. She wanted to question the girl about when she’d read this—Cora knew the diaries were boxed up in the closet in Christine’s room—but she thought better of it.
“Not exactly. But you can figure it out. She says something about how it was her fault, ’cause she knew better than to shake a baby that was coughing, but she had to get formula, and she was going to lose her mind if she didn’t get out for a few minutes. Something like that. It’s like she wrote it, but not exactly.”
Cora wondered whether she should tell Lexie that Alex had come back when she was six and she herself had run him off—that she’d picked up the same idea and used it like a loaded gun.