Dad. He'd used the word twice. Now that Carolyn was dead, Les had been given back his title. Anna took that as a good omen for the future.
"Carolyn came along maybe two years later. Dad met her at a party at Boeing. Or maybe it was somewhere else. I really don't know. I don't care. God." Rory stopped a minute, breathing out whatever memories had derailed his narrative.
Anna sat quietly, hoping none of the boys in the dorm would come rocketing out and wreck the chemistry of the moment. She had a hunch if Rory stopped talking now, he might never start again.
"Mostly I remember how much fun she was. It was like we'd been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized. I guess Dad and I hadn't got out much since Mom died. I sort of remember I used to do things after school-you know, kid things like Little League or whatever. But sometime after Mom, I'd sort of stopped, I think. Dad worked late a lot. I guess there was nobody to take me places and pick me up or something.
"Then Carolyn shows up and we're doing things again. Lots of stuff: water parks and fairs and circuses and hockey games. She was always laughing, teasing Dad. She did everything for us. She'd cook and she cleaned the house. I remember that, though I couldn't have been much more than seven or eight. I came home from school one day and the house was bigger, lighter. The curtains were open. Dad's piles of newspapers and magazines were gone. My clothes were hung up and my bed was made. Like when Mom was alive.
"She was at our house all the time. Dad didn't work late much anymore.
"They got married pretty soon after that. They hadn't known each other six months. I know that for sure. Later Carolyn was always saying things like, 'I must've been out of my head marrying you when I'd only known you five months. Five fucking months. God. By month six I knew I'd made one hell of a mistake, that's for sure.' "
Rory probably related the words verbatim. As he said them his face curled into a sneering mask and his voice was charged with such contempt Anna winced. That particular scene had evidently been burned into his brain.
"That was later though. I guess I remember her teasing got mean and she got really jealous-had to know where Dad was all the time and went into a fit if he was like two minutes late home from work. She'd driven it and timed herself so she knew exactly how long it took. She got real picky about the house. It had to be just so. And dinner was at six-fifteen every night and don't be late or else. If Dad didn't say the right compliments about the food she'd go off on him.
"They started having huge fights. Not the big ones in front of me. Always after I went to bed. My room was upstairs and way at the back of the house but I could still hear them. Not words, just shouting. Crashes. Crying. In the morning sometimes things would be broken. I was older by this time, I must've been twelve because I remember Mrs. Dent, my sixth-grade teacher, sending me to a counselor because I kept falling asleep in class. The counselor was okay but sort of fixated on drugs, like I was a junkie. I didn't tell him anything."
Rory looked at Anna. It was the first time he'd dragged his eyes from visions of the past. "I thought it was Dad," he said clearly. "I thought Dad was beating Carolyn. They tell us about that stuff in school and you see movies about it on TV all the time. I didn't even know it could be the other way around. I mean, Dad was stronger than she was. Why didn't he stop her?"
The question was pushed out with such intensity Anna could tell he'd been living with it for a long time. Now, with childlike insistence, he was waiting for her to answer it, and she couldn't.
"Did you ever ask him?" she said instead.
Rory was disappointed. He slumped back against the wall and his gaze slipped away again to other times. "Once," he replied. "He said she didn't mean it. He said she was high-strung. He said it was hard for her to be married to an older man. He said he could be pretty aggravating sometimes." Rory was silent for a minute and Anna thought he'd finished. But he wasn't. In a voice constricted with rage and shame he said, "Then he told me he didn't mind.He was in the hospital when he said it. Carolyn had hit him in the face with this metal stool she kept in the kitchen to reach high shelves. The underside of the seat was real sharp. She nearly cut half his face off. You can still see the scar." Anna had seen it-the thin white line that marked off a semicircle of Lester's face. They'd been looking for a motive for the slicing off of Carolyn's brow, cheek and half her nose. This certainly fit the bill. For both father and son.
"Did she ever hit you?" Anna asked.
"Not really. She started to get after me once when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was in the backyard hitting a ball into the fence and something set her off. She came out and headed for me. It scared me so bad I raised the bat. I think I'd have used it too. By then I'd pretty much figured out why Dad was always bruised or limping-she'd already put him in the hospital twice, once for a broken collarbone and the other time for a ruptured eardrum, I think-anyway, her coming at me like that was scary. When she saw I meant to fight she just stopped. Then she laughed and said, 'That's right, Rory, don't take any shit. Not from anybody.' "
"She never knocked you around when you were little? Slapped you, shook you, anything like that?"
"Just Dad," Rory said.
In a sick sort of way it made sense. Carolyn wasn't into child abuse, just the abuse of men. At fourteen Rory had been becoming a man.
Maybe in Carolyn's world there were only two kinds of men: those whom you beat and those who beat you.
"You seemed to get along with her well enough," Anna said mildly.
"Yeah. Well. At least she didn't let anybody beat on her."
That pretty much summed it up. Rory'd gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he'd been ashamed of. A child's natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. Anna had to wonder how far it had gone.
"Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?" she asked sympathetically.
"Sometimes," Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. "How could anyone not? He'd get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you've even kicked them. Then you wantto kick them."
Anna understood the phenomenon. "Ever do it? Ever kick them?"
"Hit Dad?" He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. Anna guessed that on so many occasions over so many years Rory had wanted to strike out against the humiliation he felt in the person of his father, that he was either making sure he'd never actually done it or he was counting the number of strikes. Anna dearly hoped it was the former. To be beaten by one's own child must be a torment only Shakespeare and God could comprehend.
At length Rory spoke. "I wanted to," he admitted. "But I never did. Mom-my real mom-wouldn't have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so… so pathetic. It made me sick."
Rory looked sick. Anna felt sick. They sat in sick, wretched silence for a while, the ghosts of Rory's childhood twining about them.
Anna fought off the hopeless lethargy they exuded and asked, "Did you ever fight back for him?"
Rory'd been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at Anna's question and the lines of his face firmed up. "You mean did I kill Carolyn?" he asked without seeming much to care whether Anna thought him a murderer or not.