I reached my hand inside the open window on the passenger side and quickly opened and closed the glove box, tucking Hamish’s keys away. I grabbed my purse. From braid to bullets, I thought. How this would have satisfied my ill-fated therapist. He would delight in the alliteration until I would want to smack him silly. Perhaps I would give him a call sometime. A little ring-a-ling from hell.
I heard the Bartók go silent. I placed the purse firmly on my shoulder. I would walk to Mrs. Leverton’s, let myself in, and-was it possible?-calmly shoot myself.
As I stood, I noticed that Mr. Forrest had shut off his lights. I saw Bad Boy bounding across the lawn and heard the front door close. I turned and walked at what I considered a normal pace, down to the end of the block.
I did not look at my mother’s house-never my father’s, though it had been his earnings that had paid for it. His earnings that had set me up, allowed me to raise two daughters on live modeling and occasional secretarial work. I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but just like my father, I had seen the yawning tide that was my mother’s need and fallen in. Jake would say I had dived in, that it had been my choice to return.
Mental illness had the unique ability to metastasize across the generations. Would it be Sarah? Would it be tiny Leo? Sarah seemed like the most obvious candidate, but that didn’t mean much. And always, always, it had been left undiscussed, as if the geographical cure that Emily had taken would be enough. But I had tried that myself. I thought Madison, Wisconsin, would mean escape, but it did not. Nor did marriage or motherhood. Or murder.
I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother’s front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they’d first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father’s life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop. Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch’s death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge. Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.
I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.
“What do you remember?” she had pressed me.
“Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time.”
And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant-not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I’d initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.
“And the guns,” I’d murmured.
Natalie had merely nodded her head.
I heard my father say the universal words again: “It’s a hard day, sweetheart.”
It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown. My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.
He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest’s on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter. He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe’s Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.
By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun-if he could find it-for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.
My mother came out of the kitchen. She’d taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.
“I slept in,” my mother had told the police. “He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings.”
I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs. Castle.
He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.
“I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute.”
He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you done?” he’d asked her. The gun was already at his temple.
“I reached my arm up,” my mother told us-and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white-“but he…”
I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over her shoulder. I had vowed to hold her more from that day forward and to come and care for her, because we were what remained.
The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier’s on Route 29. I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.
Now as I left the border of my parents’ property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always-day in, day out-there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn’t the two of us sat together for years?
Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied. Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake-Jake had even seen her body and stayed.
There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton’s lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.
Unlike my mother’s house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton’s house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm. But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother’s backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.
The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father’s workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.