Julie giggled. “If we didn’t have heads, we couldn’t eat. Is Gramma going to have cookies?”
Julie must have been thinking of my mother’s famous soft, melt-in-your-mouth ginger cookies. I figured that Mom hadn’t even had time to unpack the cookie sheets, let alone bake anything on them. “I don’t know, Julie. But we could stop at the grocery store and get some pizza.”
“Yay, pizza!” Dylan lived for pizza.
“Pepperoni!” chimed in Sean. “No mushrooms.”
“Abby likes mushrooms,” said Julie. “Don’t you, Abby?”
I felt as if I’d stepped into a time capsule and been whisked back forty years. As I drove south on I-97 listening to the happy patter and good-natured squabbling of the children, I recalled wondrous cross-country trips as the U.S. Navy moved us from one duty station to another. Sometimes Daddy would hitch up a trailer to our big Chrysler and drag it behind. We’d camp in national parks along the way-Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite. I smashed my finger in a door at the Tetons and bled all over my new plaid shirt. Mother washed it out in a tub of cold water, using an old-fashioned corrugated washboard. Funny the things you remember.
Sometimes we’d pull off the road where a flashing neon sign announced “Vacancy” and “Free TV,” and, if we were really lucky, “Heated Pool.” We loved staying in inexpensive motels where my sisters and I would get a room of our own. With our parents locked safely behind the connecting door, we’d watch TV late into the night, falling asleep while the black-and-white images still flickered on the cheap knotty-pine paneling.
“The Doorknob to Hell,” a small voice intoned from the backseat. We were heading east on Rowe Boulevard, just approaching the Naval Academy stadium where a water tower shaped like a golf ball on a tee towered over the parking lot.
I glanced into the rearview mirror and tried to catch Dylan’s eye. “Who told you that, Dylan?”
“Nobody. Looks like a doorknob is all.”
“Yeah,” Sean agreed. “There was this giant…” and the twins launched into an improbable story involving dinosaurs, devils, and underground caverns, interrupting each other to heap one extravagant detail upon another until Julie clamped both hands over her ears and even I screamed for mercy. But in the left-turn lane at Taylor Avenue, waiting for the light, I looked back over my shoulder toward the stadium. The kid was right. Darn thing did look like a giant doorknob.
Ignoring our pleas, Sean reached the climax of his story and began making woo woo noises and waggling his fingers at his sister.
“Make him stop, Aunt Hannah! He’s scaring Abby!”
The light turned green just then, of course, so I couldn’t deal with Sean until we had pulled into the parking lot at Graul’s Market.
I unbuckled my seat belt and swiveled around. “If you can’t behave yourself, Sean Patrick, I’ll have to leave you in the car while the rest of us go shopping.”
I wouldn’t have, of course, but Sean didn’t know that. He hung his head until his dimpled chin touched his chest, tucked his hands snugly between his knees, then looked up at me through white-blond lashes. “Can I pick out the pizza?”
“You can each pick out a pizza.” Auntie Hannah wasn’t usually so generous. I just wasn’t in the mood for any hassles. Exhausted with worry and racked by guilt, I could focus only on getting to my parents’, anxious to find out if my passion for truth had ruined my sister’s life.
A few minutes later, I paraded into the supermarket, three perfectly behaved children in tow. It was too good to last. Dylan wanted to take the shopping cart and tear through the aisles like Mario Andretti, but I nipped his racing career in the bud by putting him in charge of my purse, a large bookbaglike satchel that contained everything I own. He hung it around his neck like a feedbag. At the checkout, he reached in and solemnly extracted a twenty-dollar bill from my coin purse and handed it to the cashier. Sean, meanwhile, correctly pegging me as a softie, had selected two candy bars and tried to slip them into the shopping cart when he thought I wasn’t looking. Julie, ignoring us all, danced Abby up and down the tabloid magazine racks. Abby laid a noisy kiss on Leonardo DiCaprio, then moved on to smooch with Bill Clinton. Cheeky little rabbit. I had forgotten how it was, shopping with kids.
Back in the car, the children were strangely subdued, and I wondered if they were worrying about their mother or had simply run out of gas. By the time we reached the spot where the road forks left to Providence and right to the Naval Academy golf course, Sean and Dylan had fallen asleep with chocolate on their lips and the bag of groceries sandwiched between them.
I pulled into the drive behind my father’s black Lincoln and set the brake with relief. Paul’s blue Volvo was parked on the street in front of the house next door. “We’re here, sports fans!” I reached back to unbuckle Julie, stepped out onto the driveway, then pushed my seat forward so the kids could get out. As Sean started to run off, I grabbed him by the hood of his jacket. “Not so fast, big fella. Carry the bag for me, will you?”
He wrapped thin arms around the bag in a bear hug and plodded up the walk. “Help, Aunt Hannah! I can’t see!”
I flipped down the automatic door lock and smiled after my nephew, as he staggered with slow, exaggerated Frankenstein steps up the walk, acting for all the world as if the bag weighed fifty tons. How could someone as screwed up as my sister Georgina have managed to raise such sweet kids? Oh, Lord! What if she had killed her therapist? What if she went to jail? I couldn’t imagine Scott handling the kids. Especially Julie. Inside that clever head of hers wheels were turning, measuring, weighing, taking everything in. And that defiant little chin, just like our Emily. At least Emily had turned out all right-eventually-although there had been times when she was in high school when I would gladly have strangled her. I shuddered, remembering Dr. Sturges’s distorted face. Not nice, Hannah. You shouldn’t joke about stuff like that.
I stepped through the door the kids had left open. Amid stacks of packing boxes still piled in the entrance hall, Paul greeted me with a hug and a soft kiss, his lips lingering on mine just long enough that I began to forget where I was and what brought me here. “Hold that thought,” I whispered against his ear. “Right now I have to cook up a few pizzas for lunch. Want some?”
“Pepperoni, no mushrooms?” Paul asked, hopefully.
“Pepperoni, no mushrooms.”
Paul touched my lips with his index finger. “I love it when you sweet-talk me like that.” A long, satisfying minute later, he followed me into the kitchen where Sean had abandoned the grocery sack, leaning crookedly against the refrigerator door.
Paul tore open the pizza boxes while I fiddled with the high-tech dials and buttons on Mother’s new stove, trying to get the oven to turn on. “Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked.
“In the living room. Watching TV. They were waiting for the news, at least that’s what they were doing until the recent invasion of adoring rug rats.”
I rummaged through the cabinets, looking for something to bake the pizzas on. “What a mess! How are they taking this?”
“Neither one’s saying much. Could be shock, I suppose. Your dad’s wearing a hole in the carpet with his pacing while your mother’s keeping a stiff upper lip. She’s confident it will all turn out to be a colossal mistake.”
I found the cookie sheets-Mother had unpacked them, after all-and Paul slid the rock-hard pizzas onto them. While we waited for them to bake, I quietly brought Paul up to speed on the events of the past twenty-four hours and my role in them. I was relieved when he hugged me and told me that he thought I had done the right thing by telling the officers the truth.