She has called work and said she will be late because of an “urgent family situation” and were truer words ever spoken? The situation goes to the heart of her family, and if the situation doesn’t seem urgent to anyone else-her mother has been dead for thirty years, her father has been lying to her for forty-five-she cannot imagine doing anything until she has this conversation. It took great resolve last night not to shake her father awake and demand to speak to him then and there. She has not slept at all, and she snapped at the twins throughout the morning routine, then snapped at their babysitter for being all of five minutes late.
And yet her father, the true object of her wrath, is unrepentant, even if he cannot meet her gaze.
“Lu, you were never going to have a mother. Adele was not capable of taking care of anyone, including herself. She wasn’t fit to live outside an institution.”
“But to lie to your children and say that she was dead-”
“She was, in a sense. She attempted suicide several times. In 1985, she managed to slit her wrists with a knife she conned a staff person to smuggle in. If you want to berate me for something, then focus on the eight years that I lived in denial of the fact that my wife was severely mentally ill, the terror that her disorder visited on your brother. The day after you were born, she had a full-blown psychotic episode and attempted to kill herself for the fourth or fifth time. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing at Johns Hopkins. And, as far as I knew, she was to spend the rest of her life there. I tried to visit her once or twice, but she was truly a hopeless case. It did no good. For either of us.”
“But-the death certificate says she died in Spring Grove? How did she end up there?” Spring Grove was the state psychiatric hospital in Catonsville. Her mother had been perhaps ten miles from her family through much of Lu’s childhood.
“I don’t know. I gave your grandparents power of attorney. They were responsible for her care.”
“They blackmailed you,” says Lu. True, she has blackmail on the brain, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Her father was and is a circumspect man. He would have agreed to any condition if it meant keeping this secret.
“It was never that-coarse. But we did reach an agreement. They would keep her in the hospital if they could have power of attorney. They were wealthy people, better able to care for her than I was. Our insurance was running out-And, as far as I knew, she was being cared for. I think she may have been switched to Spring Grove after their deaths. I don’t know.”
“Why did you tell AJ and not me?”
“I didn’t. He also thought she was dead. Then he became very depressed while at college. I thought I owed it to him to know about the family history. The children of suicides are so much more likely to commit suicide.”
“Only she didn’t succeed until AJ was a year out of college,” Lu points out. “And she was-what was her diagnosis?”
“When she was first diagnosed, in her teens, they said it was schizophrenia. I’ve come to believe it was probably what we’d call bipolar disorder now. She had stunning mood swings, but she also was delusional at times. We had no hope that she could ever live outside a hospital setting. She was beset by paranoia, incapable of recognizing those who loved her and cared for her. You have to remember, Lu. Your brother knew her, lived with her for eight years. Eight fraught, difficult years. I owed him the truth because it helped him make sense of his childhood.”
Isolated events are connecting in Lu’s memory. This is why AJ was worried about having a child. It’s why he didn’t want to use his own sperm. And it was why her father and brother didn’t seem overly concerned when she had to have a hysterectomy in her late twenties. To their way of thinking, she dodged a bullet.
“What about me? Why wasn’t I owed the truth?”
“I suppose you were.”
His ready agreement deflates her. Nothing defangs a good rage quite like the other person admitting that you’ve been wronged. “I rationalized, as people do. One, you never knew her. Why not let you have a mother you could mourn. Two-I didn’t sense any of that melancholy in you. You’re tough, grounded, my little pragmatist. But as AJ got older, he was prone to depression. He was in a very dark place for a while there, during college. I kept it from you at the time, but he almost dropped out of Yale freshman year. So I told him everything-that his mother was still alive, but quite ill. When she finally killed herself five years later, I wondered if I had made the right choice after all.”
“Did you ask AJ not to tell me?”
“No. I told him only that I preferred to share the story with you when the time seemed right, and he agreed. Then I kept putting it off.”
All the family legends are unraveling in her head. What was true? Fact: Her mother was beautiful; Lu has seen the pictures. Fact: Her mother died. Everything else is now up for review. She thinks about her mother in this very house, her alleged hatred of light, which now streams into their home from all angles. Who was Adele Closter Brant?
“Did she ever hold me?” Lu asks her father. “Even once?”
“I’m sure she must have,” he says. His words are less than persuasive.
Fifteen years. Her mother lived for fifteen years after Lu was born. Yet-she was not inclined to be Lu’s mother. Her father gave his children a myth in place of a parent. Two different myths. For young AJ, the story, eventually, was that the woman who had become increasingly unreliable around him had gone into a hospital and never come home. For Lu, it was even simpler. This beautiful woman gave birth to you and now she’s gone. If this is grief, it’s an odd kind of grief, mourning the loss of a lie, the end of a fantasy. Lu might as well cry for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
She wondered if AJ ever confided in Noel. The boy with the absent father had zeroed in on their missing mother that very first day. Norma Talmadge, he had said right before he broke the desk. Where is she buried? What had come between Noel and AJ? He stopped talking to me, AJ said at his funeral. Did the others know what happened?
But Lu has no more time for her family’s mysteries. Work calls, literally. Della is trying to put out any number of fires, and Lu needs to be there, now. She goes to get dressed, frustrated. Her father’s apology was too ready, too easily given. He doesn’t believe he was in the wrong. She’s glad she knows, but it makes her feel odd about her father. Lots of people like to proclaim melodramatically that so-and-so is dead to them. Her father carried through, killing loved ones who became problematic. First he cut his ties to his own parents, then his wife, his in-laws. Why did he find it preferable to end relationships so definitively? What would happen if Lu or AJ ever disappointed him profoundly?
JUNE 27
The revelations about her mother blindside Lu, throw a long shadow over a scorching, relentless June that, after a brief retreat into jacket weather, doubles down on heat and humidity. These are vicious days, Lu thinks, in every sense. Baltimore is experiencing homicide numbers that haven’t been seen since the early days of the crack epidemic. Even Howard County’s homicides for 2015 double-to two.
Lu decides, after much back-and-forth, to take the new case, but only because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is gun-shy after the Rudy “incident.” This one is a domestic, a term she hates. Domestic violence may not be an oxymoron exactly, but the term mitigates murder, as if death at the hands of a former loved one is gentler. It’s hard to imagine a stranger doing something worse to this woman: her ex-husband, returning their nine-month-old after his weekend visit, shot the baby’s mother in the forehead when she asked for her support check. He now claims he was driven to the act by her divorce attorney’s demands. The case against him is so easy that Lu worries it is beneath her, a dunker she ought to hand off to Andi or another deputy. She would be happy to plead it out. Ah, but a man who has the ego to think he can end a person’s life because he doesn’t like the terms of their divorce also has the ego to demand “my day in court.” This phrase, my day in court, comes up so often that Lu feels as if she’s dealing with a demented bride. My day, my day, my day, my day. He believes that he is the wronged party, that all he needs is a venue to tell his story and everyone will agree he had no choice. Okay, sir, you shall have your day. In fact you might have as many as four days in court and then you will have many, many, many days in prison to think about your day.