The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  Oh God! I had thrown them into the Ohio River.

  “Mrs. O’Neill? Mrs. O’Neill? Laura!”

  That minute, that very second, the tape started running again. The woman looked down at the muddy waters, where flashes of light clothing popped in and out of the water. The tugboat that had, by providence, been in the area was bobbing in the waves. The water was choppy, an angry brown in color and running fast. It had been raining a lot, off and on. The Ohio River was full of debris, huge tree limbs and litter, and undercurrents were strong enough to grab a man’s toe and pull him under. But still, a man, a savior, jumped in to rescue the little girl. And the other annoying man would not let her cleanse Debora, so what else was she to do? She laughed at him and tried to jump in too. She wanted to die. To protect her girls from the growling and the lights. And from her. Most of all, from her.

  But she didn’t die. She’d been rescued.

  After trying to kill her children.

  Chapter 38

  Laura

  Laura’s journal, blue cover, date scratched out:

  (I am writing this under duress)

  Dr. C is back. He’s different. He looks at me different now. His voice sounds odd, strangled, as if there’s something cutting off the airflow. Or maybe it’s because I’m different. I tried to kill my children. That makes me unique. In a bad way.

  “Laura, how are you feeling today?”

  I shake my head. I’ve decided not to speak anymore. The words get stuck in my throat like fish bones. I’m afraid I’ll choke.

  He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, just looks at me, his blue eyes bloodshot and swollen. He feels sorry for me, I know he does. I feel sorry for myself.

  “Laura . . .” He holds up my diary, the navy-blue one. “I want to help you. I want to find out what’s making you sick.”

  I shake my head again. I write: BORN SICK.

  He smiles slightly. My heart warms. I want to make this man smile. He’s nice. I feel bad that I’ve made him feel bad. He flips through the pages of the diary and then stops. I know what page he’s on. He takes a breath, then holds up the book.

  “Laura, will you tell me what this is.”

  NO.

  “I’d . . . really like for you to tell me. I have my own theory, but it’s probably wrong.” His voice is firm. “I need for you to tell me. Please. I need to hear your voice, Laura, you understand. I know that you understand.” He taps the page and turns the notebook around again. “What is this?” And in a soft voice, its volume so low that it’s almost a whisper, he asks, “Who is this?”

  I shake my head and put the pencil down. I am not saying that.

  Dr. Christiansen bites his lip and sets his notebook and pen on the table. Then he reaches across and picks up my hands. His blue eyes—they’re almost pink now—they are sad looking, so weary, like the hymns they sing in church. My soul is weary. I know what that is, to be weary. A tiredness that seeps into the bones, travels through the veins, and penetrates the soul. It breaks my heart to see him like this.

  “Laura, this is serious. And I won’t lie to you by saying that if you speak, this . . . darkness will go away. We just don’t know. But I will tell you that you have to acknowledge . . . it. And by doing that, maybe we have a chance to help you. But you have to speak. You have to give . . . the darkness a name.” He sighed. “Can you . . . will you do that?”

  I let go of his hand and pick up the pencil.

  RATHER NOT.

  Dr. C sighs again. “Okay.” He pushes back from the table, unfolds himself, and stands up. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone look so sad. Except for Luke, of course.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow, Laura, if that’s all right.” He walks to the door, his shoulders drooping, his string-bean frame all legs, skin, and bones. I feel so sorry for him.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  Dr. Christiansen stops and turns around. His mouth is gaping. He looks hilarious, except there’s nothing hilarious about any of this. He isn’t laughing, and neither am I. He’s looking at me as if I’ve just landed from the moon, as if he’s never seen me before. Maybe he hasn’t, not really. But I want him to understand, to be certain that he knows what I am saying to him.

  “It. Is. ME.”

  * * *

  Dee Dee’s hand was trembling. She closed the notebook and set it gingerly on the Ping-Pong table. Her mother never really came “home” again; she just went from crisis to crisis. Her body went in and out of treatment centers and hospitals. Her mind traveled to a place that only she could explore, secured by a gate to which only she had the key.

  It was the first time in Dee Dee’s adult life that she had admitted—no, acknowledged—rationally and clear-eyed, through the lens of a grown-up, just what had been wrong with her mother. Even when Laura died—when Dee Dee and Deb were adults—even then she had processed her mother’s situation through a glass darkly, because it was, well, easier. It was softer, less embarrassing to say, “She’s sick. She’s ill,” with the grit and serrated edges of mental illness sanded away, or just plain obscured by the nearsighted fog of childhood.

  “Mommy’s sick.” The words she’d heard all of her life. She remembered her dad saying, “Yes, that was before your mother got so ill.” But Laura didn’t have cancer or ALS. She wasn’t “consumptive” like Victorian-era invalids, suffering silently (except for the coughing) and in ethereal beauty as written in historical novels. Laura was bipolar and fought a minute-by-minute battle with her own mind—Laura vs. “It,” twelve rounds, for fifty-three years, three months, and six hours. She’d died from a massive coronary, compounded by a stroke, perhaps a side effect of one or more of the psychotropic drugs she’d taken for decades. And when the fight was over, it was hard to know who’d won, Laura or “It.”

  Dee Dee picked up the notebook again to put it into the I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-to-do-with-this pile, then absently flipped through the blue-lined pages once more just in case she’d missed something. She had.

  January 13, 1996

  I’ve been drawing for hours. For days! It’s b-l-i-s-s! Joy! The wonder of it! All light. YES!

  The light’s fantastic in here. Brilliant. With all the shades I want and texture! What good is color without texture? Even the ceiling windows, some of them cracked (and grimy—I’d like to give them a good scrubbing), give off amazing light, and then the sun filters through, dropping a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, drops like rain. A head trip extraordinaire. Cool. Very cool.

  My pencil skates across the paper. I love this paper! It has texture too, it makes sound. As if it lives and breathes, speaks to me, tells me what it wants. It loves my pencil. I see the pictures so vividly. My daughters. It’s like working from a live subject, like I did in composition class in school. As if somehow I’ve time-traveled back and the girls are small again. Oh, they were darling. I see the scab where Debora sucked her thumb, and little Dee Dee didn’t want to smile because her front teeth were gone, taken by the Tooth Fairy (Haha). I told Luke to leave a dollar for each tooth. He told me that I was insane, then he stopped and said, “Laura, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.” Oh, Luke, I know what you mean.

  I draw on, using the picture in my mind. The girls were so adorable in the white dresses that Luke’s mother bought for them, their dark hair braided into Pippi Longstocking plaits that twirled upward. My brushes whish along, they’re magic. They move by themselves, I see them. It’s so perfect. Surreal and all mine. All quiet. No one talking to me. No one getting in the way. Just my breathing and the singing of the brushes and chalk and pencils as they sail across the paper, the traces forming my memories and one, especially, that is now so clear.

  I woke up, left Luke and the girls in the bed.

  Went to pee, looked out the window, porch lights here and there. It was early or maybe it was late, but it was dark, cool, October, and quiet. I love the quiet.

  I looked up and there it was, the moon, a crescent with a little halo! A nimbus moon holdin
g its own against the ebony sky, a sky too black for me to paint, and to the left, a star, and I wanted to hold on to that moment, that second, that heaven . . .

  And that’s when I realized . . .

  Heaven isn’t a place of clouds like pillows or gold-paved avenues where the souls of pious people stroll. (God, deliver us from pious people, right? They are boring.) Heaven is a moment like this one, one moment of clarity to realize that all you need is a good sleep. The feel of your lover’s hand against your cheek. The snoring of a sleeping child. Chocolate! Heaven is one stitch among many in a life, and it’s not easy to find, it hides. Because it’s only that moment, you only get a few. That moment of joy when you smile, you feel light, and you look at the brilliant moon and mysterious distant star and say thank you.

  It’s amazing. When the dark thing sleeps, I sneak out and feel grateful and sing and dance and see things that really are

  There

  And feel gratitude for the slivers and shards and microbes of heaven allowed me, for my exquisite Luke and my fearless Debora. For Dee Dee, she’s awake now, and her small, warm body nestles against mine, one of her wild runaway braids tickles my cheek. She picks her nose then uses the grubby little finger to point at the emerging moon.

  “Look, Mommy! A toenail!”

  And so it is.

  Amen.

  Chapter 39

  Dee Dee

  Elise picked up her wineglass, then set it down again. “Beautiful.”

  “She . . . had a way with words, you have to give her that,” Carmen commented.

  “She never spoke?” Elise asked.

  Dee Dee sniffed and shook her head. She blew her nose. “She rarely spoke. Dad said that in her mind, maintaining silence kept the . . .”

  “It,” offered Carmen.

  Dee Dee smiled slightly. “Yes. It. Mommy had rationalized that if she didn’t speak, then It couldn’t either. So even when she was well—relatively well—she was quiet. When we visited her . . .” Dee Dee’s voice broke. “She’d hug us and smile. She’d even laugh. But she didn’t speak. Not one word. Not to us, not to our dad.”

  “Do . . . do you remember . . .” Carmen stopped. “I’m sorry. That’s totally inappropriate.”

  Dee Dee closed her eyes. “No. It’s okay. Sometimes I think that I remember. But most of the time I realize that I don’t. I’ve had counseling up the wazoo, but . . .” She sighed. “You know, all I remember is Mom picking me up. After that, it’s a blur, then blank. Maybe—”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” Carmen interrupted. She took a sip of her cappuccino after blowing away the steam from the soup-bowl-size cup. “I think it’s overrated to remember everything. There might be a good reason to forget some things and remember others.”

  Elise nodded.

  “You’re right,” Dee Dee said.

  “Like my ex-husband, I acknowledge and then I forget,” said Carmen.

  The women laughed and the somber atmosphere faded.

  Elise reached out and picked up the small picture frame resting on the counter, within a nest of old Sunday newspapers and disintegrating grocery bags.

  “Just so you don’t forget this,” she said, looking at Dee Dee, holding up the picture. “This is your proof. This . . .” She looked down at the stack of mismatched diaries and journals. “These items should wipe away any notions you might have that your mother was so out of it that she forgot about you and Debora completely.” Elise looked at the painting, then passed it over to Dee Dee. “She loved you very much.”

  “She did,” Carmen chimed in.

  “Who would’ve thought . . .” Dee Dee murmured, running her hand across the worn-out flap of one of the cartons. “Talk about a Pandora’s box.”

  “After the woes and the evils and the sad things flew out of Pandora’s box to afflict the world, one small presence remained behind, hiding in a corner,” Elise commented.

  Dee Dee’s brows rose.

  Elise smiled. “Hope.”

  Dee Dee studied the little watercolor and smiled. And sings the tune—without the words . . . An image came to her—was it a memory or a wish? The scene was as vivid and coherent as this very second: she and Debora posing for their mother as she sketched them, smiling and blowing them kisses from behind her easel, the corners of her eyes crinkling as she worked, the funny faces that she made to hold their attention, flipping the pages off her huge sketch pad, lifting their chins, then kissing them on the tips of their noses and telling them . . .

  Dee Dee gasped. Her mother had spoken. Or was this just wishful thinking? But Dee Dee heard Laura’s voice in her head, low, alto, soft yet firm, a mother giving instruction to her children, the maternal authority in her tone.

  “Look at me, Deb, all right? Look at Mommy.”

  “Dee Dee, darling, is your nose running? Do you need a tissue? That’s a good girl.”

  Always balanced, a Zen master’s attention to design and simplicity, a portrait decades in the making. A background of two shades of blue, turquoise and sage-tinged, two arrangements of flowers, one a tall planter of lean, sparsely foliaged stems, the other delicate and abundant in a squatty vase set on the table: two of everything, and two little girls, dressed in white with blush-colored bows in gently curling black hair, the darkest color on the paper except for their eyes. Two little brown-skinned girls, alike but not identical, one slightly shorter and maybe younger, a little bit chubby, the other taller and leaner, the baby fat gone, and the younger one wearing a red ribbon around her waist. Dee turned the painting over and looked at what her mother had written on the back: “Love, Mother.”

  * * *

  “I’ll pick up the girls,” Dee Dee said.

  Lorenzo was reaching for the car keys. His hand froze in the air.

  Dee Dee smiled. “That way you can finish watching SportsCenter or Golf Last Week or whatever is on.”

  Her husband’s expression was equal parts grin and sneer. “Wrong on both counts. I was watching Curling Today on CBC,” he said.

  Dee Dee’s laughter almost choked her. “W-what’s CBC?”

  “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. What?” he exclaimed in response to her reaction of restrained hysteria. “You got something against Canada?”

  “No . . .” Dee Dee said, chuckling as she took the keys from his hand. “I . . . just didn’t know that you were into curling.”

  “Oh yeah,” Lorenzo said, kissing her on the cheek as he walked back toward the great room. “I’m big into curling. Love that sweeping action,” he added, demonstrating with comic results. “Hey, when you grab the girls, don’t let Phoebe forget her duffel bag. She left it at the gym last week. Those clothes have gotta be ripe by now!”

  Frances and Phoebe weren’t thrilled to see their mother in the car-pool line. Standing together, looking like near-matching bookends, they quickly exchanged glances when they realized that it was Dee Dee behind the wheel. Dee Dee suppressed a smile since, as far as Frances was concerned, she was supposed to still be in angry-parent mode.

  “Hey, Mom,” Phoebe said brightly as she clambered into the back seat, duffel bag in tow.

  “Mom,” Frances echoed cautiously, dumping her gear on the seat next to her sister. She climbed into the front seat.

  “Girls,” Dee Dee said in as neutral a tone as she could manage. She clicked on her turn signal and maneuvered into traffic. “How was practice?”

  The question provoked a detailed play-by-play response from Phoebe, who was beginning to enjoy the soccer that she’d avoided like the bubonic plague last school year. Frances, who’d been in practice on the high school field just opposite the middle school practice area, gave her standard response to parental inquiries: “It was fine.”

  “Good.” As Dee Dee turned onto the freeway, she glanced into the rearview mirror at her younger daughter. “I have something I want to tell you when we get home.”

  Frances came out of her usual slouch in the passenger seat and then looked over her shoulder at her sis
ter.

  Phoebe shook her head slowly, mouthed the words, You’re in trouble.

  “Me? Why?” Frances squeaked.

  “Both of you,” Dee Dee said, trying to keep amusement out of her voice. She knew that Phoebe was planning a fast exit the moment they got home.

  “What did I do?” her younger daughter whined.

  “No whining, Phoebe, and you didn’t do anything,” Dee Dee said. “I only want to talk with you. You and Frances.”

  “Talk . . . with us? What about?” Frances asked.

  This time Dee Dee did smile. “Geez! Frances! Talking with your mother is not a foreign concept. What have you miscreants been up to, you sound so suspicious? This is not the Spanish Inquisition. I only want to talk with you. About your grandmother.”

  Frances frowned. “About Grandma? Why, is she sick?”

  Dee Dee shook her head. “No, she’s not. And I’m not talking not about Grandma Davis.” Lorenzo’s mother was the only grandmother her girls had known personally. Dee Dee sighed. “I’m talking about your other grandmother, my mother. Laura.” Both of the girls formed an O with their lips.

  After they got home, Dee Dee positioned the eight-by-ten painting on a small easel stand and placed it on the kitchen island. The girls padded in together on bare feet, their hair damp from the shower, the smell of coconut and lavender perfuming the air.

  Frances picked up the picture. “Who’s this? Me and Bean Head?”

  Phoebe poked her in the side.

  “No, it’s me and Aunt Deb.”

  Frances’s teenaged nonchalance cracked. “Oh,” she said. “It’s good. It’s really good. Who painted it?”