“You think Dad was trying to tell me something?” I asked him finally.
“How so?” Kurt said.
“About Jenny having a point. And that business about not assigning blame. He can be so fucking cryptic at times, especially since his open-heart.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Kurt replied. “But, no, I don’t think he was sending out any secret messages. Just don’t rush into anything.”
“Meaning the lawsuit? Meeting with this lawyer Edmund’s lined up?”
“Yeah. You want my opinion? I don’t think you’re ready. Jenny or you. You know how Eddie gets—everything’s got to be ASAP. Well, it doesn’t. You and Jenny need to come down from this. You need to—what does Tessa call it?—process the whole thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue it at some point down the pike maybe. I was there. And I’ve seen my share of accidents. I can vouch for it: something about the way that car seat came loose was fucked-up. But wait until the time’s right, until you two have had a chance to talk it all through. And I would definitely not go doing anything behind Jenny’s back.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re right. But you don’t think Dad was trying to say like—that maybe I’m the one to blame?”
“How the hell did you hear that? I sure didn’t.”
“Yeah, well. I had been drinking. You know, I keep thinking about that, keep wondering if—”
“No way, Cal. You blew like a .03 on the BAC at the hospital. That’s just about dead sober in my book.”
“I don’t remember taking a breath alcohol test. When did that happen?”
Kurt glanced over at me through the darkness and then back to the road ahead.
“When we got to the hospital. In the ER. It’s standard procedure. You were still pretty out of it. You had a concussion. People sometimes have whole hours at a time wiped right out.”
“I remember enough that you wouldn’t let Tyler Breath-alyze me at the scene. And it was over an hour, nearly two, between my last beer and the ER. So you probably figured I’d be just about sobered up by then.”
“What’s going on with you?” Kurt asked, turning into our drive. He pulled up by the back entrance but kept the engine running. “You actually trying to say you think you’re responsible for what happened? Because if you are—I’ll tell you right now that that’s total bullshit. God—or whoever the hell’s in charge here—has a plan for each of us, even if at times it seems really cruel. It’s not going to do you or Jenny any good if you start playing these kinds of stupid mind games. Understand me? What you need to think about now is how to help Jenny get through this, how you both can come out of this stronger and better people.”
I want to believe what Kurt said. And most of the time I’m able to. It’s usually only late at night, after Jenny’s gone up to bed, that I begin to think about how Kurt has always protected me. He shielded me from bullies when I was boy, helped me toughen up for high school sports, pushed me to hang out with the kids my age he thought had their shit together. He also taught me by example how to play it straight, stay strong, be a guy other people can count on. And how to avoid getting taken in by liars and users, and even—without ever saying it out loud—how I should keep a wary eye on Edmund. But then, too, I know he loves me, perhaps in the way only siblings can. I’m a pretty genial guy, but if anyone ever hurt Kurt in any way, I’d probably want to kill the person. I think he feels the same way about me. So what’s that say exactly about his ability to judge me—innocent or not?
I went back to work a couple of days after the funeral. An hour after I walked in the door, Ravitch called to say the project was still on. So at least Kurt and I have our hands full deciding on the crew, ordering materials, applying for the permits and insurance. But I feel like I’m just going through the motions. It’s like a big part of my brain is out of commission, like I’m still suffering from that concussion. I have to keep consciously reminding myself to do the simplest things: turn the key, step on the gas, downshift, brake. I borrowed Dad’s ancient Oldsmobile convertible until we can decide what to do about a new car, and each time I glance into the rearview mirror my heart stops.
I see Betsy everywhere. She’s in the kiddie seat of a stranger’s shopping cart at the Price Chopper, or riding on someone’s shoulders into the Covington Public Library, or running crookedly in a gaggle of other kids across the baseball field where she spent the last hours of her life. I cry at every excuse and for no reason at all. I can’t concentrate for more than a minute or two on the newspaper, or a book, or the evening news. My mind keeps wandering. At first, I didn’t know where. I’d just find myself snapping back from some trancelike state. But I can remember fragments—like bits and pieces of a dream—and I’m beginning to suspect that I’m drifting back again to the moments right after the Jeep rolled over. When Betsy’s fate was still undecided.
Kurt must have said something, because everyone’s been going out of his or her way to make it clear that I shouldn’t in any way blame myself for what happened. My mother. Tessa. Dad. Even Edmund’s wife, Kristin, gave me a call at the end of my first week back at work.
“You know, I looked up the meaning of ‘fox’ in my compendium of symbols,” she told me. Kristin leavens her lack of humor and perfectionism with an avid interest in the occult and new age spirituality. “The Chinese connect the animal to the afterlife. Apparently, a fox sighting is considered a signal or message from the world of spirits.”
On one level I’m touched by these assurances; on another I wonder why they have to be made at all. Why the need to declare my innocence unless there’s actually some question about my guilt? The only person who hasn’t broached the subject of my blamelessness is the one I need to hear from most. In fact, she avoids all discussion of the accident itself. That whole hour or two from the time I left with Betsy in the Jeep to the moment I met Jenny at the hospital seems to be off-limits. It’s as if Jenny is insisting on a kind of mutual amnesia—as if she’s decided to appropriate the dreamlike oblivion of my own concussed state of mind.
We can talk about how much we both miss our baby. We can discuss Betsy’s funny, rambunctious personality. Her stubbornness, her determination. We read aloud to each other from the letters and e-mails our friends and family have sent. Nightly, we’ll sit together in front of the Mac computer in the great room and click through our collection of photos, laughing and crying. We can even go over the events of the funeral and burial. The way Jenny’s dad, after his rigid dictums about sanctity and propriety, had the good grace to let his voice quaver and then break on the final benediction. How Jude, ten minutes late to the church, wept loudly straight through the service and internment, probably the only one in the entire congregation who had never actually met the person she was mourning with such typical Jude-like self-absorption and theatrics.
But Jenny doesn’t want to hear about the accident itself. She’ll cut me off when I mention how the last thing I saw before the fox running in front of us across the road was Betsy laughing—or how a part of me still feels trapped upside down in the Jeep on the side of the road.
“No, Cal, please!”
Jenny will shake her head. Stand up. Leave the room. And there I am alone in front of the computer with a shot of Betsy taken last Christmas filling the screen. She’d pulled tinsel from the Christmas tree and draped it around her shoulders like a fancy shawl. I remember taking the photo: her head turned slightly away from me, toward the kitchen where her mother had just called out:
Cal! Get that stuff off of her right now! I told you it’s a choking hazard!
I think what a cautious, anxious mother Jenny had been. She’d seen danger lurking around every corner. I’d been just the opposite: tossing Betsy up in the air, running with her on my shoulders, pushing her on the swings as high as she could go. Driving fast down a back road, windows open, breeze whipping at my daughter’s curls. I tell myself that even if I’d done things differently—drunk less, gone slower—it would have turned out the same. I
reassure myself with Kurt’s comment about God’s plan. Or what Kristin had said about the fox being a messenger from the spirit world. Fate in the form of a red blur with a whitish tail, racing across the road at just that juncture, at just that moment, and then escaping into the woods without a backward glance.
6
Jenny
Cal first mentioned Daniel Brandt a week or so after Horigan Builders broke ground for the Ravitch place. It was early May. I was spending most of my time in the garden, digging up the old overgrown beds that Cal and I inherited with the house. He must have understood that gardening was therapeutic for me on some level because, unlike Tessa and Jude, who kept dropping by to check up on me, he left me alone to work outside as much as I wanted. It was still daylight at seven when Cal came home, popped open a beer, and stood on the back porch watching me spade around a woody spirea I was planning to transplant the next day.
“Need any help?” he asked me. “That looks like quite a job.” We’ve become very solicitous and polite with each other, like two patients in a convalescent home.
“No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m about to quit for the day anyway.” It really was pretty grueling work: the soil around the shrub was congested with rock rubble and ingrown roots. I had to jump up and down on the spade, trying to force it down through the unyielding layers. But it was this kind of intense effort and concentration that was keeping me sane. I was going to bed exhausted at night, my muscles screaming but my mind nearly blank.
“We met with the landscape architect today,” Cal told me. “Daniel Brandt. Ravitch was thrilled that he agreed to do the job. He’s supposed to be some kind of big deal. He’s won all sorts of awards.” I detected a definite “but” in Cal’s voice.
“So?” I asked. “What’s he like?”
“It was a little weird,” Cal said, setting his beer can down on the porch railing. “I felt that I knew him from somewhere. That we had this kind of connection. I don’t really know how else to explain it. I kept trying to figure out where we could have met before. I probably annoyed him with all my questions. But he’s new to the area. So there’s no real chance our paths would have ever crossed. I’m thinking now that he maybe just reminds me of someone I know.”
“Too bad you can’t use Frank,” I said. Cal usually recommends my old employer Frank Pellani for landscaping work. “But I guess you’re stuck with this new guy if Ravitch wants him to do the job.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know,” Cal replied. “It might be interesting to work with somebody new. He comes across as very buttoned-up—and sort of cool. Maybe I could learn a thing or two from him.”
“Great,” I said, though Cal’s reaction surprised me a little. He generally makes a point of being loyal to people he works with, but he seemed so willing to bypass Frank this time. And “buttoned-up”? Since when has Cal considered that a good trait in another person? But I let the subject slide. We’re doing that a lot lately. Avoiding sources of friction or unease. Steering clear of people and situations that might make either one of us uncomfortable. He’s finally stopped trying to talk to me about the accident itself. And, thank God, the subject of suing Gannon Baby Products has been dropped. I’m the only one who knows it probably wasn’t the manufacturer’s fault. But I can’t tell even Cal what I believe might really have happened. I can hardly admit it to myself. I’m able to think back to the final moments with the seat belt, the weight of the metal buckle in my palm, the coolness of its surface on a hot day. But I can never seem to get past that. And my thoughts cycle back so often to that last clear moment that I’m beginning to fear I could lose even that, rework it one too many times, and end up destroying the few fragile threads that still connect me to my former, blameless self.
Maybe that’s why I’m discovering that Jude is one of the few people I can tolerate being around these days. She’d been gone for several years by the time I was pregnant with Betsy, and she wasn’t here when my baby was born. She’d never known my daughter—or seen me as a mother. So she has no real sense of the gaping hole at the center of my life right now. With Jude I can revert to a former version of myself, one where I outwardly appear to be pretty much a whole person again.
It helps, too, that Jude’s so self-involved. She’s not constantly asking me in hushed tones how I’m doing like so many women I know do, or giving me those long, meaningful looks and heartfelt hugs. I can hardly stand to be in the same room with Tessa these days; her sympathy and concern are so overwhelming. It feels like just an added burden to what I already have to carry.
And there’s something else about Jude that I know makes no logical sense, but she reminds me so much of Betsy: stubborn, brashly confident, and yet playful and mischievous in a way that I could never be.
“I decided to take it upon myself to clean out the Reverend’s basement,” she announced a few days after Cal first mentioned Daniel Brandt. Jude often referred to our father as “the Reverend” or “His Holiness” when we were growing up. I think she hoped that poking fun at his uncompromising authority would diminish it and somehow help to dispel his power over us. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and she was stretched out on one of our lawn chairs, stripped down to her bra and jeans, a glass of iced tea resting on her exposed stomach. From the three photos we have of our mother, we know that Jude takes after her: redheaded, lean, with the long, attenuated limbs of a dancer. Though Jude’s always been a tomboy: full of energy, but clumsy and accident-prone.
I’d taken up most of the old flagstone patio by then and was stacking the slabs in the wheelbarrow. My hands and knees were caked with dirt. I’d decided just that morning to lay in a pathway, utilizing these stones, up the old haying field that rises to the north of the house, at the top of which I planned to eventually install a gazebo. A beautiful teak model had caught my eye at Pellani’s Garden Center early this spring. Betsy seemed to have liked it, too, grabbing onto the wooden railings as she circled the octagonal interior. I decided it would make a great playhouse for her when she got a little older. And I could see her at fifteen or so, sitting next to a boy in the gazebo, being kissed for the first time. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I also pictured her getting married under its wooden cupola one day. I know Cal thought I was crazy when I suggested we bury Betsy there, but it felt so right to me. I’m not new agey or anything, like Kristin, but the top of that hill is one of three or four places where I feel my daughter’s spirit hovering. I can so easily imagine her running full tilt down through the field of wildflowers—and into my arms.
“I was thinking that I could turn part of the basement into a workshop,” Jude went on. My sister collects odd-lot pieces of chintz and printed fabric and sews them into quilts, pillows, and kitchen mitts, which she sells at craft fairs. “Plus I guess I was hoping to find a little corner of that house where I could make a mess. The place is like a fucking museum, Jen. Everything in its little anal place. Anyway, I received the blessing of His Holiness to move things around down there. Guess what I found?”
Jude was shielding her eyes from the sun, waiting for me with a knowing smile when I looked up and over at her. The two of us have been searching for clues to our mother’s abrupt disappearance from our lives for almost as long as I can remember. Her name was Lillian. I think my father used to call her Lilly. All I know is that she ran off with a man—a church consultant—who’d been working with my father to try to build up his congregation. I’m not sure how I came to learn that; it’s just embedded in my memory somehow.
I was eight when she left and, though Jude can’t recall a thing about her, I remember her vaguely. But even the few memories I have of her—standing in cutoff jeans in front of the sink, smoking a cigarette (I’m certain without my father’s knowledge, let alone approval) while reading me a bedtime story, waving to me from the back of a motorcycle—seem to me both out of focus and larger than life. They’re like big blowups of photographs where the details have blurred, the eyes and mouths unreadable smudges. Especi
ally now, since Betsy’s death, I resent how insubstantial these images are, how little I have to hold on to.
“Gotcha!” Jude said, laughing. “Oh, Jen, you should see your face! No, it has nothing to do with Mom, except in a roundabout sort of way, I suppose. Are you ready for this? I found about a two years’ stash of old Playboy magazines! They’re in perfect condition and—this is almost too good to be true—they’re arranged in chronological order! Can you believe it? The lecherous old hypocrite! I almost lugged them upstairs and called him on it. But then I was afraid he’d change his mind about letting me have the basement.”
I didn’t smile back. I was stung that she’d tricked me into thinking she’d discovered something about our mother. Angry that she seemed to think I was in any kind of emotional shape to respond lightheartedly to her kidding around. Jude has always had a way of making me feel older than my years—more responsible than I ever wanted to be. She remains so immature and needy. She surely must know that the bottom has fallen out of my world, but she behaves as though nothing much has changed with me. She still seems to see me in the role I’ve always played for her: the reliable, uncomplaining caregiver. Would my sister ever grow up—and finally see me as a person separate from herself? I needed her now, not the other way around.
“Which two years?” I asked her, turning back to my work.
“What?” She seemed surprised that I wasn’t sharing in her amusement.
“You said there were two years’ worth. Do you remember which years?”
“Sometime in the eighties, I think. There was a lot of big hair—along with plenty of other big body parts, let me tell you. The whole thing really creeped me out. You know what I’d love to do? I’d love to donate them to the church sale this summer. Courtesy of the Reverend Karl Honegger.”
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