The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “Hey there, soldier boy,” I hear my brother say as he approaches Andrew, his booming voice carrying over the noise of the crowd. Andrew introduces his uncle to his new friend, and my brother says, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch! Good god, how long has it been?” He shakes the man’s hand and pats him on the shoulder. They know each other? From business, must be. Donald does the tax returns for a lot of well-heeled businessmen. But still, it’s a coincidence. When I ask Mimsy if she knows him, she says no but that she only helps out at the office part-time.

  Now here comes Andrew. He greets his aunt, gives her a kiss. Then he turns to me. “Hey, Mom,” he says, holding out his arms. I’m so grateful for his embrace that I don’t want to let him go. But when I do, he says something about a surprise. That man who’s been shadowing him steps forward.

  “Hello, Annie,” he says. Bad teeth, salt and pepper stubble. I smile. Offer him a generic thank-you-for-coming. You’d think if he can afford to buy art from Viveca, he could get himself a decent haircut. “Long time no see, huh?”

  What? . . . Who?

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize your long-lost cousin?”

  Is it . . . ? No! Not here. Not today. Andrew’s saying something, but I can’t . . . Don’t react, Annie! Don’t lose it in front of all these people.

  “Kiss for the bride?” When he puts his hand on my shoulder and leans in, puckering, my head jerks back and hits the wall behind me. But it’s no use. His lips land on mine, dirtying my kiss from Viveca. I look from Andrew’s bewildered face to Ariane’s. “Mama?”

  “It’s Kent,” Andrew says. “When I went back to the house for . . .” His lips are still moving, but what he’s saying is blocked out by a roaring in my ears. The floodwater rushing beneath us. . . . Then I’m back here at Bella Linda but everything has turned gray: Ariane’s bouquet, the chattering wedding guests. My mind has gone blank.

  He’s talking to Mimsy. “And then I was in sales for a while. Insurance. Got so many Salesman of the Month certificates that I started running out of wall space, heh heh.”

  I’m light-headed. Frantic. I can’t stay here, but I can’t leave. I have to protect my kids from him. I step forward, putting myself between him and Ariane. “Are you all right, Mama?” she asks me. “You look so pale.”

  “What? Yes, I’m . . . It’s just so hot in here. Why is it so hot?”

  “Gee, I was just thinking they should turn the air-conditioning down a little. I’m freezing.”

  “Oh. You are?” Where’s Viveca? Why is everything so gray?

  “Yeah, Donny and I shared a room when I went to live with them. But we were like night and day, us two. . . . The honor roll type. Mr. Popular. But I hated school. I was just barely scraping by.”

  “Do you want to get some air?”

  “Some air? Yes, okay. That’s a good idea.”

  “Want me to go with you?”

  No, I can’t risk that. I’m just barely holding it in. I can’t break down in front of my daughter. Or my son. But I have to get them away from him. What if he tells them? Is that why he’s come? To let out the secrets I’ve been so careful to—“Maybe . . . maybe you and Andrew can get me some water. I think if I had a little water.”

  She laughs, says she thinks she can handle getting a glass of water by herself. “Just go out on the veranda and I’ll bring it out to you.”

  “Isn’t that right, Annie?” he says. I can’t look at him, so I look at Mimsy. “I was just telling her what a peach your mother was. Aunt Sunny, man. After they made her, they broke the mold.” His voice: it’s the only thing about him that’s the same. “A crying shame what happened to her. And little Gracie, too.”

  Don’t look at me! Don’t say her name! Oh god, I’m going to heave. The room is spinning. I cover my mouth. Swallow back the vomit in my throat. Then I’m bumping past the guests, past a waitress holding a tray of—“Excuse me, please! Excuse me!” When I reach the pocket door that closes off the room, I claw at the handle. Throw it open with a bang and rush through the lobby, heading not toward the front door but toward the stairs. Is he following me? Don’t look back! Keep going! Get away from him! . . . When I reach the second-floor landing, I run down the hall to Viveca’s suite. The door is open. A maid is stripping the bed. “Go!” I shout.

  “Yes, ma’am. I just need to—”

  “Now!”

  I lock the door behind her. Rush into the bathroom and lock that door, too. Lean against it. Alone now, safe, I release my sobs. Take in gulps of air. Then I stagger over to the toilet and vomit into the bowl.

  I’m on the floor, whimpering, rocking. I’m six again, lying in the dark. I hear the click of my bedroom door. Feel him get into my bed with me. Feel his hands reach under my nightgown, his breath on the back of my neck. Don’t touch me. I won’t tell. I promise. Just don’t touch me.

  Someone’s calling my name from far away. I don’t answer. “Miss? Could you help us please?” It’s Viveca’s voice.

  “Yes, ma’am. I was finishing up the bed when she . . .”

  Then their voices are closer, inside the suite. Coming from the other side of the bathroom door. “Mama?”

  “Mom? What’s the matter?” Andrew’s voice.

  “Anna, it’s Viveca. Are you all right in there?”

  “Is he up here?”

  “Who, Mama?” Ari’s voice.

  “My . . . my cousin.”

  “No, Mama, it’s just us.”

  “Darling? We’re concerned. Please unlock the door.”

  I reach up behind me. My fingers find the windowsill and I pull myself off the floor. Go over to the door and stare at the knob. “Anna?” I watch my fingers turn the lock, twist the knob.

  They’re standing there, my three kids and Viveca. But they blur away and I’m back there again. . . . The roar of the water is in my ears, Gracie’s screaming. She’s cold and wet, and her body keeps stiffening, pushing against me. I can’t see Mama but I can hear her. “I can’t, Chick! I can’t.” Daddy shouts something to Kent and the two of them drop belly-down onto the roof. Kent grabs onto Daddy’s ankles and Daddy’s head and shoulders disappear over the edge. Then more of him. “Pull!” he keeps screaming. “Pull!” I scream, too, at Gracie. “Stop it! Stop squirming!” But she won’t stop. I’m staring so hard at my cousin and my father, Kent’s hands gripped around Daddy’s ankles, that I don’t even notice it at first: that my baby sister has stopped crying, stopped bucking and squirming. When I look down at her, she’s not there. My arms are empty. . . .

  And then I’m back again, looking at their worried faces. And I blurt it out. “It wasn’t him. It was me.” They stare at me, confused. “He didn’t drop her like we said. I did. She drowned because . . . because . . . I dropped her.”

  “Dropped who, Mama?” Ari says.

  “My baby sister. I was holding her and . . . and then she wasn’t in my arms anymore. She was in the water, getting carried away.”

  Viveca holds out her arms, and I step toward her. Fall against her and wail. If you ever tell them what we’re doing, then I’ll have to tell on you, Annie. They’ll find out what you did and . . . But he didn’t tell on me. I’ve just told on myself. What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize your long-lost cousin? Kiss for the bride? I’ve heard his voice all my life, but seeing him down there was a hundred times worse. He hadn’t died. He was back again, smiling, leaning in to kiss me again like . . . I couldn’t keep it in anymore. I had to tell.

  They lead me out into the suite, onto the bed. Viveca sits on one side of me, Ariane on the other. Marissa’s pulled up a chair. She’s facing me. Andrew’s standing behind her. Everyone’s waiting, looking confused. And so my long-ago memories of that terrible night tumble out: our plunge into the dark water, his pulling me from the back of the car onto that roof, the way she was bucking and screaming in my arms. “I was sopping wet. It was so cold. I think my hands must have gone numb because I didn’t even realize . . . not until . . .”

 
; “What water?” Marissa asks. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  It’s Andrew who answers her. “That flood they were in. The one her mother died in. And her sister.”

  “What sister? How did I not know she had—?”

  “Shut up,” Andrew says. “Let her talk.”

  Viveca takes my hand in hers. “Go on, sweetheart,” she says.

  “He said . . . He said, ‘Where’s Gracie?’ And then the roof started caving in under us, and he grabbed my hand and led me across it. Lifted me up into that tree.”

  Marissa’s mouth is gaping open. Ariane reaches over and brushes the hair off of my cheek. I take the tissues Andrew offers me and wipe my eyes. They have questions. Ask me for clarifications. “He told me he didn’t want me to get in trouble. That if he said he dropped her . . . I was so scared, and it was all so confusing. I don’t think I even realized . . . I just wanted my mother.”

  The kids, Andrew in particular, look like they’re in such pain that I have to keep looking away from them. I look, instead, at my hands, the fingers of one twisting the ring on the other—the ring Viveca slipped onto my finger downstairs before I realized who he was, that he had come to ruin our wedding. The one I finally face is Viveca. “Our beautiful day,” I tell her, sobbing. “I’m so sorry.”

  She takes me in her arms and holds me. Rocks me back and forth on the bed. “Does my brother know what’s going on?” I ask. Marissa says he doesn’t—that hardly anyone noticed. That she herself had no idea there was a problem until Ariane came and got her. “Good. Don’t say anything to Donald and Mimsy. I don’t want them to know. . . . Is he still down there?”

  “Uncle Donald?” one of them asks.

  “No. Him.” I can’t say his name. “I want him to go away.”

  They look at each other. Ariane says, “But, Mama, he came especially to see you. We can’t just tell him to leave.”

  “I can,” Viveca says. “Don’t worry, Anna. I’ll handle it.”

  I nod. “Thank you.” I look from Marissa to Ariane, from Ariane to Andrew. He’s the one who looks the most stricken.

  Viveca asks me if I can handle going back down and joining our guests once she gets him to go away. “They’ll be serving the luncheon soon. We can’t just abandon everyone.”

  I tell her I don’t think I can do it—that I’m too shaken up. “I just don’t trust myself. I’m sorry. I would if I could but—”

  “No, that’s all right. We can work around it. But I don’t want you to be alone up here either.”

  She makes a plan. Ariane will stay up here with me, and she, Marissa, and Andrew will go back down and carry on. A stomach flu, they’ll tell people. “It came on her out of nowhere. She’s sick as a dog, poor thing. Well, things happen. What are you going to do?”

  I ask the kids if they’re comfortable with that. Both of the girls nod. “Hey, I’m an actor,” Marissa says

  “Ari, you go down,” Andrew says. “I’ll stay with her.”

  She looks at me, then back at her brother. “Okay.”

  Before they head back down, Viveca gets me a glass of water and hands me another Xanax. “Here, darling. I think you should take one of these.” I take the capsule, a sip of water. She takes one, too. Takes a deep breath and puts on a smile. “Okay then,” she says. “We’ll see you a little later. You try and relax.”

  At the door, Marissa turns back and asks her brother if he needs something from the bar. “Yeah, bourbon. A double.”

  “No problem. Be right back.”

  After they leave, Andrew apologizes for bringing him here. “It’s just that last night after you and I were talking about him, and you said you’d lost track of him, I thought you’d want to see him, Mom. I didn’t know about . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t. How could you?” I ask him to please go over to the window. I need to make sure that Viveca has gotten him to leave.

  “Yeah, all right. Sure.” A few minutes later, he says, “Okay, there he goes. He’s walking down the driveway.”

  “Good,” I say. “Good riddance.”

  He looks from the window to me. “You know, Mom, I know his showing up brought all those bad memories back. I get that. But when you think about it, he was only trying to protect you when he said he dropped her.”

  “Protect me? Ha!”

  “I’m not saying he should have, necessarily, but think about it. There would have been all kinds of questions. And I mean, hey, you’d just lost your mom. He was probably just trying to spare you the third degree on top of—”

  “Bullshit! He made up that story so that—”

  Stop it, Annie! Shut your mouth!

  He comes over, sits down on the bed. “So that what?”

  I look away from him. “Nothing.”

  “No, what were you going to—?”

  “He used it against me.”

  “Used . . . ?”

  “Our secret.”

  “How? What do you mean?” I look back at him. “Jesus Christ, Mom, tell me. I’m just trying to figure this whole thing out.”

  He’s waiting, a plea on his face. “I . . . He made me do things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Honey, it’s too hard to . . . It was such a long time ago. But when I saw him down there today. When he leaned forward and kissed me . . .”

  “Did he molest you or something? Is that what you’re saying?” He waits. “Mom?”

  It’s no use. He’s guessed it. I can’t sit here and lie to him. “He said . . . he said that if they found out it was me who dropped Gracie, they’d take me away and put me in jail. And that it would be dark and cold. He said jails had rats in them, and that they’d come out at night and crawl all over me. Bite me.”

  “But dropping your sister was an accident, Mom. You said so yourself before: that it was cold, you were both sopping wet. That you got distracted watching them try to rescue your mother. I can see how, yeah, back then you might have been confused. Scared or whatever. But to keep it a secret all these years? Didn’t you ever say, hey, wait a minute—it wasn’t my fault. It was the circumstances. Nobody would have blamed me.”

  I nod. “I have told myself that, Andrew. Hundreds of times. But when you’re molested at that age, it leaves you with . . . You get stuck. Emotionally, I mean. So yes, as I got older, I could make that rational argument to myself. But my memories weren’t rational. They were emotional. A part of me has never stopped being that scared little girl who, if I tell, is going to be put in a jail cell with those rats.”

  “Yeah, but Mom . . . I mean, what were you? Six? Since when does a six-year-old go to jail?”

  “But that was the problem. I was so young that I believed him. My mother was gone, my father wasn’t coming home half the time. My brother was always busy with school. So a lot of the time, it was just the two of us in the house. Just me and him. It started during my bath time. He’d—”

  “What do you mean started? It happened more than once?”

  Is this real? Am I really telling him? “It went on for almost two years. It didn’t stop until the state pulled me out of the house.”

  “Two years,” he says. He gets off the bed, walks around the room repeating it. “Two years?” He comes back and faces me. “When you say he molested you, what . . . What . . . ?”

  I hear the sloshing bathwater, see him holding the washcloth. “I didn’t understand what was happening. Not at first anyway. He’d come into the bathroom while I was taking my bath and tell me he needed to show me the right way to wash myself. And it . . . went on from there. He’d get excited. Get into the bathtub with me. Tell me to touch it, kiss it.” He listens blank-faced. Keeps shaking his head from side to side, as if to shake off the ugly things I’m telling him. “I knew that what we were doing was bad, but that if I didn’t keep it a secret, he’d—”

  “Mom, don’t say ‘we.’ He’s responsible for what happened, not you.”

  I nod. Tell him I understand that now but that I didn�
�t back then—that “we” was the way he kept putting it. “And then . . . And then, he started sneaking into my room in the middle of the night.” His weight on the mattress wakes me up. I feel his hands under my nightgown. “And then one night, he turned me on my back. Got on top of me and—”

  “Mom, stop!” he shouts. “Just . . . stop it.” His face is flushed. He looks dazed. For the next few minutes, neither of us speaks. He just keeps shaking his head, blinking back tears. When I reach over and place my hand on his shoulder, he bats it away. Oh god, I should have spared him. Especially him. Why have I told Andrew of all people? He can’t even look at me now that he knows. Looks, instead, at his right foot, his shoe moving back and forth against the carpet. Oh god, my poor son.

  “Did they arrest him at least? After they found out?”

  “Honey, they didn’t find out. They took me out of the house because of my father, not him. Kent kept my secret and I kept his. Until right now. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

  His fists are clenched, his shoe keeps moving backward and forward. “It’s just so fucked-up that he got away with it all these years. Did what he did and then never had to pay for it.” He looks up from the floor. Looks right at me. “It must have been a relief, right? When the state did take you away?”

  I shake my head. “I was scared to death when that happened. I didn’t trust anyone at that point, especially strangers. What’s that thing they say? Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t?”

  He gets up and goes over to the window. Splays his hands on the sill, rests his forehead against the pane. He speaks to me over his shoulder. “So all these years, you just stuffed it? Didn’t even tell Dad?”

  “I couldn’t, Andrew. Those secrets became a big part of who I was. I just hope . . . ”

  “Hope what? Say it.”

  “That now that you know the truth about me, you won’t think I’m a horrible person.”

  “Why would I think that?”

  I wish he’d turn around. Wish I didn’t have to say it to his broad back.

  “Because of what we . . . What he . . . Maybe if I had gone to my father. Or Donald. Or told your father at some point. He’s a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. He deals with this kind of stuff. It’s just that . . .”