“Leave what alone?” I play stupid to see how far she’ll push, to gauge if her threats are empty.
“You. Bert. This investigation. The book. You can’t think I want any of this getting out: who Hannah is or why I sent her away.”
Truth is sometimes the hardest thing, and I’m unaware of a statute of limitations protecting Marjorie from prosecution even now. I don’t blame her for being intimidated. She has every reason to worry. “I haven’t told the police anything,” I say.
“It won’t matter when the book releases,” she says and to her it seems an inevitability.
I’m not so sure. “When, as in, you aren’t going to fight this?”
“I’m accountable to more than the law. I owe Hannah the truth, and probably something to you and Bert, too, after all the damage I caused, though I never told Hannah to involve Matthew.” Marjorie is as contrite as she is convincing. “Even if it wasn’t all bad.”
She’s referring to Revealing Jacob’s success, for which credit is due, though it’s hard to thank someone for this sort of inspiration. “I’d have given it all up not to have gone through what we did,” I say.
“I guess I would have, too, which is why I promised Hannah I wouldn’t interfere. But I need something in return.” No one gives something for nothing, least of all someone in as difficult a position as Marjorie is in.
“Which is?” I brace for financial terms, a payoff we can’t afford.
“That you include my side of the story. I know it’s going to be more work for Bert and that his book is already delayed, but there are things that Hannah doesn’t and can’t know. Things I wanted to wait until she was old enough to tell her, and now that she is she won’t listen. If this book is going to be written either way, I want it to tell the whole story.”
I try to contain my excitement and hide the fact that Marjorie’s demand does us an enormous favor. “To be clear, if Bert writes what you want him to, you’ll sign a release?” I need to know Marjorie isn’t only reacting in the moment, but will abide by this decision long-term. We can’t absorb any more risk.
“I will,” she says. “I’ve spent the last twelve years letting Hannah believe I was the bad parent because it was easier than telling her the truth. If this is what it takes to get her to listen, so be it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“WHAT is the truth?”
I catch a glimpse of the Marjorie I remember, an uneasy woman who nervously chews her lower lip as she reaches for a copy paper box on the floor next to the couch. She removes the lid and peers into the clutter as if reminding herself what’s inside: pictures, a journal, and newspaper clippings. Much of the paper has yellowed, and there’s an accompanying musty smell, as if this has all been stored in a damp basement somewhere. Watching her sift through the contents feels monumental, like witnessing the opening of a time capsule. She hands me a carefully selected photograph face-down, as though she’s seen it too many times and can’t stand to look at it again.
I almost don’t want to turn it over, but I have to, and when I do, I understand her reluctance. The image is of late-twenties Marjorie, teary-eyed and shying away from the camera lens as she lifts her shirt to reveal dozens of round scabs, most likely from the tip of a lit cigarette, scattered across her breasts and torso. Some have become infected, the skin swollen and red around the margins. Others appear to be freshly bleeding. These are recent injuries, but there are scars too.
“Peter hadn’t even raised his voice to me before we were married,” she says, and the air of control and calm she’s maintained to this point crumbles into shame.
Unfortunately, this is the explanation I came for.
Your “hook.”
I consider how domestic abuse will play with your readers, and wonder whether public outcry will be enough to keep Marjorie from facing prosecution. I can’t decide if the ends justify the means. “You sent Hannah away to keep her safe.”
The statement sounds more like a question, and she apparently reads judgment into it because she says, “Peter never hurt her. I’d have left sooner if he did.” That she can defend him even now sickens me on a visceral level. There is no good to be seen in someone capable of something like this. “But yes, I worried he might do something to her to get back at me for whatever thing I had done wrong—and believe me, there were plenty of those things. I never meant for Hannah leaving to become permanent.” It takes a minute for her to find that last word, which strikes at the heart of the distance Marjorie is attempting to repair.
Unlike the estrangement between Matthew and us, there’s time for her and Hannah to recover.
I give Marjorie space to work out what she wants to tell me and how. To unburden herself; an urge I know well. She details years of beatings and the subsequent attempts at making things right. Trinkets, trips, things Marjorie couldn’t have afforded on her own, and good times, like Matthew and me on that scrambler, where Marjorie could believe that whatever Peter had done was for the last time.
“You did the right thing,” I say.
Maybe it wasn’t the legal thing, but Marjorie’s sacrifice came from a place of love.
“Did I?” She needs affirmation, which I give to the best of my ability.
“You protected your daughter.” At least that’s how it seems.
“I’m still protecting her”—Marjorie glances toward Hannah’s bedroom shrine—“which is why I put her somewhere safe.” Any question that I had about whether or not Hannah’s hospitalization might have been voluntary are answered. “I can’t risk the police seeing whatever that is and asking about Matthew. Hannah would never have hurt him, but I’m terrified what she’d have to admit to in order prove that. She’d have to tell the police who she is, and how Matthew’s protected her identity all these years. She’d have to convince them how close they were, sacrificing me in the process. I’m not ready for that yet.”
Marjorie’s fear is palpable and on par with my own, though for different reasons. For a second, I feel the best thing for us to do is to take down and destroy every last photo. Whatever it means to Hannah to have plastered her walls with them, Marjorie’s right: Hannah’s no more a killer than you are. She doesn’t need to come home and see these walls. No one needs to see them, and I offer this suggestion to Marjorie who shrugs it off, as though with Hannah institutionalized, it is less of an issue. I’d remind her that a search warrant might still be executed but suspect her reasoning comes from a deeper place, from a feeling that this is Hannah’s home, and changes aren’t hers to make.
“I hate to think what would have happened if I hadn’t come back.” Only when Marjorie says this do I imagine the life that exists for her elsewhere. Is there a husband? I check for a ring. A boyfriend? Other children? Is she hiding from Peter in a place where the Harman name bears no weight or shame. I had wondered what drove her to make this grand gesture, all the while assuming the worst. “If I had known about Claire, I’d have done so sooner,” she says.
I’m not sure if she means weeks or months or years earlier, or if this is another necessary generalization because even she doesn’t know the answer. “Hannah never told you Claire was sick?”
She shakes her head. “She didn’t tell me about Matthew, either. I read it in the paper.”
Matthew’s murder made headlines. Claire slipped into an early natural death—if death so young can ever be natural—and warranted no more than ten lines in an obituary section. “Claire didn’t deserve what she went through,” I say, though I haven’t a clue what she might have endured during her illness. With Matthew gone, I felt like reaching out would have been an unwelcome interference. Now, I wonder what kind of human being I am that I let Hannah shoulder the long-term care of a terminally ill woman without even an offer of help. “I wish I could say I knew her better. She seemed like a good woman.”
“The best, and I owe her so much more than I could ever repay.” Marjorie’s eyes fill with tears. “I can’t imagine what might have happened without her.
Peter could have killed me. God, sometimes I wished he would have, if not for Hannah. I had to survive for her.”
After years of blaming this woman for everything that’s gone wrong in our lives, I want to reach out and hug her. “Sometimes making bad choices is how we learn to make better ones.”
“Tell that to my daughter, who hates me.”
An unfair notion exists that while parents should love unconditionally, children do not share in that burden. “You made a difficult choice when there were no good options, but how did you do it?”
“Change Hannah’s identity? That involved a few favors. Homicide prevention law allows for domestic abuse victims to change their names and social security numbers if there’s evidence of a substantial threat. Claire used a lot of what’s in there”—she points to the box—“and ultimately Peter’s murder conviction to turn Hannah into Ansley. She proved risk.”
“Which means other people knew Hannah hadn’t been abducted.”
“A few, but like I said, Claire called in favors. There are people willing to work around things like that if you know where to look.”
“Why didn’t you go, too?” If everything is as simple as Marjorie makes it out to be, I can’t understand why she sent Hannah alone.
“It’s easy for a child, who has no credit rating and no work history—no history, period, other than their parents—to disappear, but for me it meant severing my future from my past.”
“It seems a small price.”
“Peter would have exhausted every available resource searching if we both vanished. If I could only save one of us, it had to be Hannah.”
No matter how well thought out, executing a plan involving a reluctant eight-year-old couldn’t have been easy or without complications. “Did he ever become suspicious?”
“I’m not sure there was time.” Reflecting on the brief interlude between Hannah’s disappearance and Gregory Phillip King’s murder seems to make an already sad-looking Marjorie appear even sadder. I have a million questions about King, about the rumors, and about why he might have been in or around their house, but Marjorie apparently can’t even say his name. I have no right to ask her to. “We were careful, Claire and I,” she says. “Even if Peter hadn’t done what he did, I can’t see how he’d have guessed I was behind all this or that Claire had Hannah, even temporarily.”
“Do you think Claire suspected you might not come back?”
“She might have, though I never said it. I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. I’m still not, but I’m trying.”
This I understand completely.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
MATTHEW’S THERAPIST once told me if you’re questioning whether or not you’re a good parent, you probably are. I didn’t dare admit the reason for our session wasn’t because I doubted my aptitude so much as my interest. I hadn’t wanted children, and didn’t know when I married you that I’d be inheriting one. Less than a year after our wedding, I began worrying I made a terrible mistake.
I saw the places where the things I enjoyed—writing, networking, conferences—were being slowly pulled away from me and replaced with obligations, overcome by responsibilities. I might have been in love with you, then, or I might have been infatuated with the idea of being tied to someone so up-and-coming in our business. I try to separate the feelings now and to dissect why I stayed, but bitterness interferes.
Looking back, I should have acted on instinct, as Marjorie did. She claims she wasn’t cut out for parenthood, but her actions prove otherwise. She put Hannah’s safety before her own, and selflessness is the hallmark of motherhood. I explain this as best I can without sounding like an amateur shrink, needing Marjorie to understand how unnecessarily hard she’s being on herself. We have both been overly self-critical.
“There’s so much more to it.” Marjorie shakes her head. “Maybe I could forgive myself if Peter had been my only mistake, but there were plenty before him.” She admits to having no idea who Hannah’s biological father is, and she had no interest in finding out. He could have been one of several men, none of whom would make a better parent than she had been. “I was only nineteen when Hannah was born. My family disowned me, and the few friends I had wanted nothing to do with a baby. I found out quickly how expensive it was to try and take care of two of us, and ended up moving in with a string of shithead boyfriends because I couldn’t afford to live on my own. Not and take care of a baby, too, but the problem with men,” she says as if there’s only one, “is that they tire quickly of children.”
“Sometimes before they’re born,” I say, which is the camp I feel you best fit in. Ella’s attempt at salvaging your disaster of a marriage only served to make matters worse.
“They don’t want to hear that you’re too tired or that it’s bath time or that the music’s too loud or ‘don’t smoke around the baby.’ They don’t want to be second, not to a child, and particularly not to one who isn’t theirs. I couldn’t be everything they wanted and all that Hannah needed, too.”
“No woman can be.” Although Marjorie has no way of knowing about your infidelity, she’s nicely summarized the reason I’ve always suspected you cheat. You’ll never admit to your competition for affection with your own son, a boy you burdened me with, but I would swear to it.
“I was determined to strike a balance when I met Peter, and thought I had. He wasn’t like other men I’d lived with. I told myself ‘different’ was exactly what I should be looking for. I wasn’t even really attracted to him, but he had a stable job and owned his own home. He was so far ahead of anyone I knew that I had to try to make things work. I could learn to love him—for Hannah, I thought—and he seemed worth trying for.”
Marjorie tells me about the almost-too-perfect man she fell in love with, a man who gladly shouldered responsibility for Hannah and who gave her not only the things she needed but who catered to her every whim and want. For a time, Peter enjoyed lavishing affection upon them both. Marjorie would’ve sworn he was her first good decision, until halfway to their second anniversary when she realized she couldn’t have been more wrong.
The abuse started small with Peter asserting a sort of playful-but-stern physical control with a shove or a too-tight grip on her wrist. A push turned to a slap then escalated to a cycle of injuries and apologies that Marjorie thought would only end in her death. “He wasn’t the first man to hit me,” she says, “but he was the worst, and he didn’t just hit me. He forced himself on me.”
She alludes to sexual assault with an air of hesitation. There’s an assumption about what rape is and isn’t, and whether such a thing can occur between husband and wife. I assure you, it can; that it did.
Marjorie’s account of the six years she spent married to Peter are no easier for her to describe than they are for me to hear. There are minor transgressions for which she had gone without food and comfort, and for which she had been forced to sleep on the floor. Maybe she hadn’t remembered to pick up the dry cleaning. Maybe she left dishes in the sink. Maybe she caught the eye of another man with a cute dress, a new hairdo, or some makeup. Peter’s response to others’ reactions caused her to stay home more often, gaining weight and looking less and less attractive. He turned her into the meek and homely woman I remember.
“If only I hadn’t” and “I knew better” are phrases she says more than once, as if she somehow deserved the mistreatment.
I can’t help drawing comparison to Ella and me, acknowledging our collective sacrifices: my career, Ella’s family, and Marjorie’s daughter. What about being a woman makes us crave love to the extent that we go against instinct and common sense?
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
IF I COULD ANSWER THAT question, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in, reluctantly responding to your urgent text message demanding I collect you from the precinct, which is the last place I want to be right now. I’m tired of stressing over Matthew and over you, about whom I shouldn’t have to worry. You’re a grown man with far more needs than one should hav
e at forty-two-years-old. Even with Matthew gone, nothing in my life is about me.
I apologize to Marjorie for having to leave when she’s clearly in need of someone to talk to, even if I’m the least likely candidate. Everyone needs to unburden themselves at some point, and I wonder when it will be my turn. Who will listen?
I arrive at the station and park curbside, with Marjorie’s evidence box strapped into the back seat. You have probably heard some unflattering things about me, and I can explain most of them, but the photos, articles, and journal will be proof enough of my worth that I won’t have to.
Vern waits on the stoop next you, with his suit jacket unbuttoned and his hands deep in his pants pockets. He looks pleased. By comparison, you look like someone bled of his secrets, a man who can’t get away from the police fast enough. Vern locks on my gaze as you make your way toward freedom, maybe for the last time. I won’t let him shake me. It’s what he’s tried to do all along.
You open the passenger door and say, “Where have you been?”
I understand you’re upset—and I might be, too, if our positions were reversed—but this isn’t the greeting I’d hoped for. “I told you I had something to do.” I open the gallery on my cell phone and show you the photographs, heading off any conversation we might need to have about our dire finances—which your book should solve in the short-term—or about my having been at the Holiday Inn.
Should the need arise, I’ll explain that I’d intercepted a text that prompted action, but the footnote of that conversation would be that yes, I assumed I might be confronting another of your mistresses. Neither of us wants to have that discussion, so you focus instead on what I’ve given you.
Where We Went Wrong Page 16
