We waited for Johnny or another of his family to emerge from the kitchen, but when the waitress came we looked up to see that it was Sibyl McGuin, who had been in Meggy’s nursery-school class, and who inherited Meggy’s bicycle after she died. For a moment I couldn’t figure out what she was doing there at Antonelli’s, standing beside Justine and me in a white blouse and black apron, hair pulled back in a ponytail and a pencil poised over a pad. Then I realized that if Meggy had lived, she would probably have started her first real job this year, too.
Sibyl started when she recognized us, letting out an involuntary noise. She tried to smile. “Hi, you guys,” she said, as if she were not surprised to see us, as if nothing dramatic had interrupted our casual but continuous acquaintance of the past twelve years. She put down a basket of rolls and packaged bread sticks, and I saw her eyes widen as she took in Justine’s newly expanded girth. But my sister was looking down at her menu and by the time she looked up again, Sibyl had recovered. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the funeral,” she murmured, and then I saw her brow dip as she tried to figure out if this was a stupid thing to have said.
“That’s okay,” Justine told her. “We know you were there. You signed the book.” She flicked a forefinger at the menu. “We’ll split a sausage and pepper, okay?” I could tell it was not out of her own discomfort, but a desire to relieve Sibyl’s, that she acted as if we were in a hurry. “A Diet Coke, too,” Justine added, and I caught Sibyl’s raised eyebrows at the word “diet” as she scurried back toward the kitchen.
“We make her nervous,” Justine said.
“Gee. I wonder why.”
“Like it’s contagious or something.”
While we waited for the food, I folded the edge of the tablecloth between my fingers and Justine kept taking sips from her water glass, letting ice chink against her teeth.
“They should turn on the air-conditioning,” she said, pulling at the collar of her wrinkled shirt. “It’s hot in here.”
“You think so?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not really.” In fact, I felt a chill, though there seemed no real reason for it. We sat without speaking for several minutes and looked out the window at people leaving the five o’clock Mass. A young family emerged—a mother, father, two daughters, and a baby son—and waited to cross the street. The mother was carrying the baby, and both girls reached up to take their father’s hand. At the same moment, Justine and I turned away from the window, and our eyes met over the basket of bread. I thought one or both of us would look away, but we didn’t, and I felt myself flush.
“Ana,” my sister said, seizing what moved in the air between us. “I have to ask you something.” Something in her voice made my spine sit up. “Do you think he would have killed me, too, if I had come home earlier from Lake George?” She spoke as if we were merely picking up in a conversation we’d already begun, when in fact neither of us had ever directly addressed, with each other, the details of that day.
A sound stuck in my throat but Justine didn’t notice.
“And what about you?” She concentrated on a spot she was rubbing in the tablecloth, so she would not have been able to see that I wanted her to stop. “What if the Melnicks had decided not to go to New York that day, or one of the kids was sick, and they didn’t need you to babysit? They said he didn’t shoot himself right away, after Meggy. Do you think he was waiting for one of us? Or both?” Just saying it seemed to scare her, and her voice rose on a choked breath.
I had to swallow before I could answer. Although I wanted to tell her the truth, it felt dangerous, somehow, to let her know I had wondered the same thing.
“No,” I said, hoping I sounded convinced. “I think Nora Odoni was right when she said he just kind of snapped at the end, and no one could have guessed what he was thinking.” Sibyl McGuin came toward us hefting a round silver tray, and I waited until she set the pizza and drinks down beside us, then left again, before I continued. “Besides, Meggy was his favorite.”
We’d never said this aloud to each other, but once it was out, I could see that we both felt relieved. Justine studied me closely, searching for evidence that I was withholding something, and when she didn’t find it, she sniffled and blew her nose into a napkin. Then she put her fork down and wiped her mouth hard. I bit the insides of my cheeks and waited.
“Do you think he was always—well, nuts?” she asked, and I saw she regretted choosing the word. “Maybe we should have seen it coming.”
“No,” I said, though I couldn’t have said where my certainty came from.
“But the way he was about eggs, and germs, and the stuff in the pantry—” Her lips trembled and she pursed them around the straw in her Coke. “Maybe we should have done something.”
“Like what?” I lifted a piece of pizza to my mouth, but the smell of sausage curled my stomach and I put the slice back down. “Like what, Justine?”
She sat back in the booth, not expecting my force. I hadn’t expected it, either. “I don’t know.”
“If anybody could have done something, it should have been Mom,” I said.
Justine snatched up a cellophane bread-stick wrapper and pressed it into a ball. When it began to uncrinkle on the table she jammed it into the napkin dispenser. “You shouldn’t say that,” she murmured, so low I almost couldn’t hear.
“There’s no way she didn’t read that note.” I thought of my mother as she appeared in the photograph on my dresser—surrounded by her husband and daughters, wanting to say something, but cut off by the camera’s snap. Or maybe I’d been wrong, all these years; maybe, after the image was captured, she did get to speak her peace. “There’s no way somebody writes you a suicide note and you don’t even read it. No goddam way.”
Justine said, still muted, “But why would she lie?”
“I have no idea.” Rage, acid and aching, rose in my throat, but I pressed it down again. “That’s why we have to make her tell us what it said.”
“We can’t, Ana.”
“Why not?”
Justine rubbed a fresh napkin roughly across her lips. “I’m not sure I want to know,” she told me. “What was in the note.”
“How could you not?”
“Do you think,” she said, hooding her eyes with her hand, “it’s possible, what some people were saying? That Dad was—you know, abusing her? Don’t look at me that way, Ana. I’m serious.” She drummed her fingers on the table to a nervous beat.
“I mean, do you think it’s possible that he lost his mind that way, at the end? If he did, I’m not saying I think he killed her because she said she was going to tell, or anything. First of all, she wouldn’t.” She raised her eyes to check, in mine, the truth of what she was saying. I nodded; we both knew that Meggy’s love for and loyalty to our father would have prevented her from betraying such a secret, if it existed between them.
“I think he could have killed her out of guilt, though,” Justine went on. “Himself and her, if he did touch her, even once, in a kind of trance or something.”
The image of Meggy hugging a pillow the night before she died, trying to tell me something, darted across my eyes. I shook my head to get rid of it. “No,” I said to Justine. “He’d kill himself before—” I stopped short, and to save both of us she interrupted.
“But what else could be in those pages?” She pinched a crust of the pizza between her fingers. “From her diary? I mean, what else could she have written about, that he would have bothered to take out?”
“You said you thought Meggy ripped out those pages,” I reminded her.
“But why?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m saying I wish we knew about the note.”
Abruptly, she stood up from the table and let her fork clatter on the floor. “Enough,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sibyl hadn’t brought us the check yet, but I took out a twenty and stuck it under my glass. Justine tucked the remaining bread sticks into her p
urse and we headed toward the door, both of us tasting escape.
But just as we reached it, I recognized one of the two women sitting at the corner table. It was Mrs. Nichols, who worked in the library at the middle school. The kids all called her Hanky Head because she had a scalp disease and wore kerchiefs to cover her perpetually thinning hair. Today it was gingham, the red matching her manicured nails. It was too late to pass her by, because she recognized us, too, and her eyes were briefly startled, then filled with thrill and pity. “Well hello,” she said, catching my eye, calling us over to their table with a wave. “How are you, girls? This is my sister-in-law, Phyllis Nichols. Phyllis, meet Anastasia and Justine Dolan.” She paused for breath and surveyed us curiously. “How are you, girls?” she repeated.
“Dolan?” The sister-in-law tapped her fingers on her forehead, scrunching up her face. “Why is that name so familiar, Bev?”
“It isn’t,” Mrs. Nichols told her abruptly. A sudden, spastic move of her body made me believe she had tried to kick the other woman under the table.
“But I could swear,” the sister-in-law said, clearly frustrated.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Justine said. “Our father killed our little sister last month, and then he killed himself, and it was all over the papers and TV, so that’s probably where you know the name from. Yes, that was us,” she continued, as the women looked up at Justine with stunned looks on their frozen faces. “By the way, that necklace you’re wearing is so adorable I could just puke.” It was a thick gold chain supporting a round blue bead, with a bouquet of pink buds painted in the middle. Meggy had barrettes just like it. Justine said all of this very calmly before moving out the door, and I followed her as if this were a normal thing that had just happened, as if she had just told the women she’d made the cheerleading squad and they should try the eggplant parm.
On the sidewalk, Justine told me, “I know that wasn’t the right thing to say. In there, to Hanky Head. Do you think I’m nuts, like Dad?” She stood on the corner with her hands thrust deep in her jeans pockets, letting her hair hang into her worried eyes.
“No,” I said. I knew she expected me to add something, but I didn’t know what it would be. Just: “No.”
We were about to cross the street when we saw a line of teenagers on bikes whizzing up the street toward Washington Park, riding no-handed. They shouted to each other over the whirr of many pedals: “Gross—hurry up and pass Spud, he just cut one”; “That’s disgusting, Tanner”; “Is Shelly meeting us there, or are we picking her up?”
Justine and I looked down at the sidewalk as they passed. They weren’t likely to be friends of Meggy’s riding bicycles this far into the city. But just in case, we didn’t want to be recognized. “Remember how that used to be the most important thing?” she said, when the kids were out of sight. “Going to the park after dinner in the summer? Remember how Pete at the snack bar used to give us free Nutty Buddies? Oh, God—I actually remember telling Dad I was going to kill myself, if he didn’t let me go that one time.”
“But he did,” I said, finishing the story. I waited a moment, feeling my heart pound, and then asked, “Is that what you were thinking, when you cut yourself that day?”
“Thinking what?”
“About killing yourself.” I had never asked her about it before, even after the bandage came off and I could see the sharp, pink line down the inside of her arm. It was fading over time, and she usually tried to hide it under long sleeves, even when it was hot, but sometimes I caught a glimpse of it when she was changing clothes.
“Oh, God. No.” She blushed, embarrassed. “I don’t even remember doing it,” she told me. “I think I was just in shock from—what I saw in there.”
I could feel a perverse impulse take hold of me, one I knew, in that moment, I wouldn’t be able to keep back. “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you,” I told her, turning the key, and in the seat next to me she went stiff with apprehension. Before she could stop me, I asked, “What did it look like? When you found Dad?” Justine gave a gasp; the sound made my throat close up, but I couldn’t stop. “I mean—just what did it look like?” I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb without checking to see if anybody was in the lane.
“I can’t believe you asked me that, Ana,” Justine said, barely able to utter the words. Two months ago she would have told me to fuck off, but now she only swallowed. “Don’t ever ask me again, okay?” She reached into her purse and took out the bread sticks she’d hoarded. Then the car was filled with the sounds of my sister’s crunching until the sky went dark.
5. Petrified Creatures
Q. How long can a woodpecker peck?
— D. O’M., Rensselaerville
A. A woodpecker is an animated chisel. It digs into wood by knocking out small chips with its bill. It grasps the tree with its claws, props itself with its stiff tail, then bends back the upper part of his body to put force behind each swing. It can beat its head against wood 20 times a second, in uninterrupted bursts of almost an hour, and dig holes more than a foot deep into the heartwood of a living tree. In the process, it sets up vibrations in its skull that would probably kill any other bird.
Nine weeks after the deaths, at the beginning of September, we drove Justine off to college in Syracuse. It wasn’t that far away, an hour or so, but we all knew it meant the end of something much bigger than the summer. She’d wanted to put off school for a semester, but our mother convinced her it would be better to start on time. Mom seemed in a hurry when it came time to say good-bye. I believed I understood; the last time we had left a daughter of hers, and a sister of mine, it was in that sunny cemetery, the grass so green and vivid that I was aware, even through my numbness, how I hated to flatten it under my feet. I remember pulling away in the backseat of the big funeral car, thinking, How can we leave her like this? I found out only later that my mother and Justine felt the same weird consolation I did: at least Dad’s with her, he’ll keep her company.
In her new dorm room, Justine could see that we were struggling, and she came outside with us to the car. “I’m okay, you guys,” she kept saying, though I knew she was scared, about to be on her own in a new place with an alien body and with none of her former glories known. Her assigned roommate had arrived ahead of her and claimed the best spaces. Justine hung the framed photograph of her old cheerleading squad over her bed, and hid Meggy’s rubbie in a drawer of the smaller desk.
She lasted two weeks. I was getting ready to move back to Boston, where my friend Ruthie had found us an apartment in the same neighborhood where John F. Kennedy was born. She was particularly excited about this because she hoped someday to marry JFK’s son. She’d been sending me the Help Wanted section of the Globe every Sunday, with ads she’d circled for jobs I might get with my psychology degree, and I had a few interviews set up.
The day before I was scheduled to leave, I was alone in the condo, packing, when a cab pulled into the parking lot and my sister stepped out. Through the window, I watched her just stand there, looking stunned, while the cab driver removed her suitcases from the trunk. I went outside to help her carry them in, and she mumbled something about how she’d tried but she just couldn’t do it, the only things her suitemates ever talked about were sex and money, she wasn’t on their planet, she wanted to come home. Her decision gave me an excuse to call Ruthie and say that although I would send a rent check, my actual move back to Boston had been delayed. When our mother arrived home after work that day, she found us both unpacked, settling in again with our books and TV.
We’d put our empty suitcases back in our mother’s assigned rectangle of storage space in the condominium basement, next to the box of baby clothes we’d rescued from Pearl Street. (When we’d come home with our load of memorabilia that August day, our mother made us drive her old newspapers, and our father’s cache of dead keys, straight to the dump. But the baby clothes she let us keep.) Most of the storage space was occupied by Meggy’s things, except w
hat Justine and I had taken as keepsakes, like her rubbie and her collection of seashells from Cape Cod. My mother marked all the boxes Fragile, even though most of the things inside them were not.
She pretended it was fine if we wanted to stay with her “a little longer,” but we could feel her dread; she’d expected us both to be gone by the end of the summer.
“You know,” Justine murmured to me that night in the sofa bed, so our mother couldn’t hear, “some people would be glad if their kids wanted to stay home with them, after what happened. They’d like the company.”
“I know,” I said, and I didn’t have to add what we both understood was true in our mother’s case: that having us around reminded her of what she was missing. With summer behind us, she couldn’t pretend that Meggy was away at camp anymore. But if all three of us were gone, she might be able to concoct a different story for herself.
The day after we came back, she told us that she expected us both to go out and get jobs. Neither Justine nor I had to work, as far as money was concerned—after our father died and his debts were paid, she and I would divide two hundred thousand dollars in insurance. I always thought insurance didn’t pay out on suicides, but this isn’t necessarily the case. It depends on the policy and when it was bought. In our first phone call I asked Don Whitney, the insurance agent and a member of our grandfather Ott’s Kiwanis Club, if our father had asked specifically about suicide when he signed up. Mr. Whitney wouldn’t tell me, which I figured was an answer in itself.
So we each had some savings and plenty of cash on the way, but our mother said that if we wanted to keep living with her, we had to pull our own weight. (When she said this I saw Justine—who’d just dropped off a whole bag filled with her old size-eight clothes at Goodwill—give her a dirty look, but it seemed to be an innocent choice of words.) I knew that Justine hated the idea of having to go out every day, giving up the narcotic drone of the TV. But instead of arguing she went down to the Donut Hut and signed up to work behind the counter, because she knew our mother would find it embarrassing.
And Give You Peace Page 12
