And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.”

  When I realized she was saying no, I felt a storm in my stomach. “Please?” I said. “Could I just look at the kitchen? Step in the back door?” I began moving toward it as I spoke, certain she would not restrain me physically. But she reached out to touch my elbow, and when I shook her hand off, she did a little dancing end run and blocked the door.

  “Don’t do this,” I said, hearing the plea in my voice and hating myself for it. “Please don’t keep me out.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I think it’s better this way.” The front door opened and a man called, “Barb?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to call the police,” she said, “if you don’t leave now.” Her voice was shaking, but I could tell she meant it. And I recognized another feeling in myself, along with the desperation: I envied her children for the way she protected them.

  “Everything okay?” Mr. Crowell said, coming over to us. He smiled at me, but his expression changed when he saw his wife’s face.

  “Don’t worry, I’m leaving.” And I meant it, but as I turned and took a few steps back down the driveway, feeling both sets of eyes on me, I looked over and saw that the husband had left the front door open. Without planning it for even a moment (I was probably more shocked than they were, though their surprise rooted them where they stood, while adrenaline set my legs free), I ran up to the door, slipped around it before they could get to me, and locked it from the inside.

  I looked around: all the furniture was arranged differently, but this was still our living room, where we used to eat grilled-cheese sandwiches on Sunday nights, where we pushed aside one end of the sofa to practice cheerleading, where my mother piled her suitcases at the foot of the stairway the morning she moved out.

  At the top of the stairs, the girl called Courtney, who was naked, screamed. Then she cocked her red head and asked in a normal voice, “What’s your name again?” Behind her a boy came out of the bathroom, wearing fire-truck pajamas, and flicked his wet towel at his sister’s backside. Last one in is a rotten egg.

  “Ana,” I called up to her in answer, and the boy, startled, dropped the towel over the banister. I caught it where I was standing, just as the parents came banging through the back door. I felt rather than heard them rushing across the kitchen toward where I stood, and without thinking I threw the towel at them, right in the mother’s shrieking face, before I started scrambling up the stairs. At the top, the kids gave out screeches that sounded more like laughter—as if they believed this to be a game—and they darted into the bathroom, slamming the door. Behind me, I felt fingers on my heels and kicked them away, and when I got to the landing I turned down the hall, ran past my old bedroom and my parents’, and hurtled into the room where my sister died.

  It wasn’t a girl’s bedroom anymore. The bunk beds against the wall were covered with football bedspreads, and model airplanes hung from hooks on the ceiling, which was painted to look like the sky. Identical posters of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were thumbtacked over each bed, and the lamp shade, a creepy clown’s head, cast the light of a bright orange bulb.

  Still—and the shock of it felt electric—I saw traces of Meggy here. In the far corner of the sky-ceiling was the raw patch of plaster where she had once affixed, with glue, a galaxy of stars and planets she’d made out of cardboard and glitter. The window shade held a nick from one of her early experiments with scissors. And in the corner stood the bookshelf my father built into the wall for her eighth birthday. Although the outside frame had been repainted to match the color of the sky, I could see that the shelves themselves remained as my father made them, decorated with Alice in Wonderland decals.

  All of this I registered in the space of a second or two, the time it took for the Crowells to catch up with me. The door didn’t have a lock—none of our bedrooms ever did—so I stood on the other side and pushed back against the two of them. Behind them I heard the children chorusing, “Get her, get her!” Of course, their combined weight was too much for me, and when they forced the door open I was flung backward, off balance, toward the dresser, where I hit my arm.

  Before I could fall all the way to the floor, the father reached out to steady me. His touch was solicitous, intended only to soothe. As soon as I was standing again, he let me go.

  “David,” his wife said, “hang onto her, for God’s sake.”

  “What?” The look he gave her was annoyed.

  “She’ll run again.”

  “No,” I said, feeling suddenly airy and without a center, as if I floated above them all. “I’m sorry.”

  “Aren’t you going to call the police?” Courtney asked, sounding disappointed.

  “Yes, we are.” Her mother backed up toward the door while keeping an eye on me.

  “No, we aren’t.” Mr. Crowell turned to her and shook his head. With both of his hands he took hold of my shoulders, as if meaning to comfort me.

  “David—”

  “Don’t worry, Barbara. I’ll take care of it.” He nodded toward the door and she led the children down the hall, where I could still feel them hovering somewhere out of sight.

  The father was still holding me by the shoulders. “You do have to go,” he said, perhaps feeling in my arms the tension between wanting to have him hold me and to push him away. “I’m sorry.”

  I told him, “I know. Me too.”

  “Are you all right?” He said it in a low voice so his wife wouldn’t hear. I nodded, though we both knew I was lying.

  He led me out past his gathered family and down the stairs where Justine once fell and broke her arm on a Cabbage Patch doll I hadn’t put away when my mother asked me to. (When we got to the emergency room, the doctor thought I was the patient, because I was crying harder than Justine.) I could hear the kids whispering. One of them said, “Well, she looks regular.” From above my head, the mother called down, “Please don’t come here again.”

  “For crying out loud, Barb,” her husband said. “I think she gets the message.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Outside, he stood on the stoop and watched, waiting until I reached the end of the driveway before closing the door again. Instinctively, I knew he did this not because he wanted to make sure I was gone. He waited because he knew what I would feel if I had been close enough to hear the door shutting behind me.

  I went back across the street to the Lonergans’, my legs feeling like waves of water, and told my mother I wanted to leave. Ed hadn’t returned yet with the extra ground beef—no doubt his errand would take him to the Shamrock for “a quick one” or two—and my mother and Kay were sitting side by side over a bowl of Doritos and matching glasses of beer. “Well, okay, sweetie,” my mother said, and her readiness to agree was what let me know that she was also uncomfortable, because otherwise she would have tried to convince me to stay.

  Kay said, “What about lunch?” but I could tell from her voice that she, too, was relieved. This impromptu reunion was something we would all have liked to be able to do, but in the world as we found it now, it wasn’t possible. She and my mother hugged and kissed each other, and Kay tried to include me, but I pretended I hadn’t noticed. They promised to stay in better touch with each other, and I also pretended not to know, as they made this promise, that they would probably never see or talk to each other again.

  “Where did Matt disappear to?” my mother asked, and Kay said vaguely, “Oh, he’s around.” I remembered that just after the deaths, Kay told our mother that Matt was having a rough time of accepting what had happened, and she asked us to understand if he couldn’t make it to the funeral. In the end Matt came, but he left before the service was over. Now, I thought I saw him standing in the shadow behind the curtain of his bedroom, watching us, but Kay said I must be mistaken. She suggested we wait until Ed returned so he could give us a ride back to our car, but my mother and I said, No, it’s not that far, and we walked back down the block and through
the cemetery, the long way this time, avoiding Meggy and Dad. My mother had a comment about every house we passed, and the family in it—Remember the time they had the fire, did you hear he lost everything in that last crash? Her step quickened; she seemed invigorated by recalling the bad luck of the people we had known. She still didn’t ask what had upset me before I returned to the Lonergans’, and I wondered if she would.

  When we arrived at the Toll Gate, we had to park three side streets away, and coming closer we saw that the restaurant was packed with Pee Wee football players and their families. The line for takeout was long and wide, and when we finally made it inside the door, we saw that Rosemary and Justine were still on the bench where patrons waited before being seated at tables. Justine was in the middle of a sentence, talking to our aunt, but when she saw us she shut up abruptly. “What happened?” she demanded. Then, before we could say anything, she added, “I knew you shouldn’t have gone back there.”

  I told them about the girls in the driveway, the new woman in our house, the way I had sneaked by them, and the way I’d been chased out.

  “Oh, Ana,” my mother murmured when I’d finished, but I couldn’t tell what was in her tone.

  Rosemary said, “That bitch.” I gave her a grateful smile.

  “Look, let’s just get out of here,” Justine said. She got up, jostling the elbow of the woman standing in line behind her. The woman turned, annoyed and startled, but Justine didn’t apologize.

  “Sorry,” my mother said to the woman.

  Justine said, “Mom, don’t talk for me.” She tried to push her way through the line to the door, but people weren’t moving fast enough for her. “Get out, get out!” she yelled at a frightened child who was on the way into the restaurant with her father. The girl’s face collapsed and she reached up for her father’s hand, which was already on its way down to meet hers.

  “Hey,” the man said, but Justine had already lumbered by him and through the door.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother murmured to the man as she went after Justine, and then as Rosemary and I followed we left an echo behind us: Sorry, sorry.

  Out on the sidewalk, my mother caught up with Justine and grabbed her by the arm. “Hey,” Rosemary said, in the same tone the child’s father had just used. “Take it easy, Margaret.”

  But if my mother heard her, she gave no sign. “What were you thinking?” she said to Justine. With the force of her own anger, she tried to turn Justine to face her, but my sister broke away and kept walking. “That was a little kid.”

  At this, Justine stopped suddenly. “Jesus, Mom,” I heard her mutter. Rosemary and I were behind them both, keeping a distance so they could have the sidewalk to themselves, but close enough to intercede if it were needed. “Since when do you give a shit?” She shouted loudly enough to make us all wince.

  “Ssh,” our mother said as people turned to look at us.

  “Don’t shush me!” Justine dug down deep for a breath, and I saw that she was headed beyond control, that she was going to excavate it all; and although I felt scared, the sight also thrilled me. “How can you fucking tell me to shut up? Meggy would still be alive if it weren’t for you, and you’re telling me to shut up?”

  My mother shrank where she was standing. Her shoulders deflated, her face drained of color, and the features turned small.

  “Justine,” my aunt whispered, but there was nothing to add.

  We were still standing on the corner. The light had changed twice and we could have crossed by now, but none of us had made a move. Traffic whooshed by and someone beeped, but we didn’t look to see if it was for us.

  My sister continued screeching, and I imagined her throat rubbing raw against the red words. “I can’t believe you just left us with him, and look what happened!” She made a broad gesture of display with her chubby hand, as if showing us charred bodies at the side of the road. “Couldn’t you tell there was something wrong with him? How could you just leave us there? You’re the fucking mother!” In her inflection, “mother” was higher than human and closest to God.

  At each sentence our mother flinched. She waited when Justine paused for another breath, as if to allow her all the time she might need to finish. Justine wasn’t finished, but neither was she about to say anything more. She stood with her body shaking. Actually, it looked more like twitching. It was the motion of crying, but no tears came—just a high, dry wail before she pitched over to the trash barrel by the phone booth and vomited into it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Rosemary said, but it sounded more reverent than profane.

  I said, “Can we go home now?” My voice came out high and hysterical, reminding me of anyone but myself.

  Justine said, “We don’t have a home anymore, Ana. Where have you been?”

  “Let’s at least go back to the car,” Rosemary suggested, turning her face from the window of the Shoe Box, through which people were pretending not to watch our family drama.

  “Justine,” my mother said. It sounded like a plea. “Justine. Will you look at me?” Justine turned her face a bit more toward our mother, but still not all the way. “I never thought Daddy would hurt any of you. You guys wanted to stay in school here, and it was only for those few months. Remember? I actually thought things might be better—that he might be better—when I left. If he didn’t have the stress of me bugging him all the time to keep trying therapy, to try medicine, all those things we used to fight about. And wasn’t it better, for a while?”

  The fact that Justine gave no response made me realize the answer was Yes. “Well,” she said. She seemed to be aware, for the first time, of where we were. “Look, just forget it.” It was not a reconciliation, but at least she allowed herself to be led back to the car. We were all silent as my mother made the three-point turn that brought her back to Birch Street. I knew they all felt the way I did—as if we were fleeing, having committed some crime.

  “I can’t believe either of you went with Kay in the first place,” Justine said finally to my mother and me. “I mean, just being back in this town gives me the creeps.”

  Rosemary said, “You know, I didn’t think it would bother me, since I didn’t live here.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out as fast as she took it in. “But I do have some memories, and they do make it hard. Like I remember being on this street with Tom once, watching you guys in a parade. When you were Brownies. Margaret, you were working that day, I think. We had Meggy with us, and he put her on his shoulders so she could see. I remember when the band went by, she said her heart had a drum in it.” My aunt made a sound like a single sob when she exhaled.

  “Stop,” my mother said, putting a hand to her own heart. “Rose, I can’t.”

  “Sorry,” my aunt murmured.

  Then we were quiet again for a stretch, retracing the route we had taken to get there, through Four Corners, past Oberheim’s, and out to the Thruway. Next to me I could feel Justine wanting to know what it was like—being in our old house—but I also knew that she wouldn’t ask.

  In the front seat, Rosemary put her arms up to the car ceiling and let out a stretching noise. “Hmm,” she said. “Funny how kids always come back to jump roping. When I was little, we used to jump rope in the middle of West Street, and if a car came while somebody was counting, we made them wait till the person missed.”

  “Like a cow in the country,” I said. “Lying down in the middle of the road.”

  “Except it’d be easier to move a cow.” I couldn’t see my aunt’s face, but from the sound of her voice I knew she was smiling. “People would get really pissed off, and if they drove in our neighborhood a lot, they learned to avoid going down our street after school or on weekends.” She laughed, and we could tell she was recalling an old, favorite scene. “Especially if your father was having a turn.”

  “Dad?” Justine sat up from the force of her own surprise. “You mean boys played?”

  “Well, when they were little. Until they found out it was just for girls.” Rosem
ary lit another cigarette. “Your dad was one of the best—better than most of the girls, even.” When my mother said, “Rose, please, the smoke’s killing me,” she took a long drag and flipped it out the window.

  “One day it started raining,” our aunt said, sounding as if she were about to recite a fairy tale. “Tommy was jumping, and I was on one of the ends. It started to thunder and lightning, and our mothers called us in. We all made a run for it, except Tommy. He wouldn’t stop. He picked up the rope, wrapped the ends around his hands to make it shorter, and kept jumping by himself while the rain poured down.

  “Well, of course, Ma was furious. ‘Get in here,’ she yelled, and you could see people all along West Street at their windows, looking out at him and laughing.” Rosemary coughed, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because of smoke or the memory. “He wouldn’t stop until he’d jumped to a thousand. It had to be a perfect thousand, with no misses, but the rope was heavy because it was wet, and the ground was slippery. You could see his mouth moving while he counted. A few times he got up to five or six hundred, but then he’d get caught in the rope and have to start over again.”

  “My God,” my mother murmured. In the rearview mirror I could see that she looked as if something long unanswered had suddenly been revealed, and I knew what she was thinking: So he was like that even then.

  “It got dark, of course, and the rain wasn’t stopping. Ma went out once to try to force him to come inside, but Tom was already stronger than she was. ‘When I get to a thousand, I’ll be done,’ he told her. When she came back in she said to me, ‘That’s it. I’ve had it. He’ll be the end of me.’” Rosemary’s voice became small, belatedly hurt on behalf of her brother.

  “Ma made me go to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep. I could hear Tommy’s rope hitting the ground outside my window, and I couldn’t help counting every time he started up again. I was cheering for him, in a way. Finally, I heard him get to nine hundred. I actually started praying, and believe me, I never prayed. I could feel my heart under my nightie, and I was whispering, ‘Please, God, let him make it.’ When he got to a thousand, I said ‘Thank you.’” Rosemary shook her head, as if to clear it of clutter. “God, I haven’t thought about this in a million years, but I remember it like it was yesterday.” She turned toward all of us, knowing we’d want to hear more.