None of us had known Janet Peyser very well. It was early in the school year, she’d just transferred from somewhere in Canada, and she never came back after the accident. But I had forgotten all this until now.
“I remember that, too,” Frank said, pausing beside me on the stairs. He licked brownie crumbs from his fingers. “The one everybody thought the Cunningham kid pushed, right? But there was never any proof.”
“He was so screwed up.” Whenever I pictured Phil Cunningham’s face, it always had the same smooth expression—no frown or smile, no hint in the eyes of affection for anything. “Do you really think he did it?”
Frank shrugged. “Who knows? Probably.”
“But why?”
He shrugged again. We were at the bottom of the stairs, and he turned a light on. “I suppose he just felt like it. There are people like that. You know?”
I didn’t, but suddenly it wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue. I bit the insides of my cheeks and continued to follow him.
The evidence was not kept in the cafeteria, as I had expected. Our old eating room had been converted to a maze of cork-walled cubicles. Frank led me beyond the kitchen to an even bigger room, without windows, which hadn’t existed when the building was a school. There was a desk in the corner, next to a Xerox machine; otherwise, the room contained only shelves, filled with boxes stacked so high that there were stepladders to reach the ones closest to the ceiling.
Without hesitating, Frank went over to one of the ladders and climbed up to remove a box, which I saw was labeled Dolan, Thomas E./ Margaret O., 6/29/88. When he put the box on the desk and took the lid off, I backed up a step, as if something might jump out and grab me by the neck.
I kept my eyes averted so I wouldn’t catch sight of anything in the box as Frank rummaged through it. He pulled out an envelope. “Let me just make you a copy,” he said, moving to switch on the Xerox machine.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I can’t give you the original. It’s evidence.” He waited as the yellow lights fluttered and whirred.
“That’s what I want.”
“Ana, you can’t have it. It’s procedure. Look, this machine works fine. There won’t be anything you won’t be able to make out.” He lifted the copier lid and from the envelope gingerly removed the sheet of paper it contained. Even from a distance I recognized my father’s handwriting, the tiny letters upright and fine.
“No.” I went over to stop Frank’s hand before he could give me the copy. “I want that.” I gestured toward the original. How could he not understand that I needed the actual page my father had touched, the lines of ink he had put there with a pen pressed between his own fingers? I reached for the note, but Frank drew it out of my reach.
“What do you expect me to do? Break the rules?”
“Yeah, if you have to.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Well, you’d better. Because if I have to tell them about us, I will.” I’d had no idea I was going to say this, and Frank looked as shocked as I felt. But I made no move to retract it.
“What do you mean?”
“Us sleeping together. You said it could get you in trouble.”
He let his breath out through lips that almost formed a smile, as if he thought I was joking. “You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Yes, I would.” For a moment I thought I might laugh, because it was like hearing someone else speak, and it felt so scary; but instead I kept it in.
“My God.” He stared at me without blinking. “I guess I was wrong about you.”
“No, you weren’t. This isn’t me, I promise. But I’m not taking a copy.” I nodded at the reproduced page sitting in its tray.
Frank looked at me for another long moment. Then he shrugged as if he knew he’d been defeated and said, “Okay.” He folded the copied sheet in thirds and tucked it into the envelope, then held out the original between us. “I guess it goes without saying that I could get in trouble for this, too.”
“I know.” I took the paper as carefully as if it had thorns. “But you won’t. There’s no reason for anybody to ever look in here again, right? The case is closed.”
Frank replaced the box with my family’s name on it and turned off the copier, and we went back upstairs. This time, he stayed a step or two in front of me. I could tell he was trying not to let his agitation get the better of him. “You going to be okay?” he said, gesturing at the envelope I held in my hand. He had led me to the waiting area. “You can sit in here, if you want to. Take as long as you need.”
I had imagined him staying with me when I read the letter, but now I saw that he didn’t intend to. I chose to believe, then—and I still do—that it was deference to my privacy that kept him from offering, rather than anger at my blackmailing him. In any case, I knew I didn’t want to stay in the police station. The hallway felt suffocating, the ceiling too low. “I think I’ll just get on the road,” I said, and Frank nodded. He held out his hand. Confused, I pulled the letter behind me, thinking he meant for me to give it back. But he reached down and took my other hand and squeezed it gently.
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“You too.” For a moment, I wished he would grab the letter away from me and pull me close to his chest, a heroic movie gesture, the strong leading man saving the deluded ingenue from herself. But, of course, nothing like that would happen. I felt him watch me go down the steps and out to the parking lot, and by the time I reached my car and looked back, he was gone.
The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees since the afternoon. I shivered behind the steering wheel, where I sat without turning the engine on, trying to work up the nerve to open the envelope. Holding it, I felt a freeze as sharp and thorough as if ice had been touched to my spine.
I took the page out. It was a piece of lined paper that had been torn, no doubt, from one of Meggy’s spiral-edged school notebooks. My father had trimmed the left margin of his letter with scissors; not even in a suicidal haze would he have been able to tolerate a ragged edge. The page had been folded neatly, and above the top crease was written
Margaret
Anastasia
Justine
The sight of our names struck me hard enough that I had to look away for a few minutes—at the American flag flapping in the breeze above the police building, the phone booth on the corner—while my stomach rolled.
There was no other salutation. But at the top of the first page my father had noted, in his precise fashion, the date and time: June 28, 1988, 9:42 P.M. Which meant that he’d started writing it the night before the deaths; and now I remembered that he had shut the door to his bedroom after saying good night to Meggy and me. Had he begun the note then? Had he written it in bed? If I’d waited a moment longer the next morning before going to my baby-sitting job, would he have broken down, shown me what he was writing, and begged me for help?
But wondering these things made me feel sick again, so I focused hard on the page.
The time has come the walrus said to talk of many things
of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings
Remember? That’s not how I meant to start this, but when I put down ‘The time has come,’ the rest of it just sort of fell out of my head.
It got to be too much. You always said I was all talk no action, Margaret. Well I guess you won’t be saying that anymore.
The gun is Russell Stinson’s in case you wondered. He has a collection, he showed me one day. I took it when nobody was home. Their fault—they should have left the door locked.
Here the ink of the letter changed, from blue felt-tip to a black ballpoint. The next section of text had been reheaded 6:07 A.M.—meaning that he must have picked it up again right after I left to go baby-sitting at the Melnicks’—and the words looked as if they’d come more quickly, with more chaos and urgency than before.
I went out there with Cokes for them. The loving dad. Like milk and cookies. What did I think they
’d be doing, playing Candyland? He was on top of her, she was pulling his mouth down to her oh God her chest. Right there in the tree house, hadn’t been swept since the summer. How dare he? He liked me better than his own father. He told me that once. I had to save her, can’t you people understand that?
Seeing Matt’s face flash in front of me, I reached up to press at a sudden pain digging into my forehead.
Thank god we have her on video. My Annie. You better make copies, Margaret, in case the tape should break someday.
She wrote it down. Not only how he touched her, but how she saw me, looking in. I knew she did—it was only for a second but somehow she knew. I caught them.
What happened was an accident. My seeing her. Not then, in the tree house, but a few nights before, outside the Toll Gate. She was getting ice cream with Matt and some other kids. I was taking a guy for a test drive, in a Cutlass, and we went that way. Here he is telling me about his relatives in New Jersey, and I’m looking out the window, not listening but pretending like I am. I see this woman from the back, she’s wearing one of those belly shirts, I think you call them—maroon—and she has these perfect shoulder blades. Her head’s tilting as she bends to lick her cone. I keep my eyes on her, she looks so good; and then even before she turns so I can see her face, I realize who she is.
There’s no way I can tell you what it felt like, seeing Meggy that way. My own baby girl. I wanted to drive straight into the restaurant, a wall, anything hard, to stop what I was feeling. No word big enough for it. Guilt? Too puny. I must have made a noise, because the test-drive guy asked if I was okay, and then he saw what I was watching. “Hey, nice,” he says, nodding at Meggy, and my foot falls off the clutch. I made him get out of the car right there. I knew the sale would fall through but I didn’t care.
Again I had to stop reading, remind myself to breathe. A uniformed officer led in a business-suited drunk who was shouting to the police station at large that he was being railroaded. I watched until they took him into a room. Then there was nothing else to look at, except my father’s words.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then last night when she came home and I heard her go outside, I got the Cokes and climbed up the ladder. Why couldn’t they just have been talking, like the old days? They used to do their school projects out there. When they were little, play Go Fish. But no. He ruined her. I should have realized, I should have had the gun before it happened, but I was too late. I’ll never forgive myself for that.
It was when she came in, after him, that she called you, Margaret. I heard her on the phone. She didn’t exactly say what the matter was, but you should have been able to tell. I heard her ask you to come and get her. If you were still here it would have been different, she wouldn’t be wearing things like that, belly shirts and things you can see through. A woman’s things.
Or touching him in the tree house. Where were you?
Remember the trip to Boston that time, the boat we went on, Old Ironsides? Meggy was five. It was the same day we went to that witch house in Salem, Ana pretending to be a witch, and we saw that retarded boy. Remember?
On the harbor boat that day I was holding Meggy, she asked me to pick her up to see the water. The three of you were standing by the railing, looking down, and I realized I could throw her in. I could do it so fast she wouldn’t have any idea until she was over the edge, on her way down to the water.
Think of what it would do to her.
Not dying. That’s not what it was about. But her body down there in the water, and I would have done it just because I could. What it would look like, her face turned up to me. That kind of power, nobody should ever have. It scared me so much I had to put her down on the deck and go over to the other side of the boat. I sat on my hands so I couldn’t touch her. Remember? You all thought I was sick.
But I was just exhausted from thinking. Trying to get rid of the picture in my brain. Sooner or later, the only way to get rid of it is to make it happen. There’s nothing left for me. I love you but I’m done
The letter ended abruptly, with no punctuation, no signature at the bottom of the final page. I folded it back into the envelope, stuck it in my purse, and pulled out into the road, where traffic had grown heavy with commuters on their way back to Ashmont. Cars passed and beeped at me and flashed their high beams, but it wasn’t until I reached the toll booth at the Thruway, many miles later, that I realized I’d been driving without any lights.
7. Asunder
Q. How come my white shirt has inexplicably developed yellow spots?
— S.H., Watervliet
A. According to the International Fabricare Institute in Silver Spring, Md., the cause is likely to be optical brighteners used by some clothing manufacturers. Such brighteners make white garments appear even whiter. But exposure to light can chemically break down those brighteners, causing exposed areas to turn yellow and unexposed areas to remain white.
Unfortunately, once this happens, the effect is irreversible.
By the time I got back to Delphi it was after nine. The first jack-o’-lantern of the season glowed a grin on the porch of the duplex, in front of three-year-old Deirdre’s door. All the parking spaces were taken, so I let my motor die in the Tow Zone and sat watching my mother’s condo for a few minutes. Two lights were on—in the living room and kitchen—and white rays from the TV cast themselves through the shuttered blinds. I kept telling myself to get out of the car and go inside. But it wasn’t until I started to shudder that I forced myself to move.
At the sound of the door opening, my mother and Justine looked up. The sofa bed hadn’t been pulled out yet, and they sat on either end of the couch, their feet on the coffee table, heads sunk back in the cushions. Over both sets of legs lay the afghan Grandma Ott had knitted and given my parents for a wedding gift. A commercial was on, and I knew that if I hadn’t interrupted, they’d be watching the ad with as much concentration as they had given the program itself.
“Where were you?” my mother said, and I sensed it was not so much because she wondered about the answer as that she knew I might have expected to be asked. She turned her attention back to the TV, but when I didn’t respond, she looked up as if I had done something to irritate her. “What?” she said, and Justine looked at me, too.
“Just a minute,” I told them. Ordinarily I would have left my purse on the kitchen counter, but remembering what was in it, I carried it with me into the bathroom. I thought I only had to pee, after the car trip, but instead I realized I was going to throw up. Just in time I turned on the sink faucets to cover the sound. When I came out, my mother turned the volume on the TV down and Justine clucked in protest.
“What’s going on?” My mother was sitting up straight in her seat now, and she brushed her share of the afghan aside. “Ana, what’s the matter? You’re acting strange.”
“What else is new,” Justine said, but it was only a halfhearted jab because she’d gone back to watching the soundless screen.
Still not answering—I didn’t know what the words would be—I poured myself a glass of ginger ale before joining my mother and sister in the chair opposite where they sat. When I lifted the drink to my mouth, I saw that my hand trembled and I spilled ginger ale down my chin.
“Ana.” Now my mother clicked the set off altogether, and even Justine seemed to sense something serious. My mother got up and came over to take the glass out of my hand. She got a coaster from the coffee table and set the drink on it, then reached up to take hold of my chin with her cold fingers. “Ana,” she repeated, like someone trying to get a groggy patient to stay awake. “What is the matter with you?”
With the same shaking fingers I unzipped my purse and took out the folded letter. Watching myself from the outside, I kept thinking, It’s still not too late to say, “Nothing,” flush the letter, go to bed. But I knew I wouldn’t do any of those things. I saw my mother take the piece of paper out of my hands and unfold it. I watched Justine instinctively gather the afghan closer to her c
hest.
“What is it?” she demanded. “What the hell is that?”
As if it had scorched her fingers, my mother dropped the paper on the couch between them. Justine snatched it up and started reading. “Oh, shit,” she said, when she saw the handwriting and the first words. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and then focused again. Next to her, my mother clutched herself around the middle.
“Where did you get it?” she whispered. She was not looking at me.
“The police had it.” They were the first words I’d spoken since entering the house. “I went there. One of them gave it to me.” I felt like a foreigner speaking a new language. A simple sentence was all I could form.
Neither of us said anything else until Justine had finished reading. As her eyes moved down the page, she made little noises that sounded—I realized with embarrassment, wondering if my mother thought the same thing—like the noises of making love, tiny grunts as she exhaled, moans she could not have held back if she tried. When she came to the end, she looked up with an expression as thoroughly blank as I had ever seen on a human being.
“What does this mean?” she said, almost smiling in awareness of her own stupidity.
My mother shook her head. I couldn’t tell whether she was deferring to me or asking me not to answer. But it didn’t matter, because for the moment—thank God—I was beyond being able to care. “It means,” I said to Justine, “that Mom lied to us.”
And Give You Peace Page 20
