That was the flaw in their father’s dream house—it had been built for a family of four, not five. With the fourth floor taken over by the Office, there was room for only three bedrooms—two on the third floor, a master suite on the second. More than a master suite, a room with a hidden room, her father’s study, reached by a secret door through the walk-in closet. There was no reason for her father to hide the study that way. It was just for fun, he said. “I always wanted a secret room,” he said. He didn’t need one.
Or so Alanna thought until the day she got hungry and wandered down from the Office to find Elyse and ask for a snack. She didn’t call her name—her mother had gotten very harsh on people being “shouty,” especially as the new baby’s sleep patterns were so unpredictable—so she went from room to room on tiptoe. She had to be somewhere. Elyse had put Ruby down for a nap, then told Alanna she could watch anything she wanted on the television in the Office, for as long as she wanted, an unheard-of privilege. Her mother was at the pediatrician’s with Isadora, again. Alanna soon grew tired of her video feast. So she went looking for Elyse. She had been up and down the stairs three times before she thought to slide open the secret door.
And there was Elyse, her head buried in Alanna’s father’s lap. His head was thrown back, but he had his fingers in Elyse’s hair, his eyes closed.
To this day, she could not remember what happened next. Did she speak? What would she have said? She couldn’t get back to the girl who stood there, a five-year-old who knew nothing about sex, much less this strange game her father and Elyse were playing. She probably thought her father was rubbing Elyse’s head, the way he did with Alanna and Ruby at bedtime. So why was he the one falling asleep?
But they saw her. And overreacted. How could they not? Whatever they did, whatever they said, Alanna understood that much: They had been doing something wrong and they wanted her to keep the secret. Her father said Elyse had bad news and she was crying and he was trying to make her feel better. Ooooo-kay. He asked what Alanna wanted most of all, said he would buy it for her, but she had to keep the secret. Why? Because Elyse was very private about the things that made her sad. And if Mommy knew Elyse was sad and talked about her sadness, she wouldn’t let Elyse come over anymore.
Okay, that made no sense. But Alanna got an American Girl doll out of it. One for her and one for Ruby. Isadora was too young. Alanna waited for her mother to say something about the dolls. Her mother had said they couldn’t have American Girl dolls, that they offended her on some principle. But she didn’t even seem to notice the dolls. She didn’t notice anything anymore. She was like a ghost, wandering through the house at odd hours, holding Isadora, who was forever crying, crying, crying.
Then Elyse went away anyway. “Did Mommy find out Elyse was sad?” Shhh. We don’t talk about that. Respect Elyse’s privacy, okay? Then Elyse came back, after, and stayed for another year. Then she got mad and quit. She had said Alanna’s daddy wasn’t fair. Well, Alanna knew that to be true, sometimes. He wasn’t always fair. He had a hard time keeping promises, although he had kept the one about the American Girl dolls.
And for a long time, she was never sure if he knew that she had broken her promise, too. Not on purpose. But Mommy was having a bad day. That’s what she would say. I’m having a bad day, Alanna. Mommy’s having a bad day. Ruby would cry and say, No, it’s a good day, Mommy, don’t say that, it’s a good day. But Alanna was older. She knew that some days were bad, especially for her mother. Alanna, without thinking, had said, A bad day like Elyse when she was crying in Daddy’s lap. And Mommy, vague and checked-out as she was, had asked Alanna what she meant. It was too late to keep the promise, but she had begged Mommy not to tell Daddy that she’d told.
She thought her mother had kept that promise. But then one day, grown-ups came over and said they had to ask her about that, and Daddy said it was okay, she could talk about it. They gave her dolls, asked her to act out what Daddy and Elyse did. They asked if she could tell the story to a roomful of people. She said yes, but she didn’t mean it. She had stomachaches every night. It might have been when the migraines started, too, although she didn’t have words for her headaches then.
Then, two days before she was to go and tell the story, Daddy came to her and said she didn’t have to. That she would never have to tell the story and she probably shouldn’t.
Five, six, maybe seven years passed before she realized, while reading a terrific dirty book that was making the rounds of Roland Park Country middle school, that she had seen a blow job and that she was supposed to describe that in her mother’s trial.
The why of it had taken a little longer to piece together. But it was part of the before time, when Isadora was alive. Alanna told her mother, by accident, what she saw. Elyse was fired. A month later, Isadora was dead.
Good-bye to the musketeers, who never were.
Last year, in an avant-garde film class, the teacher had screened a film called 1900. You had to have a permission slip to watch it. The parents had to sign off on a Wikipedia entry that described the plot and emphasized there was nudity and graphic violence. Alanna had high hopes, but the film didn’t live up to most of the dirty books she had read. There was one scene where two lovers, interrupted by a child who spies on them, rape the child. The man then swings the boy around by his feet until he ends up bashing his brains out on a rock. Was it on purpose or by accident? She couldn’t figure that part out. But whatever he had seen, the memory was gone.
“I protected you,” her father had said the other night, when they fought. “I was thinking only of you.” But was that true? Who could tell her what was true?
She had time to kill before her appointment. She climbed the trapeze in the Office, swung her legs and sang a song, the one about the mockingbird and the diamond ring and the looking glass. Who had sung that song to her? Mommy? Elyse? Daddy? No, it had been a woman’s voice, she was sure of that. Sweet and high. And if that diamond ring turns brass—was that even possible? Don’t say a word. Don’t say a word. Daddy will buy you whatever you want. Don’t say a word.
5:00 P.M.
“This isn’t how I imagined the interview with Ethan going, Harmony. I have to tell you, I am not happy with this one.”
Harmony, seated in the living room of Melisandre’s new apartment, took a deep breath. This was the moment she had feared since taking the project. Until last week, however, Melisandre had been almost too hands-off. Then, out of nowhere, she’d asked for the camera and a quick overview of Harmony’s protocols, saying she had a “mystery guest” to interview, someone who wouldn’t speak to anyone but her. She also had said she wanted to review dailies, although Harmony had assumed the events of this week had pushed those plans out of her mind.
No such luck. Despite her last-minute move, Melisandre had managed to review all the video shot to date and summoned Harmony to her new apartment, which already looked polished and perfect. Rich people. It helped that Melisandre’s furniture and household items had been chosen weeks ago and warehoused, so she had only to summon her decorator, who supervised the movers. Still, Harmony could not get over the fact that last night this apartment had been empty and now it was furnished. Even art had been hung, although it felt impersonal, the kinds of things a decorator would choose.
“This is raw footage,” Harmony said carefully. “Unedited.”
“I know what raw means, Harmony.”
This was not the woman that Harmony had met in London four months ago. This woman had no desire to charm or seduce. She was jumpy, agitated. And she still wouldn’t tell Harmony whom she had interviewed yesterday. Nor had she uploaded the video for Harmony to transcribe. But the transcription app would kick it to her soon enough. Assuming Melisandre had remembered to use it.
“I think the interview with Ethan isn’t as bad as the interview with Poppy, in some ways. That’s going to be very difficult to edit, with her bringing up money all the time. There’s a big difference between paying someone a per diem and trav
el expenses and paying for an interview, but it confuses the issue, having Poppy reference it over and over again.”
Harmony did not add that she had been blindsided by Poppy’s talk of money. Melisandre had made that arrangement through Tyner. Harmony wasn’t sure what she found more disturbing, Melisandre’s failure to tell her about that deal or the fact that Melisandre wouldn’t even get on the phone with her former roommate once she was in Baltimore. Melisandre had addressed the latter at least, explaining to Harmony that Poppy’s preoccupation with Melisandre’s wealth had driven a wedge between them after they left the hospital. They had been the same there. They weren’t in the outside world, and Poppy could never stop dropping hints about things she wanted. Poppy was the one, Melisandre said, who kept asking about visiting her, but made it clear that Melisandre would have to buy the tickets, and could she have a companion fare and would it be okay, as long as she was making such a long flight, to go to Paris, too?
But it wasn’t the Poppy interview that bothered Melisandre. It was Ethan on whom she had fixated. Careful, clipped Ethan. To Harmony’s amazement, Melisandre was angry that Harmony had pushed him on the issue of his testimony. But how could the documentary ignore it?
“The whole point of the documentary—our smoking gun—is what Stephen and Ethan did to guarantee the mistrial, then how Stephen used that opportunity to manipulate you,” Harmony told her.
“That is not the whole point. I confided in you about Stephen and Ethan so you would have the big picture. I never expected that to become your central inquiry. The mistrial, Ethan’s mistakes—I don’t want this to get bogged down in a discussion of legal technicalities.”
“He made a slip, though. He said at one point that the articles were on your desk, then another time that they were on your nightstand.”
“So what? Anyone could make that kind of mistake. You let it go pretty easily.”
“I’m not—this isn’t 60 Minutes, Melisandre. I’m trying to be unobtrusive, stay out of it. I can’t be adversarial during the interviews. That’s not right for the tone of the piece I’m creating. We’re creating.”
“Ethan perjured himself. He’s never going to admit that on-camera.”
“I know that’s what you think happened, Melisandre.”
“It’s what happened, Harmony. No ‘think’ about it.” Lord, her voice was icy when she was mad. Harmony had a moment of wondering what Melisandre had been like as a mother. The woman had a mercurial streak that was hard enough on Harmony. How had two small girls felt when her moods jumped like this? Harmony thought of her own mother, a working-class woman of great charm and wit. She was loud but direct, shouting instructions at her children and husband. But Harmony never had to wonder where she stood with her mother.
“Melisandre, this is supposed to be a documentary about the insanity defense and our society’s inability to grant people the verdict that the court bestows. You won in court. You were judged not guilty. As you know, the same circumstances happened in the Andrea Yates trial. The original guilty verdict was vacated, based on inaccurate testimony, and she went on to be judged not guilty by reason of insanity.”
“No one has ever doubted that Andrea Yates was insane. And Andrea Yates is still hospitalized. Like Hinckley, she’ll probably never get out. I’m the one that people think rigged the system because I had money. I’m the one who has to prove that this is real, that it can happen to anyone, not just some silly Bible thumper with a substandard IQ. Not that I think of Yates that way.”
The last sentence was said hastily, in a tacked-on way. Harmony tried to keep her face neutral. Yet she was sure that was exactly how Melisandre thought of Yates.
“But that’s what others think,” Melisandre continued, up and pacing now, raking her hands through her hair. “There’s always a reason to look away when mental illness is involved. When someone even opens the door to the question, as Ethan does here, that I might not have been ill—I can’t tell you how hurtful that is to me. The others hint at the same thing. It was bad enough to do what I did, to live through it and have to go on. You know there were suicide attempts, Harmony. You know because I told you, and I’m willing, in our film, to share that with the world for the first time. I lost my mind. You have no idea how apt that phrase is until it happens to you. I lost my mind. I got it back. But I lost everything else. My daughters, all of them.”
Not your money, Harmony thought. But she realized that was her obsession. Melisandre had suffered. She missed her daughters terribly. Her money was no cushion against those harsh realities.
“I signed those custodial papers under stress. Ethan doesn’t tell that part, does he? And believe me, Ethan knows all about what happened when I left the hospital. Ethan conspired against me. But it’s Stephen who has to admit what he did. Not the affair, so much, but his desperation to keep it from coming out.”
And here was the Melisandre of Claridge’s in London again. Warm, empathetic, seductive.
Harmony, eager to please, said, “I can’t really afford the time to edit this right now, but I could edit the transcript, show you how it might appear.”
“Is that the best use of your time?”
“I told you: Transcribing the audio really seals the information in my head, gives me perspective. The forest and the trees, you know? I doubt this interview with Ethan will even be a big part of the final project. You’re right—it covers ground that’s been covered. But with Stephen reneging on his agreement to let the girls participate in the film, this is all we have right now.”
“For now,” Melisandre said. “He’ll change his mind.”
“Let me edit the transcript, show you what I think we might use, and how. Then we’ll take it from there. I’m not opposed to sitting down again with someone. I just want to avoid meeting over and over. People get too smooth after a while. We want this to feel, you know, real. Unrehearsed. I wish we didn’t have to do so much with talking heads and voice-over. And you know I won’t do re-creations, I just won’t. No fuzzy scenes with actors portraying the past. But—the things we had hoped to be filming this week. Well, it may be a while.”
She was trying to be as tactful as possible about the impasse over the girls. The incident with Melisandre’s trainer had given Stephen more juice. Perhaps Melisandre thought owning an apartment in Stephen’s building would force him to concede her surroundings were safe, but it wasn’t working out that way.
“That’s another thing—I don’t want it mentioned in the film, ever, that Alanna was called to testify. I don’t want to go down that road. Not because of me. Because of her. I wouldn’t do that to her. Believe me, I have no problem revealing that Stephen wasn’t quite the saintly husband and father people think he was during my illness. But it would hurt Alanna, and that’s all that matters. That was my concern at the time and that’s my concern now.”
Harmony took a deep breath. “I’m not sure we can leave it out. It’s a salient fact. The prosecution was attempting to build a case that you were not criminally insane, that you had cause, that you knew about the affair.”
“The prosecution thought I was Medea, is that what you’re saying? Perhaps Medea was mad, too. Again, this isn’t about me, Harmony. It’s about Alanna. Maybe if Stephen understood we weren’t going to go there—Well, I will reassure him about that, and watch his objections to the film disappear.”
“Even after the incident with your trainer?”
“Stephen’s not the least bit concerned about Silas. He’s terrified his secret is going to come out, after all these years, and he’s using this as an excuse. Poor brave Stephen Dawes, bewildered by his wife’s behavior, sought solace with the nanny. The nanny. How did I ever marry such a cliché?”
The question had occurred to Harmony, although not in the context of a cliché. Why had Melisandre married Stephen? She had filmed Melisandre’s version of the proposal story, beneath the now winter-bare tree where it had happened. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something off abo
ut the story, an emphasis on the romantic gesture but little reference to any genuine romantic feeling. Maybe that was because Melisandre had to tell the story from the vantage of hindsight, knowing how it had ended.
“The other dailies are fine, Harmony,” Melisandre said. “Even Poppy. And I assure you, I am not going to censor your film, or try to structure it. You do have final cut.”
Final cut contingent on the film being accepted into a major festival within one year of completion or finding distribution within two, Harmony thought. No pressure there.
“Thank you,” Harmony said, hating herself for being submissive, subservient. How had she become this person? “And I look forward to seeing what you did this morning. The ‘mystery’ interview.”
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