by R. L. Fox
“I believe it’s back in my mother’s chest of drawers, where I first found it, and where Julie must have found it, too, which, now that I think about it, makes me wonder what she was doing in there.”
I believe Daniel could solve even the most difficult of riddles. I put Julie’s note in my purse, and I shove the purse under Daniel’s bed, with my suitcase. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
“Wait a minute,” Daniel says solemnly. He walks over to the window. “I’m so close now to finding my mother’s diary, that I want to savor the moment. I suppose I’m feeling some reluctance, you know, like perhaps I shouldn’t intrude, shouldn’t risk tarnishing my mother’s blessed memory.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. It’s a difficult decision. But it might help clear your conscience. Maybe she wrote something just for you, something that she wanted you to see.”
“I guess ... you could be right.”
“I’ll wait here, Daniel, if you wish.”
Daniel gazes sharply at me. He can probably see just how much I really want to be with him when he finds the diary.
He smiles thinly. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”
Daniel walks slowly through the bathroom. I follow, a step behind, my hands on his waist. He opens the door to his father’s bedroom. Once we’re inside, he closes it. The windows are shut, shades drawn. The room is cloaked in semi-darkness.
I stand at the foot of the bed, looking around the room. “Gosh, Daniel, you’re sitting on the bed your mother once slept in. Doesn’t that make you feel weird?”
“The bed on which she died, too,” Daniel says incisively.
I feel his anger like it’s my own, and I want to lighten the moment. “Oh, be quiet, it’s spooky enough in here already.”
“Should I switch on the lamp?
“No, I’m all right.” I continue, “Do you ever talk to your mother, I mean now that she’s in Heaven? I always talk to my ... dad, or I used to, anyway. I would be walking home from school and I’d tell myself, if a leaf falls from that tree before I count to ten, well, that’s my dad sending his love down from Heaven. I’ll bet your mother is proud of you, and I’ll bet she’s happy, now that she’s up there with God and the angels.”
“I haven’t let her know how I feel about her death, if that’s what you mean. Sometimes I want to ask, ‘Why did you leave me?’”
It occurs to me, and it’s probably a leftover “little girl’s fear,” that I might one day wake up and all this, the thrill of being in love with a sensitive boy like Daniel, the precious moments of shared intimacy, will burst like a bubble, like Alice coming out of the rabbit hole.
“Okay, here goes,” says Daniel.
I sit next to him on the bed, as Daniel opens the dresser drawer and slides his hand under his mother’s clothes. Slowly, he brings his hand out. He’s holding a red book, his mother’s diary. His eyes seem filled with delight, and perhaps, I’m sure, a little trepidation. He clutches the diary and holds it to his breast, and then he looks closely at the book and runs his fingers over the raised gold lettering on its cover: Diary of Mary Rosen.
He closes the drawer and hands the book to me, and I hold it in both hands, fingers trembling. I look at Daniel and he puts his arm around me.
“Let’s wait a few minutes before we peek inside,” he says.
“What kind of stuff do you expect to find in your mom’s diary?” I ask.
“I don’t know, personal things, I guess. Like the reason she took her own life.” His penetrating dark eyes almost cause me to shudder.
“Wow, that’s heavy,” I say. “Do you have any hypotheses?”
He looks at the floor. “Just what Julie said in the note, if she’s telling the truth. My father didn’t treat my mother very well.”
“Did he yell at her? My dad, uh, William, yelled at my mom sometimes.”
Daniel keeps his eyes cast down. “Worse than that.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Daniel.” I want so much to know for certain that Frank is not my father.
“It used to make me angry,” Daniel says, poignantly.
As he looks at me I can see his pain, reflected by his face. In a cracked voice he adds, “I wanted to do something, but ... well, one night, last fall, I came home late after being with Liz. My mother and father were arguing in the living room. I was in the kitchen getting a snack. My mom had found Liz’s letters, and she’d been drinking and my dad was pissed. I heard the dull, thick sound of my father’s fist, striking my mother. A wire snapped in my head and I went after him. My dad is really tough and he moved in fast and slapped me across the face and grabbed my throat, pinning me against the wall. I retreated to my room like a whipped dog.”
I take his hand in mine and squeeze gently. I make no reply, because I don’t know what to say. Can it be that I’ve come to understand this complex boy? Impossible, I decide. It’s only one of my brief attacks of common sense.
But it’s probably the same for both of us. We’ve finally found our twin. We are from different worlds, and yet we are so similar. In his arms, I know who I am, Sarah, just Sarah, and that’s more than enough.
“I care a lot about you, Sarah,” says Daniel. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” He turns away, head down. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that my father did terrible things to my mother. He’s not really the way he appears to you and your mother. It’s an act. He treated my mother badly. He’s an evil man.”
I sort of want to believe Daniel is lying, but I know he isn’t. What if Frank is my father? Pictures of all the kissing and touching with Daniel flash through my mind. We’d be going to hell for sure.
I let myself cry, quietly.
Daniel nudges me and I see the sense of urgency in his eyes. “Someone’s here,” he says.
I stop crying because I hear it too, the crunching sound of gravel as a car pulls into the driveway.
“My father is supposed to be out of town,” Daniel says. “But now I don’t know. Mike is working. It could be your mother. Do you think she would come into the house?”
“I don’t know, I can’t think. I don’t want to go home.”
“Let’s hide in my mother’s closet.”
Daniel takes my hand, and we scramble noiselessly into the closet, clearing a space against the back wall, behind the clothes on hangers, amongst his mother’s shoes. Daniel closes the closet door, and we sit in utter darkness. As we listen for the noise of someone entering the house, he puts his arm around me and hugs me. I nestle my head on his shoulder, with the red diary in my hands.
20
Daniel
Friday evening, August 8
El Cajon Valley
Sitting quietly with Sarah in the darkness of my mother’s closet, I’ve been evoking phantoms that have lived an eternity in my soul, until I hear the bedroom door opening.
A few seconds later My father says, “Where’s the diary? I’m pleased you told me about it. I would have never known. If that thing were to get into the wrong hands ...”
There’s the sounds of some shuffling about, and then Julie says, “I put it right here ... this morning. I swear, Frank.”
I sit absolutely rigid: an expectant rigidity as when, from the darkness of my own bedroom, not long ago, I would hear my mother plead for mercy.
“How could anyone have taken it?” my father says in a frustrated tone. No one’s been here, no one else knew about it. Mike told me Dan’s gone to the beach.”
There’s a moment of silence and then my father speaks again: “All right, we’ll deal with the diary later, Sugar. Let’s have a little fun before we leave for the cabin.”
I don’t believe Julie is in any real danger. But that person out there with her, the congressman, I’ve decided, isn’t my father. Frank, you bastard, I’m through, I tell myself. From this moment forward that person is just some evil guy named “Frank.”
“Lie down, Sugar. Here, put these on.”
“Whatever you say, F
rank. I want you so bad.”
I hear more moving about, the clicking of metal. It seems Frank and Julie are playing some sort of sick game. They’ll go away soon, I reckon, if Sarah and I can just stick it out a little longer.
“Be right back,” Frank says.
Julie giggles solicitously.
I hold Sarah tightly in my arms. She’s shaking interminably, which adds to my confusion. I hear her thick, tortured breathing.
Then there’s the familiar clack, clack, clack of Frank’s shoes across the hardwood floor as he enters the bedroom again. I hear him say savagely, “Tell me about Mary’s diary, or I’ll slit your throat.”
As Julie begins to whimper, Sarah covers her ears with her hands.
“I wrote things in the diary,” Julie says, “the truth about Mary’s death. I left it for Dan, he must have taken it.”
So now Frank knows I’ve taken possession of my mother’s diary, I tell myself, and that Julie has scribbled “the truth” in the diary regarding my mother’s death. No matter what happens, I must keep the diary from Frank, at least until I’ve been given a chance to read Julie’s version of what took place on the night of my mother’s death.
Suddenly I hear Frank’s voice in a loud, angry taunt: “If you’re lying to me, I’m going to cut you from ear to ear.”
The words of Mr. Christie, “Evil must be encountered, not evaded,” like a supplicating verse from the Torah, bring me to my feet. I can no longer suffer what Frank is doing to Julie. Sarah stands with me. For a moment I hesitate, and then I take a deep breath and throw open the closet door, jump out and shout, “Get the hell off her, you bastard!”
Frank, straddling Julie on the bed, starts. When he sees me, his hand comes away from her throat, and he moves slowly, calmly, from the bed and stands beside it, his carefully groomed hair unruffled. In the other hand he holds a large carving knife.
The menace that darkens Frank’s face causes a quaking in my knees. His eyes seem to glaze over like a rattlesnake’s. With Julie’s hands cuffed to the bed frame, I’m reminded of a scene from a Wes Craven film. She’s lying still, on her back, her hair horribly disheveled. Her skirt is hiked up. She’s wearing the gold anklet. On her face there’s an innocent quality, as of a child who’s quit resisting.
“What’s going on?” asks Frank. “What are you doing in my bedroom, son?”
I point at Julie, who is gaping at the ceiling like a madwoman, and I mutter angrily, “What’s she doing here, and why is she handcuffed?”
“That is none of your business,” Frank snarls. “I want you out of my bedroom!”
“You won’t control me, Frank!” I’m looking at him with hatred so intense it bathes the room in apprehension.
“Daniel, Daniel, calm down ... please. We can clear all this up, if you’ll simply allow me to talk to you.”
If I owned a sword, I am thinking, I would run it through Frank’s heart. There was a time, long ago, when I considered Frank fearless and strong, a modern warrior. But I see clearly now that Frank is a man frightened by his inadequacies. I cannot listen to his flat ugly voice without a twitch of shame. Frank is a man on whom the sky is falling.
Frank puts the knife on his dresser. I anticipate the moment when he will ask about the diary. Sarah is still in the closet, and I’m hoping she won’t come out.
“You never wanted to talk to me before,” I say bitterly.
“That’s because you acted like a kid, still crying for the tit.” Frank’s steely eyes flash with derision. “You were always her boy.”
“And you always had your convenient meetings.” If I could reach into the past I would show Frank in living color the pain he caused my mother and I. “I should have been your boy, too!”
“So you were lonely?” Frank laughs. “Try it for twenty-two years.”
I stand with my hands in my pockets. “I know about you and Mrs. Hartford, in 1998. You were probably chasing Julie before Mom’s corpse was cold!”
“How would you know? You were gone, Dan. Don’t you remember? And after that I wasted the days here alone, with her, watching the hours tick by, with all her fucking Catholic bullshit, the pills and the booze.” Frank chuckles ironically. “Listen to me you little punk. For years you walked around this house blaming me for your mother’s illness. You concluded I was a self-absorbed, insensitive prick, and you were fucking wrong! I was out there campaigning, working, paying the medical bills, feeding your lazy ass and putting a roof over your head!”
I feel my throat constrict and my eyes moisten. Frank’s anger hurts me. “Why did you have her committed? Why did you let her have all those shock treatments?” I’m aware of the quaver in my voice.
“Because she wanted to take her own life,” Frank says thickly. Then, in a softer tone, “For several years she wanted to die. The only thing that stopped her was you. She lived for you.”
I sense that some of my guilt, some of the burden I’ve carried over Liz’s letters, has been lifted. But if what Frank says is true, my mother took her own life because of Frank, because he had caused her to suffer, because he had withdrawn his love.
“You should be ashamed of treating her like you did,” I say, my voice rising as I experience a moment of dreadful recognition. “You think I don’t know, but I listened to you every night, hurting her for your own selfish pleasure. She suffered because of you, you bastard! She died because of you! You might just as well have murdered her!”
We stare at each other—a few seconds of fierce enquiry. I can hear Frank’s labored breathing, and then Julie speaks, in a flat, lifeless tone: “Mary didn’t take enough pills to kill herself ... she just wanted help ... she found us together ... Frank finished the job ... he held the pillow over her face—”
“Shut up, bitch!” Frank roars. Julie’s accusation seems to snap in a closing circle around him.
I catch my breath. The question lies squarely before me: Did you kill my mother? Asking it, I am sure, will cost me my life.
“Don’t you talk to her like that!” I bellow. It occurs to me that Julie has been trying to tell me the truth all along.
Frank taunts Julie. “Tell him what really happened. The truth. Tell him what you did to his mother.”
Julie giggles under her breath. She seems disconnected from the world, from reality itself.
Sarah shuffles out of the closet and stands next to me. She’s holding the diary in one hand and wiping tears from her eyes with the other.
“What’s this?” Frank seems surprised, but only for an instant. “Give me the diary, Sarah,” he says compellingly.
“No, Sarah,” I say. “Go. Run. I’ll meet you at our hiding place.”
As Sarah hesitates, I feel a surge of panic; my heart beats fearfully. Frank takes a step towards Sarah, a quick predatory gesture, but like a flash of lightning I move between him and Sarah. I stand my ground, prepared to protect her, and the diary. Frank backs away.
I look at Sarah, she looks at me, and then she runs, almost crashing into Mike as he appears in the doorway. As Sarah flies past him, he calls after her, “Your mother’s in the car, down the lane.”
Mike switches on the lamp atop Frank’s dresser. He’s holding his revolver, pointed at Frank. “What the hell? Take those cuffs off my wife before I put a bullet through your heart, Dad.”
The vexed look on Frank’s face changes to a smile that is bright and false and filled with contempt. He takes the key from his dresser drawer and unlocks the handcuffs. He’s laughing, too, and I find it odd to hear him laugh and to be so utterly outside the laughter, as far away from the impulse that caused it as the moon.
Julie massages her wrists and swings her legs off the bed. When she stands, Frank grabs the knife off the dresser and wraps his arm around her throat, positioning himself behind Julie with the blade against her neck. The tip of his tongue protrudes from between his lips like a little pink snake.
Julie is silent for a second, and then her throat shapes a small, wounded squeal.
I should have warned Mike about the knife. How stupid of me, I think, as it becomes clear to me that my life is in danger.
“Put the pistol on the dresser, Mike,” Frank says calmly. “We’re all family here, and if everyone keeps his mouth shut, and I get my hands on that diary, nobody will know anything. Let’s be sensible, we can’t bring your mother back.”
Mike places his gun on the dresser, but at the same time Julie sinks her teeth into Frank’s arm, causing him to lose his grip on her. Julie breaks free. Frank pushes her onto the bed and she screams. Mike is already lunging at Frank. He tackles Frank and together they fall onto the bed, on top of Julie, who lets out a high-pitched wail that pierces the air.
My heart lurches, and I freeze, as Mike and Frank roll to the floor. Mike has a hold on Frank’s wrist, preventing Frank from slashing him with the knife. Their shadows play on the wall, with the blade held six inches from Mike’s neck, until Mike is able to punch Frank in the face. Frank drops the knife; it clatters on the hardwood floor.
Mike jumps to his feet and backs away from Frank, who’s already standing. They face each other with mouths agape, gasping for air like cage fighters in a UFC event. Julie is still screaming as Frank lands a hard right to Mike’s jaw, staggering Mike and moving him backwards. Mike falls to his knees, stunned, and then goes down on all fours, groggily attempting to rise, when Frank kicks him in the ribs. Mike sprawls on the floor.
I yell, “Ahhh!” and fling myself at Frank with fists raised. But Frank comes around with a left that slices across my face and stands me on tiptoes for a second, until I lurch sideways and catch myself against the wall, next to Frank’s dresser. I touch my lip and spit blood; the iron taste of it fills my mouth.
Mike gets to his feet and yells, “Run, Danny, run!” I’m thinking, Not this time, dude! I regard Mike’s pistol on the dresser as Mike brings up a right hook and Frank blocks it, kicking Mike hard in the groin. Mike doubles over. Frank picks up the knife and moves in.
I take up the pistol, release the safety, raise the barrel and point it at Frank. But as my finger touches the trigger I know I will never pull it. I simply do not possess whatever it is that gives leave to destroying another human being. I cannot kill. Cannot.
