She seriously entertains this fantasy for a moment, picturing what she’d pack—which of her shoes would work best on ice floes?—and then discards it. She has to take care of the cats, who would not consider a road trip to Canada, with or without ice floes, a good time. Her knee’s hardly up to leaping. And God knows that if she could afford to just pick up and leave her job, she would have done it years ago. No, that won’t work.
She takes a long swallow of coffee, sweet and creamy. Her doctor’s been on her for years now to cut down on sugar and cholesterol, but she’s never planned to live forever and she needs her pleasures. Savoring her French roast, she forces herself to think about work. The 19c Brit syllabus is pretty much dictated by the department; not much leeway there. But Women & Lit’s an open topic. She can teach it however she wants.
Since the middle of last semester, it’s been advertised as Women & Work, a topic that allows her to teach everything from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its oppressed slave women toiling away under the lash, to Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, with its oppressed Wal-Mart employees sorting endless piles of Jordache jeans. The topic resonates with the students, most of whom are working their way through school. For a long time, it was one of Veronique’s more popular courses, which is why she keeps teaching it. But she’s tired of it, as of so much else, and as she’s grown more bored, so have the students. Time for a change.
All right, so what would be more interesting?
Women & Tourism.
Women & Murder.
Women & Abandonment.
Veronique feels encased in lead. What’s she thinking? She can’t prep a new course, with an entirely new set of books to be ordered, in two weeks. That’s insane.
Women & Violence.
She blinks. Trendy. Relevant. Related, God knows, to Melinda, which means Veronique will have some emotional energy invested in the work. She can still use the Stowe, the first book on the syllabus, which will leave a month for the other books to come in, if she orders them in the next few days.
The students won’t have signed up for this topic. On the other hand, Women & Lit satisfies both college and departmental requirements and always fills: she’ll have students no matter what she teaches.
She pushes herself away from the breakfast table, already making lists as she heads upstairs to search her shelves, and the library database, for good fits. Stowe. Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers.” Beloved. Bastard Out of Carolina, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Something by Kingsolver, who’s always a hit with students.
That’s a thin list, but it’s a start, and she’ll find others. Maybe she can do this. Maybe she can force herself through another semester.
* * *
Gone, finally. Anna waves the detested rental car out of the driveway and goes inside to collapse onto the couch. William’s parents have been in Seattle for a month and a half, from before Thanksgiving to now, New Year’s Day. Even if she felt close to them, even if the visit hadn’t come at such a hideous time, having them here for so long would have been a strain.
The one blessing is that they stayed in a hotel, not at the house. William spent a lot of time with them, which meant that Anna didn’t have to, although it also meant she didn’t see much of William. But that was true even before his parents descended on Seattle.
She suspects she’ll see even less of him now.
She knows they have to talk. She’s afraid to talk to him, afraid of guilt and accusations and recriminations, most afraid of having to witness his pain, since her own is vast and unsupportable and inescapable, the air she breathes and the lungs she breathes it with. She can’t face what happened yet. She can’t face talking to William about any of it, having to witness his own grief. His only son, his boy. Percy.
She hasn’t been able to face anyone else, either. Her New Year’s resolution is to get back into the world again: to help William with Kip’s postponed opening, to go back to her knitting group, to turn her energies back to the Blake board, which will be meeting in a few weeks.
Before Marjorie and David came, all of that would have seemed unbearable. Now it will be a relief.
Marjorie and David, of course, arrived with an agenda. Communication. Openness. Transparency. They wanted everyone to share feelings, to use the incomprehensible horror of what Percy did and how he died as an opportunity for personal growth. They wanted to help William and Anna through the holidays, which they knew could be meaningful even in grief, and they wanted to help plan Percy’s funeral as a community celebration of life. They hadn’t been especially close to their only grandson, mostly because they lived in Massachusetts, but in this case, that was a blessing, because it gave them clearer heads with which to supervise their son and his wife.
Anna didn’t want to be supervised.
She found their ideas about growth and transparency and celebration obscene.
She knows they meant well. They always mean well. But they always mean well in such a high-handed, officious, controlling way that it makes her want to scream. The funeral is none of their business. They kept telling her and William that it was important to have a service for closure, but Anna isn’t sure she wants closure, even if she should. How can you have closure on the death of your only child? How is that possible under any circumstances, let alone these? She’s simply not up to the ordeal of a memorial service, especially one that includes any form of the word “celebration.” She suspects William feels the same way, although they haven’t discussed it directly. They’ve only discussed it through his parents.
In any case, the date’s now fixed. Percy’s memorial service will be on July 24, which would have been his twenty-third birthday. That’s going to be a brutal day anyway: they might as well have the memorial then, and pack all the misery into as short a span as possible. At least it’s a Saturday, the most convenient day for such an event.
Marjorie and David wouldn’t leave Seattle until the date was set. They’ll come back in July, for the service. Anna fervently hopes they won’t stay another six weeks.
She’s closed her eyes in sheer weariness, but she feels a wet nose nudging her hand, which rests on one knee. “Hello, Bart,” she says without opening her eyes; a warm tongue licks her palm in response. She hears soft thumping now, the dog’s tail beating a tattoo against the carpet.
“Don’t get your hopes up. The days of nonstop walks are over.” While Marjorie and David were here, she took Bart on three, four, five walks a day: to get away from them when they were in the house, and to relieve her stress through exercise when they and William were off somewhere without her. As much as she longed to be alone, she couldn’t stand being in the house by herself; she kept finding herself listening for Percy’s footsteps. So she’d fidget and pace and wind up taking the dog out, again. A few times, Bart even refused the leash, flopping down with his long head on his lanky paws. If you want to go out again, human, do it by yourself.
But David and Marjorie are gone, finally, and the weather’s at its most wretched, and the dog will just have to cope with the old, two-walk-a-day regimen while Anna tries to resume her old life. She’s pretty sure that no one in her knitting group or on the Blake board will want her to share her feelings about Percy. That’s the upside of the isolation she’s felt: the common decency of privacy.
Marjorie and David kept pestering her about how she needed to find a support group. There are bereavement groups for suicide survivors, they told her, and she’s sure that’s true, but she doesn’t think she could deal with a room full of other people’s overwhelming grief and anger, that maelstrom of sheer agony.
William, who knows her horror of touchy-feely group therapy, suggested a psychologist during one of their infrequent conversations. He’s seeing one himself. He’s on medication now, and thinks it will help her—although to her he seems flat and foggy, blunted and blurred—but she doesn’t need to talk to a shrink and she doesn’t need to be on drugs. What she needs is to know that other people whose children have comm
itted horrible crimes have survived the experience, have made sense of it somehow and gone on with their lives.
That’s the support group she really needs, but she doesn’t think it exists. She can’t find Mothers of Murderers Anonymous in the phone book. If Marjorie were in this situation, she’d start up a chapter herself, and probably organize a national charitable foundation of some sort into the bargain. But Anna isn’t Marjorie. She never has been, never will be. William skipped the section in the manual explaining that men are supposed to marry women who remind them of their mothers.
In lieu of group therapy, she kept reading everything she could find about Melinda Soto. She read articles about the funeral, read the online archive of library newsletters Melinda edited, read the online guestbook set up by the library: note after note talking about how wonderful she was, how incomprehensible her death is.
Many of the notes express rage at Percy. Anna keeps reading them anyway. She understands the rage. She shares it.
So much pain, pain that overwhelms the words meant to express it.
The dog’s still licking her hand. The sensation was soothing at first, but now it’s as grating as if her hand were being raked over glass. Anna pulls away from Bart’s slobber, gets up, and makes her way into the bathroom to clean the dog spit off her skin. Her hands yearn to knit; she craves the softness of yarn and the familiar, reassuring movements of the needles. She hasn’t knit since Marjorie and David showed up. She knows the rhythm of the stitches will calm her, help her think more clearly again. Knitting is a promise that she can still function, still do useful work.
Her knitting bag’s where she left it the night Melinda Soto was killed, half under an easy chair in the living room. She’s heading back into the living room to collect it, to resume work on the Frost Flowers shawl, when the phone rings. She picks up in the kitchen, hoping it’s not David and Marjorie saying that their flight’s been delayed, or offering yet more ideas for the memorial service. Please, be anyone but them.
It’s Miranda Tobin.
Watch what you wish for.
“Anna, dear, I’m just calling to find out how you and William are doing.”
Anna doubts this very much, and she wouldn’t know how to answer the question even if it were sincere. She and Miranda have never been close. She fumbles for words and comes up dry.
“Anna? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here. It’s—a hard question to answer. I don’t have words for it.” Only the silent scream. “It was kind of you to call, Miranda.”
If the call’s really a compassionate gesture, Miranda will recognize this as dismissal and get off the phone. Of course she doesn’t. “Toby and I were talking just last night about how terrible it all is. We just can’t understand it.”
“No one can understand it,” Anna says. Her mouth tastes like blood, and her hand hurts from gripping the phone. If Percy had to kill someone, why couldn’t he kill Miranda Tobin?
Anna recognizes this as humor too black to share with anyone, even William. Especially William. She clears her throat and says, “We’re having the memorial service on July 24. It would have been Percy’s birthday. It would be lovely to see you and Toby there.”
“Oh, we’d love to come, but I’m afraid we’ll be in Europe then. It’s Toby’s last free summer, really, because things will heat up so much in his second year at Harvard Med, so we thought we’d take the chance to see France and Italy.”
I cannot, thinks Anna, believe that I’m having this conversation. She wonders if Miranda expects her to ask about the trip, or say that she hopes they have a wonderful time. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t be there. It was really very kind of you to call, but—”
“Anna, dear, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but, well, we had a board meeting last night—”
Ah. “I’ve taken a leave of absence from the board,” Anna says, “although I’m thinking of coming back. Weren’t you told?”
“Yes, of course, we all know that, and of course you would, you have to, I can’t even imagine what this must be like for you, but Anna, dear, I thought you should know. There’s talk about asking you to resign.”
The room shifts slightly, and then settles. “Resign?” Anna says. “They’re asking me? Or telling me?”
“Well, you know, because it’s a school, and well, we want the public to focus on the fine young people who attend Blake.”
And not on the rapist murderers, Anna thinks grimly. She can’t even blame them, but she’s shaking anyway. All the work she’s put into that place, the hours of meetings and events and fundraisers and school functions, not to mention the tuition she and William paid for Percy’s very fine education. “I understand completely,” she says, trying to keep her voice under control. “I’m a PR liability. If it were Toby, I’m sure I’d have come to the same conclusion about you.”
Miranda coughs, sounding a bit strangled, but then regains her dovelike tones. “I thought it was cruel, just to send a letter. I thought someone should tell you in person.”
The hell you did, Anna thinks. You wanted to gloat. She’s so angry she can barely form syllables. “Well, I have the message now. Thank you.”
“I just didn’t want you to be blindsided, Anna. When you get the letter.”
This time it registers. A letter. They’ve written a letter? Already? Percy’s only been dead six weeks. They couldn’t have waited another few months? Or, if they couldn’t wait, they couldn’t send someone to tell her in person?
Miranda’s still talking, but Anna can’t make it out, doesn’t want to. She hangs up.
She no longer has the slightest desire to knit. She entertains a brief fantasy about strangling Miranda Tobin with her yarn, and then dismisses it. She knows the Blake board made the decision they had to make, but the way they’ve done it still enrages her.
All right, she’ll preempt them. She’ll send out a letter of resignation before she can get their letter firing her.
Halfway down the hall to her study, she stops. No. She can’t do that. Because Miranda will know the truth, and will tell everyone else, and then her own letter will merely look thin and desperate, as indeed it would be. There’s no good way to handle the situation, but giving Miranda Tobin another reason to gloat would definitely be a bad one.
The silent scream bubbles into unspoken words. I wasn’t a bad mother I wasn’t I don’t know why this happened but it’s not my fault, it has to be but it can’t be, how can it be my fault that my child did this thing I can’t even bear to think about?
Anna feels a huge shudder pass through her body. She swallows. She’s standing in front of Percy’s bedroom.
It’s not like this is unusual. She walks past this door too many times each day to count. She hasn’t gone inside. She’s told herself that she’ll do that when she’s ready. There’s no hurry. Nothing inside is going anywhere.
She stands in the dark hallway, looking at Percy’s doorknob. It’s just a room, now. He’s not in it. The police have returned what they took, six big boxes worth, which William lugged back into the room. They’re still there, Anna supposes, sitting on the floor or the bed: pieces of Percy’s life, torn out of context.
She can’t bring Percy back. She can’t undo what he did or comfort the people who loved Melinda Soto. She can’t restore his good name at the school he attended from the ages of five to eighteen. But she can put his things back where he kept them, back where they belong. That tiny bit, she can make right.
She opens the door and turns on the overhead light. Someone—William? the cops?—lowered the blinds, making the room even gloomier than it would be anyway. Resolutely, stepping around boxes, Anna crosses to the windows and raises the slats, allowing such daylight as there is to filter into the room. Then she turns on Percy’s desk lamp and bedside lamp.
There. It’s a little more cheerful now. She takes a deep breath and looks around. He was a neat kid. Too neat? Should his neatness have alarmed her? His comic-book posters marc
h across the walls, lined up with architectural precision, interrupted only by a Stanford pennant and his framed diplomas. On his desk, a small wooden one he’s had ever since he started junior high school, his GMAT study book sits centered, flanked by a row of pencils, a calculator, an eraser. Ordinarily his computer would be on the desk, too, but it’s not; she supposes it’s in one of the boxes, since she knows the police took it. She doesn’t believe they found anything interesting on it, although William talked to them in much more depth than she did. Surely William would have told her if anything had turned up, though. Even in his present state, he wouldn’t have withheld any information that would explain any of this.
One narrow bookshelf is full of textbooks and a few beat-up novels. The other bookcase, much larger, houses Percy’s comic collection, each issue stored in a plastic slipcase, each year of issues boxed and labeled. William, who deals regularly with art collectors, says that many of them are more passionate about the act of collecting than about what they collect. Had they fastened on stamps or coins or bottle caps, they would be equally driven. Percy, says William, fastened on a comic book, which worked out well, because the comic book is popular and ubiquitous and inexpensive.
She walks to the closet and opens it. Button-down shirts and slacks hang neatly from the racks. There are a few ties, a collection of shoes in a rack on the door. The shelves are empty; she suspects she’ll find whatever was there in the police boxes.
Percy’s dresser, too, holds only what you’d expect. Socks, briefs, polo shirts, jeans, sweatpants. Everything looks rumpled, so the police must have searched it.
Her first cursory inspection completed, Anna looks around the room again. There’s a small photo frame on the desk. Percy, thirteen or fourteen—no, he was fourteen then—his arms around puppy Bart, who licks his cheek as Percy laughs, eyes closed and face to the sun, oblivious to the camera. William took the photo.
How did this sunny, joyous kid turn into the person who killed Melinda Soto? What didn’t Anna know about Percy?
Mending the Moon Page 15
