The Good Sister

by Drusilla Campbell

  “But Franny was really mad and yelling at Mommy, and Gramma Ellen kept telling her to be quiet and let her think. She said she’d give Franny five thousand dollars if she’d forget what just happened.”

  The inestimable Franny had taken a bribe. And now she had vanished.

  “But you know what?” Merell said. “Franny wasn’t even looking at the pool. She was lying on her stomach, reading a magazine. She just turned around when everyone started yelling.”

  “But you saw all this?”

  “Mommy wanted to drown her. That’s how come I called 911.”

  * * *

  Simone sent Celia home with two fifty-dollar bills.

  “Everything’s fine now,” she said, glowing with her own generosity. “I can manage. See you tomorrow, bright and early.”

  She put Olivia in her chair in the kitchen with a pile of bright orange cheddar cheese crackers and a sippy-glass of grape juice on her tray. Olivia grabbed a handful of crackers and stuffed them in her mouth.

  Simone assembled a picnic supper, the twins looking on as she packed potato chips and string cheese and oranges cut in fourths in a cooler bag with blue ice.

  “Where are we going?” Valli asked.

  “We’re going to look at boats.”

  If Shawn was at the boat shop he might offer to take them out for an evening sail. Simone would like to see the sunset from the water again, but her hopes and dreams did not require that. She would inquire of whoever was in the shop where she could sign up for sailing lessons. She’d pay for ten at a time, maybe twenty. She patted the pocket of her slacks, making sure her credit card was where she’d put it.

  If you’d just do something.

  If you weren’t so helpless.

  She had to arrange for lessons and be back from the Shelter Island marina before Johnny came home and they had the conversation. She knew he wouldn’t be pleased at first. He would say it wasn’t safe for a pregnant woman to sail a boat. He’d probably laugh and say she couldn’t even throw a ball, what made her think she could trim a sail or hold a course? He’d be surprised when she told him that after more than ten years, she could still tie a bowline hitch.

  He wouldn’t care. He’d have a fit when he heard what had happened to Olivia that day. The memory rose in Simone’s mind like sand stirred up off the bottom of the sea, taking up so much room it was hard to keep thinking about happy things like sailing. And cupcakes. Just that morning she’d planned to make cupcakes and now… Maybe Roxanne would explain to Johnny about Olivia. Simone would listen and nod and she wouldn’t make excuses. Johnny would call her terrible names and shake her by the shoulders until she had to squeeze her eyes shut to keep them from falling out of her head. Roxanne would try to stop him but he would push her away. After a while he would calm down and say he loved her and that he was sorry for losing his temper. He’d be happy then to hear that she’d signed up for sailing lessons. The conversation was like a recorded book in Simone’s head. And then another, different conversation began. Johnny saying over and over that she had almost killed their baby, and he was sick of her. He didn’t want a son, not from her. She was helpless, stupid, he didn’t want her anymore.

  Johnny might as well have been standing beside her, going at her like a seagull pecking at a piece of bread, repeating the same savage things over and over until she knew she would rather die than listen to any more.

  Valli tugged on the leg of Simone’s shorts. For how long had Olivia been crying? If they didn’t hurry, Shawn would close the shop and go home. They would miss the sunset.

  “Go-go-go.”

  “What about Libia?”

  “I’ll come back for her.”

  The twins were adorable in their oversize lifeguard hats and flip-flop sandals decorated with garish plastic flowers. Simone forgot about the conversation with Johnny and sang, “Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main.”

  In the garage she stood on the landing and looked at her two black cars. It was like choosing between mud and dirt, and at the prospect of driving anywhere in them, her mood deflated again. Why had Johnny ordered both cars in black? If he had asked her, she would have told him she wanted a happy car. A yellow car. An oriole.

  She remembered the vintage Camaro. The Yellow Bird was perfect. They would fly down to the marina in a yellow bird and then they would get on another yellow bird and fly across the waves. She would be responsible and make sure the girls wore life preservers.

  She removed the key from the hook and opened the door to the vintage garage, remembering to replace the key on the hook afterward, thinking as she did that Johnny would love her if she did all the right things.

  “Libia’s crying,” Victoria said, looking back toward the kitchen.

  “I know, I know. I’ll get you settled first.” She laughed so the twins would see how happy she was, and excited.

  Shawn’s mother or father might be in the shop. They would be glad to see her and surprised that she had twins. She imagined one of them saying, “Go right aboard the Oriole. Make yourselves at home.”

  She opened the Camaro and checked that the key was in the ignition where it was supposed to be. She pulled back the driver’s-side seat.

  “Hop in, sailors.”

  The twins settled in the backseat with their pails and shovels and towels piled between them.

  “We don’t got our car seats.”

  “You don’t need car seats in a Camaro.”

  “Where’s my hat?” Victoria put both hands on her head and started to cry. “I want my hat.”

  It had vanished somewhere between the kitchen and the Camaro. “Never mind about your hat.”

  “I want my hat.” Victoria kicked the seat back. “I’ll get burnded same as Libia.”

  “Where’s the seat belt?” Valli asked, raising her voice to be heard over Victoria’s yelling. “I can’t find the seat belt.”

  It took Simone a minute of searching before she realized that old Camaros didn’t have seat belts in the back.

  “I want to go in the van,” Valli said, pouting.

  “I don’t like this car.”

  The Mercedes and Cayenne each had its own set of car seats, three of them, permanently in place. Simone saw that this excursion, which had seemed so simple a few minutes before, had become as complicated as making cupcakes. The thought sent fire to her face, and she knew she could not survive another failure. Maybe the Camaro wasn’t safe but when she thought of driving one of her black cars she realized she’d rather not go anywhere. But if she canceled this plan… The thought was unbearable.

  “We’re going to the marina and we’re driving this car.”

  “Why are you mad, Mommy?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You sound mad.”

  “My head hurts.” The tree was on fire and had spread its branches all the way around her head, grabbing hold of her eyeballs and squeezing.

  “What about my seat belt?”

  “We’re just going over to Shelter Island. You don’t need a seat belt.”

  “I’m exciting!” Victoria cried, her hat forgotten, and banged her hand against the window glass so hard she hurt herself and started to cry.

  Simone watched her cry and a word popped into her head. Stupid. Johnny had said Simone was as stupid as a post. Or had she imagined that? Had someone else said it?

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” the girls chorused.

  Going back for Olivia, Simone faltered at the door connecting the garages, thinking that the trip to the marina would be so much easier without lugging a baby along. Olivia was strapped into her high chair and there was no way she could fall out of it. Why not just leave her there? Roxanne would take care of her if she and Merell got home first. She’d never tattle to Johnny. He still might find out though. The twins might tell him.

  In the kitchen she stopped at the sight of the crying baby, twisted around in her chair and almost facing backward, her crimson face spackled with soggy cheddar crackers. S
imone stared, her hands jerking and grabbing at her thighs. Her feet wouldn’t move. Time drifted by.

  Valli ran in from the garage. “When are we going? I wanna go.”

  Simone had lost more time. Where did it go?

  Valli said, “Did we have lunch yet, Mommy?”

  Simone couldn’t remember where she had been at lunchtime.

  “My tummy hurts,” Victoria said and sniffed, working up to another volley of tears.

  “Go back to the car. I’ll give you some string cheese.”

  “I don’t like—”

  “You can eat it or starve.”

  The twins darted away. Behind Simone’s closed eyes, galaxies spun out dizzying possibilities. She looked at her hands and told them to stop jittering so she could press the release on the strap holding Olivia in the high chair, but the tremor didn’t stop and the release stuck so she pulled out drawers until she found a pair of scissors and cut the straps. Still shaking, she lifted her baby’s sweaty little body out of the chair and carried her past the Cayenne and the Mercedes into the vintage garage, where she put her down on the carpet at the back.

  “How come she’s on the floor?” Victoria lay down on the carpet beside Olivia and moved her arms and legs, making a snow angel. “This floor is soft.”

  “Go back to the car.”

  “I don’t wanna see boats,” Valli said. “I wanna watch TV.”

  “Get back in the car, dammit.”

  “Can I have some string cheese?”

  The logs of white cheese were sealed in plastic and Simone’s hands shook too much to open them. She bit the plastic seal and tore at the edge. It slipped from her hands.

  “I want cheese, I want cheese.”

  “Get in the car.” She shoved the twins into the back of the Camaro and tossed the cheese after them. “Open it yourself!”

  She picked up the baby and got into the Camaro and slammed the door. The Naugahyde upholstery cooled the back of her thighs.

  “Mommy, you forgot the food.”

  The cooler sat on the rug, open.

  “I’ll buy you hamburgers.”

  “Yeah,” the twins screamed.

  I can do this.

  “Where’s Libia’s car seat?” Valli asked.

  I must do this.

  “She’ll sit on my lap.” Simone glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the alarmed expression on Valli’s face.

  “Don’t look at me that way. What’s the matter with you?”

  Simone thought, I won’t drive fast and I’ll stay on surface streets.

  In the backseat Victoria and Valli began singing two different songs. One about sailing, one about string cheese. Simone’s thoughts jumped like water drops on a hot skillet. She would turn left out of the driveway, go down the Juan Street hill into Old Town, but then what?

  Useless.

  “I gotta pee,” Victoria said. “I’m gonna wet my pants in Daddy’s car.”

  “I’m gonna poop,” Valli said.

  “I’m gonna poop and pee.”

  “I’m gonna poop and pee and throw up.”

  The twins collapsed together, giggling.

  Too stupid to live.

  Simone thought of her daughters’ lives stretching out beyond hers. Like her, they would be foolish, do-nothing women. Time and the world would fly past while they dithered helplessly. The terrible pity of it converged to a single stiletto point so sharp it cut out her heart. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  She realized she had always known.

  She turned the key and the Camaro’s V8 engine roared to life.

  The twins squealed and Victoria banged the window again.

  The sound of the racing engine cleared the last doubt from Simone’s mind as if she had sailed out from fog into bright weather. Where there had been confusion only moments before, now there was calm clarity and on the bottom of the sea every grain of sand was as precisely outlined as if she had drawn it there with a fine-tipped pen.

  Valli complained. “I don’t like the smell.”

  “I’m warming up the engine,” Simone said, holding Olivia against her heart as she used the lever that reclined her seat back. “This is an old car.”

  “Smells bad,” said Victoria.

  “I don’t feel good. My head hurts.”

  “I’m gonna throw up, Mommy.”

  The twins’ voices were sweet and plaintive as the songs of captive birds. Simone closed her eyes and imagined a narrow street lined on both sides with shops full of bright yellow birds in wicker cages. Her fingertips tingled as she opened the cages and set them all free. In the sky their wings lifted and rode the air like sails. Olivia rested in Simone’s arms, quiet at last.

  This is how a good mother feels. This softness inside.

  Chapter 15

  March 2010

  Prosecutor Clark Jackson was a barrel-shaped man in his forties, his bald head encircled by a curly gray tonsure. On the first day of Simone’s trial for the attempted murder of her daughters, he sprang from his chair and strode confidently to the front of the courtroom to deliver his opening remarks to the jury in a sharp tenor voice that was abrasive and compelling at the same time. In the gallery, Roxanne took a deep breath and tried to relax. She’d woken up with a tennis ball in her throat; oxygen could barely get around it.

  Jackson frightened her because she knew immediately that punishment was as important to him as justice.

  He smiled at the jurors, leading with his teeth. “On behalf of the people of the state of California, I want to thank you for your willingness to serve as jurors in this very difficult and important case. What is decided by you in this courtroom will be seen and read about around the world. But let me put your minds at ease. You won’t have any trouble coming to a fair decision. The evidence will show without a shadow of a doubt that Simone Duran is guilty of four counts of attempted murder.”

  The twins, Olivia, and Claire, unborn.

  Looking from Jackson to Simone’s attorney, David Cabot, sitting at the defense table on the other side of the bar, and then back at Jackson, Roxanne felt a new presence in the courtroom, an excitement like what she remembered feeling before one of Ty’s marathons or 10Ks. Until that moment she had been naïve, not realizing that Simone’s freedom and the future of her family devolved to just this: a competition between two ambitious men, with justice moving in and out between them, an obstacle and at the same time a referee.

  David said they were lucky to get Judge Amos MacArthur, a big, gruff, exhausted-looking man with a thick head of dark hair and a mustache too large for his face. Though inclined to be both irascible and eccentric, he was a judicial moderate and not likely to be swayed by the high voltage of the case.

  Jackson stepped away from the jury box and dramatically pointed at Simone. “The government will show that when this woman tried to kill her daughters she knew exactly what she was doing. She planned to murder them. And she was almost successful.”

  Jackson’s tenor voice softened, confided. “Ladies and gentlemen, defense counsel is going to tell you that Simone Duran was insane at the time of the crime. And you’re going to want to believe it because you’re good people and Simone Duran is a pretty, sweet-looking lady. She doesn’t look like a monster, does she?”

  Jackson stared right at Simone, encouraging the jurors to do the same. Roxanne saw Cabot reach under the table for Simone’s hand.

  “Don’t let yourselves be fooled. Our evidence will show this is a dangerous woman. She is not insane. She has never been insane. She knew what she was doing when she tried to kill her children and she must now face the consequences.”

  At the end of his short remarks, Jackson resumed his seat, and David Cabot, six feet five with an athlete’s natural grace, announced that he would reserve his opening statement until after the prosecution had presented its case. This caused some murmuring in the gallery. Cabot had prepared the family for this departure from the usual order of trial, assuring them that in this case it made st
rategic sense.

  The prosecution’s first witness was the SDPD’s lead investigator on the case. He testified that he had arrived at the Duran residence just after the EMTs and gave the jury a vivid and disturbing picture of the scene outside the garage. Roxanne did not remember much of what had happened that late afternoon. Trauma did that to some people, the doctor told her when she left the hospital.

  Jackson’s next witness, a medical technician, told the jury about the girls’ precarious condition at the crime scene. At Jackson’s prompting, he said that, based on his eleven years’ experience, he knew that if Simone and the children had been exposed to carbon monoxide for one minute longer, they would have suffered permanent brain damage. Before Cabot could object, the witness volunteered that Olivia’s survival was “a miracle from heaven.” Cabot declined to cross-examine these witnesses.

  The state’s psychiatrist and expert on postpartum depression and psychosis, Gerald Frobisher, took the stand with an unassailable dignity and self-confidence. He was a middle-aged man, thin and elegantly dressed, his shoes polished to a mirror shine. His smoothness disgusted Roxanne. There was a word to describe Gerald Frobisher: smarmy. Jackson asked Frobisher what qualified him as an expert, and he responded—taking care, Roxanne noted, to adopt a subdued and modest tone of voice that did not for a moment convince her—listing a daunting number of postgraduate degrees and publications in prestigious journals.

  At the end of Frobisher’s lengthy testimony, Jackson asked him, “Doctor, will you tell the jury, on the basis of your tests and interviews and in your opinion as an expert in the field, at the time of the incident in question was Mrs. Duran able to distinguish between right and wrong?”

  “I am certain she was.”

  Judge MacArthur glared out over the murmuring gallery.