All but the copy-shop owner sat down. David had predicted this woman would be the jury foreperson. He was a smart attorney and he’d given Simone a strong defense. A flutter of hope brushed over Roxanne.
“Have you reached a verdict?” Judge MacArthur asked.
“We have, Your Honor.” She handed a folded piece of paper to the bailiff, who handed it up to the judge, who read it without a flicker of emotion and passed it back.
“How do you find?”
The foreperson rubbed the heel of her hand across her mouth before she spoke. “On the charge of attempted murder, the jury finds Simone Duran not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Roxanne cried out and covered her face with her hands. Johnny ran toward the front of the courtroom. Despite Judge MacArthur’s warning, the gallery erupted.
Chapter 19
August, Three Years Later
Ty would accompany Roxanne if she asked him, but she preferred to go to St. Anne’s Hospital alone. And he preferred to stay home. He liked the daddy time with their son, Liam, who was eighteen months old, a towheaded boy who collected roly-poly bugs from under rocks and slept with a pink velour spider.
She appreciated having a few hours alone before she saw her sister; and afterward the long return drive allowed her time to resettle her emotions and focus on her family as she wanted to, not forgetting Simone, but putting her in a corner of her mind where she was no longer Roxanne’s first concern. Roxanne calculated that she’d traveled the winding road to St. Anne’s thirty-three times; and at the current pace of Simone’s therapy, it seemed likely she would drive it that many times again. Lately she had begun to wonder if her sister might never return to her family.
During the first several months of her incarceration Simone had seen no visitors, and when the ban was lifted she sent word through Dr. Lennox that she wanted to see Roxanne. The reunion was less awkward than Roxanne had feared. For two hours they sat in the hospital’s recreation room and played Monopoly. This was what Simone wanted to do; and Roxanne, remembering their weekend at the lake cottage, was struck by how like the twins she was: misering over her money, squealing with delight when Roxanne landed on one of her properties, and grabbing for two hundred dollars every time she passed Go as if Roxanne wanted to keep her from having what the game owed her.
Before each visit Roxanne spent time with her sister’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lennox. Sometimes she thought he had become her doctor as well as Simone’s. She sat in his office, and as always in the beginning, she was tense and wary of his questions. Today he began by telling her what she knew already.
“Simone is angry.”
“No kidding.”
“She says you all ruined her life.”
Roxanne’s first instinct was resentful and defensive; but her protest went unspoken because she couldn’t blame her sister for being angry. Dr. Balch had testified, and Roxanne knew, that along with Ellen and BJ and Johnny she had done her part to stymie whatever self-reliance might have struggled inside Simone. In Roxanne’s mind her sister’s thwarted longing to sail had become symbolic of all the roads and byways she had not been allowed to explore, the trips and falls her family had protected her from, the disasters large and small that were a necessary part of growing up.
Liam had been walking since he was ten months old and fallen a hundred times. Ty encouraged him to run and climb; and when he took a tumble, Roxanne, hearing his cry, wanted to scoop him up and put him in a bubble where nothing could ever hurt him. Instead she kissed his sore knee, applied Band-Aids when needed, and let him go. Sometimes it took every ounce of her will to do it.
Johnny visited Simone when she invited him, which was not often. Once on their anniversary he had come, and she had turned him away. Afterward he sat on the stone bench in the visitors’ garden and wept as he never had, not even during the trial or after the verdict. Simone said she loved him, but Dr. Lennox said she might never go back to him. She feared being lured back into their dance of submission, helplessness, and control.
Dr. Lennox said Simone and Roxanne also danced. “Simone won’t stop dipping and spinning until you do.” His voice was kind and quiet, but Roxanne thought he was scolding her so she turned her deaf ear and watched the birds at the feeder outside his office window. It was interesting, perplexing: something about St. Anne’s and Dr. Lennox brought out her stubbornness.
Johnny still worked long hours, but he spent every free moment with his five girls. Olivia and Claire were charming little creatures, close as twins in their looks and sweet ways. Valli and Victoria remembered the day in the garage; but their memories didn’t hold together. Soon they would slip apart, disintegrate like threads of cheesecloth.
To Roxanne it seemed Merell had, in lying to protect her mother, sacrificed her innocence. She was almost a teenager now, a bright, wild, and unpredictable girl, sensitive as a hot wire. Her teachers complained that she was unmotivated, secretive, and unreliable. They wished that she would make friends. Johnny talked of sending her to boarding school in Monterey, but Ty and Roxanne had convinced him not to and wanted her to live with them for a while. They had a roomy second story, a guest bedroom with beautiful windows.
Two years ago, when Johnny announced his plan to build a new house on the beach in Leucadia, Ellen had stayed behind in the city and bought a town house near her office in Little Italy, where there was always something going on. She had a wide circle of friends, and her real estate business was a small but thriving concern specializing in homes considered difficult to sell.
In his office Dr. Lennox told Roxanne, “Simone still feels as helpless as she did the day she first came to St. Anne’s. She’s stuck and that’s why she’s angry. She’s like a little girl in a woman’s body, and she knows that until she grows up, she’s never going to leave this hospital.”
Though Lennox was a superior doctor and highly professional, he spoke to Roxanne in a commonplace way, friend to friend, in a language they both understood.
“You’ve been a good sister, but now it’s time to take the next step.” Dr. Lennox leaned forward across his desk, fixing Roxanne with his gray eyes. “I can’t tell you what goes on in your sister’s therapy, but I can tell you she’s been very brave. And she knows that she won’t be able to go home without your help.”
A flash of anger. “You’re saying it’s up to me. Again?” She liked Lennox and trusted him, but there were times when her patience with the whole therapeutic regime ran out. “Why is it always up to me? She’s the one who put the girls in the car and turned on the gas.”
“She trusts you. There is no one in the world she loves more than you. You can help her, Roxanne. If you’re willing.”
Lennox knew too much about Roxanne: she’d been too candid, giving him an advantage. Over her thirty-three visits to St. Anne’s she had talked about the house in Logan Hills, the Royal Flush, and the reason for her deafness, going to Gran’s, and coming back. Now she regretted every honest word she had ever spoken to him. “Why are you doing this to me? What gives you the right to use me? Haven’t I been used enough?”
Dr. Lennox dipped his head, as if in agreement. “When you were brought back from Daneville, how did you feel about being put in charge of your sister?”
How do you think I felt?
“It didn’t matter.” Ellen had abandoned her once and she would do it again if Roxanne did not do as she was told.
“Why didn’t it matter?”
She wanted to stand up and walk away, drive back to San Diego and to hell with St. Anne’s and Lennox and her sister.
“How do you feel now? This minute?”
“I want her to get better, of course.”
“That isn’t a feeling.”
All right: I hate her and I hate you. Are those feelings? I want this sister off my back! And I want to go home to my husband and boy and never come back to this place. Is that enough feeling for you?
“Roxanne, what would happen if you were to tell your sister how you felt bac
k then, how you still feel? How you’ve felt all along?”
“She knows I love her, Dr. Lennox.”
“I am not talking about love.”
Outside the window, against the background of blue sky, a boldly marked yellow bird bent its head at the bird feeder hanging from the eaves.
After her visit with Dr. Lennox, Roxanne stood in the lobby at St. Anne’s and watched Simone come toward her wearing blue jeans and a tank top. Her tender prettiness was entirely gone. She had lost more than twenty pounds, and in the flimsy top her clavicles protruded like a necklace of bones. Over the years her eyes seemed to have grown larger and darker. They dominated her face in a way that was raw and unattractive. Her hair—she still hated washing it herself—hung lank and drab. Dr. Lennox believed that somewhere in the labyrinth of Simone’s history there must be an explanation for her aversion to fresh water.
“Shall we walk?” Roxanne asked, linking her arm with Simone’s.
St. Anne’s was a sprawling hacienda-style building with thick cement walls and a tile roof and grounds landscaped with desert plants. In the summer the temperature was often one hundred degrees or more; most patients, visitors, and staff preferred to be indoors, where air-conditioning kept every room a mild eighty degrees. Simone and Roxanne preferred to be outdoors and truly private. They walked the gravel path through the beavertail cactus and ocotillo to the top of Anne’s Hill. At the crest there was often a breeze and a square of shade under a ramada. The view was across the arid mountains and up to the ridge where a Native American tribe had erected hundreds of windmills.
The wind blew Simone’s hair off the nape of her neck, revealing a collar of freckles from a long-ago sunburn.
Simone said, “Remember those pinwheel things we had when we were kids?”
One day before Roxanne started school, the babysitter, Mrs. Edison, took her around the block to a fair at Logan Hills Elementary where she met Mrs. Enos, the brown-skinned, orange-haired first grade teacher who gave her a silver pinwheel. On the way to Gran’s she held it out the window of the Buick and watched it spin like the windmills.
She could have told this to Simone, described the teacher she had liked so much and how frightened she was to be taken away from her home and abandoned to the care of a grandmother she hadn’t known she had. Instead, she talked about their mother.
“How is she?” Simone asked.
Roxanne tipped her head from side to side, and they smiled. Dr. Lennox once said that having a sister was what made having a mother bearable.
“She’s happy these days,” Roxanne said. “The business is going like gangbusters. Big bucks.”
“I guess she’s over missing BJ.”
She had never told Simone that BJ gave her money in appreciation when Simone became engaged to Johnny. She had kept the inside and the outside of her life a secret from her sister because a good sister must protect, must not be angry or unhappy or confused, never resentful or rebellious or reluctant. A good sister was orderly in her thinking and knew how to take charge of any situation.
She played back Dr. Lennox’s words. In Simone’s world the only feelings that matter are her own. That makes her a child. That keeps her a child. Tell her the story of your life. Let her know what it felt like to be Roxanne. Let her grow up.
She had never told Simone about the house in Logan Hills and the night she almost burned it down. She hadn’t described standing on a stool to wash dishes or covering their mother with a blanket when she passed out drunk on the couch. Simone didn’t know that their mother beat her ear with a rubber sandal until it bled. And she didn’t know that Roxanne was brought back from Gran’s because Ellen feared she would hurt Simone too.
This is what Dr. Lennox asked her: “You gave up your childhood to protect your sister. How does that make you feel?”
Blood rushed in and out of her heart, the valves opened and closed and her pulse kept time. I will be abandoned. I will be beaten. Her heart would cramp and then explode; blood and bones would fly out in all directions.
Someone will hold my little sister’s head beneath the bathwater to stop her crying or grab her by the heel and throw her in the swimming pool.
This is what Dr. Lennox told her:
“Simone was brought up to be helpless and you were brought up to be afraid, to be on guard and watch for threat. But there is nothing to fear anymore.”
Her heart beat against the prison of her ribs.
Roxanne asked Simone if she had remembered to put on sunscreen.
Roxanne told her she was too thin.
Caretaker and charge, helper and helpless. Both of them frightened by life. Roxanne was as much trapped in her roles as Simone was in hers.
Along the ridge, the windmills turned; somewhere a yellow bird took to the air, sailing the sky like a ketch in blue water. Roxanne was sitting on Anne’s Hill with her sister. The only sister she would ever have. She held the key to their past; it would open the door to their futures.
“When I was younger than the twins, there was a place across the street from where we lived, a bar called the Royal Flush. Mom and my dad would go there at night and leave me alone.” She pulled Simone down on the bench beside her and forced herself to speak. “One day I almost set the house on fire.”
The wind was up, tearing through their hair. There was lightness in Roxanne. Another puff of wind and she would fly, she and her sister would both set sail.
“That was the night Mom beat me with a rubber sandal. That’s why I’m deaf in my left ear.”
She spoke and Simone listened.
Letter from Gran
Roxanne left her grandmother and the ranch when she was nine years old. From then until Gran died seven years later, she and Roxanne exchanged regular letters. Sometime after the events of the story, Ellen Vadis came upon a cache of old letters and among them, apparently overlooked and still sealed, was a letter to Roxanne from Gran, written near the time of her death when Roxanne was a teenager.
My dear girl,
First time I saw you, I couldn’t believe there was so much determination in one little kid. Such a small, waifish package, long legs and bony knees and with something hopeful about you, despite your sad eyes, as if from early on you had decided to view life from the sunny side no matter what. At the time, all I could think was that you looked like an orphan in rubber go-aheads, your hair a rat’s nest of brown tangles. Neglect was written all over you and it almost broke my heart, though it’s true, I didn’t want you and I was angry that your mother had the gall to drop you on my porch with just a couple of days’ notice. I put you in her old room and for the first week you left off watching from one window or another only when I called you to meals.
You must have been with me a month or so when I fixed a roast chicken supper with mashed potatoes and gravy and gave you the job of shelling peas. Before then, the only peas you’d ever seen came out of a plastic bag. You couldn’t get over how wonderful it was that they came packaged in their own green shells. I told you what I thought, that God takes care of the good things on earth. You asked me what God looked like and that was the start of it, three years of you asking questions and me trying to figure out the answers. One thing for sure and it gratified me, a child who asks questions is a bright child. The more questions, the better.
It used to rile me that Ellen went off and left you, never looking back, but you still thought she was someone special. She was always selfish, your mother. She put her own pleasure ahead of whatever anyone else wanted. I blame your grandfather’s leaving for that. She loved her daddy like crazy. There was jealousy between us on that account though I’m ashamed to admit it now. He just turned his back on her and went off to live a life that suited him better, and she blamed me. I can’t speak to whether it was me who drove him away; too much time’s gone by. All I know for sure is, he hated the ranch, the never-ending work, and I can’t blame him for that. We were just kids when we got married, and being young, it’s hard to see the value of land and tr
ees and fruit compared to parties and dancing and all that glittery business. But after he was gone, I gradually learned there’s comfort in work, a kind of peace and a gratification there’s not a man on earth can give you.
You were a hard worker, Roxanne; you knew how to listen and follow directions and you always seemed to take some pleasure from a job well done. You had my orderly ways bred into you, I suspect, and that’s not a bad thing. First grade, spelling was your favorite subject, probably because there was a clear right and wrong about which letters went where. Plus you liked to memorize: the states of the union, presidents of the United States, the names of every flower in the garden. You knew them all.
Summer mornings you’d come downstairs in your shorts and T-shirt and the big shoes I made you wear to protect your feet from the pointed stuff that’s always lying around a ranch, even a well-tended one like mine. You never wanted me to make you breakfast. Come to find out, no one had ever fixed pancakes or even fried an egg for you before I did. After eating you’d clear the table without being asked and then you’d write out your daily list, sounding out the words you couldn’t spell. You said the list was your plan for the day. Back then your biggest chores were gathering the eggs and feeding the hens, and I had a kid-size rake so you could keep the big coop tidy. You enjoyed that work, I know you did; and you liked drawing a line through the items on your list.
You even played in an orderly kind of way. In your bedroom there were a half dozen old dolls from your mother’s time. You set them up on chairs and played school, teaching those dolls everything you were learning. And then you’d read them stories, sitting up on your bed with them all nestled around you like the family you wished you had. You were the dearest thing.
For me, the years you lived at the ranch were the happiest of my life. I felt like God had given me a second chance to be a mother. See, I know I failed Ellen; and maybe I should have told her that. Maybe it would have made a difference between us. But all my life I’ve been too full of pride for my own good. Never could say I was sorry or ask forgiveness. When your grandfather came to see me the last time, I should have right out told him I loved him and wanted him to stay. But I could see in his eyes that he was already far away and I wouldn’t humiliate myself. Didn’t even cry. He wanted to say good-bye to Ellen, but I told him he had no right and he begged me with tears in his eyes. It shames me to say it but I took satisfaction from those tears.
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