Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  There is, however, that deeply layered fecund smell of the suburbs. The light grassy scent of lawns, the darker fragrances from the trees. Lu may want to believe she’s a city person, but she is, at heart, a child of the suburbs, a child of this suburb, and she can’t live without yards and trees and flowers. Their first two years as a married couple, she and Gabe had lived in the treeless yuppie playground that was Federal Hill in the 1990s and she was secretly miserable, then ashamed of herself for being miserable. But she missed these smells.

  “You want to take a walk with me?” she asks AJ, as the sun—finally—begins to set. “Around the lake?”

  “I’m sooooooo tired, Lu. I’m still on Australian time. My body’s living in tomorrow.”

  “That’s the price of being a visionary,” she jokes. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “Please. I want to hear about the status of your, um, project. The one we discussed all those months ago.”

  A lie, but it will take at least forty-five minutes to stroll around the lake in this heat. She figures that they will have exhausted the topic of AJ’s fatherhood by the time they reach the dam—only yards away from the events of Graduation Night 1980.

  It turns out that AJ doesn’t want to talk about fatherhood or IVF or rented wombs. He is full of Australia, practically a travelogue on the topic, and a pedantic one at that. “As we head into summer, Australia is on the cusp of winter . . .” Oh, really, dear brother is that how the Southern Hemisphere works? He speaks of how expensive it is, pontificates on its island-country-continent status, praises its food, its sense of ecological responsibility, its rich cultural life.

  “The primary cultural export I remember from Australia is the Wiggles,” Lu says. “Although they were fading by the time the twins were born. The Wiggles and Mel Gibson. And now there’s a new Mad Max movie. Nothing ever changes—until it does. What’s happening with your baby plans?”

  “Not much. We thought we had a surrogate, but it didn’t work out. Ridiculous falling-out over the silliest thing. I don’t know. She didn’t like us, that’s the bottom line.”

  Oh, so she met Lauranne, then? But Lu holds her tongue.

  “I saw Davey Robinson the other day,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “At his church. I went to see him. Something very weird came up.” She fills AJ in, as briskly and neutrally as possible. Somehow, she knows he will argue with her. And he does.

  “Life is full of coincidences, Lu. For all you know, Fred could just be fucking with you.”

  “True. But Davey lied to me. He told me that Nita’s pastor shared information about her sick grandchild. She—Nita, Jonnie as she’s known now—doesn’t even have a pastor. I think she tried to shake Davey down last fall, threatened to go public with the story of the events of Thanksgiving 1979, and he did whatever was necessary to keep that from happening. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “It makes sense because you’ve decided to link these facts. Rudy Drysdale killed a woman. That woman lived across the hall from Nita Flood. His intended victim might have been Nita Flood. It might not have been. You’re imposing a pattern on events because that’s what our minds are trained to do. Nita didn’t tell you anything. Davey didn’t tell you anything. Rudy is dead.”

  “Davey told me that Rudy had a crush on Nita, in high school.”

  “Have you talked to Dad about this, Lu?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Because he’d tear you apart for this kind of shabby thinking. Heck, it almost sounds as if you’re Rudy’s defense attorney. He did it. He had cause. He didn’t have cause. He was hired. I mean, what is it? Pick one.”

  “I think Davey hired Rudy to kill Nita Flood.”

  “As you said, they barely knew each other.”

  “His church does a brown-bag giveaway. Every Sunday in North Laurel.”

  They are nearing the grove of trees where Ben Flood died. Lu wouldn’t be surprised if AJ decided to pick up the pace, but he slows down, takes in his surroundings. “Things are supposed to get smaller as you get older. But the trees get bigger. Our family home is literally bigger. Everything about our family just gets bigger and bigger. I tried to make my life simpler, and it’s more complicated than ever.”

  “Have you even been here, since—”

  He stares at the trees, gray green in the dusk. “I don’t really remember any of it. I remember the story, but not the actual event. Does that make sense? I had to tell it so many times, it’s like something I read in a book. I hate that Ben Flood died that night. But it wasn’t my fault.”

  “I know.” Lu touches his arm, the one he broke, the one that never quite hangs straight, although he says his years of yoga have helped him regain almost all his flexibility.

  “Except—I ran after him. I tackled him—or tried to. I barely grazed his calves with my hand before I fell on the rocks and broke my arm. But he turned—he turned his head to look at me. I’m seeing it now, Lu. I don’t want to see it. It took me so long to stop seeing it—”

  “Let’s keep walking.”

  It seems cruel now to keep talking about Nita and Davey. They walk another ten minutes in silence. They reach the halfway point, the spot from where they can see their own house across the water, full of light.

  “Damn, it really is huge,” AJ says.

  “Good thing he bought a double lot all those years ago. AJ—did our mother like the house?”

  “I thought so. I mean, when you’re eight, you can’t really tell if your parents are happy or sad. But I think she liked it. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. It seems so very much his dream house now, tailored to his tastes.”

  “Three massive HVAC units,” AJ says. “That’s quite a carbon footprint you’re leaving.”

  “Says the man who just flew to Australia, the man with three rowhouses, disguised to look as if he lives in just one.”

  “We try never to use the AC.”

  This is true, Lu knows. It’s why they don’t visit her brother June through August.

  “Was she sad? Our mother?”

  “Lu, she was very ill.”

  “I know, I know—the heart thing.”

  He is rubbing his left arm now. A long plane trip has probably aggravated the stiffness there. “No, Lu. She was mentally ill. She was a depressive. I’m sorry. I assumed that dad had finally told you everything.”

  She stops on the path. “What ‘everything’?”

  “I always promised—and I thought by now he would have—look, you have to talk to him. He has to tell you the rest. Because there are questions only he can answer.”

  Hadn’t AJ said the same thing about sex almost forty years ago? There are questions only he can answer. Lu was eight and still trying to piece together what really happened when babies were made. But it turned out there were a lot of questions their father could not, would not answer. Most particularly—Why would anyone do that? “Well, we have to have babies,” her father said then. And she knew, the way children always know when they are being lied to, that he was withholding something important. That’s why she had ended up talking to Teensy about the whole messy affair.

  But had she really never guessed that their mother’s sadness, which now seems obvious in every anecdote she knows about her, was something more than mere moodiness? That Adele’s parents had guarded her not from the dragons outside their Roland Park castle, but from demons within? Lu cannot wait to get home, send AJ and Lauranne back to Baltimore with the leftover cherry pie, deposit the children in their beds, and confront her father. She wishes she could leave her brother standing here, plunge into the lake, and swim a straight hard line toward the large, light-filled house on the other side.

  But life doesn’t work that way when one is an adult. There are Penelope and Justin, who need to go to bed at a decent hour because there’s school tomorrow, a kitchen to clean. Life goes on. Life is relentless. And when the house is finally quiet, Lu discovers her father dozing in his
usual chair. She cannot bear to wake him, much less start peppering him with questions.

  Instead, she goes to his desk, the planter’s desk that Noel broke all those years ago, scattering her father’s papers, and finds the slender file that loomed so large in her imagination, one that she used to sneak peeks at when she was a child. It is a plain manila envelope with her mother’s name on it. There are photos, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate.

  A death certificate, too, which Lu doesn’t remember ever seeing in this envelope before.

  Maybe that’s because it’s dated 1985.

  MAY 26

  “Nineteen eighty-five,” Lu says, not for the first time, waving the death certificate as if it were an exhibit in a trial. She is standing over her father, who sits at their dining room table, his eyes downcast, but his demeanor defiant. “She lived for fifteen years after I was born. How could you keep this from me?”

  She has called work and said she will be late because of an “urgent family situation” and were truer words ever spoken? The situation goes to the heart of her family, and if the situation doesn’t seem urgent to anyone else—her mother has been dead for thirty years, her father has been lying to her for forty-five—she cannot imagine doing anything until she has this conversation. It took great resolve last night not to shake her father awake and demand to speak to him then and there. She has not slept at all, and she snapped at the twins throughout the morning routine, then snapped at their babysitter for being all of five minutes late.

  And yet her father, the true object of her wrath, is unrepentant, even if he cannot meet her gaze.

  “Lu, you were never going to have a mother. Adele was not capable of taking care of anyone, including herself. She wasn’t fit to live outside an institution.”

  “But to lie to your children and say that she was dead—”

  “She was, in a sense. She attempted suicide several times. In 1985, she managed to slit her wrists with a knife she conned a staff person to smuggle in. If you want to berate me for something, then focus on the eight years that I lived in denial of the fact that my wife was severely mentally ill, the terror that her disorder visited on your brother. The day after you were born, she had a full-blown psychotic episode and attempted to kill herself for the fourth or fifth time. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing at Johns Hopkins. And, as far as I knew, she was to spend the rest of her life there. I tried to visit her once or twice, but she was truly a hopeless case. It did no good. For either of us.”

  “But—the death certificate says she died in Spring Grove? How did she end up there?” Spring Grove was the state psychiatric hospital in Catonsville. Her mother had been perhaps ten miles from her family through much of Lu’s childhood.

  “I don’t know. I gave your grandparents power of attorney. They were responsible for her care.”

  “They blackmailed you,” says Lu. True, she has blackmail on the brain, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Her father was and is a circumspect man. He would have agreed to any condition if it meant keeping this secret.

  “It was never that—coarse. But we did reach an agreement. They would keep her in the hospital if they could have power of attorney. They were wealthy people, better able to care for her than I was. Our insurance was running out—And, as far as I knew, she was being cared for. I think she may have been switched to Spring Grove after their deaths. I don’t know.”

  “Why did you tell AJ and not me?”

  “I didn’t. He also thought she was dead. Then he became very depressed while at college. I thought I owed it to him to know about the family history. The children of suicides are so much more likely to commit suicide.”

  “Only she didn’t succeed until AJ was a year out of college,” Lu points out. “And she was—what was her diagnosis?”

  “When she was first diagnosed, in her teens, they said it was schizophrenia. I’ve come to believe it was probably what we’d call bipolar disorder now. She had stunning mood swings, but she also was delusional at times. We had no hope that she could ever live outside a hospital setting. She was beset by paranoia, incapable of recognizing those who loved her and cared for her. You have to remember, Lu. Your brother knew her, lived with her for eight years. Eight fraught, difficult years. I owed him the truth because it helped him make sense of his childhood.”

  Isolated events are connecting in Lu’s memory. This is why AJ was worried about having a child. It’s why he didn’t want to use his own sperm. And it was why her father and brother didn’t seem overly concerned when she had to have a hysterectomy in her late twenties. To their way of thinking, she dodged a bullet.

  “What about me? Why wasn’t I owed the truth?”

  “I suppose you were.”

  His ready agreement deflates her. Nothing defangs a good rage quite like the other person admitting that you’ve been wronged. “I rationalized, as people do. One, you never knew her. Why not let you have a mother you could mourn. Two—I didn’t sense any of that melancholy in you. You’re tough, grounded, my little pragmatist. But as AJ got older, he was prone to depression. He was in a very dark place for a while there, during college. I kept it from you at the time, but he almost dropped out of Yale freshman year. So I told him everything—that his mother was still alive, but quite ill. When she finally killed herself five years later, I wondered if I had made the right choice after all.”

  “Did you ask AJ not to tell me?”

  “No. I told him only that I preferred to share the story with you when the time seemed right, and he agreed. Then I kept putting it off.”

  All the family legends are unraveling in her head. What was true? Fact: Her mother was beautiful; Lu has seen the pictures. Fact: Her mother died. Everything else is now up for review. She thinks about her mother in this very house, her alleged hatred of light, which now streams into their home from all angles. Who was Adele Closter Brant?

  “Did she ever hold me?” Lu asks her father. “Even once?”

  “I’m sure she must have,” he says. His words are less than persuasive.

  Fifteen years. Her mother lived for fifteen years after Lu was born. Yet—she was not inclined to be Lu’s mother. Her father gave his children a myth in place of a parent. Two different myths. For young AJ, the story, eventually, was that the woman who had become increasingly unreliable around him had gone into a hospital and never come home. For Lu, it was even simpler. This beautiful woman gave birth to you and now she’s gone. If this is grief, it’s an odd kind of grief, mourning the loss of a lie, the end of a fantasy. Lu might as well cry for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

  She wondered if AJ ever confided in Noel. The boy with the absent father had zeroed in on their missing mother that very first day. Norma Talmadge, he had said right before he broke the desk. Where is she buried? What had come between Noel and AJ? He stopped talking to me, AJ said at his funeral. Did the others know what happened?

  But Lu has no more time for her family’s mysteries. Work calls, literally. Della is trying to put out any number of fires, and Lu needs to be there, now. She goes to get dressed, frustrated. Her father’s apology was too ready, too easily given. He doesn’t believe he was in the wrong. She’s glad she knows, but it makes her feel odd about her father. Lots of people like to proclaim melodramatically that so-and-so is dead to them. Her father carried through, killing loved ones who became problematic. First he cut his ties to his own parents, then his wife, his in-laws. Why did he find it preferable to end relationships so definitively? What would happen if Lu or AJ ever disappointed him profoundly?

  JUNE 27

  The revelations about her mother blindside Lu, throw a long shadow over a scorching, relentless June that, after a brief retreat into jacket weather, doubles down on heat and humidity. These are vicious days, Lu thinks, in every sense. Baltimore is experiencing homicide numbers that haven’t been seen since the early days of the crack epidemic. Even Howard County’s homicides for 2015 double—to two.

&nb
sp; Lu decides, after much back-and-forth, to take the new case, but only because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is gun-shy after the Rudy “incident.” This one is a domestic, a term she hates. Domestic violence may not be an oxymoron exactly, but the term mitigates murder, as if death at the hands of a former loved one is gentler. It’s hard to imagine a stranger doing something worse to this woman: her ex-husband, returning their nine-month-old after his weekend visit, shot the baby’s mother in the forehead when she asked for her support check. He now claims he was driven to the act by her divorce attorney’s demands. The case against him is so easy that Lu worries it is beneath her, a dunker she ought to hand off to Andi or another deputy. She would be happy to plead it out. Ah, but a man who has the ego to think he can end a person’s life because he doesn’t like the terms of their divorce also has the ego to demand “my day in court.” This phrase, my day in court, comes up so often that Lu feels as if she’s dealing with a demented bride. My day, my day, my day, my day. He believes that he is the wronged party, that all he needs is a venue to tell his story and everyone will agree he had no choice. Okay, sir, you shall have your day. In fact you might have as many as four days in court and then you will have many, many, many days in prison to think about your day.

  At least the case offers a distraction, something on which to focus. Something to think about other than her mother, alive in a hospital one county over for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Fifteen years. It’s a dirge that plays in her head.

  Lu’s father and the twins don’t even seem to notice the undercurrent of sadness in her, whereas AJ is unusually affectionate. He calls constantly, no matter where his travels take him. He has called almost every day since he has directed her toward this discovery. He has apologized over and over again for not telling her as soon as he knew, back in college. He also has apologized for telling her at all. According to AJ, whatever he did would have been the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  “I don’t know why it came out then, when we were walking,” he says at one point. “I guess I was—overwhelmed.”