“I see that,” Papa said, “but I’m restless.”
“You always were,” Mama said, and turned her face away.
That week, my father took me and the baby to the temple in Cedar City to seal Rafe to our family, for time and eternity. As a father and a priest, he had done the same for all of us. I think he was in a special hurry because it made him feel safe to spend time in the temple. The day was warm, and my father stopped at Snackster’s for milkshakes. We sat on a picnic bench, and I gave Rafe his bottle.
“Ronnie,” he said, “if Becky and Ruthie had been eight years old, and had needed to be baptized, I would have wished that you could be the one to do that.” He hugged me. “I think they would have wanted that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“This isn’t the end. You’ve been so terrified. I’ve seen your worry. I haven’t known what to say. I haven’t been there for you,” Papa said then.
“Pops, it’s okay. I know,” I said.
“It’s not okay,” he said. “You want to lead your child. But I don’t see the path yet.”
I thought of the maps that my mother had once asked us to make of our lives, of the places that made up what we thought of as home. The little girls just drew trees and circles; but I worked hard on mine, including the church, the general store, the road to the high school gym, the mountains where I rode Ruby, my own room, and my own desk. If I had put my old map over a new one—one that basically made a skinny, empty triangle of my house, the barn, and the church building—it would have looked as though my world had disappeared. Scott Early had taken away not only Becky’s and Ruthie’s lives, but all of our lives. Barely in his forties, my father looked like a trembly old man, his raggedy head in his hands, his milkshake separating like slush.
And so I didn’t tell him that they’d forgotten my thirteenth birthday.
Chapter Eight
There would be no trial. Scott Early had written a full confession and added to it over time.
So there was no need for anything but a judge’s decision.
But there was an investigation. The sheriff visited us more than once. He actually was a pretty nice person. The psychiatrists and medical doctors for the defense lawyers and the prosecutors interviewed my parents and me, asking us if Scott Early had demonstrated signs of pain, if he seemed to walk unsteadily or had a seizure. They were all the same, and they were as curious as dogs. I told them that Scott Early held his head and moaned, but that was all. After regular doctors did a thorough exam, including pictures of his brain, it turned out that Scott Early didn’t have a physical disease that made him unable to think.
We waited for the decision. Days passed, then weeks.
That was the silent-movie period at its worst. I simply walked through my days, trying to be me. I went to Clare’s recital with the Emorys. I set up a fan that would keep me from sweating through my sheets as the nights got warmer, but even the air-conditioning didn’t help. I began doing full-out wind sprints from our house to the church, then jogging up the hill to the Sissinellis and back, so I would be conditioned for summer basketball camp. None of it was any fun. None of it was even satisfying. I had always wanted to be super-slender like Clare, and now I was, but it turned out to be a chore to take in the waists of my pants. Lessons had no effect on me, and I simply endured things I used to enjoy. Family Home Evenings were no fun without my sisters. Some nights we only played Monopoly, pretending the board was heaven. There were a lot of visitors. Relatives and even some of my mother’s gallery buyers dropped by or came to stay. I could see the shock on their faces when they saw the beautiful Cressida Swan with baby oatmeal stains on the shoulders of a dirty man’s striped shirt, wearing a pair of my father’s overalls three sizes too big. I was sad for her, but people made my skin crawl. I hoped the sight of my mother would make them stay away. Finally, they did. You’re obliged to mourn the mourning of your brothers and sisters, but people can stand only so much.
The Sissinellis were in their summer home on Cape Cod, all but Miko, who was spending his last summer before college in Utah with friends. He was off camping most of the time. I walked Ruby past their house more than necessary when he was home, sitting out on the porch without his shirt with his friends. They waved to me once, but Miko said something to them and they put down their hands. I guess he told them about my sisters, and they acted like most people did when they found out—like they had something to be ashamed of.
A few days after Miko left the first time, Mrs. Sissinelli called and said the lady she asked to come in and clean had quit, so she asked me if I wanted the job. I cleaned their house to earn money. The pleasure I felt in dusting the Florentine glassware, my mother’s ceramics, and the inlays on the picture frames had no envy in it, but the space and silence were magnificent. I hung around long after I had to, though I didn’t charge Mrs. Sissinelli for the extra time. I felt like the custodian of a museum, able to touch all the jewels and even lightly brush my finger over the textures of the paintings in the galleries. Once, after I’d polished it, I slid all the way down their curved banister. Once, I put on one of Mrs. Sissinelli’s furs and stood in front of the mirror, savoring its softness like a spoonful of dessert, seeing myself as I would look as a wealthy woman who had six of these. Once, I turned on all the speakers and played Vivaldi while I danced on the floor of the foyer, the sun through the patterns of stained glass making my arms and hands into the sleeves of a harlequin costume. It was cool in there, cooler than our window air conditioners ever made our house; and I found extra things to mess with, cleaning the grout in the kitchen with a toothbrush. What I really longed for was to curl up in their deep sofas and sleep forever. There was a time when I did fall asleep, almost jumping out of my skin when Miko and his friend came banging through the back door. As I walked out into the furnace of the afternoon, I was grateful that all he said about me was that I was “the kid down the road,” not other things, even though they might have been more interesting.
Serena wrote me to see if I wanted to come out to visit; they would send me a ticket. I very much wanted to go, and my parents encouraged the trip because I’d never seen the ocean, but there was still that itchy shadow garment all over me. I wrote back to tell Serena I hoped she would ask me again, any other summer, and I would come. I was needed at home now.
At night, when she could bear the heat enough to be out, I walked Ruby down to stand in the cool mud of the creek bed. The mosquitoes were like a veil on my face, and Ruby’s haunches quivered with pain and annoyance, no matter how much natural repellent oil or WD-40 I rubbed into her coat. I knew that since she was nineteen, Ruby was ready to go for what I’d always hoped her last years would be, as a therapy horse at Guiding Gait, a place in Cedar City where little kids with cerebral palsy and even adults got lifted onto the backs of quiet horses to let them have fun and to build their confidence. I arranged with Papa for her donation. On the day they came for Ruby, I cried harder than I had at the funeral. Papa cleaned her stall for me, washing every corner with water and mild soap, laying the floor with fresh shavings. I couldn’t bear to do it alone. Ruby’s broad back was the last bridge between my sisters and me. Now they were square on the other side.
Not having Ruby to look after left my evenings idle. I started doing a little church work, mostly mailings, because it would let me be alone. Clare and Emma asked me to come with them to a study group about changing women’s roles and whether they could work within the context of the church. I said I didn’t want to go. Mama made me. So I went, taking the bus. About twelve girls met in a room at the Cedar City Public Library, with a woman who was LDS but also a playwright. She’d written all the words and music for a play about Noah and the Ark that had been shown and acclaimed in London’s West End district. I was getting into a discussion one night about whether a woman could legitimately work and raise a family if her work was a service to humanity rather than simply a way of increasing her family’s wealth, works on earth being a way of attainme
nt in heaven, when I overheard two ladies outside the open door say, “That’s her. That’s the girl who was there when the little kids were killed. The Grim Reaper murders.”
I never went back.
Mama said the decision was being held up because Scott Early was being examined over and over by psychiatrists from Salt Lake and Phoenix and even an expert from Philadelphia; and they were also talking to people from his own hometown, Crescent City, Colorado, and his university friends and professors.
Papa still roamed. He wore out his boots and had them resoled. He was so thin, he looked like Abraham Lincoln; and he forgot to cut his hair until the principal reminded him when the term began that the kids were the ones who were supposed to get in trouble for having long hair. At night, when the bugs were fierce or the air too thick even for him to stand it, he paced our halls. Or he glued and sanded and polished everything in the house, replacing screws in doors that hadn’t closed the right way since I was a baby. Mama confessed it made her crazy trying to fall asleep listening to him rearrange the silverware drawer in tidy little divided containers. We almost giggled. Papa made Mama a button holder from one of his old tackle boxes and separated all the buttons according to size and color. Then he made me one—from the wooden shoebox Mama had intended for Becky’s doll clothes. I couldn’t see how he could do that, if he knew what the boxes were for. Maybe he didn’t know. I guess he needed activity more than he needed to seem sensitive.
I spent all the time I could with Rafe, until you could tell he was reacting more to me than to Mama.
Poor Rafe.
Mama didn’t start to love him, really love him, until he could sit up and crawl.
I look back on that long, long year. She never exactly ignored him, and she made sure he was clean and sweet smelling; but I never heard the murmuring and singing from their bedroom that I heard when Becky was tiny. There were other odd signs. When he was only one month old, they moved him to his nursery instead of keeping the cradle in their room. I liked my privacy, but I kept our two doors open, so he could hear me breathing or typing, my music playing softly, and know someone was right there. Mama treated him like a nice little puppy, something dear she would pet, but as if she weren’t all there. She really wasn’t all there. It was no one’s fault, my father said. Dr. Pratt said the same thing.
But, thank Heavenly Father for His mercies, I couldn’t resist my little brother. When I came into a room, it was as if someone had flipped his switch. His eyes locked on mine like a pair of hands and pulled. He wriggled and gurgled and chuckled like a sweet little seal. Papa was right. Rafe tricked me into loving him. How can you not love a miniature human being whose greatest joy was to lie on the table while you blew bubbles on a fold of chin pudge at his neck? Who thinks it’s completely hysterical when you set a Tupperware container on your head—not just the first or the second or the fourth time, but the twentieth time? He was so fat and utterly cheerful—almost as if he had to be, to win us from Ruthie and Becky—that even my uncle Pierce said this boy was a joyous spirit with a purpose on earth of creating mirth. At six weeks old, Rafe had astonished Mama by sleeping from seven at night until eight in the morning. I was the one who went into Rafe’s room and poked him to make sure he was alive. He was the human equivalent of the locks on the doors I had to check.
For Mama barely did anything except sleep, still. I never woke her; I figured she went in her dreams to feel her hands making a pot again, or wiggling Becky’s loose tooth, or trying to brush out Ruthie’s hair.
You could tell that waking life was an obligation for Mama. She was never unkind, but she didn’t initiate a thing, even eating. Mrs. Emory tried to get her to help reach out in the primary, but I could see from Mrs. Emory’s face that she repented asking right in the middle of saying it. She then suggested Mama minister to women in homeless shelters, to teach their children to draw; but Mama said she honestly couldn’t be with children at all. She helped by making packages from home for young people on their missions, filling them with books and jams and handmade shirts and scarves. Parents were supposed to do this themselves, but some had so many younger kids that the packages got scarce.
Mama had once taken me places, like museums and universities, to help make history and biology living subjects. Now, she simply assigned me my readings, if she remembered, and told me to do Internet research for my papers. She had seemed relieved when school ended; and she had ended school early that year, in mid-May, marking my exams and sending in my report to the school district.
We got a letter informing us that I had enough credits that I was already a high school sophomore. But I didn’t feel knowledgeable, the way I had when she’d taken me to plays to understand the reason Shakespeare wrote his plays in speech that made the King James Bible sound like a comic book. I started looking at my old Book of Revelations and Remembrances, a kind of personal scrapbook of photos and meaningful objects from nature, as well as my own observations and descriptions of me from adults I knew (“devout and loyal, but stubborn”). I began to add to what I’d written when I was little. As I worked on my writing and pasting, I would watch Mama at the table, her hands busy with knitting sweaters and caps for Rafe for winter, simply staring at the shed—as if the power of her look could make it go up in flames. It was almost as if she had forgotten how to play and didn’t know that Rafe needed it. She simply tied her empty thread spools together with bright-colored yarn but didn’t bounce them or set them up in towers on the floor.
I did that.
Every morning that fall, before I got out my books, my mending, or my computer, I would hear Rafe signal me with the tinkling of his bells. I would peer in, and as soon as he caught sight of me, it would begin, the roly-poly gyrations all over the cradle. Rafe wriggled so much before he could roll over that he wore off a patch of his thick black hair. He had a tiny little bald spot Papa swore was the baby version of the one his brother Pierce had.
Rafe was the thing my parents had the biggest argument over that I’d ever heard.
It had to have been summer then, because I was in basketball camp, catching a lot of grief from Coach when we’d scrimmage, and why wouldn’t I? I’d be driving up the lane and then my brain would blink out and I’d pass right into the hands of the opposing center. He would start to say, “Where’s your head, Swan?” But then he’d stop, and I could see he was half-ashamed and half-mad that he had to make allowances for me. I tried to concentrate on the drills, and there still was nobody who could take the ball away from me if I was on my game or catch me if I had it. But way too often, I was throwing it away or letting it drop as if it were a gum wrapper or a penny.
Finally, I quit. I was very sad.
Basketball seemed to me to be the one sure way back to a sort of halfway version of the Ronnie I had been. All my team friends had been so glad to see me, so glad to give me back the job I always had—that all point guards have, of sort of being the brains of the team, making sure everybody was where she was supposed to be. They didn’t care that I was younger. They’d missed me. They said the team wasn’t the same without me. A couple of them told me, during drills, that they wanted me to be captain next year. But a point guard has to think, fast and on her feet. Just like Becky wrote, I didn’t even realize when I was traveling. I would have been an asset to nobody on varsity. When I finally told Coach, he and the assistant just hugged me. Nobody tried to talk me out of it. I came home crying the night I quit, taking the bus from Cedar City to about a mile from our house and then walking. I could hear them before I walked in. Great, I thought, this is just great.
“He’s your son, Cressida,” my father was saying. “He’s a blessing come to us in our sorrow. You act like he’s a burden.”
“And what do you do? London, you’re never here. When you’re home, you’re not here. You’re alone in your thoughts. I can’t get in. We don’t pray together. We don’t talk. I hear you pacing and . . . fussing all night.”
“That’ll end when the verdict comes in. My
emotions are all over the place, Cressie.” Because he was a teacher, I guess, Papa always sounded like he had prepared remarks and was talking about the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird or something.
“And so are mine. Where does our baby fit into that?” my mother snapped back at him. “At the hospital, you convinced me that I would have all your support in binding this little boy to us. . . .”
“I’ve sealed—” he began.
“I don’t mean that you’ve sealed our family,” my mother said. “I don’t mean our family in eternity. I’m sure we’ll be just fine in eternity. I’m talking about earth, London! We’re not doing so well on earth!”
“Cressie, it hasn’t even been a year!”
“Tell Raphael that! I try,” she said, and I could hear her begin to cry, “I try to give him the same . . . love I gave the girls. I pray for the Holy Ghost to give me the strength to overcome grief with love. . . .”
“I read once . . . I read it to you, honey. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the holy purposes of grief? Adams wondered to what end we endured the sensations of grief. Remember how he said that? He used the example of the couple with everything going for them, the way we had. And he wrote, wait, let me think . . . ‘Through one of the accidents allotted to humanity,’ one of them died. Why would it happen? And if it did, why would we feel such misery? Finally, he said that the more sensitive we are, the deeper we grieve. His opinion was that the purpose was to drive us deeper into reflection, to make us stoics and Christians.”
“Well, that’s nice, London! That’s a wonderful intellectual conjecture! But this is real life, just a little bit south of hell on earth! Am I stoic? Is stoic getting up and bathing the baby and brushing my teeth every day? I must be stoic, because what I really feel like doing is lying in that bed until I dry up and smell. What I feel is like a Rachel, lost in the wilderness, but all my tears are dry. I could blow away like a leaf. There’s no purpose for my grief, London! I’m not Thomas Jefferson. My grief just leads back and back and back on itself, then—”