CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Usually I told the police whatever I could, but sometimes I told them what they wanted to hear. It was just easier that way. And sometimes I volunteered whatever Stephen suggested I say. I wasn't nervous about that until I realized that they thought Stephen had killed Dad (maybe even Mom and Dad), and then I found myself thinking long and hard every time I opened my mouth and--what was even more disturbing for me--every time I said something Stephen had advised me to say. Tina said she was surprised I hadn't been more freaked out around the state troopers. She said after she spoke to them that one time that she didn't think she could have handled talking to them as much as I did. But I reminded her that everyone, including the police, was really, really worried about me. I was, like, the Vermont Poster Child for Domestic Abuse. I could pretty much do or say whatever I wanted. It wasn't just the tattoo. I stayed out as late as I felt like, and the Cousinos just smiled and asked if I was okay or needed anything. I cut classes, and the teachers asked me if there was anything they could do. I could have been dealing crack cocaine to five-year-olds and people would have said, "Oh, think of what happened to her parents. Poor kid." I could have been carving up kittens in the Cousinos' basement and people would have patted me on the head and asked me if I wanted a different therapist or social worker. Membership in Club Orphan has its privileges, too.
Still, I don't recommend it. I probably wasn't nearly as cool a customer as I sound now. One day I had this totally uncontrollable crying jag in the girls' bathroom at school, and, unfortunately, a teacher found me. And then some days it just felt easier not to talk at all.
Josie Morrison asked me all the time how much I missed my mom, but only once if I missed my dad. I was pretty clear about the fact that I didn't miss him at all, and that was that.
But my mom was another story. Suddenly I had all these pretend moms in my life, all these women who wanted to mother me like crazy. There was Carole Cousino and Ginny O'Brien for starters, and then there was Josie, who sometimes was the hip young mom and sometimes the badass big sister. She was better in the big-sister role, because not a lot of moms in Vermont have dreads and tats. And there were the female teachers at school and my guidance counselor, Mrs. Degraff. I got some of the best grades of my life that autumn, even though my work was pretty half-assed and my attendance was basically whenever I felt like going to class. But none of those women could even begin to fill the void. I loved my mom. I loved her so much. We had grown incredibly close in the winter when Dad had been gone. She changed. The vibe of the whole house changed. Sometimes Tina would come over and we actually baked with Mom: We made things like coconut cupcakes and pineapple upside-down cake and your basic brownies out of a box. Suddenly Mom and I weren't walking around the house like scared, silent cats, waiting for Dad to get nasty about something ridiculous. I didn't spend so much time with my earbuds in, listening to my iPod. She bought me a dock and speakers for the device, and we blared the music as loud as we wanted. She was, like, totally liberated.
Things were so peaceful that I allowed a boy who was interested in me to pick me up one Saturday night and hang around for a couple of hours before we went to a party in the village. He was a senior. He drove. Dad would never have allowed me to date a senior. He would never have allowed me to even go to a party with him. But Alan was fine, totally harmless. He was already into college by then, and we were just having a good time--which, looking back, is exactly why Dad would never have let me near him and why it wouldn't have crossed my mind to invite Alan to within a hundred yards of our house if Dad had been there.
And Mom and I could talk about Alan. We could talk about Brendan, another boy who I liked a bit, although we only hung around together as friends. (The summer and fall after Mom and Dad died, Brendan and I got a little closer, but I think that was mostly because he had spectacular dope. We didn't hook up or anything.)
It's interesting, but the two males Mom and I didn't talk about very much when Dad was gone were Dad and Stephen. One time I asked her why Dad often seemed so angry, and she said he came from an angry family. I knew what she meant: I know my grandfather. I know my uncles--all those brothers. She also said he was under a lot of pressure at work and sometimes he drank too much, and those were the big reasons why they had problems. But I could tell she was being evasive. She was suffering and didn't really get it herself.
I didn't bring up my fantasy that she might divorce Dad, but for a while in February and March there really was this out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing going on. Dad knew how pissed I was at him, and so for a while he kept his distance. But at the end of February, I got a text from him on my cell. It was a joke about something--something he'd seen on TV that he thought would make me smile. And there was something so pathetic about my dad alone at night at the lake watching crap TV that I texted back. And the next week he sent me an e-mail. Short, but with a link to a video on YouTube he thought I'd get a charge out of. Then, the week after that, he sent me a long e-mail, the first of many, and it was all about how sorry he was for being such a crummy husband, because it meant that he had always been a crummy father. But he said he was resolved to be a better person, and he said he was going to look into counseling. He always went on and on about how much he loved Mom and how much he loved me. I wasn't totally sure what to make of the e-mails and whether I should show them to Mom. I thought I might even just delete them. Mom and I had been living a day-to-day life without Dad, and it wasn't hard to imagine him gone forever. To want him gone forever. Not necessarily from my life, because that wasn't going to happen. Already he was insisting we have lunch every week or two in Manchester, where he had his stores and his restaurant. (We would do that beginning the end of March, and it would continue until he came home in May.) But out of the house forever--that sort of gone. And I feared if I showed the e-mails to Mom, it might screw things up with whatever she had going with Stephen.
In the end Dad made the decision for me about whether to show Mom his e-mails. It seems that he had been e-mailing her, too. Or, maybe, calling her. I don't remember. I just remember that one night in April when we were having dinner, Mom told me that she heard Dad had been sending me some very sweet e-mails and she was wondering if she could read a few of them. I was pretty cornered: I really couldn't say no. And so she read a couple before we had even cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, and sometimes I wonder if this was the beginning of the end of her relationship with Stephen.
Looking back, I really wish I had just deleted them.
IF MY MOM had been into Facebook or MySpace, here's a video she would have uploaded for sure: They're at a wedding reception at some beautiful inn when we still lived in Bennington, and I was about three years old. It's New Year's Eve. I'm not in the video, because it's a pretty rockin' reception and I was home with a baby-sitter. But I love the dress my mom is wearing. It was a black-and-white zebra print without any sleeves. My mom wore a cardigan sweater over it, more likely because my dad thought it showed too much shoulder than because it was cold in the ballroom. Supposedly when Mom kissed me good night before leaving for the wedding, she said, "See you next year," and I melted down like a Fudgesicle in July. We're talking near panic attack, the way Mom would tell the story. The problem was that I didn't totally get New Year's Eve yet. Once Mom explained it to me, I chilled, but I gather it was pretty gnarly there for a couple of minutes. Anyway, they're at this inn that has pushed all the tables in this huge room against the walls so people can dance, and there are still all these tiny white Christmas lights along the ceiling and the windowsills and over the top of the glass doors. There's a good crowd, and everybody's dancing--even the bartenders, a guy and this girl in bow ties behind this long table with rows and rows of bottles and glasses. The two of them look like they're having as much fun as the people on the dance floor. Most of the crowd seems to be in their twenties and thirties, but there are grandparents and aunts and uncles, I guess, sitting at some of those tables. Whoever is holding the video camer
a must have known it belongs to Mom and Dad, because they're focusing more on the two of them than on anyone else in the room. And they are really moving. They look more than a little dorky, but I guess it's sweet that they're so into the party and so into each other. Suddenly the DJ, wherever he is, says he is going to play something slow now for all the lovers in the room. My mom falls against my dad, and the camera catches them looking into each other's eyes like they invented romance. Her fingers are on the back of his neck, and when they finally break eye contact, her head falls forward into his chest, she closes her eyes, and she has this smile on her face that looks like she is having the most peaceful and beautiful dream of her life. We're talking movie moment.
Anyway, it would have been a classic on Facebook. And it reminded me that once, a long time ago, my parents' marriage hadn't been the natural disaster that it would soon become and will look like forever to most of the world.
OBVIOUSLY I THINK a lot about what must have been going on at my house that Sunday night while Tina and I were in Albany at the Fray concert. Everyone around me seemed to be concocting whole scenes that August and September, and the only thing they all shared was this: I was lucky as hell that the band was playing a Sunday-night gig, because that's the only reason I'm alive today. The general consensus is that if I'd been home, I would have been killed. We'll never know, but I also think it's possible if I had been there, all three of us would have been alive the next morning. Maybe my mom would have kept to herself whatever it was she said that put my dad over the edge. Maybe Mom and I would have gotten the heck out of there before my dad blew up like a furnace. And maybe, pure and simple, Dad would have been incapable of killing Mom if I'd been in the house.
But everyone who talked to me had a different idea about how the fight might have unfolded, and they were all basing it on their memories of their own parents' fights--or, I guess, on their own fights with their own spouse or partner or whatever. That's the thing. We all have recollections of fighting with someone we're supposed to love, and I figured out at a really young age that what goes on when the doors are closed is anyone's guess. Still, I have tried to piece together that Sunday night from what I know of their fights (which is, unfortunately, a lot), what Ginny told me, and what the investigators seemed to have figured out in the weeks that followed. Stephen and I talked about it a couple of times before it became clear to me that he was the last person in the world I should have been talking to.
But if I were one of those hidden cameras, here's what I think I would have seen at my house that Sunday night: I would see my mom in the doorway when Tina and I are starting down the driveway in her parents' red Subaru wagon. Tina has had her license for about three months, and even though she drives like she's about ninety years old--we're talking five miles below the speed limit, always, and she might be the only one of my friends who doesn't text while she's passing a manure spreader--my mom is worried. She has worried whenever I have gotten in the car with Tina the first half of the summer. She has no idea that even though I only have a learner's permit and am only supposed to drive a car when Mom or Dad are right there beside me in the passenger seat, I drive that Subaru all the time around Haverill. Not smart, I know. But not ridiculous, either, because the state police never patrol around here. And so I drive that wagon a lot, and I am, like Tina, a pretty careful driver.
Anyway, Mom is standing in the doorway, and she still has in her arms the big blue bowl with the peas she has plucked from the garden. Her garden. My dad and I really have very little (read: nothing) to do with it. She hasn't shelled those peas yet. Imagine Auntie Em, but still young and pretty. Remember, my mom was only thirty-eight when she died. I know that's supposed to seem ancient to a teenager, but it's not. It's just not.
So my mom waves once, and I hope I wave back. But there's no guarantee. Meanwhile my dad is tidying the garage. Organizing. I have absolutely no idea why, but that's what he is doing late that Sunday afternoon. He doesn't come out to holler good-bye to me or wave. But the last time I saw him in there, he was drinking a beer. It is at least his second bottle and maybe his third, and the idea has crossed my mind that this is trouble. When he first returned in May, he wasn't drinking at all. But at a picnic for one of his manager's birthdays in late June, he started again, and since then he has been ratcheting it up. Mom has said it's because business is a little slow and we're in a recession. When things pick up, he'll--as grown-ups put it--go back on the wagon. But when he drinks, he becomes a total jerk. This month has been three-plus weeks of Mom and me walking on glass, tiptoeing around the house so we don't piss him off any more than we seem to simply by breathing. Something about Mom's baptism this morning has ticked him off, and I've been unable to put my finger on what it is. Midafternoon I almost asked Mom if it was as obvious as the idea that the baptism involved Stephen, but in theory I don't know about Stephen, and I have to assume that my dad doesn't either.
As Tina and I reach the end of the driveway, I have a thought: Dad is puttering around in the garage because Mom never goes there except to pull out the car in the winter. It's a place where he can hang out and totally avoid Mom and me. Which, with him drinking right now, is probably a good thing for Mom. Something happened on Friday night when I was at a party in Pownal. I don't know the details, but even by the admittedly very low standards of civility my dad subscribes to, it couldn't have been pretty. How badly did he hit Mom? I don't know because I wasn't home, and almost always he hits her in places no one can see. But since Friday night the house has been especially gloomy, even on the pathetic Happiness Scale in place at the Haywards'. I think he beat her pretty badly, no doubt on the lower back.
After I've left, my mom sits down to shell the peas in that bowl. She probably sits down near where I saw her waving, outside in the sun that is still bathing the western side of the lawn in warmth. Eventually she will rise, go back inside, and cook the rest of their dinner. She doesn't set the kitchen table, because I think they will eat on the front porch tonight. It is a balmy summer evening, and my parents always liked to eat outside on that porch. It didn't have a table, because it really was just front steps with a landing, and so they will eat that night with their plates on their laps and their drinks on the wooden planking beside them. In my mom's case, that means iced tea, in my dad's another beer.
They probably aren't saying a whole lot as they eat, because by the time they plop themselves down on those steps, Mom is a little scared and my dad is well on the way to being totally hammered. Talking to him right now is like baiting a hungry lion. Why do that? Why go there? The thing is, it could be such a great night for them. Tomorrow is Monday, her day off, and the kid is at a concert and spending the night with a friend. Wouldn't you think most parents would be having Naked Sunday together?
But not mine. Not that night.
At some point when he is done chewing a bite of chicken, his tongue clearing bits of meat from around his gums in this creepy way that reminds me of a mole tunneling just under the grass, my dad turns to my mom and says something nasty about the meal. Maybe it's as simple as how her vegetables don't taste any better than the ones you can buy at the supermarket, but with all the mulch and manure and fertilizer she uses, these ones from her garden actually cost more. Some nights this month, this has been his song. Maybe he says something about her shorts: They're too short. Too baggy. Too frumpy. Too slutty. My dad had a thing about shorts and my mom's legs--which were really very sexy for a mom. But most likely it is the baptism he has brought up, planning to use it to find a way to wound her and pick a fight. He says, maybe, that he can't believe she paraded around like some tramp in a bathing suit before the whole batch of Holy Rollers.
That's what he called the people who went to the church: Holy Rollers.
He says that everyone must have loved that: Alice Hayward, tarting around at the pond. Now, my dad wasn't a moron. He has to know on some level that he is being completely ridiculous. So why is he saying these things? So Mom will dispute him.
It was a Speedo, she reminds him, not some bikini. And I was wearing a T-shirt over it, anyway.
Oh, how lovely, he says, his voice taking on that weird, condescending, pretend-upper-class monotone. But do you honestly think that makes it better? Do you think I would prefer to have my wife parading around town like she's a contestant in a Hooters wet-T-shirt contest?
And my mom will know what's coming and that she can't win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there's no place left to go. And Mom is already hurting from whatever she had endured on Friday night when I was gone. Still, here is the problem she faces: If she disagrees with Dad, he might hit her for challenging him, but if she agrees with him, she is admitting to having dressed like a slut at her baptism, and that will be his grounds for whaling on her.
What does she say? In my mind I see her shaking her head, realizing that she should have gotten out years ago. Or that she should have gone to court when she was supposed to a week or so after she got that temporary restraining order back in February. Or she should have taken the flowers that had started arriving almost daily in May and tossed them into the compost heap. Or she should never have allowed him back in the house when he wheedled his way into a reconciliation just after Mother's Day. But that isn't what she did, and now she's looking at her second beating in three days. And so she stands up with her plate and retreats inside. I have seen her do this before: just take her food and excuse herself from the table. Or excuse herself from the table without taking her food. The upside to this strategy--withdrawal without a word--is that she hasn't said anything that he can use as a justification for his anger. The downside? She has seriously dissed him. (And when she has done this when I've been present, she has also humiliated him in front of his daughter.)