We looked at each other. Then she came into the room and sat down on my bed, which because of our cramped space was right next to the desk, right next to me. I swiveled, and we were knee to knee, still staring at each other.
Then she leaned right over me. Her nose was less than an inch from mine.
She said softly, almost gently, “Matthew. Do you have any idea how deeply you have hurt and betrayed me?”
I swallowed. I said, “Murdoch didn’t do it, and I couldn’t sit by and let him get in trouble just because you wanted it that way.”
“Better to get me in trouble? Was that what you were thinking?” Her voice rose.
“That was your choice. You were the one who lied to the police. Not me.”
“And you are the one,” Nikki said, “who is disloyal. You are the one who has broken my heart.” The pupils of her eyes were entirely dilated.
I felt almost as if I were outside my body, looking down on the two of us in that room. And something seized me. Maybe it was just the desire to finally speak the truth to her.
“You don’t have a heart, Nikki,” I said. My voice shook. Vaguely, I realized that it was the first time I had used her name to her face instead of saying “Mom.” I kept on going. “And you have no idea what loyalty really is.” Despite my shakiness, I felt suddenly powerful. I really had hurt her. I knew it. She wasn’t just saying that. I had hurt her when I had supported Murdoch to the police, and I was hurting her again now.
I was glad.
There were tears on her face. “My son!” she shrieked. “My baby!”
“Murdoch got to know you,” I said. “And once he knew what you were like, he got as far away as he could. Well, that’s how I feel, too. That’s how my father feels. Everybody who really knows you hates you, including your children. And you say you want love? You say you want loyalty? It’s almost funny. If I didn’t despise you so much, Nikki, I’d laugh at you.”
I was so completely focused on Nikki that when Callie spoke, I was shocked. I’d forgotten all about you girls. You could have heard it all. And now there Callie was, half in and half out of the doorway, staring at us.
And I could see you, too, Emmy, right behind Callie, peering in around her, staring at us. Looking at me, at Nikki.
My rage ebbed.
“Matt?” Callie said tentatively. “Mom? Please. Please stop fighting. Emmy’s frightened.”
Nikki turned away from me, to Callie and to you. “Out,” she said. “Get out of here right now.”
Callie grabbed you and scurried out of the doorway. Nikki stood up and stepped away from me. Her jawline was as tight as a stretched rubber band. I could still see the tracks of her tears on her cheeks, but she wasn’t crying now.
“You, too,” she said to me. “Out.” Then she was in my face, leaning in, screaming. And crying again. “You sneaking little spy, get out! I don’t care where you go. But you don’t live here anymore! Do you understand? Get out! I don’t want you in my home!”
But I couldn’t even get up. She was leaning over me, hands on the chair back behind me. I could feel her breath on each word. The pulse in her throat was jumping.
“Out! Now! Go live with Murdoch, since you worship him so much. See if he wants you!
“I’m through providing for you! I’m through working hard to put food on the table and clothes on your back! I’m through! Do you understand me? Get out!”
But her arms imprisoned me in the chair. Her eyes fixed on mine. I thought: In just another second, she’s going to haul off and hit me. I tensed, getting ready.
And then she did it. I sat in that chair and took the blows, right on my face. After a while, I raised my arms to protect myself.
Finally it stopped.
“Matthew, look at me,” she said.
I did. I was crying. I couldn’t help it.
Her right arm extended in one long straight line ending in the index finger. Pointing to the door.
“Go,” she said. “And never come back. You are not welcome in my home. You will never be welcome again. You are no longer my son.”
I have no memory of my body moving, only of Nikki’s outstretched arm, her pointing finger. I was moving, but I don’t know where I was going. But at the same time that I kept moving, I knew I couldn’t actually leave. I couldn’t leave Callie. I couldn’t leave you. Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut?
Except it also felt so good—so good!—to have spoken.
I met Callie’s eyes as I walked through the living room. She had you in her arms, even though you were really now too big to be carried easily. You were hanging desperately on her, legs wrapped around her hips, and Callie was clutching you back fiercely. You had your face buried in her neck.
Nobody said anything. I reached the door of the apartment. I reached out for the knob.
And then, behind me, Nikki rasped, “No. Stop. You’re staying right here, Matt. You can’t go anywhere. You have nowhere else to go, isn’t that right?”
She waited. I didn’t turn back. I was trying desperately to figure out a way to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.
Then you spoke, Emmy. “Matt?”
And I turned back.
“That’s right,” I said. “I have nowhere else to go.”
There was a long, long pause. Then Nikki said, “Make sure you understand that, Matthew. Make sure you really understand it.”
31
SISTERS
This is what Aunt Bobbie said about Nikki, after it was all over:
“Your mother at thirty-five was the same lying, self-absorbed, vindictive, underhanded, treacherous, mean girl that she was at sixteen, when she used to torture me all the time.” The words rolled out of her mouth so easily that I decided she must keep them in a string in her mind, saying them over to herself like a rosary. “She made me miserable as a kid, and it all came flooding back, once I realized you and Callie and Emmy were in my place. Except she had more power over you kids than she ever had over me. It wasn’t right, how you had to live. And it wasn’t right that I tolerated it. That I turned a blind eye. Until Murdoch.”
“I called Bobbie,” Murdoch confirmed. “I called her in the middle of that court business, after she knew I hadn’t done anything to your mother. And she was willing to talk.”
“I knew who he was, of course,” said Aunt Bobbie. “I felt so bad. Nikki could have gotten him in a lot of trouble, and he was innocent. So I agreed to meet him for dinner. He said it was confidential. I admit I was also curious about what he wanted to say to me.”
“She was worried about you kids,” Murdoch said. “I know you thought she hadn’t noticed anything, and that she didn’t care. But she didn’t know what to do, so she buried her concern and didn’t let herself think about it. She didn’t know she could do anything, really . . . and she wasn’t sure yet that she wanted to. It takes a while to decide to change the life you’re used to. Also, she was still afraid of her sister at that time.”
“Afraid of Nikki?” said Aunt Bobbie. “Me? No! I was careful, like you’d be careful of a snake. But it wasn’t like I was fourteen anymore. I’m not so easily scared.” Aunt Bobbie won’t give in on this point.
It’s strange. The rest of us all admit that Nikki was enough to give anyone nightmares. Even Murdoch. But Aunt Bobbie, who had known Nikki for the longest time and was afraid for the longest time, too, has wiped the fear from her mind like dirt from a window. “I wasn’t afraid of her!” she insists. “Not after I grew up. First, I didn’t care about her. I thought she could do whatever she pleased and it had nothing to do with me. Then later on, once I understood what was happening with you kids, I was too determined to be afraid. Once I talked with Murdoch and we realized that there had to be a way to detach you, safely, I focused on that. It was a challenge.”
She hesitated, and then added: “Look, Matthew. Even though it was awful, it was also fun. Sometimes. Some of it. Does that make me sound terrible? That I actually had some fun figuring out how to outwit Nikki?”
“No,” I said.
But I wondered, then and now, if Aunt Bobbie was glorying—even just a little—in the revenge of the ugly little sister, who in the end took everything away from the beautiful one. If so, I don’t begrudge her. Not exactly.
Fun was always Nikki’s word. Nikki’s goal. But they were sisters. And this, Emmy, may ultimately be why, though I adore Aunt Bobbie, I will never quite trust her completely.
Please, Emmy, never tell her. I know it’s wrong of me.
32
JULIE LINDEMANN AGAIN
While Aunt Bobbie and Murdoch were talking secretly, Nikki, too, was plotting. She intensified her harassment campaign against Murdoch. Initially, she stayed within the bounds of the restraining order. Maybe she meant to stay on the right side of the law—barely—and just wanted to have fun, too.
Or maybe the demons had her.
She started with phone calls. Murdoch got a lot of hangups from a “private number.” Then she left messages that contained nothing but breathing. Sometimes so many messages came, so quickly, that Murdoch’s voice mail message quota would completely fill up and people who wanted to leave an honest business message couldn’t.
Then she started following Murdoch in her new car.
Our family had always managed without a car before. But Nikki used a chunk of her severance money to buy a twelve-year-old white Toyota Corolla that was missing its entire backseat and that had a blue passenger-side door that had once belonged to a different car. It ran great. And one morning, Murdoch spotted her parked one hundred yards down the street from his front door. “Pretty near exactly one hundred yards,” he told me.
And then she was there again the next morning, and the next. She’d sit there and wait. She had a view of his front door. When he got into his truck, she’d follow.
“She wanted me to see her,” Murdoch told me. We were walking the causeway. “She wasn’t hiding. When I’d see her, she’d catch my eye and wave. I remember, one time, she nearly sideswiped me on Route 2, and then she blasted the horn like crazy.
“I called the police a few times. But I didn’t behave consistently. See, Matt, I wasn’t your average harassment victim. It didn’t suit me to have her stop. I realized that maybe I could use it. One day, I saw her behind me in the Toyota, and I realized that we—Bobbie and I—could use her behavior.”
“What do you mean?”
“I decided to goad her,” Murdoch said. “I wondered what she would do if she got even angrier at me. I wondered if she would make a mistake. The police weren’t going to care if she violated the restraining order in small ways. If we were going to get you kids away from her, she had to be worse than that.”
I thought about that. “So you brought in Julie to provoke her,” I said. “Your girlfriend.”
Emmy—that was when I got my big surprise.
Murdoch said to me, “Wait. Julie Lindemann was a friend. Not my girlfriend.”
I stared at him.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I didn’t realize you thought that.”
“I did. If she wasn’t—then why would she . . . ?”
“It’s true Julie sort of posed as my girlfriend in front of Nikki. On the sidewalk when Nikki was watching. That sort of thing. But we were just friends. She was actually in love with some guy at work she couldn’t have. We were both chronic losers in the romance department. We bonded over our sad love lives.” He paused. “I’ll always wonder what’s wrong with me that I don’t ever feel attracted to the Julies of this world. The nice women.”
I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I managed, “Well. Yes. Julie seemed nice.”
Murdoch didn’t respond for a while, and I thought the conversation was over. I didn’t mind; it was a lot for me to digest. But then he said: “Julie was nice. That’s true. But she read too many suspense thrillers.”
“Huh?” I said.
We had stopped walking to watch a fisherman casting off the dock. Without looking at me, Murdoch said, “I think that was one reason she suggested helping me. She didn’t take your mother seriously enough, even after she saw my smashed truck. She didn’t realize it was real. She thought we were playing some spy game.”
“You didn’t take Nikki seriously, either,” I said. Since we were talking about Julie, I felt it had to be said. “You didn’t realize what she was capable of, even though I’d warned you.”
“I knew,” said Murdoch tightly. “I just didn’t think to protect Julie. If I had warned her, if I had just told her not to treat the whole mess like some game out of a suspense thriller, she might never have gone out to play car games with your mother that night.
“I’ll burn in hell for what happened to Julie,” Murdoch said.
33
THE NEW BENJAMIN WALSH
Soon after Murdoch and Aunt Bobbie began talking, Ben telephoned me. “I want to see you, Matt. I get off my hospital shift early Saturday morning. Would you meet me for breakfast at Mul’s at seven?”
“All right,” I said.
I got to Mul’s before Ben did and was shown to a booth by a waitress who had a tattoo of dark blue lacework covering her slender arms from shoulder to wrist. I was so fascinated by her tattoo that I forgot to stop her from filling my coffee mug nearly all the way to the brim.
My father arrived and slipped into the booth across from me. I pushed the coffee mug toward him. “You like it black, right?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He downed half of it in a single gulp. He was wearing pale green hospital scrubs and a thick gray sweatshirt.
“How was your shift?” I asked.
“Not so good, actually. I’m in the critical heart unit right now, and somebody died.” He finished the rest of the coffee.
“You don’t get used to that?” I found myself curious.
“Well, yeah, you do. But you don’t, at the same time. I’d been giving this guy a bath and stuff every day for a week. I knew him a little bit. He wasn’t able to talk, but he’d kind of smile with his eyes at me and try to cooperate, try to turn himself over in bed. He wanted to do for himself.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Yeah. Well.” My father stared intently at his menu. We sat in silence until the waitress came back to take our orders. I got eggs and toast; Ben got only oatmeal and juice. I waited. And eventually Ben said, “So, you’re friends with Bobbie now?”
“Yes.”
“How’s that?”
“Fine. She’s been good, actually. Good to have around.”
Ben rubbed at his eyes with both hands.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I said finally.
“Yeah. Listen. That guy—Murdoch McIlvane. I had a long talk with him the other day.”
I sat up straight. I had been wondering if Murdoch was going to talk to my father as he had said he would, as he had talked with Bobbie. “You did?” I said. “What about?”
Ben was looking into the depths of his refilled coffee mug. “About what you said to me in September. When we took that walk together by Columbia Point, you said your mother was getting more, well, more unstable.”
“So?” I said.
“So . . . well, what do you think now?” Suddenly, words came streaming out of him quickly, urgently. “Do you stand by what you told me? It’s not that I didn’t hear you then, Matt, it’s that—it’s that . . . I don’t know. But have things gotten even worse now? What’s your take on what’s going on with your mother? I keep remembering what you said that time . . . about when you were in the car with her. That it wasn’t safe. And now, Bobbie says she’s worried, too.”
I tried to sort all this out. I wasn’t clear on exactly what Ben was asking. And part of me just wanted to know what he thought of Murdoch, where they had met, what had been said between them.
My heart was racing.
“Yes, I stand by what I said. She’s crazier than ever. You know about her lies about Murdoch?”
Ben nodded. “I know.”
The waitress brought our br
eakfast. I looked at my toast and scrambled eggs. I felt too excited—too something—to eat. But I accepted more coffee, not even caring when the waitress overfilled my mug again. I added three lumps of sugar, and sipped at it.
Ben put his head down and ate his oatmeal in quick small swallows, his mouth and throat moving continuously until he was done. He put down his spoon and stared unhappily at me. He said, “This is bad.”
“What did Murdoch say?” I asked.
“Pretty much what you said.” He hesitated. “And that we should all think about how it would feel if one of you kids really got hurt. And wasn’t it better to err on the side of safety.”
I said carefully, “And what do you think about that?”
My father stared at me. “What kind of a man do you think I am? What kind of father?” He pushed his empty dish of oatmeal aside and buried his face in his hands. “Jesus.”
I didn’t answer, and after a minute, Ben shook himself like a dog and leaned his elbows on the table. Not sure why I said it, I muttered, “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “No. I am. Matthew, I haven’t been much of a father to you. Or Callie. Don’t think I don’t know it. I just—I didn’t know what to do.”
Do you now? I wondered. I said: “And Emmy.”
He winced. But he looked straight at me and said, “Or Emmy. I know. I’m going to do better. We’re figuring things out right now, but I want you to know. I’m on board. I’m going to do better.”
We, he’d said. On board, he’d said.
And he’d actually said your name, Emmy.
The waitress had returned. “You still working on that?”
I shook my head. “I’m not hungry after all. Sorry.”
I watched my father watch her lacy blue arms as she stacked our dishes. “Anything else I can do for you?” she asked. “More coffee?”