Chapter 28
Violet
Even though it was late, I called Lisette. Clay answered the phone and argued with me for twenty minutes before he finally put her on. When she picked up the phone extension in her bedroom, her voice was surly and resentful. “Yeah? What?”
My mind was spinning, my eyes were dry as sandpaper, and my stomach was trying to flip upside down. For once, anger had no hold on me. I couldn’t even feel an echo of it inside my skull. I could only feel a rush of relief and happiness at the sound of my daughter’s pissed-off voice.
I wasn’t thinking about the attic or the bag of marbles in that moment. I was thinking about Martin Peabody, the look in his eyes, the brush of his fingertip on the back of my neck, filling me with cold despair.
“Are you all right?” I asked Lisette.
“Yeah.”
“Is everything going okay there?”
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t going to give me anything. When was the last time my daughter had given me even the tiniest piece of herself? It had been years.
I was trying, for once. It had been years since I had done that, either.
We did a dance of strike and parry. Is school okay? Yeah. Did you do your homework? Mostly. What homework was it? English. She didn’t ask anything about me. She never did.
“What’s going on there?” I asked, still trying.
A brief pause. “Dad’s watching The Love Boat with Katie.”
Clay must have a girlfriend, then. Had this been kept from me like some careful secret?
Had they thought I would explode at the news?
I truly did not care that Clay had a girlfriend.
I assumed he’d had more than one over the years.
I did care that this woman was spending more time with Lisette than I could.
I wasn’t going to explode, though. I wasn’t going to be the Crazy Ex-Wife, just this once. I would glide past this news with dignity, like a ship in the night. “You like that show,” I said.
“It’s a stupid show.” She shot the words back at me like a slingshot. I wasn’t even sure she meant them.
“You always said you liked it.”
“It’s stupid,” she proclaimed. “Dad says I have to go to bed now. I have to get up for school tomorrow.”
“You’re a night owl.”
“I need to sleep.”
Annoyance crept up the back of my neck and pinched my skull. This was Violet the Bad Mother, always annoyed and out of patience. My daughter knew I had a short fuse, and in the last few years, her favorite hobby was testing it, then blasting it to pieces.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” I said. “You can ask me anything, too. I’ll answer any question you want.”
I had surprised her, but only for a second. She was too smart to trust those words out of my mouth. “Who cares?” she shot back. “It doesn’t matter. You left.”
“I’m only in upstate New York,” I pointed out. “Not Mars.”
“You left,” Lisette repeated. “Dad says you did it because you wanted to. Because you didn’t want to have to look after me.”
I felt a flash of anger, and then a cooling jet of admiration.
She was very good at this. It was a one-two punch of Bad Mother accusation and the words guaranteed to infuriate me, Dad says.
When Lisette wanted to pick a fight with me—which was most of the time—all she had to do was use the magic phrase Dad says, and she’d get one.
For the briefest second, I almost gave in and gave her the fight she was looking for. Then my anger popped, the air flapping out of it like a balloon, and I couldn’t. Instead, the words marched out of me, one after another, perfectly calm.
“I know I’m a bad mother,” I said. “But I work hard, I’m sober, and I’m around. I ask you to stay for the weekends, but you never come.”
“You’re around?” Lisette’s voice was dramatic, near tears, and I still drank it in like water. “That’s how you’re my mom? By being around? You left.”
“This is important.”
“Sure it is.” There was all the pain and despair of a teenager in her voice. “More important than being around.”
I blinked hard at the wall, at the faded, flowery wallpaper.
Vail and Dodie had gone upstairs, ostensibly to bed, but I could hear Vail’s footsteps in the upstairs hall and the water running in the bathroom sink.
Vail said something, his tone caustic, and Dodie said something caustic back. Vail’s steps retreated.
We were here in this wretched house, which was full of awful memories and seemingly haunted by something malevolent and cruel.
We were watching TV in a room with words scrawled on the wall.
Our dead brother’s things were moving in the attic.
Soon, we would all try to sleep as the nightmares crawled in.
I had always shielded my daughter from the worst things in life.
It was what you did when you had a child, what made you a good parent.
You told your child bedtime stories about unicorns and treasure maps, not about how you lost your voice screaming your brother’s name as you walked the hallways, how you only knew the cops in the house by their feet because you never raised your gaze.
You didn’t tell little children about Ben, about how your parents looked through you like glass, about being lonely and scared, about dead people watching you work. About Sister.
That was fair. It was right. But Lisette wasn’t a baby anymore. I had been much, much younger than Lisette when I had first seen Sister standing in my bedroom. Maybe, at a certain point in time, your children craved the truth, because without it they didn’t know you anymore.
“When I was your age,” I said into the kitchen phone, “I lost my little brother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“He was six years old,” I said. “He would have been your uncle, I guess. His name was Ben.”
Another second of silence. Then, “Uncle Ben? Like the rice?”
It was rude, sarcastic, but I wasn’t fooled. Lisette was invested. I invented this kind of rudeness. I knew it well.
“Like the rice,” I replied.
“What happened?” she asked. “Was he murdered?”
The question was a punch to the gut. I thought of wrestling Ben into his clothes that morning, trying to get him to comb his hair.
In my mind, I had silently decided that Ben had an accident, that he’d fallen somewhere and lost consciousness, that he’d gone quietly without knowing what was wrong.
That it was just one of those things. Children died every day, didn’t they?
They drowned in pools or played with matches or got into a bottle of prescription pills.
The thought of anyone murdering Ben was, even now, too much to bear.
“I don’t know,” I managed to say. “We don’t know. We played hide-and-seek with him one day, and he hid and never came out, and we never found him. He died and we never found his body.”
“Didn’t you call the police?” she asked as if this had just happened, with the blithe certainty of someone who has never known this kind of pain. “Didn’t they look for him?”
“Yes, we did, and yes, they looked. We all looked. We never found him.”
“How could that happen? How could he just be gone?” She was in disbelief, and I had the strange double vision of being irritated and knowing that yes, I had successfully shielded her from some of the bad things in life. At least I had done that much.
“Lisette, he disappeared.” I found that I was suddenly infinitely patient.
“That’s all we ever knew. So yes, I know I’m screwed up, but there’s a reason for it.
Okay? And I’m sorry. I’m sorry the bad shit I grew up with got dumped on you.
You didn’t deserve it, which was why I never told you this story.
I thought I was protecting you. But I’m telling you now. ”
The words were jumbled, ineloquent. The sentences spilled like stones, rolled away like marbles on the attic floor.
On the other end of the line, there was silence.
Then Lisette said, “Why are you there now? Are Aunt Dodie and Uncle Vail there?”
Lisette had only met her aunt and uncle a handful of times.
We did not do summer vacations or Christmas visits.
In the way of little kids, she hadn’t been curious about her aunt and uncle, who to her were distant adults, ancient, another species.
But two years ago she’d seen one of Dodie’s shampoo commercials, which was inescapable on TV at the time.
She’d watched those commercials in fascination, going silent whenever one of them came on during The Young and the Restless.
She’d asked me questions about Dodie. Where did she live? Was she married? Was she a runway model like Cindy Crawford? Was she rich? Was she really that pretty? Was she in magazines?
Clay, of course, had discouraged her. He was against Lisette having anything to do with my side of the family, and Lisette’s questions about Dodie probably gave him nightmares of our daughter thinking she’d become a model.
He’d told her that her aunt and uncle weren’t interested in her, and Lisette’s questions had gone quiet after that.
I couldn’t argue otherwise with any honesty, and even if I believed that Lisette should be around either of my siblings, there was nothing I could do about it.
It was part of the infuriating helplessness of not having custody.
“They’re here.” I answered her question, trying to calculate how much to say.
If I told her about ghosts, about aliens, about dead childhood friends and dead suicidal boys whispering in my ear at the hospital, I would never be allowed to talk to Lisette again.
“He was their little brother, too. We all want to know what happened to him. So we came here to look for ourselves and find out.”
“Like, investigating? What exactly are you doing?”
“We’re going through the house. Comparing our memories of what happened. I’ve made some inquiries in town.” I made it sound routine, when in fact I’d passed out at the storage rental place and Bradley Pine had had to carry me out of the hospital like a sack of grain. So much for honesty.
“Have you seen him?” Lisette asked. “Ben?”
I sagged against the kitchen wall, my hand sweaty on the phone.
Lisette knew I had been in the hospital.
She knew it was because I saw things that weren’t there, things that I claimed were ghosts.
She had learned all of this from Clay, not from me.
I never talked to my daughter about the people I saw.
I never wanted her to know how crazy her mother was, how ashamed I felt.
The shame weighed me down, but I was so used to the drag of it that I hardly noticed it anymore.
My daughter had never asked me about it. Not only was she asking now, she sounded as if she might believe me.
“No,” I replied, the honesty a shield this time.
“I haven’t seen him.” Despite everything, I didn’t want to be the crazy woman in Lisette’s eyes, the mental patient.
Just this once, couldn’t I be normal? For a few minutes?
“It’s nothing like that, Lisette. It’s simply that we never got an answer, and now we’ve decided to look for one.
” I paused, then added, “Please don’t tell your father any of this.
I told him that this was a family visit, that’s all. ”
“Dad doesn’t know? About Ben?”
That was my marriage to Clay, right there.
I had never told my own husband about the death of my little brother.
“No, and there’s no reason for him to know now.
I have to be here for a little while, do this one thing, and then I’ll be back.
If you tell him too much, he won’t let me talk to you anymore. ”
Lisette seemed to think this over. “I think you should find whoever killed Ben, then get them arrested,” she concluded. “Maybe Uncle Vail can beat him up.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I miss you.”
Annoyance now. “Jeez, Mom.”
“I know, I know. I’ll call. Every night, if you want.”
“Not every night.”
“Every other night, then.” I really did miss her.
I wanted to see her face, even if it was in its usual affected sneer, even if she was sulking or rolling her eyes.
I wanted to listen to her talk about anything at all.
I wanted to hear her careless, thumping footsteps in the house and the rattling in the kitchen as she rifled through the fridge.
I wanted her clothes dumped on top of the washing machine and her backpack dropped in the hall.
I wanted all of it. There hadn’t been much good in my life, and Lisette was a whiny bitch, but she was my whiny bitch, my surly, curled-lip princess who flitted from sourness to white-hot rage and back again.
I didn’t just love Lisette, I knew her. And I knew more than anyone that she had every right to be angry.
I hoped she banked that anger, stoked it carefully, and kept it for life.
After I hung up the phone, I stood in the kitchen, in the silence.
It was late, the darkness outside the window deep and seamless, as if we were in space.
Either Dodie or Vail had left a lamp on in the living room, and another light reflected down the stairs from the upstairs hall.
There was a silent agreement among the three of us not to sleep with the lights out.
A closet door opened and shut upstairs with a squeak.
A drawer shut in Dodie’s bedroom. Vail’s footsteps—even in socks, he couldn’t walk quietly—sounded in his bedroom.
Then a creak as his childhood bed protested as he got in.
A thump from Dodie’s room, probably her dropping something off the dresser.
And then, half a second later, like an echo of the other sounds, there came the staccato rap of knuckles from high up in the attic. Knock, knock, knock.
My breath stopped in my throat. Upstairs, Dodie and Vail went instantly silent.
The silence stretched on, beating like a heart.
“Good night, Ben,” I whispered softly, then turned toward the stairs to go to bed.