Chapter 27
I managed to keep myself together through Janet’s party, smiling as necessary through dinner, through candles and cake and the opening of presents.
But the image of Leonard’s hand, the nub and knuckle of those missing fingers, kept appearing in my mind’s eye.
His mother said he hadn’t been injured in the fighting, but his mother was a liar.
It seemed unlikely he’d lost those fingers playing volleyball or missing her lasagna.
“Earth to Nora,” Janet said, using the Martian voice from Bugs Bunny. She waved a forkful of cake in front of my face. “Are you at my party or not?”
I didn’t snap at her. I could see she was having a hard time, not enjoying her own party. Everyone, even Janet’s friends, kept looking at Shirley and talking about how cute she was with icing all over her face.
“Sorry, honey,” I said. “I was just thinking of how much you’ve grown up.”
It could have been true. Janet was already as tall as I was, and wearing a bra. But she gave me a skeptical look, and I could see I’d hurt her feelings.
I tried to make it up to her. After her friends went home, I told her about the turkey scraps I’d gotten, which seemed to lift her spirits.
I followed her out back, where the dog was still waiting by the fence.
I’d been warned by Mae not to say anything about the fight with the neighbor.
She felt it was best if Janet never learned the transfer of the dog had been a possibility.
Russ came out and pronounced the dog a mutt, and tragically ugly. He added that he once had a much better-looking dog that was so well trained he could put a piece of sausage on its nose and the dog wouldn’t eat it until Russ, and only Russ, gave it the okay.
“Five minutes, ten minutes, whatever,” he said, touching the tip of his own nose. “Bug would wait. His whole body would tremble, because the scent would be driving him nuts. But he wouldn’t dare till I said.”
“Neat,” I said, again unconvincing.
Russ eyed the neighbor’s dog, who wagged its scraggly tail at Janet. “This one doesn’t look as smart,” he said. “But you should at least make it sit and shake first.”
Janet ignored the advice, slipping another piece of turkey through the fence. “The owner’s mean,” she whispered. “It never gets to go anywhere but this hot yard.”
Russ allowed the dog’s lot was a shame. He said that when he was growing up, a good dog just stayed with you, no fence required. If it ran away, you had to shoot it.
Janet looked at him, then at me. She twisted her mouth to the side, as her mother often did. “Don’t get a dog,” she said.
I told her we wouldn’t. The fence was too tall for me to reach over, so I stretched my fingers between the metal links, scratching the dog’s hot fur. The dog immediately made a sighing sound, staring up at me in a hopeful way, as if I could somehow help him.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t.” Not a lie. There was nothing I could do for him. Russ said he was hot and went back inside. As soon as the door shut behind him, Janet turned to me.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “What is it?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just tired.”
She narrowed her eyes, waiting. I forced a smile, and she shook her head. She told the dog she’d see it later, and went inside, letting the door slam behind her.
“You know who could have pulled that off?” I whispered. The dog had turned its head so I could scratch the white star between its ears. “Leonard’s mother. She’s a far better liar than I’ll ever be.”
Of course she was. She was a trained professional. When she was young, she’d been a good enough actress to get paid for it. I might have considered that, that day on her patio. But I hadn’t.
The dog thumped its tail against the fence. I crouched low, our faces level. The dog’s stare changed, turning plaintive. I again told it that I was sorry, and I stayed with it, in the heat, until Russ stuck his head out and said he had work in the morning, and that we should get on the road.
—
She called the next morning, when Russ was at work. I was mopping when I heard the phone. As soon as she spoke, I recognized her voice, though it sounded hoarse from crying.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
How nice, I thought, for her to be so considerate of my time. What a thoughtful person. But I was curious as to what she wanted to say to me. I told her to go ahead.
“I’m almost relieved.” Her voice was flat. “I’ve had the Sword of Damocles above me for so long. I don’t have to worry anymore.”
I could have laughed. I wanted to crack the receiver against the countertop. “That’s what you have to say to me?”
“No,” she said. “I want to try to explain. You probably think I’m a monster.”
I didn’t correct her. I stayed silent, waiting. She took a deep breath and began.
—
The first thing she told me: Leonard was reported MIA long before I went to New Jersey.
They received the telegram on July 10, 1950, just two weeks into the fighting.
She said that as soon as she read that telegram, she went out of her mind.
Both she and Leonard’s father knew people who’d lost sons and brothers in the previous war.
They knew what MIA usually meant. But it was exhausting, she said, the not knowing.
Worse than grief. They suspected he was probably dead.
From the beginning, Leonard’s father was more convinced of that than she was.
She worried he was dying, suffering. The worst part, she said, was the hope.
They didn’t tell anyone he was missing except for family in New York.
That was her idea, keeping it quiet. She didn’t want to have someone from the newspaper calling her house, or some well-meaning acquaintance coming up to her in the supermarket and giving an opinion on whether or not her son was alive.
Her husband felt the same. He kept going to work, but they stayed in mostly, just trying to get through every day, waiting for a letter, or another telegram, for any news at all.
But day after day, week after week, there was nothing.
“When your stepmother called,” she told me, “the first time I mean, when she just called to see if he was okay, I told her what I’d been telling everyone. That he was fine, back in Japan. Safe. It was the easiest way to get people to stop asking.”
This whole time, she and her husband were reading the same news articles I’d been seeing, about UN forces coming across dead Americans, their hands tied behind their backs.
She said she stopped sleeping. Her hair started falling out.
She’d lie awake at night, imagining Leonard, her beautiful boy, dead in a ditch, or dying.
“I don’t want to make excuses,” she said. “But you can’t imagine what that’s like. Your child out there, and you don’t know where, and you don’t know if he’s okay, or if he’s getting hurt.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I know exactly what that’s like.”
She was quiet. I stretched the phone cord so I could walk to the back window. One of our patio chairs had been blown sideways out into our yard, the new grass yellowed from heat.
“I know sorry isn’t enough,” she said. “But I’m sorry, Nora. You don’t know how sorry I am.”
She said they’d guessed, as soon as Mae called again and said they needed to talk, that I was expecting.
Leonard’s father was certain that my predicament had nothing to do with Leonard.
He believed some other boy had disappointed me, and in my desperation, I was trying to make the most of Leonard’s inability to defend himself.
He imagined I’d tried writing to Leonard, and received the same MIA red stamp on my returned mail that they’d gotten on theirs.
He didn’t know that I’d been too scared to write my address on the envelopes, and that none of my letters, stating I was pregnant, could be returned.
He was all but certain I knew very well that Leonard was missing, and was using that to my advantage.
“And what did you think?” I asked. I was rubbing my bare shoulders, my knees pulled up to my chin. I reached over and switched off the AC.
“I wasn’t sure. You’d promised me you wouldn’t see him again.
John was so angry with me for not telling your father about the shower.
He said I’d let you manipulate me. He said you’d either broken your promise to me, or you were lying about Bradenton.
Either way, we couldn’t trust you.” She sighed.
“I wasn’t myself, Nora. I couldn’t think. ”
I shook my head. She was right that I’d broken my promise to her. She was right that night I was so scared in her car, I’d cried and convinced her to lie to her husband for me. But it wasn’t the same as what they’d done to me. And what they’d done to Leonard.
“You let me think he was just ignoring my letters.” I gripped the receiver so tightly my hand hurt. “You made me think I was alone, that he knew and didn’t care. Mrs. Lifton, you let me go up there and give my child away.”
Another long silence. I was wasting my breath. Everything I’d just told her, she already knew.
“I’ll say this,” she said finally. “That day you called from New Jersey…I was the one who answered. When the social worker was about to put you on, it made sense for John to take the phone. It made sense to him, and it made sense to me. He thought you’d been able to manipulate me once, and that you’d do it again.
I didn’t argue. I handed him the receiver.
Oh Nora. I wasn’t sleeping. I was hardly eating.
I never went out. But I knew it was wrong for him to tell you Leonard knew about the baby.
That was going too far. But once the words left his mouth, once you’d already heard them, there was no going back.
You see? If I’d have contradicted him, even in that moment, if I’d wrested the receiver from his hand and told you the truth, nothing could ever be fixed.
I knew that if Leonard was alive and came home, you’d tell him what his father told you, that he’d known about the baby and didn’t care.
And Leonard would never forgive him. Never. ”
“Who would?” I asked. “Who would forgive a thing like that?”
She didn’t answer. I tried to picture where she was in her house. They had the telephone in her sunny kitchen, and an extension back in their room. She might have taken the phone out to the patio where she’d held my hand and told me I should move away.
“You make it seem,” I said, “like it was just your husband lying. But you’re worse than he is. You lied to my face.”
She told me she’d hated lying to me, and that she’d tried to make it so she wouldn’t have to.
She told me that the day I found her on her back patio, she’d been hiding from me.
She’d seen me roll up on my bike, and she had just enough time to drop to her hands and knees and crawl down the hallway to her bedroom.
“We’d just learned ourselves he was alive,” she said.
“The night before the list came out. Someone from the State Department called and said he was on it. We were ecstatic. It was going to be another Christmas without any news, and then all at once, we knew he was alive. I didn’t even think of you.
Then John left for work, and there you were, running up to the door.
I hid from you because I didn’t want to lie to you.
But you came and found me out back. I had no choice. ”
“You had a choice,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. It was either lie to you, tell this terrible lie that might make you finally go away, or let my family explode.
For years, the only thing I had to hang on to was that he would come home alive, and the three of us would be a family again.
When we saw his name on the list, the damage to you was already done.
So yes. You’re right. I had a decision to make, and I made it.
I looked you in the eye and lied. With everything I had. ”
A pontoon boat rolled slowly down the intercoastal. Its wake caused The Last Laugh to rise and fall by the dock.
“You lied to Leonard as well,” I said. “Your own son.”
She said not at first, not exactly. She hadn’t needed to.
They first heard from him in late 1952. He was still in the camp, but the Chinese were starting to let the prisoners write home.
When they got Leonard’s first letter, they could tell he’d sent others, letters that never reached them.
He told them he still wanted news, any news at all, about me.
“We read that”—she paused to let out a shaky breath—“and even John knew you were probably telling the truth. About Bradenton, I mean. But you were married by then. I’d seen the announcement in the paper. So I wrote Leonard to tell him that. That you’d gotten married.”
I closed my eyes. He must have tried to write to me directly. He would have sent the letter to my parents’ house. Mae, I thought. My anger swelled. But when I spoke this theory into the receiver, Leonard’s mother disagreed.
“I wouldn’t blame your stepmother. His letters to you might never have left the camp.
When he came home, he said that prisoners collecting firewood had found sacks of outgoing mail, addressed to the States, rotting out in the woods.
I didn’t know if one of his letters reached you or not. I was sick about it, worrying.”
“You got lucky,” I said. “Lucky you.”
She said she didn’t feel lucky. Lucky he was alive, yes.
Lucky he was coming home. But she hated hurting him, letting him think I’d just forgotten about him, or changed my mind, when he was still over there, alone.
And when he was finally home and safe, she couldn’t tell him about the baby.
What good would it have done? They couldn’t get the baby back. And I was already married.
“We’d just gotten him back. You have to understand.”
My eyebrows shot up. I didn’t have to do anything. “That was your grandchild,” I said.
She made an ugly, wheezing sound. I was unmoved. More lying? More fakery from her? I couldn’t know. When I was a girl, dazzled by her, she once told me I’d see the world differently after I’d seen more of it. She’d been right about that.
“I’ll have to live with that,” she said. “I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
Good, I thought. Because so would I.
“Nora?” she asked. Her voice sounded tinny and far away. “Are you there?”
I sure was. I looked around the kitchen, at the mop waiting in the corner. I didn’t think she deserved an answer. I hung up without giving her one.