Chapter 5 #4
“Well, we park in front of her house. It seems like we would have overlapped at some point.” We had once seen Norma and Bright walking across the yard in their swimsuits but that was it, and that was ages ago.
“This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.”
“It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months.
“Whatever. We’ve been lucky.”
“Do you ever think about her?” I didn’t think of Andrea often, but there were times when we were parked in front of the Dutch House that she might as well have been in the back seat of the car.
“Sometimes I wonder if she’s dying,” Maeve said. “I wonder when she’ll die. That’s about it.”
I laughed, even though I was pretty sure she wasn’t joking. “I was thinking more along the lines of—I wonder if she’s happy, I wonder if she ever met anyone.”
“No. I don’t wonder about that.”
“She couldn’t be very old. She could have found someone.”
“She’d never let anyone in that house.”
“Listen,” I said, “she was horrible to us in the end, I’ll grant you that, but sometimes I wonder if she just didn’t know any better.
Maybe she was too young to deal with everything, or maybe it was grief.
Or maybe things had happened in her own life that had nothing to do with us.
I mean, what did we ever know about Andrea?
The truth is I have plenty of memories of her being perfectly decent.
I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t. ”
“Why do you feel the need to say anything good about her?” Maeve asked. “I don’t see the point.”
“The point is that it’s true. At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?
” The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.
“Did you love her?”
I let out a sound that could only be described as exasperation. “No, I didn’t love her. Those are my two choices? I love her or I hate her?”
“Well,” my sister said, “you’re telling me you didn’t hate her, so I just want to know what the parameters are.
I think it’s a ridiculous conversation to be having in the first place, if you want my opinion.
Say there’s a kid who lives next door, a kid you have no particular friendship with but no problems with either.
Then one day he walks into your house and kills your sister with a baseball bat. ”
“Maeve, for the love of God.”
She held up her hand. “Hear me out. Does that present fact obliterate the past? Maybe not if you loved the kid. Maybe if you loved the kid you’d dig in and try to find out what had happened, see things from his perspective, wonder what his parents had done to him, wonder if there wasn’t some chemical imbalance.
You might even consider that your sister could have played a role in the outcome—did she torment this boy?
Was she cruel to him? But you’d only wonder about that if you loved him.
If you only liked the kid, if he was never anything more to you than an okay neighbor, I don’t see the point in scratching around for good memories.
He’s gone to prison. You’re never going to see the son-of-a-bitch again. ”
I was doing my residency in internal medicine at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and every two or three weeks I took the train to Philadelphia.
There wasn’t enough time to spend the night but I never let an entire month go by without visiting.
Maeve was always saying she thought she’d see more of me when medical school was over but that wasn’t the case.
There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.
We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father.
We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.
There had already been a few cold nights and the leaves on the linden trees were starting to yellow.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll drop it.”
Maeve turned away from me and looked at the trees. “Thank you.”
So alone I tried to remember the good in her: Andrea laughing with Norma and Bright; Andrea coming in to check on me once in the middle of the night after I had my wisdom teeth out, her standing in the door of my room, asking if I was okay; a handful of moments early on when I saw her bring a lightness to our father, his briefly resting his hand against the small of her back.
They were minuscule things, and in truth it made me tired to think of them, so I let my mind go back to the hospital, checking off the patients I would need to see tonight, preparing what I would say to them. I was back on call at seven.