Chapter 30 Greta
Greta
He was laughing. A little nervously, maybe. Holding up his hands. He had taken one step back from Hailey. Only one. Greta
was tempted to fire a round.
Oh, she wouldn’t fire at his head. Maybe at the kitchen window. It would be so satisfying to watch the glass shatter and fall
away.
But the gun hadn’t been out of the attic cupboard in sixty years—she’d had it hidden behind a false panel—so she didn’t know if it would function properly.
She knew nothing about guns. She had only ever held one—this one—a couple times in her life, decades ago.
Her brother Harrison had given it to her after the war, saying she could use it to protect herself.
Only then had she realized that he must have known all along what had happened to her in the attic when she was twelve, the summer before the war, and somehow that felt like a bigger betrayal than the failure of her brothers to protect her.
She wondered if Cary and Will had known, too, and if her parents had known, and if knowing was why Harrison had hardly spoken to her for the rest of his life; why her parents had insisted on traveling with her on her concert tours until she was thirty years old; why her mother’s dying wish had been that Greta promise to agree to marry Tom, who had been asking, so that Greta would not be left, as her mother put it, “without protection.”
Now Greta held the gun in both hands, with her feet planted slightly apart the way she’d seen Benson and Rollins on SVU hold their guns.
“Grandma, put it down!” Hailey said.
“I want you out of my house,” Greta told Noah. She craved the striking of a hammer, the sounding of a note. “I never want
you in my house again.”
Noah was still chuckling, his hands raised, but Greta was satisfied to see that he had broken a sweat and was backing away
from Hailey. This was what Greta had wanted, but it was stunning to see that he had no impulse to protect Hailey.
Zero, as the kids would say. “Fine, fine.” It was the same tone in which he’d said, A little heads up would’ve been nice.
She twitched to fire at him. Oh, not really, not really, she wouldn’t!
“Grandma, please, put it down!” Hailey said again, but Greta continued to point the gun at Noah, following him with it as
he moved toward the door. She felt she should’ve been using this thing all her life. It would have made her feel so powerful.
It would have changed everything.
“Never come here again,” Greta said to him.
Noah nodded. A glance at Hailey, as if accusing her. “No problem.” He pushed his way out the screen door. A second later,
through the kitchen window, Greta saw him running up the road, then he was gone.
Hailey was looking at Greta, aghast. Greta lowered the gun and said, “I suspect he won’t bother you anymore.”
Hailey covered her mouth and burst into hysterical laughter, even as her eyes filled with tears.
“Mother!” came Lindy’s voice from the stairs.
“He was threatening her,” Greta told Lindy, who stood at the foot of the stairs gaping. Lindy’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying, but Greta couldn’t shift gears to ask why. “And it’s not a far distance between taking a threatening posture and landing an actual blow, or an actual assault!”
Hailey had gotten her laughter under control and stood. “Grandma, he wouldn’t have—”
Greta interrupted, insisting. “They all start off seeming wonderful, but most of them, unfortunately, are not. And I will
not have that in my house!”
“Mother,” Lindy said. “Put the gun down. Why would you do that to Noah?”
Greta moved toward the stairs. “I’ll just go put it away. I don’t think he’ll come back.”
“Where did you get that?” Lindy said. “You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not David,” Greta said, beginning to climb the stairs.
“Mother!”
“What does that mean?” Hailey said.
“I can’t condone you marrying that young man, not anymore,” Greta called to her.
“Oh, God, I’d better check on him,” Hailey said, heading for the door.
“Mother, what is wrong?” Lindy said, as Hailey banged outside.
Greta kept climbing the stairs.
Greta gripped the rail as she ascended the steep steps to the attic, the .45 dangling from her other hand. Her heart felt
clutched in a fist. Some summers, she managed not to go up here at all. She would send Lindy up to make the beds, or the grandkids
up to grab this or that from storage. Nobody ever questioned it. They probably thought her too old to manage the stairs. They
never seemed to remember that she attended Pilates twice a week, eight months out of the year, in New York City.
Greta heard Lindy calling after her, running up to the second floor, as if she’d taken a moment to see to Hailey, then decided
to go after Greta instead.
Greta climbed faster. She still didn’t like the attic, and she wanted to hold on to the gun—she enjoyed the heaviness of it in her hand—but she couldn’t chance there being some accident, or Tom finding out about it.
If he understood what she had done, he would be angry with her.
He did not believe that violence or threats of violence were ever justified, not even in retaliation, not even for protection.
He was a fan of Gandhi; he had traveled to Mississippi one summer with his students when Lindy was a baby.
(“Don’t you remember you’re a father?” Greta had screamed at him, terrified, before he’d left.) He’d marched and sat in at a Woolworth’s counter and been doused
in ketchup and beaten by a police officer’s truncheon, all without raising a hand in return, and he’d come home proud of his
yellowing bruises. He would never approve of Greta having a gun, much less of her pointing it at anybody. He always thought
there was a way to talk through to a solution, though Greta thought that, having been a student of history all his life, he
ought to know better.
Of course, now, from this moment to the next, he might not remember that what she had done was something he would object to,
or that it mattered to him what she did at all. He might not even remember who she was.
She swallowed hard, wishing suddenly that she had told him the secret of what had happened to her up here so that she might
have the pleasure of knowing it was a thing that was now in the process of being forgotten.
She glanced over the room, the boys’ unmade twin beds with their blue plaid sheets, the “updated” blinds Lindy had hung a
few summers ago, replacing the old curtains with trains printed on them. It was a blessing, at least, that the attic looked
nothing like it had in the days when it had been her room.
There was no reason it should have been her room.
Since she came into existence, the bedroom at the back of the cottage, the one her granddaughters now shared, had been hers.
But the summer she was ten, she’d gotten the idea that she needed a view of the ocean.
Everyone else had one! (Greta and Tom’s present room had originally belonged to Greta’s parents, and Lindy’s present room had belonged to Greta’s brothers and contained two sets of bunkbeds, so they always had room for at least one friend.)
Greta’s father had agreed. Greta’s brothers liked to complain that Greta could ask their father for the moon and he would
find a way to get it for her, but, in truth, they treated her the same way. She had been a “surprise,” born eight years after
the youngest of her brothers, Harrison, and the entire family had always been thrilled by her. Only her mother ever exhibited
sternness, confessing later that she’d simply felt compelled to try to preserve Greta from becoming “one hundred percent spoiled
rotten.” (For one example: Greta’s entire family considered her a “prodigy” on the piano, when in fact she was simply a capable
student who had been started at age three, whose father didn’t mind paying for three lessons per week.)
In any case, once Greta said the word, her father and brothers set about making over the attic’s front half into a bedroom
fit for a Connecticut princess. They added a wall to divide off the back section for storage. They put in a big picture window
to give her a broader view. Her father, a stockbroker, had no idea what he was doing, but somehow managed to order his sons
around with authority, and somehow none of them got killed in the process of putting that giant window in. Her mother ordered
pink curtains, a pink-trimmed white bedspread, and a pink rug from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and, four weeks after Greta’s
initial request, the family blindfolded her and led her up the steep steps for a grand unveiling.
It was perfect. Greta’s original room was made over into a guest room, which her mother was extremely pleased to have.
For the next two summers, Greta enjoyed closing the attic door behind her and climbing the stairs to her private lair.
(Her brothers, having worked hard to create the space, were not allowed in it, a fact which they accepted with jovial ease.) She would retreat to the quiet with a book.
She and her best friend Marjorie Tennyson, who would later become Marjorie Westfield, would hold elaborate tea parties, gossiping for hours over imaginary ladyfingers and Earl Grey.
Greta would’ve liked to have had her piano moved up there so she could practice without fear of interruption, but her parents
had to draw the line somewhere. Will, who was the most scientific of her brothers, explained that the refusal was, more than
anything, about the laws of physics, which even their father could not change, not even on Greta’s behalf.
Heading for the back storage area now, Greta heard Lindy in pursuit. The gun felt very heavy in her hand. You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?
Such a thing would never have occurred to Greta.
Would it?
She didn’t want Lindy to know where the gun was kept, so she hurried through the door that she’d left ajar in her haste to
get back downstairs with the gun. It surprised her now that she had done such a thing, but, again, so many things had been
surprising lately that she had almost lost the ability to become alarmed.
In the storage area were old tables, lamps, ancient suitcases, sets of dishes, a bureau that had belonged to her brothers
when they were young. A trunk full of her mother’s table linens, out of vogue for decades now. There had been an elegance
to Innisfree when Greta’s mother was alive—but of course one had to modernize. And Lindy’s love of yard sales and decorating
meant frequent “updates,” so the detritus of the ’70s and ’80s was up here, too: the fondue pot, the plastic end tables, the
VCR, the martini glasses, the floral armchairs.
They would have to have their own yard sale, Greta realized, before Innisfree was sold.
The big old wardrobe that stood at the back of the storage room had belonged to her father, and Greta had left its door ajar,
too, when she had taken out the gun.
Quickly now, she fumbled past where her brother Harrison’s old Army uniform and overcoat hung and pressed open the secret panel at the back.
Carefully, she set the gun inside, not wanting to think any more about what Harrison might’ve known about what had happened to her in this attic nearly seventy summers ago, or whether such knowledge had been what had spurred him to give her the Colt.
Things that happen in the summer don’t matter at all, she had always told Lindy, mostly in an effort to convince herself.
Already missing the weight of the gun in her hand, and missing the person that holding it had made her into, she closed the
secret panel, swung the wardrobe door shut and latched it, then hurried out into the boys’ room, slamming the door behind
her.
“Mother! Seriously, what are you doing?” Lindy, who had just arrived at the top of the stairs, jutted fists to hips.
“I put it away.” Greta was having a hard time breathing, suddenly. “Let me by so I can go downstairs.” Out the big window
behind Lindy, only the treetops were visible, then a wall of fog, curtaining off the ocean.
“Mom, you pointed it at Noah!”
Greta pressed a palm to her throat. “I told you. He was threatening Hailey. I told him he needed to stop, and he didn’t listen.
So I came up here and got the gun. It’s always been up here.”
“What? Always? Up here? In the boys’ room?”
Hailey came running up the stairs, wiping fresh tears from her face. Was she angry or just upset? Greta couldn’t tell. Anyway,
Hailey would thank Greta later. Greta had had no choice.
But now she needed to get downstairs. She would find Tom; she would sit beside him for a while. They would both feel better,
then—at least, if he remembered her just now.