Chosen for Death (3 page)

Carrie's search for her birth parents had been a notable exception.

There was an elaborate buffet breakfast laid out on the old carved sideboard. I set my coffee cup down on the table, picked up a plate, and began piling up food. I still had no appetite, but my body needed food, and eating was an activity which could delay the moment when I had to confront the assembled multitude.

All the leaves were in the dining table my mother had bought for the large family she hoped to have. It could have seated an army. But then, according to Michael, an army lurked somewhere in the house. I could hear the murmur of voices from the living room.

When she and Dad married, they'd planned to have six children, but it hadn't worked out that way. Before me there had been a series of miscarriages. There were two more between me and Michael, and when Michael was born she'd hemorrhaged so badly they'd had to do a hysterectomy. They'd started immediately trying to adopt more children, but the agencies hadn't been very sympathetic to a couple who already had two healthy children of their own. It had taken six years to get Carrie, and after that they'd given up.

I was eight when they brought her home, a tiny, picture-perfect baby. I loved taking care of her. She was better than any doll. My friends were wildly jealous, vying for the privilege of coming to my house so they could play with baby Carrie. I suppose Michael liked her well enough, but he was busy with his little-boy pursuits, and a baby can be very disruptive when you've just gotten your trucks and cars lined up for a big race, or if you have to keep all the little pieces of a building set on the table so the baby won't eat them.

It always seemed to me that there was something furtive in the way she arrived, in the way the grown-ups always lowered their voices when we came into the room if they were talking about Carrie. Mom says that's just my imagination. Maybe it is.

They were always very open about the fact that Carrie was adopted. They didn't have any choice, really. Carrie was a tiny pink and gold pixie in the midst of a bunch of Neanderthal giants. She couldn't help noticing she didn't look like the rest of us.

Mom and Dad are both tall, big-boned people. Dad is loud-voiced, flamboyant, and opinionated. Scotch-Irish in background, though his family has been here for a long time. He loves to argue. Mom is quieter and more controlling, but she also has strong opinions. Her family is eastern European, more recent immigrants, but they've embraced American middle-class values with a fervor that would make you think they've been here forever. Mom reads etiquette books the way some people read novels. Dad's hair is dark and wavy; Mom's is impossibly thick, black, and curly. I've inherited it. Like our parents, Michael and I are tall, dark, and handsome. Michael has Dad's hair. He's thin and moves like he's connected with piano wire, but he's actually quite a good athlete. Anyway, when we go out together, people stare. When we used to go out with Carrie, they stared even more.

It wasn't like me to sit around like this, lingering dreamily over food. I'm not the lingering type. I'm an active person, like Mom, but today I couldn't keep my mind on the present. Maybe it was being in this house. It was too filled with memories. If I'd been home, in my condo, I could have found a million things to do. Open the week's mail. Do the dishes. When all else fails, I just go to work. I like to go in to work on a Sunday. You can get a lot done when no one else is around.

The idea of immersing myself in work was very appealing. Maybe I could leave soon. If I left by noon, I could still manage a few hours in the office. Which meant I'd better get into the other room and fix whatever it was they were all expecting me to fix. I poured a second cup of coffee and carried it into the living room.

It was a beautiful room. It ran the whole width of the house, front to back, with tall windows and elaborate moldings where the walls met the ceiling. The walls were painted a strange shade of green called Banshee, which looked perfect with the flowered chintz curtains and overstuffed chintz sofas. There was a huge Oriental rug on the floor. Plenty of comfortable chairs. And today, all the seats seemed to be taken. It looked like the set for a high school play. A dozen pairs of eyes rose to watch my entrance. I almost wished I'd worn a dress. I set down my coffee, hugged my parents, and took the seat reserved for me between Todd and Uncle Henry.

Michael hadn't been exaggerating. Todd looked dreadful. His unshaven face was white, and the circles under his eyes could have been painted on by a kindergartner. I put my hand over his, and he seized it as if it were a lifeline. "Thea," he said, "what do I do now?" The others were watching me, covertly, waiting to see what I'd do. I knew they were waiting for me to "fix it," whatever that meant.

"You need to talk, Todd," I said. "Let's go out on the sun porch." He nodded, got unsteadily to his feet, and headed toward the French doors.

I sat on the porch swing. I've always sat on the porch swing, ever since I was tall enough to crawl into it. Todd sat facing me in a green wicker chair. "I would have protected her, Thea," he said. "Why wouldn't she let me? Why did she have to go off and live in Maine by herself like that, working in that lousy restaurant? It was probably someone she met there who killed her." His voice had a forced, rasping quality. He was the picture of dejection, sitting there. "I shouldn't have let her go."

I suppressed my urge to tell him that he was grabbing blame he had no right to. He'd beaten himself up enough already. Right now, what he needed was reassurance that he wasn't responsible. "Todd," I said, "this is not your fault. Carrie loved you. But you know how Carrie was. She didn't go away because of you. You know that, don't you?" He nodded, but it was perfunctory. He wasn't really listening. He was remembering.

I slid off the swing, went over to him, and put my hands on his shoulders, forcing him to look at me. "Listen to me, Todd. This is important. She didn't go to Maine because of you. She went for herself. There was something she needed to deal with on her own, without any of us, that took her to Maine. Even when she was very little, Carrie had a lost quality. No matter what we did—you, me, Mom and Dad, any of us—to make her feel loved and secure, she never felt like she belonged. It isn't something any of us did, or failed to do." I shook him gently. "Are you listening, Todd?"

His head was bent so I couldn't see his face, but he nodded. "I'm listening."

"There was never a person more loved than Carrie. But you can't make someone believe something. I've read that it's quite common for adopted children to feel this uncertainty about who they are and a sense of not belonging. Going to Maine was part of Carrie's attempt to find herself. Her true self. She told me she couldn't settle down and commit herself to anyone until she was clear about who she was."

"I know, Thea, I know," he said. "But I just keep thinking I ought to have done something more. Or that if I'd just done things right, she'd still be here."

I pointed toward the doors. "Everyone in there is thinking the same thing, Todd. Carrie's vulnerability captured all of us. We all felt responsible. We each should have saved her. But it's very arrogant of us to think like that, Todd. Carrie was a grown woman. She had her own agenda and she was acting on it. Sure, we could have tried to keep her here and protect her, but it wouldn't have worked. She would have gotten angry and frustrated and hated all of us."

"But at least she'd still be alive," Todd insisted.

"Yes," I said, "and still fighting with you, and with Mom, and everyone else, and doing who knows what sort of self-destructive things. Look, Todd, you can flagellate yourself endlessly with the might-have-beens, and it won't do you or Carrie any good at all. I know this will sound selfish, but you've got to pull yourself together and get on with life. Start thinking about the positive, about how much joy we all got out of knowing her. Let her memory be a source of good..." But Todd wasn't listening again. He was preparing his rebuttal, and it came bursting out before I could finish.

"Right," he said angrily. "It's easy for you to say that; she was only your sister. We were lovers. My loss was different! You don't understand how it is for me."

I knew I'd been sounding a bit too much like Pollyanna, but when Todd said that, my self-control flew right out the window. "I don't understand how it is for you, Todd? Because you were her lover? Have you forgotten about David?"

Todd's mouth snapped shut and he fell back in his chair like he'd been slugged. He made a few futile attempts before he finally got some words out. "Oh, God, I'm sorry, Thea. I forgot." He got up and walked shakily toward the outside door. "I'm just going to drag my miserable body out of here before I make things worse. Tell your folks thanks for breakfast."

I took his hand and pulled him back, pushing him firmly onto the porch swing. "Not so fast, Todd," I said. "We aren't finished." I sat beside him and put my arms around him. He buried his face in my chest, shoulders heaving.

"Oh, Thea," he said, "what am I going to do now, without her?"

"It won't be easy," I said, "but you go on, somehow. When David died I was furious, at first, that I hadn't died, too, instead of being left behind to face every day without him, surrounded by his things. Everything I touched, everywhere I went was a reminder of what I'd lost. I was too numb to do anything. I just sat home and cried. For a long time I was sad, then I got really mad at him for leaving me. Eventually I learned to do what I just told you to do, to be glad we had the time we did, and to find pleasure in that, instead of feeling angry and cheated because of what we might have had. It's been almost two years now, and I still miss him. I'll always miss him."

I looked down at his dark head, laid so trustingly on my chest. He was so young, poor thing. Everything seems so monumental when you're young. Kids like Todd could make me feel a million years old. "I didn't mean to dismiss your pain, Todd," I said. "I know it hurts. All I'm saying is that it gets easier, and you go on."

I never talk about David. My family doesn't mention him anymore, and neither do my friends. I used to dissolve in tears whenever they did, so they learned to be careful. Except for my boss, Suzanne, the people at work don't know about David. David was my husband. I met him on the rebound from a guy I'd loved passionately who didn't love me. I'd finally broken the hold of that unrequited love. To celebrate, I'd gone to a movie with two friends. It was an intense, somewhat inscrutable foreign film. Afterward we'd gone to a bar for a drink to talk about the movie. David pulled up a chair and invited himself to our table. His opening line, a model of stupidity, was, "I knew three such attractive women didn't come here just to talk to each other."

In my most charming way, I'd urged him to get lost, but he wouldn't.

"I can't," he said. "I know that was a dumb line, and I apologize. The truth is that I'm mesmerized by your fabulous green eyes, and I've come to claim my right to spend eternity in their orbit." My two friends laughed derisively and I, who earlier in the evening had resolved to maintain a heart of stone ever after, fell hopelessly and irrevocably in love. My friends went home, and I stayed with David. That night, and every night after that until the night he didn't come home because the friend who was giving him a ride wanted to show off his new Camaro and wrapped David around a tree.

The friend escaped with a few bruises and a broken wrist. When he came around after the funeral to say how sorry he was, I gave him two black eyes and a broken nose. So I knew how Todd felt.

I just sat and hugged him for a while, letting him cry. He left quietly through the outside door, saying he was going home to sleep. I thought he'd be OK. I went back into the living room to join the family. "Todd's gone home," I said. "He says thanks for breakfast."

Mom nodded. "He just needed someone to talk to. We knew you'd understand." She began collecting coffee cups. Mom can't stand clutter, and she can't sit still. "A policeman who is working on Carrie's case just called," she said. "He wanted to know if he could come over and talk with us. I said he might as well, since everyone is here right now. Except Todd. But I suppose he can go to Todd's house, can't he? I know you're anxious to get going, Thea, but you can wait a little longer, can't you? It would be nice to have you here."

My mother knows me so well. I hadn't said a word to her, but she knew I would want to get away as soon as possible. I need a lot of time by myself, or I get crazy. "No, Mom. That's fine. I suppose we might as well get it over with."

Sonia, Michael's perennial fiancée, got up and stretched. Sonia is white-blonde, ivory-skinned, and rail thin. She likes loose, fluffy clothes in unmatched colors, and when she's sitting down, she looks like a pile of unfolded laundry. She doesn't like anyone in the family except Michael, though she's polite to Dad, and she hates family gatherings. She's a rich, spoiled workout queen, and I don't like her. She checked her watch, a wide swath of magenta on her skeletal wrist. "Michael, if I don't swim today I'll feel wretched all week. There's no reason for me to stay around and wait for the cops, is there?" It was a simple enough question, but with the whine in her voice and the elaborate body language that accompanied it, she made it sound like Michael had inconvenienced her enormously by having the audacity to have his sister get murdered. Michael shook his head. He was probably glad to see her go. Their relationship is based on a contest to see who can make the other more miserable.

"No, Sonia, you don't need to stay around," said my mother. She turned away from Sonia, who was wasting no time on goodbyes, and frowned at my sweatshirt and jeans. "You might want to put on something a little different, Thea," she said. By which she meant she didn't think it was right for a respectable widow my age to meet a policeman in my present unkempt state. I'd used up my energy on Todd. I didn't have any left to argue with her, so I excused myself and went upstairs to change.