Mending the Moon (20 page)

Marjorie and David kept pestering her about how she needed to find a support group. There are bereavement groups for suicide survivors, they told her, and she's sure that's true, but she doesn't think she could deal with a room full of other people's overwhelming grief and anger, that maelstrom of sheer agony.

William, who knows her horror of touchy-feely group therapy, suggested a psychologist during one of their infrequent conversations. He's seeing one himself. He's on medication now, and thinks it will help her—although to her he seems flat and foggy, blunted and blurred—but she doesn't need to talk to a shrink and she doesn't need to be on drugs. What she needs is to know that other people whose children have committed horrible crimes have survived the experience, have made sense of it somehow and gone on with their lives.

That's the support group she really needs, but she doesn't think it exists. She can't find Mothers of Murderers Anonymous in the phone book. If Marjorie were in this situation, she'd start up a chapter herself, and probably organize a national charitable foundation of some sort into the bargain. But Anna isn't Marjorie. She never has been, never will be. William skipped the section in the manual explaining that men are supposed to marry women who remind them of their mothers.

In lieu of group therapy, she kept reading everything she could find about Melinda Soto. She read articles about the funeral, read the online archive of library newsletters Melinda edited, read the online guestbook set up by the library: note after note talking about how wonderful she was, how incomprehensible her death is.

Many of the notes express rage at Percy. Anna keeps reading them anyway. She understands the rage. She shares it.

So much pain, pain that overwhelms the words meant to express it.

The dog's still licking her hand. The sensation was soothing at first, but now it's as grating as if her hand were being raked over glass. Anna pulls away from Bart's slobber, gets up, and makes her way into the bathroom to clean the dog spit off her skin. Her hands yearn to knit; she craves the softness of yarn and the familiar, reassuring movements of the needles. She hasn't knit since Marjorie and David showed up. She knows the rhythm of the stitches will calm her, help her think more clearly again. Knitting is a promise that she can still function, still do useful work.

Her knitting bag's where she left it the night Melinda Soto was killed, half under an easy chair in the living room. She's heading back into the living room to collect it, to resume work on the Frost Flowers shawl, when the phone rings. She picks up in the kitchen, hoping it's not David and Marjorie saying that their flight's been delayed, or offering yet more ideas for the memorial service. Please, be anyone but them.

It's Miranda Tobin.

Watch what you wish for.

“Anna,
dear,
I'm just calling to find out how you and William are doing.”

Anna doubts this very much, and she wouldn't know how to answer the question even if it were sincere. She and Miranda have never been close. She fumbles for words and comes up dry.

“Anna? Are you there?”

“Yes, I'm here. It's—a hard question to answer. I don't have words for it.” Only the silent scream. “It was kind of you to call, Miranda.”

If the call's really a compassionate gesture, Miranda will recognize this as dismissal and get off the phone. Of course she doesn't. “Toby and I were talking just last night about how
terrible
it all is. We just can't understand it.”

“No one can understand it,” Anna says. Her mouth tastes like blood, and her hand hurts from gripping the phone. If Percy had to kill someone, why couldn't he kill Miranda Tobin?

Anna recognizes this as humor too black to share with anyone, even William. Especially William. She clears her throat and says, “We're having the memorial service on July 24. It would have been Percy's birthday. It would be lovely to see you and Toby there.”

“Oh, we'd
love
to come, but I'm afraid we'll be in Europe then. It's Toby's last free summer, really, because things will heat up so much in his second year at Harvard Med, so we thought we'd take the chance to see France and Italy.”

I cannot, thinks Anna, believe that I'm having this conversation. She wonders if Miranda expects her to ask about the trip, or say that she hopes they have a wonderful time. “Well, I'm sorry you can't be there. It was really very kind of you to call, but—”

“Anna, dear, I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but, well, we had a board meeting last night—”

Ah. “I've taken a leave of absence from the board,” Anna says, “although I'm thinking of coming back. Weren't you told?”

“Yes, of course, we all know that, and of course you would, you have to, I can't even
imagine
what this must be like for you, but Anna,
dear,
I thought you should know. There's talk about asking you to resign.”

The room shifts slightly, and then settles. “Resign?” Anna says. “They're asking me? Or telling me?”

“Well, you know, because it's a school, and well, we want the public to focus on the
fine
young people who attend Blake.”

And not on the rapist murderers, Anna thinks grimly. She can't even blame them, but she's shaking anyway. All the work she's put into that place, the hours of meetings and events and fundraisers and school functions, not to mention the tuition she and William paid for Percy's very
fine
education. “I understand completely,” she says, trying to keep her voice under control. “I'm a PR liability. If it were Toby, I'm sure I'd have come to the same conclusion about you.”

Miranda coughs, sounding a bit strangled, but then regains her dovelike tones. “I thought it was cruel, just to send a letter. I thought someone should tell you in person.”

The hell you did, Anna thinks. You wanted to gloat. She's so angry she can barely form syllables. “Well, I have the message now. Thank you.”

“I just didn't want you to be blindsided, Anna. When you get the letter.”

This time it registers. A letter. They've written a letter? Already? Percy's only been dead six weeks. They couldn't have waited another few months? Or, if they couldn't wait, they couldn't send someone to tell her in person?

Miranda's still talking, but Anna can't make it out, doesn't want to. She hangs up.

She no longer has the slightest desire to knit. She entertains a brief fantasy about strangling Miranda Tobin with her yarn, and then dismisses it. She knows the Blake board made the decision they had to make, but the way they've done it still enrages her.

All right, she'll preempt them. She'll send out a letter of resignation before she can get their letter firing her.

Halfway down the hall to her study, she stops. No. She can't do that. Because Miranda will know the truth, and will tell everyone else, and then her own letter will merely look thin and desperate, as indeed it would be. There's no good way to handle the situation, but giving Miranda Tobin another reason to gloat would definitely be a bad one.

The silent scream bubbles into unspoken words. I wasn't a bad mother I wasn't I don't know why this happened but it's not my fault, it has to be but it can't be, how can it be my fault that my child did this thing I can't even bear to think about?

Anna feels a huge shudder pass through her body. She swallows. She's standing in front of Percy's bedroom.

It's not like this is unusual. She walks past this door too many times each day to count. She hasn't gone inside. She's told herself that she'll do that when she's ready. There's no hurry. Nothing inside is going anywhere.

She stands in the dark hallway, looking at Percy's doorknob. It's just a room, now. He's not in it. The police have returned what they took, six big boxes worth, which William lugged back into the room. They're still there, Anna supposes, sitting on the floor or the bed: pieces of Percy's life, torn out of context.

She can't bring Percy back. She can't undo what he did or comfort the people who loved Melinda Soto. She can't restore his good name at the school he attended from the ages of five to eighteen. But she can put his things back where he kept them, back where they belong. That tiny bit, she can make right.

She opens the door and turns on the overhead light. Someone—William? the cops?—lowered the blinds, making the room even gloomier than it would be anyway. Resolutely, stepping around boxes, Anna crosses to the windows and raises the slats, allowing such daylight as there is to filter into the room. Then she turns on Percy's desk lamp and bedside lamp.

There. It's a little more cheerful now. She takes a deep breath and looks around. He was a neat kid. Too neat? Should his neatness have alarmed her? His comic-book posters march across the walls, lined up with architectural precision, interrupted only by a Stanford pennant and his framed diplomas. On his desk, a small wooden one he's had ever since he started junior high school, his GMAT study book sits centered, flanked by a row of pencils, a calculator, an eraser. Ordinarily his computer would be on the desk, too, but it's not; she supposes it's in one of the boxes, since she knows the police took it. She doesn't believe they found anything interesting on it, although William talked to them in much more depth than she did. Surely William would have told her if anything had turned up, though. Even in his present state, he wouldn't have withheld any information that would explain any of this.

One narrow bookshelf is full of textbooks and a few beat-up novels. The other bookcase, much larger, houses Percy's comic collection, each issue stored in a plastic slipcase, each year of issues boxed and labeled. William, who deals regularly with art collectors, says that many of them are more passionate about the act of collecting than about what they collect. Had they fastened on stamps or coins or bottle caps, they would be equally driven. Percy, says William, fastened on a comic book, which worked out well, because the comic book is popular and ubiquitous and inexpensive.

She walks to the closet and opens it. Button-down shirts and slacks hang neatly from the racks. There are a few ties, a collection of shoes in a rack on the door. The shelves are empty; she suspects she'll find whatever was there in the police boxes.

Percy's dresser, too, holds only what you'd expect. Socks, briefs, polo shirts, jeans, sweatpants. Everything looks rumpled, so the police must have searched it.

Her first cursory inspection completed, Anna looks around the room again. There's a small photo frame on the desk. Percy, thirteen or fourteen—no, he was fourteen then—his arms around puppy Bart, who licks his cheek as Percy laughs, eyes closed and face to the sun, oblivious to the camera. William took the photo.

How did this sunny, joyous kid turn into the person who killed Melinda Soto? What didn't Anna know about Percy?

Almost everything, she thinks. But couldn't any parent say the same? Couldn't she and William say the same of each other, especially now? Do any of us really know the people we love? Anna thinks bleakly that she probably understands Bart, that simple and reliably demonstrative creature, better than she does any of the people in her life.

It occurs to her that this is a reciprocal principle, that the people in her life also don't understand her, but she shoves that thought away. It will only lead to self-pity, which is entirely too imminent a threat right now anyway, now that her rage over the Blake mess has, at least for the moment, faded to a dull ache.

All right. What can she do now, after the fact, to deepen her knowledge of her son?

She looks around the room again. Those ghastly posters, rank upon rank of blinding primary colors and over-exaggerated gestures. The carefully preserved comic books. She's never understood this
Comrade Cosmos
phenomenon, which bores her almost literally to tears, but something about it meant a great deal to Percy.

All right. Every day, she will unpack one box—which should take an hour or two—and read as many of the comic books as she can stomach, starting at the beginning. The second process should keep her busy for a long time.

*   *   *

Wearing an Irish fisherman's cardigan Walter gave her for Christmas five years ago, Rosemary carefully pulls the last ornament off her tree. It's antique glass, opalescent and fragile, and belonged to Walter's grandmother. It's the first ornament to go on the tree and the last to come off, taking pride of place even over the treetop angel. She packs it carefully into a thickly padded box and sets it aside. She keeps it in her bedside drawer, fearing that catastrophe would befall it in the garage.

New Year's Day is always something of a relief, but always leaves her feeling desolate, too: the warmth of Christmas fled even though, according to the church calendar, the season lasts until Epiphany on January 6. January 1 is a dull dud of a holiday, a dead spot in the year designed to allow people to recover from hangovers. Since Rosemary doesn't have one, she simply winds up feeling tired and out of sorts.

She enjoyed New Year's Eve at Vera's; that's always a pleasant, civilized evening. She was glad, if surprised, that Jeremy joined them. She'd thought he'd want to be with his friends, but he'd merely explained with a shrug that he wasn't really into hard partying, especially now.

That's good, Rosemary thinks. He isn't using alcohol or drugs to try to escape. Melinda always fretted that he was a late bloomer, sullen and unfocused, but Rosemary thinks he has good instincts.

She missed Melinda desperately last night, although not, she's sure, half as much as Jeremy did. Somewhat less desperately, she missed Melinda's weekend-before-Christmas party, an interesting mix of library people, church folk, and fellow adoptive parents. Most of all, though, she missed Melinda on Christmas itself, all the more because she also missed Walter so much.