Secrets of Eden (40 page)

And so my dad didn’t, even though my mom had to have been trying to get him to. Although I have never asked, I’m sure she fought back, if only because it must have hurt so much. She must have tried to push him away or get his fingers off her neck. She must have tried to hit him or scratch him hard enough that he’d release her, if only for a second.

And then, before he knew it, she was dead in his hands. And that’s the thing about the way he killed her: One minute she was alive in his hands, and the next she was dead. One minute she was struggling, and the next she wasn’t. Fighting. Not fighting. Breathing. Not breathing.

And that, in my opinion, is when my dad polished off the rest of the beers that we had in the house. He was drunk when he killed her, but not nearly as drunk as he’d be when he died.

AND YET ONLY
a little more than two months before that nightmare, Mom had taken him back. Had him move in with us again. I thought this was nuts even then and told her that I thought this was a very bad idea. But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just believe whatever we want. And I guess my mom wanted to believe that everything would be different.

I really wasn’t all that surprised when she sat me down one night in May and said Dad was coming home. There had been plenty of signals—Exhibit A, all those flowers. And Dad had been getting goopier
and goopier on the telephone, telling me that he was convinced we would soon be reunited as a family and how much this meant to him, since in a few years I would be off to college and he didn’t have a lot of time left with me. (He sure was right about that one.) He had also been saying for weeks that he knew he would still make mistakes in his life because he wasn’t perfect, but he was positive that the worst was behind him. (Okay, he was wrong there.) And he did sound better. Happier. He said he wasn’t drinking.

But there had been signals from Mom, too. The biggest one was that sometime in the late spring something happened between Stephen and her. I don’t know for sure when they first started hooking up, but I think it was before Christmas, when Dad was still living at home. And you could just see Mom opening up like one of her roses that winter. She was less nervous, more confident. She was laughing a lot more. Suddenly anything and everything could be funny. My big worry in the beginning? Dad would figure out something was up and that fight would be the sort they would eventually have in July. (I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he would kill her. But I thought it would be bad with a capital B.) But in early May she started retreating again. Our dinners got quiet. She suggested we eat supper in the living room in front of DVDs of the TV shows I liked, which I knew she did when she didn’t want to talk—when she couldn’t cope. I had been making my own lunch for school for years, but when she was happy that winter and spring, she would insist on offering me advice: She would throw in an apple or a clementine, she would surprise me with the macaroon cookies I liked from the bakery. That changed, too. She might still be in the kitchen when I was making my lunch, but she would sit at the table sipping her coffee, not exactly a zombie, because sometimes she would be toying with a crossword puzzle, but not exactly present, either. She would be dressed for work by then, because a lot of days she would drive me to school before continuing on to the bank. And what she
considered dressed for work changed, too. In the winter she had started dressing a lot cooler, especially after Dad was gone. The jeans were a little tighter on Monday, when she didn’t have work, and the skirts were a little tighter the rest of the week. No more of those I’m-running-for-Congress pants suits. Sometimes she even allowed her blouses to show a little cleavage, a hint of bra. After Dad was out the door in February, it was like she had bought a whole new wardrobe. Unfortunately, those clothes went the way of her laughter as summer approached.

I asked her about this once, but she was pretty cagey. That’s one thing I have learned about women like my mom: There are no people in the world who are better at keeping secrets. You want to find a good spy? Pick a battered woman. There are things they won’t tell a soul. And they can really take a punch.

Anyway, Mom sat me down one evening, and I knew instantly what was coming. It was May, so the days were getting long, and I remember there were a ton of birds at the feeders. Mom had three, and they were all on the opposite side of the house from her vegetable garden, because she loved birds, but she loved her garden, too, and she didn’t want the robins or the blue jays eating her seeds. And she had just planted most of the garden and put her freaky clear plastic tepees over her tomato-and pepper-plant seedlings. The tepees always looked like they belonged in a science-fiction movie or video game: You know, the way the human colony grew things on some faraway planet. We were sitting on the steps (the same steps where I have always imagined they ate their last meal together), one of us occasionally stroking Lula behind her ears. Mom sort of beat around the bush for a few minutes, asking about school and what sorts of things Dad and I had been talking about lately when he phoned or at lunch. Then she went on this riff about how complicated adult relationships are, which would have been the absolute perfect moment for me to bring up Stephen. But I didn’t, and that will always be a regret I’ll live with, because now I’ll never know for
sure what she was thinking. At any rate, I acted surprised when she said Dad was coming home, because I figured I was supposed to. Then I told her that I really didn’t think this was such a good plan and reminded her of some of the worst fights they’d had in the months before he moved out. But she said things were going to be different now because Dad was going to be different now. She said this had been a real wake-up call for him and he had learned from his mistakes—which was not unlike what my dad had said to me, too, though he’d also said he was still going to make plenty of them. (Yup, that was my dad: a real lifelong learner.)

But the thing that struck me then and I think about now is this: Mom didn’t seem all that happy about Dad coming home to live with us. She seemed resigned to the idea. It was like it was all a big chore that loomed before her. Something we both would just have to endure.

W
hen I think of that spring, the first thing that comes to mind is how easy it all was. There had been so much tension in the house for so many years that I hadn’t realized how simple life could be if you weren’t always waiting for the boiler in the basement to explode. And I know my mom felt that way, too—probably even a ton more than I did. There was this massive late-season snowstorm on Easter, but still Mom and I trudged up the hill in our parkas and snow boots for the sunrise service at six in the morning. Obviously we didn’t expect to see the sun rise over the mountains to the east. No one did, and there were about seventy of us who made it there. (Just for the record, it was the first sunrise service I had gone to in three or four years. Usually I slept in and would stagger out of bed for the regular nine forty-five service. And the only reason I went to the sunrise service that year was for Mom.) Stephen was very funny, even though you could only hear about every other word in the gale. But about six-fifteen the wind started to slow and we could all see the sky lightening to the east. Soon there were just a few big flakes floating around, and then even they were gone. We never got actual
blue sky that morning, but we could all see this great round lightbulb behind the thin shade of clouds. And that’s what it was like for me when Dad was away. This big storm I had gotten used to was gone, and while there may not have been total sunshine, I could see the light—and I knew that with a little luck even that last veil of clouds would disappear if I gave it more time. And I imagine it was even better for Mom, because she wasn’t being abused and she had this cool thing going with Stephen.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after that when, for whatever the reason, her affair with Stephen began winding down. And then, a little later, the flowers from Dad started coming. It was like he knew that now was the perfect time to wedge the toe of his boot back in the door.

It’s funny, but I have a childhood memory of Mom reading to me in the apartment we had lived in when I was a little girl in Bennington that I link in my mind with that spring. Mom is reading to me from
Blueberries for Sal
, which I still have, incidentally, and I’m curled up in her arms in this massive rocking chair that she told me once was the chair in which she liked to nurse me when I was a baby. I guess I’m, like, four. The chair went with us when we moved to Haverill. And one Sunday afternoon that spring when Dad was gone, I saw Mom sitting in that chair and reading a novel. The dust jacket had the same blues and yellows as the cover of
Blueberries for Sal
, and the afternoon sun was coming in through the window just the way it had that day long ago when I was curled up in her lap in Bennington. And just like that day when I was four, I felt totally at peace and totally secure. That’s what that spring had felt like when Dad was gone. And that feeling, I guess, is what my dad had taken away from me for most of my life.

BETWEEN THE FIRST
days of February and the last half of May, I never saw my parents together. They had a colossal fight the Sunday
night after Groundhog Day. (Looking back, Sunday might have been the night they were most likely to collide. Maybe, like me, my dad just found Sunday nights totally depressing. You know, it’s the end of the weekend and school and work are all you have to look forward to for the next five days. And even though my mom had Mondays off, it’s possible she felt those same end-of-the-weekend blahs, too, because for the rest of the world the weekend was ending.) Nearly three and a half months would pass between the fight that led Mom to get the temporary restraining order and the day I came home from school and there was Dad at the kitchen table. I was living with my mom that whole time, but by the end of March I was seeing my dad again, either in Manchester or one time at our cottage on the lake.

I’m not sure why my dad started that fight in February. Actually, I’m not sure why he started most of their fights. There was never a good reason. Usually he was drunk, but not that Sunday night. I mean, he had been drinking. That I know. But he wasn’t so drunk that he couldn’t drive. After all, he got in his car and drove away on his own when Mom told him to get out. At first he’d said there was no way he was leaving his own house. He reminded Mom that her salary at the bank sure didn’t cover the mortgages on the house or the cottage or the car payments. (I must admit, until that night I didn’t even know we had car payments. I knew we had mortgages. But I hadn’t really thought about how we might not own Dad’s BMW or Mom’s Accord outright.) But she held her ground. She had rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and her turtleneck so she could hold an ice pack on her elbow. Dad had, for reasons that probably didn’t make any sense and certainly no longer matter, pushed her down the stairs. I saw him do it. And, worse, he saw that I had witnessed it. I think we all thought he had broken her arm. He hadn’t, but despite the ice pack it would swell up like she was Popeye. She also had a bruise on her hip that was so black and blue it looked like a screen saver of outer space.
I think Dad was torn when Mom told him to get out. Should he get out, like his wife was demanding, or should he take her to the hospital? Mom would say to me later that night that his big concern was his reputation. It wouldn’t look good for him if he had broken his wife’s arm pushing her down the stairs. But my mom also thought it wouldn’t have looked good for her, either. She would go to the hospital the next morning, just in case. But I don’t think she would have gone if Monday hadn’t been her day off. Still, she did get her arm and her back X-rayed. Nothing was broken. But someone at the hospital must have said something to her, because it was on the way back to Haverill that she detoured to the courthouse and got what is called a relief-from-abuse order and had the papers served to Dad before he could come home.

Dad, I assume, had thought he was just leaving for the night. And so it must have been quite the shocker when the police showed up at his little suite of offices above the toy store. I don’t know what he told his secretary or his accountant or anyone else who might have been present about why a couple of policemen were there. But I’m sure he figured out something. He was pretty fast on his feet when he was sober. And, like I said, I’m sure a lot of the world thought he had left Mom, not the other way around. He was, in many people’s eyes, a pretty solid catch.