The Murderer's Daughters (14 page)

“Come join us. We have brownies and ice cream.”

I put my book bag down in the foyer and shuffled to the kitchen. “Hi,” I said to Eleanor, trying not to sound disappointed.

Eleanor nodded as she tried to disentangle herself from her five-year-old, Rachel, who tugged at Eleanor’s long skirt. Ugly, as were all her clothes.
Her skirt resembled a burlap bag, and her velvet shirt had stiff spots where breast milk had leaked. A scarf tied on the back of her head held back her frizzy blond hair. Lulu said that Eleanor dressed as if she thought she was still a hippie teenager. I’d heard Doctor Cohen ask Mrs. Cohen why Eleanor had to dress like a peasant. Her brother, Saul, dressed the opposite, with everything perfectly tucked. He was a surgeon, like Doctor Cohen, and kept his life precise and clean.

“Mom, please, can you get her while I nurse the baby?” Eleanor nudged Rachel toward Mrs. Cohen with her knee.

“Merry, why don’t you hold Rachel?” Mrs. Cohen turned her nervous sunshine smile on Rachel. “Don’t you want Cousin Merry to read to you, darling?”

Rachel raced to the pile of books and toys Mrs. Cohen kept in a wicker basket. Eleanor rolled her eyes. I rubbed my thumb against my lower lip.

“Stop confusing her,” Eleanor said. “If you keep calling everyone her cousin, Rachel won’t have a clue what it means.”

Mrs. Cohen looked apologetically first at Eleanor, then at me. “Hardly everyone.” She squeezed my shoulder and handed me a dish of ice cream topped with a fat, walnut-studded brownie, which I’d throw up if I tried to force it past my closed throat.

“Read this.” Rachel dropped a Dr. Seuss book in my lap. I grabbed the book and carried her to the living room before Mrs. Cohen or Eleanor said any more.

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play,” I read. Rachel snuggled in close, slipping a thumb in her rosebud of a mouth.

Across from the couch stood the Cohens’ satiny baby grand piano, which seemed not a baby but enormous. Since it was Monday, when the cleaning lady came, the black top gleamed. Pictures and pictures and more pictures cluttered the top, the gilded frames outlining the Cohens’ lives.

A lone picture of Lulu and me perched on edge of the piano, taken at the home of relatives of Doctor Cohen’s who lived in Long Island. We both wore tiny, flat smiles. I’d clung to Lulu the entire day. Nobody had
talked to us except to comment on how beautiful I was—
Look at those curls and dimples!
—ignoring Lulu as though she were my babysitter.

“So we sat in the house / All that cold, cold, wet day.”

When we first came to live with the Cohens, I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere without Lulu. I’d even waited outside the bathroom for her. The apartment seemed enormous, even though I’d visited before. The prospect of living with a man seemed impossibly strange. My breath had come in short, little bursts as Lulu and I walked around the apartment. Mrs. Cohen had said it was our home now, except we should never go into Doctor Cohen’s study; entering that room was forbidden. A month later, I saw Doctor Cohen bring Rachel in to draw and play with her dolls while he worked.

I bet Daddy wouldn’t keep me out of his study. Lulu said Mama usually let us play in her room, that we used to make her big bed into our circus grounds, propping a broomstick under the covers to create the big top. Lulu only talked about these things late at night when I had a nightmare that made my head hurt so bad I thought I might smash it open just to make the pain stop and I ran into Lulu’s room.

Rachel grew heavy as she slurped on her thumb and settled in deeper. If I lived with Daddy and he had a study, I didn’t think he’d forbid me to enter.

As I read the last line of the book, I saw Rachel had drifted off to sleep. I covered her with the patchwork afghan Mrs. Cohen kept on the couch and tiptoed to my room.

Having a space just for me still surprised me. Where everything at Duffy had been limp and worn, here new, shiny things filled my room. Silky yellow ropes tied back billowing orange curtains. Rainbow pillows covered my bed. The only thing I didn’t like was the framed poster of a tree in winter, stripped bare with dark limbs hanging against a bleak gray background. I found the picture depressing, but the Cohens liked it so much I pretended to like it also.

I noticed two new envelopes on my bed and rushed over. They had to be from my father. No one else mailed me anything. One was for me, and one would be for Lulu. Lulu wouldn’t open Daddy’s letters, so he addressed them to me, then I had the job of trying to get Lulu to listen to what he’d written, a task I usually failed.

I slit open my envelope.

Dear Merry, I miss you like you wouldn’t believe. Like walls miss paint! Like Abbott missed Costello! Like baseballs miss bats! It’s sure been a long sad time since Grandma died and I got to see both you and Lulu.

All Daddy’s letters started with this: how he missed me, and how long it had been since he’d seen me. Last week’s letters had included skies missing stars and soap missing washcloths.

Nothing new here (ha ha!). Well, that’s not true. I got a roommate. Not exactly a good thing in prison. It gets more crowded here every day. I knew that eventually my time would come. At least this guy (his name is Hank) doesn’t seem out to do me dirty.

Sometimes the stuff my father wrote made me wish I were blind.

I finished my optician program. Can you believe it? I really did learn a new trade in here. Grandma would be happy. I make lenses for glasses now. I’m a grinder. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. And when will that be? I wrote to your new foster parents, but I’m still waiting for a reply. By the way, Cookie, I told them not to think about adopting you. I don’t have any intention of giving up my only family.

Was Daddy mad at me? I thought of him throwing things. Banging things. Hurting the Cohens. Everything tightened, and I tapped my chest until the feeling passed.

Did the Cohens want to adopt Lulu and me? Was that why Daddy had double-underlined? I didn’t dare ask my father when I wrote back, because if the Cohens saw the letters, maybe they’d think I didn’t want them to adopt me. Or that I did.

Merry, keep telling them you want to come. Ask them a lot! I need you soooooo much!

So, how is school? Are you still best friends with Katie? I look forward to
meeting her when I get out of here. My lawyer is working on another appeal. He says they should have treated a crime of passion different.

Anyway, remember how much I love you. I miss you like cars miss wheels. Love, Daddy

I dropped the prison paper and tried to figure out how I could visit my father. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Cohen, wearing her gold bracelets and scarves, going with me into a prison.

I had to hide this letter. I had to get the Cohens to take me to Daddy before he got us all in trouble. What if they realized we were too hard to have around? What if they gave us back before Lulu turned eighteen?

“I hope I didn’t take advantage of your sister.” Mrs. Cohen pushed a handful of stuffing into the turkey as I steadied it. “Do you think buying the turkey for me put her out?”

Lulu worked at a supermarket after school, which Mrs. Cohen thought gave Lulu the inside track to the best bird.

“It’s fine.” Even after two years, I avoided directly addressing Mrs. Cohen. I’d turn twelve in December, and I still didn’t know how to handle the problem. Working with her in the kitchen was torture. I tilted my head down and caught her eye each time I needed to ask or answer her. “All the kids at the A & P try to get the best turkey for their parents. Lulu told me.”

I cringed hearing myself say
parent
but used it anyway, knowing it made Mrs. Cohen happy. I didn’t care about lying, not when my lies made people feel special. That’s why people liked me. Anyway, did Mrs. Cohen actually believe Lulu cared about which turkey we served for Thanksgiving? Not
that Lulu would deny any request Mrs. Cohen made, but after she’d go on and on about how annoying Mrs. Cohen was.

“Lulu is so sensitive to breaking rules.” Mrs. Cohen patted the turkey. “I just wanted to have a big enough bird. You’re sure she’s not angry at me?”

Mrs. Cohen mined me for information as though I had some magic bead on my sister. As if. You’d have as much luck breaking into Fort Knox as you would trying to pry something personal from Lulu. Mrs. Cohen was desperate to understand my sister. If I wanted, I could have told her Lulu cared only about applying to colleges outside New York and getting away from the Cohens.

When I’d recently asked Lulu why she hated the Cohens so much, she’d snapped her fingers in my face and said, “Wake up, Merry. We’re just their project. You don’t really believe they think we’re family, do you?” She’d gotten a sort of twisted look on her face, which I almost thought meant she was going to cry. “The only family we have is each other.”

I would have mentioned Daddy, but that would only make Lulu mad.

“She’s not angry,” I assured Mrs. Cohen. “Just tired.”

Lulu had practically thrown the turkey on the table when she came home last night. Mrs. Cohen often fretted about the hours Lulu worked, but Doctor Cohen insisted that as long as Lulu stayed on the honor roll—
and for goodness’ sake, Anne, she has the third-highest grades in the school
—he approved of her long hours. Working built character. It would help her attain a scholarship.

Doctor Cohen used words like
attain
instead of
get.
My grades, good or bad, never worked him up, even though I was in seventh grade now. He left me to Mrs. Cohen. Most of the time it was Mrs. Cohen and me hanging out alone at home, just the two of us. Lulu was hardly ever around. If she wasn’t working at the supermarket, she was serving food at a homeless shelter or volunteering at a hospital in Harlem.
The savior,
Eleanor called her, but she didn’t sound like she was complimenting Lulu.
That girl has a savior complex,
she’d say to Mrs. Cohen, shaking her head and pursing her lips.

“Would you start slicing the potatoes?” Mrs. Cohen asked.

I dropped the now fully stuffed turkey, which weighed a ton, and reached for the cutting board. I rinsed and rerinsed the potatoes the way
Mrs. Cohen had taught me, then cut each of them in quarters for boiling and mashing, trying to make all the pieces as equal as possible.

“Is everyone coming?” I smiled to show how excited I was at the prospect of the Cohen family overrunning the apartment.

Mrs. Cohen seemed pleased by my question. “Everyone will be here.”

“Do you want me to shine the good glasses?” I hoped not. We’d been in the kitchen for hours, and spending so much time trapped with her exhausted me.

“What would I do without you?” Mrs. Cohen asked.

I turned my back on her and made a face in the toaster. Then I reached for the glasses.

The roasted turkey looked like an advertisement from the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Doctor Cohen placed the silver platter on the dining room table. The table, opened to its fullest extension and covered with a heavy white tablecloth, ironed by the cleaning woman that morning, looked like a televi sion show. Lulu had rolled her eyes when Mrs. Cohen explained how the woman didn’t mind coming in on a holiday because they paid her triple time.