The Murderer's Daughters (41 page)

“Ruby,” I called. “I’m here.”

The detective and police officer held me back as I tried to run to my children. I strained against their arms, pulling at their hands, raking them with my nails.

“Wait,” they commanded as officers headed toward my girls.

“Ruby,” Cassandra yelled. She flew off her chair, knocking it to the floor as she raced to her sister.

Merry took Victor in her arms, rubbing her hand along his back as tears ran down her face.

Cassandra reached Ruby before the police. Ruby leapt into her sister’s arms. My daughters wrapped themselves together so tight the officers could only stand before them.

They handcuffed Victor.

They released me.

I entered Merry’s office and fell to my knees before my children.

A tow truck had taken my car. Drew had come. Now we were home. The girls were safe. I didn’t know if they could ever feel protected again, but at least Drew and I could hold them, watch them, and kiss them as we huddled in the living room.

Chinese food sat on the counter, congealed and cold in greasy white cartons. Sophie had brought the food over. We’d called Cassandra’s therapist; she thought watching the news was the right thing.
Let the television lead to discussion,
she’d said. After dinner, we turned on the set and saw Ruby on the screen, clutched in my arms as police led a crying Victor Dennehy away in handcuffs.

“What are they going to do to him, Aunt Merry?” Ruby curled in Drew’s arms, touching the edge of her mouth with her thumb, an old habit.

“Put him in jail,” Merry answered.

“Will he be locked up forever?” Ruby slipped her thumb into her mouth.

Merry frowned, wondering what the right answer was, I supposed. Where was her honesty now?

“He’ll be in jail until he goes in front of the judge.” Merry curled herself into a tighter ball on the easy chair. “Then they’ll decide. He’ll likely be in jail for a long time, but not forever.” She looked at me. I was on the couch with Drew. The back of Ruby’s head grazed my shoulder as she lay in Drew’s lap. Cassandra pressed close on my other side.

“Is our grandfather in jail forever?” Cassandra asked.

Drew snapped off the TV. Ruby’s thumb sucking echoed in the silence. “No,” he said. “Your grandfather won’t be in jail forever.”

Cassandra opened her mouth, then closed it, as though not sure what to say. She changed her position from leaning on me to leaning against the sofa arm.

“Why didn’t you tell us about him?”

I rested my head against the couch, scratching tiny hearts on Ruby’s back. “I wanted to protect you.” It was the truest answer I knew.

“From what?” Cassandra asked. “From him?”

“No. Not from him. He’s in jail.”

“Then what?” Cassandra moved to the wooden rocker.

“I didn’t want you to know you had such a bad man for a grandfather.”

“Is he?” Ruby asked. “Is he a bad man?”

“Of course he is.” Cassandra’s huff made her sound awful and old. She sounded like Aunt Cilla had sounded so long ago. “He killed Mommy’s mother.”

“But didn’t you ever miss him, Mommy? Don’t you ever want to see him?” Ruby looked at Drew and then sat up so she could stare right into my eyes. “Maybe he wanted to say he was sorry.”

Sorry doesn’t bring back the dead, Ruby my love.
I held the words on my tongue, and then swallowed them down.

I came back from putting the girls to sleep in our bed. Drew and I’d spent an hour upstairs with them, and then he’d stayed after they fell asleep. We’d take turns with them until we all went to bed, together, so they wouldn’t wake up alone.

I fell on the couch. It looked as though Merry hadn’t moved from the chair where I’d left her. I reached over to the coffee table, picked up her glass, and took a long sip of brandy.

“How are you?” Merry asked.

“Numb. How are you?”

“Trying to get numb.” Merry placed a hand on her stomach. “I still feel like I might throw up.”

“Getting drunk won’t help.” Even as I spoke, I regretted my words. The last thing I wanted to do right now was criticize my sister. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You must be a wreck. Maybe more than I am.”

“Watching might have been worse than being in the middle of it,” Merry said.

I nodded. “Watching was bad.”

“Are you angry?”

“At you? It wasn’t your fault. I never should have suggested you take
them to the courthouse. About saying what you said? It worked, right? But still . . .” I let the words trail off, not sure how to go on.

Merry squeezed in next to me and put a hand on my leg. “It hurt me. Saying it. Having the girls hear it—especially like that.”

“But they’re my girls,” I said. “I don’t know if you can really ever understand.”

“They’re my nieces. My family. I love them. Ruby’s life was in my hands.”

“I’m grateful for what you did. But now they know everything.” I finished Merry’s brandy. “Were you waiting for an opportunity like this?”

“Lulu.” Merry pressed a hand to her forehead. “I wasn’t revealing your secrets. I had to save Ruby’s life. I knew what I was doing. Don’t you ever think maybe sometimes I’m right?”

Merry cut me off when I tried to speak.

“Sometimes someone other than you has an answer.” She crossed her legs and took my hand. “Sometimes we need to work together. Decide things together. Seeing what happened today, did you learn anything? Did you learn that hiding doesn’t work?”

I wanted to go to bed, lie next to Drew, breathe him in, and breathe me out. “I learned what I already knew.”

“What?”

“The world isn’t safe for us.”

The overheated train to Dorchester stopped and started as it left Park Street Station. I unwound my choking scarf and stuffed the fabric in my pocket. I considered skipping the next step in my commute to the courthouse—the crowded bus—and walking the twenty blocks. Wet wool smells mixed with the overpowering lime cologne worn by the man pressed close to me. I thought I might throw up from the combination and prayed to hold myself together until the crowd thinned out at U Mass, when I’d travel against the rush-hour tide.

Reading my book was impossible without a seat, so I didn’t even try. To occupy my mind, I played little games, memorizing the ads above my head and anagramming the words describing language schools and health careers until I couldn’t pretend anymore. The only thing on my mind was how much I didn’t want to go back to the courthouse.

I’d been home for a week; we all had. Except for Drew making forays for food and DVDs, we’d not ventured out. The weather had cooperated by providing steady sodden snowflakes. We’d wrapped the girls in blankets
on the couch, snuggled close to each other, and lived life movie to movie.

Even Lulu had skipped work, leaving the couch only to take calls from Sophie. I’d spoken to no one, letting voice mail take my calls, letting Colin sort through the messages. I sent Valerie a short e-mail: “Tell everyone thanks for the cards, and let them all know I’m okay.”

I wasn’t okay.

Day after day, I had held Ruby close and pressed my cheek to her soft hair. Cassandra and Ruby, after a lifetime of poking for every shred of family history they could unearth, spoke not a word about our father. They’d mentioned nothing of consequence for such a long time that we became frightened. Then, suddenly, Lulu had pressed for sharing and unburdening of the soul.

“Cassandra,” she’d said, “can you guess what my favorite books were when I lived with Mimi Rubee, when I was your age?”

Cassandra had shrugged. “Not now, I’m reading.”

“Ruby,” Lulu had tried later, in the middle of a Monopoly game. “Do you want to know the games Aunt Merry and I invented when we lived at Duffy?”

Ruby hadn’t even looked up as she grabbed another handful of kettle corn from the bowl. “Can’t we just play?”

Lulu and I became partners trying to untangle the mess of deceit while the girls worked to staple all the lies back up. They rejected everything we offered. Having a mysterious imprisoned grandfather who’d murdered a grandmother long assumed car-crashed was apparently less interesting than reading Harry Potter. Everyone—Drew, the girls’ therapist, as well as their pediatrician—assured Lulu that Ruby and Cassandra could ingest only teaspoons of the trauma. Lulu wanted to feed them the story whole, wanted them to digest it and move on. And this didn’t even touch incorporating Victor into the equation.

Moreover, Dad still waited out there.

“You okay, Ms. Zachariah?” Jesse walked into my office as though the very air was fragile and he had to move carefully to keep the molecules from colliding and causing a catastrophic event.

“Fine, just fine.” I leafed through papers on my desk searching for something to distract me from wanting to run away.

“I brought you something.”

I looked up, expecting another piece of paper indicating that Jesse had achieved some milestone and needed my celebratory excitement to seal his happiness. He held a thick sheaf of catalogs and offered them to me. Curious, I placed the pile on my desk, reading the title of each one in turn:

New England School of Law

Boston University School of Social Work

Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University

I shuffled the books top to bottom and back again. “You’re considering all these fields, Jesse? Terrific.” I feared my voice sounded devoid of terrific. I hoped I wouldn’t depress poor Jesse back into a life of crime.

“I got them for you, Ms. Zachariah.”

“For me?” I turned over the veterinary school catalog, expecting puppies with giant, begging eyes, and saw students who looked about fifteen wearing white coats.

“You need to get out of here, Ms. Zach.” He clapped his hands together and pointed them at me. “Not that you can’t handle us—look how you did Victor, who’s nothing but a mama-boy pussy. Sorry,” he added.

“I appreciate your concern, but this isn’t about me. Your probation ends in a few weeks. We have plenty of work to do.”

“You’re right. My probation’s ending. I’ll probably be the last client who takes your advice for a long time, huh? Why not quit while you’re ahead?” He reached into his pocket and brought out a crumpled sheet of paper. “I had to write this for English class. At Bunker Hill. Anyway, the professor said I should show you.”