The Murderer's Daughters (42 page)

I smoothed out the paper, laid it flat on my desk, and began to read.

MY LIFE-CHANGING EVENT

This is about my probation officer. It’s less than the 500 words we had to do (not by much) but I think it should be okay.

Since I was twelve this is what I’ve done: Did every drug except
crack (cause the crackheads around me look like walking scabs.) Banged every girl I could by telling any story they want. Smacked them if they didn’t listen. Forced one to get rid of a baby—because I didn’t want to be nobody’s baby daddy, because I knew I’d be a shitty one just like mine. Pulled my mother off the streets, when it looked like she might die. Let her stay there when I couldn’t care enough for both of us anymore. Stole pocketbooks, even off old ladies. Dropped out of school. Almost killed a guy.

Since I got arrested and got put on probation (for almost killing that guy) this is what I’ve done: Gotten a GED, because my PO made it part of my probation. Stayed straight because my PO made me take urines every week. And made me pay for the damn tests. Got a job, because my PO made it part of my probation. Read books, because my PO made a reading list part of my probation. Ended up here, in Bunker Hill Community College, because it’s part of my probation.

Now my probation is ending and I’m leaving Bunker Hill. It’s over. I’m done. Now I’m going to Northeastern. Because my probation officer got me the application. She said I made her proud.

In the beginning, my probation officer wrote this on top of my probation plan: “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Helen Keller”

The bitch of it was that I didn’t even know who Helen Keller was, and I was too embarrassed to say so, or to let her know I cared that I didn’t know. But I made sure to find out—even though I started learning by watching the movie about her. After that, I read her book. Even though it wasn’t on the list. That was the first time in my life I ever read anything that I didn’t have to. I found out maybe I like reading.

Maybe the quote was my life-changing event. Maybe it was being arrested. Maybe it was being put in a cell long enough to realize I didn’t like sleeping on sour-stinking jailhouse cots. I don’t ever want to ride that iron horse again.

I don’t know if my probation officer done the quote thing for every guy she has, or if she saw something in me. It didn’t matter. What mattered is she made me see something in me. She made me ready to find
my worthy purpose. So, I guess meeting Ms. Zachariah and having her as my probation officer was my life-changing event.

I looked up. Jesse met my eyes.

“Ms. Zach, you never seem happy,” he said. “I don’t think this place is your worthy purpose.”

Preparing for Quinn to arrive that evening was an angry mix of beauty chores. I sliced open my right leg while shaving. I stabbed myself in the eye with my eyeliner brush. I tugged on sweater after shirt after sweater looking for something that didn’t say,
I have absolutely nothing except other people’s lives, other people’s families, and other people’s husbands, so fuck me right here, then go home.
Giving up on men, and most especially giving up Quinn, had once again failed.

The moment he arrived, Quinn asked, “Are you okay?” He held me at arm’s length, checking me as though to assess the damage. “I read the article in the paper. You handled the whole thing like a trouper.”

“Is that why you called?” I offered him a beer. “To congratulate me?”

“Don’t you believe I could worry about you?”

I didn’t want to answer. I just wanted to go to bed, and so we did.

As Quinn pounded into me, it became clearer and clearer that whatever my worthy purpose might be, it wasn’t Quinn. My excitement dissipated until Quinn must have felt as though he were screwing sawdust. It sure seemed that way to me. My breasts squashed under him as he pressed closer. Quinn’s method of forcing out an orgasm, whether I wanted one or not, wasn’t working.

Tonight it felt like he banged me out of meanness.

Knowing Quinn’s remarkable control, and what he probably saw as dedication to my pleasure, I was aware that, unless I did something, he’d keep at it until I came. We weren’t about anything except the sex, so he always wanted to tie that one thing up in sparkling ribbons. I suppose in that way he was loyal.

“Jesus, you fill me up, Quinn,” I said, feeling the shudder of excitement in him that my lie brought. I dug my heels into his back and bucked up
toward him, drawing him in deeper. I ripped my nails down Quinn’s flesh, acting out his whorish fantasies.

Baby, baby, baby.

Oh. Do me.

Quinn wrenched from me a sad orgasm born of friction and time, and then he came.

Did Quinn worry about me? I wondered as he collapsed on top of me. If I died, would Quinn come to my funeral? Could I go to his? Would I dare?

How could I sleep with a man I wasn’t sure would attend my funeral? A man whose funeral I had no right to attend? How did I kiss a man I couldn’t see buried? “What am I doing here?” I whispered to his shoulder.

“Please, no, Merry. Not again.” He struggled up and rolled off me. “I must have told you a million times, we have what we have. If you don’t want it, fine, I’ll go. I don’t do scenes.”

True. Quinn had never done scenes, and he’d never lied to me. He’d been the most constant man in my entire life, the most constant one not locked up, though Quinn might as well have been in jail for how much he shared my life.

And I’d picked exactly this man.

I inched toward Cabot Hospital at three miles per hour, barely able to see through the snow and afraid of ending up in a ditch. A nor’easter was clobbering Boston. The only joy in my life was that Christmas, when we’d had to pretend we were okay for twenty-four hours, was over.

Thirty minutes into my commute, a red light blessed me by allowing me to release my cramped fingers from clutching the wheel. Normally, in thirty minutes I could have driven to the hospital three times. Dense flakes swirled thicker and faster with each passing moment.

The light changed, but the stalled traffic remained unmoving. After sitting trapped in my car for another ten minutes and getting no farther than half a block, I pulled into a near-deserted McDonald’s parking lot. I didn’t think anybody would bother with my car on a day like this, but just in case, I placed my
CABOT MEDICAL DOCTOR ON CALL
placard in the rear window and bundled up to walk the final ten blocks to the hospital.

I hoped my electric yellow hat provided enough visibility to stop truckers from mowing me down in the slick, storm-obscured streets. My
mother-in-law, a big proponent of “brightening up your face with a little color, honey!” had sent the hat for Christmas. At the time, I didn’t imagine ever using it; now I was glad I’d thrown it in the car. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. My face matched the snow, but the hat stood out like a beacon.

A biting wind tugged at my hat as I trudged toward the hospital, my face tucked down. Within moments, the shell of my knee-length down parka turned dark as the coat worked overtime to repel moisture. Fellow travelers wrapped in layers passed me, wet, red faces pressed into chins, all looking like overstuffed moles.

The dank smell of snow-soaked clothes rose from me as I entered Cabot’s warm lobby. I nodded at the man selling papers, unwound my scarf, and buried my hat in my purse.

“Happy New Year, Doctor Winterson,” the paper man said.

“Same to you, Kelly.” I never knew if Kelly was his first name or his last.

“Your girls okay?”

“Doing better, thanks.”

Being on the news had made my family public property. That which I’d dreaded my entire life had come true; the newspapers had ripped away my privacy. After their initial traumatized silence, the girls had peppered me with questions about their grandfather and grandmother. They hadn’t asked to meet my father, but the day would arrive; which day remained the only mystery.

I tried not to be angry at Merry. Truly, I didn’t think I was, but nothing felt the same. Merry had forced my life out of alignment.

The hospice unit of Cabot Hospital, despite signaling impending death, offered more comfort to me than the rest of the hospital. Without machines blinking and hissing and with fewer tubes tangled around beds, a sense of humanity seeped in. Frail and weak as Audra appeared, she looked like a person again, not an experiment in medical carnage.

Audra seemed to be napping, but the moment I walked into the room, her eyes opened. “Doctor,” she whispered. She seemed thinned to transparency. “Thank you for coming.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Audra.”

“You’ve had a rough time.” She coughed, then worked to catch her breath. “Your poor daughters.”

“Don’t worry about the girls. They’re fine.” I gave her ankle a whisper of a tap.

“And yourself?” Audra reached for my hand, and I offered it to her, careful of her easily bruised skin. “Children bring us closer to God, but sometimes so close we get burned. All my hardest moments, where I truly believed I might die from fright, were around my children.”

Seeing that man’s hand around Ruby’s throat had frightened me more than Teenie’s apron soaking up Mama’s blood. More than Merry almost dying by my father’s hand, and that had almost destroyed me. Without Ruby or Cassandra, I couldn’t envision living. People did, but how? What kind of strength did they tap?

How had my father put a knife to his child?

Merry always said she didn’t remember anything. I found it hard to believe. Had she screamed and screamed while I got Teenie? Did she see my father kill my mother? Had she watched? Was that why my father tried to kill Merry and himself, to take away the pain of knowing, to erase that picture?

I needed to know.

A washcloth rested in an ice bath. “It’s snowing like crazy outside,” I said, wringing out the cloth and wiping Audra’s lips.

“Open the blinds. I want to see.” Audra turned toward the window. After letting in the light, I tucked extra pillows behind her back. The bank of windows revealed the whirling storm. We sat quietly, watching.

“It’s so lovely,” Audra said. “God’s work.”

I envied Audra’s comfort of faith. “It’s lovely when you’re not walking in it. I wouldn’t mind if God skipped the snowstorms.”

“Everything has a place in the universe.”

“War? Children dying?” I watched snow melt from the heat of contact and slide down the window.

“Maybe that’s what I hope death brings, putting all the pieces of all the puzzles together. Perhaps these things are meant to test us. To separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“But why?”

“You know what I’ve learned?” Audra said. “Dying is easier than watching your children in pain.” She looked away from the hypnotic storm and faced me. She placed a delicate finger on my forehead and swept away the stray hairs moisture had unraveled from the rest. “Maybe when we recognize the trivial for what it is, we can concentrate on what we love most, what we most treasure.”

Staten Island seemed so ordinary. I guess I’d expected fire and brimstone lining the road to Richmond Prison.