The Sunflower Forest (24 page)

‘Please, Mama, please don’t think about this any more. Please? I understand. I do. About József. About the hostel. About Ravensbrück. I understand the things you did and the decisions you made. They’re understandable, Mama.’

She looked at me. ‘You can forgive me then?
Ja
? For what I do, you can forgive me?’

‘Oh yes, Mama. I can forgive you.’

The next morning after breakfast when Megan had gone outside to play, I told my father about Mama’s restless night and the conversation we’d had. He knew about those things. He’d always known, I suppose.

He told me other aspects of those times, about her long, slow recovery from typhus and the after effects of the two-and-a-half years in Ravensbrück, where she’d spent most of her time with Polish women like Jadwiga, doing heavy farm labour. He described their harrowing journey back to Lébény and their fruitless, decade-long search for Klaus through the ruins of Germany. That was the real reason, he said, that they’d stayed on in Wales, because it was easier to follow up leads on the Continent from there. A fact I’d never known was that my mother and father had come to the States for a short time immediately after the war and lived with Grandma. However, Mama had been so fretful with worry about the possibility of missing a clue to Klaus’s whereabouts that she’d persuaded my father to return to Europe. Yet search as they had, through the orphanages and the Red Cross and all the other agencies set up to reunite families, no substantial evidence about Klaus ever surfaced. All the records from the
Lebensborn
hostel were destroyed and the hostel itself abandoned when invasion by the Allies had seemed imminent. Whoever had taken Klaus either did not know he had been unwillingly given up or else did not come forward. My mother remained tormented. In every crowd of school children she saw him. Every small boy with blond hair and blue eyes might have been him. She could go nowhere without searching the faces of all the children. Every shop, every street, every home with a child in it caught her eye. In the end, my father insisted they leave Europe and return to the US. It was 1957, he said: time to get on with their own lives before this thing destroyed them both.

Dad stayed home that Saturday instead of going down to the garage, as he usually did. I had upset him, telling him about the things Mama had said to me in the night. He paced restlessly around the kitchen, washing up the dishes with rough vigour. When I next saw him, he was sitting on the floor beside the couch in the living room, where Mama was still asleep. Gently, gently, he stroked her hair, his face only inches from hers.

Paul was coming over for Saturday lunch. He and Aaron had been out rat shooting the previous evening, so he’d promised to make it up to me on Saturday afternoon. We didn’t have much in mind. Just going out to Ladder Creek and being alone.

He arrived about eleven o’clock in a roaring good mood. He had bet Aaron that he could hit five rats in a row without missing and had won, so Aaron had had to buy him three boxes of .22 shells. Gleefully, Paul brought them in to show me. I told him that his pastime was disgusting, that it was undoubtedly his least likable characteristic and that I refused to listen to him glorify it. But I did volunteer to help him put the guns and the rest of the shells in the house. I was not going to ride around with all that crap in the car, I said; it was dangerous. He agreed wholeheartedly. But I knew all he was worried about was someone stealing the precious things and spoiling his main source of entertainment.

After all the trauma in the middle of the night, my mother, in a way so characteristic of her, was full of rollicking good humour when she finally got up. She’d surfaced only slightly ahead of Paul’s arrival and was showering when he came. While we were in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for a salad for lunch, she wandered in, her hair still wrapped in a towel.

‘Ah, modelling the newest fashions from India,’ Paul said when he saw her.

‘Where have you found this lout?’ she asked me. ‘In a dump shooting rats? He has no respect for his elders.’ Pulling the makeshift turban off and letting her damp hair tumble down, Mama flicked the towel at Paul, giving him a sharp snap on the backside. He jumped, grabbing the seat of his pants. Both of them were hooting like chimpanzees.

Lunch was spirited. Mama, rested and relaxed, bantered with everyone. Dad and Paul fell into a serious discussion about the Chicago Cubs. Megan, desperate for attention, rocked back and forth on the edge of her chair and inserted non sequiturs into our conversations.

Afterward, Paul and I left. Dad had promised Megs that he would run her downtown. Megan had gone on absolutely relentlessly in the previous few weeks about getting some shoes she wanted. They were a kind of sneaker that all the other schoolchildren were wearing, and Megan seriously believed that her social life would be at an end if she didn’t get some too. At first my father had told her that she was just being silly, that we didn’t have money to spend on things like that, and that her other shoes were perfectly good enough, especially since they still fitted, which was something none of Megan’s shoes seemed to do for long. But then Dad received some overtime from the garage, and I guess Megs must have worn him down on the issue. Anyhow, he had promised to run her down to Penney’s. Consequently, when Paul and I came through, she was standing barefoot in the hallway because my father had told her to check her socks to make certain they weren’t holey or smelly. So there Megan stood, having taken them off completely to have a good look. Dad came blustering in, telling her to hurry up.

‘I’ve got to have those running shoes,’ Megs was saying to no one in particular. ‘They cost $10.98 and I got to have them.’

My father was muttering under his breath about something else she was going to have to have, if she didn’t speed up.

Paul and I went out along Ladder Creek to our familiar spot. I don’t know how it came to be that we went there and nowhere else along the creek, but by that point, it was our second home.

We took the blanket from the back seat of the car, took it down to the water and spread it out over the thin grass. Paul took his shirt off, and we lay down together. I could see little heatwaves rising off the plains and looked up to scan the skies. April and May were tornado season and in Kansas, you paid a great deal of attention to what the skies were doing at that time of year. It was clear and cloudless. I wondered how long it would be before the thunderheads formed.

We talked, but not much. The main topic was Paul’s going away to school and my going away and the fact that we were going to different places. We discussed the survival of our relationship in cool, detached tones, as if it didn’t matter too much to either of us if it faded and died, when I knew for a fact that it mattered much. I told Paul I wasn’t even certain that I would be going to college, given that I had cashed the bond in. He said he wasn’t very sure about Ohio State anymore either. He really did wish he was going to study astronomy, or at least physics. Then he paused. It was easier, he said in a sad tone, when we were kids. Then there never was a worry about things like jobs or money. That comment caused us to digress on to the subject of childhood in general. I said I thought Megan had it a lot easier than I had had, and that I’d always felt a certain amount of responsibility toward the family that I didn’t believe she did. Paul said it was just personalities, in his opinion. That different kids reacted in different ways. He said the same thing was true of him and Aaron. Aaron had no sense of responsibility either. Aaron lived in the here-and-now and had no sense of the future. Basically, he said, Aaron just had no sense, period. The conversation made me think of Megan and her obsession with reading about the war. That had subsided some, but I knew she was still doing it. I couldn’t understand where she got it. I said I knew too much already without reading more. I said I did believe that ignorance was bliss in many respects. Paul replied that he thought they got that expression wrong. Innocence, he said, was bliss. But to his way of thinking, ignorance was like standing in a prison cell with an unlocked door and never opening it.

Paul reached over and unbuttoned my blouse. When he lay back down again, I could feel his warm, bare skin. We made love in the hot afternoon stillness. It was much better, easier. I could relax. The heat helped; heavy and soporific, it dulled my thinking, and my body responded effortlessly.

We grew drowsy afterward. Little bugs floated by in clouds, and you could hear their high-pitched, distant buzz, sawing against the silence. We lay, eyes closed, arms around one another, our bodies slippery with sweat. Having been awake in the night, I was tired. I grew sleepy in the warmth and dozed with the steady thumping of Paul’s heart against my ear.

A car came along. We heard it on the road. I roused when Paul rose up on one elbow to listen to it. We were down out of sight of the road because of the slope the creek bank created. The car slowed but went on. I fell back on to the blanket. I’d been fully asleep and dreaming. It had been a confused dream, an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole sort of dream where I had not realized I was actually asleep until I woke. But now, awakened, I was heavy with the desire to return to it. I closed my eyes.

Paul remained poised, up on his elbow, as alert as a jackrabbit. Probably some kid casing out parked cars, he said as the sound diminished. I asked if he had locked the car. Yes, he said. But good thing he’d taken the guns out.

We talked then, lazily, about kids and cars and things like drugs, which were rampant at school if you knew where to look. I asked him if he knew Jennifer Olsen, because I knew for a fact that she was stoned half the time. You could tell too. Paul told me that his mom had caught Aaron with part of a lid not long before, and she’d said that he could just go live with his dad if he felt like doing stuff like that. I asked Paul if he’d ever tried pot. Yeah, he said, once with some of Aaron’s friends. He hadn’t thought much of it. He hadn’t gotten much of a high. What about me? he asked. I said I’d never been anywhere it was offered.

Then we heard the car come back. Paul was sure it was the same car because of the way the engine sounded. He said he was going to check who it was. I wasn’t wearing anything. I rolled over and reached for my jeans, just in case we had to make our presence known.

As I was buttoning my blouse, a policeman came over the crest of the embankment. I had a moment’s panic, thinking perhaps what Paul and I had obviously been doing was illegal, but it passed. I kept forgetting I was an adult.

‘Are you Lesley Elena O’Malley?’ the policeman asked.

The panic returned. I was still struggling with the buttons on my blouse. Paul stood halfway between the policeman and me.

‘Are you the daughter of Cowan Christopher and Mara Elena O’Malley?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Would you come with me, please?’

Numbly, I rose to my feet. The panic had risen to something akin to terror. I had no idea why he wanted me, which made it all the more frightening. I’m listening to Mama’s stories too much, I thought. I also thought of running.

‘What did I do?’ I asked when I found my voice. We were up on the edge of the embankment, nearing the road.

The officer opened the police car door for me. He motioned me in. But when Paul leaned forward to get in with me, the policeman put his arm out. ‘No, son,’ he said gently. ‘Just the young lady.’

The officer went around and climbed in the other side. Paul had jumped back down the embankment to get our things. The last I saw of him was when he came struggling back up, the red wool blanket a jumble in his arms. The police car started and we drove off.

Numbness suffused my body. I was shaking, but the panic had subsided as abruptly as it had come. What replaced it was a disquietingly complete calmness. I felt absurdly clearheaded. ‘What do you want me for?’ I asked.

His eyes were fixed on the rearview mirror, and he did not look at me. ‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s just killed three people.’

M
y mama had waited until Paul and I had left and Dad had gone in the car to make the few minutes’ run downtown to let Megan off. Then, armed with one of Paul’s rat-shooting rifles, she went to the Watermans.

Apparently, she killed Toby Waterman first, there in the frontyard with his mother, who’d tried to push him inside. Just one shot. Then Mrs Waterman. Finally, my mother shot Mr Waterman, reloaded and shot him twice more.

By the time the police arrived, my father was there, trying to get her to give him the gun. But she panicked, seeing the officers with their handguns, and she fired at them. The policeman said he’d had no choice but to shoot back. He fired three times and hit her twice. When she fell, she was still holding the rifle.

During the trip back from Ladder Creek, time took on a bizarre quality, running simultaneously too fast and too slowly. Like film in an unreliable movie projector, the scenery flew by the car in jerky, Keystone-Kops fashion. But inside the car, things wound down to slow motion. I saw each movement of the police officer beside me in frame-by-frame detail. He glanced in the rearview mirror, over to the side mirror, looked ahead, rubbed his cheek, signalled and turned the car on to the main highway. He looked over at me. He smiled politely. His skin was very dark, as if he were of Middle Eastern extraction. His uniform appeared uncomfortable, because he kept scratching at his shirt and pulling the collar out from his neck. Beside him I sat, frozen, all my attention focused acutely outward, every external stimulus from the stubble of his beard to the smell of the police car being registered with permanent, graphic clarity. But inside myself I felt nothing whatsoever. I was empty.

Outside the police station was an enormous crowd of people. There were three police cars and an ambulance, two highway-patrol vehicles and a van marked ‘Channel Seven News’. Obliquely, the thought came into my mind of how much excitement my mama had provided for this small Kansas outpost.

‘Hello! Hello!’ cried a woman as we climbed out of the car. Trailing the cord of a microphone, she ran toward us. The policeman with me grabbed my arm and pulled me to his other side so that he was between the woman and me.

‘Are you the daughter?’ she shouted. Then a second officer opened the door to the station and tugged me through by the sleeve of my blouse. I turned to look back at the woman. Her question echoed in my head, like words from a foreign language.

My father was there. The police station was little more than just a big room, divided by a wooden partition with a gate in it. The officers’ desks were all on the far side. Back behind the big room was a smaller one with a glassed-in office and just one cell. My father was sitting in a wooden chair beside one of the desks near the far wall. He turned when I entered, and rose partway up from the chair. Then he stopped, frozen mid-move, and gaped at me, as if he were seeing a stranger. He sat back down again.

It was at that moment that the enormity of what had just happened first hit me. It came as a physical sensation, like scalding heat. The horror was so great, so overwhelming, that it wasn’t an emotion at all. I felt myself sinking, as if my feet were melting through the floor of the police station. All around me from above came crashing colours of paralysing, psychedelic brightness. My knees went weak from the weight of them.

Then my father was beside me, his arms around me, supporting my weight, keeping me on my feet. The moment passed; the feeling receded like nausea after vomiting. And it left me with the same sort of foul residue in my mouth.

I hardly recall the rest of the afternoon. For all the minute details etched into my memory about the return from Ladder Creek, almost nothing about the hours spent at the police station registered. I do remember Paul coming in with his mother. It had been his .22 Mama had used. He stood, face pale, hands behind his back. While he talked to the officer, I saw Bo looking over at me and then my father. She stared at us fixedly and did not look away when I turned toward her. Instead, she continued to gaze, as if I were a stranger, or rather as if I were not quite a person, and so staring did not matter. She was wearing a red silk blouse she had let me try on once. I thought then, as I sat beside my father, that I’d never cared greatly for red anyway. Paul glanced over too, but we were never close enough to speak.

I also remember faces being pressed against the glass, almost like a surrealistic painting, when I went out in the hallway on my way to the toilet. But chiefly, I recall the coffee, which they kept giving us in small Styrofoam cups. It was weak and tasted of chemicals from the whitener. What I kept thinking was how, the weekend before, it had made my mother sick to her stomach. I wondered if I too would be ill from drinking it.

The only other clear recollection was of the police sergeant. It had been he to whom my father had been talking when I’d come into the station, to whom my father had had to tell all Mama’s small secrets. He was a short, balding man, roly-poly and red cheeked like a Santa Claus. Later, while we were waiting on the long wooden bench in front of the main desk, he came to us and held out his hand to my father. When Dad took it, the sergeant simply continued to hold Dad’s hand and did not shake it.

‘This is the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said to my father. ‘I want you to know I feel so awful. Nobody can hear these things that happened to her and feel anything but the most terrible compassion for your wife.’

Not lifting his head, my father nodded. He still held the sergeant’s hand.

I remember that.

Sometime in the early evening we were allowed to leave the police station. My father went directly over to the hospital, where Mama was in intensive care. He had the car, so one of the policemen drove me home to avoid the crowd still collected outside the station.

Everything continued to seem unreal to me. As I rode along, I thought about exactly
how
unreal it seemed, and before I was aware of it, I had begun seeing things as they usually were. I could see myself arriving at the front door and opening it. The scent of soup and freshly made bread mingled with the familiar home smell in the darkness of the front hallway. Everything was starkly clear to me. The dusky rose-coloured rug on the floor by the front door. Megan’s dirty overshoes. The outline of Dad’s beloved tall clock in the hallway. The tangle of coats and jackets on the hooks at the bottom of the stairs. That certain kind of darkness that fills a house when only the kitchen is lit. I could smell the soup very distinctly. Lentil. Because it was my father’s favourite, Mama made us eat it about once a week. I could hear her voice, first humming, then breaking into song for a line or two, then humming again. It was a song she often sang absently to herself. Neither her voice nor the song was very melodic, and I never even knew what song it was. Upstairs, Megs was playing. I could hear the muted thunk of her sock feet as she ran back and forth in the upstairs hallway. It was all so clear.

Still trapped in imagery, I thanked the officer for the ride and got out. The sights, the sounds, the smells, even the way I always felt emotionally when arriving home, were an illusion so powerful that I was convinced it was real. And this other obscene thing was not. It had just been some awful joke someone had played on me. Elaborate but false. And in bad taste. I knew when I turned the doorknob that there would be the hallway darkness and the light spilling from the kitchen and my mama.

The dream collapsed with sodden suddenness when I opened the door. The house, of course, was empty and unlit. Silence tumbled out on top of me like an armload of books from an overloaded closet. I stood a long minute on the doorstep, feeling bitter and humiliated.

I didn’t know what my father had told Megan about the murders. I didn’t ask when I finally went to get her from the Reillys’ next door. I didn’t know how Dad had done it, but Megan certainly knew.

That evening continued to be tainted with a powerful aura of unreality. Megan and I went through the routines of normal living, saying nothing to each other about what had occurred and yet never thinking about anything else. Megan too was doing a great deal of pretending, just to get by. Once, mid-evening, she looked over at me and said, ‘Really, it’s just like Mama’s had a bad spell and Daddy’s upstairs taking care of her. That’s all. And we’re down here like usual.’

One of Paul’s rat rifles was still out in the hall by the coat closet. I had assumed the police would have been over to take it as well, so when I chanced across it, it startled me as much as if it had been a living thing lurking there. I jumped back and cried out in surprise. There too were the boxes of ammunition. I could see they’d been disturbed but I was unable to bring myself to lift up the lids and see which box Mama had taken the shells from. I didn’t even want to touch those things, but the fact that they were there unsettled me. It was Megan who resolved to do something about it. She brought out a plastic garbage bag and carefully transferred the boxes of shells into it. We carried the bag and the gun out to the back porch and put them into the cupboard with the vacuum cleaner. Megan shut the door and leaned the dirty-clothes basket against it. Pausing, she regarded the basket pensively before going out to the garage for some rope to run through the door handles, tying the cupboard securely shut.

‘There,’ she said, trying the cupboard to see if it would open. The rope held fast. Thoughtfully, she studied it.

‘You don’t suppose they’ll think we’re trying to hide them, do you?’ she asked me. ‘Would they arrest us?’

‘No. We’re just putting them in a safe place. They’d know that.’

We both regarded the cupboard.

‘Anyway, they got the other gun down at the police station,’ I said. ‘I saw it. They probably don’t care about this stuff.’

Megan continued to look at the cupboard. Then she turned and went into the kitchen. ‘Let’s lock the door,’ she said and shut the kitchen door tightly behind me as I came in. She slipped the bolt through.

We ate a supper of cold cuts and bread, food Mama had bought for Sunday lunch. I was hungry and embarrassed by it, since it hardly seemed like a time to feel much like eating.

Around eight my father came home. Mama’s condition was not stabilizing the way the people at the hospital had hoped, and they were debating about bringing in a helicopter to fly her down to St Joseph’s in Wichita. She’d had three-and-a-half hours of surgery to remove the bullets and still she continued to haemorrhage. Dad said she had never been conscious the entire time he was there. But then, she was still under the influence of the anaesthetic, so he wasn’t too worried. Or at least that’s what he said.

After he had had a cup of coffee and a sandwich, Dad rang Auntie Caroline in Chicago. Auntie Caroline was his older sister, and she was the only member of my father’s family with whom we still had contact.

I grew angry. I didn’t want Auntie Caroline to come down. She hardly ever came to visit otherwise, so I didn’t want her now. I told my father that. I also told him that every time Auntie Caroline was there she made snide comments about him and Mama and the way we lived. He said he knew that, and that it was just Caroline’s way. I said I didn’t like it and I didn’t want Megan to hear that kind of stuff. Especially now. So how could he even suggest it? Moreover, I was upset that he hadn’t even bothered to consult Megan and me about the matter. He’d simply gone in the living room and phoned her.

Dad said there wasn’t much to consult about. What else could he do? There was no one else to come. He didn’t even exchange Christmas cards with Uncle Kip and Uncle Mickey. Aunt Kath was still with the Sisters of Mercy in Colombia. Uncle Colin wouldn’t be any help, given the way he drank. And Dad hadn’t spoken with Uncle Paddy since that time Mama threw the cranberry juice at Aunt Gretchen. In general, Mama just hadn’t made a great impression on Dad’s relatives.

I said we didn’t need anybody. If I’d been able to cope with things before, I certainly could do it now with just Megs and me. No, he replied in a tone of voice that left no room for argument. If Mama went to Wichita, he would have to go there to stay with her and he didn’t want us left alone for days at a time. With Auntie Caroline here, I could return to school and carry on with my ordinary affairs, he said.

Great. Just what I wanted to do, go back to school. After all my agonizing to get back earlier, now I couldn’t even bear to contemplate the idea. Given what Mama had just done, the only school I wanted to attend would be in another country. Possibly another planet. I sighed and turned away from my father. That’s basically what’s wrong with life, I thought morosely. When you want to do something, you can’t. When you can, you don’t want to.

Afterward, my father went upstairs, showered, shaved and put on a clean shirt. Then he kissed both of us and went back to the hospital to spend the night with Mama. That left Megan and me alone once again.

Since the murders had occurred, there had been an almost constant barrage of people from the media. The police had put a van outside our house to discourage them from bothering Megan and me. They also told us to keep the phone off the hook. But Dad, without thinking, had replaced the receiver after talking to Auntie Caroline. About fifteen minutes after he’d gone back to the hospital, the phone rang.

It was a quarter to ten. I remember looking at the clock and wondering who would be calling so late before it occurred to me that we shouldn’t answer it. Megan already had.

By the baffled expression she had on her face, it was clear that the caller was someone we did not know. Cupping the receiver in both hands, she was listening intently to what the person was saying.