The Sunflower Forest (25 page)

He must have known he had a child, someone who didn’t know how to put him off, because whoever it was, he was talking a great deal. I could hear the faint buzz of his voice. I gestured for Megan to hang up.

‘Who is it?’ I mouthed when she continued to listen.

She shook her head slightly, still intent on what the caller was saying.

I stood just outside the small circle of light thrown out from the table lamp. Megan, bathed in incandescent gold, began to cry. The tears welled up around the corners of her eyes; they glittered in the lamplight.

Reaching over, I removed the phone from her hands. The man’s voice was still audible as I gently laid the receiver down in the cradle. Giving the line a few minutes to clear, I then lifted the receiver and laid it alongside the telephone.

‘Don’t put it back,’ I said. ‘Just leave it there, Meggie. And if it gets put back accidentally, I don’t want you to answer the phone. Understand?’

With the tip of one finger she was flicking back traces of tears, hoping, I think, that I hadn’t noticed them. ‘Has Mama accepted Jesus, Les?’

‘Is that what he was on about? Look, Megs, don’t pay any attention to that.’

‘But has she? He said Mama had the Devil in her. That the Devil made her go out and kill innocent people. That God was trying her and she needed to accept Jesus.’

‘Megan, forget it. We believe differently than that man does. Don’t pay any attention to what he was saying.’

Her face remained puckered with concern. ‘But he said Mama’d go to Hell. He said she’d die and go to Hell and burn for ever for what she did. He said I had to go over to the hospital right away and tell her to accept Jesus as her saviour quick, in case she died, so she’d be saved from Hell.’

I knelt and put my arms around her. ‘Meggie, that’s what that man believes. It’s not what we believe. Mama’s innocent, Megan. Even if she did do it, she didn’t mean to. She just got things confused. But she didn’t mean to. She’s not going to Hell. Mama’s not even dying. So just forget what he said. Don’t worry about it.’

She was having a difficult time keeping up with the tears. They never fell but they continually puddled up. As soon as she wiped them away, they were back. ‘But I think he might be right, Les. It’s a sin. It’s against the Ten Commandments to kill someone. I don’t think Jesus would be very pleased, even if it was just one of Mama’s things. You’re not supposed to kill people for any reason.’

The telephone call upset us both. Megan had a nearly impossible time getting it out of her head. It was late anyhow, well past her normal bedtime, and both of us were extended far beyond our ability to judge things rationally. For me it was upsetting because it made me suddenly feel very vulnerable there in the house alone. Maybe having Auntie Caroline wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Before going to bed I went through the house and made sure all the windows and doors were locked and the curtains were closed. Although a police van with two officers remained outside on the street, for some reason I was not comforted. While upstairs brushing my teeth, I glanced over at Megan, who was changing her clothes. Without speaking, we went downstairs afterward and put chairs under all the doorknobs.

We slept together. First we planned to sleep in her bed. Then in mine. Finally, we ended up in our parents’ bed. What if Daddy comes home? Megan asked hopefully. I said I didn’t think he was planning to. But if he did, there was enough room in there for him too.

The three of us, Megan, me and Big Cattie, lay clutched together in the dark. All the windows were closed against the balmy, scented spring night; all the curtains were pulled. Megan’s hair, long and dark, spilled over us like an extra covering. She smelled good. Being close to her, my nose was filled with her warm, familiar child’s scent, and for an instant, it seemed perhaps the possibility still existed that this was just a nightmare and we might soon waken.

I couldn’t sleep. I lay perfectly motionless with Megan and the stuffed cat still in my arms but I did not even close my eyes. Megan too lay without moving. A long time after I had assumed she was asleep, she spoke.

‘Are you awake, Lessie?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m scared.’

I drew her even closer to me.

‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

‘A little.’

Silence.

‘They’re dead.’

‘What?’

‘I said, they’re dead. I keep seeing them. You know, that little boy, that little Toby Waterman. I remember the first day when I was with Mama and we saw him. I can see him clear as anything. Like he’s right in front of my eyes. And then I see him shot dead. Right out there in the bushes by the creek. I know that isn’t how it happened, but that’s what I keep seeing. And he looks like Mrs Beckerman’s cat looked when it got run over. All squashed out.’

‘Megan, don’t think of such things.’

Silence.

‘Lessie, that gun’s down there. In the cupboard. We should have made Daddy take it away.’

‘Megs, that’s not the gun. Don’t think about it. Just forget it.’

Silence.

More silence.

‘Can you forget about it, Lessie?’

Silence.

‘Can you, Les?’

‘No.’

T
he mattress in my parents’ bed sagged in the middle, and it was nearly impossible to sleep without rolling on top of Megan. Megan, restive in her sleep anyway, continually hit against me. Underneath us was the muted plastic crunch of the waterproof sheet Megan had put on in case she wet the bed. So I awoke very early, feeling as if I had never been asleep. Megan, whose relaxed body was flung out in abandon across the big bed, stirred when I climbed over her, because moving on the bed without jostling her was out of the question. Disoriented a moment, she rose up on her elbows and looked at me. But before I could tell her to go back to sleep, she already had.

It was not quite six-fifteen, and everything was bathed in morning quiet. The day had dawned peerlessly clear and cool, the sun so bright that it shimmered on the dewy grass. Without thinking, I went to get the Sunday paper off the front step. Wearing only one of Dad’s T-shirts and my underpants, I was startled to find one of the two officers in the police van watching me as I opened the door. He waved when I looked up, paper in hand. Embarrassed, I pulled back inside and slammed the door.

In the kitchen, I got myself a glass of apple juice and sat down at the table to unroll the paper. There, right across the top, as I unfolded it, were banner headlines:
LOCAL WOMAN HELD ON TRIPLE MURDER CHARGE
.

There was a large photograph of Mama beside the article. The first thing to occur to me was to wonder who supplied them with that picture. It was from a family snapshot taken the previous summer during a picnic at Scott Reservoir. Mama was wearing her old red-checked shirt, the one with the collar that curled up regardless of how often she smacked it with the iron. Mama was smiling in that casual, off-handed way she had sometimes. Her long hair was pulled back. The sun had been behind her, so it created a halo all around her head in the photograph, causing her hair to appear even blonder than it actually was. The lighting also made her look a little more foreign, a little more exotic with her high cheekbones and her wide-set eyes, squeezed into slits by her smile. Yet it remained a disarmingly friendly picture, the kind that made you believe you really could trust her to recommend the best brand of laundry detergent or panty hose or sausages, not that she had just murdered three people.

Missing Mama had already grown into an identifiable ache. My father was always coming and going anyway, so the fact that he was absent from the house was noticeable but acceptable. However, Mama was never gone. I was brutally conscious of the fact that it was morning and my mother was not at home. She was no longer distanced from me and my thoughts, the way she had been the previous afternoon. Now I was aware of only two things: she was my mama and she was conspicuously absent.

It was that feeling, I suppose that made reading the article in the newspaper so much more difficult than I had anticipated, because in it the woman they talked about was simultaneously my mama and a stranger.

The article was long but rather vague. They had her birthday wrong. They muddled up the fact that she was Hungarian, saying that she was German. There were brief, relatively accurate details about the concentration-camp experiences, but they said nothing about the breeding hostel. And they made no mention of the connection between those years and the Watermans: that because of that experience she believed that the parents were Nazis, keeping her son away from her. The killings appeared senseless.

Only the description of the murders was given in detail. Even then, reading about them in the newspaper, they seemed unreal, as if the Watermans were people in a television show, whose lives and deaths did not matter. Intellectually, I knew I shouldn’t think like that. They were real people and they had been murdered. And my mother had done it. She had taken a rifle and deliberately shot them all dead. All the blood and gore faked on the screen was, for that instant in that small Kansas farmhouse, a reality.

I tried to make myself think of it. I tried to see Mrs Waterman crouched helplessly over her son, the way the article described. I tried to picture their bodies, the blood pooled and red in the same hot sunlight under which Paul and I had been making love. I tried to conjure up the other Waterman children, terrified, huddled together in a back-room closet. But I could not. They stayed dream people, like the memory of something once imagined.

Sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of apple juice and the Sunday paper spread out, I could only call up the image of Toby Waterman the day that I was home from the dentist’s. There across from me was the chair he had been sitting in. He had been such a horrid child, with his mucky hair and his odd eyes, and so cocky and confident about his right to a relationship with my mother. He had scared me. Right from the very first moment out by the tree trunk. He had believed so easily what my mama had told him.

And now he was dead. As simple as that. Never to grow up and be a man. Never to go to school and know the guileless tedium of learning. Never even to know what this brilliant spring morning looked like, when the morning before he had woken up just as I had. How could you really understand a thing like that?

Auntie Caroline’s bus arrived at half-past eleven. Before then, my father had come home for a brief while. He’d shaved again and changed his shirt again, so I knew Megan and I were going to have to put on better clothes too. But we stayed home and let Dad go to the bus depot alone. I had seen the reporters run up to my father’s car as he had turned off Bailey Street when he came home from the hospital. It seemed judicious for Megan and me to avoid them, if possible.

By the time Auntie Caroline and my father reached the front door they were already in an argument. Dad had her suitcase in one hand and a flight bag in the other.

‘Cowan, you ought to have told me Mara was like this. It does no good to pretend about such things. Not with family, at least. You just ought to have said something earlier,’ Auntie Caroline was saying to him as he came in the door. Dad put the suitcase down by the foot of the stairs and balanced the flight bag on top.

‘The thing is, Caroline,’ he said, ‘Mara
wasn’t
like this. I’ve told you that.’ His voice was tight with restraint. They must have been arguing for some time. He marched past Megan and me and went into the kitchen. Filling up the kettle with water, he slammed it on to the stove.

‘She always has been highly strung, Cowan. Ever since the beginning. Ever since that first time you brought her home. Remember that? Remember how she kept carrying on with Mother?’

‘Caroline,
anybody
’d carry on with Mother. Besides, for God’s sake, she was still sick. She was still recovering from all that. Honestly, what did you expect of her?’

‘She certainly was full of her opinions, though. And she was so highly strung. Every little word and she was upset.’

‘Well, did Mother have to keep going on at her? Did Mother have to harp constantly about religion all the time?’

‘Yes, Cowan, but did Mara have to keep saying what rubbish it all was? She could tell how Mother felt about it.’

‘And Mother could damned well tell how she felt too. Honestly, Caroline, there she was, a guest in our house, a stranger in a foreign land, still sick, still half-starved, just having gone through experiences you and I would never survive. Did Mother have to say all those things to her?’ He paused, looked down at the floor and then back. ‘I married her, Caroline. She was my wife and I loved her. It was as big a slam to me, Mother saying all those things, as it ever was to Mara.’

Auntie Caroline just shook her head.

‘It was, Caroline. It was just Mother trying to make me look like a failure one more time.’

Caroline turned. ‘You’re too sensitive, Cowan, You always have been.’ It was then she saw Megan and me, standing just outside the kitchen doorway.

She smiled suddenly, disarmingly. Her arms opened and we were both wrapped up in a hug together.

My father returned to the hospital immediately, not even stopping to have lunch with us. That left Megan and me to help Auntie Caroline settle in. She had to sleep in the study on the bed that pulled out from the couch. So Megan and I carried her things up, pulled the bed out and put sheets on it. Auntie Caroline stayed downstairs and prepared a meal for us.

She did a good job with what was around the house. No one had done the weekly shopping, so there wasn’t much choice. Mama’s constant craving for starchy things ensured that, while we might be running out of other food, you could count on there being plenty of bread and pasta and potatoes. So there was Auntie Caroline amid our vast collection of Rice-A-Roni and boxed macaroni and cheese, trying to make a Sunday dinner.

My aunt had a lifestyle considerably different from ours. Her husband, our Uncle Roger, was a dentist in Winnetka, and they had lived for thirty-four years in the same house on the same street. Their children were all raised there and had all grown up and married and had families of their own. Auntie Caroline devoted most of her time to playing bridge. The rest she spent at church or at Weight Watchers. Unlike all the men in Dad’s family, both Aunt Kath and Auntie Caroline had figures that were 40–40–40. Auntie Caroline must have been a founding member of her Weight Watchers group, because she’d been going to the meetings for as long as I could remember. And she was still overweight. When she came to visit us, she would always give Mama heck for her carbohydrate fetish. The two of them were like Jack Sprat and his wife, one unable to gain, one unable to lose, and both not-so-covertly envious of the other.

Auntie Caroline used to visit us quite frequently, although Uncle Roger seldom accompanied her. Caroline said it was because of his practice, but I suspect it was more because of Mama. Mama loathed dentists. She had had several courses of experimental dental work, without anaesthetic, while she was in Ravensbrück and after that, I don’t think she was ever fully relieved of the belief that all dentists were in cahoots with the SS. She could argue this logic in a sophisticated, virtually flawless fashion, the way she could so many of her convictions, which made countering her points almost impossible. And she never let the argument drop. Repeatedly, she would corner Uncle Roger and tell him that there had to be something sadistic in the psychological make-up of an individual who chose a profession that caused most people to be terrified of him and allowed him to legally hurt them. Understandably, this point of view did not endear Mama to Uncle Roger, who was a rather soft-spoken, unobtrusive man. I remember once, when Mama had pursued Uncle Roger into the kitchen to continue the discussion, his saying to her in his quiet, patient voice that dentists were there to
stop
people’s pain and that they didn’t really want to make people afraid of them. And Mama laughed. She threw her head back and howled like a hyena. Uncle Roger never came again, after that.

At lunch that Sunday, I could not eat. I came into the kitchen, sat down, took my serving of Auntie Caroline’s casserole and then sat there, knowing that if I ate, I would be sick all over the table. Auntie Caroline sat, eyeing me from my mother’s chair across the table.

‘I haven’t got much of an appetite, I’m afraid,’ I said finally. It was reaching the point that even the smell of food was making me nauseated.

‘I think you ought to try,’ she replied. ‘You look like a walking skeleton, Lesley. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You can’t have been eating right.’

‘I’ve been eating fine. I’m just not hungry now.’

Auntie Caroline sighed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not the food or anything. It’s just me.’

‘You look anorexic, if you ask me,’ she said. She lifted an eyebrow. ‘Are you?’

‘What’s anorexic, Auntie?’ Megan asked.

‘Anorexia nervosa,’ replied Auntie Caroline.

‘Oh,’ said Megan, still perplexed. She mulled the information over for a few moments. ‘Does that mean nerves? Bad nerves? Nervosa?’

‘Something like that,’ Aunt Caroline said.

‘Yeah, I think Lesley’s got bad nerves too.’

I pushed the food around.

‘You just better watch out, that’s all I can say,’ Auntie Caroline said to me. ‘Or you’ll end up just like your mother.’

About 5.30 my father returned. The doctors at the hospital had decided they would transfer Mama to Wichita. He was going to drive the car over so that he would be there when the helicopter arrived. If I wanted, he said, I could go down to the hospital to see her for a little while before she was moved.

Megan, sitting beside me, leaped up, saying she wanted to go too. She broke into tears before my father even had a chance to tell her no. You’re not quite old enough, sweetheart, he said to her, pushing her hair back from her face. When she continued to cry, he sat down and lifted her into his lap. We’ll go another day when Mama’s feeling better, he said to her. Auntie Caroline can bring you down to Wichita on the bus.

The hospital was quiet. It was too late for regular visitors, so I was all alone in the corridor. My footsteps echoed far ahead of me as I walked. The hospital was so small that there seemed to be no activity anywhere.

The intensive-care unit consisted of only two tiny rooms separated from one another by a nursing desk and the medical monitors. Only Mama’s room was occupied. The other care unit was empty. At the desk, two nurses were absorbed in writing. One looked up, smiled and said I could only have ten minutes.

Mama was all alone in the room. It was a small place, barely large enough for the bed. It faced west and all was bathed in a deep, murky twilight when I entered. There were no lights on, and what came back to me in that quirky, leapfrogging manner memories have of returning at odd moments, was the previous weekend, when I had opened the door to my parents’ bedroom and seen her asleep in my daddy’s arms. She was asleep now, or comatose, I didn’t know which. My father said she’d been conscious on and off through the day. But now she lay in the bed, silent and still, like Snow White in her glass coffin.