Acts of Love (9 page)

“No,” she said quietly, pulling her knee away, scratching it as if it itched, as if that was why she had removed it. “I don't think so.” She turned to him, her eyes shinier, harder now. “You want all this sexual intimacy, but what about the rest of the day?”

He flared. “You think you can get inside me, and you can't. There's a place that has always been just for myself and always will be. That's the only way I could have survived.”

The next morning, though, he came up behind her while she was making coffee, kissed her neck, and whispered, “That talk made me love you even more. We have all the time in the world to work things out. The rest of our lives.”

S
ANDY STOOD IN THE CEMETERY
that was built into Baron's Hill, on the north side of Hardison, where her parents were buried, and watched them lower Ann's oak casket into the ground. She had one arm draped around Julia's shoulder, the other around Ali's. Behind her, her boyfriend, John Norwood, stood with his arms taut by his sides, watching the sheer autumn light fall on the crowns of their heads, steppes of auburn and blond. A small number of floral arrangements from the hospital and the PTA ringed the open grave. Three of the nurses who worked with Ann on the fourth floor of Hardison General were there, standing silently together; two hospital administrators, Dr. Neal Frederickson, in a navy pinstriped suit, and a few parents of Ali's and Julia's schoolmates also stood in mute attendance. All kept their distance, from each other, from the family, scared off by the gunshot that reverberated even now through the last words of the Lord's Prayer. Sandy, her back stiff, face blank, found some scant comfort in her show of dignity; it was what she had left. The only movement came from a young man three yards away, his foot on a tombstone, taking copious notes in a small spiral pad.

 

S
ANDY LEANED UP AGAINST
the open front door, saying goodbye to the last of the guests she had felt obligated to invite back to her house after the service. They had stood about her haphazardly furnished living room, most of them unknown to each other, unknown to Sandy, in great gulches of silence, having no guidelines for this particular mutation of the ritual of grief. They looked with dramatic pity at Julia and Ali in their stiff floral dresses, and tried to express the proper modicum of shared outrage to Sandy, but they spoke little. That would come later, Sandy knew, over their own dinner tables, in telephone calls to relatives who had moved away, on the supermarket checkout line, turning the event this way and that, relishing each detail, each theory, the inevitable thrill heightened by the fact that they actually knew the participants, that they were there.

“Thank you for coming,” Sandy told the nurse who had been on duty with Ann two days before the killing. That is how she referred to it, and if anyone thoughtlessly said “the accident” she quickly and vehemently corrected them.

“If you need anything, anything at all.”

“Thank you.”

“The girls, they're staying with you?”

“Yes.”

“How could that man? When I think of it, I just want to…”

“Yes, I know. Thank you. Goodbye.”

She shut the door. Remnants of food and drink lay scattered about the room where people used to be. Julia, Ali, and John stood behind the canvas couch, watching her, waiting for her to tell them what to do next, how to feel. When she said nothing, they began to shuffle nervously, picking at their unfamiliar clothes and knocking their toes into the thrift-shop kilim on the floor.

“I'm glad that's over with,” John said hopefully.

“Are you? I thought I'd feel some sense of relief, and I don't.” Her voice, usually so animated, was dull. She turned to Julia and Ali. “Why don't you girls get out of those glad rags and put some blue jeans on?”

She watched as they traipsed dutifully up the stairs, waiting until they were out of sight before collapsing onto the couch. John sat down beside her, his sturdy, athletic body moving awkwardly in his best suit. “Are you okay?”

“Great. Lost in a goddamned nightmare and doing fine, thank you very much.” She started, for the first time that day, to weep, and she swallowed hard, willing herself back in, back under. “I just keep thinking Ann is going to walk through the door and take the kids home with her. I can't believe I'm never going to see her again.”

“I know.”

“I don't know what to say to them. I don't know what to do.”

“You're doing fine.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do I feel like I'm sleepwalking through hell?”

 

U
PSTAIRS
, in the guest bedroom that Julia and Ali had been sharing, sleeping together on a foldout couch, they rummaged through the large suitcase on the floor that Sandy had packed for them three nights before, choosing, in her blind-eyed, stunned haste, the top handfuls of each drawer until the case was full, so that they had a preponderance of shirts and too few pants, numerous socks but few panties. The girls took off their dresses and began to wriggle out of their tights.

“Where's Daddy?” Ali asked quietly as Julia helped her untangle her shoes from the pile on the floor. She looked down shyly—“daddy” had become one of those words you knew you weren't supposed to use but didn't quite know why; it engendered the same hush, the same dismay in grown-ups.

“You know where he is.”

“Jail?”

“Yes.”

They both chose striped turtlenecks from the suitcase and pulled them over their heads, then carefully folded their dresses and tights, and placed them back in the case, good guests always, neat, polite, wary.

“You saw it, didn't you?” Julia asked.

“Saw what?”

“Saw him shoot Mom.”

“I was in the kitchen. You know I was in the kitchen.”

“No. You came out. You saw it. You just don't remember, that's all.”

Ali, beneath Julia's fierce look, shook her head, confused. “I don't know.”

“He's a murderer. Say it.”

Ali's lower lip quivered.

“Come on. Say it.”

But she couldn't.

“You're stupid to love him,” Julia spit out, turning away. “You thought I didn't hear you tell him the other night, but I did. I hear everything.” She walked over to the mirror above the wicker dresser and stared at her own reflection. The strict geometry of her bobbed hair pleased her, and she pushed up one loose strand to make it even more absolute.

“Come on,” she said, swinging back suddenly to Ali. “Let's go out.”

 

W
HEN
S
ANDY HEARD
Julia and Ali coming down the stairs, she rose to meet them, hoping still to find a word, a touch, that would codify for them what remained an amorphous horror that they had not yet spoken of, not yet given name to. Each time she touched them, though, she was reminded that she did not, in fact, have the prerogative of a parent, the fondling, fluttering, fixing caress that was taken in due course. Instead, each touch remained a willful act, inorganic and duly noted. She rested her fingers lightly on Ali's shoulders, then straightened the turtleneck.

“Are you okay, honey?”

“How long are we going to stay here?”

“You're going to live here now. With me. With your crazy old aunt.”

“Forever?”

“I don't know.”

“I want to go home,” Ali said simply.

Sandy's fingers contracted involuntarily on her shoulders. “I'll tell you what. First thing tomorrow, we'll go to the mall and get some things for your room. What do you like, posters of hunks in bathing suits? Stuffed animals with chartreuse fur? Whatever you want. And then we'll go back to the house and pick up some of your toys and books, okay? And I'm going to order two beds for you girls.”

Ali kept looking at her, waiting for more, waiting for something else entirely.

“C'mon, Ali,” Julia said. “Let's go outside.” She put her arm around Ali protectively and headed her toward the front door.

“Take a jacket,” Sandy called after them. “It's getting cold outside. And don't play in the street.”

“Take a jacket? Don't play in the street?” She sat back on the couch beside John. “Where are these things coming from? Is that what mothers say? I don't know what to say. I just wish someone would tell me what to say.”

“Ssshhh, come here.” He pulled her head onto his shoulder.

“What do I know about kids?” Sandy asked.

“You've always gotten along great with Julia and Ali.”

“But now I have to
know
things.”

“I think they're already toilet-trained.”

“I'm serious. John, I'm worried about Julia. The other night, I heard her crying in her room, but when I went in to see if she was okay, she pretended to be reading. She's being so…I don't know. Stoic.” The implacable silence she wrapped herself in, carrying it with her everywhere, always, a bell jar of watchful, guarded silence that warped the distance between herself and everyone else. “She just watches me.”

“People deal with trauma differently.”

“I suppose.”

“Sandy, whatever you need to do, you'll do. Whatever you need to learn, you'll learn.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “I called the school to arrange for some extra counseling for the girls. Maybe that will help.” She shifted position. “I'm going to make sure that bastard pays for this,” she muttered.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe Ted is telling the truth?”

“Ted wouldn't know how to tell the truth if his life depended on it. Particularly if his life depended on it.”

“I know you've always had a thing against him, and I don't much like him myself. But we still don't know exactly what happened.”

“I can't believe you're defending that man to me. He killed my sister, for God's sake.”

“Sandy, you're a journalist. You should know better than to jump to conclusions. You should know the importance of facts.”

“Yeah, and the fact is, my sister is dead. And Ted Waring did it. Ask Julia, she'll tell you.”

“Julia is thirteen years old.”

“With twenty-twenty vision. Do you mean to tell me you find it acceptable behavior for men to go around shooting their ex-wives?”

“Whoa, come back here. Of course I don't think it's acceptable behavior for men to go around shooting their ex-wives. Good Lord. All I'm saying is, we don't have the facts yet. There's going to be a trial. You know that, Sandy.”

She nodded grimly.

“The police are satisfied with Ali's statement. After all, she didn't see what happened. But they want to talk to Julia again tomorrow,” John added.

“I know. I'll take her over there in the afternoon. First I want to get them more settled. When I look at them, when Ali says she wants to go home…”

John said nothing.

They were both silent for a moment. “You know,” Sandy said softly, “I always felt like I had to protect Ann. Even when we were younger. She was always so…so fucking sweet, you know? Gullible. I was always tougher.”

“Sandy, what could you have done? This had nothing to do with you.”

But she knew that wasn't true.

 

S
ANDY ROSE EARLY
the next morning and, tying her chenille robe tight against the late-October chill, opened the door to pick up the paper. The top-right-hand corner of the
Chronicle
was dominated by a picture of Ann, Ted, and the girls, under the headline, “Tragic Accident or Murder?” She leaned up against the wall, breathless.

She had always been fascinated by the sole, stark event that could turn a person, a family, into this. Public domain. News. The single misstep that left you chained like Prometheus to Mount Caucasus, with guts to be picked over afresh each day. Neighbors, friends, always protested about these paper faces. “They were such a normal family,” but she was certain that if she could dig further (for she was often the one asking the questions, taking the notes), there must have been a symptom, a portent, overlooked at the time, noticed but discarded as insignificant.

Hers, of course, had never been a normal family, and she had always feared that they were just barely keeping whole and private beneath a thin sheet that pushed and strained with the effort. In the back of her mind, Sandy had been waiting all her life for that sheet to rip. In a way, she was almost relieved now, leaning up against the wall, paper in hand, like a hypochondriac being given a diagnosis of cancer. Ah. Here it is. So this is the form it is to take. Of all of them, though, she had never imagined that Ann would be the one to pay. She heard Julia and Ali rustling about and quickly hid the paper beneath a chair cushion before they came downstairs.

“Morning.” She was surprised to see that they were already dressed, their shoes on, their hair neatly combed, as if they were waiting to be taken someplace else at a moment's notice.

“Morning,” they answered.

They followed her into the kitchen, still dotted with precarious piles of dirty serving platters from the food that neighbors had brought over during the last couple of days.

“Why do people always bring casseroles when someone dies?” Sandy muttered. “Every time I see a casserole, I start to smell embalming fluid.” She opened the refrigerator door. “Let's see. There are two frozen Lean Cuisines. Some yogurt. One or two things I could only classify as science experiments on mold growth.”