Prayers for the Dying (Pam of Babylon Book Four) (20 page)

Pam spent the morning getting the turkey stuffed and into the oven. When her children finally got up, the three of them went out for a late breakfast. They had a great time telling their mother all the wonderful things they did at school that parents are never supposed to find out about. Several times, Pam laughed so hard she had tears coursing down her face. The hostess gave them a “look” saved for unruly customers. The worst involved a long story about alcohol consumption; passing out in the back of a strange, unlocked car; and waking up to find the president of the college scared to death that his wife would find out there was a half-naked girl sleeping in his backseat. He drove the young woman to a McDonald’s parking lot, pulled around behind the Dumpsters, gave her a shirt he’d dug out of his dirty laundry bag, a fist full of money, and begged her to get lost.

“Oh my!” Pam exclaimed. “She could’ve said he got her drunk, or worse! Lock your cars, people!”

“What time’s everyone coming?” Brent asked, yawning.

“Not till four,” Pam replied. “Look you two, there are few things I should probably explain. Marie is ill and looks awful, and she is pregnant.” She paused to let the full effect sink in.

“Great! That’s just great. She is about as ready to raise a kid as Brent, here, is,” Lisa said.

Brent laughed out loud. “How’d I get involved? Jeeze!” he said. “You’re right, though, she can’t even fend for herself.”

Pam let the kids have their say before she went any further. She was slightly surprised; they’d never voiced negativity about Marie before, and now she wondered if they’d always had such contemptuous feelings toward her.

“She is very frail,” Pam added, curious that they hadn’t inquired about who the father was. “Her boyfriend is a very nice older man. You’ll meet him this afternoon.”

“Who is he? I can just imagine,” Lisa said with a sneer.

Wow,
Pam thought,
where’s this coming from?
“Someone she met at work. He’s really devoted to her, you’ll see,” Pam said, trying to smooth things over. Brent wasn’t saying much, but Pam could see the wheels turning.

“She makes me sick,” Lisa replied. “She acted like Dad was her
amore
and as soon as he dies, she screws some old man and gets pregnant.”

Speechless, Pam wondered if it was smart to have caved in to her mother’s demands for an invitation to the beach. If she called them now, made an excuse, they’d have time to find something else to do for dinner.

“What do you think, Brent? Are you as angry as I am?”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Brent answered.

“Okay, you two, what’s going on?” Pam asked, almost certain she already knew, but so appalled that she couldn’t bear saying the words out loud. Her children knew about Marie and Jack.

“Mom, trust me, you don’t want to know,” Brent said. “Lisa, shut up.”

Pam didn’t want to give away too much, just in case what she was thinking and what they were thinking were two different things. “Look, I am all about honesty right now. We can’t have secrets and move forward. At least I can’t,” she added. “I need truth, and I want to give it, too.”

Brent was staring at her intensely.

“We don’t want to cause trouble,” Lisa said, and Brent agreed.

“There’s no trouble,” Pam said. “Only freedom. You both have to know that I have had some struggles lately.” It was her first reference to AIDS since they’d gotten home.

“We don’t want to hurt you, either,” Brent said.

“I won’t say that there is nothing more that can hurt me,” Pam explained. She’d been so worried about protecting their image of their father and now it looked like they may have been on to him long before she learned the truth. “But one of you better spill the beans!”

Lisa rolled her eyeballs.

“Poor Mom, you are such a nerd,” Lisa said.

Pam laughed. Nerd was a nice word for what she was.

Lisa looked at Brent. He frowned in agreement. Lisa continued. “Marie was after Dad all the time, from when we were little until right before I left for school.” Lisa stopped and looked at her mother to see what the effect was.

Pam was trying to look expressionless, but it was a losing battle. Why did she fail to see something that her “little” children saw? Pam didn’t know what the next question should be. Only one came to mind. “What did you see?” Pam asked. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

“She was always on him, always dragging him off somewhere. I hated it! I told him finally. He said he would tell her to stop. But she continued whispering to him, and I know she had him in her room,” Lisa said.

“Lisa, for Christ’s sake,” Brent hissed.

“It’s okay,” Pam told him. “But I think we should leave. I want to continue this where we can express ourselves freely without a waitress coming by.”

They agreed and Brent signaled for the check. The diner was on a lagoon. There were benches placed in a protected cove where they could see the water and hear the gulls.

Pam was struggling with whether to make Marie the fall guy, or to be honest and tell them that Jack abused her when the children were toddlers. She wished there was a psychiatrist’s office they could run to. But she was on her own, and her gut was telling her to stop making excuses, stop hiding, and start telling the truth. She’d let the kids lead the way and if there was a chance where clarity was needed, she would provide it. She felt awful about having put them in this situation because of her failure to observe.

“Did you see Daddy in Marie’s room?” Pam asked, hoping Lisa would pick up where she left off.

Lisa was looking out at the water, where the lagoon widened and mingled with the water from the ocean. Even in the freezing weather, there were diehard fishermen on the causeway, throwing their lines in.

“I did,” Brent said. “It was so frequent it was normal to see Dad come out of Marie’s room in the middle of the night.”

Pam gasped. She grabbed her son’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Brent. This is my fault. I mean, not that Daddy did it, or that Marie allowed it, but that I didn’t protect you both from the knowledge of it. That’s not right, either. I didn’t protect you from the
exposure
to it. I must have been in denial or, as Marie liked to say, had my head stuck in the sand. I just feel terrible and it is too late to do anything about it.” There was an uncomfortable silence.

“So what you are saying is that you
didn’t
know,” Lisa said. It was a statement. She had turned to look at her mother, and Pam couldn’t decipher the look Lisa was giving her. Was she disgusted with Pam, or pitying her? “Or did you? For God’s sake, Mother! Do you have any idea how this affected me?” Lisa asked, but she didn’t wait for Pam to reply. “I have felt like crap about myself because my father preferred my aunt to me, and now it would seem that you are confirming that he was fucking her. Am I right, Mother?” Her eyes were piercing, flashing anger as they stared right into Pam. “I even wondered for a while what an appropriate relationship with my father would encompass. How sick!” she sputtered. “I mean, my God! I’ve been defending him and saying that there was no way he could be responsible for your AIDS when all along, you knew!”

Pam grabbed Lisa’s arm. “I didn’t know! I swear to you. I only found out after Jack died. You have to believe me. When I say I had my head stuck in the sand, it refers to all knowledge of him. I had no idea. I couldn’t protect you because I didn’t know. I was too stupid to know, maybe that’s correct. But I truly did not know!”

Brent chimed in and directed his statement at his sister. “Lisa, I think you have to listen to what she is saying. You didn’t know about it, correct Mom?” Brent asked her gently.

Pam shook her head no. “In retrospect, I realize that it seems unlikely, but truly, I believed we had the perfect, charmed life. You children never said anything to me or even let on that there was a problem. Never! You never had a nightmare or bad behavior, never had a call from a teacher at school, or gave me one moment of worry. How would I have known?” Pam explained. And then softly, “Why didn’t you come to me?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Brent said.

Pam was confused. Were they attacking her or not? She remembered the time at the beach when Jack was twirling Marie in the air and Lisa stood away from them, brooding. She reminded Lisa of it.

“When I saw what was happening, that Jack was paying attention to Marie, and you were standing there looking left out, I intervened immediately. Whenever I saw anything that didn’t seem right, I challenged you guys, and Daddy. But if you were afraid to tell me, what could I do? I had no idea you were holding back!” There was another period of silence during which the family looked out to sea.

Lisa stood up and stretched with her arms up over her head. “We should’ve had this discussion last spring. I’m pissed!” Lisa turned to look at Pam. “I guess it’s pointless for me to ask why you didn’t say anything when you found out the truth. I’m almost afraid to ask how you found out.”

Brent started laughing. “Jesus Christ! Isn’t it clear why she didn’t say anything? Boy, you are younger than I thought,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Lisa asked. “Mom should’ve asked us right away if we had any suspicions.”

“Hindsight and all that,” Brent said.

Pam was feeling worse by the minute. “All I could think of was protecting you two,” she explained. “Should I tell you how I found out?” She was looking for a way to make them understand, but was the truth too awful to unload on them?

Lisa nodded. She wanted to know; curiosity was devouring her.

“Your father had a young girlfriend, Sandra, the one he left his business to in the will. She got to the hospital before I did to identify the body. They’d called her first.” Pam felt defiant, as bad as at that was. Her own children had pushed her to this. “She saw his body before I did; we passed as I was on my in. I knew right away.”

Lisa burst into tears. “Oh my God, how sad, Mom! But how’d Marie figure into this?”

Pam realized she hadn’t answered that question yet. “Marie was jealous of Sandra. It was as simple as that. She made sure the two of us knew that she also had a relationship with your father. It was a case of one-up-man-ship.” For the time being, she decided to leave out the child-abuse accusation and Sandra’s pregnancy. Suddenly exhausted, Pam made the split-second decision that Thanksgiving dinner was not taking place in Babylon this year after all. “Let’s get home, shall we? I need to call our guests and tell them the family meal is off. Why I allowed myself to be talked into it in the first place is a mystery.” She stood up and starting walking toward the car. If her wonderful children chose to stay there in the wind and cold, that was up to them. But she heard them approach the car as she unlocked the doors and got in to drive. The silence permeated the car and when they returned to the beach, it spread to the house as well.

.

28

B
y the time Steve Marks arrived at the mansion to drive the women to Babylon, dinner was canceled. Marie was furious, cursing her sister for being selfish and thoughtless. Nelda was dying of curiosity about the reason; it must have been a real doozy for Pam Smith to cancel a celebratory meal. Jeff Babcock was sad that his friend was upset enough to have made the call. Dave was disappointed and curious, but little else. Bernice forgot it was Thanksgiving within five minutes of being told they were staying home.

“Well, I want to go back to your apartment,” Marie insisted. “You have four days off. Why should I stay up here in hell if you’re home?”

Steve vacillated between joy that he didn’t have to go for a two-hour car ride to a place where he couldn’t smoke and terror that he’d have to take Marie home.
Why did I ever get involved with her?
She made the effort to get dressed and was pulling things together that she cared about; her purse and phone and a book she was reading. “Look Steve, I’m leaving. If you don’t want me at your place, I’m going back to my own apartment.” Unsteady on her feet but determined, Marie was going to leave if it meant taking a subway downtown. “I can do it blindfolded.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped in such resignation that Marie started laughing.

“Okay, let’s go. I guess I have myself to blame for this,” he said.

“Stop. It’s not that bad!” she said.

“What are you going to do for dinner?” Nelda asked. She already had a small ham baking and was thinking about what other accompaniments there were in the mansion larder.

“I’m about ready to puke as it is. All you can think of doing is force-feeding me. I want to go home!”

Steve tapped her arm, nodding toward the front door. With all the energy she could muster, Marie went for the stairs. She was getting out of there.

When Ashton got back to his apartment, the first thing he did was arrange for Thanksgiving dinner to be delivered to Dale’s apartment from Balducci’s. They’d had a wonderful visit and he didn’t think about being lonely for Jack. The next morning he spent a little extra time on his appearance. On the way over to her place, he picked up a bouquet of pink roses. There was pink all over her apartment, and she had a rose on her bed jacket.

He got to her apartment promptly at two; the food was going to be delivered at two-thirty. As he skipped up the stairs to the front door, a taxi pulled up in front of Dale’s building and a man about Ashton’s age got out. Ashton pushed the button on the intercom but there was no answer. Maybe the nurse was off for the holiday and it was taking Dale a while to get to the buzzer. The man saw Ashton pushing the button.