The Source of All Things (14 page)

“But I have to,” said Mom. “It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. Father Lafey and I talked about it. I met with him at the priory.”

Mom put her faith in Father Lafey, the Jesuit priest at the Jerome Catholic Church. I liked the priest because he had acoustic guitar at mass. I figured he'd be fair to the whole family when it came to our situation, especially as a man of the cloak. But I'd also seen Mom trap people in conversations; I knew how she'd pretend she didn't know what she was saying, so she could say anything she wanted.

“Okay, then,” I said, digging my spoon into my oatmeal. “Whatever you want, Mom. Go for it.”

The words blasted from her mouth like machine-gun fire:

“What if it was the devil?”

“What?”

“I said … What if it was the devil and not Dad who hurt you?”

“
Mom!
How can you think that? How can you even say that?”

“Say what? You're taking it too literally. I'm talking about how the devil can get
inside
people. Make them do things they don't want to do. I'm not saying Dad
became
the devil. But the devil can make people do things they don't want to. Father Lafey and I
talked about this. He agrees: whatever's ailing Dad can be healed with your forgiveness.”

I chose my words carefully.

“Well, if you put it that way,” I answered, “I guess it could have been the devil.”

Mom questioned me
again, a few weeks later.

This time her friend Nan was with us. We were sitting at the kitchen counter, eating boiled eggs and English muffins.

Mom and Nan complimented me on my new haircut, the short/long Eurythmics style I'd given myself over the summer. They
ooohed
and
aaahed
over my new clothes style, a preppie/punk rock fusion that consisted mainly of super-short mini skirts and Hanes men's size large T-shirts. My new favorite band was the Sex Pistols, so I'd permanent-markered NeVeR MinD tHe BoLLocKS HeREs THe sEx PiStOLs across the front of several shirts.

But after a while, the conversation shifted to an episode Mom had seen on the
Phil Donahue Show
. She'd been at home, nursing a migraine, when she turned the channel to a row of women sobbing on a stage. Instantly captivated, she watched until the last commercial.

“It was horrible,” said my mom, glaring into her teacup. “These women were raped by their husbands. They had to sit there and take it. Some of them were hurt so badly they had to be hospitalized. And nobody helped them. They had to take themselves to the doctor.”

I sat on my barstool, listening to the conversation. I liked it when Mom talked about important things. We never discussed
concepts like social justice or women's rights when my dad was around. This sounded like a new beginning.

I was just about to tell Mom and Nan about Laura Etter, and how brave I thought she was for being the only female brakeman on the Twin Falls branch of the Union Pacific Railroad, when Mom changed the subject again. Or maybe she didn't change it, but shifted it ever so slightly. It's obvious she didn't think about what she was going to say because the next thing out of her mouth hit me like a sledgehammer to the tonsils.

“You know, though,” she said, “sometimes I wonder if incest has been blown out of proportion in this country. I mean, Americans can be so
Puritan
. In Newfoundland we put up with old men grabbing us all the time. But we never
did
anything about it.”

I'm trying to
remember what came first: the constriction behind my ears that felt like someone was pinning them together or the hot tears that jumped to my eyes, blurring my vision. Mom's comment had come out of nowhere. I caught the tears before she and Nan could see them, but I couldn't stop the words that tumbled from my mouth like a rockslide down a muddy, rain-soaked mountain.

“
Mom!
Do you have
any
idea what you're saying?” I shouted.

“What? What's the matter?” stammered my mom.

“Do you really think Americans are
too sensitive
about abuse? I'm sitting
right here,
Mom. Does that mean
anything
to you?”

I stood up, accidentally slamming the barstool against the refrigerator. Mom and Nan looked at me in horror. But instead of apologizing like I'd normally do, I turned around and took off down the hallway.

“Tracy, stop!” Mom yelled from behind me. “I didn't
mean
anything by it. I was just
saying
…”

But I didn't want to hear what my mom was
saying
. I'd spent fourteen years listening to what she said. She'd told me—about the poverty in Newfoundland, the neglect in her childhood, and her uncles, all raging alcoholics, who did things like shove their wives' heads in oven broilers while their children stood watching—so often I'd never forget it. What she'd always failed to realize was that a
person
with her own thoughts and feelings sat at the other end of her conversation. I wanted to scream that it
mattered
how and when she said things, and more important,
who
she said them in front of.

I got to my bedroom just as Mom was rounding the staircase, and jammed a Soft Cell cassette into my tape recorder. Mom banged on the door of my bedroom, yelling that she was sorry. She carried on so long that eventually I started thinking of Nan out there listening. I liked Nan, so I turned down the music on my stereo.

Mom was leaning into the door, pushing her sentences through it. “Tracy. I'm so sorry,” she said. “I did it again, didn't I? Said something stupid and made you angry. I
know
. I'm an
idiot
. A
poop
. But I promise I didn't mean anything by it. Whatever you heard, Tracy, you took it the wrong way.”

You've heard about
the camel, and that tiny straw that crushed its back? That last sentence was my straw. I stood up and pressed my body against the door, waiting for my mom to finish talking.

“I'm so sorry, Tracy,” she pleaded. “I promise, I'll never say anything like that again. You know I love you and would never do anything to hurt you. I just got overexcited. Now open the door, please, and let me in.”

When it seemed like she was through begging my forgiveness, I unfastened the deadbolt I'd installed after my dad left and opened the door of my bedroom. Mom stood in the hallway, in front of the linen closet. She opened her arms, offering a make-up hug. I lifted my arms too, but when I got close enough to wrap them around her, I shoved her into the linen closet.

Looking up at me with wild, injured eyes, she said, “So is this it? Is this what I can expect now that I'm the evil mother?”

“Yes, Mom,” I answered. “It's
exactly
what you can expect.”

Mom got me. I got her back. But it was the shock of what happened to Dad that threatened us all. Among the stipulations of my homecoming was that Dad couldn't come within five hundred feet of me. If Claudia—or one of the cops assigned to keep an eye on us—drove by and saw his Jeep parked in the driveway, he'd be in serious trouble.

Apparently it didn't matter.

One Saturday morning in late November, the Jeep pulled into the driveway. Mom was dusting the furniture, and I was perched in my dad's leather swivel chair watching
American Bandstand.
Dad walked through the front door as if he still lived with us; he went straight to the kitchen and hoisted himself onto the counter. Mom hurried to him. I hung back, nervous.

Dad and I hadn't talked since the time I'd called him from the abused girls' shelter. Not really talk, like we used to before the abuse. He'd called us nightly over the past month, and when he did, Mom made me say things to him. She'd raise her eyebrows and point into the receiver. I'd concede but keep it brief—“Hi, Dad. How ya doin'? See ya later”—because the pain in Dad's voice scared me. I knew he hated living with his brother, and my mom had told me that the sex-offender meetings the court required him to attend were filled with thugs who did things like rape babies. I could see why she was proud of him for going, but I wasn't about to be the one to congratulate him.

Mom saw the Colt .357 handgun the second Dad pulled it out of his waistband. And the second she saw it, she started screaming. Then I saw the gun, too, and froze where I was standing. I started to shake, and my chest wall cramped over my heart. My heart hammered:
Would he fire? At us? Himself?
Across my mind flashed a common headline: “Man shoots family, then self.”

My mom started walking in circles, pulling on her earlobe. “Don?” she said. “What is that? Is that a gun? You have a gun, Don. Why do you have a gun?”

But Dad just sat there with his legs dangling over the counter. The glance he threw me made me want to throw up. I'd known a girl whose parents tried to kill her in a fit of insanity. They'd been drunk and had hacked at each other with kitchen knives during a fight. The girl ran to our house, and my dad let her sit on the couch under an electric blanket while he called the police. Now my dad could be her dad, but unlike her, I had nowhere to run for help. I watched my dad and wondered if he was going to kill me. I figured he must have been contemplating it, because in hell,
like in Newfoundland, incest was probably considered normal. Behind me, a small moan started in my mom's throat. It grew until she was screaming.

Her hollering made Dad stand up. He put the gun in his back pocket and started for the front door. Mom sprinted after him, reaching for his shirt. She couldn't swim, ride a bike, or ski except for cross-country, but she clung to his light blue Izod like one of the Wicked Witch of the West's flying monkeys.

I still don't understand how my dad reached his arm around his body and grabbed her, casting her off of him like a tick that hadn't yet burrowed into his skin. It didn't seem like an arm should have been able to bend that far backward. But she hit the floor and crumpled. I watched the commotion from the spot I'd wedged myself into between the piano bench and the wall.

My dad took one last look at us before he continued walking. He was still smiling … and still crying. He was about to step through the door, when he turned around and spoke in a voice that sounded like his vocal chords were coated in butter. “What other choice do I have?” he said. “People are going to find out what happened. Then what? What's left?” My mom must have been in shock, because when I looked at her, she was poking her tongue between her cracked red lips. She pulled at the collar of her sweatshirt, as if she couldn't get enough air.

Years later my mom would tell me that, after my dad drove off “to kill himself,” she almost copied him. She thought she could no longer live with such a pitch-black feeling. While I sat in the living
room waiting for someone to save me, she went to her walk-in closet, dug under a shirt rack, and located a different gun. This one was a Smith & Wesson Chief 38 Special that my dad had given her for protection. She cocked the gun and bit the barrel. But just as she was about to pull the trigger, a voice inside her spoke up.
Doris. Think of Chris and Tracy,
it said.
What will they do if you take the easy way out?

Bandstand
was still playing when she emerged swollen-eyed, rumply-clothed, and tearstained from her bedroom. I pushed myself around in my dad's swivel chair while she picked up the phone and dialed a number. I figured she was calling the police, to alert them that my dad was on a suicide mission. But she wasn't. She phoned my uncle, who told her, Doris, you're overreacting. Donnie took the jeep into the South Hills this morning. But he's back now, and he's in his room napping.