mouth as he descended farther into the gloom. Guilty for breaking down in his presence after he’d confused her for his dead wife; when he begged her to remove his restraints and they wouldn’t let her; when in a fit of rage he swung at her cursing; when it got so bad she no longer wanted to visit him. She felt guilty for trying to get on with her life. For allowing the nursing home staff to avoid taking extraordinary measures when he would no longer eat. For letting him die.
The woman looked at her for a moment as if reading her thoughts. “Then I’m sorry for you. I suppose the only consolation is that the disease blots out the victim’s awareness of one’s offenses.”
Cassie glanced at the newspaper story. “We had a fine sisterhood that lasted until we were old ladies. Certainly there was the usual sibling rivalry stuff, but there were enough years between us so that I was more the older sister and confidante than competitor. We would talk all night in bed, laughing, sharing stories, little truths, and secrets. And as trite as it sounds, I recall some of it as if it were yesterday.
“In many ways we were blessed with exceptional parents who were smart and loving and who provided us with a childhood full of laughter and beauty that should have lasted longer than it did, at least until the age when the world begins to dull and harden the child. Unfortunately, that happened much too much sooner than it should for my sister.”
The woman looked away for a moment. “Clara was raped by a neighbor when she was five years old.”
“Oh, how horrible.”
“By a drunken pig of a man who would sit on his back porch and drink beer out of large brown bottles and snort because he had some kind of sinus problem. One day he enticed Clara to come inside because he wanted to show her something. His name was Donald Dobretsky, the man my father lent the lawn mower to, the man whose wife was our mother’s shopping friend. The man we shared Christmas parties and barbecues with.
“He would encourage Clara to recite jingles, silly rhyming things she picked up from radio and TV like ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent’—way before your time—or ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ or ‘Ding, dong, bell, pussy’s in the well.’
“Or ‘Donny Doh, Donny Doh, tsee-tsee go, tsee-tsee go.’ As clear as it was last evening, I remember her small, frightened voice cutting the warm night air of our room. Donny Doh was the name she had given Mr. Dobretsky. Just one of the many sweet names her magical little word box had created for people she knew.”
“And what’s ‘tsee-tsee go’?” Rene asked.
Cassie looked at her point-blank and said, “What he stuck in her mouth.”
“My god.”
“It took me a while, but she told me everything. She was still too innocent to know she was being sexually abused but old enough to know that what he made her do was bad. So she never told our parents, and I was too afraid. Besides, back then people didn’t talk about child abuse. The term wasn’t even part of the public lexicon. And if children were abused, nobody talked. And nobody believed kids even if they made such claims. Such things didn’t exist in our nice world of Barton Glen. Today, a little whisper can send a man to jail for life or close down a church.”
“Was it just that once?”
“No, no. And the SOB told her that our parents wouldn’t believe her if she said anything. He was clever not to rape her because that would leave torn tissue. But he left her so deeply scarred that for days she wouldn’t speak or eat and had nightmares. Our parents thought she had meningitis or some brain fever and put her under the care of the family doctor because she was wasting away. Of course, all the tests were negative because it was that monster’s filthy pleasure.”
She was shaking so much that her composure began to fracture. But she took a breath and found her center again. “I tell you this only to explain what’s beneath the layers—a wound that never, ever healed. Whatever it was, something in the encounter with poor Mr. Zuchowsky cut to the quick of that, and she exploded.”
Mrs. Gould closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she seemed recomposed. “Besides, Clara’s nearly gone, so it doesn’t matter that I tell you.”
She suddenly looked very tired and old, as if she were staring into the narrowing corridor of her own last days. Rene got ready to leave. “What happened to this Donald Dobretsky?”
“Died of old age.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me, too. And a perfect stranger paid with his life.”
8
The phrase stuck in her mind like a thorn—all the way to Rose Hill Cemetery.
Rose Hill was located in Paxton, a small town outside of Peterborough, N.H. The place consisted of narrow tree-lined lanes like an arboretum. Since her father’s death, Rene had been coming here maybe once a month and on special days such as Memorial Day, Father’s Day, or Christmas. This day would have been his eighty-second birthday.
Her mother was also robbed of her golden years, dying of cancer three years before her father, two years after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was buried beside him.
Rene had always been close to her father, but never so much as when he began to fade and especially after Diane died and his dependency fell full-weight on her, his only child. She had made regular visits each week to her parents’ home. She had arranged for visiting nurses, then hospice when her mother’s condition had begun to worsen. After her mother’s death, Rene moved her father into a long-term-care home, where he rapidly declined into the disease. She cleaned her mother’s headstone and laid down a pot of geraniums, then moved to her father’s.
“Hi, Dad.”
With paper towels she wiped the headstone, a black marble speckled slab that still glistened like glass in the sunshine. She removed some dead leaves and set down the second geranium pot.
THOMAS S. BALLARD BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND
She wished they had picked a less generic inscription. Three-quarters of the headstones had the same wording, just change the gender terms. She wished she had selected lyrics of one of his favorite songs—maybe a few bars of “As Time Goes By” or “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” or “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” or a hundred others. But the funeral director had talked her out of it, which made sense, since they’d probably have had to get copyright permission. And wouldn’t that look cute: a footnote with something like “© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP, Music and Words by Herman Hupfeld.” Dad would have appreciated that.
“Well, eight weeks on the job, and I’m caught up in a murder investigation because one of my patients escaped from a locked ward and killed a guy. Half her records are incomplete, there are patients on the ward that shouldn’t be, and everybody’s stonewalling while my head’s on the block. Otherwise, it’s been a great week.”
She finished buffing the stone.
The end was in sight when he began to stop eating, something common with dementia patients. Most of his cognition was gone, but he had had no medical condition and was strong enough physically to shuffle about the ward on a walker or to sit up in a wheelchair. Hoping to stimulate his appetite, the nursing home staff treated him with antidepressants, which worked for a while. But eventually he refused food no matter how much they encouraged him. Sometimes he’d spit it out or he’d keep it in his mouth, not chewing. Or he’d chew it and not swallow, pocketing the mash in his cheeks. Because Rene was at pharmacy school fifty miles away, she couldn’t visit as often as she wanted—a fact that ate at her heart like acid. But when she did, his mood would perk up and he’d eat a little for her, sometimes recognizing her, sometimes just responding to a smiling face that encouraged
