False Memory

Then came Claudette, pushing between them, forcing them apart, her back to Junior, confronting Dusty, eyes harder than before, the unyielding gray of flint and flashing as if with sparks. For the first time in her life, her face didn’t astonish with its beauty: instead, such a hideous ferocity. “You leave him alone, leave him alone, you get away from him!”

“He killed Eric.”

“He saved us! We’d all be dead, but he saved us!” Claudette was shrill, as never before, her lips pale and her skin gray, like some stone goddess come alive and raging, a termagant who, by sheer power of will, would alter this bitter reality to suit her, as only gods and goddesses could do. “He had the guts, and he had the brains to act, to save us!”

Lampton appeared, too, pouring out thick streams of soothing words, gouts of platitudes, slathers of anger- management jargon, no less containable than the oil spill from a floundering supertanker. Talking, talking, talking, even as his wife pressed her ceaseless strident defense of Junior, both of them chattering at once: Their words were like paint rollers, laying down obscuring swaths of new color over stains.

At the same time, Lampton was trying to get the machine pistol out of Dusty’s right hand, which at first Dusty didn’t even realize he was still holding. When he understood what Lampton wanted, he let go of the weapon.

“Better call the police,” Lampton said, though surely neighbors had already done so, and he hurried away.

Skeet warily approached, staying well clear of his mother but nonetheless coming around to Dusty’s side of the standoff, and Fig stood farther back down the hall, watching them as though he had, at last, made contact with the aliens he had so long desired to meet.

None of them had fled the house as Dusty had urged them to do — or if they had gotten as far as the roof of the back porch, they had returned. At least Lampton and Claudette must have known that Junior was loading his crossbow with the intention of joining the battle, and apparently neither of them had tried to stop him. Or perhaps they had been afraid to try. Any parents with common sense or a genuine love of their child would have taken the crossbow away from him and dragged him out of this house if necessary. Or maybe the idea of a boy with a primitive weapon defeating a man with a machine pistol — a twisted incarnation of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, which set so many hearts aflutter in the academic literary community — had been too delicious to resist. Dusty could no longer pretend to understand the odd thought processes of these people, and he was weary of trying.

“He killed a man,” Dusty reminded his mother, because for him no amount of shrill argument could change this fundamental truth.

“A lunatic, a maniac, a demented man with a gun,” Claudette insisted.

“I’d taken the gun away from him.”

“That’s what you say.”

“That’s the truth. I could have handled him.”

“You can’t handle anything. You drop out of school, you drop out of life, you paint houses for a living.”

“If customer satisfaction were the issue,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it, unable to restrain himself, “I’d be on the cover of Time, and Derek would be in prison, paying for all the patients’ lives he’s fucked up.”

“You ungrateful bastard.”

Distraught, on the verge of tears, Skeet pleaded, “Don’t start this. Don’t start. It’ll never stop if you start now.”

Dusty recognized the truth of what Skeet said. After all these years of keeping his head down, all these years of enduring and being dutiful but distant, so much hurt remained unsalved, so many offenses had never been responded to, that the temptation now would be to redress all wrongs in one terrible venting. He wanted to avoid that dreadful plunge, but he and his mother seemed to be in a barrel on the roaring brink of Niagara, with nowhere to go but down.

“I know what I saw,” Claudette insisted. “And you’re not going to change my mind about that, not you of all people, not you, Dusty.”

He couldn’t let it go and still be sure of who he was: “You weren’t here. You weren’t in a position to see anything.”

Martie had joined them. Taking hold of Dusty’s hand, gripping it tightly, she said, “Claudette, only two people saw what happened. Me and Dusty.”

“I saw,” Claudette declared angrily. “No one can tell me what I saw or didn’t see. Who do you think you are? I’m not a doddering old senile bitch who can be told what to think, what she saw!”

Behind his mother, Junior smiled. He met Dusty’s eyes and was so lacking in shame that he didn’t look away.

“What’s wrong with you?” Claudette demanded of Dusty. “What’s wrong with you that you’d rather see your brother’s life ruined over something as meaningless as this?”

“Murder is meaningless to you?”

Claudette slapped Dusty, slapped him hard, grabbed handfuls of his shirt, tried to push him back, and as she shook him, words shook from her, too, one at a time: “You. Won’t. Do. This. Vicious. Thing. To. Me.”

“I don’t want to ruin his life, Mother. That’s the last thing I want. He needs help. Can’t you see that? He needs help, and somebody better get it for him.”

“Don’t you judge him, Dusty.” Such venom in the emphasis that she gave to his name, such bitterness. “One year of college doesn’t make you a master of psychology, you know. It doesn’t make you any damn thing at all, except a loser.”

Crying now, Skeet said, “Mother, please—”

“Shut up,” Claudette said, rounding on her younger son. “You just shut up, Holden. You didn’t see anything, and you better not pretend you did. No one will believe you, anyway, the mess you are.”

As Martie pulled Skeet aside, out of the fray, Dusty looked past Claudette, to Junior, who was smirking as he watched Skeet.

Dusty almost heard the click as a switch was thrown and insight brightened a previously dark space in his mind. The Japanese called this a satori, a moment of sudden enlightenment: an odd word learned in one year of college.

Satori. Here was Junior, as fair of face as his mother, blessed with her physical grace, as well. And bright. No denying how very bright he was. At her age, he would be her last child, and the only one with the prospect to fulfill her expectations. Here was her last chance to be not merely a woman of ideas, to be not merely the bride to a man of ideas, but to be the mother of a man of ideas. Indeed, in her mind, though not in reality, here was her last chance to be associated with ideas that might move the world, because her first three husbands had proved to be men whose big ideas had no solidity and had popped at the first prick. Even Derek, with all his success, was a chupaflor, not an eagle, and Claudette knew it. Dusty was, in her mind, too pigheaded to fulfill his potential, and Skeet was too fragile. And Dominique, her first child, was long and safely dead. Dusty had never known his half sister, had seen one photo of her, perhaps the only ever taken: her sweet, small, gentle face. Junior was the only hope that remained for Claudette, and she was determined to believe that his mind and his heart were as fair as his face.

While she was still browbeating Skeet, Dusty heard himself say, “Mother, how did Dominique die?”

The question, dangerous in this context, silenced Claudette as nothing else except perhaps another gunshot would have done.

He met her eyes and didn’t turn to stone, as she intended, and shame — rather than a lack of it — kept him from looking away. Shame that he had known the truth, intuitively at first and then through the application of logic and reflection, had known the truth since boyhood and yet had denied it to himself and had never spoken. Shame that he allowed her and Skeet’s pompous father and then Derek Lampton to grind Skeet down, when ferreting out the truth about Dominique might have disarmed them and given Skeet a better life.

“You must have been heartbroken,” Dusty said, “when your first child was born with Down’s syndrome. Such high hopes, and such sad reality.”

“What are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even more highly charged with anger.