The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger of being crushed alive.
“And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant death syndrome. How difficult to endure it…the whispers, the medical inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.”
Martie drew a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said, “Dusty,” meaning
He had never spoken up when it might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five, going on six…a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?”
“I guess,” Skeet said shakily.
“They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved not to be the case.”
“My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him.
“Maybe that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.”
Claudette regarded Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what she feared most.
He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph of Dominique.”
She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the air, the blow not struck.
In some respects, this was the hardest thing that Dusty had ever done, and yet in other ways it was so easy that it frightened him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the hallway outside the nursery.”
Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from Dusty.
His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him.
Junior stepped forward protectively.
“Better pick up your crossbow and load it,” Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.”
Although the violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s, Junior backed off.
“When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t remember what. But you knew I was there, and you…stopped. At the time, I didn’t know what had almost happened. But later…years later, I did understand, but wouldn’t face it.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”
Although Dusty had faith in the power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all.
Claudette’s teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws.
“A couple minutes ago, Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even give you pause. Which is odd, because
“Are you done?”
“Not quite. After all these years of putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say. I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we all have, and we’re going to suffer more—”
Clawing at his hand, drawing two thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said, “If Dominique hadn’t been a Down’s baby, and if I hadn’t spared her that half life she would’ve led, and if she were alive here and now, wouldn’t that be worse? Wouldn’t
The sense she made diminished as the volume of her voice rose, and Dusty had no idea what she meant.
Junior moved closer to his mother’s side. They stood hand in hand, drawing a strange strength from each other.
Pointing toward the dead man sprawled in the foyer below, a gesture that seemed to have no connection to her words, she said, “Down’s was at least an obvious condition. What if she’d seemed normal but then…all grown up, what if she’d been just like her father?”
Dominique’s father, Claudette’s first husband, had been more than twenty years her senior, a psychologist named Lief Reissler, a cold fish with pale eyes and a pencil mustache, who had thankfully played no role in either Dusty’s or Skeet’s life. A cold fish, yes, but not the monster that her question implied he was.
Before Dusty could express his bafflement, Claudette clarified. After three days of shocks that he’d thought had forever inoculated him against surprise, she rocked him with eight words: “What if she’d been just like Mark Ahriman?” The rest was superfluous: “You say he burns down houses, he shoots people, he’s a sociopath, and this crazy man who’s dead downstairs is somehow associated with him. So would you want his child for your half sister?”
She raised Junior’s hand and kissed it, as though to say that she was especially glad that she had spared him the problem of this difficult sister.
When Dusty had claimed to know her worst secrets, all the worst, she assumed he’d been referring to more than the fact that the sudden infant death syndrome that claimed Dominique had truly been ruthless suffocation.
Now, because of his reaction and Martie’s, Claudette realized this revelation need never have been made, but instead of retreating into silence, she tried to explain.
“Lief was infertile. We were never going to be able to have children. I was twenty-one, and Lief was forty- four, and he could have been the perfect father, with his tremendous knowledge, all his insights, his theories of emotional development. Lief had a brilliant child-rearing philosophy.”
Yes, they all had their child-rearing philosophies, their deep insights, and their abiding interest in social engineering. Medicate to educate, and all that.
“Mark Ahriman was just seventeen, but he’d started college soon after his thirteenth birthday, and he’d already earned a doctorate by the time I met him. He was a prodigy’s prodigy, and everyone at the university was in awe of him. A genius almost beyond measure. He was no one’s idea of a perfect father. He was a snooty Hollywood brat. But the
“Did he know the child was his?”
“Yes. Why not? None of us was that conventional.”
The buzzing in Dusty’s head, which was the accompanying theme music for any visit to this house, had settled into a more ominous tone than usual. “When Dominique was born with Down’s…how did you handle that, Mother?”
She stared at the blood on his hand, which she had drawn with her fingernails, and when she raised her eyes to meet his, she said only, “You know how I handled it.”
Once more, she lifted Junior’s hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles, this time as if to say that all her problems with damaged children had been worth enduring now that she had been given him.
Dusty said, “I meant, not how did you handle Dominique. How did you handle the news of her condition? If I know you, Ahriman got his ear bent almost off. I’ll bet you dished out more humiliation to him than a snotty Hollywood brat is used to.”
