'You must realize, Russell, that Grace is lying about almost everything.'
'She is most definitely not lying about the burns on her feet.'
'Burns?'
'Continue, Amber.'
For the next twenty minutes, Amber built her case against our daughter: Grace had learned to lie while learning to talk; she had never answered to anyone but herself; she was self-serving, evasive, and capable of small malice; she had increasingly lived in a 'dream world' since the age of four or five; she talked to 'characters' who were not visible-, she invented tragic histories for nonexistent friends; she spun tales of classmates and neighbors engaged in preposterous behavior that Amber, upon investigation, had rarely found to be true; she seemed to derive almost as much enjoyment from being caught at a lie as from getting away with one.
'She can change the truth faster than I can change expressions, Russ.'
'I wonder where she learned to do that.'
'Go ahead. Believe her. It's a game where she forces a choice. But I've been down this road enough times to know where the curves are.'
'And you will not be held responsible.'
'You've become cruel, Russell.'
'I go with my strengths.'
I sped down the interstate, the suburbs still sprawling every direction as far as the eye could see. As far as the Midnight Eye could see, I thought. What a hell this place had become,
'I'm not trying to exonerate myself, Russell. I'm just trying to tell you there are explanations for what I did in… another life.' 'What did you do in the other life?'
'For one thing, I ignored my own conscience.'
'And Alice was a place for you to start.'
Amber was silent for a long moment. 'Yes. Yes, she was. You know, I was always so ashamed of her. One of the reason I left home at sixteen was so I would never have the time become like her. And now, Russ, when I say those words, I feel small and foolish and terribly selfish again.'
Her daughter's mother, I thought, but did not say it. 'What was so bad about her?'
'Nothing that I can see now, but then, when I was a little girl, well…'
'Well what?'
Amber breathed deeply. 'I don't know how it happened but since I was very small, my family frightened me. They seemed like… like… imposters, or beings from another planet.
Fultz. What a crude and backwoods name. Alice was two years older than I. Daddy was a roofer, always covered with asphalt that stuck in the cracks of his fingers and never went away. Mom took in cleaning. She had this dress I remember, a cotton/ poly shift kind of thing with vertical stripes of green and pink, and a little pink tie at the top, and gathered short sleeves that pinched her arms tight. It was always clean. She wore it all the time, it seemed. I hated its ugliness, its shapelessness, the way it made her look aged and hopeless and unattractive. Alice wanted to be like Mom. She'd help with the washing and ironing. She'd wear the same kind of dress. They both liked wearing those fake leather sandals that have a band over the toes and a sole that wears out and slaps against your heel when you walk. So, slap-slap-slap, Alice and Mom going from the washer to the drying line, slap-slap-slap, Mom and Alice going back to the porch when the wash was hung. And the way Mom held the clothespins in her teeth, fanned out like wooden cigarettes, and Alice, of course, chomping her own collection, slap-slap- slap, back to the ironing boards. One time I remember sitting in the shade of the porch and watching them. They were side by side at the clothesline, moving the pins from their mouths to the clothes. Mom was heavy by then, and Alice still very thin, but I swear I could see my sister's posture becoming old even then, and she couldn't have been much more than twelve. I had a magazine on my lap, a Cosmopolitan, I believe, and on the open page before me was a picture of a woman and her daughter running across a street in Paris, the mom holding down her hat, the daughter swinging a tiny shiny purse, both of them smiling and the men in the cafe looking most appreciatively after them. And I knew I would be that woman-one of those women-someday. This may sound like a vanity beyond vanities, Russ, but when I held a good heavy magazine in my lap as a girl and I smelled the smooth paper and looked at the attractive print and saw those advertisements, I simply knew-I understood that was where I belonged. I was positive. No slap slap-slap. I remember I cried then because I was so far away from Paris. And Russ, I'm crying now when I think about what a rotten brat I was, and when I think about Alice. How could anyone do that to her? She was an innocent, Russ. I flew her out to try to begin again, to become the sister I never was, and got her killed.'
'What were you going to do with her?'
'Love her! Treat her well. See if she or Mom and Dad or anybody needed anything. Start over! Jesus, Russell, is that so hard to understand?'
'How many of her boyfriends did you steal?'
'Shit on you, Russell.'
'I imagine one was enough. One, Amber? One special guy of Alice's?'
She slapped me again, quite hard. 'He tried. I wouldn’t. It doesn't matter.'
'Is that why you couldn't trust your own daughter when she got older? Because your sister didn't trust you?'
She looked out the window for a long time. 'There maybe some truth in that.'
'How much truth?' 'None of your business how much. What you need know is that I'd become proud of her. She turned out pretty by the pictures she sent me, although she was poor and never found a good job. And you know something? In the last few months, I'd begun to feel proud of all of us. Proud of our poverty, proud of the ugly dresses, proud of the fact that we were what we were. And what I wanted more than anything was to help Alice and tell her what a fool I'd been, and that I was proud I be a Florida Fultz. The last job she had was in a bowling alley cocktailing out by Orlando. I was feeling damned proud to have a sister who was humble enough to cocktail at a damned bowling alley. I believed there was a lot I could learn from her. I wanted her… forgiveness.'
By then, Amber was sobbing again. 'And you know what made the change begin? Grace did. I looked back on our lives and I looked at all the fancy schools I dragged her in and out of, all the expensive tutors, all the elaborate meals in European capitals, all the attention we got, all the travel and excitement and money, money, money, all the paparazzi and covers and suntans and rubdowns and mud baths, and I couldn't remember one moment when we did anything like stand by a clothesline with pins in our mouths, just doing something together because it had to be done and making the best of it. I actually asked her, at one point, not to call me Mother. To call me only Amber. I lost Grace, Russell, more than you did. There was a point when she leveled those brown eyes of yours on me and I saw that she had distanced herself, that she feared me the same way I feared my own mother, and she was gone for me. The only thing I could think to do was hold on harder, keep her closer. Didn't work. Do you know that for the last six months she's never once returned a call? I do not exist for her. It breaks my heart.'
It was my turn then for silence. Her words seemed so alien, her voice so, well, genuine. 'Thanks for the updated Fultz family bio,' I said. 'The last I was told, Daddy was a banker and Mommy a beauty queen.'
'It… it was easier to believe an appearance.'
'So what appearance was it that let you keep me away from my own daughter when she was a girl?'
'Oh, Russell, no.'
'If you're coming clean, include me.'
She sighed significantly, perhaps a tad histrionically. 'The idea of my daughter being brought up sheltered and conservative in boring old Orange County. Surrounded by dull, conventional, materialistic people. Inexperienced, untraveled, unsophisticated. Gad, I sound bad. But I wanted her to be a true princess in this world.'
'Unpolluted by a common sheriff's deputy hauling down twenty-six grand a year.'
'Yes.'
'But you married Martin Parish, who later in life thought highly enough of you to try to kill you.'
'Marty was interim. A way to get you out of my life.'
'Damn.'
'I know.'
I thought for a moment. 'Well, thanks for saying so. I suspected it was that, but it clarifies the stupidity of the whole notion to hear you admit it.'
'Pound away, Russell. This is your big moment.'
