narrowly avoided a collision with an oncoming car or he had navigated a turn with only the barest of clearances. That Christmas Eve we lost a hubcap from the right rear tire when he grazed a farmer’s old stone wall a good ten feet off the road-our white Cutlass Supreme traversing in a blink the frozen ground with its patches of rock-hard ice and snow-and I think only Amanda and I understood how close the call had been. (The next day it would be my grandmother, a guest at our house for Christmas, who would inform my parents that the hubcap was gone when she innocently asked them where it was. They were, as they were most Christmas days, enduring such excruciating hangovers that they didn’t even bother to venture outside to the driveway to take a look.) All the while Amanda prayed beside me in the backseat, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips silently moving. It has crossed my mind numerous times over the years that the only reason we survived that night was my sister’s terrified entreaties to either an angel or God.
When we got home, I presumed that the worst was over. Given my parents’ relationship, there was absolutely no reason to make that assumption. But I did. Amanda went directly to her room, and I went to the den to see if there was anything at all on television other than the Yule log: essentially a televised fireplace with Christmas carols in the background. My mother sat down with me on the couch and tried to wrap her arm around my shoulders, but that night I was resistant to her embraces. She tried to win me over with a remark about how only a year or two earlier I might have been putting out cookies for Santa and then racing upstairs to bed so I would be asleep when he arrived with his reindeer. But I was in no mood to try to add a patina to what had always been a childhood of Christmas Eves marked by my parents’ verbal and, on occasion, physical brawls. Quickly my mother sensed my frame of mind, and even though she was still very drunk, she left. She kissed me on the forehead and stumbled to her feet on shaky legs. She had kicked off her boots as soon as she had walked in the door, but even in her stocking feet she was having trouble negotiating the plush living-room carpet. And then, all alone, I clicked back and forth among the four or five television stations we had.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that my parents began to argue. I will never know precisely what triggered that one, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that soon after they started, I heard the sound of a great amount of glass shattering, and I knew it was the beveled mirror that was suspended by two oak arms above my mother’s dresser-a Victorian piece that I know now was well over one hundred years old. Then my father emerged from the bedroom and stomped toward the top of the stairs, where he paused for a moment at the balcony that ran perhaps fifteen feet along the corridor, his hands in fists at his sides as he surveyed the first floor. I gazed up at him, but our eyes never met and I wasn’t altogether sure that he had registered I was there on the living-room couch. He was still in the clothes he had worn that evening, though his shirt was untucked and the top three or four buttons were open. His T-shirt was the color of a peach. His wonderful, creosote-black hair, which had been slicked back at the party, looked now as if he had teased it with spaghetti tongs.
My mother appeared behind him in only her panties and blouse, barefoot, and her own hair-a great flaxen mane-was also in disarray. Her lipstick was smeared like a clown’s, and her mascara was dripping in rivulets down the right side of her face. (It’s possible, I imagine, that it was running from her left eye as well, but I recall noticing at the time that for some reason only her right cheek was streaked with makeup.) She was sobbing and she was furious and she threw herself at him, pounding her fists into his back and shoulders with such force that it looked for a split second as if he would hurtle over the side of the balustrade and fall either one flight into the living room or- worse-a full two flights if he tumbled over the section of balcony that was above the stairs that linked the living room with the finished basement.
“Stop it!” he yelled, grabbing her fists in his hands. “Settle the fuck down! You nearly fucking killed me!”
“You stop it, just stop everything!” she screamed back, a demand that, as unreasonable as it was, might have accomplished its intent if she hadn’t added, “You are pathetic. You are just the most pathetic loser.”
“Pathetic? I’m not so fucking drunk I-”
“‘Fucking’? Why don’t you swear some more in front of your children? Why don’t you tell them what you just called me? Heather, do you want to know what your father just called me?” I hadn’t any idea how to respond to this appeal, and so I murmured-not loud enough for them to hear over the din of the television and their own verbal pyrotechnics-“Don’t fight. Please. Don’t fight.” In my mind I see myself curled up on the couch in the red Christmas skirt from Saks Fifth Avenue and the turtleneck dotted with silver snowflakes I had worn that evening, a throw pillow clutched in my arms as if it were a stuffed animal. I’m sure I was crying, too.
“You’re a drunk, you know that?” my father told her, and he released her fingers as if they were a fish he was tossing with two hands into a lake, his arms upraised when the movement was done. “You’re a fucking drunk and the poorest fucking excuse for a mother I’ve ever seen. You’re a shrew and-”
He never finished the sentence, because my mother, her hands newly freed, slapped him, and the stinging
“You’re drunk,” my father scolded her.
“You’re drunk!” she shouted back. “And you’re a drunk, too! You’re a wretched and feeble excuse for a man! Your own father knows it, your mother knows it, your daughters know it. They know. They know.”
She pushed off against the wall and stood to face him. “They know,” she mocked him one more time, and she glanced down at me for the merest of seconds. And so my father smacked her again, but this time she was prepared for the blow and remained on her feet, though her body fell hard against the wall, her head bouncing like a basketball off the Sheetrock and causing the small framed print of a rosebush near her to quiver.
“They know their mother’s a shrew!” he yelled. “That’s what they know! She’s a fucking, bleeding, harpy shrew who can’t even keep her goddamn underwear clean!”
She dropped her hands to her sides in a posture of absolute submissiveness and hissed, “Hit me again, you drunken fool! Hit me again.”
And so he did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Initially Stephen didn’t tell me why the deputy state’s attorney or those state troopers from Vermont seemed to suspect him of some involvement in that tragic murder and suicide in his community. He had shared with me a very great deal about Alice our first days together in Manhattan, but somehow he had missed that one small detail that they’d been lovers. He had had many opportunities when it would have made sense to tell me, beginning with the day we met right up until the day that we left Statler-especially when we reached the highway on our way back to New York City and he discovered that his cell phone had a series of messages from the Vermont State Police. Weeks later his defense would be that I would have misconstrued what had happened in those months and who he was as a person. Likewise, he said, I wouldn’t understand what had really occurred that July night in Haverill and why it had ended so horribly.
The reality is that had he told me at any point in those first days we were together, I wouldn’t have felt the need later on to withdraw. He could have told me in Haverill, and he could have told me in Manhattan. He could have told me in the hours and hours we spent in the car driving to and from the Adirondacks. He could have told me on our hikes in the mountains or after we had made love in the woods, in those moments of postcoital intimacy when we shared so much of our personal histories. We spoke of so many of our lovers, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have understood. I had felt that the angels were with us those days.
I was, quite obviously, mistaken. I had allowed my mortal judgment to cloud my celestial instincts.
FOR YEARS I had worn a small gold cross around my neck. It really wasn’t much bigger than a thumbnail. It was a gift I had been given by my aunt when I was born, with the assumption that I would grow into it. When my mother finally shared it with me, I must have been seven, and I had little regard for it. It sat in the bottom of my elementary-school jewelry box, along with plastic hoops and clip-on seashell earrings and pretend pearl necklaces.
