Dad that she knows for a fact that Stephen is straight. Very. Remember, I’m not home, so the sexual volleys might be racier and nastier than usual.
The result? Dad is confronted for the first time with the news that Mom has been with someone other than him, and it is-how’s this for an irony?-the leader of those so-called Holy Rollers who Dad thinks are just such total losers. Moreover, for all he knows, Mom has been with Stephen awhile. Maybe not merely when Dad was living out at the lake. Maybe before he left. Maybe even when he was living right here in little old Haverill. It’s around eight o’clock at night. That old school professor’s voice of his is swamped by serious rage: Mom’s latest infraction isn’t just wearing a top that’s too revealing or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. She has tossed a hand grenade down the front of his pants.
You what? I hear him yelling in my head, and she repeats whatever it was that she said the first time about Stephen and her and how they’d been sleeping together. Or how they’d been lovers. I honestly can’t decide the precise wording of the bombshell, because as well as I knew my mom, there were just some things we never talked about. I mean, she had never told me that she and Stephen had been hooking up. But I’m sure there is a moment when my dad can’t believe what he’s hearing and has her repeat herself.
And so my mom does.
And when you repeat things, you add things. The adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Fisher, taught us that. And so I see my mom realizing that for the first time ever, she has wounded Dad, really smacked him back hard, and so she starts piling it on. She tells him whatever it was that Stephen gave her that marriage to my dad doesn’t. She talks about how intelligent and well educated Stephen is (an incredibly sharp dagger for Dad, since he never went to college). Or how tender. Or how gentle. But she always brings it back to the fact that they were lovers, because she has seen that this really ticks him off.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t have a death wish. I really believe that, too. I really don’t think she thought for even a split second that my dad was going to kill her. Hit her? Sure. Pound her a couple of times? Hell, yes. But I am absolutely convinced that she didn’t see him taking his hands and strangling her. Stephen is very smart, but he was wrong about that.
First, of course, my dad probably slugs her. For one of the only times ever, he even hits her in the face. Open hand, backhand, a fist. I don’t know. No one told me a lot about what the medical examiner said about the condition of their bodies, and I don’t even know if you can tell in the end whether a bruise was caused by knuckles or palm. I never asked. Heather would tell me later that she hadn’t asked, either: She hadn’t asked anyone what had gone down when her dad killed her mom. And she told me that she regretted that. But still I didn’t ask. I mean, how could I?
So my dad hits Mom. Does she hit him back? No way. My mom was never going to hit back. Besides, she has just had the wind knocked out of her. Or she has fallen to the floor. Or she has banged into something (that seemed to happen a lot). I see her on the floor in the living room, Dad standing over her. And when she gets her breath back or she gets back in control, she says something more about Stephen. As my grandfather-my dad’s dad-always says, in for a nickel, in for a dime. And Dad is thinking the same thing.
And then-
Which is when he kills her. He loses all control. He has his hands around her neck, and he is shaking her, maybe not realizing that this is it-that he has passed the line of all reason-but shaking her and pressing his thumbs against her esophagus. I have tried to see what it must have felt like. One time I even had Tina squeeze my neck till I said, “Enough, I get it.” (She was creeped out, but she understood what I wanted to know, and so she did it.) It must have hurt like crazy. Agony. But here is that expression again: in for a nickel, in for a dime. Once you’ve started to kill your wife, how do you stop?
And so my dad didn’t, even though my mom had to have been trying to get him to. Although I have never asked, I’m sure she fought back, if only because it must have hurt so much. She must have tried to push him away or get his fingers off her neck. She must have tried to hit him or scratch him hard enough that he’d release her, if only for a second.
And then, before he knew it, she was dead in his hands. And that’s the thing about the way he killed her: One minute she was alive in his hands, and the next she was dead. One minute she was struggling, and the next she wasn’t. Fighting. Not fighting. Breathing. Not breathing.
And that, in my opinion, is when my dad polished off the rest of the beers that we had in the house. He was drunk when he killed her, but not nearly as drunk as he’d be when he died.
AND YET ONLY a little more than two months before that nightmare, Mom had taken him back. Had him move in with us again. I thought this was nuts even then and told her that I thought this was a very bad idea. But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just believe whatever we want. And I guess my mom wanted to believe that everything would be different.
I really wasn’t all that surprised when she sat me down one night in May and said Dad was coming home. There had been plenty of signals-Exhibit A, all those flowers. And Dad had been getting goopier and goopier on the telephone, telling me that he was convinced we would soon be reunited as a family and how much this meant to him, since in a few years I would be off to college and he didn’t have a lot of time left with me. (He sure was right about that one.) He had also been saying for weeks that he knew he would still make mistakes in his life because he wasn’t perfect, but he was positive that the worst was behind him. (Okay, he was wrong there.) And he did sound better. Happier. He said he wasn’t drinking.
But there had been signals from Mom, too. The biggest one was that sometime in the late spring something happened between Stephen and her. I don’t know for sure when they first started hooking up, but I think it was before Christmas, when Dad was still living at home. And you could just see Mom opening up like one of her roses that winter. She was less nervous, more confident. She was laughing a lot more. Suddenly anything and everything could be funny. My big worry in the beginning? Dad would figure out something was up and that fight would be the sort they would eventually have in July. (I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he would kill her. But I thought it would be bad with a capital B.) But in early May she started retreating again. Our dinners got quiet. She suggested we eat supper in the living room in front of DVDs of the TV shows I liked, which I knew she did when she didn’t want to talk-when she couldn’t cope. I had been making my own lunch for school for years, but when she was happy that winter and spring, she would insist on offering me advice: She would throw in an apple or a clementine, she would surprise me with the macaroon cookies I liked from the bakery. That changed, too. She might still be in the kitchen when I was making my lunch, but she would sit at the table sipping her coffee, not exactly a zombie, because sometimes she would be toying with a crossword puzzle, but not exactly present, either. She would be dressed for work by then, because a lot of days she would drive me to school before continuing on to the bank. And what she considered dressed for work changed, too. In the winter she had started dressing a lot cooler, especially after Dad was gone. The jeans were a little tighter on Monday, when she didn’t have work, and the skirts were a little tighter the rest of the week. No more of those I’m-running-for-Congress pants suits. Sometimes she even allowed her blouses to show a little cleavage, a hint of bra. After Dad was out the door in February, it was like she had bought a whole new wardrobe. Unfortunately, those clothes went the way of her laughter as summer approached.
I asked her about this once, but she was pretty cagey. That’s one thing I have learned about women like my mom: There are no people in the world who are better at keeping secrets. You want to find a good spy? Pick a battered woman. There are things they won’t tell a soul. And they can really take a punch.
Anyway, Mom sat me down one evening, and I knew instantly what was coming. It was May, so the days were getting long, and I remember there were a ton of birds at the feeders. Mom had three, and they were all on the opposite side of the house from her vegetable garden, because she loved birds, but she loved her garden, too, and she didn’t want the robins or the blue jays eating her seeds. And she had just planted most of the garden and put her freaky clear plastic tepees over her tomato-and pepper-plant seedlings. The tepees always looked like they belonged in a science-fiction movie or video game: You know, the way the human colony grew things on some faraway planet. We were sitting on the steps (the same steps where I have always imagined they ate their last
