What The Dead Know

that wives either tolerated or didn’t. The women in affairs were young and toothsome and unencumbered- secretaries and stewardesses, Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. Miriam couldn’t have an affair. She was a mother, a good one. Poor Mrs. Baumgarten. Her husband was clearly cheating on her, but she had lashed out blindly, settling on Miriam because she was a handy target.

He dialed Miriam’s office number, and let it ring, but the receptionist didn’t pick up. Ah well, Miriam was probably still out at an open house, and the receptionist had left for the day. He would ask her about it tonight, something he should do more often anyway. Ask Miriam about her work. Because surely it was her work that had given her so much confidence recently. It was the commissions that accounted for the glow in her face, the bounce in her step, the tears in the bathroom late at night.

The tears in the bathroom …but no, that was Sunny, poor sensitive Sunny, for whom ninth grade had been a torture of ostracism, all because he and Miriam had tried to fight the other parents over the bus route. At least that’s what he’d told himself when, sitting in his study late at night, he had heard those muffled sobs in the bathroom at the head of the stairs, the one that the whole family shared. He’d sat in his study, pretending to listen to music, pretending he was respecting the privacy of the crying female just a stair climb away.

Dave tore the letter in pieces, grabbed his keys, and locked up, heading down the street to Monaghan’s Tavern, another Woodlawn establishment doing a booming business on the Saturday before Easter.

CHAPTER 10

You were supposed to stay away from me,” Sunny hissed at Heather after the usher dragged them both out of the movie theater and said they were banned for the day. “You promised.”

“I got worried when you didn’t come back from the bathroom. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. Certainly Heather had wondered why Sunny had left fifteen minutes into Escape to Witch Mountain and not returned. And she’d been worried that Sunny was trying to dump her, so she had gone outside, looked in the bathroom, then sneaked into the other side, where the R-rated Chinatown was playing. Sunny must have been pulling this trick for a while, Heather figured, buying a ticket for the PG movie on one side of the theater, then using a bathroom visit to gain entrance to the R-rated one while no one was looking.

She took a seat two rows back from Sunny, the same maneuver she’d used in Escape to Witch Mountain. (“It’s a free country,” she announced airily when Sunny had glared at her.) This time she’d gone undetected until the moment the little man had inserted his knife in the other man’s nose. Then she had gasped, quite audibly, and Sunny had turned at the sound of her voice.

Heather had assumed that Sunny would ignore her, rather than draw attention to both of them. But Sunny came back to where she was sitting and, in urgent whispers, told her that she had to leave immediately. Heather shook her head, pointing out that she was observing the rules that Sunny had set down. She wasn’t with her. She just happened to be at the same movie theater. Like she said, it was a free country. An old woman called the usher, and they were both thrown out when they couldn’t produce the proper ticket stubs. Heather, being Heather, had lied and said she’d lost hers, but slow-thinking Sunny had produced the ticket for Theater One, where Escape was playing. A shame, because busty as she was, Sunny might have passed for seventeen. If their ages were reversed, if Heather were the older one, she would have been able to get them out of it-lying smoothly to the usher about her lost ticket, claiming to be seventeen and arguing that a sister counted as the adult supervision required for an R movie. What was the good of an older sister if she didn’t act like one? Here was Sunny, on the verge of tears because of a stupid movie. Heather thought it was crazy, spending precious mall time to sit in the dark, when there were so many things to see and smell and taste.

“It was boring anyway,” Heather said. “Although it was scary when that guy got his nose cut.”

“You don’t know anything,” Sunny said. “That movie was directed by the man with the knife. Mr. Roman Polanski, whose wife was killed by Charles Manson. He’s a genius.”

“Let’s go to Hoschild’s. Or the Pants Corral. I want to look at the Sta-Prest slacks.”

“Slacks don’t wrinkle that much,” Sunny said, still snuffling a bit. “That’s stupid.”

“It’s what all the girls are wearing now that we’re allowed to wear pants to school.”

“You shouldn’t want a thing just because everyone else has it. You don’t want to run with the herd.” That was their father’s voice coming through Sunny’s mouth, and Heather knew that Sunny herself didn’t believe a word of it.

“Okay, let’s go to Harmony Hut, then, or the bookstore.” On her last visit to the mall, Heather had sneaked a look at what seemed to be a dirty book, although she couldn’t be sure. There were lots of promising descriptions of the heroine’s breasts pressing against the thin fabric of her dress, usually a good sign that something dirty was about to happen. She was trying to work up her nerve to read the book with the zipper on the cover-not a real zipper, like the Rolling Stones album cover that Sunny owned, but one that nevertheless revealed a portion of a woman’s naked body. She needed to find a bigger book to put in front of it, so she could read it without drawing attention to herself. The staff at Waldenbooks didn’t care how long you stood there reading a book without buying it, as long as you didn’t try to sit down on the carpet. Then they chased you out.

“I don’t want to do anything with you,” Sunny said. “I don’t care where you go. Just do your own thing and come back here at five-twenty.”

“And you’ll buy me Karmelkorn.”

“I gave you five dollars. Buy your own Karmelkorn.”

“You said five dollars and Karmelkorn.”

“Fine, fine, what does it matter? Come back here at five-twenty and you’ll get your precious Karmelkorn. But not if I see you hanging around me again. That was the deal, remember?”

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“I just don’t want to hang out with a baby. Is that so hard to understand?”

She headed toward the Sears end of the mall, the corridor with Harmony Hut and Singer Fashions. Heather thought about following her, Karmelkorn notwithstanding. Sunny had no right to call her a baby. Sunny was the babyish one, crying so easily over the smallest things. Heather wasn’t a baby.

Once Heather had loved being the baby, had reveled in it. And when their mom had gotten pregnant, back when Heather was almost four, and they had started talking about “the baby,” it had bothered her. “I’m the baby,” she said hysterically, pushing a finger into the middle of her chest. “Heather’s the baby.” As if there could be only one baby in their family, in all the world.

That was when they moved to Algonquin Lane, to the house where everyone could have her own bedroom. Even then Heather could recognize a bribe when she saw one-you can have a bedroom, but you won’t be the baby. The house was huge compared to their apartment, big enough so that four children could have their own bedrooms. That made Heather feel better somehow. Even the new baby wouldn’t always be the baby. And Heather would get second dibs on whatever room she wanted. She thought she should get first dibs, given that she was losing baby status, but her parents explained that because Sunny was older, she would be in her room a shorter amount of time before going to college, so she should have first choice. If Heather really wanted the room that Sunny chose, then it could be hers for three years, most of high school. Even at four going on five, something in Heather rebelled at that logic, but she didn’t have the words to make an argument, and her parents were never impressed by tantrums. Her mother said exactly that when she tried: “I’m not impressed, Heather.” Her father said, “I don’t respond to that kind of behavior.” But he didn’t respond to any behavior that Heather could see. Look at Sunny. She played by their rules, marshaled her arguments and presented them in orderly fashion, and she almost never got what she wanted. Heather was much sneakier, and she usually got her way. She even got to stay the baby, although that wasn’t because of anything she did. As it turned out, the baby just hadn’t been strong enough to live outside their mother’s stomach.

When the baby died, their father made a point of telling Heather and Sunny exactly what a miscarriage was. To do that he had to explain how the baby had gotten inside their mother in the first place. Much to their dismay, he used all the proper words-penis, vagina, uterus.