Shakespeare’s Christmas

exhausted again.

Mother eyed me sharply. “You didn’t sleep well,” she said. “Bad dreams again?” And she and Varena and my father stared at me with matching expressions of concern.

“I’m absolutely all right,” I said, trying to be civil, hating them thinking about the ordeal again. Was I being disgustingly self-pitying? It was just being home.

For the first time it occurred to me that if I’d been able to stay longer after the attack, if I’d toughed it out, they might have become used to me again, and they would have seen my life as a continuation, not a broken line. But I’d felt compelled to leave, and their clearest, most recent memory of me was of a woman in horrible pain of both kinds, plagued by nightmares waking and sleeping.

“I’ll go clean now.” I pulled on my coat.

“Dill’s at work checking his inventory,” Varena said. “I don’t know how long he’ll be. We’ll be picking Anna up and taking her straight to Penney’s from the party. Then we’ll come back here.” I nodded and went to get my purse.

Mother and Varena were still fine-tuning their agenda when I walked out the door. My father was working a crossword puzzle, a half smile on his face as he caught snatches of their discussion. He didn’t loathe this wedding frenzy, as most men did or pretended to. He loved it. He was having a great time fussing about the cost of the reception, whether he needed to go to the church to borrow yet another table for the still-incoming gifts, whether Varena had written every single thank-you note promptly.

I touched Father’s shoulder as I went by, and he reached up and captured my hand. After a second, he patted it gently and let me go.

Dill owned an undistinguished three-bedroom, three bath ranch-style in the newest section of Bartley. Varena had given me a key. It still felt strange to find a locked door in my little hometown. When I’d been growing up, no one had ever locked anything.

On the way to Dill’s, I’d seen another homeless person, this one a white woman. She was gray-haired but sturdy looking, pedaling an ancient bicycle laden down with an assortment of strange items bound together with nylon rope.

The night before, my parents’ friends had been talking about gang activity at the Bartley High School. Gangs! In the Arkansas Delta! In flat, remote, tiny, impoverished Bartley.

I guess in some corner of my mind, I’d expected Bartley would remain untouched by the currents of the world, would retain its small-town safety and assurance. Home had changed. I could go there again, but its character was permanently altered.

Abruptly, I was sick of myself and my problems. It was high time I got back to work.

I started, as I like to do, with a survey of the job to be done. Dill’s house, which looked freshly painted and carpeted, was fairly straight and fairly clean-but, like the Osborns‘, it was showing signs of a few days of neglect. Varena wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of prolonged wedding fever.

I had no guide here to show me where everything was. I wondered if Anna would have been as interesting a helper as Eve had been the day before.

That recalled me to the purpose of my cleaning offer. Before anything or anyone could interrupt me, I searched Anna’s room for her memory book. As I searched, naturally I picked up her room, which was a real mess. I slung soiled clothes into the hamper, stacked school papers, tossed dolls into a clear Rubbermaid tub firmly labeled “Dolls and doll clothes.”

I found the memory book under her bed. Page 23 was missing.

I rocked back on my haunches, feeling as though an adversary had socked me in the stomach.

“No,” I said out loud, hearing the misery in my own voice.

After a few minutes trying to think, I stuck the book in the rack on Anna’s little desk and kept on cleaning. There was nothing else for me to do.

I had to face the fact that the page that had been sent to Roy Costimiglia and passed to Jack had almost certainly come from Anna’s book. But, I told myself, that didn’t have to mean Anna was Summer Dawn Macklesby.

The book being in Dill’s house perhaps raised the odds that someone besides Meredith Osborn might have mailed the page to Roy Costimiglia. At least, that was what I thought. But I wished I’d found the book anywhere but here.

If Anna was the abducted child, Dill could be suffering from the terrible dichotomy of wanting to square things with Summer’s family and wanting to keep his beloved daughter. What if his unstable wife had been the one to kidnap the Macklesby baby, and Dill had just now become aware of it? He’d raised Anna as his own for eight years.

And if Dill’s first wife had abducted Summer Dawn, what had happened to their biological baby?

As I paired Anna’s shoes and placed them on a rack in the closet, I saw a familiar blue cover peeking from behind a pair of rain boots. I frowned and squatted, reaching back in the closet and finally managing to slide a finger between the book and wall. I fished out the book and flipped it over to read the cover.

It was another copy of the memory book.

I opened it, hoping fervently that Anna had written her name in it. No name.

“Shit,” I said out loud. When I’d been young, and we’d gotten our yearbooks, or memory books, or whatever you wanted to call them, the first thing we’d done was write our names inside.

One of these books had to be Anna’s. If Jack’s basic assumption was correct, if the person who’d sent the memory book page to Roy Costimiglia wasn’t a complete lunatic, then the other book belonged to either Eve or Krista, and it was someone very close to one of them who had sent the picture. Like someone in their house. A parent.

Dill was using the third bedroom as a study. There was a framed picture of Dill holding a baby I presumed was Anna. The snapshot had obviously been taken in a hospital room, and Anna looked like a newborn. But to me all babies looked more or less the same, and the infant Dill was gazing at so lovingly could have been Anna, or it could have been another child. The baby was swaddled in a receiving blanket.

I cleaned, scrubbed, and worried at the problem. I straightened and dusted and vacuumed and polished and mopped, and the activity did me good. But I didn’t solve anything.

When I went in Anna’s room yet again to return a Barbie I’d found in the kitchen, I looked more closely at Anna’s collection of framed snapshots. One was of a woman I was sure must be Dill’s first wife, Anna’s mother. She was buxom, like Varena; and like Varena her hair was brown, her eyes blue. Aside from those superficial similarities, she didn’t look at all like my sister, really. I stared at the picture, trying to read the woman’s character in this likeness. Was there something tense, something a little desperate, in the way she was clutching the little dog on her lap? Was her smile strained, insincere?

I shook my head. I would never have given the picture two thoughts if I hadn’t known that the woman had eventually killed herself. So much despair, so well hidden. Dill had an unstable mother, had married an unstable wife. I was frightened that he could see something deep in Varena that we didn’t suspect, some inner weakness, that attracted him or made him feel comfortable with her. But Varena seemed sane and sturdy to me, and I have a built-in Geiger counter for the ripples of instability in others.

It felt odd to see Varena’s clothes hanging in half of Dill’s closet, her china in his cabinets. She had really and truly moved into Dill’s house. That intimacy bore in on me how much Varena would lose if Anna was someone else’s daughter, for surely there would be the scandal to end all scandals… media coverage, intense and drenching. I shivered. I knew how that could affect your life.

The wedding was so close. One more day.

Very reluctantly, I reentered Dill’s office and opened the filing cabinet. I had put on a pair of fresh rubber gloves, and I kept them on. That shows you how guilty I was feeling.

But this had to be done.

Dill was an orderly man, and I quickly found the file labeled simply “Anna-Year One.” There was a separate file for each year of her life, containing drawings, pictures, and a page of cute things she’d said or done. The school-age files were crammed with report cards and test scores.

As far as I was concerned, Anna’s first year was the most important. The file contained Anna’s birth certificate, a record of her immunizations, her baby book, and some negatives in a white envelope marked “Baby Is Born.” The handwriting wasn’t Dill’s. There was not a thing there that would prove Anna’s identity one way or another. No