I moved away from him and he saw the gun in my hand, sighed and rolled his eyes at the sight of it, as though it were a toy, as though I was throwing a childish tantrum.
“You tell them I pulled a gun on you,” I said, sounding a little shaky, a little nuts. “That you found me here and I wouldn’t go with you.”
He shook his head, gave me a disbelieving smile. “Oh, come on, Izzy”
“I love you. You’re a great husband and a great dad.”
He knew I’d never hurt him, and I knew he knew it. But we played out the scene; he saw something in my face and backed away from the door, put his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender.
“I wasn’t enough to keep him with us. None of us were.”
He blinked, somehow knowing I wasn’t talking about Marc. “This is not about your father, Izzy. This is not the same.”
I put Camilla’s bag over my shoulder.
“What am I supposed to tell them, Iz? The police? Linda and the kids?”
“The truth. Just tell them the truth. I pulled a gun on you and now I’m going after my husband.”
“The police are starting to think you’re guilty, that you had something to do with all of this. How am I going to convince them otherwise if you run off like this?”
“They’re right. I’m guilty, like any wife who is guilty for ignoring all the signs, all her instincts.”
“You’re not yourself, girl. Don’t do this.”
But I left him there and he didn’t come after me. And I left the building and ran up the street, then ducked into the subway. I wasn’t flying blind. I knew where to go, maybe where I should have been all along.
15
She never thought of that night anymore. It lived inside her like a room she never entered in a big, drafty old house. She might walk down the dark hallway might even rest her hand on the knob, but she never opened the door. She heeded Blue Beard’s warning, thought Pandora was a fool. There are some memories better abandoned. Common wisdom demanded examination of the past, probing of childhood pain and trauma. Then-acceptance, release, and ultimately forgiveness. But Linda wondered if this was always the best course. Maybe this was a philosophy that just had people picking at scabs, creating scars on flesh that might have healed better if left alone.
She didn’t want to go back there to that night when she awoke with a start, and the room she shared with Isabel was washed in a moonlight so bright that for a moment she thought it was morning. But then through her window she saw the pale blue face of the moon low and bloated in the sky. She slipped from bed, not worried about waking Izzy who slept soundly like Margie, had to be vigorously roused in the morning. She was a buried ball under the covers, her breathing so deep, so steady, it almost seemed fake. Linda moved over to the window and looked out onto the backyard. The rusting old swing set they hadn’t touched in ages sagged dangerously, its frame crooked in the moonlight. The grand old oak towered, its leaves whispering just a bit in the very slight breeze. Off near the edge of the property, just before a stand of trees, her father’s work shed stood wide and solid, looking righteous, though it was as rickety as the swing set.
She saw that one of the doors was ajar. Eagerly, she pulled on jeans under her nightgown, slipped her feet into a pair of Keds, walked quickly down the hall.
The day belonged to Isabel. But at night, when Margie and Izzy were off in their deep, dreamless sleep, Linda was Daddy’s girl. Linda shared a minor case of insomnia with her father, where sometimes the night called them both, didn’t offer any sleep at all.
“We’re the moonwalkers, my girl. Just you and me, alone with the stars.”
She crossed the yard, the dewy grass soaking through the canvas of her sneakers. She heard a rustling and banging behind her, on the side of the house. Raccoons in the garbage. Margie was going to have a fit. Linda would tell her father and they’d have a laugh. It was another thing they shared, a mischievous pleasure in the things that got her mother’s “panties in a knot.” She couldn’t have said why at the time. But when the cool and measured Margie cursed and blustered over scattered garbage, or the same fuse that always blew, or the cabinet door that kept coming off its hinge, Linda and her father exchanged a secret smile.
“Was that the only way you could connect with your father, over a shared disdain for your mother?” Erik had asked her once. Linda felt ashamed, chastised.
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. It was almost a relief when she lost her cool. Like, wow, she’s human after all-not some robot, always programmed for appropriateness. I think we liked it because-sometimes we wanted to see those frayed edges that everybody else has.”
“Hmm,” said Erik. “I don’t see her that way, not stiff and robotic like that. I find her kind of warm, funny.” “That’s because she’s not your mother.”
“Touche.”
AT THE DOOR, she’d knocked lightly. “Dad? Daddy?”
She thought she might find him dozing, sitting upright on his work stool, with his elbow on the table, chin resting on fist, eyes closed. Or he might be so focused on his work that he wouldn’t hear her come in. But then he’d look at her and smile.
“Hello, Moonbeam,” he’d say. “Have a seat.”
And she’d have him to herself. The day belonged to Izzy His eyes always drifted to Isabel first; he always laughed at her jokes loudest, was quicker to take her hand or stroke her hair. Not that he didn’t do those things with Linda, too. But it always felt like sloppy seconds, even if-and maybe because-he didn’t mean it to be.
She pushed the door and it swung wide and slow with a mournful creeking. Her sinuses began to tingle with some foreign smell that wafted out-something metallic, something sweet. The scene revealed itself in snapshots: a cigarette still burning in an ashtray, a nearly empty bottle of liquor and a toppled glass, a frozen, mocking smile, a dark swath down the white of his shirt, a pistol on the ground. Everything existed in a separate frame, nothing coalesced. It was too dark to see the gore. He’d put the gun beneath his chin, an inefficient way to end your life, better at the temple where there’s no margin for error.
At the time, she’d fixated on the cigarette. She’d never seen her father smoke; it seemed like an insult, a dirty secret he’d kept. She was angry about it. But years later what she’d remember, what she’d dream about, was that smile. She’d never seen that look on him in life, that derisive grin, that “Fuck you, world” expression. But maybe it had been there all along, waiting for the veil to fall away.
There was a red wash of terror, mingling with rage that felt like a cramp; feelings she barely understood then as adrenaline rocketed through her frame. She wasn’t much older than Emily was now, and younger in many ways, less sophisticated, more sheltered. Nothing had ever prepared her for the sight before her; it was so utterly incomprehensible that it was nearly invisible. They’d find her vomit beside the door in the morning; that’s how they’d know she’d seen him first. She remembered a wash of numbness, a kind of internal powering down.
She told herself this with absolute conviction. In that walk from the shed, through the back door to the house, where she stepped out of her wet sneakers and wiped her feet dry on the mat, up the stairs and back into her own bed, she could believe that the power of her will might bend reality. She lay in a deep state of shock, mercifully blank until the sun rose and her sister stirred. She told her sister about her dream.
“Dreams can’t hurt you,” Isabel said.
Then Margie’s screaming, a horrible keening wail, cut through the silence of morning, ending the world as they all knew it.
Why should she want to think about that? What good did it do? But there it was, as her children slept in the
