Laura didn’t answer. She picked up one of the knights and pressed it toward me. I could see that it was trembling in her hand.
“What did you say, Laura?” Jamie repeated, only this time in a tone that was more than teenage anger. Cold. Severe. A prelude to explosive rage.
Laura locked her eyes on mine. “This is the knight,” she said evenly, “it moves like this.” She lowered the knight to the board and demonstrated the move.
Jamie continued to stare at her with a terrible, quivering hatred. I remember bracing myself, my own mind racing to decide what I would do if he lunged forward and hit her.
But he did no such thing. After a few more impossibly tense seconds, he simply rose silently and left us, a lean, disjointed figure striding awkwardly across the green summer lawn.
Laura had resumed teaching me about the knight by the time Jamie had finally disappeared into the house. She went directly to its moves, to various ways of using it. She didn’t try to explain what she’d meant with that angry, nearly whispered “Sort of,” and I never heard her say anything so cryptic to Jamie after that.
So what had my sister meant that day beneath the maple tree?
For well over thirty years, it was a question I’d never asked. Then, that Sunday morning, as Peter and Marie slept upstairs and I sat at my desk, with both Rebecca and her mission steadily gaining force in my own mind, I tried to find out. I went to the box I’d brought up from the basement the day before, hoping that the answer might be there.
Within a matter of only a few minutes, I discovered that it was.
EIGHT
THREE DAYS LATER, Rebecca had hardly taken her seat across from me at the restaurant before I handed her the document I’d found in the box. She took it from my hand and began to read it. What I gave her that evening was something she’d already asked for, my father’s army records. After the war, he’d taken a few college classes under the GI Bill of Rights. A short application process had been required, and he’d submitted several forms to prove that he’d been in the army. One of them was a listing of his whereabouts during all that time. It began with Newark, New Jersey, where he’d been inducted in June of 1940, and ended with New York City, where he’d been mustered out on a medical discharge, an injured knee, in May of 1942. All the places my father had lived during those two years of military service were listed in the document, along with all of his official leaves. What it showed unmistakably was that he had lived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from July of 1941 until April of 1942, when he’d been given leave to return to New Jersey, and where, on April 1, he’d married my mother in a civil ceremony in Somerset.
When Rebecca finished reading, she looked up, her face very still. She had instantly put it together.
“Jamie was not your father’s son,” she said.
“No, he couldn’t have been. My father was in North Carolina when my brother was conceived.”
“And so he must have known that he wasn’t the father of the child your mother was carrying. Even on the day he married her,” Rebecca added wonderingly.
“Yes, he had to have known that.”
She thought a moment, then asked, “So who was Jamie’s father?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “How could I know? It all happened a long time before I was born.” Then something occurred to me. “Do you have the pictures you showed me last time?”
“Yes.” Rebecca took them out and spread them across the table.
I lifted the one that showed my mother posed alluringly against the stone wall and handed it to Rebecca. “I think maybe the man who took this was Jamie’s father,” I said. “I mean, look at my mother, at the way her face is shining.”
Rebecca let her eyes dwell on the picture as I continued.
“I think my mother was in love that day,” I said. “She was satisfied in every way. I don’t think my father ever made her feel like that.”
Rebecca returned the photograph to the table. She remained silent.
“Reading all those romance novels, that was the way my mother went back to that time in her life,” I told her. “She never forgot him. She never forgot the way he made her feel.” I glanced over at the picture of my father. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear, that he was going to live the rest of his life in the shadow of my mother’s first love.”
“Which might explain your mother’s murder, and perhaps even Jamie’s,” Rebecca said. “But what about Laura?”
I had no answer, and after a moment, Rebecca’s eyes returned to the picture of my father on his wedding day. “Even though he must have known about the child, he looks very happy in this picture,” she said.
“He was happy, I think,” I admitted. “It’s the only picture he ever looked that happy in.”
She thought a while longer, then returned her attention to the military document that had revealed everything. “Where did you find this?”
“In some papers my aunt left me,” I said, “but there was something else I couldn’t find.”
I told her about the blue papers, the ones Laura had found in the garage that day, the ones, I felt sure now, that had told her everything about Jamie, that he was only “sort of” a member of our family.
“So Laura knew,” I said when I’d finished, “and she used that knowledge against Jamie at least once.”
I went through the story of the argument beneath the maple tree.
