Don't Be Afraid (31 page)

Say what you would about Dorothy Busby, and Amy had said plenty, her mother didn’t bat an eyelash when she showed up at ten minutes to twelve carrying Emma in her arms. She just opened the door to her immaculate colonial home and stepped aside.

For the first day, Amy did little but sleep. She stayed in the guest room at the end of the hall on the second floor while Emma had her old room. She was dimly aware of the two of them laughing together when she woke sometime late that morning, but she barely had the strength to use the bathroom and drink some water before returning to the soft comfort of the queen-sized bed and falling back into a deep, but troubled sleep.

She woke for the second time late in the afternoon. Her mother seemed to realize that what she needed was nurturing, for she quietly offered her a dinner of soup and bread and didn’t press her for any information beyond asking if she’d spoken to the police.

She spent the next morning reconnecting with her childhood home, examining the photos that lined the hallways and revisiting the memories each of them held. Here she was with her brother Michael at the beach. Here they were huddled together around a campfire. Here was a formal portrait that her mother had insisted on the summer she turned twelve and was pudgy with impending adolescence.

She wandered into her parents’ bedroom and remembered the security of crawling between her parents when she’d had a bad dream. Amy’s father had been dead for more than five years, but this was another room that Dorothy Busby kept the same. His highboy still stood against one wall with his gold cufflinks on the surface next to a photo of a young Dorothy.

Amy fingered the cufflinks and lifted the lid of the old cigar box next to them. There were no cigars left inside, just the faint odor of tobacco lingered, but there was something. A key.

Small, silver—not a house key, Amy decided. What then? She searched his drawers and saw nothing that had a lock. Then she looked high on the closet shelves and found a metal box.

The key turned smoothly in its lock. Inside was a pale blue hand towel folded into thirds. She drew back a corner and recoiled from what lay inside. A shiny, charcoal gray handgun.

She’d actually fired a handgun once. Long ago as part of a personal safety class for high school girls that went a little too far in most of the parents’ opinions. It had been dropped the following semester and so had the teacher, a heavyset mannish woman who’d talked a lot about taking back the world from men. She’d been the sort of woman her father had disparagingly labeled “butch.”

Amy never knew her father owned a gun. She ran a finger lightly down the muzzle, wondering what her mother had thought of this purchase.

It was strange that she hadn’t thought of it before, but until Sheila’s murder, Amy lived in a world virtually insulated from crime. She’d heard about things, of course. The robbery over in Norwalk in which an elderly couple had been tied up and badly frightened. The stick-up at the convenience store. There had been rumors of the date rape of a senior when she was a freshman in high school and she remembered watching the girl in the hallways at the school and how everyone had whispered about her as if what had happened to her was shameful.

Had her father purchased this gun because he felt threatened in some way? She vaguely remembered some discussion about a hostile employee. Or was it just something he thought a man should have? She wouldn’t be surprised to discover that her brother knew about it, but she hadn’t been told.

She lifted it up, felt the power in the heft in her hand. Checked, just like she’d been taught all those years ago, and sure enough the safety was on, but she popped out the clip and saw that it was fully loaded.

Slow footsteps sounded on the stairs and Amy hurriedly tucked the towel back around the gun, locked the box and shoved it back in the closet. She’d just returned the key to the cigar box when her mother entered the bedroom, carrying a basket of laundry.

“Oh!” She put a hand to her chest and let the laundry basket drop with a plop. “What are you doing in here?”

“Just remembering Daddy.”

Her mother smiled and came to the dresser Amy leaned against. She opened the top drawer. “Do you know that I still keep his handkerchiefs here,” she said, lifting one of the snow white squares monogrammed with his initials. “I just couldn’t bear to part with them. Silly.”

“It’s sweet.”

“Why don’t you go downstairs and settle in on the couch. I’ll make you something to eat.”

Emma was sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas watching cartoons when her mother came down for breakfast, a bowl of some sugary, artificially colored cereal in front of her.

“Hmm . . . that looks nutritious,” Amy said, kissing her daughter’s cheek before heading for the coffeemaker.

“It won’t hurt her,” Dorothy Busby said. She was mixing something with her hands in a large ceramic bowl. Amy poured a mug of coffee and doctored it with skim milk and sugar, leaning against the granite countertop to watch her mother. Despite the early hour, the older woman was already neatly dressed in slacks and a light sweater, her short, iron-gray hair pulled back and fastened with a tortoiseshell barrette at the nape of her neck. Little pearl studs in her ears, matinee-length pearls around her neck and the faint scent of Chanel No. 5 completed her look.

A flowered apron covered her clothes and she’d carefully folded back the sleeves of her sweater to do her work. Her platinum wedding set was sitting in a small silver dish above the sink, the same spot where she always put them when she was working. It was the only time she ever had them off.

“What’s that?” Amy said.

“Stuffing. Can you get me the whole chicken in the fridge?”

Amy brought it to her. “What’s the occasion?”

“Just a family dinner. I’m celebrating having my girls with me.”

“Nana’s taking me shopping,” Emma announced.

“Go get dressed, then we’ll decide what we’re going to do.”

“She’s going to buy me a present!”

“We’ll see.” Amy waited until Emma ran upstairs before talking to her mother. “It’s not a good idea. She just got out of the hospital. It’s bad enough that she’s playing with Riley. If she gets around all the scents in the stores, she could have another attack.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Amy. The dog’s outside, poor thing, and all I’m talking about is a simple shopping trip.”

“Let’s stay here, okay. We could take Emma to the park.”

Her mother seemed slightly mollified. “Do you have any other outfits for her? Those jeans are pretty worn at the knee.”

“She likes it and that’s the style, Mom. Besides, it’s comfortable.”

Dorothy sighed. “How is she going to learn to act like a lady if you won’t teach her?”

Amy had a sudden vision of herself as a young girl, tearing down the hill on her bike, shrieking at the top of her lungs. “The whole neighborhood could hear you!” her mother had scolded when she came home. “That’s not ladylike behavior.”

“I don’t want her to be a lady,” she said to her mother. “I want her to be a little girl.”

“You know what I mean, Amy.”

“I know exactly what you mean, but some things are more important than others.”

Dorothy didn’t say more, but she turned her back on her daughter, cleaning the kitchen with short, sharp movements.

Amy left her there and did a nebulizer with Emma, watching her daughter sucking in the green air behind the mask, looking, as she always did with this treatment, so much more frail than she acted.

“I’m going shopping with Nana!” she announced as soon as Amy removed the mask.

“We’ll go to the park today.”

“I want to go shopping! Nana wants to buy me a present.”

“Maybe another day. But today we’re going to stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.” Because it’s safe here, she felt like saying, but couldn’t. She didn’t want to scare Emma any more than she’d already been scared. It was great that her daughter seemed completely unaffected by what had been happening at home. It was as if she’d left all that stress behind in Steerforth.

Amy wished that was true for her, but coming here had just brought different stress. What was she going to do? She didn’t know how to answer that yet, but she could endure Emma’s cold shoulder while she figured it out. Let her daughter think that she’d spoiled her fun day with her grandmother. It was better than telling her the truth.

She watched Emma playing with the porcelain music box that Amy’s father had given her when she was about her daughter’s age. He’d brought it back from one of his conference trips, the hinged lid opening to reveal a tiny fairy, also made of porcelain, with a real tulle tutu and translucent wings. She held a tiny wand aloft and spun around and around while the tinny sound of “When You Wish Upon a Star” played over and over again.

Amy felt a sudden yearning to be a child again, to return to a time when she believed in the power of wishes.

“Make a wish, Mommy,” Emma said, holding the box aloft.

Amy closed her eyes and wished to go back in time, to when things were easy. She remembered the moments early in her relationship with Chris, when she was nothing but excited that other women looked at him, thinking that they couldn’t have him, that he was hers. She remembered sitting in the hospital bed with Chris sitting next to her, warm against her hip and day-old Emma in her arms, thinking that now her life was complete.

Before the asthma, before the cheating, before the world she thought she was building splintered then shattered.

Late in the afternoon they took their walk, three generations of Busby women, but not at the park as originally planned because Emma chose the beach instead.

Dorothy came out of the house buttoning a red barn coat and locked the door. “There. We’ve got at least an hour before the chicken’s done. As long as we make it back to the house by then we should be fine.”

It was a brisk fall day and the leaves were falling faster. The maple trees that bordered the road along the beach were in high color, a swath of rosy, orange-red splendor. The wind came faster along the water, blowing across the small pebbles and coarse sand and muting the noise of the traffic a few feet away.

Emma ran along the beach in front of them, pausing to examine empty crab casings and mussel shells. Amy remembered doing this when she was a girl, running along with Michael while their parents walked sedately behind them.

She remembered walking along this beach as an adult, too, the week after her father died. The funeral had come and gone along with the steady stream of visitors. The thank-you notes for all the flowers and food had been written and Amy remembered how they’d been waiting, a tidy stack of small ivory cards bordered in black, on the table near the front door.

Then, as now, Dorothy Busby had walked along in silence, hugging her jacket around her as if to contain the grief. She’d seemed to slip so easily from one role to the next, wife then widow, mother than grandmother. If these transitions caused her angst she was careful not to show it.

Emma began picking up flat pebbles, trying to skim them along the water’s surface. Amy remembered the weekend two years ago when Chris taught her to do that. She’d always been astonished by the patience he could exhibit when he chose, the way he’d repeatedly wrapped her small fingers around each pebble, guiding her arm in the motion needed to make the stone skip across the surface of the sound.

“Have you talked to Chris?” Dorothy said, as if she could read Amy’s mind.

“No.”

“You should call him.”

“No, Mom, I shouldn’t.”

Dorothy sighed, scanning the water, as if the words she looked for were hiding in its silver ripples. “It’s time to stop this, Amy.”

“Stop what?”

“This notion that you’re going to support Emma and yourself and do it all alone. This is just foolishness. You need a man in your life—if all this killing hasn’t taught you that I don’t know what will.”

“I’m earning good money now—”

“Oh, I’m not talking about finances,” Dorothy interrupted. “You’re a smart girl and I have no doubt that you could earn enough to survive with Emma. But why make that choice?”

“He’s still cheating on me, Mom.”

“You need to let that go.”

“He didn’t just do it once. He’s done it over and over again. He’s going to continue doing it.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of forgiveness? You don’t want to hold onto these hurts, Amy, it’s just hurting you.”

“How many times am I suppose to forgive that? And how can I forgive someone who isn’t really sorry?”

“He’s said he’s sorry, hasn’t he?”

“He keeps doing it, Mom, how sorry could he be?”

Dorothy waved her hand as if brushing away a fly. “He’s a man, Amy. To men, sex is like water.”

The phrase was what did it. The same words, the same intonation. Fifteen years fell away and Amy remembered the moment when she’d learned the truth about her parents’ marriage.

She and her friends were Christmas shopping at the mall when she spotted a man who looked like her father. Only it couldn’t be her father because he had his arm around a woman with curling red hair that draped down the back of a long, fur coat. They had their backs to Amy, the man nuzzling the woman’s neck as they stood at a jewelry counter.

Then the man turned and Amy saw that it wasn’t just a similar-looking man in a camel’s hair coat, it was her father. At the same minute, he saw her, too, and they stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. The smile slipped from her father’s face. She turned away, running to catch up with her friends.

She remembered the noise of the mall, the tinny sound of Christmas carols and the greasy smells of the food court. She remembered the sour taste her Diet Coke left in her mouth, the way she smiled and laughed with her friends as if nothing was wrong, the way she took the bus home, struggling to hold back tears.