The Talk-Funny Girl (39 page)

M
y father was given a sentence of life in prison without parole, Pastor Schect eighteen years, Cary Patanauk five years’ probation. Aaron enlisted in the marine corps and was sent overseas. Sands and I were married when I turned twenty-one. I’ve never visited my father again—he doesn’t seem to want me to—but I’ve seen Patanauk once or twice in the town, on my trips up there. Older, weaker now, he still stares at girls’ bodies the way he always did, though he pretends not to recognize me.

In the years since my mother’s death and my father’s sentencing, we did our best—Sands, Aunt Elaine, and I—to raise Lily well. But it didn’t turn out the way we wanted. As if by some unlucky spin of a roulette wheel, there was, in my sister, just too much bad weight handed down. Even having people around you who are kind and loving isn’t always enough to balance off something like that. For a long time—until I reached my middle twenties—partly because of what seemed to be happening with Lily and partly for other reasons, I was afraid to have children of my own. Sands convinced me we should try. Among many other things, I’m grateful to him for that. I became pregnant almost right away, and then again a few years later. We named our first child Audrey Elaine, in honor of my aunt, and our second in honor of Sands’s father, Robert Arthur.

By the time Robert was born, Lily was in fifth grade and already causing a great amount of trouble. This wasn’t a surprise to any of us. We’d first taken her for counseling when she was in second grade. She chose bad friends, did poorly in school, was unhappy at home. From sixth grade on, she seemed drawn to larger troubles the way animals are drawn to the smell of food. We left the rectory and moved to Watsonboro, hoping a new place and new friends would make the difference, but nothing really changed.

By the time Lily was sixteen there were days at a stretch when we wouldn’t see her. I’d leave Audrey and Robert with Sands and go out looking for her at all hours of the day and night. If I found her, I’d try to convince her to come home, I’d buy her a meal and try to talk, but it was like talking to a tree in the woods in winter. She had discovered that certain kinds of drugs—easy to get where we lived—could temporarily blot out the pain inside her, and no amount of sisterly affection was a match for that. I tried and tried—bailed her out of jail when she was caught shoplifting, paid for more counseling, paid to have her sent away to a residential treatment center for teens that Aunt Elaine knew about.

Finally, when Lily was seventeen, just the age I’d been when I went out looking for full-pay work, Sands said to me, “You have your own children to think of now, Laney.” That was all he ever said about it, but I understood what he was getting at and I knew he was right. I began to let go of Lily then, and Aunt Elaine began to let go. She left school and we didn’t try to stop her. She lived with friends not far from the cathedral and then moved away altogether. For a while we’d get collect calls from her, always when she was in trouble and needed something. She was in New York City. She was in North Carolina. She was in Fort Lauderdale. She’d be angry sometimes and lonely sometimes and trying to get us to send her money most of the time. Eventually the calls stopped, though I expect someday I will hear from her again, if she is still alive.

Audrey and Robert are good children, eleven and eight now,
normal children, able to show love and receive it. We take them to the weekly Quaker meeting at the cathedral, and sometimes they can sit still through most of it, and sometimes not. So much joy has come of our life with them. So much good to set against the bad that came before. I struggle with that bad part, though. Even still. Sands struggles, too, inside himself, in a different way. Sometimes the ordinary trials of daily life just turn in a certain direction and call up the hurt of the past, and there you are, living with children of your own, surrounded by echoes of the things you went through. Those echoes were what sent me back to try and understand my own life better, to wring a lesson out of the past. All that bruise and confusion, all that guilt and shame and buried anger: I wanted to go back and hunt it down and close the hurt-museum for good, though I discovered you cannot really do that. What you can do, what you have to do, is not pass too much of it on. If you can stop that trouble from flowing through you onto your children and husband and other people, or even if you can dilute it, then it seems to me your life ought to be pleasing to whatever kind God it was who made you.

June 22, 2009–January 26, 2011
Conway, MA