The Telling (38 page)

I try to shake her off. “Josh told me you sent him over at Marmalade's that night, so I guess ‘hate' is the wrong word.”

Her fingers dig into my shoulders. “Lana,
I don't hate you at all
. I never have. My mom talks about you constantly. About
your mom
constantly. It's her biggest regret not helping her, not taking it seriously when your mom moped. And I know that's why she pops all the pills and has five too many martinis and why Dad left and why she'd rather be at tennis than home with me. I got to blame you. It was easy to do that if I didn't know you. If you were just the bitch whose fault it was.” Her arms flop to her side. “I'm not telling you because I think we're going to be blood sisters or anything. I feel shitty about it is all, especially with . . . with what Becca said about you.” She holds herself.

In that moment I think that maybe I do remember Carolynn, her warm toddler arm hooked with mine as we skipped to the
Mira
, our parents gathered and beaming at her bow. I
feel
our shared history. “Your mom never came to visit us,” I tell her.

Carolynn flicks her hair behind her shoulders. “Don't take it personally. She's a zombie.”

“It helped having a distraction this summer, you know. I don't mean only Josh. You too.” I brush her arm, and she smiles.

“Yeah, but Josh especially,” she teases.

“How did you know?”

She stoops and recovers the dropped packages. There's the shriek of metal on linoleum, and the woman with the hunched spine is back on the stool. “Everyone likes Josh. And it wasn't charity,” she says. “I wanted to go over and talk to you myself, but I knew Josh wouldn't eff it up like I would.”

“You should tell Duncan,” I say to her after a pause.

“I didn't ask you,” she says tartly.

“He stares at you.”

“Yeah.” She bats her lashes at me and smirks. “Guys usually do.” Her smirk fades. “But he's Dumb-can. It's embarrassing.”

I reach past her and replace the granola bar. “I like gummies. Sour ones. And don't wait for Duncan to ask you out. If you want him, make it happen, before it's too late.”

C
alm Coast sits like a proud, painted lady on the bluffs. She wears too much makeup to hide her old age; the fissures are there through the paint and the cornices, though. One private drive, a security checkpoint where my driver's license is verified against an approved visitor list, and a reception office later, I'm signing the log and leaving Carolynn and Josh behind on worn jade satin chairs.

I didn't come with Dad when he delivered Diane here, and so I wasn't expecting the grand old house with an eastern-boarding-school feel. Truthfully, I haven't been imagining Diane anywhere other than gone, a McBrook deserter.

I'm led to a small sitting room in a wing that overlooks an internal garden courtyard. Diane's petite silhouette is framed against the crowded and diminishing greens through the glass. She's wrapped up in a gray afghan, its chunky knit doing nothing to mask the sharpness of her shoulders poking through. In a room filled with faded botanical paintings, muted sea-foam wallpaper, and beige upholstery, Diane appears to belong. It's a breakable sort of place, one that's seen better days, and so has she.

I go to her slowly, the silver hair at her temples standing out as I approach. She tracks a red ladybug crawling across the windowpane. “Diane,” I say. She keeps tracking the insect. I let myself down on the cushions beside her. I brush her hand with my thumb.

With a sharp intake of her breath, she pitches back. Her eyes go wide, her jaw slides open an inch and to the side, and her arms fold, shielding her face. “Diane, it's just me,” I say, patting the air between us, afraid to touch her again. She sputters, trying to catch her breath, with a wild, unfocused look in her eyes. “It's Lana,” I try louder. Until she hears my name, there's no recognition.

“Lana,” she whispers. She lowers her arms to her lap. “Is Cal here?” Her eyes cut to the door, dismayed.

“No.” I was always struck by how little Ben and Diane resembled each other. Only their heavy-lidded and gray eyes were similar. Now Diane's are bulbous and baggy. “Dad misses you. So do I.”

Her features slacken and she looks lost again. I slide closer. “I'm not here to talk about Dad, though.” She tucks her chin into her neck, her shoulders fold forward, and I sense she's trying to make herself smaller. I recognize the instinct. “You lied to us—about
everything
.” I wait. Nothing comes. I feel the photo album grow heavier where it rests on my knees. “Do you recognize this?” I ask, tapping its cover.

Her attention touches on it briefly, and her features spasm. “Of course I do. I told Ben to get rid of it.”

I begin to crack the cover. Her four-fingered hand shoots out to stop me. “I don't need to see the photographs. I remember.”

I watch her incomplete fist retract, and she hides it in the fold of the blanket. Suddenly, I understand. “
He
did that to you.” My stomach opens up, and I know that if I continue to think about Diane's
missing finger, I'll be sick. “
He's
in Gant, Diane. He killed Maggie, a boy from school, too, and Becca Atherton yesterday.”

She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “You don't understand,” she whispers. “Your father is a kind man. He loves you, and to him that means he wants what's best for you.”

“Ben's father wasn't like that?”

Her eyes become unseeing. “We were only nineteen when I had Ben. I only saw him again when he came to say good-bye at the end of the summer, before he left for school.” An eerie pause. “You've heard of men described as haters of women?” She had the frailest pink in her cheeks; it made her appear girlish. “My father was a hater of everyone. His hatred was unprejudiced. Everyone was deserving. He kept us insulated in the nightmare world he created. My older sister had two children and I had Ben, and both of us were to stay there and raise them. There was no one else. Our mother died a long time before, and our father rarely left the house. He preferred us fully dependent and terrified often.”

I was prepared to coax the details free. I was ready to shout and insist if she refused. Here is the truth, and I want to jam my fingers into my ears to make it stop. I wanted to throw my arms around her to protect her. “Why?”

“Would telling you that he'd been an abused child or that many of the men in our family had suffered mental illness make it any better? None of that is true.” She gives a short, out-of-place laugh. “It wouldn't matter if it was. He was hateful. He was happy when we cowered. There are people like that, men and women, who want to injure the feeble and terrorize the weak.” Her voice deepens. “The children brought something wicked out in him. It started with nightmarish
bedtime stories. A sick game. Beheaded stuffed toys and afternoons spent chasing the children through the maze until they cried. He never raised a hand to them, not at first. There were things much worse than physical violence.”

She continues after too long a beat, “He laid his nightmares into their brains and let them hatch. There was an incident where Ben's younger cousin tumbled out of the attic window and was paralyzed. Ben was in the attic with his grandfather. He was inconsolable. The week after, Ben's face was bloodied, his nose broken, and again he wouldn't say what happened. He'd been alone with my father.” She removes her hand from the concealment of the blanket. “I'd known violence like that before. Thirteen years old. It was the first and last time I told him off. I couldn't let that happen to my son. We had to run. But my sister had
peculiarities
of her own; the world frightened her. This was our father's trick. He made her fear him a degree less than everything else. I tried to bring my niece with us. . . .” Her eyes go distant. “Ben—oh dear, Lana, his name isn't Ben, it's Henry, our names are Henry and Sophie Wheaton—Henry and I ran. I reached out to Henry's father's family. They gave us enough money to leave. Henry was just a small child when we began running.”

I clear my throat. There's cotton there, strangling me from the inside out. “Why didn't you go to the police?”

“I tried once. In Raleigh, a day after we left. I marched into the police station. My father had a prestigious name. I overheard an officer telling his chief that I was a hysterical runaway, an unmarried mother, and to phone my father to collect me. Even if I'd made them listen, what crime had he committed that I had proof of? Ben cried
when I asked him about his cousin's accident and his nose. This”—she lifts her hand—“had happened ten years before. Proving the abuse would have required us to confront him, at least in court and through lawyers. I wanted to leave it behind.”

“But he wouldn't let us. There were signs we were being followed: strange cars idling in front of our apartments; prowlers nosing around; a woman snapping pictures of us from across the street. I was good at watching. It was fate colliding with your father in the lobby of the hotel I worked at.” She pats the delicate graying curlicues of her hair that frame her face. “I told him I was there for a conference; I was paid in cash to serve cocktails. My father was looking for a mother and son. Not searching for a family of four.”

I'm hot-faced, indignant for Dad. “That's why you came to Gant and married my dad?”

“No and yes. Once I realized that we needed the protection of a larger family, any nice man might have done. I knew I could love Cal on our first date. I also knew that I couldn't burden him with this. He had you. He needed to make decisions unencumbered by my secrets.”

“Why didn't you tell him and the police once Ben died? You could have prevented everything that came after.”

Her eyes go glossy. “I thought I was leaving you and Cal safely behind. I thought my father would find me. I've been waiting.” She has the defeated look of one of those fish trapped in the crab pots Carolynn described. Diane
knows
. “I was told that the detective called, but I had no idea of the violence of this past week. I'm here because Ben's death is my fault.

“Two years ago I was anxious. Had he given up? I reached out to Ben's father, who had returned to the town we grew up in to raise
a family. He told me that my father had suffered a stroke. He was confined to a wheelchair. No one thought he'd recover. I told Cal I needed to fly east to see an aunt, and I went home. My sister, nephew, and niece were gone; I don't know for how long or to where. My father was large still, but he was in a wheelchair, his jaw warped and frozen. I felt that I had won. His nurse left us, and I went right into his face. I looked him in the eye and said, ‘The devil's been cleaning house for you.' He could speak out of the corner of his mouth, and he asked if I'd come to kill him. There was malice in his voice. It was how he sounded when he called me weak. I lost my temper. I said, ‘I dare you, heal and come find me for a fair fight.' ” She rubs at the creases on her forehead with quiet violence. “The last I heard he was seeing a doctor in Switzerland, a specialist. Six months ago.”

One shaking fist punches her thigh and the shake travels through her, until she's trembling mad, furious with herself. “I spit in his face. I dared him to find us. I'd even worn my wedding ring. He knew to look for a family. He got better. He came for us.”

“But we can tell the police. They'll find him. You can come home with me.”

Diane shakes her head. “I don't expect you to understand this. . . . Not everyone deserves another chance. I don't deserve one with you and Cal. My son is dead. I'm not sure he ever knew what he meant to me. I couldn't pull myself out of the past enough to show either of you how much I love you. Because I do, Lana, I love you. All those other children are dead because I left.”

“They're dead because someone killed them and it wasn't you. I love you too. How can I just leave you here?” I ask, my voice turning panicky.

She tilts her head, a flash of maternal warmth in her gentle smile. “By getting up and walking out,” she says. Then she stands, and before I make sense of what she's doing, she's seized the iron poker resting against the fireplace. She lifts it in a high arc and sends it flying into the mirror above the mantel. Glass breaks and tinkles to the pale-blue rug below. A volley of shouts comes from the corridor, and Diane screams.

A doctor and nurse trample the glass. Diane's arms beat against those trying to subdue her. None of the jerky, wild swipes of her limbs disturb me as much as the calm in her eyes. Her focus is piercing. She throws the tantrum so that I'm told to leave.

A woman in a lab coat with a syringe advances on her. Diane's screams cut off abruptly as whatever is injected into her neck rushes into her bloodstream. Her eyelids drop, her whole body settles and sighs into a nurse's arms, and Diane is carried away.

I get up as Diane said I should. I avoid the broken glass. And I leave.

B
y the time the unspooling highway bisects the wildflower- and cow-dotted pastures and we're halfway home, I've spoken to Detective Sweeny three times. I have no more secrets from her, except that Ben and I were each other's summers. I think of Ben's grandfather, using the storybook words I understand best. He was a mad king; his daughters lived in isolation, pawns under his thumb. Their house was a haunted one, crafted by a rich, wicked lunatic who enjoyed filling children with fear, whispering vile things in their ears and watching them squirm.

Diane, the escaped daughter and hero of the story, dared her ailing father to heal, grow stronger, and come after her for a fight. She wasn't frightened by him any longer. She thought he'd rot in his wheelchair and that she and Ben were finally free.