Laura and I sat together in the back seat while Jamie lay crouched up and constantly complaining in the small square of trunk space that lay just behind us. He had absented himself as much as possible from the rest of us during the preceding week, but this last effort at self-imposed exile was certainly his most extreme, a punishing act of ostracism which Laura found ridiculous and contemptible, but which my father, lost in his own thoughts, seemed hardly to notice.
We’d planned to leave early that Monday morning, but things had gotten scattered and confused during the day, and we’d finally pulled away from the little cottage at nearly four in the afternoon. By that time, the off-Cape traffic had reached its dreadful end-of-season peak, and we’d staggered along toward the Sagamore Bridge at a snail’s pace, inching down the highway one jerk at a time, Jamie groaning uncomfortably with each movement of the car.
It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the house on McDonald Drive, but my father didn’t seem particularly tired. He pulled himself briskly out of the old station wagon and immediately began to unload the week’s supplies while my mother staggered wearily into the house, then up the stairs to the bedroom.
Laura regarded my mother’s bedraggled retreat into the house as nothing more than a way of avoiding the work involved in unpacking the car, and she clearly resented it.
“Why doesn’t Mom help unpack?” she demanded sharply as my father handed her a large cardboard box. “The rest of us have to work at it.”
My father did not reply. He simply drew another box from the back of the car while he listened as Laura railed on about my mother.
“Why is she so special?” she asked hotly. “Why does she get to go up to bed?”
Once again, my father refused to answer her. Instead, he yelled for Jamie, tossed him a heavy box, and commanded him to take it into the basement. Then, when Jamie was safely out of sight, he turned toward Laura, his eyes staring pointedly into hers. There was a kind of fierceness in his gaze, and I remember being quite drawn by the strangeness of it, as if he were about to pronounce some vital truth that he’d kept to himself all these years, waiting for the right moment to reveal it. But when he spoke, no such great truth emerged. Instead, after he’d settled his eyes on Laura for a moment, he said to her, almost in a whisper, but very distinctly nonetheless, and with that air of unchallengeable authority he often had, “You should know.”
Rebecca wrote the words in her notebook, then looked at me. “Where were you when your father said that?”
“I was standing next to Laura.”
“What did Laura say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“What do you think your father meant by, ‘You should know’?”
“I have no idea,” I told her. “But Laura knew what he meant. I know she did, because of the way she reacted.”
I was standing only a few inches from her. I saw her fire her final question, then heard my father’s reply, his voice neither sharp, nor angry, nor resigned. Instead, it seemed to carry a sense of severe scolding which struck Laura like a slap in the face, so that she shrank back from him immediately and lowered her eyes. Then, almost in the same motion, she stepped toward my father again, placed her hand very briefly on his shoulder, then turned and made her way into the house. She did not come back out to help us unload the car, but remained inside with my mother.
“Actually with my mother,” I told Rebecca emphatically. “In the same room with her, not just the same house.”
It wasn’t until we’d finished unloading the car that I finally returned to the house. My father and Jamie continued putting various things away in the garage outside, but that was heavy labor, unsuited for a nine-year-old boy, and so I’d left them and gone back inside. It was nearly one in the morning by then, and I was very tired and wanted to get in bed as soon as possible.
I’d passed the threshold of the stairs and was headed down the corridor toward the room I shared with Jamie when I saw Laura and my mother. It was enough to make me stop.
“They were together in my mother’s room,” I told Rebecca. “Sitting side by side on the bed. I’d never seen my sister sit that close to my mother. It seemed very strange.”
They were facing away from me. My mother had changed into her red housedress, and she was bent forward slightly, as if she were about to pick something up from the floor. I could see that Laura had draped her arm over my mother’s shoulder comfortingly, and though I didn’t know it then, the soft shaking motion I noticed in my mother’s body undoubtedly was caused by the fact that she was crying.
Rebecca looked up sharply from her notebook. “Crying?” she asked.
“It must have been that,” I said. “I don’t know what else it could have been.”
“But what was she crying about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction,” I said. “You know, delayed from earlier, when my father had thrown that romance novel at her.”
“And Laura was comforting her, you said?”
“Well, not exactly,” I answered, remembering it with a fierce clarity.
Rebecca looked at me, puzzled.
“It wasn’t real,” I said, “the sympathy. None of what Laura was doing was real. Not the way she’d slung her arm over my mother’s shoulder. Probably not even the words she must have said to her while they sat on the bed together.”
Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “How do you know that?” she asked.
“By the way my sister looked at me,” I answered, glimpsing that look again, a chill moving over me, as if a ghost had suddenly drifted past, brushing my shoulder with its pale robe. “It was a strange look,” I added.
In all the years I’d known her, Laura had never glared at me in such a forbidding way as she did that night. I’d climbed the stairs wearily, innocently seeking only the shortest route to my bed. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. And yet, as Laura’s head swiveled slowly in my direction, I saw her face stiffen hideously, her eyes take on a dreadful anger.
“She looked like an animal,” I told Rebecca, “trapped, like a creature driven into a corner.”
Rebecca jotted a note into her notebook, but didn’t speak. Even then, as I told Rebecca about that one brief incident, the look in my sister’s face chilled me, and I remembered that during the few seconds she’d stared at me, I’d felt as if I were under fire, bullets slamming toward me, chewing up the floor beneath my feet, riddling the plaster wall behind me, spewing dust into the air.
“I all but dove into my room,” I said, “just to get out of her sight.”
But I’d done more than that. Once in my room, I’d locked the door behind me, then pressed my back against it like some terrorized child in a grade-B horror movie.
I’d still been standing in the same position a few minutes later when I felt the doorknob turn.
“Stevie? You in there?”
It was Jamie.
“Stevie?” he called again. “Stevie, you in there?”
I opened the door, glancing around his lean body toward the empty corridor. The door to my mother’s room was closed. To my right, only a few feet down the dark corridor, the door to Laura’s room was closed too, though I could see a line of bright light just beneath it.
“What’s the matter with you?” Jamie demanded irritably. “You hiding something? Why was the door locked?”
I shrugged, unable to come up with an explanation that would have made any sense to him. “I didn’t know it was locked,” I said finally.
To my surprise, Jamie didn’t challenge the completely illogical nature of my answer, perhaps because the childhood sense of the magical and miraculous which lingers on in adolescence was still so much a part of the way he saw the world that he could casually accept the otherwise impossible notion that doors could sometimes lock themselves.