Then she stepped away, bent down to me, lifted the black net from her face, and kissed me softly on the cheek. “Bye, Skipper,” she said. She looked at me a moment, then smiled brokenly, and added, “Maybe someday.” After that, she quickly grabbed May’s hand, and the two of them disappeared into the train. My father and I hoisted the bags on after her, but she was not there to take them from us, and I had the strangest sense that she was just inside the first car, standing with her back pressed against its cold metal wall, crying.
“There might have been something between them,” I told Rebecca, “but only on her side, not his.”
“So you don’t think that second ticket to Mexico could have been for Nellie?”
Because there seemed no other, more likely, candidate, I let myself consider the thought once again, probing at it almost academically, using little bits of logic and deduction to piece together my father’s phantom love affair.
Then a chilling thought occurred to me.
If it was true that the two tickets to Mexico had been for my father and Nellie, then what had they planned to do with May?
For an instant, I saw her exactly as I’d seen her that day in the train station, a little girl in a burgundy dress, disappearing into the gloomy, rattling depths of the railway car. A few months later had she died as my mother, Laura, and Jamie had died? In some distant city, perhaps even at the same time, had Nellie Grimes done to her daughter what my father had done to Laura?
From the grim notion of such a murder, it was easy for me to imagine it in all its awesome detail.
I could see May in her room, playing with her doll, a record on the little dark red plastic music box she had carried with her onto the train that day. She was humming along with its scratchy tune while she dressed a pink, rubbery doll whose heavy lids closed each time the head was tilted back. Alone, sitting Indian-style on the checkered quilt that covered her bed, humming to herself while her fingers tugged softly at the doll’s little wool dress, she barely looked up as the door to her room crept open and Nellie Grimes stepped into it as if from a cloud of thick gray smoke.
I sat back in my seat, startled by the vividness of my own imagination, by the way it had driven me toward a firm and uncompromising denial.
“No, that second ticket couldn’t have been for Nellie,” I said with absolute certainty, “because two tickets would mean that they’d have had to kill May, and I don’t believe my father would have had anything to do with such a murder.”
Rebecca looked at me cautiously. “You don’t think he would have had anything to do with the murder of May Grimes even though he had been willing to kill …”
“The rest of us, yes,” I said. I shook my head at the absurdity of my own reasoning, but I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that, for all he’d done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie, my father would not have brought May Grimes within that murderous circle.
“He wouldn’t have killed May,” I said again. “He killed us because we’d done something to him. We weren’t like May. We weren’t … innocent.”
I stopped, stunned by the hard and unforgiving judgment I had just rendered upon my murdered family. I tried to draw my scattered thoughts into a coherent whole. “It’s just that we were unhappy,” I said finally, giving up. “Desperately unhappy.”
I stopped again, waiting for the next question, but Rebecca knew I’d supply the story anyway.
“I think my mother tried to kill herself once,” I said softly, “but I can’t be sure.” I drew in a long, weary breath, then continued. “It was toward the end of October,” I said. “I know because it was the night of the fireworks. It was sort of a village Indian summer celebration. The town had this big festival in October, and we always went together, the whole family.”
It had been a clear, unseasonably warm night, and I was dressed in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The town fireworks display went off at nine, and for a few blazing minutes we’d all watched as the dark sky exploded with brilliant shards of multicolored light. It had lasted for only a short time, certainly no more than ten minutes, and yet, during that interval we’d actually seemed like a family that might endure, taking the days in ordinary stride, weathering the usual storms.
After the fireworks, we went to a local diner, and my father ate quite heartily, which was unusual for him. So unusual, in fact, that it seemed curiously faked, as if he were acting a part, forcing himself to appear less troubled than he was. My mother sat beside him, and from time to time, while Laura and Jamie and I dined on our usual hamburgers and french fries, my mother and father talked quietly to each other.
“We got home around eleven that night, I suppose,” I went on. “My mother looked very tired. We all noticed it. Jamie actually took my mother’s arm as she got out of the car. Laura saw it, too. After my mother had sat down in the living room, she went into the kitchen and made her a glass of warm milk.”
“And your father?”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said. “He just sat across from my mother until we all went upstairs to bed.”
As always, Jamie fell asleep almost instantly. I could hear him snoozing contentedly in the upper bunk. Laura was more high-strung, and that night, like many other nights, I heard her walking about in the room next door long after everyone else had fallen asleep.
But that night, I heard something more than the familiar sounds of Jamie’s breathing and Laura’s rustling about in her own room. I heard the door of my mother’s bedroom open softly, a tiny squeak I had long ago recognized, but had rarely heard at such a late hour. I got up at once, walked to the door of my room, and opened it. In the corridor, I could see my mother as she came out of her bedroom, then, without turning on the light in the hallway, made her way slowly down the stairs. She was all the way down the stairs before I ventured out of my room. I walked down the same corridor, but stopped at the top of the stairs. From there I could see the light in the downstairs bathroom go on, and hear my mother as she opened the white wooden medicine cabinet that hung above the sink.
“What did you do?” Rebecca asked.
“I waited until she started back up the stairs,” I told her. “Then I just went back to my room.”
But I didn’t fall asleep, and about two hours later, I heard the same squeaking hinge that told me my parents’ bedroom door had opened once again. Just like before, I walked to the door of my room, opened it slightly, and looked out. From that position, I could see my mother as she staggered toward the staircase once again. But this time she was weaving unsteadily and moaning softly, her arms wrapped around her stomach.
I started to move toward her, perhaps to help her down the stairs or to wherever it was she was trying to get to that night, but then I saw my father come out of the bedroom. For a moment, he stood very still in the doorway, watching her silently, his light blue eyes glowing, cat-like, in the moonlit hallway. Then, as if in response to a sudden signal, he rushed toward her, gathered her into his arms, and walked her back into their bedroom.
I remained at my door for a long time, but I didn’t see either my mother or my father again that night. I could hear my mother coughing and gagging, and I knew that she was in the bathroom that adjoined her room, probably bent over the sink or the toilet. After a while, I returned to my own room and lay down on the lower bunk.
“At the time,” I said, “I thought it was just a bad stomach.”
Rebecca looked up from her notes. “Why did you ever come to think it might be something else?” she asked.