Secrets of Eden (39 page)

As Tina and I reach the end of the driveway, I have a thought: Dad is puttering around in the garage because Mom never goes there except to pull out the car in the winter. It’s a place where he can hang out and totally avoid Mom and me. Which, with him drinking right now, is probably a good thing for Mom. Something happened on Friday night when I was at a party in Pownal. I don’t know the details, but even by the admittedly very low standards of civility my dad subscribes to, it couldn’t have been pretty. How badly did he hit Mom? I don’t know because I wasn’t home, and almost always he hits her in places no one can see. But since Friday night the house has been especially gloomy, even on the pathetic Happiness Scale in place at the Haywards’. I think he beat her pretty badly, no doubt on the lower back.

After I’ve left, my mom sits down to shell the peas in that bowl.
She probably sits down near where I saw her waving, outside in the sun that is still bathing the western side of the lawn in warmth. Eventually she will rise, go back inside, and cook the rest of their dinner. She doesn’t set the kitchen table, because I think they will eat on the front porch tonight. It is a balmy summer evening, and my parents always liked to eat outside on that porch. It didn’t have a table, because it really was just front steps with a landing, and so they will eat that night with their plates on their laps and their drinks on the wooden planking beside them. In my mom’s case, that means iced tea, in my dad’s another beer.

They probably aren’t saying a whole lot as they eat, because by the time they plop themselves down on those steps, Mom is a little scared and my dad is well on the way to being totally hammered. Talking to him right now is like baiting a hungry lion. Why do that? Why go there? The thing is, it could be such a great night for them. Tomorrow is Monday, her day off, and the kid is at a concert and spending the night with a friend. Wouldn’t you think most parents would be having Naked Sunday together?

But not mine. Not that night.

At some point when he is done chewing a bite of chicken, his tongue clearing bits of meat from around his gums in this creepy way that reminds me of a mole tunneling just under the grass, my dad turns to my mom and says something nasty about the meal. Maybe it’s as simple as how her vegetables don’t taste any better than the ones you can buy at the supermarket, but with all the mulch and manure and fertilizer she uses, these ones from her garden actually cost more. Some nights this month, this has been his song. Maybe he says something about her shorts: They’re too short. Too baggy. Too frumpy. Too slutty. My dad had a thing about shorts and my mom’s legs—which were really very sexy for a mom. But most likely it is the baptism he has
brought up, planning to use it to find a way to wound her and pick a fight. He says, maybe, that he can’t believe she paraded around like some tramp in a bathing suit before the whole batch of Holy Rollers.

That’s what he called the people who went to the church: Holy Rollers.

He says that everyone must have loved that: Alice Hayward, tarting around at the pond. Now, my dad wasn’t a moron. He has to know on some level that he is being completely ridiculous. So why is he saying these things? So Mom will dispute him.

It was a Speedo, she reminds him, not some bikini. And I was wearing a T-shirt over it, anyway.

Oh, how lovely, he says, his voice taking on that weird, condescending, pretend-upper-class monotone. But do you honestly think that makes it better? Do you think I would prefer to have my wife parading around town like she’s a contestant in a Hooters wet-T-shirt contest?

And my mom will know what’s coming and that she can’t win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there’s no place left to go. And Mom is already hurting from whatever she had endured on Friday night when I was gone. Still, here is the problem she faces: If she disagrees with Dad, he might hit her for challenging him, but if she agrees with him, she is admitting to having dressed like a slut at her baptism, and that will be his grounds for whaling on her.

What does she say? In my mind I see her shaking her head, realizing that she should have gotten out years ago. Or that she should have gone to court when she was supposed to a week or so after she got that temporary restraining order back in February. Or she should have taken the flowers that had started arriving almost daily in May and tossed them into the compost heap. Or she should never have allowed
him back in the house when he wheedled his way into a reconciliation just after Mother’s Day. But that isn’t what she did, and now she’s looking at her second beating in three days. And so she stands up with her plate and retreats inside. I have seen her do this before: just take her food and excuse herself from the table. Or excuse herself from the table without taking her food. The upside to this strategy—withdrawal without a word—is that she hasn’t said anything that he can use as a justification for his anger. The downside? She has seriously dissed him. (And when she has done this when I’ve been present, she has also humiliated him in front of his daughter.)

But it is often how Mom played the game, and sometimes it worked. No fighting in the night, and the next morning there would be peace on earth and my dad would apologize for being such a jerk. My guess is that is exactly what my mom does that Sunday night. She leaves him alone on the front steps and finishes eating inside. In the kitchen, reading the newspaper, maybe. Lula is sitting beside her and wagging her tail, waiting for Mom to hand her a few pieces of chicken or cut some up and drop the meat into her dish. The picture to someone who doesn’t know what’s really going on? It’s like Mom lives alone with her dog. Except there’s this teeny-tiny detail that she is scared to death her husband is about to come in and belt her.

Based on the plates that would be found in the sink and how much of the dinner had been cleaned up and put away—at some point I overheard someone saying that the bowls with coleslaw and peas both had plastic covers on them—the strategy worked for a while. I see my dad sitting on the steps, stewing. Drinking. Maybe for a while he goes back to the garage and drinks some more.

But at some point he comes inside, plops himself down on the living-room couch, and turns on the TV set. Is he watching
60 Minutes
? Maybe. Sometimes he would turn it on. But he is so drunk by now that he really isn’t watching anything. And pretty quickly he
conks out. Falls asleep and isn’t making a sound. It’s the darnedest thing: He never seems to snore. My mom once told me that the only time she could recall him snoring was when he had a sinus infection years ago. (Not snoring is also something he takes weird pride in. I actually heard him brag to people at the annual Father’s Day volunteer firefighters’ barbecue that he never snores. He made it sound like it was some amazing athletic accomplishment.) My mom makes that phone call to Ginny, a conversation that led lots of people to tell me that Ginny was the very last person my mom would talk to. (One time I considered reminding them that they were mistaken: The very last person my mom would talk to was pretty obviously my dad, as she begged him or screamed at him until she could no longer breathe to stop killing her.) My mom peeks into the living room, sees Dad is still out like a light, and changes into her nightgown. The red nightgown.

And then, not too long after Mom has said good night to Ginny and gotten ready for bed, Dad wakes up. Some people say he killed Mom that night because she dropped the bombshell on him that she was leaving. The fight they’d been having outside resumed, but at some point it took a new course and ended with my mom informing him that the marriage was over and she was getting out. Literally. She was leaving him. Leaving the premises. She probably didn’t tell him to get out that night, because how could he? He was drunk. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed his own sorry self by driving into a maple tree at sixty or seventy miles an hour, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to bring some innocent person down with him. She really did worry like crazy about cars. And so she tells him that she is out the door. So long. She is going to get dressed, pack a bag, and split.

And maybe people are right and that is exactly what she said that caused the fight to go nuclear.

But maybe not. Or maybe not right away. I think she had to be
driven just a little further before she would say that. When I’m trying and failing to fall asleep at night, I see it continue like this. I see my dad trying hard to get a rise out of Mom, and even if he doesn’t know that she’d been hooking up with Stephen, he knows for a while they were pretty tight. And so he says something about Stephen and manages, if only by accident, to hit just the right nerve in just the right tooth—especially since, maybe, Stephen was the one who ended their affair. I’ve always wondered if maybe she only took Dad back because Stephen broke up with her. All those flowers Dad sent? They only worked because Stephen wasn’t around anymore. I also think that’s the reason Stephen felt so guilty after Mom died. The baptism? Yeah, right. He said that he felt responsible because he’d missed all these signals about how she was ready to die, but that was totally ridiculous. We’re talking fairy tale. More likely Stephen felt like a louse because he’d told my mom early in May that he didn’t want their thing to go public or he didn’t want it to continue. Whatever. And so she takes back her own husband on the rebound, he kills her a couple of months later, and Stephen winds up feeling horrible. As he should.

Anyway, my dad is getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and he says something stupid about Stephen’s sexual orientation. Among my dad’s more pathetic prejudices? Homophobia, big-time. I’d heard him make cracks before about why Stephen wasn’t married. And maybe that night Mom has had just enough of this lunacy, and so she tells Dad that she knows for a fact that Stephen is straight. Very. Remember, I’m not home, so the sexual volleys might be racier and nastier than usual.

The result? Dad is confronted for the first time with the news that Mom has been with someone other than him, and it is—how’s this for an irony?—the leader of those so-called Holy Rollers who Dad thinks are just such total losers. Moreover, for all he knows, Mom has been with Stephen awhile. Maybe not merely when Dad was living
out at the lake. Maybe before he left. Maybe even when he was living right here in little old Haverill. It’s around eight o’clock at night. That old school professor’s voice of his is swamped by serious rage: Mom’s latest infraction isn’t just wearing a top that’s too revealing or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. She has tossed a hand grenade down the front of his pants.

You what? I hear him yelling in my head, and she repeats whatever it was that she said the first time about Stephen and her and how they’d been sleeping together. Or how they’d been lovers. I honestly can’t decide the precise wording of the bombshell, because as well as I knew my mom, there were just some things we never talked about. I mean, she had never told me that she and Stephen had been hooking up. But I’m sure there is a moment when my dad can’t believe what he’s hearing and has her repeat herself.

And so my mom does.

And when you repeat things, you add things. The adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Fisher, taught us that. And so I see my mom realizing that for the first time ever, she has wounded Dad, really smacked him back hard, and so she starts piling it on. She tells him whatever it was that Stephen gave her that marriage to my dad doesn’t. She talks about how intelligent and well educated Stephen is (an incredibly sharp dagger for Dad, since he never went to college). Or how tender. Or how gentle. But she always brings it back to the fact that they were lovers, because she has seen that this really ticks him off.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t have a death wish. I really believe that, too. I really don’t think she thought for even a split second that my dad was going to kill her. Hit her? Sure. Pound her a couple of times? Hell, yes. But I am absolutely convinced that she didn’t see him taking his hands and strangling her. Stephen is very smart, but he was wrong about that.

First, of course, my dad probably slugs her. For one of the only
times ever, he even hits her in the face. Open hand, backhand, a fist. I don’t know. No one told me a lot about what the medical examiner said about the condition of their bodies, and I don’t even know if you can tell in the end whether a bruise was caused by knuckles or palm. I never asked. Heather would tell me later that she hadn’t asked, either: She hadn’t asked anyone what had gone down when her dad killed her mom. And she told me that she regretted that. But still I didn’t ask. I mean, how could I?

So my dad hits Mom. Does she hit him back? No way. My mom was never going to hit back. Besides, she has just had the wind knocked out of her. Or she has fallen to the floor. Or she has banged into something (that seemed to happen a lot). I see her on the floor in the living room, Dad standing over her. And when she gets her breath back or she gets back in control, she says something more about Stephen. As my grandfather—my dad’s dad—always says, in for a nickel, in for a dime. And Dad is thinking the same thing.
I hit her in the head and the sky didn’t fall in. And my wife was sleeping with some dude I don’t really like. Maybe she’s sleeping with him even now
. So he beats on her some more. Whacks her in the nose.

And then—
then
—Mom tells him she’s leaving. That’s what I mean about having to drive my dad to that point. She had to seriously get under his skin. Even my dad needs a little motivation to wrap his hands around Mom’s neck and squeeze till she’s dead. I see my mom holding her nose (because he has hit her there, not because she smells something bad) and wiping away the blood that is trickling slowly over and around her lips. She straightens her back and rises to her full height (which is still shorter than Dad) and announces that he has hit her for the last time. This time there will be no backing down when the day comes to show up in court.

Which is when he kills her. He loses all control. He has his hands around her neck, and he is shaking her, maybe not realizing that this is
it—that he has passed the line of all reason—but shaking her and pressing his thumbs against her esophagus. I have tried to see what it must have felt like. One time I even had Tina squeeze my neck till I said, “Enough, I get it.” (She was creeped out, but she understood what I wanted to know, and so she did it.) It must have hurt like crazy. Agony. But here is that expression again: in for a nickel, in for a dime. Once you’ve started to kill your wife, how do you stop?