The Murderer's Daughters (26 page)

“You’re not being fair,” Cassandra complained. “No one is.”

“What do you want?” I struggled to keep my voice even, knowing I’d already failed, my irritation already spilling over the nice white and blue room.

Motherhood had never been my dream. I’d never thought I’d be very
good at the job.
See, Drew. This is why you’re the mommy and I go to work.
Not that he’d argued with me about our division of labor. Drew had worked hard in his campaign to sell me on motherhood. In the end, his strong want had won me over, though the thought of being a mother had terrified me. It still did; it had turned out to be worse than I’d ever imagined. I hadn’t known how much they’d own me, how every fall they took would raise bumps on me.

“Why can’t you take us to the beach today?” Cassandra asked.

Why are you so hard to please when we give you so much?
“Daddy’s taking a friend for each of you, right?” I said. “You don’t need me.”

Maybe we gave them too much.

Cassandra got up on her knees, pleading with me to understand. Her lank brown hair falling over her shoulders reminded me of my own. “Yes, I do need you,” she said. “You never come. You haven’t even seen how good I swim the crawl now.”

“We’ll all go this weekend. I promise.”

“Sure,” Cassandra said. “I bet.”

She sounded as though I broke promises every day. Was that how she viewed me? “And we’ll go to the bookstore and get a new batch of summer books.”

Every way I turned as a mother, I disappointed someone. Ruby and Cassandra were warring nations, always needing different things, never satisfied at the same time. At any moment, I faced disappointment, failure, or terror. At some point, all these were certain to occur, right?

See, Drew? I knew it.
Having children ensured enduring life’s worst crap. By hounding and bribing me into pregnancy, Drew had forced me to become a hostage to terror. You give birth, and then worry becomes your lifelong caul.

Had my mother felt that way? Had thoughts of danger threatening Merry and me kept her up at night? Trying to catch memories of Mama felt like trying to hold rain. I didn’t remember sensing her worry, but she was my mother, she must have worried. I gave myself comfort with those thoughts.

Ruby ran through the door. Drew walked behind balancing a mug.

“Did you wake her up?” Ruby asked Cassandra. She turned to her father. “She’s in trouble, right?”

“No, she’s not in trouble,” I said. “Don’t be an instigator.”

“What’s that?” Ruby asked.

“
Instigator
means someone who starts something, but not in a good way,” I said.

“Someone who acts like a baby,” Cassandra said. “And who cries all the time.”

“You pooped in your pants!” These were eight-year-old Ruby’s final words in most fights.

“Ruby! How many times do we have to tell you not to say that?” Drew said. He placed the coffee in my hand. Ever since Cassandra had had a horrible bout of food poisoning on the way home from the Cape and couldn’t hold out for a bathroom, this had been Ruby’s favorite taunt. “You know Cassandra was sick.”

“You shouldn’t be rude and mean,” I added.

Cassandra stuck her tongue out at Ruby, and then turned accusing eyes on Drew. “I told Mommy you made Ruby her pancakes, even though I won.”

Looking for ways to knock out my daughters’ bad traits—Cassandra’s need for hair-splitting fairness and the mantle of victimhood, Ruby’s attempts to push her way to the top—appeared to be a Sisyphean task. My girls had so many wearying qualities. Civilizing them overwhelmed me. How much easier it would be to simply throw them gobs of goodies as though they were rabid dogs.
Candy! Toys! Hot dogs! Come get them, girls! Ruff! Love me!

“But I got hurt,” Ruby said. She held up her hand, showing me a Sleeping Beauty bandage on her tiny palm. “See?”

“Cassandra, Ruby did get hurt. We talked about this,” Drew said. “Tomorrow you’ll get waffles.”

Cassandra collapsed in on herself, leaning back against me. I stroked her fine, light hair, wanting to run far from all of them. Cassandra sighed out her loss. She turned to me and took my face in her hands, staring as though I were the blood running through her veins.

“Please stay home with me, Mommy,” Cassandra begged. “Let Ruby stay with Daddy, and you stay with me today. Don’t go to work. Please!”

“Lulu?”
Merry’s scream cut through the drama. “
Drew?
I’m grabbing some coffee, okay?”

“Fine,” I yelled back down.

Drew squeezed Cassandra’s knee. “Come on, honey. You know Mommy has to go to work. Plus, we have to pick up your friends.”

I grabbed Cassandra for a hug around her dejected shoulders before she left. “It will be fine,” I told her.

Fine
was my word of the morning. Fine for me not to see Cassandra for a single full day this summer and fine for Merry to pour a cup of coffee. It was fine about four workdays out of five, when Drew’s already brewed coffee usually trumped the prospect of Merry making her own.

I didn’t worry about Merry walking out her front door wearing slippers and pajamas, running around the corner from her apartment to my and Drew’s entrance. The unusual was the usual in Cambridgeport. Walking in nightwear didn’t come close to earning us a place in the neighborhood freaky line, not in the part of Cambridge where Drew, Merry, and I lived.

The marionette lady, who carried wooden puppets to speak for her, lived on one side of us, and a platinum blond drag queen who stood six foot, five inches without his stiletto heels owned the house on the right. Even more amazing, right here in the heart of Cambridge, we had a Republican. He covered his house with American flags and played Taps each night on his front porch.

Following September 11 the previous year, our ultraliberal neighborhood had declared a brief détente with the neighborhood Republican. For a few weeks, everyone gathered by his house at dusk, listening as he played. Now, almost a year later, the neighbors again treated him as a crazy outcast.

Sometimes I was startled to wake up in the role of mother with daughters, wife with husband, no longer a virtual orphan trying to keep herself to one drawer or one room, but able to spread out from a starkly lovely bedroom to a well-ordered basement. Even after years of living in this house, in this identity, I still didn’t know how to stretch out to live in all the corners of my world.

Despite my trappings, I suspected that it was only Merry’s presence next door that kept me stabilized. Sometimes, even though I didn’t tell anyone, the realities of my daughters and my secret father locked away in
a New York State penitentiary collided inside me like a clap of thunder. Mama still lived inside me as the beautiful-angry mother of my earliest years. I’d always have to hide the reality of my relationship with Mama from my girls. Sadder, when I searched for ways to be a mother, what motherhood meant, my memories of Mama were of no use.

I drove up the final ramp to the top floor of the garage attached to the Cabot Medical Health Care Building. Staff parking was first come, first served in Cabot’s survival-of-the-first-to-arrive plan. By 9:50, time forced us into the Siberia of parking real estate, the outermost corners, where our cars were vulnerable to rain, snow, or the beating sun.

Cabot Medical thrived on malice and discomfort, from the vicious parking battles to our careful tracking of Red Sox wins and losses. Working this close to Fenway Park, we prayed for them to lose, caring only about shortening the season of insane traffic. Screw the pennant.

I’d gone straight through from Cabot Medical School to the Cabot Medical Health Care group practice. They offered a job, and I accepted.

I hurried to the staircase, ran down to street level, and crossed the hot courtyard to the glass-and-bronze entry. Running stairs was my only form of exercise.

“Morning, Doctor Winterson.” Jerry the coffee guy had the lobby concession. A paraplegic with massive arms, he’d designed the operation to his reach and comfort, daring anyone to complain about having to crouch down for their sugar or creamer. I admired his skill in using his disability to blackmail his way into extra income. No one dared not to buy something, not with Jerry’s hints that turning down his muffin, tea, or ready-made sandwich reflected on your generosity toward the handicapped.

“Jerry probably has a mansion by now,” the receptionist, Maria, had muttered last week. Even so, she said it while clutching a chocolate chip cookie baked by Jerry’s wife.

“I’ve had my coffee, and I brought my lunch,” I said as I passed Jerry’s cart. I held up my L.L.Bean lunch bag as proof. “I’ll pick up a dozen cookies for the staff meeting later.”

“If we have any left,” Jerry said darkly, as though if he sold out it would be a bad thing, and probably my fault.

“I’ll take my chances.” I opened the door to the inside staircase and ran up three flights to Internal Medicine, coming out in a large open hall carpeted in industrial gray and leading to pods labeled A, B, and C. As I entered the B pod, Maria waved from the circular reception area, nodding as she spoke into her headset. Patients leaned toward my white coat like drooping weeds seeking sun.

Sticky notes fluttered from my computer screen. Area secretaries stuffed our mail slots so full with administrative memos and junk mail from drug companies that we of B pod communicated by stickies and bits of paper taped to chairs.

Cabot Medical had become a hatred-inducing practice, hounding us daily with reminders about money:
Bottom line! Remember capitation! More patients in less time! Accrete or burn!
I waited for the day the Medicrats told us to troll through bingo parlors for new patients.

My patient roster had gradually changed into a solid block of women whom I considered the almost old; doctors seemed to have less patience for these transitional women. I felt for them. I’d be one someday soon, and, unlike many acquaintances, I didn’t pretend otherwise; I didn’t want to be one of those females who were surprised by their swift fall, women who barely had time to wave good-bye at being beautiful, being needed, or being wooed as they slid toward retirement and the gray world of invisibility.

I made time for the almost old; in return, they clucked and fussed over me as if I were their personal miracle worker.
So clever, this one.

I peeled notes from my chair and computer. A larger-size hot pink Post-it screamed from my desk lamp.

Where are you? I had to drink coffee alone with the master of boredom. Doctor Denton kept me prisoner for twenty minutes of soul-killing tales of gardening. Please, come cleanse my aura and hear about my DATE. What are you planning for your birthday tomorrow? Can I take you to lunch? Check schedule for upcoming patient crush. Sorry. Kisses, Sophie

Sophie, the nurse with whom I teamed, had become my closest friend since Marta had left Boston for a rich husband. Patients came to Cabot as much for Sophie as they did for me. She knew how to comfort and give hugs when they cried for their lost wombs, their vanished sex lives, and the alopecia that horrified them each time they looked in the mirror. They, in turn, kept an eye out for a suitable husband and father for Sophie and her three nightmarish boys.

“Sounds great,” I’d said when Sophie told me about yet another patient’s eligible nephew. “Remind Mrs. Doherty that her son should bring his whip and lion-taming chair when he picks you up.”

Sophie stuck her head in the door. “Your ten-twenty is waiting, and your ten-forty is checking in. In addition, I had to squeeze in Audra Connelly. She found a job and she needs a full physical before starting.”

I studied my schedule laid out on the computer, color-coded courtesy of the Medicrats upstairs. “And just how do I manage this? Magic?”

“You’re the doctor. Figure it out.”

I nodded. Audra’s husband had recently died from pancreatic cancer, the once-massive and cheerful cop becoming skeletal and yellow as he suffered the pain by folding in on himself. I’d figure it out. “What time?” I asked. “Oh, wait—I see.”

She’d squeezed Audra’s appointment into 4:10. I massaged the back of my neck.

“How about a birthday lunch tomorrow?” Sophie asked.

Birthday tomorrow.

Anniversary of my mother’s death today.

Merry and I dreaded memorializing the event, but if we didn’t recognize the day in some way, we’d wait all year for the inevitable punishment, so we always marked it together. Some years we’d snuck to her grave, bringing red roses. My mother had become Snow White in my smoky memories, with lips the color of fresh blood, hair blacker than lacquered china, and skin white as a geisha’s.

Most years we watched sad movies to honor Mama. Repeatedly, we’d heard Mimi Rubee say,
My Celeste was beautiful enough to be a movie star.
When we’d lived at Duffy, we’d saved the quarters Grandma Zelda slipped
us and snuck off to the Loews theater on Mama’s death day. After we had moved to the Cohens’, we’d continued the practice. Asking them to take us to Mama’s grave site never seemed a possibility.

Each year we picked the saddest movie with the most tragic actress, moving through the decades from the Loews in Brooklyn to videos to DVDs, choking with sobs as we watched
Sophie’s Choice
or
Terms of Endearment,
wondering how devoted our mother would have been had she lived. I couldn’t imagine her letting gray roots grow in, as the mother had during her daughter’s illness in
Terms of Endearment.
The thought made me ill with guilt. Merry was supposed to rent tonight’s movie. We’d watch. She’d drink. We’d cry. Then we’d go to sleep. Happy anniversary, Mama.