The Murderer's Daughters (9 page)

The patchouli I’d sniffed on the college girls who volunteered to be so-called special friends to the older girls at Duffy-Parkman. Hillary Sachs was my special friend. I didn’t know if they’d assigned me a Jewish special friend on purpose or if it had been a coincidence. Hillary gave me cow-eyed, meaningful looks while we played Scrabble or went on little trips. I hadn’t yet deciphered what she offered in those looks. Last week she’d told me to get ready for something great the next time we met, which would be tomorrow.

When I got all the way upstairs, Grandma stood in the doorway, arms crossed over her bony chest. I still remembered Grandma as soft and round, and my heart folded in on itself when I noticed her clothes hanging so loose they looked like I could stuff in another Grandma.

“So, where were you? I was worried sick.”

“It’s only ten minutes after twelve.” I pointed to the cheap Timex that Grandma wore.

“I worry after two minutes.” As Grandma gave me a rough hug, Merry stuck her tongue out at me.

“For lunch I made hot borscht. Of course, I forgot the sour cream. Your grandmother is now officially an idiot. Proven this week, by the way.”

“By who?” Merry grabbed a hard candy from the bowl Grandma kept filled for us.

“By who? By everyone. Mrs. Edelstein downstairs asked me to take in her mail while she visited her son in New Jersey, and guess who forgot?”

“That’s not a big deal,” I said.

“Believe me, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.” Grandma took her purse from the secretary filling most of the postage stamp hall. “Here, Merry. Go down the street and get Grandma some sour cream. Also, I need a quart of milk and three apples, but not the mealy ones they stick in front. Make sure you take the sour cream and milk from the back also.”

“Lulu should have to go. She doesn’t even come every week, so I end up doing everything,” Merry said. “I want to stay here with you.”

“I’ll go.” I’d happily go. Grandma’s three-room apartment suffocated me. I couldn’t believe my father lived here when he was a teenager. He would have filled the place up. The tiny kitchen had a miniature table covered with an overscrubbed piece of red oilcloth, an ancient fridge, and a stove that looked like it should be in the Brooklyn Museum. A maroon velvet sofa and chair overfilled the living room, but even so, Grandma crammed in wobbly little tables smothered with tea-colored doilies. Grandma cleaned the apartment every hour, but everything still had a thick old-lady smell.

“No. You’ll stay.” Grandma handed the money to Merry. “Remember, take from the back.”

Merry left, and I curled up on the old sofa, trying not to let my face touch the scratchy fabric, picking up the only available reading material, a large-print
Reader’s Digest.

“Stop with the bookworm routine. I need to talk to you.” Grandma sat next to me on the couch and pulled the magazine from my hands.

I gave her a closemouthed smile. “What is it?”

“You need to hear a few things.” Grandma grabbed my hand. Despite her fragile appearance, she held me with a powerful grip. “I’m not going to be around forever, Lulu.”

“I hate when you talk like that.”

“Shush. By
forever,
I mean not very long at all. The doctor says my heart is getting bad, and the sugar makes it worse and worse. And my eyes, I can hardly get around. Forgive me for saying so,
tatelah,
but dying will be a blessing. Except, who will take care of your father? Who will watch over Merry?”

“I have to go to the bathroom, Grandma.”

“You can hold it a minute. Listen to me—when I’m gone, you watch your sister. Understand?”

“I watch her now.”

“Don’t be fresh.” Grandma squashed my fingers as she gave my hand a painful squeeze.

“Ouch!” I tried to pull away, but Grandma held on with her iron gangster grip.

“You watch her like a hawk, do you hear me?” Grandma still wouldn’t
let go of me. “Merry’s your responsibility when I’m gone. I know, I know, you think you do everything already—but believe me, you don’t. When I’m gone, you’ll be all she has. You can take care of yourself, you’ll always be okay, but she’s not tough like you.”

“Okay, fine.” Grandma’s words piled on me. Why did everyone think I could take care of stuff? I hadn’t done it for Mama, had I?

“And remember, your sister will need to see Daddy,” Grandma said. I ignored her, staring down at my knees, and she gave me a tiny smack on the side of my head. “Look at me.”

I looked up. “I said I’d take care of Merry, but how do you expect me to take her to prison? I’m only thirteen, Grandma.”

“What a character you are. When I try to tell you what to do you say you’re not a kid, you’re thirteen. Now suddenly thirteen is a baby?” Grandma shook her knobbed finger in my face, still holding on to my hand with her other hand. “We need to talk about your father.”

I ran my free hand over the worn velvet nap, pushing it one way and then the other. Merry might be my responsibility, but I wasn’t taking him on.

“You haven’t seen your father once,” Grandma said. “Not once. When I die, you go see him. Do you hear? He’ll be all alone in this world except for you and Merry.”

“Wasn’t that his choice?” I squeezed my thigh. Grandma and I never spoke of how Mama died, that my father killed her, that he ran a knife wet with Mama’s blood into Merry’s chest.

“Your father did a terrible thing. It’s not for me to defend. However, he’s my son and he’s your father. When I die, you take care of Merry and you see your father. Do you promise?”

“Just how am I supposed to get there?” I pictured the prison as a fortress with rats jumping from everywhere and moving brown patches of cockroaches covering the walls.

“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. Call your uncle Hal.”

Was she kidding? Aunt Cilla and Uncle Hal hadn’t come to see us since Mimi Rubee died.

“It will kill me if you don’t promise,” Grandma said.

I shrugged.

Grandma squeezed my hand one more time. “Promise!”

I crossed my fingers. I wound my legs together. I’d never go to Richmond Prison. Never.

“I promise,” I said. “I promise.”

“That’s a good girl.” Grandma unwound her fingers and patted me. “Remember, a promise is sacred. God listens. Disobey a promise and God knows what can happen. But never mind, I know you’ll keep your word.” She tilted her head and gave me an approving smile. “I see your father in your face. It comforts me. I’ll die easier knowing I can count on you.”

The next morning I dressed with particular care. I tried not to get excited as I waited for Hillary to pick me up for our “something great.” So far, we’d gone to the movies, gone to the Brooklyn Museum, where she couldn’t get enough of the costume rooms and I thought I might fall asleep, and stayed here to play Scrabble. Once she’d dragged me around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which actually soothed me. I’d like a life as peaceful as the Japanese section there.

I made my cot up as tight as possible, using the hospital corners Mrs. Parker insisted upon, tucking in the wool blanket, working carefully to avoid the iron ribbing on which the mattress rested. They’d given me enough scrapes over the years. I didn’t feel like running to the housemother to beg for Neosporin. However, I would, and did every time my skin broke, because germs loved Duffy-Parkman. No matter how hard Mrs. Parker made us scrub, you’d always find some Duffy girl puking or wiping her snot on a chair. Blood poisoning lived a scratch away here, and before they brought you to a doctor, you had to lose your leg or have a temperature of 105.

I’d debated between being a doctor and being an anthropologist for a long time. As a doctor, you were always doing the right thing, saving and healing people. Doctors knew what to do no matter what happened. You had to take care of disgusting things, but almost nothing made me sick to my stomach. When Olive was afraid to tell Mrs. Parker she thought she had lice, I checked her. I even got Grandma to buy the stuff to get rid of
the bugs, and I took care of Olive secretly in the bathroom, with Merry posted as the lookout. I combed out every single nit.

Anthropologists made sense of people. I read
Coming of Age in Samoa
when someone threw it in a bag with other donated stuff for Duffy. It made me think that where you live can make all the difference. I’d have liked to be an anthropologist like Margaret Mead, but I didn’t know how I could ever travel that far from Merry.

I beat my flat pillow in an attempt to bring it to life, but the dead feathers had their own dead mind. I dusted and lined up my books in size order, positioning my crayoned “D
O
N
OT
B
ORROW
W
ITHOUT
P
ERMISSION
” sign smack in the middle. No one here read much, but stealing was the Duffy sport of choice. Luckily, no one cared enough about books to want mine, except Olive, and although she was spooky, she was a rare spot of Duffy honesty.

I put my brush and comb into my small and only drawer. Leaving my room without neatening my three shelves until they were perfect, with everything lined up and all the fold sides of my clothes facing out, could ruin my day. I had the neatest shitty stuff in Brooklyn.

I checked myself in the mirror through slitted eyes, trying to imagine what the college girls thought of me. Most Duffy girls dressed like whores, but I rummaged through every bag of donated clothes searching for shirts, pants, and skirts as not-Duffy as possible.

When people dropped off old clothes, the housemothers dumped the bags in the middle of the family room, and we’d eye the bulging sacks as if we couldn’t be less interested. The moment someone made the first move, we all pounced.

The toughest and meanest girls wore the best clothes. That’s why Merry looked scruffy. I tried to pull out decent clothes for her, but try looking for two sizes while girls knee you in the chest. I had one advantage, though. While the idiots here searched for hot pants that showed their butts, I fought for Levi’s and oxford shirts.

Today I wore a blue button-down shirt. I thought my complexion looked almost pretty in that color. Not that anyone cared, but at least I didn’t have pimples. Most Duffy girls’ skin oozed so bad you wanted to
close your eyes. Maybe it was our greasy meals, so I tried to eat the best stuff Duffy served. Of course, I couldn’t do that every meal, otherwise I’d have been limited to bread and water. My good skin was probably just luck. Tall and no pimples; these were my big blessings.

Merry burst into the room, her mouth turned down and lonely. Sunday mornings it was as though we were the only people left in the world. “When are you coming back?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Where’s she taking you?”

“I don’t know. It’s a surprise.”

Merry hopped up on my neat bed, folding her legs Indian style. I wanted to chase her off and smooth it down, but she seemed so pathetic. Poor Grandma tried to make Merry’s chopped-off hair look good, twirling it in Dippity-Do for hours, and only succeeded in making her look like a crazy poodle.

“I hate it here.” Merry dug her heels back and forth along my blanket.

“Stop messing up my bed. I know you hate it here. I hate it also.”

“Everyone hates me.”

“No one hates you.”

“Reetha and Enid hate me. They cut up my shirt while I was gone. The one Grandma got me. With the tiny flowers.” Resignation colored Merry’s voice. “Or maybe someone else did it. Someone else who hates me.”

“Grandma will get you another one.”

“I can’t tell her,” Merry said. “It would scare her.”

“I have some money saved. I’ll buy you a new shirt.”

Merry lay on her belly, her cheek against my pillow. “Forget it,” she said in a muffled voice. “It doesn’t even matter. Everything turns ugly here. We’re just going to have an ugly-ugly life.”

Hillary’s something great turned out to be having lunch with her parents. She kept it all a big secret, taking me on the subway, transferring a thousand times, and bouncing around as though we were going to see the president. I tried not to look disappointed. I’d allowed myself to get all
excited, imagining all sorts of things: Shopping trips! A Broadway play! Carnegie Hall! Places I’d read and dreamed about, like the top of the Empire State Building and the ice-skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza.