The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Next on their secret agenda was a shakedown for drugs Billy might try to smuggle into the hospital. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got,” Jesse said, playing off his request as if he had reconsidered Billy’s earlier offer.

  Billy obliged, and from his pockets spilled rainbow stores. While Doro explained what was to happen next, about the ER and the arrangements she’d made, Jesse collected the stash in a napkin.

  Billy sighed, settling back in the seat. “I see how it is,” he said in the voice of Grover the Muppet, using the childhood pet name from when he was the beloved baby of the family. “It is detox for Boysie?”

  Firmly, sadly, in unison, hearing in their answer the long-learned inflections of their father’s voice, the posse said, “It is.”

  Again ClairBell leaned around her seat and held out a hand to Jesse, gesturing toward the confiscated pills. “You want me to take those home and bury them in the burn pile? Set fire to them, maybe? I’d be happy to. We can’t just drive around town with them. What if the cops stop us?”

  Jesse said, “Better not, Bell. Some animal could get at them. Your coyotes and your raccoons and whatnot.” He dumped the take into the remains of cherry limeade, shook the cup until the pills dissolved, and then poured the pink slurry out the window to splatter onto the hot asphalt of East Harry Street.

  “Litterbug,” said ClairBell. The rest of the way to the hospital she glared at the roadside, thinking dark thoughts. Nobody appreciated her. It was all Dean Doro Do-Right and Jesse the Beloved and the Prodigal Favorite, O Where Have You Been, Billy Boy? She, ClairBell, was the Forgotten Child. She tried to work up a few tears but could get none to fall. At least, she thought, she had Randy. Doro had run her husband off, even a medical doctor not perfect enough. Well, there was the matter of his drinking, but still—a doctor? ClairBell would have made a different choice, but Doro had to have things just right. Spoiled, she was, ClairBell thought. Prissy and spoiled and stuffed up like a Thanksgiving turkey with book learning, educated way past the need of any common everyday person to get along in the world. She, ClairBell, was salt-of-the-earth and she loved it. So there.

  Jesse the Beloved’s wife had divorced him. Same reason: drink. Plus some ugly business with a shotgun that neither ClairBell nor the courts could figure out. Had Jesse turned the weapon on his wife or on himself or on the barn door he eventually shot full of holes? Whatever, he was nevermore allowed to own a gun in the state of Kansas, the United States, and possibly the universe. Despite his sobriety he was keeping company with Patsy Gaddy, barflooze extraordinaire. He thought he was hiding it, but everyone knew. Still, Jesse acted like the woman wasn’t shacked up in his spare room, cadging rides and smoke money and bleeding him white. One day when the rest of the family was out in Jesse’s tomato patch, ClairBell had sneaked into his house and she’d seen the piles of women’s clothing on the floor—little bitty raggedy cowgirl jeans and pink plaid pearl-snap shirts and the fringed vest Patsy wore everywhere. Oh, Brother Bear wasn’t pulling one over on ClairBell.

  Gid’s latest common-law hookup was the usual hot Gideous mess, all crystals and chakras and incense and sweat lodges and New Age ugga-boo. Plus an aquifer of booze. Finally there was the Prodigal’s life partner, Leo, a retired Navy chaplain turned AIDS counselor Billy’d joined up with in what they’d called a commitment ceremony but which looked for all the world like a two-groom wedding cake with punch and shrimp cocktail in the basement of the Metropolitan Community Church. She’d liked to have died when the two grooms gave each other that Pac-Man tongue-kiss for a full minute in front of Daddy. Reverend Leo had beat feet west the second or third time Billy fell off the wagon, but not until after they’d taken a few trips to Europe and a cruise to South America. A half-life partner, ClairBell thought, cracking herself up. But seriously, only she was still married. Go figure.

  When she thought of her first two marriages, she softened. Fact was, every last one of the Campbells was messed up from the bassinette on and every bit of it was Hattie’s fault; their mother played favorites. The order went this way: Billy first, always, foremost, followed by Jesse the Beloved. Their brother Nick probably would have been next because he was male, but he was long gone, dead at twenty-three of a sick heart, and so it was Doro the Exploro in third place, and then in fourth place Gid, who was a man-child so he should have at least beat out Doro, but somehow that part of her mother’s favoritism didn’t play in Gid’s case and Gid didn’t care about favorites anyway. This left ClairBell to waddle along at the tail end of the line like the last quacking duck in a wooden pull toy. A hot, satisfying tear brimmed over.

  After Billy had gone through triage, to which he submitted docilely, supplying information about his consumption that widened the eyes of a student trainee, Jesse walked with him and the hospital attendant to the detox intake.

  The sisters went outside to wait in the parking lot. They leaned against the car’s hood, Doro waiting for her heart to slow down. She’d forgotten to take her beta-blocker that morning and she felt a pounding in her neck and beneath her breastbone. ClairBell opened the car door, found the warm remains of a Reddi Mart Pepsi, and sipped through the straw. Her mouth was dry. She’d been ramping up on some of the oxycodone she’d snagged from her father’s top drawer, a prescription he had for the bouts of back pain he suffered even years after the war. She’d swallowed three while the others were at the intake desk. Feeling the buzz come over her, she watched the late afternoon light play like water on the chrome of the parked cars and thought, not for the first time and she hoped not for the last, how beautiful light could be, how refreshing wind could be, even if it carried a faint smell of engine oil and hot tar and maybe a whiff of the sewer plant on South Hillside, and how good life was, really, and how much she loved her dumpy, clunky-tribal-jewelry-wearing, know-it-all big sister, poor old Goody-Two-Orthopedic-Shoes, who was standing off a ways, gazing at a bus stop bench through her fancy Hollywood sunglasses with a queasy look on her face.

  An elderly woman in a flowered headscarf waited for the bus on the bench beneath a redbud tree, shopping bags at her feet. The woman looked at her watch and then drew a cigarette from her fanny pack and lit it. The smoke blew their way. The cloud hit Doro like the divine afflatus, and she breathed deeply. She took an involuntary step toward the woman. She was on her third quit, she had told everyone about it as an insurance policy, and for the past weeks she’d been doing well. The day had been difficult, though. Despite all her hard talk about getting help for Billy, despite the danger he put their parents in, the financial drain his habits were, and the damage he was doing to himself, she felt as if she were betraying him. She would bum a smoke, just one. It would calm her. Only ClairBell would know. Then she remembered that whatever her sister knew, the world would soon know. Jesse would know. The clerks at Dollar General would know. Hattie and Abel would know, along with embellishments calculated to make Doro look worse. By the time ClairBell finished reporting the incident, the tale would be that Doro had scrounged through an overflowing ashtray frequented by lepers and lit a crumpled butt, spendthrift that she was, with a flaming ten-dollar bill. She took a step back.

  “You okay?” ClairBell asked, looking at her sharply. “You look a little sick.”

  “Good.” Doro took a deep breath. “I’m good.”

  ClairBell snort-laughed. “Everybody knows you’re good,” she said. “I asked if you were okay.” She cut her eyes toward the headscarf woman and then back to Doro. “You looked like you were having a nicky.”

  Doro pretended to notice the woman and her wreath of smoke for the first time. She knew she should admit to her weakness, her temptation, but she couldn’t. Something in her, a part of herself she didn’t like and was trying to work on, wouldn’t let her give ClairBell the edge. “No,” she said shortly. “I’m just tired.”

  ClairBell rolled her eyes to throw shade on her sister’s pitiful excuse. “Right.”

  In the barred room of the hospital basement where Bill
y was to stay for his detox, Jesse made his good-byes. “Thank you, my big brother,” said Billy. “Tell Doro and ClairBell I understand. I know you want what’s best for me.”

  Of the Campbells, Jesse was most sentimental, and he was moved by his brother’s surrender. He loved the flighty little punk and it ripped his heart out to see him this way, sick and down. Not to mention that Jesse’d been there himself, but with booze, saved only by a sponsor who kept him straight, and his own banged-up white knuckles. He shook Billy’s hand, thinking not for the first time that if his brother weren’t such a high-flaring flame ball of the kind the barstool jockeys at the Pay Dirt would want to beat up, he’d like to have taken him, back in his drinking days, for a beer. They could have compared notes about what it was like to be sons of Abel Campbell—Attorney-at-Law, Municipal Judge, and King of Kansas. At this last unkind thought, he told himself, almost by reflex, Easy Does It. Keep the bitterness down.

  When Jesse arrived at the car and relayed Billy’s message, ClairBell’s anger, simmering all day and muted only a little by her meds, boiled over. “That little skunk. What I really want is for him to pay me back for everything he stole. Last time he came over he kyped a bottle of Lortabs from my train case—which was locked, by the way—and a jug of quarters from the pantry. Not to forget Randy’s best Stetson he wore to gay rodeo night and did anybody ever see it again, yee-haw?”

  As she carried on, Jesse and Doro pretended interest in the western sky, now piling up with thunderheads. When ClairBell made claims, it didn’t pay to question her word. The more far-fetched her accusations were, the more fiercely she stood by them. In this way she was like their father—every argument was a hill she was prepared to die on. Besides, they reasoned separately, silently, these particular charges probably hadn’t been fetched from that far away. Billy’s rap sheet was long.

  On the ride home they were quiet. The sky darkened, lowering. A fresh, ozone-y wind came up. As the first gouts of rain splashed across the windshield, ClairBell quietly took up the ever-nourishing matter of her abandonment, Jesse considered the odds of a request to use Abel’s log splitter being met with a simple yes or no, with no dramatic reading from the List of Tool-Borrowing Offenses, and Doro reflected on how to pack for the next morning’s flight, on the relief it would be when the plane skimmed over the harbor and touched down at Logan and she was done, at least for this visit, with family matters.

  At the house in Amicus, Hattie had waited for word, and when the party returned she asked for an accounting, sighing as they filled her in on the day. “So he’s safe,” she said. “For now.”

  Two

  The child was an accident, a slip on a snowy March midnight in 1963, Hattie and Abel tipsy on champagne and staking their fates on a diaphragm so brittle it should have been tossed away months before, whispering under blankets so not to wake the five children asleep in rooms down the hall.

  They had recently come back from the city where Abel’s job as a claims adjuster had taken them, to their homeland among the farm towns of southern Kansas. To Hattie, the time they’d spent in Chicago had seemed like exile. Abel’s health had gone bad there—a hiatal hernia and maybe an ulcer and all of it most likely caused by nerves and worry. Homesickness, Hattie suspected, but she kept her opinion to herself. She was glad when he decided to return to the slower, quieter place where they’d grown up, glad to return to family and to ways she knew. The champagne was to celebrate their homecoming, their first night in the first house that wasn’t a rental, and to mark the new leaf in Abel’s career.

  After the war ended he’d gone to law school on the GI Bill. There’d been a glut of new lawyers in the year he graduated, and so he’d decided to wait to start a practice. Before they knew it Theodora and Nicholas were toddlers and the child who would be Jesse was on the way, and in no time at all Claire and Gideon came along to make five. Thanks to Hattie’s frugality and a boom economy, they got along all right, and at last, a decade after Abel had passed the bar exam, they were able to put a down payment on a stone house on three acres in the outlying village of Amicus, where Abel had been hired as town counsel. Another purpose of opening the bottle, though neither would say it and both tried hard not to think it, was to blunt the recent, terrible news—the diagnosis of their eldest son’s heart defect and his diminished life expectancy.

  Nick was a skinny thirteen. He had soft brown eyes and long lashes, sand-colored hair, a high forehead. On his cheek below his right eye spread an oblong birthmark the color of Mercurochrome. His nail beds were blue, his fingers had started to club, and when he tried to run he wheezed and had trouble catching his breath. He would probably not live past twenty, the doctors said. Neither Hattie nor Abel could bear to think about this. Nick had been Abel’s hope, his first true joy since before the war, and he made no secret of this. In his son he saw traits he wished that he himself possessed—Hattie’s patience and kindness, for two—in addition to a good mind and a sense of justice. It had been Abel’s worry about Nick’s health rather than Hattie’s—she was pragmatic about illness and tended to brush off sickness or to expect time to do its promised work—that led to the cardiac catheterization and the diagnosis: tetralogy of Fallot. A defect of birth. Four holes in their boy’s heart.

  As winter turned to spring, the weather warmed, and Hattie missed first one and then two of her monthly cycles, she wondered if maybe she was entering the change of life. She was forty, and she was eager to see the end of her moon-ruled days. She’d put her education on hold to marry. Back in the days right after the war everyone was getting married—her sisters and brothers, her friends, everyone—and the world had turned into a whirl of bridal showers and weddings. She and Abel were married in Hattie’s church, First Baptist, with the aisle and dais lit with candles, with sheet cake and frilled nut cups in the church basement, a honeymoon trip to the Ozarks. They hadn’t made their destination that first night for the rise of desire that in all the years they would be together would not diminish, a desire that caused them to turn the shoe-dragging, tin-can-clanking Studebaker into the first highway tourist court they came to after leaving the city limits. They parked and hurried to check in, the white painted letters scrawled on the car’s sides announcing—for all the world to see and to Hattie’s maidenly embarrassment—Abel’s lustful ambitions: “Hot Springs Tonight!”

  Now, with the childbearing part of her life drawing to a close, Hattie intended to go back to school and finish a degree in elementary education. Maybe teach school part time. She knew well that her work was her husband and children and house, and she didn’t question it, but often through the years of infants and young children she had looked up from the stove or the sink or the washing machine to imagine the day she would be free. She loved the children, but still she had counted the years.

  When other signs that something was going on inside her came on—tenderness in her breasts, morning queasiness, an odd blurring of time, the longing for an afternoon nap—she thought again, until the reason for these changes dawned on her like a slow and terrible change of mind. After disbelief came dread. She remembered the sleepless nights, awakened by a baby’s cries, her exhaustion, how confined she’d felt, how haggard, tethered to a newborn, to infants and toddlers, her life become urine-drenched and soiled, the reeking diaper pails, the calf mash smell of Karo syrup and evaporated milk, curdled and everlasting spit-up. Magazine articles and glossy advertisements made motherhood look like bliss, like an enterprise the resourceful woman could control with the latest products and could even take delight in, cooking balanced meals, greeting her husband at the door in a pinafore apron, freshly bathed, a steaming crown roast held out on a platter. What a laugh, if it hadn’t been so sad. Not one of her friends would admit to a similar sense of doom, and so she felt alone, beleaguered and worn to a nub. Her doughty little mother had given birth in their farmhouse in the same bed she’d conceived seven children in, nursing each baby until another was due. How had she done it?

  Abel was a
camera buff and he loved to photograph her, artfully staging her or, worse, catching her when she wasn’t expecting him to aim the camera. He didn’t seem to notice her distress, but when Hattie saw candid photographs of herself in those years, even long after they were over, she had to look away. The haunted look in her own eyes made her feel sick. She had moved through the days of early motherhood as though—it was silly—as though she’d committed some unknown sin and she couldn’t get away from what she’d done, as though she were laying offerings at the altar of an unknown god.

  Every Saturday Abel had stayed home to watch the children while she took the car to do the week’s marketing, and sometimes she imagined pressing her foot on the gas pedal and driving away, driving and driving and driving as far as she could go. On one particular Saturday, deep in the frigid Chicago winter when she was desperate to get away, if only to sit in the cold car in the stillness, Nick and Jesse had hidden in the backseat, planning to pop up and surprise her and trick her into taking them along to the store. She’d driven only a block when they shouted, “Surprise, Mommy!” She’d screamed in shock, and then turned the car around, sent them to the house, and gone on alone to the store. When she returned home and parked the car in the alley, for the longest time she couldn’t make herself go inside. She’d sat in the car until night fell and frost flowers bloomed on the windows and the lights in the bedrooms went out.