The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Left alone by the pool, Billy contemplated his own prank. The family cat loved the sandpaper-like texture of the diving board and she often lazed on its rough surface. She was drowsing there now. Billy’s plan was to catch her and drop her into the black water below.

  He climbed up the low board and made his way to where the cat lay, a task he’d done often enough through the summer, though always with a brother or sister waiting to catch him when he jumped and always with the beautiful blue water rippling below. Ribbon was an old marmalade kitty, manhandled by children and accustomed to being picked up under her forelegs and dangled limply, helplessly. At first she submitted patiently enough to Billy’s will, but when he got close to the edge of the pool, she drew up her hind legs and clawed the air, flipping herself over. She made her escape from Billy’s grip, but fell ten feet down into the muck at the bottom of the pool. In the struggle Billy toppled over, cracking his head on the brick ledge. He fell, unconscious, into the filthy water.

  No one had witnessed the accident. Hattie’s first indication that something was amiss came when she caught sight of Ribbon, muddy and yowling at the patio doors. Wondering what had happened, she hurried outside. Scanning the pool, she saw nothing out of order. The shallow end was empty except for a plywood plank and a homemade skateboard one of the boys had abandoned. There at the deep end was Billy’s tricycle parked on the apron. The dark, debris-clotted water at the pool’s bottom lay in shadow. At first it revealed no clue, and she had almost turned to go back into the house to resume her dinner preparations when she caught sight of a patch of dirtied white fabric, half submerged—the training pants she’d put on the baby not twenty minutes before.

  She didn’t remember afterward how she got down into the pool, whether she’d jumped into the dry shallow end or hastened down the steps, or how she pulled the still body from the water and laid him on the dirty concrete. Standing there, she knew only that she had to think of what to do.

  Only think.

  But she couldn’t. No thought would come, and it would be this way all her life, that in dire times she would freeze and be unable to summon a thought. Something would shut down in her brain.

  She stood, trying, trying.

  ClairBell and Gideon had made their way to the south side of the house, to the door nearest the big bathroom, garter snake at the ready. When they saw their mother standing alone in the deep end of the pool, and that the bundle at her feet was their baby brother, they dropped the snake. Yelling, they banged into the house and barged into the bathroom and then ducked out of the way so Doro, who was dressed in madras shorts and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, who had worked summers as a lifeguard, could race past them to help. Nick and Jesse had come in to wash for supper, and they called the police, who dispatched an ambulance.

  Doro knelt in the bottom of the pool over the baby’s body. His skin was cold and blue. She turned him so he was on his side, stuck two fingers in his mouth, scooped out a clot of matter, leaves and sticks, turned him on his side. Black water poured out. She put her mouth to his blue one and began to blow the way the Red Cross had taught. Another murky spring of water gurgled up. As sirens sounded in the distance she kept breathing into him, not sure she was doing it right, worried that she was pushing more of the foul-smelling water into him. Her only practice had been on the rubber mouth of Resusci Annie. She looked up once to see that neighbors stood around. The woman who lived next door brought a blanket and she put it over her brother, tucking in the edges, and then the ambulance was there, the attendant lifting him to secure him to a gurney. He was unconscious.

  At the Town Hall, Abel had heard the police call come in. He raced home to find fire department, police, and ambulance on the property. Neighbors and gawkers, drawn by the sirens, stood around. When it was clear that his son was breathing, he fell to his knees in the empty pool, his face in his hands, not to pray but to cover the horror at the terrible bargain, the profane prayer his mind had too suddenly, too easily supplied: Take this boy, spare the other.

  By the time Hattie came out, grim-faced, shattered, dressed for the drive to the hospital, he had composed himself.

  * * *

  Billy recovered, no worse for wear. Abel labored for several years to forget his unholy exchange, to forget the sick feeling he’d had when he found himself thinking the unthinkable. When Billy was six, the pool’s concrete cracked in a bad freeze, and though Abel groused about cheap materials and a capricious water table and his own workmanship, he was relieved when the bulldozer drove the last of the fill dirt over the hole where the pool had been.

  Three

  Winfield was a hill town in the shadow of the dormers and chimneys of the former state asylum, where even into the middle years of the twentieth century chains and leg-irons were used to restrain patients. It was to this place, now a drug rehabilitation center, that Billy went when his detox was completed. A student of architecture, he led his recovery pod in historical appreciation of the Victorian-era buildings and in sick jokes about their current incarceration, but he did well on the program. Given his upbringing, Hattie’s teaching, and his own spiritual leanings, talk of surrender to a Higher Power was second nature, and when the time had been accomplished he was released.

  Clean, sober, clear-eyed, he went first to a halfway house and then to a job at a Bible publishing company. Hattie was ecstatic. The manager was a deeply kind man who recognized suffering when he saw it and who lived a loving creed. In this man’s presence Billy flourished. He made decent friends and he made enough money to rent a bright studio apartment in an Art Deco building in Riverside Park, which he furnished in tasteful castoffs from Hattie’s attic and the Goodwill, and where he was happy and productive for almost a year, until sickness and hunger and need again drove him down.

  He went down fast. All his old haunts he revisited, his old sources he renewed. He tricked the PA at his doctor’s office into a double prescription for methadone. He lost two apartments. The pretty Deco one he’d set fire to in what he said was a cooking accident—“But cooking what?” ClairBell wanted to know—and from the second place, no more than a flop, he was evicted for operating a massage parlor without a license. “It was probably a front,” said ClairBell late one night on the phone to Doro as she brought her sister up to date on Billy’s relapse.

  For all her sister’s education—to ClairBell’s way of thinking a mighty waste—Doro could be a big dunce. “A front for what?”

  ClairBell made her voice dire. “Happy endings?” she repeated until Doro at last caught her drift and said, “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he looks like death warmed over,” ClairBell said. “Who’d even want a massage from him?”

  Doro sighed. “I don’t know,” she said, but then suddenly, sadly, she did.

  It was a wonder he was getting around at all. The side effects of antiretroviral treatment had weakened him, and the hip replacements he’d had in more stable times had gone bad. He limped painfully. Macular degeneration and a bout of shingles had left him blind in one eye. For suffering that was genuine and unbearable he took the prescribed methadone, which he supplemented with benzos and oxy and vodka, cough syrup if these substances were scarce.

  ClairBell tried to crack wise. “Looks like the Little Bad Wolf has checked himself into re-tox,” but nobody laughed. The situation was grim. No one could live this way for long, least of all such a small man who was so sick already. From all appearances Billy had begun a decline that he couldn’t recover from.

  Because he would otherwise be on the street, Hattie, bucking all advice and Abel’s glower, invited him home to live in the guest bedroom.

  Jesse shook his head. “He’s forty-fricking-seven, Mom.”

  ClairBell huffed. “Enabling again? What happened to tough love?”

  Outraged, ClairBell phoned Doro, who said, “And we’re surprised?” though if Doro were to tell the truth, she was. She had believed he could beat the beast. It was no comparison, she knew,
but she had quit smoking. Going on almost a year. She crossed her fingers and wished she had a cigarette to celebrate with.

  All were against the residency plan. Billy would burn down the house, either with forgotten Mavericks or with his midnight flambés or his crème brûlée torch, and the old ones would go up in smoke. Probably Billy himself, the very god of second chances, would escape the fire and live on. He’d deal drugs from the deck. Lowlifes would traipse through the yard. He’d turn Hattie into his drug runner. He would sell her, ClairBell said, for a nickel bag.

  But Hattie only smiled. “‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these…’ And it’s only until he gets back on his feet.”

  It was late November. Abel was growing more feeble, drawing his age about him with the tartan blanket he wrapped around himself like a stooped Highland laird. His youngest son’s voice at the dinner table, droning in terrible monologues about food and wine and books and his plan to enroll in a fly-by-night massage “academy,” set his teeth on edge. So did the clatter-bang-crash of Billy’s late-night cooking and the missing beta-blockers and painkillers from his medicine lockbox, money from the wallet he left on his nightstand. He’d had to hide things all over the house and outside and then he couldn’t find them himself. Any man would bark. As Abel waxed in anger and Billy in backslide, Hattie recited the Beatitudes. Blessed are the peacemakers, she whispered for strength, for they shall become the children of God. She’d settle for less if only the two wouldn’t snipe.

  A week into his stay, a certified letter arrived, addressed to Billy. It was a bench warrant for contempt signed by Judge B. Gerald Jameson, a colleague of Abel’s. The year before, during the decline that led to detox and rehab, Billy had failed to appear in court on a forgery charge. He had stolen a blank check from Hattie’s book, made it out to himself for two thousand dollars, and signed her name.

  “Why can’t we just forgive the debt?” Hattie had wanted to know when Abel discovered the theft. “He can pay us back.”

  “With what? The money you sneak him behind my back? He spends his disability check the minute it hits the bank.”

  To teach Billy a lesson, Abel pressed charges, badgering Hattie until she joined suit. Billy was served a citation, which he ignored, hence the warrant, now catching up to him.

  Abel saw his chance to clean house. “We’ll hand him over,” he decreed from the kitchen stool where he stirred a bowl of fudge ripple ice cream to the consistency he liked. He’d been choking a lot lately and he’d been trying to keep his diet soft. “He’ll have to go to jail. The law requires it.”

  Her back to him, Hattie washed dishes with a pointed slosh and splash. “The law now,” she muttered. “So now it’s the law.”

  When she made no audible answer, Abel persisted. “We need to show him we’re in accord.”

  She scrubbed at a scorched pot. “Well, you may be in accord with yourself, but I’m not.” She was treading on thin ice, she knew, but she didn’t care.

  “Then I’ll get one of the children.”

  Abel stumped down the hallway to his boar’s nest to think. Jesse was out of the question. He was currently sober but his time in the county DUI work-release program had left him with a grudge against the court system. ClairBell was square with the law except for a pending personal-injury lawsuit brought by some ambulance chaser she’d hired after a fender bender. The case was doomed, yet another of his daughter’s nuisance suits to clog the docket and fan the flames of her martyr’s fire. What she sought was the usual emolument, the healing application of a greenback poultice. For all her maddening ways, she was his favorite, but she wasn’t a good candidate for the job. One, he couldn’t control her; two, her jealousy of Billy might ignite; three, her habit of stump lawyering too often made her mouth run ahead of her hindparts. Gid was out. He’d come back from New Mexico after his bale hut burned under suspicious circumstances, but he had a hollow leg, a foul temper, and a hatred for what he called “the police state.”

  That left Theodora. If there was one thing he could depend on, it was that his eldest would try to please him. As a child she’d been a shy creature, sensitive and quick to cloud up. Early on, he supposed, he’d made her afraid of him. He knew this and he regretted it. When she was three he’d had to question her about Hattie’s wedding and engagement rings, missing from the nail in the linen closet where she often kept them. It was the early fifties and they lived in a postwar crackerbox house near the law school. There’d been a terrible drought that summer and the bare dirt yards had cracked, leaving crevices that went down ten or so inches. He had a hunch that the child had dropped the rings down one of them. He searched with a flashlight but finally gave up and came inside. Hattie was in the nursery putting Nick and Doro to bed, listening to their “Now I lay me”s. He asked her to go over the last time she’d seen the rings.

  “I put them on a hook in the linen cupboard last night, when I was soaking diapers, and now they’re gone.”

  The rings had set him back a pretty penny. He’d been saving to buy a horse and he had his eye on a little roan, but instead he bought the rings so he could propose. To see that money buried in the dirt …

  In summer pajamas printed with figures of Goldilocks and the three bears, Doro lay in the top bunk of the army-issue beds he’d painted blue. A hot breeze blew through the open window. Outside, locusts sawed.

  “Sister, look at Daddy.”

  The child, frowsy-headed from near sleep, sat up, alert and watchful.

  “You took Mommy’s rings from the hook in the linen closet and you played with them, is that right?”

  She shook her head and looked down. He went on. “But you saw the rings. They were pretty, weren’t they? And you wanted them.” He reached for her hands and held them and looked into her eyes, and there it was, the crack, the guilty flicker, the child’s darting gaze. He had hit the truth.

  He badgered her then, cross-examining the way he might a witness, employing the rhetorical strategies he’d learned in law school—Did you or did you not? Were you telling a fib then or are you telling a fib now?—trying to trick her into confession until she was mixed up and crying and finally Hattie had stopped him. “Abel, that’s enough. She doesn’t know where they are.” The next day Hattie found the rings when she put away clean laundry, tucked among a stack of washcloths. He wasn’t sure his daughter remembered the night—she’d been only three—but it seemed to him that since then she’d been ginger around him, skittish and wary. But he knew he could count on her to do right. Or at least do what he told her to do. He began to plan his strategy, and when she arrived from Boston for her pre-Christmas visit, he deputized her.

  “Well, hot damn. It’s tough love at last,” ClairBell said when she heard about Abel’s plan to turn Billy over to the court system. “Daddy’s cracking down on him even if she won’t. I’m proud of you, sister.”

  Doro’s heart sank. When ClairBell was proud of her, it usually meant she was about to do something that would turn the bad-girl spotlight, the one that usually illuminated ClairBell, onto herself. This seemingly new problem—whether or not to help her father get her brother to jail—was the age-old coyote trap of her parents’ crossed wills, and once again her do-gooding paw hovered over the snare. No matter whose will she upheld, she’d be wrong.

  She spent the next day making herself scarce, claiming a bogus trip to the library and a lunch with friends in order to avoid Abel, but at last she decided to make good on her word. She told herself she would be a help to her brother, a buffer. She told Billy the same. She laid it out plain—it was this or the police would come to the house to arrest him, why not spare himself?—and he agreed to turn himself in.

  Hattie was a mild woman, but she had a limit beyond which smart money didn’t bet, and now she was angry past tolerance. Not at her husband, or at least not any more angry than usual, but at her daughter for taking his side. On the morning of the jailhouse trip she wondered aloud to Doro what would it hurt to drop the charges.
Or not to have pressed them at all. Or to have given Billy a cash gift in the amount he’d stolen. “Or you?” she said darkly. “You could help. You’ve done well.”

  Doro studied the shredded wheat in her bowl. This was true—she had a good job, a light-filled apartment in Brookline, and her sagebrush-and-snakebite novels sold surprisingly well—but the time was wrong to say she’d done well by curbing her impulse to toss dollar bills into bottomless wells. Which wasn’t true anyway, as she had indeed tossed her share, if well-made clothes and books and plane tickets and beautiful dinners counted. And the time wasn’t right to admit to her famously frugal mother the alarming credit card debt she’d racked up. Not that she would, anyway—admit it. Certain things were best kept quiet. Doro dipped her spoon into the cereal and fished up a mouthful, which she used to forestall further talk. “Mm-hmm,” she mumbled.

  “Well, I have a date with a two-dollar ham” was Hattie’s last dispatch as the jail-bound party made ready to leave. At the market the day before she had sorted through the bargain bin and found a whole boneless ham her Depression-era childhood wouldn’t let go to waste. Ham cradled in one arm, she hugged Billy with the other and told him, “Honey, you don’t have to go. They can’t make you.”

  Already feeling the effects of the pre-jail dosing he’d done, Billy said, “It’s all right, Mother.”

  Because her feelings often took on a surrogate, when Hattie vised the clamp mount of the cast-iron meat grinder to the kitchen counter and tightened the screws it was lost on no one that they bored into Abel’s hard head and Doro’s soft one.