Set This House In Order Part 44

"And did that have anything to do with your decision --"

He started crying.

I'd seen my father angry before, many times, but I'd never seen him cry. I hadn't known he was capable of it. But now his eyes flooded with tears, and his soul was wracked by horrible sobs. It hurt me to see, but it scared me, too; I found myself checking the sky repeatedly, to see if the sun would darken in sympathy. It didn't; but I could swear that the mist on the lake got thicker again.

"I loved her, you know," my father said, when he was able to speak again. "I loved her, and for years I waited for a sign, any sign, that she loved me too. Of all the hopes I ever had, that was the one I held the longest, and the strongest. I wanted her love more than anything, even more than, than to get away from him."

"The stepfather," I said, as another realization fell into place. "She was there, living in the same house, the whole time he. . ."

"Yes."

"Did she know?"

"Don't be stupid, Andrew. Of course she knew. She never abused us herself," he added forcefully. "Not once. And when it was just the two of us, when he wasn't home, it was fine. It was wonderful, in fact. But when he was home. . . she knew."

"Then she was as evil as he was," I said.

He exploded at me: "Don't you say that! You weren't there! Don't you ever say that about her!"

"I'm sorry, father, but you know it's true. If she knew what was going on, and did nothing to stop it --"

He disappeared. His face got very red, until I thought he was going to lash out at me, and then he vanished. A few seconds later, in the forest behind the house, a series of loud crashes began -- whole stands of trees being uprooted and hurled in anger. This went on for some time, and once again I checked the sky, this time for incoming meteors.

The crashes subsided. My father, calmer now, reappeared beside me. I didn't try to pick up where we'd left off. "Why did she do it?" I asked instead. "Could she really have loved the stepfather that much, to let him -- "I don't know what motivated her," my fadier said. "What moved her. I never knew that. All I can say. . . it must have suited her to be married to him, suited her enough that she was willing to overlook. . . to allow. . ." His composure faltered. "I guess she must have loved him, if she loved anyone. More than she loved me.

"But still," he continued, "I held out hope, and watched for a sign. And I thought I had it, once. It was near the end of high school, when the time came to start applying to colleges. The stepfather didn't want me leaving home, but she argued in favor of it. It was the only time I'd ever seen her argue with him about anything. And I thought, this is it, this is the proof. Maybe she can't stop him from, from doing that to me, not while we're under the same roof, but she is trying to help me escape. She does care. She does love me. . ."

He shook his head. "I should have let it go at that; I should have just believed what I wanted to believe, and been content. But it wasn't enough; I had to try to confirm it. And so after it was settled that I was going away to college, I got her alone, and tried to thank her. I told her how grateful I was, and I told her that I understood what it really meant, her sticking up for me like that.

"She cut me off before I could finish. She told me I shouldn't make a.s.sumptions. She said that it wasn't anything she'd done for me, it was just. . . she was tired of competing with me for his attention."

He paused, and I thought he might cry again, but instead he smiled, a ghastly smile. "So that. . . that was not the response I'd been hoping for."

"And after that you gave up hoping. . ."

He actually laughed. "Come on now, Andrew," my father said. "Vain hopes don't die that easily.

You should know that."

"But how could you still think, after she said such a horrible thing to you, that she might --"

"You never met the stepfather. He had. . . power. He was a monster, but he could be charming, too, and where he couldn't charm he could persuade. He could get you to say things, or not say them. It was a long time after we got away from him before I could tell anyone about what he'd done; and if he could have that kind of control over me when he wasn't even there, it wasn't hard to believe that he had control over our mother, too, and that when she said what she said, that wasn't really her talking, just. . .

his power.

"But he was older than she was. And he drank; he drank more as time went on. It seemed very likely that she'd outlive him, and that there would come a day -- maybe in ten or twenty years, but still -- when she wouldn't be under his influence anymore, and then, then finally, her true feelings could come out. . ."

"That's. . ."

"Ridiculous?" my father said. "I suppose. But not too ridiculous to hang a hope on."

"And you were willing to wait for that?" I asked. "For him to die of natural causes?"

"It wasn't a question of being willing. I couldn't have killed him. I couldn't even stop him from f.u.c.king me; to actually stop him from living. . ." He shook his head. "There would be no way. My only chance of beating him was to get beyond his reach; my revenge was to survive him, and maybe one day s.h.i.t on his grave -- after he'd gone there on his own."

"About that," I said. "Is the stepfather --"

"Oh yes," said my father. "He's dead. But for a long time I didn't know it.

"Going away to school was only the first step in my escape," he told me. "MSU, where I started college, wasn't really far enough. It was only a two-hour drive from Seven Lakes. During the first semester, he tried to, to visit me, on campus. He tried twice. The first time, I knew he was coming, so I hid for three days. The second time, there was no advance warning, and I ended up jumping out a window to get away from him.

"There wasn't any third time. After that surprise visit I dropped out of school, and left no forwarding address. . ." He paused, then corrected himself: "I say 'I,' but really it was Gideon who did that. Gideon and probably Adam. All I did, I closed my eyes in East Lansing one afternoon, and when I opened them again it was nine months later and I was living in Ann Arbor.

"I never went back to Seven Lakes. Never called either, not even from a pay phone -- I would have liked to hear our mother's voice again, but I was always afraid he'd trace the call somehow, or maybe just come crawling through the line. So I didn't call, or write, but I did come up with what I thought was a clever way of keeping tabs: every so often I would dial directory a.s.sistance and give them the stepfather's name. I figured as long as he was listed he was still alive; it didn't occur to me that our mother might keep the phone in his name even after he died.

"So anyway there I was, in Ann Arbor. And this part of the story you mostly know: I, we, slowly started putting things together, understanding our multiplicity. Eventually we met Dr. Kroft, and worked with him until our falling out. And then we moved to Seattle, and found Dr. Grey.

"That part you know. But what I never told you, because I didn't think it mattered, is that I finally did try to contact our mother again. This was after we'd been in therapy with Dr. Grey for a while. The therapy was going really well, and I had what was either a fresh burst of optimism or a perverse impulse to screw things up. I decided to try and get in touch with our mother and let her know that we were alive, and see if she missed us. If she was ready to love us yet."

"Oh boy," I said.

"Yes," said my father. "Dr. Grey didn't think it was such a hot idea, either. But Mrs. Winslow was more supportive. I decided to write rather than call -- I was still afraid of the stepfather tracking us down -- and Mrs. Winslow had a suggestion for how I could make the letter harder to trace. I rented a post office box in Seattle, one that I could stop and check on my trips to Poulsbo, and wrote to our mother care of that PO box. Mrs. Winslow also promised me that if the stepfather did find out where we were living somehow, she would deal with him." He smiled. "I think I would have paid to see that. He had power, but Mrs. Winslow could have taken him."

"He didn't show up, though, right?"

"No. He was already dead by then. But our mother didn't write back, either. I waited a few months, and then wrote another letter, and then another. . . five in all. The last one, I didn't even bother with the PO box -- I included our home address and phone number in Autumn Creek." He shook his head. "Stupid. . . but still she never got in touch.

"In January of 1995, though, right after Dr. Grey went into the hospital, I got a call from a Police Chief Bradley in Seven Lakes. I remembered him from when we were little, when he was still just Officer Bradley -- he'd been a friend of our father, our real father, and he would come by the house once in a while to see how our mother was doing."

"Did you ever tell him about the stepfather?"

"I tried to," my father said. "Once. But I was so scared I botched it -- he had no clue what I was talking about -- and then afterwards, the stepfather just knew somehow, knew that I'd been bad. . . and from then on, believe me, I knew better than to even think about telling.

"Anyway, it was Chief Bradley who called to tell me about our mother's death. He said he regretted not getting in touch sooner -- they'd already had the funeral -- but he'd only just found our last letter to her."

"She did receive it, then," I said. "And she kept it."

"I think she just forgot to throw it away," my father replied. "It came out during the conversation that the stepfather was dead, too, for going on four years. Four years -- that just killed my heart. I mean I'm sorry, he had power, I know he did, but four years was more than enough time for her to, to get past that.

"And then the final straw: Chief Bradley said that the other reason he was calling, besides just to let us know -- in her will, our mother had left everything to her sister, only it turned out she was dead too, and had no heirs. So Chief Bradley thought that it was only right that we should get the property, and the house. 'I'm sure that's what your mother would have wanted,' he said.

"But it wasn't true." My father looked at me. "It wasn't true, and I couldn't pretend any longer. I don't know what we did wrong, what we lacked, but she didn't love us. She didn't love us.

"And that is why I decided to call you out," he concluded. "What happened to Dr. Grey, that was hard, but I could have coped with it. But our mother. . . finding out that our mother. . ." His eyes brimmed with tears again.

"How did the stepfather die?" I asked next.

"He had an accident of some kind."

"An accident."

"That's what Chief Bradley told me. He wasn't more specific, and I didn't care enough to ask questions."

"Well that," I said, "that isn't the response I was hoping for."

"I really doubt we could have had anything to do with it, Andrew," my father said.

"Just because you don't think you could have killed him --"

"Not just me. I don't think any of us who knew him could have done it. Including Gideon.

Besides, Gideon wasn't desperate for our mother's love. The only love Gideon ever needed was Gideon's."

"There are other reasons for killing someone."

"Like revenge?" My father shook his head. "Gideon has the same problem hating people as he does loving them -- in order to feel that strongly about someone you first have to think of them, and Gideon would rather think of himself."

"He seems to do a pretty good job of hating you."

"Only because he can't ignore me. If we weren't trapped in the same head together. . ."

"What about money?" I said. "Xavier told Penny he was going to Michigan to collect an inheritance."

"Well," my father admitted, "it's true that Gideon wanted me to take the house in Seven Lakes.

That was the catalyst for our last fight." He looked at the scar on his palm. "I'd thought I had Gideon settled down, ready to accept his place in the geography, but then we got that phone call. When Gideon found out I'd told Chief Bradley I didn't want our mother's property, he was furious. He said that the property was rightfully his, and I had no business refusing it."

"And that's when he tried to take over?" My father nodded. "And what about before then?" I asked. "Is it possible that sometime earlier on, while the stepfather was still alive, that Gideon might have gone to him and tried to demand, I don't know, some kind of advance on his inheritance?"

". . . and then killed him when he said no?" My father was skeptical. "That's hard to imagine. I told you --"

"Maybe he didn't do it personally. Maybe he called out somebody else, somebody new, to do it for him. That could be what Xavier was for."

"I don't know. I don't know anything about Xavier, and I'm embarra.s.sed that I don't, but --"

"Do you know where we were, the day the stepfather had his accident? I mean, is it even possible that we were in Seven Lakes that day?"

"I don't even know the exact date he died. I never asked."

"Father!"

"I didn't care about that, Andrew! I was glad to hear he was gone, but the questions I had for Chief Bradley were all about our mother."

"Do you know approximately when --"

"Late spring of 1991. Which was a pretty chaotic period for us. That was when I had my big blowup with Dr. Kroft."

"Dr. Kroft. . . so there's a chance we were locked up in Ann Arbor when the stepfather had his accident."

He nodded. "It depends on the date. For most of April that year things were pretty stable; I lost some time, a couple hours here and there, but no really big chunks. Then on April. . . 29th, I think. . . I had a session with Dr. Kroft where we tried a forced fusion, and the next five days are all lost time, although the last three of those days we were in lockdown in the Psychiatric Center. They let us out on May 6th, and then the next day I went back to the Center for what turned out to be my last session with Dr. Kroft. That was the session where I lost my temper -- and then for the next two weeks, more or less, we were back in lockdown."

"More or less?"

"The last two weeks of May are a complete blank," he told me. "When I blacked out on the 18th -- or maybe it was the 19th -- I was still on the ward. When I woke up on June 2nd I was on a Greyhound bus, on my way to Seattle."

This was a version of events I hadn't heard before. "You woke up on a bus? But I thought. . .

you always told me you decided to leave Michigan."

"Well I did," my father said. "I mean I could have gotten off the bus in Chicago and turned back.

But when I checked my wallet, I found a cashier's check for what looked like my entire savings, and a number to call to have my possessions forwarded. . . so I had a pretty good idea that if I went back to Ann Arbor, I wouldn't still have an apartment waiting for me, or a bank account -- and I was sure I didn't have a job anymore. And besides, there just didn't seem to be any reason to go back. I was done with Dr. Kroft, done with that whole chapter of my life; it was time to try something new. So I decided -- I decided -- to stay on the bus and keep going."

"But. . ." I stopped myself. This was definitely a topic to be explored in more detail later, but for now it was a side issue. "So two whole weeks are missing. May 18th or 19th through June 2nd."

"Right."

"Which is not good."

"Well, that depends on what day the stepfather died. . . You could look it up on his tombstone, I suppose. The cemetery's just outside Muskegon, so it's practically on the way."

"You know where the stepfather is buried?"

"I know where our mother is buried. They had adjacent plots." He gazed out at the mist on the lake. "If you do stop there. . ."

"You really want to say good-bye to her?"

"She was our mother," he said.

We talked a while longer, then sat, not talking, longer still. Eventually my father stood up and said he was going for a walk in the forest. I offered him back the funeral program, but he didn't want it. "Keep it yourself," he said, "or throw it in the lake."

"Keep it where? I can't just leave it lying out, and I'd rather not bury it. . ."

"If you really want to hang on to it," my father said wearily, "you can put it up in my room."

He turned away and disappeared; I went into the house. As I climbed the steps to the second floor I was struck by how quiet it was. Usually there are at least four or five souls in the common room, or up in the gallery. Today there were none. It felt as if the house were empty, though I doubted everyone could be outside; probably a lot of them were just hiding in their rooms.

A soul's own room is an intensely private s.p.a.ce -- as private, in its way, as a singular person's whole mind -- and ordinarily permission to go inside, especially unaccompanied, is a sign of great trust. In this case, however, I think my father was just too tired to worry about me poking around. Not that there was much for me to poke around in. My father's room is the definition of Spartan: four walls and a bed pretty much describes it.

It was this very simplicity that inadvertently led to me being nosy. I had to find a place to put the funeral program. It was obvious that my father didn't want to have to look at it, so just dropping it on the floor or on top of the bed was out. If he'd had shelves or trunks or a filing cabinet I could have stuck the pamphlet in there, but he didn't, so that left only one place: under the bed. When I reached beneath the box spring, though, there was already something else down there. I grabbed onto it, meaning only to shift it aside a little -- I swear -- but ended up pulling it out to look at it.

The something was a painting. Oil on canvas, like the kind Aunt Sam did, but in a very different style than hers. The painting showed a woman hugging a little girl. There was no background, no sense of location; just the two figures. The girl's face was hidden, pressed to the woman's breast, but the woman's face -- the most detailed part of the portrait -- was aglow with love, and even if I hadn't recognized her from the photograph in my wallet, her ident.i.ty wouldn't have been hard to guess.

I slid the painting back beneath the bed, and the pamphlet along with it. Resisting the temptation to hunt around under there some more, I got up to go. . . and that's when I saw the Witness standing out on the gallery, staring in at me. She was one of the older Witnesses, a girl of eleven or twelve.

"What do you want?" I asked her brusquely, embarra.s.sed to be caught snooping.

She didn't answer, only turned and walked out of my field of view. I stepped to the doorway, but by the time I got there she was all the way across the gallery. She disappeared into the nursery.