Flying in Place (15 page)

“Stop it!” my mother said. “Just stop it, both of you! I can’t listen to this!”

“Well, maybe you should start listening!”

“Donna,” said my father, “shut up.”

“No! I bloody well will
not
shut up! I shut up for twelve years, and I’m half-convinced that that’s what was eating my insides—”

“Cancer was eating your insides, dear lady.”

“Ah, Stewart, compassionate as ever. You’re terrified of me and you know it, and if you hadn’t hypnotized my sister she’d know it too. Here’s some poetry for you, Pam: I’m Stewart’s Achilles’ heel, the chink in his armor, the weak link in his lies. I’m the truth he can’t cut out or intimidate or lull into illusion. He can throw away my letters and deny my existence, but he’ll never stop me from knowing what really happened the night before the funeral—”

“The night before the funeral,” my father said, “is closed! History! And I refuse to discuss it!”

“You don’t have to. I’ll discuss it instead.”

“Donna, there’s a lot more wrong with you than cancer! You want to open that up again? Have a pleasant chat about how you made a pass at your sister’s husband—”

“I did
not
make a pass at you, you son of a bitch! You came into my bedroom, drunk, and—”

“Stop it!” Mom said. Through the kitchen doorway I could see her, leaning against a counter, both hands pressed to her temples. No wonder she’d been so upset about Jane.
You’ve just learned that someone you care about can’t be trusted to act the way she should
. “You’re tearing me apart! Stewart’s right. It’s over. It doesn’t matter what happened. Stop doing this to me, both of you!”

“Stop doing what, Pam? Stop making you face reality? It does matter. It matters very much, because it cost me my sister for twelve years. You can’t believe both of us, and I have no way to prove that I’m the one telling the truth, except that I’ve never lied to you, Stewart came into Ginny’s bedroom the night before the funeral and—”

“Time to leave,” my father said firmly.

“—and said, ‘You’re it,’ and grabbed me—”

“It’s time for you to leave now. Donna, can’t you see what you’re doing to her?”

Dad used to play tag with me, but it wasn’t fair because he always won
. I stood up, dizzy, and wobbled towards the kitchen, leaning on furniture, while Donna talked. “Pam, think: think! What made you come into the room in the first place? You heard me yelling, that’s what, not that it did a bit of good until you came in—”

“She heard me asking you what you thought you were doing, Donna. You called me into your bedroom
—Ginny’s
bedroom, for God’s sake, do you think I’d try to seduce my wife’s sister in my dead daughter’s room?—because you had stomach cramps, and then you tried to—”

“Stewart, I’d sooner fuck a chainsaw!”

“Stop this,” my mother said, begging. “Please just stop it.”

“She’s right, Donna. That’s enough. This is why we didn’t want you coming here in the first place, and this is why you’re going to leave now. I’ll drive you back to the hotel.”

“Stewart, I don’t even want to be in the same car with you!”

“Well then, you’d better walk. Because I won’t have you badgering my wife, and someone has to stay here with Emma.”

“I’ll call a cab,” Donna said icily.

Please, I thought, no, no, let both of them leave, because I can’t talk to Mom if he’s around. Please. Please. He was lying: he lied to me and he lied to Ginny and he lied to Mom and Donna, so maybe he was lying when he said Mom would die if she ever heard the truth.

Please let him have been lying. Please. Please let her believe me when I tell her what happened to Ginny. He’s lying to Mom too; he’s been hurting Mom too, but I can save her instead of killing her. We can both leave. We can both go to the Hallorans’. Myrna will take care of us. But I have to make her believe me first, because if I don’t she won’t let me out of the house. How can I make her believe me, when she wouldn’t even listen to Ginny?

“This isn’t New York, Donna. A cab won’t get here for twenty minutes, and by then you and Pamela will be at each other’s throats—”

“If you drive me to the hotel I may be at yours.”

“I’ll take that chance. We’re leaving now. Right now. Pamela—”

“Yes,” my mother said, “that’s best. Go now. Please go.”

They went, and my mother sat down very heavily at the kitchen table. She looked up dully when I walked into the kitchen.

“Emma, you look terrible. How do you feel?”

“Rotten,” I said. “Mom, he thought Donna was Ginny.”

“What? Go up to your room, darling. I’ll bring you some cold juice.”

“He thought Donna was Ginny,” I said again, doggedly. “The night before the funeral. She was in Ginny’s room, right?”

“The house was full of people,” my mother said defensively. “Diane and her boys and the Idaho cousins. That was the only room left. I never would have put Donna there if we’d had more space.”

“She was in Ginny’s room,” I repeated. “And she and Ginny had the same pajamas.”
I think that’s why I’m here. To tell you that
. “The yellow ones with Snoopy on them that they got at Macy’s.”

My mother frowned at me and said sharply, “How did you know about those pajamas? I hated those things. Donna’s been telling you stories, hasn’t she?”

“No, Mom! She didn’t tell me anything. Please listen to me, Mom.”

She got up and started carrying coffee cups to the sink. “I’m sorry you heard that ugly argument, Emma, but don’t worry about it. You can’t be expected to understand these things. Now go back to sleep, dear. You have a fever. Go up to your room and rest so you can get well.”

My room was the last place I wanted to go. “Mom, listen to me. Please listen. He was drunk, right? That’s why you got so upset when I asked you if you’d ever seen him drunk. And Donna looks like Ginny. I thought she was Ginny too when I saw her.”

She turned from the sink to look at me. “Emma, I don’t know what Donna told you—”

“Nothing! Donna didn’t talk about it!” This wasn’t getting me anywhere. That was why she kept the room locked up, so she wouldn’t have to think about what had happened. If she couldn’t even stand being in the room, how was I going to get through to her? “Mom, that poem Ginny brought you, the Psalm, think about what it meant—”

“I know what it meant! Emma, you didn’t even know Ginny. You don’t know anything about her.”

“Yes, I do,” I said, as forcefully as I could. “I do. I’ll tell you what I know about her. I know one of her front teeth was chipped and she used to chew the ends of her hair. I know she wanted to go to Disneyland. I know she loved the lake and she went there a lot when you thought she was at the library. I know that when she laughed she sounded like the little birds on the beach, and she loved to watch the animals come down to the water to drink. I know she didn’t even like that frilly nightgown, because she was afraid the ribbons would strangle her, and I know she told you not to want another beautiful baby. Why would she say that, Mom?”

My mother was staring at me, because I was telling her things she’d never told me, and my father never talked about Ginny at all. “My word,” she said. “You and Donna certainly had a thorough little chat at the cemetery, didn’t you?”

“No! Donna doesn’t know anything! Mom, I know Ginny stopped eating, just stopped, because she didn’t want to grow up, and she got skinnier and skinnier and she got sick and then she died. In anybody else it would have been just a cold, but Ginny got pneumonia because she wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. Because she hadn’t been eating. I know she wanted to disappear so Dad wouldn’t see her anymore, so she ran away, but she wasn’t running away from you, Mom, really she wasn’t. It wasn’t that she liked Donna better than she liked you. She was running away from him, so he wouldn’t sneak into her bedroom at dawn and—and breathe on her. Mom, that’s what she was trying to tell you. That’s what the poem from the Bible meant, Mom, Psalm 139, look at it now, you’ll see.”

Her eyes had narrowed to slits, but at least she was looking at me. I had to keep talking, had to, had to, because if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to start again. “Look at it, Mom! Read it again! She brought you the psalm because—because you were going to have a baby. Because she knew the same thing—Mom, the blood on the sheets—”

The gag rose from my stomach and slammed into my throat. I couldn’t talk about myself at all; couldn’t, couldn’t. Ginny had come back to give me a way of telling the story, the same way she’d used the psalm as a way of telling the story, but it wasn’t going to do any good, because my mother didn’t believe me.

She turned around and ran the water in the sink, hard, and started washing the cups. “Emma, you’re very ill and very upset. I’m sorry Donna disturbed you so much, but she’s gone now. We’ll talk about all this when you’re feeling better.”

“Don’t blame it on Donna! It has nothing to do with her, except for the pajamas! You know it’s true! Mom, you have to know! You feed me so much because Ginny starved to death! You were happy about the—the blood because—because Ginny never got her period, because she worked not to get it. Because she died instead. And you don’t want that to happen to me, you don’t, you don’t, you must love me after all, Mom—”

Her back had stiffened. I swallowed and said desperately, “Mom, please listen to me. Please turn around, Mom.”

She turned around and looked at me as if I were one of the Hallorans’ dogs, caught shitting in the rosebushes. “That must be some fever, Emma. How in the world did you manage to invent all this?”

“I didn’t invent it. I didn’t! Ginny told me.”

“
Ginny
told you?”

“She talks to me,” I said. “The first time was when—was when he—breathing—in my room—but other times too, now, she—”

The coffee cup Mom was holding dropped and shattered on the floor. She laughed, a high-pitched whinny not like her at all, and said, “Oh my God. Dear Lord. Myrna was right: you’re crazy.”

My eyes stung. That wasn’t what Myrna had been saying, was it? Did Myrna think I was crazy? “No I’m not. I’m not!” I shoved the sleeves of my sweatshirt above my elbows. “Look, Mom. See the bruises? I don’t even do gymnastics, Mom—”

She winced and turned away from me, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. It wasn’t going to work; she didn’t want to see anything, and I didn’t know what else I could tell her. I swallowed, trying to remember something else I knew about Ginny, anything. “Ginny told me—Mom, when she died, she said you shook her and shook her and shook her to try to wake her up, shook the IVs right out of her arms—”

My mother turned chalk white and backed all the way into the corner of the kitchen. I thought she was going to scream at me, but when she spoke, her voice was nearly as hoarse as mine. “How did you know that? No one knows that. No one else was there. I found her and I couldn’t wake her up and I had to go into the hall and get a nurse, because no one had been there with her when she died, no one—”

“Ginny told me,” I said. “She was watching you. She saw it.”

My mother was shielding herself with her arms as if I’d been throwing stones at her. She started rocking back and forth, but when I took a step towards her she said, “Stop. Don’t come near me.”

It was what I’d been afraid she’d say, but the look on her face wasn’t hatred or scorn or any of the things I’d feared. It was loss, plain unadorned loss, the kind that cuts like a scalpel and leaves you slapping poetry on the wounds. I knew then that she believed me, whether she wanted to or not, and I knew that what hurt more than anything else was that I’d seen Ginny and she hadn’t.

“She had to come to me,” I said. I tried to say it gently, but it didn’t work, because I was too frantic to get out of the house. “Don’t you understand? She came to me because you wouldn’t listen to her.”

She didn’t answer me, just stood there rocking herself. She still wouldn’t look at me. “Mom, we have to go to Jane’s house now. He’s lying to you too. He took Ginny away from you. He took Donna away from you. We’ll be safe at the Hallorans’, Mom. We can stay in one of their extra bedrooms, Myrna already said so, it’s got a lock on the door and everything. He won’t be able to get us there. Please, Mom. Mom?”

She raised her head and looked at me just as I heard my father’s car pull into the driveway. “At the cemetery this afternoon,” she said in her fine clear schoolteacher’s voice, as if she were explaining a difficult grammatical point, “your father told me that he loved the way Ginny smelled. He said she smelled like soap and baby shampoo and warm milk, and sometimes like peanut butter.”

Then she started shaking, hugging herself, shivering the way Ginny had shivered in the pool of darkness. “Mom,” I said, terrified, “Mom, you aren’t going to die, are you? Please promise me you won’t die.”

She didn’t answer me. She was still shivering when my father walked in and found us there, huddled at opposite ends of the kitchen.

“Well,” he said sourly,
looking at us, “Donna’s certainly gotten everyone thoroughly upset. Pamela, you never should have invited her back to the house.”

Mom opened her mouth, closed it, nodded and turned back to the dishes. She was moving in slow motion. My father stared at her. “Pam? Pamela, are you all right?”