Shelter in Place (6 page)

In the early evening of August 22, 1991, my mother, Anne-Marie March, drove to Hardwick and Sons Hardware. My father had asked her to pick up a few things on her way home from the hospital. As she was returning to the parking lot with her shopping bag, she noticed a man arguing with his wife in front of a silver Mercedes sedan.

She climbed into her car, a sun-faded blue Volvo station wagon. Before she fastened the seat belt, before she started the engine, she looked into the rearview. There were two young children with the couple and as their parents argued, they waited quiet and still.

The man was thirty-four years old, pale skin, fleshy face, thinning black hair, glasses. His name was Dustin Strauss.

My mother sat and watched the four of them in her mirror.

The children waited while the man raised the trunk and put his shopping bags inside. The boy, who was also carrying a bag, handed it to his father by one of the two handles so that the paper tore, and the contents spilled onto the asphalt.

My mother heard the sound of glass breaking. At this point she turned to watch directly through the back window. She saw the man slap the boy across the face hard enough to knock him into the door of an adjacent car. The woman, Strauss's wife, yelled at her husband, at which point he punched her in the jaw.

This is what she saw. This is what she remembers. Or it is, at least, the sum total of her testimony.

There is no argument about what happens next. There were other people in the parking lot, people who would become witnesses. There were the children. There is evidence. There were experts called. By all accounts what follows is the truth, even if the account missing is my mother's.

She says she has no memory of the time after the first blow. Still, I have read the papers, and I have seen the photographs.

My mother came out of the car holding a twenty-two-ounce Estwing framing hammer taken from one of my father's suede tool bags, which he'd left in the backseat. She crossed toward the Mercedes. The trunk remained open. Dustin Strauss was bent at the waist yelling at his wife while she knelt on the ground.

My mother swung the hammer and hit the back of his head. He fell forward onto his knees. She swung again. Then he was facedown next to his wife, who screamed at my mother to stop.

She did not.

She swung again and then again and then again and then again and then again. Seven blows in total. Seven blows according to the coroner.

When she was finished, the man lay dead in the parking lot, the Estwing on the warm asphalt beside his mouth.

She grabbed the children by their wrists, pulled them to the Volvo, and buckled them into the back. She returned to the driver's seat, laid her hands on the steering wheel and then, until the police came, did nothing more, while Mrs. Strauss went back and forth between banging on the glass, screaming for her children and weeping next to her husband's body.

Of course, when my father called he didn't tell me all of this. He only told me what he knew. That my mother had killed a man in front of Hardwick and Sons, where my father was well-known, where he had been taking me since I was an infant.

She was in jail.

I should come home.

He had to hang up now.

He needed to call Claire.

“It seems Mom has killed a man,” he said.

That's a sentence you don't lose.

I waited on the bed looking at my hand in its cast until Tess came back from work.

“My mother murdered a man,” I said and gestured to the phone as if the phone had something to do with it.

I can see her bright expression. She didn't touch me at first.

I was afraid she'd leave.

“With a hammer,” I said.

She stood up from the bed and chained the door.

“Joey,” she said and then, at last, touching me, lying down and pressing her head against my chest.

“Everyone will be shocked,” I said. “Everyone will be surprised.”

“Sure.”

“But I'm not surprised.”

“Joey.”

“I'm not, Tess. Why is that?”

“I don't understand.”

“No. Neither do I.”

“But this is the first thing? There's no history of it?”

“No,” I said. “No history of it.”

“I don't understand.”

“But what is the it, Tess?”

She didn't answer me and I didn't say anything else. She walked her fingers over the dingy shell of my cast. And as we lay there with everything shifting beneath us, I tried to work out what it was exactly. This thing of which there was no history.

I knew it was the firing rise as I stood beneath the shower, the striding into that bar. It was the hallucinations and my vanishing skin and the night alone on the sand. It was what brought me to Tess and what broke my hand and what would finally make her leave.

The refrigerator was roaring, my mother had murdered a man, and I could feel Tess breathing against my neck and her fingers walking up and down, up and down, and I knew that it was the bird and it was the tar and it was the ecstasy.

C
laire called.

At first there was static on the line and then an echo. Everything we said, repeated.

“I don't understand,” she kept saying.

Tess and I were looking at each other.

I said, “You should come home. You should just come home.”

It had been nearly a week since my father called. Neither of us, not me, not Claire, had been to see him or our mother.

This was her third phone call, each the same.

“
You
haven't even been home.”

“But I'm going,” I said. “I'm going soon.”

“So you say, Joey.”

“Come back and we'll go together. We should be there.”

There was a long silence. Tess was watching me. She'd been telling me the same all week, “You have to go see him, at least. You can't stay here.”

But I was paralyzed by the prospect of leaving her, of seeing my father's face, and most of all, of visiting my mother in jail.

“Claire,” I said. “Listen to me.”

“I'm not,” she said.

“You're not what?”

“Coming. I'm not coming home.”

“Ever?”

“I'm getting married. We're getting married.”

I imagined Henry smoking at a window. Henry studying my sister the way Tess was studying me. My sister whose mother was now a killer. Henry's pink face, Henry so full of second thoughts.

“Claire, listen.”

“I have to get off the phone now, Joey. I'll ring you,” she said and hung up.

Tess raised her eyebrows.

“She'll ring me,” I said.

Tess smiled. “She's not coming?”

“No. She's getting married instead.”

Tess shook her head. “You two.”

I looked away.

“Step up, Joey. You're going to have to step up.”

I nodded.

“Are we invited to the wedding?”

Tess undressed and got into bed with me.

“She didn't say. She didn't mention it.”

Tess saw Claire as a coward and a traitor.

That was that for her.

But not for me.

There is comfort, cold as it may be, in knowing that my sister remains alive. In many ways, despite her disappearance, she is what I have left. After all this time I have refused to condemn her, and even then, I was incapable of any true anger.

I hated seeing her leave for college, and then for England, and then to learn that she was being swallowed into some moneyed world none of us knew a thing about, rising in class, up and away from me, from us.

All during that time I was watching my mother. Through the phone calls. Through the sentencing. Through the haze of those weeks. Tess coming and going from work, the newspapers, the television.

Through those days of the thickening tar, I watched my mother. I listened for her at night. I saw her in the air.

In those first days, I wanted Claire with me more than I wanted Tess. More than anything. I wanted my sister home. I wanted her back to explain our parents, to take care of me the way she had when we were young, when our secrets were too great for mothers and fathers.

U
nlike many of her friends who'd returned home from college posing as young anarchists with blue hair and pierced nipples, my sister came carrying a handbag, wearing expensive black clothes. Her last Christmas home from NYU before moving to London. I would have been sixteen, and she twenty. There was something damning about her presence even then. I think my parents felt like country slobs around her, which I'm sure is exactly what she wanted. They would have had a much easier time if she'd blown all her money at CBGB, but the idea of her spending it on clothes and haircuts baffled them both. It particularly irked my mother.

The four of us sitting around the kitchen table eating take-out Chinese, my mother exhausted, just home in her blue scrubs, and Claire wearing heavy dark eyeliner, dressed as if she were on her way to some chic gallery opening.

All of us in front of the tree, Claire giving my father a blue silk tie he'd never wear, my mother a kit of makeup she'd never use.

One night before she went back to New York, she took me to dinner at a nice restaurant downtown where some older guy she knew worked as a waiter.

I'm sure my mother saw Claire as mannered and ridiculous, but she seemed so elegant and sophisticated to me. The way she flirted with her friend, and so effortlessly ordered us wine.

“Hold the glass by its stem, Joey,” she said.

I tried to make fun of her. There had been a time when I could have quickly embarrassed and provoked my sister. But now I was powerless.

She smiled at me with the tolerance some adults have for the innocent.

She wanted to know what I would do, not after high school, but after college, with my life.

Of course, I had no idea and told her so.

“You'll get out of here, though, right? You won't hang around and become a carpenter.”

“I guess,” I said.

I was sixteen. What did I care? But she was adamant about me leaving.

“Listen,” she said. “Don't get stuck, Joe. There's so much better.”

I tried to make fun of her again. I said, “A few months in New York, and suddenly you hate your home.”

But she didn't laugh. “I don't hate it. But also, it's not all of a sudden. Anyway, there's more out there to have, that's all. Remember that. You can go anywhere you want.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I like it here.”

She smiled at me. “Well, you are the baby.”

“Fuck off. What do you want to do? What great thing do you want to do?”

“I don't know yet,” she said, “but it won't be here. I won't end up a fucking nurse.”

We'd taken my mom's Volvo to dinner and when we pulled up to the house, Claire didn't get out of the car. She turned off the engine and the lights, rolled down her window and lit a cigarette.

“So, now you smoke?”

“You want one?” She held out her pack of Camels.

I shook my head.

“Good boy, Joey.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek.

I turned away from her even though it made me so happy when she did that. We looked at the house and through the window we could see my parents standing in the kitchen, clearing the table.

O
ut toward the eastern edge of the clearing, a small stand of cottonwoods has appeared. Or I've just now noticed it. The trees obscure my view and their fluff blows all over the house. It gets stuck in the screens, between the deck planks. I went out there with a bow saw and cut them to the ground and then went below it and took them out at the roots. It felt good to do it. To be working all day in the sun. Cutting those trees away. Keeping things in order.

But then as I was coming back home I found a wide patch of Scotch Broom, one of those invasive species we're supposed to kill on sight. Despite its cute little flowers, it's an aggressive little fucker and swallows everything in its path. I hear it can kill horses, too. Tess rolled her eyes when we found the flyer in our mailbox. I admit, it was a little hysterical. All those exclamation points, language as if the weed were Satan himself. Beware the curse of Scotch Broom scourge!!!!!

But I keep an eye out all the same. This is farm country and people don't fuck around with these things.

I took the machete from the garage and just before sunset, I hacked those invaders to death.

T
hey sent my mother down to White Pine, one hundred and fifty some-odd miles southwest of Seattle. September seventeenth she traveled. She accepted all of it without contest. Despite my father's best efforts, she insisted on a public defender, who took a plea bargain.

Twenty-five years to life.

“I did what I did,” she told the judge. “I am no more insane now than I was that day.”

Meanwhile I did nothing at all.

I still hadn't spoken to her. I waited and I watched the news. Local. National.

Piece by piece, my father sold his workshop. Then he put our house up for sale, got into his Wagoneer and drove.

“Joey,” he said when he called to tell me, his voice full of tin, “I rented a little place. Not far from the beach. I wish you'd come up. It's where I live now. Where we both do. Me and your mother.”

I was looking at Tess's chair.

“Joey?”

“Yeah, I'm here,” I told him. “I'm here.”

“Come up?”

“I will, Dad. I'm on my way,” I said. “I'm nearly there.”

“Winter's coming.” He was half-drunk.

“It's only just fall.”

“I can feel it in the mornings,” he said.

I left Tess in front of the motel. She was alone in the parking lot watching me go. A bright day. Cool. We'd made promises, but the farther along that highway I drove, the more certain I was that I'd never see her again. She must have been relieved to be rid of me. It was too much. All that weight. All the joy gone. I'd stolen it. Me and my family.