57

After our father’s admission, the FBI dispatched three agents to my bank before Polly and I even left Stateville. Those men were trained to wheedle out more information than I could ever get about our employees and twelve hundred clients.

We took a commercial plane back to San Diego. Polly sat beside me and ordered two Bloody Marys, setting them side by side on the tray table like twins. For a time, she didn’t touch them. Then she closed her eyes and took sips. One of the dogmas of her peculiar, Godless religion was that Mama had ignored her suspicions of her husband and burrowed into the delusion that he was a good man. That’s why the police needed to catch him by tracing photography chemicals. But our father had just blown up that assumption. For the three-and-a-half-hour flight, as she slowly drained her two Bloody Marys, she retreated into her thoughts.

She only turned to me when the plane touched down in San Diego. “You’re the diplomat, you lead the discussion.”

We took a taxi directly to Mama’s house. It was eleven o’clock by the time we got there, and all the lights were off. Despite Mama’s refusal to give in to fear, the front door was locked. I rang the bell five times before the living room light flashed on.

In her nightgown, she motioned us inside. She opened the window in her kitchen to let in some breeze and we sat around her white table. Mama poured us glasses of Diet Coke and sat down. She said, “I don’t care how much danger you think there is. I’m not moving out of my house. And you’re not staying here.”

I’d argue that point later. Rising, I retrieved her second husband’s model sailboat from the counter and placed it in the middle of the table. The boat skimmed over an imaginary wave, its sails swelled open.

“What’s that for?” Mama said.

“Tonight we need Randall’s presence. His calmness.” I waited a beat to let her take it in. “We saw Harvey.”

Mama’s eyes expanded as if we’d stabbed her. Her glass thudded against the table. She must have realized the secret we’d come for.

“Both of you? Both of you did that?”

Polly nodded. “He’s pathetic.”

Mama took a long drink. Her usually coiffed hair hung down, gray and thin and straggled. “That’s how he draws you in. Pity.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever pitied that man,” Polly said.

I repeated what our father had told us about his arrest, that the police had tried to make him crack by claiming they were within inches of catching him. “He laughed at them,” I said.

Mama shrugged. “He would say that.”

She glanced at Polly, then up to the light fixture and the yellow ceiling. She must have wondered what lies he’d made us believe about her. But I think she was more worried about the truths.

She said, “Listening to that man is like going into his darkroom. It’s a place without any light or windows. It’s a place where mortal mind takes over your thoughts. Don’t you get sucked in.”

Polly jerked forward in the chair. “Stop hiding behind Christian Science.”

Mama stiffened. She sipped the Coke, the ice tinkling. The drinking glass refracted the lines of her sagging face. Her eyes took in Polly’s black shirt and pants, then her cowboy boots. “And what are you hiding behind?”

I heard Polly’s slight wheeze and prepared myself for another brawl. But tonight, she didn’t grab for her inhaler and brandish it like a weapon in front of Mama’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Polly said. “That was unfair.”

Mama’s mouth opened. The apology must have been as unexpected as Polly reciting Mary Baker Eddy.

I said, “All those years, and you never even suspected?”

Mama glared at me, but her eyes held more fear than anger.

“Tell us the truth, Mama,” Polly said. “The police didn’t really trace the developer chemicals. That was just a story for the press.”

Mama stood. She carried her glass to Randall’s ancient fridge. The ice maker whirred and plopped more cubes into the Diet Coke. In the kitchen’s harsh light, her back looked bent and her shoulders stooped to match her old woman’s thin hair.

“You owe us this,” Polly said.

Mama’s stocking feet swished over the linoleum. The chair shrieked on the tiled floor and she sat down across from us. She inhaled a long breath, as if for strength.

“One day I walked out to his shed and the door was unlocked.” She stopped, as if about to walk through that door again.

“What did you find?” My voice was as soft as a nudge.

Mama held the glass between her hands as if she were praying. “Everything was clean and neat, all the tools put away. Harvey made thousands of family pictures, but not a one was there. Just a single black-and-white photograph. This pale girl like a statue with black hair.”

I thought of the possibilities: Jenny Winston, Barb Smith, Susanna Lopez.

“You know what I thought?” She glared at Polly. “I thought Harvey was having an affair. That was the worst thing I could imagine.”

Polly gave a deep, sad sigh, a sigh that seemed to hold back great swells. “If only that was it.”

Mama sipped her Diet Coke. She frowned as if forcing down medicine. “When I showed him the picture, he got so angry. He stood over me with those big hands, but I just yelled right back at him.” Her breath came faster, as if she were still marshaling her strength. “He’d taken a photography class. Never mentioned it because I wouldn’t approve on account of the money. But he was so proud of that picture. ‘She looks perfect,’ he said. ‘A child of God.’” She stared at Polly, her eyes stricken. “I believed him.”

“You wanted to believe him.” I said it gently. I didn’t mean it to hurt her.

She swallowed. Her shoulders dropped as if in surrender. “Later, I found a woman’s button in his van. The same false conception took hold of me. But now he made sure his shed was locked. One morning, when he was asleep, I took his keys and made a copy of the one for his padlock. When he went out wandering, I … I snuck inside.”

Her eyes entreated me. I felt as if I’d forced her into that shed.

“You suspected something,” Polly said. “You did what you had to do.”

Mama slowly shook her head, as if Polly would never understand. “I got down on my hands and knees and sniffed around the floor like some animal. A board was loose in the corner by his stop-bath tubs. That’s where I found it. A big jar. I thought there might be dirty pictures inside.” She bowed her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Something else was in that jar,” I said.

She swallowed. “Some kind of liquid. And floating in the liquid …”

All those years Mama wouldn’t tell us what he’d done. All those years she wouldn’t even talk about him. Polly and I had to thrash by ourselves through that swamp of shame.

“You found Katherine Miller’s hand,” I said. “Not the police.”

“How could God be in a man who did something like that?”

Polly and I had spent our lives asking how a father could be in a man who did that.

“I’m glad you went to the police,” Polly said.

Mama’s eyes burst open. She stared at us plaintively. “My daughter was thirteen. My son eight. What might that man have done to you?”

“But he didn’t,” I said. “Because you turned him in.”

“You stopped denying who he was,” Polly said.

Mama pushed her face into her hands and her whole body seemed to sink into the table. It had taken her thirty-one years to admit it: she’d chosen her children over her faith.

I turned the glass of Diet Coke in my hand. The liquid was as dark as Mama’s secrets. All those years she’d kept silent. “Why couldn’t you tell us you went to the police?” I said.

She raised her hands hopelessly. “He was my husband. He was your father. Not some stranger. I told the police he was a murderer
… and that he … No mother can talk about that to her children. It was unspeakable.”

Instead of telling us, she’d prayed and raised her thoughts back to God. It was the only way she knew to heal our family.

“You tried to erase him from our lives,” I said.

She leaned forward over the table as if she were trying to convince us, and herself, all over again. “He was like an illness. The power of what he did could disappear and we could be a family again. The three of us. We just had to push those thoughts out of our minds.”

Polly waited until Mama met her eyes before she spoke. “He’s a monster. We all loved a monster. But it wasn’t our fault.”

Mama grimaced. She sipped on the Coke. She ran her nail over the wind-filled sail of Randall’s boat, then down the twine halyards to the hull. “We try to be the spirit of God, but each of us has a body that needs food. We reflect perfection but we’re still imperfect. And no matter what we do, our children suffer. What’s Godly about that?”

I reached over the table and cupped Mama’s hand. For the first time I could remember, she seemed heroic.

“Every boy thinks he carries something of his father. But with you, with what your father did, that belief could be so destructive. I didn’t want you ever to think you were like him.”

“I had to find that out myself, Mama.”

She nodded. “I went too far.”

“To protect me. To protect Polly. ” Then I said it. I, an atheist. “Isn’t that the love that comes from God?”

Mama shook her head. There was both joy and sadness in her smile.

The chair squealed. Polly strode to Mama and wrapped her arms around her. Mama stared into her glass of Diet Coke. She bowed her head and her shoulders rounded into Polly’s embrace. She was weeping.