My father called on the motel phone. Tess was at work.
“Joey,” he said and already I could hear it in his voice. “Joey, you there?”
I cannot separate what he told me then from what I discovered later, so I’ll tell you what I came to know—that evening, the next day, in the weeks to come. The truth by all accounts.
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.