She walked the beach at Seapoint in biting November air. Days had been slipping by, and she had been negotiating the hours of her life step by step, while seeming to arrive nowhere. The funerals and her statements to the police. The cleanup at the store and her fractured talks with employees and, thanks to Lori, staving off office and management chores, recordkeeping, meeting the payroll. Struggling with Ron and, at each step, resenting her father’s unpardonable deeds.
What he had done before her eyes seemed never to entirely depart consciousness. Whatever his grievance he had no right to end people’s lives. His violation was so basic, it remained with her and disrupted who she was or would ever be.
Maine Authentic, her mother’s awkward growing child. It never stopped demanding attention, feeding, cleaning, caretaking, adding part-time help, answering mail, and Marian felt it would overwhelm her if she did not find ways to control it. The baby inside her belly was also with her each moment and was also a burden, though one she was confident of managing—an object of newness and high hopes. The store, Ron, and her father were the opposite. The problem of her father would end soon, in his inevitable dying, but she imagined herself pushed and bullied by Ron and the store for years to come if things remained unchanged.
What she wouldn’t give to have her mother with her again, if only for one last day or week. She’d absorb every word and bit of advice. She’d have her mother know she appreciated all she had done for her and, as it had turned out, had given her—far more than Marian had known existed. As it was, she planned to involve her mother in the birth of her baby in the deepest possible way. One would become part of the other, and they’d all start over again. She would will it so.
Ducking her head into the sharp air, Marian acknowledged that hers had been a privileged life, but she also believed she had gained maturity in the shocking experience of recent weeks. Immaturity had fallen away like a wardrobe of old styles and colors. Her mother had given her so much (had any child in southern Maine been half as fortunate?) and on her sudden death had bequeathed more to her in properties, insurance, CDs, bank accounts than Marian had known existed. But Marian was realizing each day the relative insignificance of wealth. I guess you had to be there, she tried joking with Ron, to explain her emerging view of things, to which he replied, “Hey, babe, the bucks are real.”
* * *
Well, you did have to be there, Marian thought as she ran it through her mind once again. Having a baby was something else Ron could not incorporate, and she remained surprised at her own impulse to protect her tiny creature back when the only world she had ever known came crashing down around her. Her hand had gone to her baby in primal awareness of its welfare. A year earlier she might have dashed from the store to save her skin, but in the crisis her hand had gone to her baby just as her heart had gone to her parents.
If only Ron had come to her side in the aftermath, she thought. He appeared to try, when things had been at their worst, but seemed incapable of really doing so. Often she pitied him, felt sorry for his shallowness, and kept knowing all over again that she could not live with him as the parent of their child. Separation was something she had to make happen. She had no wish to hurt him, to hurt anyone in any way—not now, not ever—but was more convinced each day that she had no choice. Life had assumed new meaning for her. You had to know what you were doing, and just letting things happen was as maddening as all else that lay unresolved around her.
Even here on the desolate beach, and as she felt she was returning to herself, the stain of blood remained. Her mother’s blood could as well have been paint; it felt so unremovable. Blood and the ever-clinging nightmare. She knew she was improving—while her heart would come up trembling all over again now and then, and she’d bite her knuckles to keep from crying.
Today promised to be one of her most difficult days: her mother was buried in Kittery, Virgil was at rest in his family plot in York Village, ten miles to the north, and she was scheduled to meet with her father at the York County jail—their first meeting since the slaughter and the final meeting of their lives—for purposes of naming her power of attorney over whatever remained of family and property, including his life in terms of possible resuscitation. She did not intend to be in his presence again after today—he had been arraigned, but was so near death that the formality of scheduling had been put on hold—and, like others, she regarded the promise of avoiding a trial as a small blessing. Every day since it had happened what he had done was unforgivable, and so it was today—a lens over her eyes guiding each step. There could never be an excuse for causing such loss and bloodshed. Something else could have been done. Anything but the ending of lives.
One meeting would be more than enough, and her thought—as she weighed the prospect—was to look at him without expression and say nothing unless it was to answer yes or no to a lawyer’s or deputy’s question. He may have been betrayed in life, but nothing under the sun gave him the right to do what he had done. That was her bottom line. Lori alone had dared say that inflicting death might at times be a person’s only psychological option. Virgil might be held accountable for provocation, she said, for a lifetime of abusing his office for personal gain. They were issues with which Marian decided she would have to live, and while disagreeing that inflicting death might be a man’s only option, she accepted Lori’s honesty, believing she wanted as a friend to help her move beyond the anger she held for her father.
A figure with a dog emerged from dune grass two hundred yards away, and fear seized Marian’s heart. Then she saw it was a woman, and her heart began parachuting back to earth. She knew she could use professional help. All at once the shock of what had happened would threaten her, and her impulse would be to get in her car and drive to a town where she wasn’t known. Other times, sinking into depression, she lost respect for fear and walked wherever she wished and left doors unlocked. Or she began sobbing as if she were five years old, and her mother had left her on a street in town where fire engines were screaming by.
From fearing everything to fearing nothing. From being shaken by the shriek of a gull to crossing a street between moving cars as if they did not exist. And, rarely, a thought of her father—and still another closing of her heart against him. What he had done was unforgivable. He may have been provoked, but nothing gave anyone the right to kill. Why hadn’t he moved out twenty-five years ago?
Now these new feelings of resolve: she would say and do whatever was necessary. The lessons had been horrible, the cost incalculable, still it had been an education and she was going to use it as a stepping stone to the future.
She returned over gravel and blacktop to her car. The first frost had come in the day after her mother’s funeral, and along the stretch of pavement, under shedding trees, there was now the brisk air of autumn. Let the season hurry up and change, she thought. Let the leaves disappear, and the snow come in great depths. Let her baby be blessed with health, and let this season in her own life be replaced by memories of smiles on her mother’s face, her mother serving customers, and, on the side, giving her tips on getting people to like her for who she was.
Should her baby be a girl, she knew what her name would be.
Five or six men in suits and uniforms stood within the anteroom, and Marian, introduced to each, filed away which were lawyers and which were county officials. She moved with the flow into a large room with a long table in the center and sunlight streaking through high-screened windows on one side. The sheriff, a man with thinning beige-colored hair matching his uniform, explained what would happen. “Mrs. Slemm, your father’s very sick,” he said. “He’s devastated over what he did and wants to say something to you by way of apology. You may listen to what he has to say, and respond, or not, as you wish. He’ll be in restraints and will be brought in by deputies, so there’s nothing to fear. We understand how difficult this has to be, and want only to help in any way possible. Fine so far?” he said.
Marian nodded.
“There’ll be documents for you to sign as, I believe, has been explained. After the signing, your father wants to speak, but at that time, or at any time, you may terminate things by giving me a nod. Now, we don’t know if you’ll want physical contact with your father or not. It’s up to you, and you may do as you wish at the time. As a formality, we are required to sweep you with a metal detector, which I hope you don’t mind. It won’t be intrusive, and it’s just a formality as required by law. We all set then?”
Once more Marian nodded. She perceived the elderly sheriff giving a nod, whereupon another man in uniform approached and swept over her—up one side and down the other—something like a divining rod, before stepping back.
Another nod from the sheriff followed and, across the room, a door opened and a group of uniformed deputies entered at a snail’s pace. Marian looked mainly to the floor, but within her peripheral vision, as the frail figure in restraints and orange coveralls was there in the midst of uniformed guards, and as she stiffened to hold her heart in check, she perceived a pale and sick old man, as if, in the passing days, he had foregone eating and failed all the more. She took in, too, that his head was hanging as if no strength remained in his neck. And she saw a family likeness with herself in his lifelong shyness. Her nature had come more from this man, she knew, than from her mother.
The procession stopped and her father remained downcast. The sheriff articulated softly in ways that required no response from either of them, and each took a turn reaching to the table to scratch with a ballpoint beside one x and another. Though the guards and others remained at hand and there would be nothing like privacy, the sheriff said, “Mr. Hudon, if you have something to say, this is the time.”
Marian sensed her father trying to lift his face, and as he did so, and against her intentions not to open to him, emotion broke in her throat like the crack of a lightbulb. She had to inhale not to sob aloud. “Marian,” he uttered through tears of his own. As she forced her eyes to look up, she saw that he was unable for the moment to continue. Nor was it the restraints that had had him taking baby steps, but his health, hanging by a thread. Far from restraining him, the guards were holding him up.
He gasped, needed another moment to compose himself. “You can’t forgive me,” he got out. “I …” He appeared unable to get anything more to come forth, appeared to surrender.
When another moment passed and nothing more was said, the sheriff gave a nod and the guards appeared to lift and return him the way they had come. Marian struggled against reaching to him. In her mind’s eye she saw herself emerging from napping in the pilothouse, taking a sip of coffee, and an urge was in her to undo all that had gone wrong. Still, she checked herself, restrained her heart. And when the sheriff touched her elbow, though hesitating, she moved as guided. Something within may have broken for a moment, but she knew the course she had to follow, knew she had to remain strong if she was going to survive the uncertain path before her.