Then
When are we going to visit your mother?” Grandma asked for the hundredth time. She shoveled another bite of whatever-it-was into her mouth.
“We’re not.”
“Robin, you need to see her.”
I stifled my gag reflex as a string of spittle danced between her lips, and deftly changed the subject. “What did you say you call this stuff?”
“It’s a pasty,” she said around her food.
I stared at the lump of browned pie crust covered with ketchup and mused about the fact that pasty rhymed with nasty.
“Try it. You’ll like it.”
“What’s in it?”
“Meat, potatoes, carrots, onions, rutabaga. It’s the perfect food for winter. Miners up in the UP used to keep them in their pockets to warm their hands, and then they’d eat them for lunch.”
She gave me a disappointed look and then said, “Upper Peninsula. It’s the part of Michigan that’s north of the Mackinac Bridge.”
The answer didn’t make the meal look any more appetizing. It looked like something they might be forcing my mom to eat in prison—Lindy Windsor, the woman who used to cater in posh parties people talked about for years afterward. But Grandma had been so excited to bring a cooler full of these frozen meat pies home from Mass that I cut into the shapeless lump, releasing a plume of steam. I took an exploratory bite and shrugged. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t anything.
“Probably needs salt,” she suggested. She leaned across the table and liberally salted my food for me.
The next bite was better. I gave her a little nod of approval. We ate a couple more bites in silence before she resumed the line of questioning I thought I had successfully deflected again.
“When are we going out to see your mother?”
I sighed and The Professor mimicked me perfectly.
“We need to get something on the calendar,” Grandma said. “And you need to at least write her a letter in the meantime. It would be nice if you’d get off your high horse and read one from her too.”
I poked at my food. “I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Tell her about school. Tell her about your friends. Tell her you miss her. She just wants to hear from you.”
It wasn’t true that I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her. There were plenty of things I could say. I wanted to ask her what in the world she had been thinking. I wanted to know what had made her and Dad so selfish. I wanted to know why their stupid choices ruined my life. I wanted to know why I didn’t even know who they were.
“How did my parents meet? I mean, how did Mom get from here to Amherst?”
Thankfully my grandmother took a moment to swallow her food before answering. “Your mother wanted to get out of Sussex since the minute she realized there was a bigger world out there. She met your father at Boston College her second semester. They had the same class—American history or something.”
“Did you like my dad?”
“I didn’t have a long time to get to know him. Like I said, I was only invited to the wedding. But far as I can tell, everyone liked your dad. He was very charming and obviously smart. I was sure Lindy would have a great life—a better life than I had. I was sorry she was going to be staying out east. And it took some time to get used to the idea of her marrying a Protestant, but I was happy for her because she was happy. I was as shocked as you were when everything came to light. I knew from the start that your mother had nothing to do with it.”
I wasn’t so sure. Mom had married him. She protected him. She let him do this to our family, and now I was orphaned and stuck forever in Sucky, Michigan.
“She should have stopped him,” I said. “Or left him and taken me with her. She shouldn’t have stuck around. It’s pathetic.”
Grandma frowned. “You should have a little compassion. Most women will put up with an awful lot to keep the men in their lives happy.”
“Not me. I wouldn’t have stood for that.”
“What?”
“Sure.”
The smirk on her face sent me into a rage. “I guess you’re the one who taught her to just roll over and take it when your husband’s a terrible person. Nice job, Grandma. Great legacy you’re leaving.”
I wished I could take the words back the minute they were out of my mouth. Grandma’s eyes glistened and her frown lines cut deep into her face. I should have said I was sorry. Instead, I started yelling.
“I don’t want to see her! And I won’t write her any letters. My life is none of her business anymore, and it’s none of yours either!”
I stalked off to my room and locked the door. I knew it was childish. None of this was my grandma’s fault.
Eventually I could hear the sounds of cleaning up, of Grandma tearing off a piece of plastic wrap to cover the uneaten portion of my pasty and washing the dishes. When I heard her turn on the TV, I opened my door and crept behind the couch. The Professor watched me crawl to the kitchen but said nothing, just tilted his head to keep one beady eye on me. When I silently took the phone handset from the cradle, he let out the sound of the ringing phone at the top of his infernal little lungs.
“Shut up, Professor!” Grandma snapped. “I’m trying to hear the TV.”
I quickly dialed Peter’s number. He picked up on the third ring.
“Meet me in the cemetery,” I whispered.
“Robin?”
A pause. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
I gently placed the phone back on the cradle, timing the motion with the applause of the Wheel of Fortune audience. I crawled on the floor under The Professor’s watchful eye as the big wheel was spinning and everyone was clapping, hoping it would stop at a large sum or a special prize. Something they thought would make their lives better. I slipped my boots on. Vanna spun the big lighted blocks around to reveal the letters. Another spin. More clapping. I waited. Ding. Vanna spun the letters.
Grandma bellowed at the TV, “The truth shall set you free!”
The Professor screeched.
I had my coat down from the peg by the door and on in a second. Grandma shouted out her answer again, hoping the slack-jawed contestant would hear her. “How can you not see that?” she moaned.
I slipped outside, shutting the door quietly behind me, and jumped off the porch into the new-fallen snow. Through the closed window I heard The Professor shout, “I’d like to buy a vowel!”
The moon lit my way through the trees to Emily Flynt’s black stone. The snow had piled up, partially obscuring the day she died. Down the road Peter’s headlights swung into view, passed the trailer, slowed, and turned into the little gravel lot. I trotted across the frozen dead and opened the passenger door.
“What happened?” Peter said as I plopped down into the seat.
“I had a fight with my—Martha.”
“I figured that. So what happened?”
I took a long breath. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Where are we going?”
Snow danced in the headlights like a cloud of gnats in a beam of summer sunshine. The car was warm. Too warm. Peter must have been driving it not long before I called him. Had he been visiting Sarah? I shut every vent I could reach.
“I don’t know. Where’s there to go?”
“Nowhere,” Peter admitted.
I sighed.
Peter turned off the headlights and put the car in park. “You know, I should be finishing a paper right now. What’s going on? Why are we out here sitting in the dark when I should be home finishing a paper?”
I slumped in my seat. “It doesn’t matter. You never believe me anyway.”
I could feel him staring at the side of my face.
“I’ll believe you. Whatever you say, I promise I’ll believe you.”
He was in his winter jacket, but like me, he had no gloves, no hat, no scarf. He must have left his house quickly to come rescue me.
“My mom wants to see me.”
“You don’t want to see her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I stared out the windshield at the rows of gravestones standing black against the snow. “Because she should have left with me right when she found out about my dad. Then I would at least have a mom. Now I have nothing.”
“Okay, so what really happened then?” There was an edge of frustration in his voice.
A cloud slipped in front of the moon and the graves disappeared. I focused on the snowflakes falling on the windshield and melting into droplets.
“My dad really is Norman Windsor. You didn’t believe me, but I was telling the truth. I could show you my birth certificate. My dad is Norman Windsor and he’s on trial for killing three people. He might get the death penalty. My mom is Lindy Windsor and she’s in prison for twenty-five years as an accessory and for obstruction of justice. While she should have been protecting me and getting us the heck out of there, she was busy trying to make it so that my father wouldn’t get caught, and when he did get caught, she was busy trying to make sure they couldn’t convict him. And in the meantime she forgot she had a daughter, and maybe she should have been more concerned with an innocent kid instead of a guilty grown man who deserves whatever punishment he gets.”
Peter was quiet for a moment. I could see out of the corner of my eye that he watched me intently. “Okay,” he finally said. “I believe you.”
The anxiety left my body in a turgid black stream.
“I’m sorry I didn’t before,” he went on. “But you have to admit you made it hard with all the lies.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No.”
“And you’re not going to tell anyone, right?”
“Of course not. But how do you know he did it?”
I scoffed. “The FBI doesn’t come pick you up if you didn’t do it.”
“I guess.”
“Oh, and Martha’s not my fourth cousin. She’s my grandma.”
We sat in silence a moment more, getting comfortable with the reality of who I was. The cloud that had blackened the moon drifted on, and I let my eyes roam over the tops of the gravestones, hop, hop, hop, all the way to the last row. Then I saw the dead house.
“You have a flashlight in here?”
“I think so.”
I opened the car door. “Come on.”
Peter turned the car off, rattled around in the glove box, and emerged with a flashlight. “Where are we going?”
“I want to check out the old house.”
“The Doll House?”
“It’s called the Doll House?”
“That’s what I’ve always heard it called.”
We started across the cemetery.
“Why?”
“In one of the upstairs windows there’s an old, creepy doll looking out with these empty eyes. Plus, you know, it kind of looks like a doll house, I guess.”
We walked through the fog of our own breath, following the jumping flashlight beam. Snow squeaked beneath our boots. The thin, sharp air filled my lungs, and I was thankful that my grandmother didn’t live in Florida or Texas. The cold put everything else on pause—the trees, the rivers, the flowers—so you could deal with the bones of life. It changed everything to blacks and whites, throwing the world into clear relief, separating the good from the bad, the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly. Winter made the rest of life’s ambiguities somehow bearable for a while.
We cleared the graves and stood before the massive old house. The foundation was crumbling, the front porch lurched to the left, every window had been broken. But even in the dim glow at the edge of Peter’s flashlight it was easy to see that the place had once been beautiful. Beneath the chipped paint were charming architectural details adorning every angle and corner, curlicues and flowers carved from wood, making it look like a life-size gingerbread house. It must have been like a fairy tale once. Now it looked like some frozen witch had come along and cursed it.
“My mom grew up here.”
“In this house?”
“That’s what my grandma said.”
“It’s been empty as long as I can remember.”
“Grandma got the trailer when the house was condemned and they wouldn’t let her live in it anymore.”
Peter swept the flashlight over the second-floor windows. “I think the doll is on one of the sides.”
“Think we can get in there?”
“Why would you want to? It’s half eaten by termites and dry rot. There are probably bats and raccoons living in it.”
“Let’s go in.”
Peter hesitated. The sagging front porch leaned away from the house like it wanted to disassociate itself from the place. The bottom step was gone, completely rotted away. I slid my bare fingers into the snow on the handrail and put an experimental foot on the second step. The porch let out a shrieking crack that echoed against every quivering snowflake falling through the black sky.
I snatched my foot back and looked at Peter. “Maybe there’s a back door.”
We walked through drifts up to our knees and located the back door, which wasn’t a door at all anymore, only a gaping rectangular hole in the wall, like an open grave. We stepped into the yawning darkness within, and Peter moved the light slowly along the walls. The yellowed wallpaper had been torn into jagged strips like sickly icicles. A gust of wind through the doorway sent a few curled-up strips of paper skittering along the floor like oak leaves across crusted snow.
For every step we took, the house answered back. Creaks and groans, voices of anger and sorrow. I thought of my own house back in Amherst. Had the people of my town given it a nickname? Did teenagers drive past it slowly, telling the sad story of its former inhabitants? Did little children walking home from school quicken their steps when they reached it or cross over to the other side of the street, afraid of the murderous ghosts that might dwell within?
I suddenly felt bad for being in this house as a gawker. I was about to suggest we leave when Peter pointed his flashlight at a staircase and started his ascent. I followed close behind as the walls and ceiling pressed in around me.
At the top, Peter shone his light at one of three half-closed doors. “I think it must be this one.” He pushed it the rest of the way open.
The flashlight beam tracked across a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, pictures of horses on the walls, until it stopped upon a doll seated at the window, looking out, looking for the girl who once hid under that bed when her father was in a rage—my mother. This doll had waited for Lindy Gray for more than thirty years. How long would I wait for her?
I didn’t touch her, in the same way you would not touch an artifact at a museum or the host upon an altar. But as Peter came up behind me and adjusted the beam of the flashlight, I saw her dusty, sun-bleached face and unblinking eyes. They looked dry and desperate, as if they belonged to someone who had been buried alive.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
“We just got here.”
“I’m cold.”
I closed the door on my mother’s childhood and followed Peter down the stairs. At the bottom, the light danced across the wall of what used to be the living room. Above the fireplace, hanging crooked but intact and covered with a thick layer of dust, was a family portrait. I walked through the room around the old furniture, Peter on my heels. Four people, jaundiced from whatever chemical they used to process photos back then. Two smiling children—a boy and a girl—a rather blank-faced father, and a mother who looked as if she had a headache.
“See anyone you know?” Peter asked.
No, I didn’t know any of these people. Not really. I studied the faces. “That must be my mom and my grandma. I’ve never met my grandfather or my uncle.”
I stared at the little girl. Despite the dust and discoloration, I thought she looked a bit like me. Or maybe like I did when I was six years old. Were all bad people once beautiful children? Would I turn out just like my mother or father? At that moment, I was sure I would. At some point in the future—I couldn’t know exactly when—something in my brain would twist out of place and I would become a bad person, someone who thought only of her own gain, someone whose every action would be turned inward in selfish ambition and self-preservation. And I would drive away anyone who had ever cared about me. The thought terrified me—but at the same time it seemed inevitable.
I swallowed down my fear and turned away from the family on the wall. They were all as dead as the house in which they hung. Whoever they had been then, they were now something else. My grandfather was presumably in the ground somewhere, though I hadn’t found the family name in the Methodist cemetery in my Catholic grandmother’s backyard. Grandma wasn’t the overworked matriarch of this sad little kingdom. When she wasn’t volunteering at the church’s resale shop, she was lost in TV land, shouting at game show hosts who never listened to her. My uncle was no longer a rosy-cheeked little boy. He was off in Alaska, prospecting for oil or something and probably sporting a bushy beard and a receding hairline. And my mother—well, I knew exactly what she was.
When I walked back through the hallway into the snowy dark, the torn wallpaper had morphed from icicles to bars. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Despite his athleticism and longer legs, Peter had to work to keep up with me as I strode back across the cemetery to the trailer. When I finally stopped at the porch, he put his hands on my shoulders.
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’m serious. I know what it’s like to lose a parent, and it’s terrible. But you lost two, and in a way I really can’t imagine. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m exactly the same person I was before you knew.”
He bit his lower lip. “Are you going to go see your mom?”
I was shaking my head without even meaning to. “I don’t want to see her. And I sure don’t want to spend that long in a car with my grandmother.”
“I’d take you.” His face was serious, his eyes full of kindness.
“You’d drive all day to take me to visit my mom?”
“Sure. Why not? We could go on spring break.”
I grimaced.
“Road trip,” he added in a singsong voice accompanied by a mischievous smile.
“I guess. But I really don’t want to see her. So thanks for offering—it really means a lot—but I’ll have to pass.”
He looked down for a moment. “What about your dad? Would you want to see him?”
“No. Anyway, I doubt they’d let me talk to him while he’s on trial.”
“Maybe. It’s not really any of my business, I guess, but you might regret it if you didn’t take the opportunity to talk to him before . . . I mean, you know. I’d give almost anything to be able to talk to my mom again.”
The falling snow piled up like powdered sugar on his hair and shoulders.
“What would you say?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d tell her how much I love her and how much she taught me. How she made me into the man I am now.” He glanced up at the sky a moment. “I’d tell her that even though it seemed like we took for granted all the meals she cooked and all the work she did around the house, once she was gone we realized how much she did. I’d tell her how much all her students loved her, how much she’s missed. I don’t want to tell you what to do, Robin, but most people don’t know what kind of time they have left with someone. You might. So maybe you should see your dad, tell him what you feel.”
I shifted my weight to the other leg. “It wouldn’t be all that nice stuff you just said. Anyway, no one’s really going to sentence a senator to death. That’s what my grandma said. And even if they did, I’ve got time. Death sentences go through years of appeals.”
“Okay. But the offer stands. If you ever want to see either of them.”
I put a hand on his arm in lieu of what I really wanted to do, which was to bury my face in his chest and feel his arms around me. I had gone months without a hug. “Thanks.”
I could barely see his half smile in the glow cast by the porch light. Then it vanished. He leaned toward me, put an ice-cold hand to my cheek, and pulled me in for a kiss. I winced, remembering the car crash. But as his lips gently touched mine, I couldn’t hear a thing.
“I better get inside,” I said when he pulled back.
“Hopefully she hasn’t locked you out.”
“If she did I deserved it. I wasn’t very nice to her tonight. Anyway, there’s a key under Mary. Grandma figures no one would be so sacrilegious as to employ the mother of our Lord as an accessory to breaking and entering.”
Peter snickered. It reminded me of the way I’d heard him laugh with his friends at school.
“Peter, you can’t tell anyone.”
“Why would I tell anyone where your grandma hides her extra key?”
“No, about my parents, or my grandma. You can’t tell anyone. You know that, right? I’m Robin Dickinson, not Robin Windsor.”
“Of course.”
“Because if you did, that would be it. That would be the end of our friendship—no questions asked, just gone, done. You understand?”
He grasped my hand. “I promise I won’t tell a soul. You can trust me, Robin Dickinson.”
“Okay.”
I let go of his hand and tried the door. Locked. Grandma must have gone to bed without realizing I wasn’t in my room. I shuffled through the snow in front of the trailer where Mary and her gnome attendants stood watch. I tipped her forward and felt around. The key was frozen to the ground. I pried it up, opened the door, and stepped out of the snow globe night.
“Good night, Peter.”
“’Night, Robin.”
I sloughed out of my coat and boots and tiptoed back to my room. I could hear the car driving away as I pulled the covers over my snow-dampened head. I touched my lips where Peter’s had touched them. Then I thought of the doll in the window, of the tiny, cold lips that my mother had probably kissed hundreds of times before she left, never to return. And I thought maybe I should go see her after all—if only to be sure she understood exactly what she had stolen from me.