EIGHT

I spend the summer after fifth grade lounging, mostly, in front of the television in the living room, and in my un-air-conditioned room. I’m so afraid of kidnappers and murderers that I don’t dare leave the window open while I sleep and I wake at night, sweating in the stifling heat.

We have a patio that Ann-Marie and Dad built themselves by filling a wide wooden frame with concrete and flagstones. In the summer Dad puts on mesh shorts and tans out there in a lounge chair. His face is already pink, and crisscrossed with tiny delicate purple veins on his cheeks and at the edges of his eyes and nose. As the summer goes on he grows redder and redder until, from a distance, his bright-red face and silver hair are almost shocking as he walks toward you.

Our dead end street is perfectly still most days, filled only with the sounds of cicadas and, in the distance, children’s soccer games being played at the middle school. Overhead, very dimly, you can hear the low rumble of the airplane engines as they fly over us on their way from or back to T. F. Green Airport in Warwick.

Dad always has a stack of books next to him, and he balances a glass of ice cubes and water on top. He moves among Tom Clancy thrillers, books on photography, and biographies of ex-presidents. That summer I read Clan of the Cave Bear, and work my way through most of the V. C. Andrews books, all checked out from our local library. I love the dirty sections and am proud that I’m allowed to read whatever I want. I think the prose is dark and gothic and wonderful and spend many nights in my sweltering bedroom writing my own stories of intrigue and death. The main character is usually what I imagine myself to be in ten years. I describe her as “no-nonsense” with “raven-colored” hair.

Dad’s hours at the Journal are erratic, and while most days Derek and I have the house to ourselves, we share many with Dad, lying on the porch, reading. The beach in Newport is about thirty minutes away, but we rarely go. Sometimes we drive down to the little slip of sand that is Barrington Beach to take photos of the sunset. There Dad teaches me to count out the seconds before pressing the button connected to a cord that closes the camera shutter remotely. This way you don’t shake the lens. No matter how still you think you’re standing, the camera will always shake if you don’t use a tripod.

On the Fourth of July, we set up Dad’s camera on the seawall to take pictures of the fireworks across the bay in Newport. The air smells like barbecue and seaweed. Dad shows me the exact moment to snap the pictures and when we get them developed, the fireworks on film seem far more spectacular than the ones I’d witnessed with my own eyes.

EARLY IN THE school year, Ann-Marie takes me to the dentist for a cleaning. Cleanings are traumatic, because I never, ever escape without at least one filling. Dad says I have soft teeth, like him. He had two teeth pulled in Vietnam and when he smiles wide you can just see the gap where they should have been. He says that was the first time he’d been to the dentist in his whole life. All his front teeth are capped and sometimes a cap falls off, revealing the gray stump of old tooth. Dad is vain, constantly preening in the mirror and fluffing his silver hair, but when a cap falls out he flashes his jack-o’-lantern grin for days, thrilled by my shrieks of horror.

We sit in the dentist’s office, lite rock playing softly from the speakers above us. I hope some disaster might happen that will keep me from the dentist’s office: from his drill, and latex gloves, and Novocain shots. Maybe the roof will cave in, or outside the office, on Route 195, a car will careen past the Jersey barriers into the Barrington River. Then all these thoughts of sealants, fillings, and fluoride trays will be forgotten as we rush outside to survey the damage.

Flipping through the People in the dentist’s office, I come across an article about the recent invasion of Kuwait that describes Kuwaitis fleeing the border there, racing desperately across the desert to escape an evil dictator named Saddam Hussein. In one story a family traveling by car stopped to give a man on foot the only beverage they could spare: a warm can of Diet Coke. I think of how terrible that must be, the warm, tinny, chemical taste in the middle of the blazing desert. The article describes Kuwait, a tiny country near the base of Saudi Arabia, as being “roughly the size of Rhode Island.”

“Look!” I show Ann-Marie. “This article is talking about Rhode Island!”

She looks at the paragraph. “They only talk about Rhode Island when they want to describe something small. Something big is the size of Texas. Something small is the size of Rhode Island.” I feel like our state is famous and read on with intense interest, wondering why a dictator would even bother to invade a country so small. Finally the hygienist opens the door and calls my name. She’s all smiles as I reluctantly put down the magazine and follow her back to the dentist’s chair.

I’m fascinated by the Gulf War and watch the constant coverage on CNN. During the slow buildup to the fighting the news anchors sometimes run out of things to talk about and walk around on a huge map of the Middle East pointing at Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes they hold up gas masks and demonstrate how the soldiers will need to use them if Saddam decides to gas the troops. They talk about all the terrible things Saddam has done to his people, the size of his army, and the scorching temperatures in the desert.

I imagine that this was what it had been like in the 1960s when Dad went to Vietnam. He was only seventeen when he enlisted, and while seventeen seems grown-up to my eleven-year-old mind, I understand how young it is to go to war. In class we write letters to the soldiers and I pour my heart out to them, telling them how brave they are, and how much their sacrifice matters to the country.

One afternoon as Derek and I watch TV, Lee Greenwood sings “Proud to Be an American” at a sporting event. My heart swells as his voice rises with the chorus and F-14 fighter jets fly overhead, leaving behind a red, white, and blue vapor trail. Dad comes out of the bedroom and stands in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen looking at the TV. “Now, that’s some bullshit,” he says. I’m embarrassed; the pride that had filled me leaves my body in a breath. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just fake, patriotic, NASCAR-loving bullshit,” he says. “When I left Vietnam I threw my medals at the White House. They meant nothing. The government is using those kids up.”

“So you were a hippie, then?” I sit up from where I’d been lounging on my side of the couch with my head in my left hand, my right hand holding a book open—my usual position. I pick at the tan and red tweed fibers of the couch. On the TV, the song is over and and the game has started. Sunlight pours in through the window on my left and cuts a long rectangle across the group of houseplants Ann-Marie keeps there. There are layers of dust on the leaves.

“I wasn’t a hippie, Leah. I was a poor kid from South Providence. That’s why I went to Vietnam in the first place. What else was I going to do?”

“But you thought the war was bad?” It’s hard to wrap my mind around Dad’s answers. I had thought you were either a hippie in the 1960s, or you were a veteran. I don’t understand how being poor has anything to do with anything.

“War is fucked, kiddo,” said Dad. “But it’s the best people in our country who fight them. And the ones who don’t have any other choice.” Walking into the kitchen he says over his shoulder, “And that song sucks. Since when does my daughter listen to country music?”

“I don’t!” I call back.

Dad’s attitude toward the wars—the Gulf War and the Vietnam War—continue to confuse me. At Aunty Rita’s house, we watch the footage of a Patriot missile blowing a SCUD missile out of the sky and everyone cheers. But Dad’s more concerned with the politics of it all—what are the president’s real motives; is this about oil, religion?

One night I walk into our living room, after the fighting has officially begun, and Dad watches TV in the dark. On screen, oil fires rage against the black sky.

“Now, that’s something,” he says.

It all ends so fast, the occupation, the war, it is like I never have time to fully take it in. But I have such a funny feeling watching the troops on TV. I think they looked scared and sad, and wonder if that’s how Dad had felt, and if he sometimes feels that way now.

THAT FALL I sit at the kitchen table as Ann-Marie cooks dinner, and I read an article in the Providence Journal about a missing family from Barrington, the Brendels.

“What do you think happened to them?” I ask.

“Who knows?” Ann-Marie opens a bag of macaroni and pours it into the stockpot. “I hope nothing bad. That poor little girl. So weird.”

The missing Brendel family are a father, a mother, and an eight-year-old girl, Emily, who is in the third grade. The picture of them from the paper looks strangely dated, like a family from decades before my time. The mom has a bowl-shaped haircut. I think she looks like a Pilgrim, and very different from Ann-Marie, who is stylish and gets her clothes at the Cherry & Webb store. I think the dad is old looking to have such a young daughter. And the photo itself is taken in a portrait studio—something we never do as a family. We don’t even buy school photos, since Dad takes better, cooler pictures anyway. (Though when the pictures come back I pine for my own stack of wallet-size photos that everyone else trades like baseball cards.)

“When they say foul play,” I say, looking over the article, “they mean murder, right?”

“Well, I don’t know about that!” says Ann-Marie. “This is Barrington. Whole families don’t just get murdered.” She dumps the egg noodles into a large glass bowl, then pours in peas and steak tips, mixing it all together. My stomach churns at the sight.

“So you think they just left the house and went somewhere?”

This makes a kind of sense to me. Next to our house is a lot filled with briar bushes, vines, and a massive pit, on top of which there had once been a ramshackle house. The family that lived in the house took off one day and abandoned everything. I had heard Fran from across the street tell Ann-Marie that they’d left their dog in the closet, and by the time anyone had gone into the house, the dog was dead. Soon after the city bulldozed the house, but nobody has yet bought the land, and so the lot fills with more weeds and the pit slowly caves in on itself. I think about the dog a lot and try to never look at where the house had been.

Maybe the Brendels have done something like that, I wonder. I know the family next door had been behind on their mortgage, according to Fran. Ann-Marie is right. Barrington is a safe place. It’s not the kind of place where you get kidnapped or murdered. The adults, all of our parents and teachers, talk about the case nonstop, and as sixth graders we pick up on what they say and whisper it among ourselves.

IN BARRINGTON, WE pride ourselves on being the wealthiest town in Rhode Island. It’s a town where almost nobody speaks in the thick Rhode Island accent of my grandparents and my aunts. It’s a town of lawyers and doctors and the wives and children of lawyers and doctors. It’s a place where you buy a boat, a Volvo, and a golden retriever. It isn’t the kind of place where people get murdered, especially not an eight-year-old girl, her librarian mother, and her lawyer father. Especially not a family who lives in a quaint little carriage house on the corner of Middle Road, which, if maybe not the most exclusive neighborhood in Barrington, is certainly nice.

If my family doesn’t fit that mold, if my dad isn’t a lawyer, but instead is in charge of the trucks at the Providence Journal, if he drives a Mitsubishi with tinted windows and blasts WBRU, the local alternative radio station, and if he calls Bryan Adams a hack when his song that everyone loves from the movie Robin Hood comes on, and instead turns up the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that’s fine. That’s what makes us special and different and cool. But we’re surrounded by things that are normal and wealthy and safe. Which means we, in turn, are safe.

Maybe, I sometimes think, if we had always lived in Barrington, Mom would never have been murdered. Maybe if Dad had grown up in Barrington and not in the triple-decker house on Eddy Street in South Providence, then his mom would not have drunk herself to an early death, his dad would not have hated him, he would never have gone to Vietnam, and he wouldn’t be an alcoholic now. Maybe if I stay in Barrington long enough, if we are a family in Barrington long enough, all that safe wealthy stuff—the skiing, the Volvos, the trips to Martha’s Vineyard, and the sailboating in Narragansett Bay—will work their way into our genes and we’ll become, if not normal, then at the very least, safe.

FIRST, THE POLICE find teeth and blood in the Brendel garage. And then, near the middle of November, they find the bodies.

We’re in social studies, where recently Mrs. Robbins has called me “little Murphy Brown” for a journalism project I worked on, and another girl in class rolled her eyes and said that I was Mrs. Robbins’s pet even though I never did my homework and therefore had cost the class a pizza party. The intercom over the door crackles to life and our principal comes on the speaker.

“Attention students, attention students,” he clears his throat. “After-school activities are cancelled for the day. Bussers, please report immediately to bus pickup after school. Walkers, please report to the principal’s office after school.”

When the intercom turns off, the class buzzes with excitement.

“They found the Brendels!” says Brett, one of the popular boys. He has sandy-colored hair and braces and wears Umbro shorts with his boxers hanging out the bottom hem.

“Brett!” Mrs. Robbins chides. “Don’t say that.” She picks up the coffee mug on her desk and takes a big sip of water. A drop trickles onto her chin and when she wipes it off she smears her lipstick a tiny bit. In her teacher clothes and frizzy hair, the pink smudge on her chin makes her look ever-so-slightly crazy.

When school is over for the day, I bypass the principal’s office. I am a walker—we live too close to the school to be picked up by the bus. I know that Ann-Marie won’t be home from work yet and that if Dad is home, he’s probably asleep. I walk out the door for bussers and then creep around the back of the school building to cut across the baseball field and running track and take my usual route home. When I get home, I turn on the TV in the living room and curl up on the couch with Shilo at my feet. I close my eyes to take a nap, something I often do after school, and something Ann-Marie thinks is strange.

“Kids her age aren’t supposed to take naps,” she has told Dad. “What’s making her so tired?” But I am tired, almost all the time, and particularly after school. It’s the kind of bone-weariness that makes it almost painful to keep my eyes open. When I explain this to my pediatrician, she sends me in for a bunch of tests that all come back negative. No anemia, no vitamin deficiency, no narcolepsy. The pediatrician says to Ann-Marie, “Some people just need more sleep than other people.” There’s no reason. I’m not sick. I’m just always tired.

I wake to the sound of Derek crashing through the door, knocking coats off the coatrack with his overstuffed backpack.

“I think they found the Brendels,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says. “There are all these police cars down by St. Andrew’s field.”

Our street, Carpenter Avenue, is a dead end that turns into St. Andrew’s field, a small meadow with an abandoned barn and a patch of woods. I often take Shilo for walks in the field, acting out imaginary scenarios in which I’m on a romantic stroll with Brett, or eluding a teenage murderer who is obsessed with my beauty and intelligence.

This is what we learn from the Journal and the TV news: Though the police had been searching for the bodies for nearly a month, it was a woman walking her dog who actually finds them. The dad had been buried in one grave and had crossbow wounds to the chest. The mother and daughter were in another shallow grave together across the street from St. Andrew’s field. The mom had been strangled, but the police can’t find a cause of death for little Emily.

The murderer is a local man, a man with a wife and young son of his own. His name is Christopher Hightower, and he lives in a big house on Nayatt Avenue near the water. Hightower himself had picked little Emily up from the after-school program at the YMCA (the same one I’d gone to). He’d once been a family friend and she’d gone with him willingly. I wonder what would have happened if Christopher Hightower had seen me in the field sometime by myself. Would he have hurt me? Would he have hurt Shilo if she tried to protect me?

AT THANKSGIVING, AT Ann-Marie’s parents’ house, her four brothers and their wives rest after the meal in the living room, sprawled out on the brocade sofas. Most of the grandchildren play in the basement, but I stay upstairs and stick close to Dad. It’s in a setting like this that he is often at his best, and I love to watch him. He can argue any political fact, cite any arcane literary reference, and the brothers all love him. They laugh at his jokes, slapping their knees, and nod deeply at points well made, creasing their chins and agreeing, “Okay, okay, I can see what you’re saying.”

But this Thanksgiving everyone talks about the Brendels.

“It’s just gruesome,” says Grandma Anne. “I still can’t believe it happened. And the little girl!” She clucks and shakes her head.

“Well, did you hear they think he buried her alive?” somebody volunteers. “Gave her a ton of cough syrup and then just threw her in the grave with the mom on top of her. They’re saying she smothered to death.”

This seems so horrible that I instantly picture it in my head, the darkness and dirt. I hope it’s not true. I hope that at least she’d been strangled before being buried. Dad is silent throughout the conversation. He sits in one of Grandma Anne’s wingback chairs reading a Smithsonian magazine. I look for something in his face, but it’s blank.

ONE NIGHT, DEREK and I are at the kitchen table playing Uno, when we hear the particular sounds of Dad’s very drunk footsteps coming across the patio to the side door. Dad fumbles a bit with the door while we sit there, and when he comes in, everything seems okay at first. He’s in a suit, upright but a bit wobbly. Then he turns to face us. The entire right side of his head is soaked in blood. It drips from his hair and onto his shoulders. His eye is swollen shut. He stands and looks at us as if daring us to look away. Neither of us do. Then he walks through the kitchen and makes his way to the bedroom. He leaves behind a trail of penny-size drops of blood.

Just as Ann-Marie comes running into the kitchen, our house lights up in flashes of blue and white and there’s a heavy knock at the door. Outside are half a dozen police officers. Their cars are parked on the street and in our yard and the officers stand solemnly in bright-yellow slickers to protect themselves from the drizzle that has turned to rain. The entire front end of Dad’s car is mangled, into an almost symmetrical U shape. The windshield is bloody but not smashed. Instead there’s a bubble in the glass—an imprint that Dad’s head must have made as it slammed forward.

Ann-Marie talks to the officers and I grab a kitchen sponge to clean up the splotches of blood. When I squeeze the sponge into the kitchen sink I look out the window and see the neighbors peering at our house from between their blinds and half-open doors.

Ann-Marie is hysterical. Derek has fled to his room. But I’m angry. I’m angry at the gawkers across the street and all the stupid flashing police cars. One of the officers tells Ann-Marie that if she doesn’t get Dad to come out of the house on his own, they will have to come inside and get him. I stand in the bedroom door as she tries to rouse him from sleep, the bloody half of his face slowly turning his pillow red. Eventually, the police come in and haul him to his feet. “Okay, okay,” he says to them. “Okay, okay.”

I’m blocking the narrow hallway that leads from the bedroom to the kitchen and one of the cops tells me to get out of the way. It surprises me actually, how angry the officer seems at me. In the kitchen two officers prop Dad up on either side and walk him out the door. Ann-Marie weeps silently next to me. I still have the bloody sponge in my hand. Dad turns to look at us with his monster face. “Thanks a lot, you fucking bitches,” he says so clearly it echoes through the dark house, lit up only by the flashing blue and white of the police cruisers.

When he gets back the next morning, Dad has a big bandage covering his right eye and goes right to sleep. Derek and I listen as he and Ann-Marie murmur behind the closed bedroom door. His car, which he had wrapped around a telephone pole at the bottom of the street and then somehow extracted and driven home, has been towed away. Later, we sit in the living room and Dad tells us he’s going to the VA hospital for a few weeks. He says he’s going for alcohol detox and to get electroshock therapy for his depression. It all sounds bleak and terrifying to me, but Dad seems excited.

“Everything will be better after this,” he says.

“Do you have to go to jail?” I ask. Dad rolls his eyes at me. Why am I such a bitch, I wonder.

WHEN HE GETS back from the VA hospital, he has a new diagnosis: manic depression. This is why he sleeps so much and disappears for days. He can’t drink now, because he’s on a drug called Antabuse that makes him really sick if he does. For years now, Dad hasn’t had a drink in front of us. We don’t keep alcohol in the house, though once poking around in the basement, I’d opened a case for one of his big telephoto lenses and found a half-empty bottle of Jameson’s inside.

But now he’s on a cocktail of new medications and some of them make him seem drunk. He shows us his prescriptions lined up on the windowsill above the kitchen sink looking out onto Carpenter Avenue. He shakes the brown prescription bottles, rattling the pills inside, and explains, “These are Klonopin, these are Xanax, this is lithium, this is Prozac. All of these are prescribed for a big two-hundred-pound guy, and if you or Derek tried to take one to see what it was like, you could die.”

I have no interest in taking Dad’s pills, but I watch his consumption of them closely. That summer he takes me and a friend to see Batman Returns at the Showcase Cinemas in Seekonk and lingers behind us in the car, shaking a pill from the bottle and swallowing it dry. He jumps triumphantly out of the car and squeezes my shoulders, shaking me back and forth. “Ready?” he asks. “This one won’t be as good as the last one because there’s no Joker in this one.” Then he does his imitation of Jack Nicholson dancing to the Prince song all the way up to the doors of the theater. My friend giggles.

During the movie, Dad gets up to go to the bathroom twice and takes another pill in the theater. He’s right. The sequel is not as good as the first Batman movie. As we walk back to the car he staggers a bit. From the front seat of the car he does his Joker impression again, but this time it’s in slow motion. I watch the road as we pull onto the Wampanoag Trail, the short freeway that connects Barrington to Seekonk and Providence. Dad swerves to his left and nearly swipes a mini van at one point. I seem to be the only one who notices. Dad turns up the music on the car radio and sings along and my friend laughs in the backseat and puffs on her inhaler. She always has a brown paper bag with at least two inhalers for her chronic asthma, and normally I would be both jealous of her affliction and annoyed by the puffing and the attention it gets her, but I’m too busy keeping track of Dad’s driving. I pretend to listen intently to the radio, all the while aware of Dad’s physical presence in the car, and monitor how close he is to me, where he’s looking, or if he’s looking at all.