LEXI BLUM

Despite the raw chill outside, Lexi couldn’t stand being in the cottage with her shell of a father. She made him lunch and started a load of his laundry, then escaped to the front porch, pulling her mother’s rocking chair into the weakly sunny spot at the front edge.

Detective McPhee’s theory about her mother escaping from her home left Lexi with a clenched stomach. Probably because the detective’s theory mirrored her own impossible thoughts. She watched McPhee drive onto the Court about two o’clock and park her car. The detective didn’t get out right away but sat leaning on the steering wheel staring at a small notebook. When she did climb out of the car, there was something different, less confident, in her gait. She waved at Lexi and walked toward Number Six. Why did the detective want to talk with Arnie and Aggie again, when she’d already interviewed them like everyone else?

By then, her mother had been gone over twenty-four hours and waiting for someone to find her was more intolerable with each passing hour. Over and over, Lexi reviewed her relationship with her mother and wished they had been closer. Why hadn’t they been the kind of mother and daughter who share intimate details and random thoughts? If they’d been closer, maybe she would have a better idea of what prompted this, of where to search for her. Or maybe, if the detective was correct, to understand why her mother might not want to be found.

Lexi couldn’t think clearly. Her thoughts spiraled, then wandered, then twisted themselves in knots. But one idea kept recurring: Harriet. Somehow, this had to be about Harriet. Her father was the only one who could fully explain that. Lexi knew he hadn’t told her the whole story, because it didn’t all make sense. Yet. She knew she had to force him to tell her the rest of it—however awful it was and however little she wanted to hear it and however much he resisted. It felt like the only way to find her mother.

She walked back inside her parents’ home and stood in front of her father. She was almost undone when she saw him sitting in her mother’s chair and cradling her knitting basket. Lexi steeled herself and did what she had to.

“Dad. If we’re going to find Mom before it’s too late, I need to know everything. No more half-truths. No more stories about Jewish partisans in the forest eighty-some years ago. What happened a month ago? What happened yesterday?”

He was silent, sitting like a man carved from granite. She wondered if he was going to ignore her entirely. When he began to speak, his voice was weedy with sorrow.

“I’m not proud of this,” he said. “I believed that Harriet threatened Iris and me building a good life together. So, I wrote that letter and mailed it. That one thing led to the rest of it.”

He told her everything. At least, she hoped it was everything. He talked about getting Harriet fired and arrested, about her visit to Northampton, about committing her to the hospital. Tears pooled under his eyes when he described Harriet’s pregnancy and arranging her daughter’s adoption and the suicide attempt and finally her death. He didn’t try to justify anything. It was the saga of a man’s actions and his shame.

She didn’t interrupt, probably couldn’t have spoken to stop a murder. As she listened, those knots in her brain snaked down her air pipe into her lungs, making it painful to breathe. When he finished, she concentrated on sucking air in and pushing it out, wishing she hadn’t flunked yoga.

When she could finally speak, she asked, “How could you, one person, have someone committed to the hospital? Wasn’t there a court-mandated evaluation or something?”

“Not really. We were hopelessly overcrowded in 1956. It was the peak of patient census. The laws changed later, but back then a physician affirmed the patient’s mental illness with his signature. The rest was pretty much just paperwork.”

“Did Mom know all this?”

He shook his head. “Not until recently.”

“About a month ago, right? When she started acting so strange?”

“October 10,” he said. “I’ll never forget the date. I left the house as usual that afternoon at four-thirty to take my constitutional.”

Her father was such a creature of habit. Every afternoon, two miles walking the roads of what was once his kingdom, now transformed into an ordinary neighborhood of apartments, houses, and condos.

“I came home an hour later, as usual, expecting to find her in the kitchen surrounded by smells of simmering soup with garden herbs and my martini on the table. But the kitchen was empty. Iris was in my office, sitting in my leather chair. She had apparently bitten her lip and there was a thin trail of blood to her chin. My papers covered her lap.”

“She found the hospital records?”

He nodded. “I took a tissue from my desk and went to wipe her chin, but she slapped my hand away. She had never before touched me with anything other than love.”

“What did she say?” I asked.

“Just three words, over and over: ‘How could you?’”

“Good question. I want to know the answer too.”

He shook his head. “She dragged it all up, brought all the old ugliness, the strife, into the open. Harriet had always been a pain in the ass, always telling Iris what to think and how to act. Starting on that god-forsaken island in Maine and then at college, even after I forbid Iris to have anything to do with her. Harriet’s politics could have ruined us. In spite of my efforts, that woman lived with us our entire married life. She was an extra setting at the breakfast table. An accusing body between us in bed. Always shaking her bony finger at me.”

Lexi was breathless again, those knots swelling in her lungs, taking up all the space.

Her father kept talking. “I told Iris I did what I had to. Your mother knows everything now. Well, everything except Harriet’s baby. She doesn’t know anything about that. I keep those files separately.”

“You’re still keeping secrets from her? I can’t believe you!”

He wiped his eyes. “I know.”

“What did she say, about it all?”

“She said what I did was unethical. Criminal.”

“It was.”

“True. But try to see it from my perspective, Lexi. Remember that the ink was not yet dry on my promotion when Harriet showed up. What choice did I have?”

“You could have been honest with your wife.”

“That’s what Iris said when she found the files. She shook her fist at me, saying she wouldn’t let me get away with it. That she would go to the newspaper, to the police. I tried to reason with her. Harriet was long gone and what good would it do? I’ve never seen her so furious. She told me she hated me.” His tone was surprised, almost argumentative, as if he were an attorney trying to convince a judge of his wife’s unreasonable reaction.

Lexi wanted to throw up. It took all her concentration to keep the revulsion out of her voice. She might have failed, because her father’s face fell into sorrow and his voice grew so small that she had to lean close to hear. “What did you do when she threatened you?”

“I substituted a pill that would make her confused, so she wouldn’t be able to do those awful things. I gave her such a low dose; it couldn’t possibly hurt her. I would never hurt Iris. I love her.”

“She figured out about the pills? That’s why she left?”

“Yes. I assume so. She left the bottle of pills on my desk and took my papers.”

“I can’t believe you did those things.”

He rested his head on her mom’s knitting basket, speaking through the yarn. “I can’t either. That’s not the kind of man I wanted to be. But what can I do now? Is there anything I can do to make it better?”

What could she say to him? Lexi left him there, hugging the jewel-tone yarn balls, and went back outside. She forgot her jacket but couldn’t bear to return to his house to retrieve it.

Before that Saturday afternoon, Lexi had never understood how a person’s whole life can change in a few moments. But that had just happened; her childhood was transformed, her family shattered.