11

 

The snows came harder than usual that year, the winter of 2007, but the roads were clear on the way to my dad’s house. I hadn’t wanted to leave Edith alone, but she said she didn’t mind, that she hadn’t celebrated Christmas in years. So we all piled into the car and got an early start.

I like to think of Christmas as controlled chaos. My brother and sister were there: Malinda came with her two boys, who were now pushing thirty; Jeffery, the younger of the two, had three kids under the age of six, so that added to the fun. My kids were growing up fast. Kelsey was eighteen and Willy was seventeen that Christmas. My brother Randy’s two kids were younger; he had a nine- and a five-year-old. So we had just about every age range, crowded into that one living room, and it seemed like everybody was talking at once.

We decided to have the holiday at my folks’ house, because my dad was getting kind of jittery when there was too much chaos around. Distracted, too. We’d seen it pretty often, when he’d come to visit. Before you knew it, he was pacing around, jingling the change in his pocket the way he used to jingle the car keys, wanting to leave. So we figured, if we had it at his place he couldn’t go anywhere.

He still seemed a little nervous with all of us there. He took the dog out for a walk a couple of times, and went upstairs once or twice to be by himself. Other than that, there wasn’t much indication of anything wrong with him. Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Dad’s mobility was waning, and he was pretty winded when he came in from walking the dog. He lost his train of thought in the middle of a conversation more than once that day, and got a little frustrated when he couldn’t think of a word, but the anger that we’d seen the previous year was pretty much gone. I think in the days before we knew the word Alzheimer’s we would have just chalked all this up to Grandpa being Grandpa. After the diagnosis, we all watched for signs of decline more carefully. Probably a little too carefully, and I guess that didn’t help much.

At one point, when he was upstairs, I wandered into the kitchen and asked my mom how they were doing. As I said, they’re from a generation that didn’t open up much, kept a lot inside, so I was surprised to hear how honest she was about it all.

“I can’t do a lot of the things I used to do,” she said, stirring some cranberry sauce on the stove. “I don’t go out to play bridge or anything like that. I can’t leave him alone for four hours. I don’t know if he’s going to leave the stove on, or go out for a walk and get lost.”

It took a lot for her to admit that. But there wasn’t a hint of resentment in her voice. She sounded a little scared, I guess. Scared of what might come, or of all the responsibility she had. None of us lived closer than an hour away, so it wasn’t like we could pop by while she was at the grocery store; but when I asked her about that, again, she didn’t give a hint of feeling sorry for herself. I guess that’s part of what made up folks in her generation too.

The next day, I went to Edith’s. I didn’t bring her a present, because she had made it clear that she didn’t want to have anything to do with Christmas. I wondered if there was any point in asking why, but I couldn’t help myself; I just had to ask anyway. And to my surprise, I got an answer.

“Because of one of my stepchildren,” she said. Apparently that’s how she referred to the children at the orphanage she ran in England, the one she started after she talked to the rich man at a party long, long ago. She said she had “adopted” them and considered all of them her stepchildren.

“There was a house down the hill from the orphanage,” she told me. “It was Christmas, and all the children were gathered at the orphanage, except for one of the older children. He was in the army, and he was staying at that house with his wife. And I wondered why he hadn’t come up for the party, so I went down to see after him.”

Edith was propped up on the side of the couch, clutching a light blue sweater around her. She pulled it a little tighter, as if to fend off a sudden chill.

She didn’t look at me as she described the scene she found at that house. She had knocked and called and no one had answered, she said. But the heavy wooden door was unlocked, so she let herself in, and walked through the narrow room to the bedroom in the back.

There she saw her stepson’s wife, and next to her a strange man Edith had never seen before. Both of them were nude, their lifeless bodies bloody and limp.

Edith said she didn’t notice right away, but when she looked around, she saw her stepson, slumped on the floor next to the bed, a gun at his side.

“He found his wife in bed with another man,” Edith told me. There was no emotion in her voice. “Apparently he shot them both, then blew his brains out. Blew his brains out,” she repeated, as though she was trying to convince herself it was true.

“After that I had to go back to the house and pretend nothing had happened. I didn’t want to ruin Christmas for the other children. They had so little in their lives. I couldn’t take that away from them. But since then, that’s it for me. I don’t want a tree. I don’t want a card. I don’t want a present.”

I didn’t know what to say. Surely she couldn’t be making this up. I couldn’t even get my mind around it—something so brutal, so terrible. And on Christmas, of all things. No one, I don’t care who they are, could make up a story like that. Yet how could this possibly have happened? How can you know somebody for almost two years and see them every day and they never mention a word of it?

Edith didn’t seem to be waiting for any kind of reaction. She had turned back to the television. Judge Judy was giving somebody a hard time about something. I couldn’t really focus on it.

I did a little mental math and figured that those orphans were probably in their mid-sixties by now.

“Edith,” I finally said, “what happened to all those children? Do you ever see any of them?”

She didn’t turn away from the TV. “No, that’s the past,” she said, as though that was enough of an answer.

“But what happened to all of them?” I asked again.

“When I left them to come to America to take care of my mother, they were very upset,” she told me. “They begged me not to go. Begged and begged. I tried to explain that I had to take care of my mother, that I was all she had. They said ‘But you’re all we have.’ And that was true, I guess. I knew what they were saying. But still, I had to go, and they couldn’t understand. In the end, they said they would never speak to me again if I left. It’s understandable, after all they’d been through. But I had to do what I had to do. So I never heard from them again. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it,” she said, and that was that.

She started flipping around the channels with the remote.

“Whatever happened to that castle in Cornwall?” I asked.

“I made a lot of money from the sheep I raised there,” she said, not really answering the question. She had opened the buttons on the blue sweater and was fiddling with it now, pulling it back so it hung a little more loosely. “The fellow who owned the castle told me I couldn’t take any of the money with me to the States. I guess that was fair. But you see, when your people offer me a million dollars, they don’t know that I’ve had it once and walked away from it. Money isn’t everything, Barry. It isn’t even close.”

I knew better than to ask any more questions. This was probably the longest conversation we’d ever had about her past. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to find out if what she was telling me had really happened. When I talked to Evie about it that night, she was as amazed, and confused, as I was. Two thoughts kept coming up, two opposing thoughts, one as strong as the other:

How could this story possibly be true?

How could it possibly not?