When she’d gotten everything of value she was going to get out of Mr. Richmond, it took another five minutes to get off the phone with him. Ear and brain were overheated from so much talk; talk without faces, or body language, no setting, merely voices piercing a tangled web of impersonal wires. Anna took a few minutes to breathe, to feel her butt on the chair, her feet on the floor, to hear the pleasant bustle of the office and see the shapes and colors that made up her surroundings. Anchored again in the real world, she allowed the fragments of information regarding Lester Van Slyke to coalesce in her mind.
Harried. Worried. Scared of missing Carolyn’s calls, of getting home late. Rory attached to stepmother, yet not forgiving Les the marriage. Rory’s contempt for his father. Humble. Self-effacing. Sick leave. Hospitalization. This fit with what Anna had observed in Lester Van Slyke, though at the time what she’d seen had no meaning for her.
The information operator provided her with the phone number of the hospital where Lester had been treated. Unsurprisingly, Anna got nothing from them. Medical establishments were well aware of what information they could divulge and what they could not.
Even without verification, Anna was sure of what she had seen: the bruises on Lester’s legs, some new, some already fading, the cuts on his forearms.
Folding her notes, she left the resource management building and walked the quarter of a mile past pine-shrouded employee housing to where Rory shared a dorm with three city boys in the park to learn appreciation for the flora and fauna.
An African-American youth in sweatpants and a New York Rangers T-SHIRT answered Anna’s knock. Rory was upstairs in his room. Two lung-deep bellows brought him shambling down. He also was clad in sweatpants and a T-shirt and looked as though he’d been dragged from sleep.
Rather than invite Anna into the mess, he stepped out on the porch and shut the door.
Anna chose not to give him time to organize his thoughts or get his defenses up but squared off in front of him and asked him point-blank: “Rory, how long had Carolyn been using your father as a punching bag?”
12
Anna’d been hoping
for a reaction to her jackbooted approach. She wasn’t disappointed. As the words struck him, Rory stiffened, the muscles of his face paralyzed with shock. There followed a brief struggle where he forgot to maintain that paralysis, to keep control, or at least appear to. Emotion won out. The hardened cheeks, the wide-open eyes, the rictus of his lips began to melt. Then, in sudden collapse, they flowed together in a twisted malformation and Rory began to cry. Not as a boy cries but as a man who has denied tears for decades will cry with squeezed little whimpers, convulsive jerks and dry eyes.
Moments after this phenomenon began, rage roared up inside him, so strong it spun Rory around and brought his unprotected fists hard against the wood of the house, a fire out of control.
The porch was wide enough; Anna moved discreetly out of the way until the violence burned itself out. So vehement was his outburst, she knew it couldn’t be sustained for long.
The pounding stopped. His knuckles weren’t raw or bleeding. Even in extremity he’d chosen not to harm himself. A good sign. The constricted sobs subsided, leaving his face red and dry with unspent tears. At length he turned from the side of the house and looked at her, eyes empty after the storm.
“So,” Anna said. “Am I to take it she’d been beating on him for a while?”
Rory collapsed. Back against the wood he slid down till his butt was on the porch and his knees poked up as high as his shoulders. The rough siding rucked his T-shirt up under his armpits but he seemed not to notice.
Anna sat down opposite him, her shoulders against the railing, her feet folded under her. After the weeping and wailing, the soft sounds of the park settled around them like a blessing. Needles in a great old lodgepole pine stirred and whispered overhead. From somewhere nearby came the purposeful skritching sounds of a squirrel squirreling away winter supplies. Into this Rory heaved a great sigh, blowing out unnamed mental toxins.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” Anna asked kindly.
Rory shot her a look as if her kindness was out of character. Anna was stung. She was
always
kind to animals and had been known to be kind to humans on those rare occasions when they deserved it.
“What’s there to tell?” He looked past Anna, over the rail to the whispering pine boughs. By his tone she guessed he was shooting for blasé. He only managed deep weariness.
His question was one Anna couldn’t answer so she sat quietly enjoying the sun on her face and arms. Ephemeral warmth with an underlying hint of cruelty, the northern sun touched with cleansing power. In Mississippi, in summer, the sun struck like a blow. Only idiots and Yankees stood anywhere but in the patches of shade provided by the gracious old oaks and pines. Anna’d missed the scalpel touch of sunlight at higher elevations.
Rory sighed again then began to give up the shame he’d been carrying in secret for his father for so many years. “I don’t know why it started. Mom—my real mom—died when I was little and it was just me and Dad for a while. That was okay, I guess. I don’t remember much, really. Just a lot of quiet and a lot of TV. A
lot
of TV. I remember I thought it was pretty cool that I could stay up late watching television with Dad when my friends had to go to bed at eight.”
Dad. He’d used the word twice. Now that Carolyn was dead, Les had been given back his title. Anna took that as a good omen for the future.
“Carolyn came along maybe two years later. Dad met her at a party at Boeing. Or maybe it was somewhere else. I really don’t know. I don’t care. God.” Rory stopped a minute, breathing out whatever memories had derailed his narrative.
Anna sat quietly, hoping none of the boys in the dorm would come rocketing out and wreck the chemistry of the moment. She had a hunch if Rory stopped talking now, he might never start again.
“Mostly I remember how much fun she was. It was like we’d been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized. I guess Dad and I hadn’t got out much since Mom died. I sort of remember I used to do things after school—you know, kid things like Little League or whatever. But sometime after Mom, I’d sort of stopped, I think. Dad worked late a lot. I guess there was nobody to take me places and pick me up or something.
“Then Carolyn shows up and we’re doing things again. Lots of stuff: water parks and fairs and circuses and hockey games. She was always laughing, teasing Dad. She did everything for us. She’d cook and she cleaned the house. I remember that, though I couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight. I came home from school one day and the house was bigger, lighter. The curtains were open. Dad’s piles of newspapers and magazines were gone. My clothes were hung up and my bed was made. Like when Mom was alive.
“She was at our house all the time. Dad didn’t work late much anymore.
“They got married pretty soon after that. They hadn’t known each other six months. I know that for sure. Later Carolyn was always saying things like, ‘I must’ve been out of my head marrying you when I’d only known you five months. Five fucking months. God. By month six I knew I’d made one hell of a mistake, that’s for sure.’”
Rory probably related the words verbatim. As he said them his face curled into a sneering mask and his voice was charged with such contempt Anna winced. That particular scene had evidently been burned into his brain.
“That was later though. I guess I remember her teasing got mean and she got really jealous—had to know where Dad was all the time and went into a fit if he was like two minutes late home from work. She’d driven it and timed herself so she knew exactly how long it took. She got real picky about the house. It had to be just so. And dinner was at six-fifteen every night and don’t be late or else. If Dad didn’t say the right compliments about the food she’d go off on him.
“They started having huge fights. Not the big ones in front of me. Always after I went to bed. My room was upstairs and way at the back of the house but I could still hear them. Not words, just shouting. Crashes. Crying. In the morning sometimes things would be broken. I was older by this time, I must’ve been twelve because I remember Mrs. Dent, my sixth-grade teacher, sending me to a counselor because I kept falling asleep in class. The counselor was okay but sort of fixated on drugs, like I was a junkie. I didn’t tell him anything.”
Rory looked at Anna. It was the first time he’d dragged his eyes from visions of the past. “I thought it was Dad,” he said clearly. “I thought Dad was beating Carolyn. They tell us about that stuff in school and you see movies about it on TV all the time. I didn’t even know it could be the other way around. I mean, Dad was stronger than she was. Why didn’t he stop her?”
The question was pushed out with such intensity Anna could tell he’d been living with it for a long time. Now, with childlike insistence, he was waiting for her to answer it, and she couldn’t.
“Did you ever ask him?” she said instead.
Rory was disappointed. He slumped back against the wall and his gaze slipped away again to other times. “Once,” he replied. “He said she didn’t mean it. He said she was high-strung. He said it was hard for her to be married to an older man. He said he could be pretty aggravating sometimes.” Rory was silent for a minute and Anna thought he’d finished. But he wasn’t. In a voice constricted with rage and shame he said, “Then he told me
he didn’t mind.
He was in the hospital when he said it. Carolyn had hit him in the face with this metal stool she kept in the kitchen to reach high shelves. The underside of the seat was real sharp. She nearly cut half his face off. You can still see the scar.” Anna had seen it—the thin white line that marked off a semicircle of Lester’s face. They’d been looking for a motive for the slicing off of Carolyn’s brow, cheek and half her nose. This certainly fit the bill. For both father and son.
“Did she ever hit you?” Anna asked.
“Not really. She started to get after me once when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was in the backyard hitting a ball into the fence and something set her off. She came out and headed for me. It scared me so bad I raised the bat. I think I’d have used it too. By then I’d pretty much figured out why Dad was always bruised or limping—she’d already put him in the hospital twice, once for a broken collarbone and the other time for a ruptured eardrum, I think—anyway, her coming at me like that was scary. When she saw I meant to fight she just stopped. Then she laughed and said, ‘That’s right, Rory, don’t take any shit. Not from anybody.’”
“She never knocked you around when you were little? Slapped you, shook you, anything like that?”
“Just Dad,” Rory said.
In a sick sort of way it made sense. Carolyn wasn’t into child abuse, just the abuse of men. At fourteen Rory had been becoming a man.
Maybe in Carolyn’s world there were only two kinds of men: those whom you beat and those who beat you.
“You seemed to get along with her well enough,” Anna said mildly.
“Yeah. Well. At least she didn’t let anybody beat on her.”
That pretty much summed it up. Rory’d gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he’d been ashamed of. A child’s natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. Anna had to wonder how far it had gone.
“Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?” she asked sympathetically.
“Sometimes,” Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. “How could anyone not? He’d get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you’ve even kicked them. Then you
want
to kick them.”
Anna understood the phenomenon. “Ever do it? Ever kick them?” “Hit Dad?” He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. Anna guessed that on so many occasions over so many years Rory had wanted to strike out against the humiliation he felt in the person of his father, that he was either making sure he’d never actually done it or he was counting the number of strikes. Anna dearly hoped it was the former. To be beaten by one’s own child must be a torment only Shakespeare and God could comprehend.
At length Rory spoke. “I wanted to,” he admitted. “But I never did. Mom—my real mom—wouldn’t have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so . . . so
pathetic.
It made me sick.”
Rory looked sick. Anna felt sick. They sat in sick, wretched silence for a while, the ghosts of Rory’s childhood twining about them.
Anna fought off the hopeless lethargy they exuded and asked, “Did you ever fight back for him?”
Rory’d been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at Anna’s question and the lines of his face firmed up. “You mean did I kill Carolyn?” he asked without seeming much to care whether Anna thought him a murderer or not.
“More or less,” Anna admitted.
“I didn’t,” he said simply. “I was just plain lost.”
Anna couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or not. He’d closed his eyes again, gone away to someplace inside his head and she could read nothing but distance and weariness on his face.
“I believe you,” she said. If he was telling the truth, her lie couldn’t hurt. If he wasn’t, it might put him off his guard. “Is this why you were blackmailing me?” she asked. “So I wouldn’t find out your dad was beaten?”
Rory nodded wordlessly.
“Is that bullshit over?”
“It’s over,” he said.
“It sucked, Rory. Really sucked.”
“I know.”