If the Witness Lied (6 page)

T
HE BUS IS HALFWAY TO
B
OSTON
. N
OBODY HAS ASKED
S
MITHY
why she’s on the trip, probably because there are two classes and everybody figures she’s in the other one. She’s sitting alone, and maybe they figure she wants to be alone, although who ever does? But they’re not interfering.

Smithy is lying down, curled up on the two-person bench so the teachers won’t turn around and spot her. Her skull is pressed against the armrest and her feet are twisted as if somebody is trying to pull them off.

I left my postcards in my room, she thinks.

Nothing else, not a single possession or piece of clothing, matters to her now. How strange. Because Smithy resented the postcards when they came.

Every week Nonny sent a postcard to each grandchild. Over the years, she’d sent hundreds of them. Nonny wrote exactly the same message to every grandchild every time.
Love you. Love, Nonny.
When Nonny and Poppy visited the boarding school,
Nonny bought a stack of postcards, and Smithy got card after card featuring her own location.

Love you. Love, Nonny.

Nonny and Poppy live far away. They are mainly loved because Mom and Dad said to love them. In fact, they are strangers who work hard in ordinary jobs, fifty weeks a year, and cannot easily visit. The few times they were able to come east, Dad bought their plane tickets. Nonny is a waitress. Poppy works in an office supply store. They enjoy their work. Their activities—gardening, church choir, softball league, line dancing, driving for Meals On Wheels—do not interest Smithy.

Mainly the children know their grandparents by video connection. Once a week, at a prearranged time, Mom and Dad used to prime the children with topics to discuss: a school project, a ballet step, a sleepover. When they no longer had parents to set this up, it didn’t happen. Smithy and Madison couldn’t stand sitting in front of that screen, pretending to be happy, chatting with grandparents who were also pretending to be happy.

Last summer, Nonny and Poppy took all their precious vacation time and traveled out east. They tried to collect the children for a reunion. Smithy was in summer school, but they drove up to see her. She lied and maneuvered to spend as little time with them as possible. Her grandparents, who love her.

And yet it is with Nonny that Smithy has had the most profound conversation of her life.

Tris wasn’t born yet. Smithy was eleven. She and Nonny were sitting on the tired old sofa pushed against the wall in the big kitchen/family room, tucked under one of Mom’s knit blankets.
Mom liked color. No soft denim blue or vanilla lace. It was a wallop-you-in-the-eyes combination of orange and red.

(Where is that blanket now? Where is anything now? The old saggy couch was the first thing Cheryl got rid of, when she was in charge at last.)

On that day, Nonny and Smithy were alone. Mom was napping, Dad at work, Madison at a friend’s house, Jack at a ball game.

Outside, the picketers chanted. The picketers weren’t early risers, which meant that Smithy and Jack and Madison could get to school without running into them. It was coming home that was tricky. Dad rented Nonny and Poppy a car with tinted windows so nobody could see in, and they picked the kids up at school, drove into the garage and waited for the automatic door to close behind them before anybody got out.

“Do you think Mom is doing the right thing?” Smithy dared to ask her grandmother.

“I don’t know if it’s right. But it is extraordinary. Your mother is brave. Any mother would lay down her life for her baby
after
it’s born. But your mother is laying down her life for her baby
before
it’s born.”

A fifty percent chance, the doctor said, when he told Mom about her cancer. But only if she started chemo immediately.

“I’m going to have a baby, though,” said their mother. “Chemo would damage my baby.”

The doctor wasn’t interested. “Get rid of it,” he said, shrugging.

At dinner, Mom repeated this conversation to her husband
and her three children, who thought they would talk about dessert or the possibility of quitting piano lessons. “What do you get rid of?” demanded Laura Fountain. “Broken toys. Stained shirts. Not your baby.”

Smithy was not paying attention to the baby part. She was paying attention to the cancer part. Her mother had a fifty percent chance of dying?

“This baby,” announced their mother, and she was smiling—Smithy always remembers that smile—“is your brother or sister. I want him. Or her. Because our fourth baby will be wonderful, just like you.”

A few days later, an ultrasound established that it was a boy. Mom was beaming. “He’s healthy,” she said excitedly.

“You’re not,” pointed out the doctor. “You have to start chemo.”

“No. I can make it,” said Mom confidently. “I’m tough. It’s only five more months. I’ll start chemo after the baby’s here.”

“You’ll be dead before then. This cancer is invasive. You have to have chemo. We don’t have other weapons,” said the doctor brutally.

Mom shrugged. She’d be the weapon. Her own determination would save her. She carefully prepared her children for what the doctors insisted would happen, but she always added a disclaimer: “I’ll whip it.” Did she believe this? Or was it a gift to her children? Smithy never knew, because the end came so swiftly, there was no time for questions or answers.

But on that day, on that sofa, Smithy buried her face against
her grandmother, and Nonny said, “When I was a girl, decades ago, we said the baby always comes first. Now people say the mother always comes first. We say women have the right to make a choice, but we don’t mean it. We believe they have to make a particular choice. Here we are in your own house with the curtains pulled and the shades down so that strangers who accuse your mother of suicide and want to force her to have chemo can’t see in. Your mother isn’t paying attention. She’s made her choice and she’s ready.”

“I’m not ready,” whispered Smithy.

“Neither am I. But you know what, Smithy? You and your brother and sister have strong names. Smith. Jack. Madison. Those aren’t wimpy, weak, washout names. Those are names for people who lift their chins and keep going and wake up smiling. That’s what your mother is counting on. And so am I.”

Lying on the bench in the school bus in the fetal position, Smithy admits at last why she doesn’t answer her grandparents’ e-mails, or send postcards of her own, or hang out with them when they visit.

Smithy didn’t lift her chin and keep going. She cannot be counted on.

The bus hits a bump and flings Smithy half off the seat. She struggles to a sitting position, rubbing her eyes to make it look as if she’d been sleeping, rather than weeping.

They have not hit a bump. They are here. The teachers are already off the bus. Kids gather their stuff and exit single file.

Smithy isn’t ready. She needs more time before she makes her
decision. After all, she loves boarding school. It tells you what to do. It’s the most organized, well-packed box of life out there. If Smithy runs from boarding school, she’s smashing this life, too.

Smithy steps into the aisle. Walks forward. Now she’s next to the driver. She’s on the top step.

The teachers move toward the museum entrance.

Smithy tugs her tangerine hood over her hair, steps off the bus, goes the other way around it and crosses the street in the middle of the block. When she gauges that the bulk of the bus is between her and the museum entrance, she glances back.

Nobody is looking.

She flies down the sidewalk, galloping to the corner. Safely around the bend, she flags a taxi. “Back Bay Station, please.” Smithy sinks down in the seat as if enemy agents are after her.

She has no idea what the train schedule is, but she’s in luck. There’s a train at eleven-forty. She buys the ticket with her rarely used ATM card and decides to get a hundred dollars cash back. The twenty-dollar bills are so exciting to a person who leads a shopping-free life. She has a vision of hitting the malls with her sister, and Madison saying, Why would I want your company? You didn’t want ours.

Smithy gets a blueberry muffin, an orange juice and a fashion magazine and finds a seat. She can’t eat, drink or turn the pages. The art teachers may not realize they are down one student, but some kid will say, “Where’s Smithy?” and panic will set in. The field trip will be ruined and the teachers will be in trouble.

Smithy needs to notify the school. She’ll wait until the train leaves the station and they can’t get her back. Then she’ll text,
that wonderful method of communication where you aren’t available for questioning.

They can’t arrest me for going home, she tells herself. Aunt Cheryl can’t ship me back, either. I’m too old and tall for shipping.

Suddenly she is wildly happy.

*   *   *

Mrs. Griz pats her hair and straightens her blouse. “Your aunt Cheryl is on her way over here with a friend of hers,” she tells Jack. “A producer! He’s looking into doing a television special.”

How well Jack remembers this tone of voice. The hot, thick anticipation of somebody who might get on TV.

After they gave him Dad’s wallet and watch, a friendly cop drove him home from the hospital. His sisters were told by phone that Dad hadn’t made it. (That was what the adults said: “Your father didn’t make it.” As if it were Dad’s fault.)

Somehow Jack got out of that police car. The door felt exceptionally heavy. His body seemed equally heavy, and hard to maneuver.

In spite of the cold, everybody was still outside.

Madison and Smithy were near the Jeep, staring at nothing. They looked very thin and young. They were not wearing jackets. They were shivering.

Aunt Cheryl was out on the faded grass, reciting her story to a garden of microphones, which stuck up like metal flowers in her face. Tris, no longer crying, sat on the bottom step of the front
porch, absorbed by a favorite toy—a heavy-duty picture book with magnetized cardboard cars to drive around the illustrations. He had a cylinder of Oreo cookies that one of his sisters must have brought to keep him quiet.

Tris was weirdly alone: no aunt and no sister near him. Only television cameras. When Tris saw Jack, he broke into his beautiful smile and offered his brother a cookie. Unusually for a two-year-old, Tris loved to share. Jack made it over to his baby brother and lifted him up—Oreos, picture book, magnets and all.

Into Jack’s face was thrust a microphone held by a pretty blond woman Jack recognized from the local news. She was always pacing down the main street of some area town, asking how people felt about the weather or the price of gasoline. She leaned toward Jack. “How do you feel?” she said lovingly.

Jack’s eyes didn’t focus. That was how he felt.

He took a step toward his house, and she took one too, moving the microphone even closer. “Your baby brother killed your mother by being born. Now the same little brother has killed your father. How do you feel toward him?”

Jack dropped the toys, but not his brother, planning to smash the woman’s mouth and the terrible question she’d shoved at him. The officer blocked him, fast enough to stop Jack’s fist from connecting but not fast enough to camouflage the attempt. This moment was one of the most-watched videos on the Internet that week.

Now, at the exit to her day-care center, Mrs. Griz stands as close to Jack as that microphone was. “It’s so exciting,” she whispers. “TV crews right here!”

Tris loves words. He repeats anything Jack says, so if Jack is studying chemistry, and Tris sits with him, the next day he’ll hear Tris murmur, “Covalent. pH scale.” Jack cannot repeat anything Mrs. Griz says or Tris will pick it up. “Pretty neat, huh?” says Jack. “Be sure to get all the details ironed out,” he adds, going out the door. “I have a half day in school, so Tris and I are headed for a soccer game. Have a nice weekend.”

Outside, Jack lowers Tris into the child seat on the back of his bike. It takes forever to strap Tris in and get his helmet fastened, because Jack’s fingers have thickened and he fumbles. Tris wants to know what’s in Jack’s backpack, but Jack doesn’t feel like discussing it. Tris moves on to the secret adventure. “Smithy plays soccer. Are we going to see Smithy?”

When it all went down, Smithy enrolled herself in boarding school. Fourteen years old and she figured out how. Jack is still amazed. He never figured out anything. After the funeral, after Nonny and Poppy flew back to Missouri, Jack was possessed by the fear that he would somehow lose another member of his family. He didn’t go out for sports. When each school day was over, he rushed home to do a head count.

He was right to be afraid. In a matter of weeks, both his sisters left.

Tris mainly knows Smithy from the scrapbook. Jack can see Mom now, sitting up in bed, choosing photographs, writing captions, ensuring that her fourth baby would have something to remember her by. Tris sleeps with it, as if it’s a bunny or a blankie. The most-requested bedtime story is for Jack to go through the album. “And this is Daddy,” Jack will say, pointing. “And this is
Mommy. Here’s Madison playing tennis. Here’s Smithy playing soccer. And here is baby Tris.”

“We aren’t going to see Smithy today,” he tells Tris. Or ever, as far as Jack knows. Sometimes he misses his sisters so much he goes into his failure-to-breathe mode. Other times he can’t even remember what they look like.

Jack has no choice of roads. He has to leave the day care by the same route he came in. He checks traffic. No BMW. No Lincoln. He crosses the Post Road, turns down a side street that won’t take Cheryl to the day care, so it’s probably safe, and now he is approaching the railroad station.

They are on the Boston to New York track, but no through trains stop here. This is a local commuter station. The city of New Haven is its only destination; people continuing to New York have to change trains. But even if Jack and Tris could hop on a train and get out of here, then what? You have to have supper wherever you’re going. You have to sleep somewhere. Take a shower in the morning. Have breakfast. Jack literally doesn’t have a dime, but even if he had a thousand dollars, how could he run with a three-year-old?