They were estranged from their daughter, she knew that, but surely they must be told what had happened. However estranged they were, it was their right to know, and the funeral decisions were theirs. But where would she find them? She went into Laura’s room to look for clues. She had never seen Laura carry a pocketbook. But she must have had a wallet. She opened the bureau drawers, feeling the violation.
On the flyleaf of a notebook in the middle drawer, in Laura’s round, childish handwriting, was her name and an address. Thirteenth Street, Meridian, New York.
She looked at the map and found Meridian. It was in the western part of the state. She would drive there. She would go now while her friends slept, before anyone could tell her not to go, could say that the family might not be there, might have moved or died, or might not want to see her. She called the AAA. It was two hundred and sixty miles from Selby to Meridian. She could drive it in five hours. She must go now. She would leave a note. It was the only thing to do.
The day was fresh and light. The roads, washed clear by a morning rain that had fallen southwest of Albany, shone like the ocean. She imagined children at the ocean; it was that kind of morning. Her shoulders and her neck ached with fatigue, but her eyes were lively. She felt she could drive forever.
At one o’clock, she decided to stop at a diner for lunch. A neon sign, turned off now in the sunlight, advertised the Tomahawk diner with red letters and a picture of an Indian brandishing his weapon. She ordered poached eggs. Her father had told her when she was a child to order only eggs in places she was unsure of. You always knew an egg was fresh, he said; if it weren’t, they wouldn’t be able to fool you. She thought how odd it was, the things that parents said that stuck, that grew into the myth in which love flourished at the center, a delicate plant, nourished by the humus of affectionate detail. And now she would have to tell parents who had not seen their daughter since she had left their house years ago that the daughter was dead. That she had killed herself. Anne had brought Laura’s note with her, although she would have preferred not to, because she thought the parents had a right to it. She brought as well the notebook she had found. It was obviously a repository for biblical quotations that had struck Laura. In the margins, Laura had sometimes written people’s names, and drawn thick, childish arrows pointing to the quote. In the front of the book, the name was mostly “Mom”; in the back, it was her own name she kept seeing, except for two entries, concerned with lust, that had Adrian’s name beside them.
The waitress brought Anne’s eggs. She was young, younger than Laura, Anne thought. Anger bristled around her like live wires. Were most young women angry now, she wondered? Were they right to be? She hadn’t been angry at nineteen. But she had not had cause.
Reaching for a napkin, her eye fell on the jukebox. She didn’t know any of the songs. Her eyes ran down the column. “Why Have You Left the One You Left Me For?” “Ain’t No Such Thing as a Good Chain Gang,” “All I Ever Need Is You,” “Spring Fever.” Of course the waitress was angry; of course everyone in the diner was. This is what they believed in, what they had been promised. But that was not what had made Laura angry. She had believed in God.
Her note said that she had killed herself to bring Anne to God. But how could Anne ever love a God who let a young girl bleed, who let her die thinking she should give her life to bring someone else to Him? It was not God; it was evil. But the God Laura believed in watched it happen. If this was His work, then His face was the face of evil. She looked out at the road. The only sane thing was to say that God was not within the Universe. Or it was God who held the razor to Laura’s wrist.
It was two-thirty when she reached Meridian. Off the main street, the houses gave the impression of concavity, as if the ground might swallow them up or they might fall into one another. They were expecting the worst. They seemed to have too many windows, too much porch; they bore the shame of providing more room than the shrinking families they held could use; they flinched under the monthly curses that the oil bills produced. Even the old trees on the road did not look proud. The spring was late here, the buds on the trees were folded tight still, yellow-brown. Patches of gray snow and ice took root in isolated inches on the lawns beside odd objects that the melt left bare. Everywhere, Anne felt, the loveless effluvia of domestic life were exposed. Dolls’ heads, dogs’ dishes, wire hangers, buckets, bent snow shovels, plastic detergent bottles, cans with their labels still legible adhered to the soil or mud as if they had grown from it. At the end of one lawn was a bathroom sink like a pulled tooth. Cars that would never run again sat horizontally across driveways. It was as if some weakening disease had hit the town, as if the people in the houses wasted, cradling like dolls their useless limbs. It was only the end of winter, but it could have been the aftermath of a flood. It was the bleak testimony of a place down on its luck, of bad times, no jobs and no money.
As she drove up the road the qualities she thought she had just understood changed quickly. The scene became unfamiliar to her: each house, it seemed, was not merely a dwelling but a small private business. Energy bristled like static; unprofessional signs that would entice no one were on every third lawn advertising reupholstery, aluminum siding, pet grooming, TV repair. Then the signs stopped, and the houses grew smaller, newer. They had nothing to pretend about; their offers, made after the war, were clear. They promised to be convenient, and they had been. No one had a right to complain about false promises, and no one did.
The house that went with the address in Laura’s book was a yellow ranch. There was a small yard, a cement path, a single step leading up to an aluminum storm door. When she rang the bell, a man who could have been any age between forty and sixty answered. He was thin, he had a neck too long for his body, and as if he thought it would help, he wore a gold chain around his neck. His glasses, she saw, were thick like Laura’s, but his body was nothing like hers. His plaid pants exaggerated his short torso, its relation to his long, thin legs. He looked like a bird drawn for comic effect on the front of a birthday card. He didn’t look unkind. When she asked if he was Mr. Post he smiled, and smiled again when she said that she had come because she had news of Laura.
“You’ve seen her, then?” he asked.
“May I come in?”
“Of course, I’m sorry.” Anne could see that his teeth were newly false and that he was uneasy about it. He kept wanting to put his hand in front of his mouth.
“Who is it, Larry,” asked a voice behind him.
“A friend of Laura’s.”
A woman appeared. “What do
you
want?” she said without expression, as if she expected Anne to cheat her.
Anne tried to decide if she thought the woman was good-looking. Like her husband’s, her age was difficult to fix. She was a small woman, with a trim, well-cared-for body, a body that had been won away from every natural process. Obviously she had some ideal of beauty clear in her own mind, but Anne had trouble placing it. Her hair was a flat gold color, cut into a style called a wedge, a style inspired by an ice skater, which had been slightly out of fashion for five years. Her fingernails were long and polished reddish black; her toenails were the same color. She was wearing high-heeled wooden sandals with no backs; a strip of leather across the front was fastened with visible studs. What were these two people trying to look like? They were obviously in costume; they were trying to play some part. Anne looked at their faces closely and realized that they were probably no more than five years older than she. And then she understood: they were trying to have an adolescence. Their actual adolescence had been given over to marriage, parenthood, the acquiring of this house. They felt it had been stolen from them, and now they wanted it back.
“Laura worked for me,” Anne said, sitting on a chair no one had offered her. “She took care of my children.”
“Where did you come from?” asked Mrs. Post.
“Selby, Massachusetts.”
“You with one of those religious groups?”
“No.”
“How’d you meet up with her, then?”
For a moment, Anne couldn’t remember. “A friend of mine met her on the plane.”
“So you hired her to take care of your kids?” The woman snorted. “I wouldn’t hire her to clean my toilets. Of course, she’d be real good at that. She’s a real tidy thing. Drove me crazy. You can see that’s not my forte.”
Anne looked around the room. Magazines, filled ashtrays, curlers, makeup, dirty plates lay around. It was the kind of mess a teenager would have made and lived in.
Her position was impossible. She had left it too long, she should have told them the minute she came into the house. She felt like a fool and a fraud. She should have stopped the woman before she said insulting things about her daughter. It would make her feel awful now.
“I don’t know quite how to say this,” she said, standing to speak. “But something terrible has happened. Your daughter’s dead. She’s taken her own life.”
“You mean she killed herself?” said Mr. Post.
“Shut up, Larry,” said his wife. “Don’t say anything. What do you want from us?” she asked Anne. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, first I wanted you to know, of course. And then I didn’t know what you would want done with the body.”
“Look, lady, I don’t know who you are and where you come from. As far as I’m concerned, my daughter’s been dead for years. So you do whatever you want with her now. She’s of age. She’s your problem.”
Anne looked at the husband, hoping he would urge his wife to some new action, some word of modification. But he stared silently down at his cowboy boots.
“She leave a note?” said the mother. “I suppose she blamed everything on me, as usual.”
Anne handed her the folded letter. The woman read it and handed it back to Anne.
“Mrs. Post,” said Anne, “you must tell me what you want me to do.”
“I want you to get in your fancy foreign car and get out of here. I don’t care what you do with her. Just don’t tell me about it. She’s over twenty-one. She’s not my responsibility anymore.”
Anne looked around the room. There were photographs everywhere of another child, a dark child, in a ballet costume, a cheerleader’s outfit, a prom dress. There was not a single picture of Laura.
“She was never any good to me. Never. Not from the minute she was born. Not from the minute she got started. You know how old I was when she was born? Seventeen. It was the end of my life.”
Anne picked up her bag and started to leave.
“She never meant anything to me, not from the minute I saw her. She was always ugly. She was never happy. She tried to make me miserable. She always hated me, whatever bullshit she said she always hated me. She always looked at me that way, like she hated me, since she was a kid. Watching me, making me feel like a piece of shit for breathing. You know she tried to kill me once? Put her hands around my throat and tried to choke me. I’m a good mother. I have a wonderful daughter, Debbie. She’s everything anybody could want. But Laura was no good from the beginning. So now she’s dead and you expect me to tear out my hair? Forget it.”
The woman went into the kitchen and slammed the door.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” said Mr. Post.
He held the front door for her and followed close behind her down the walk.
“She was named for me, you know,” he said. “You know, Laurence, Laura. She was always so unhappy. But my wife was wrong, she was a cute little kid. But never happy. Mad all the time. Her and her mother never got along. They were always at each other. Then she got religious, and I thought that was good for her. She calmed down a lot. I thought she was happier. I guess not.”
Anne leaned against the car door. She didn’t want to look at the man.
“Don’t pay attention to my wife,” he said. “She doesn’t mean what she says. She doesn’t feel like that, not really. She’s been real upset by Laura for a long time. And not hearing from her’s made her real upset. She gets like that when she’s upset. You have to understand how upset she is. A thing like this.”
“I understand,” said Anne.
“I’m sorry you had to go to all this trouble. I’d like to pay for any of the expenses.” He handed her a card. “Moriello and Post, Certified Public Accountants,” it said. “That’s my office number in the corner. Call me there, not here, okay? I don’t want my wife to get upset. But I don’t want you to have to pay for anything. That’s my job.”
The day was still as beautiful, as fresh, the air as washed, the sky as thin a blue as it had been that morning. But now she drove in terror. For what she had seen was more disturbing than the sight of a dead girl. She had seen the face of hatred, not contorted, not grotesque, but smooth and distant, like a face on television. That woman had said she had hated her daughter since the moment she was born. Anne thought of holding her babies, of her cheeks against their cheeks, their mouths on her breast. The woman was a monster. Motherhood was a place where hate could not enter. That was what you said, holding your baby: No one will hurt you, I will keep you from the terrible world. But that woman had brought hate with her, put a knife between her breasts, pierced her child’s flesh and poured in poison. How could Laura not have been what she was? She had been hurt and damaged. If she limped because her mother had broken her leg, no one would have blamed her. How could she have loved? But it was worse than that. She could not love, and no one could love her.
She was a twenty-two-year-old girl whom no one mourned, a dead child for whose death the first emotion was annoyance, then relief. She was out of the world now, and no grief followed her. Her mother said, “I don’t care.” Her father said, “I’ll pay the bills.” And I, Anne thought, feel only, Why did you do this in my house, in front of my children? Why did you do this to me?
Even now she didn’t love her. Even now there was no moment, no small endearing memory, to spark the flame of love. Never had she looked at the girl with pleasure. She had tried to be kind, to be just, in the end simply to be decent. But she had hated being near Laura; she had hated her presence in the house. When their bodies accidentally touched, something closed down and hardened over in her; she had nearly flinched. Now, how would she begin to mourn her?