“What difference does it make?” Jane heard herself say, her words sounding very far off. “The damage is done. My baby’s going to suffer, Ed. She’s going to bleed.”
“I know, darling. And I’m so sorry. So very sorry. Listen, put my brother on the phone for a minute, will you?”
Jane handed the phone off to Max, who was just then stepping into the kitchen for his coffee. He hadn’t seen the column, of course, and Jane stood and watched his face as Ed explained, watched the face she’d loved for so long register puzzlement, then disbelief, then twist with fury.
“I’m going to kill that woman,” he said to Jane as he hung up the phone, his words even more frightening for the softness of his voice. And then he reached for Jane and pulled her to his sweet chest.
“Kill who?” said Frannie, stumbling into the kitchen in the boxer shorts and T-shirt she slept in.
Hope was right behind her. “It’s whom,” she said, in her best Little-Sister-Knows-It-All voice. “Kill whom?” And then, making a face at her parents’ embrace, “Do you guys have to do that?”
*
“Let me see it,” Frannie said when Jane and Max had finished trying to explain. (As if they could explain.) “Just let me see it.”
“Now, darling…,” Max said, but Frannie wouldn’t be put off. She wouldn’t be sidetracked. She was their straight-ahead girl.
Give me the facts, and then I’ll deal with it
.
They stood, frozen, as Frannie read Natalie’s column, slowly, from top to bottom, taking in every word. Hope read over her sister’s shoulder. “Jesus, Frannie,” she said.
But Frannie didn’t hear Hope. Frannie was already moving.
Frannie the swift, Frannie the fleet, Frannie who had placed first in state in AA girls’ long distance, was out the kitchen door.
Jane didn’t even pause to think. In her pajamas and the leopard-print driving shoes she wore as slippers, she was hot on her daughter’s trail. “Frannie!” she called as her long-limbed daughter sped down the sidewalk, past their neighbors’ houses, past white roses and late azaleas and pink rhododendron. “Frannie, wait!”
She’s headed for Natalie’s, Jane thought. She’s going to throttle Natalie.
But her firstborn daughter, as lightning-quick in her bare feet as any Ethiopian runner, her slender legs flashing beneath her red-and-green plaid shorts, ran on past Natalie’s house, on down the sidewalk and turned up, toward the hills.
Ah, thought Jane. Then probably she’d turn north toward Tilden Park, where she’d run her whole girlhood. Maybe Frannie would find some salve for her pain on those familiar paths.
That’s good, thought Jane. Frannie’ll go that way, and then I get to kill Natalie all by myself. With my bare hands. With my teeth. I’ll show her how bloody a mother’s rage can be. A mama grizzly defending her cubs will have nothing on me.
But still, she wanted Frannie to stop. She wanted to comfort her child, to hold her to her breast, to rock her to and fro. “Frannie!” she called, a half-block behind her daughter now. Jane was keeping up better than she’d have thought, her sweaty hours in the gym paying off. “Frannie, honey, stop!”
But Frannie took no heed. Maybe she didn’t hear her mother calling. Frannie ran and she ran, flew faster and faster up the hill toward Broadway.
“Frannie! Please!” Jane cried. Very soon she wouldn’t be able to speak. She was running out of breath. Her side hurt. She couldn’t keep up this pace.
Ahead, Frannie stretched way out. Even on these broken sidewalks, zigging around old trees, she ran with exquisite form. Her coach would have been proud of her as she ran from the hurt, ran from the pain, tried to escape the humiliation that she knew was barreling down on her. Frannie was in overdrive, full-out, nothing held back, burning gas. Brakes were out of the question. Brakes were a joke. Brakes weren’t even a possibility for Frannie Millman on this fine morning in May, two weeks before she was to step up on the stage and deliver her valedictory and leap into the bright and shiny future of the young and blessed.
On Frannie ran, a fresh bay wind at her back, wings on her heels, and fury in her heart. Frannie didn’t pull up, she didn’t slow, she didn’t even acknowledge Broadway, the busy thoroughfare, when she hit it. Frannie, the valedictorian, the golden girl, ran, ignoring that most primary lesson her mother had taught. That cardinal rule: Look both ways before you cross.
The driver of the silver Mercedes never even saw Jane’s darling daughter—fleet of feet, keen of mind, and sweet; Jesus, that child had been so loving in her ways—until she tumbled like a crazy gymnast over and up his windshield. He hadn’t even had time to register the ka-thunk before Frannie’s fatal somersault began. He never had the chance to see how beautiful Frannie was without the scarlet gushing from her mouth, without that terribly wrong angle of her slender neck.
*
Now, it was September, over a year later. Fifteen interminable months, to be exact. Jane and Max had just returned from getting Hope settled in at Stanford, only an hour south down the Peninsula.
Hope had applied for early admission and had snagged it. Jane and Max were thrilled for her, of course, but they were doubly glad that, in lieu of an East Coast school, she’d chosen to stay so close to home. “I want to, Mom,” she’d said, “for all of us.”
They’d had such a terrible time. People say that the death of a child is the fiercest loss, and Jane had certainly learned the truth of that. They also say that such a death frequently rips through a marriage like a tornado, that there’s so much pain that the center of a union, no matter how strong, simply cannot hold. Max and Jane were also testament to that view.
A psychiatrist friend of Max’s said that they should have another child, that a new life to nurture would be their salvation.
“Is she crazy?” Jane said. “I’m much too old. And I wouldn’t if I could.”
“We could adopt,” said Max, late one night when they’d been up, fighting. They hardly ever used to fight. “I want you to seriously consider it, Jane. If you won’t, then I’m going to think about leaving you once Hope’s off to school.”
Since that conversation, Jane had been thinking about it quite a lot. And she was almost there. Not a baby, of course, but a youngster who needed them as much as they needed her. Or him. “What do you think about a little boy?” she’d said to Max just this morning. “You still up for teaching somebody how to play catch?”
Max’s answering grin was the best thing Jane had seen since that awful morning, Frannie’s last morning.
It had been only hours after Frannie’s funeral that Bethany Marks had fessed up to the thefts. She was a strange girl, lovely enough to be a model, but badly troubled. Obsessed, it turned out. Bethany seemed incapable of doing anything but hurting herself and those around her. Bethany explained that she shoplifted the skirt and the pearls and then took the bracelet from Lisa Broadhurst and “gave” the things to Frannie, skipping classes and walking in the Millmans’ unlocked back door, because she wanted to be part of Frannie’s crowd. Actually, she said, she knew in her heart that Frannie was meant to be her best friend. She had thought that Frannie would figure out that the gifts were from her. She had just known that Frannie was going to call her, any day, and tell her that she loved her. She’d waited and waited for the call that never came.
What was there to say to that? You could no more blame Bethany than you could blame the rain.
Natalie, of course, was a different story. Natalie was not a troubled youngster. Natalie, Natalie, was the Judas, the traitor, the user, the murderer who, to Jane’s mind, had taken their beloved Frannie as surely as if she’d put a gun to Frannie’s head.
Not that Natalie had thought that Frannie would die, of course. But what exactly had she thought as she’d sat and typed that column, as she’d pushed the button to Send?
Jane didn’t know. No one knew. Natalie had packed up and vanished within hours after she heard about Frannie. She had never returned to the Bay Area, as far as they’d heard. An agent had sold Natalie’s house, completely furnished, to a nice man from Atlanta.
What Jane did know—what she counted on, what kept her going—was that one day, one day, dear God, Natalie would sit in her kitchen once more. Sooner or later, Jane was certain of it, down to the marrow of her bones, Natalie would come forward. The guilt which Natalie had been so talented at instilling in others would turn on her and chew her liver until she would have to seek forgiveness.
Her ego would demand forgiveness.
Ah, yes. Natalie would come to Jane on bended knee and pour out the sorrow of her heart. In carefully constructed sentences. In perfect paragraphs. It would be a masterpiece, Natalie’s plea for absolution. And Jane would somehow be transformed into a priest, a Father O’Leary, or better yet, an angel of mercy, who would give Natalie her penance, then perhaps lash her about the head and shoulders a few times so she would have the proof. “Look,” Natalie could say. “Look at my bruises.” Then Natalie could dine on her deliverance, feast on forgiveness, gorge on her pardon.
Yes, Jane knew, someday, one day, Natalie would appear, hungry for Jane’s mercy.
Then, this very morning, it had happened. In the fullness of time, Jane’s desire had borne fruit.
Jane had been in her office, at her desk, about to make a call, when, suddenly, she was seized by a shudder. Earthquake! she thought at first. Then, Someone’s walking on my grave. No, Frannie’s. She stared at her hand for a long moment, poised above the phone.
Then the phone pealed.
And Jane smiled, for then she knew—her blood sang, her very corpuscles shouted
Hosannah!
—what that frisson had meant.
Natalie.
“Jane, will you please talk with me? Please?”
“Oh, yes.” Jane didn’t miss a beat. “I will.”
They made the arrangement: Natalie, who said she was in town for only one day, was to arrive at the house about five-thirty, before Max got home. “Come to the back door,” Jane said. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Jane left the office early and went food shopping in Oakland’s Chinatown. She picked up long slender eggplant, ran her fingers through bean sprouts, marveled at the vitality of the fresh produce. What, she wondered, had she and Max and Hope survived on?
Ashes. Bitters. Rue.
She decided on the menu as she shopped. The tapioca pudding was a given; she’d long known what sweet she’d serve. She’d start with the hot and sour shrimp soup that Max so loved. A green curry with chicken. Steamed jasmine rice, of course.
Now the prep was done. Jane sat and waited, the pudding, which she’d made first, cooling on her counter. The water chestnuts, peanuts, taro chopped. The parade of custard cups, blue bowls, the one scarlet.
Here it came. The knock at the back door. Soft. Tentative.
“Come in,” Jane called.
And there stood Natalie, the white blaze in her dark curls wider, but otherwise much the same. Natalie was still plump, even chubbier than before. Jane hadn’t thought that crow would be so fattening.
“Come in,” she said, pulling the door closed behind Natalie, throwing the dead bolt. She seated her old friend at her accustomed stand at the counter. She poured her a cup of coffee.
Natalie’s coffee was still steaming when she began her chant of mea culpa. Her words tumbled and rolled.
Sorry. What was I thinking? Seemed at the time. Never make it up to you. Forgiveness. Sleepless nights. Horrible. Wracked with guilt. Dear Frannie…
“Yes,” Jane said. “No.” She murmured, cooed, made the kind of sounds one might use to soothe a baby. “Go on. Yes, I know.”
Finally, it was her precious daughter’s name, obscene on this woman’s lips, that was Jane’s cue. “Yes, yes, well…,” she said, then with one hand offered forth the soothing sweet, the comfort of tapioca. Baby food.
“Oh, Jane,” Natalie cried. So touched, so grateful.
Jane pushed the tapioca closer, then followed with the four bowls of condiments. Three blue, one the scarlet of danger. “For texture,” she said. “Crunch. The raw taro—that’s the red bowl—is very hot.”
Natalie smiled. Jane remembered.
“Actually,” said Jane, “it’s probably too hot, now that I think of it.” She laid a cautionary hand on the bright bowl. “Here. Let me take it away.”
“No, no.” Natalie clutched at the raw taro.
“This is really hot,” Jane insisted. “You won’t like it. Just have the peanuts, the cooked taro, and the water chestnuts. They’ll be fine.”
Jane didn’t elaborate any further, though she could have. She’d done quite a bit of research on taro. The tuber, in its cooked form, is a popular starch in Asia, sometimes known as poi. Raw taro, however, is highly poisonous. Jane’s Thai cooking teacher had once pointed out the tuber in the market, on a field trip, and casually mentioned its danger. Jane hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but later, after Frannie’s death, all sorts of things, surprising things, dark things, had floated up.
How dangerous? Jane had wondered. Highly acrid, she’d learned from her library research. The milky juice is used on poison darts and for killing tigers. Almost insipid to the taste at first, the ingested root then produces an intense burning and itching to the mouth and throat. Severe gastroenteritis follows, and a massive inflammation of the mucous membranes, which, if not treated immediately, results in cramps, convulsions, and death.
Natalie grasped the scarlet bowl.