The Good Sister

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When She Came Home

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For Art, in memory of a lost August

The writing and production of a good novel take the hard work and cooperation of dozens of men and women. My full gratitude
list would cover a dozen pages and even then be incomplete because the truth is, anything and anyone can inspire me. Twenty
years ago I saw a woman wrench her three-year-old from aisle to aisle in the supermarket, scowling and snarling as he wailed
louder and louder. Her spirit lives in
The Good Sister
as does the memory of exhaustion written on the faces of my son and daughter-in-law as they learned to manage life with a
newborn. I wish I could thank you all, but for now let me name just a few.

First, and always, my immeasurable gratitude goes to Art, who makes me laugh and keeps me steady.

To Margaret, my own good sister. The best.

To my mother for a lifetime of love and encouragement.

To Nikki, my daughter-in-law, for her courage and her
always honest answers to my often ignorant and intrusive questions.

To my excellent sons, Rocky and Matt. Who’d have thought those little boys would grow up to be my rudder and compass.

To my agent, Angela Rinaldi, who has shown repeatedly that she can talk me down off the ledge and up off the floor.

To my stellar editors at Grand Central: Karen Kosztolnyik and Beth de Guzman, for their patience, insight, and high standards.
Karen deserves special kudos for her diplomacy in the face of terrible first drafts.

At Grand Central, my thanks go to Bruce Paonessa, Chris Barba, Karen Torres, Martha Otis, Harvey-Jane Kowal, and Jamie Raab,
who are responsible for turning
The Good Sister
into a book we can hold in our hands. Thank you also to Liz Connor for her haunting cover and to Celia Johnson for nagging
me gently.

Many women shared with me their deeply personal experiences of motherhood and depression. Your trust and honesty moved me
deeply. My heart goes out to the millions of mothers who for centuries have suffered from the gradations of postpartum depression
alone, misunderstood, and often condemned.

Finally, thank you to the Ladies of the Arrowhead Association, the mothers, sisters, and friends who make it all possible.

Home—the private journal where we learn who
we are by recording who we love.

—Judith Tate O’Brien

San Diego, California

The State of California v. Simone Duran

March 2010

O
n the first day of Simone Duran’s trial for the attempted murder of her children, the elements conspired to throw their worst
at Southern California. Arctic storms that had all winter stalled or washed out north of Los Angeles chose the second week
of March to break for the south and were now lined up, a phalanx of wind and rain stretching north into Alaska. In San Diego
a timid sprinkle began after midnight, gathered force around dawn, and now, with a hard northwest wind behind it, deluged
the city with a driving rain. Roxanne Callahan had lived in San Diego all her life and she’d never seen weather like this.

In the stuffy courtroom a draft found the nape of her neck, driving a shudder down her spine to the small of
her back: she feared that if the temperature dropped just one degree she’d start shaking and wouldn’t be able to stop. Behind
her, someone in the gallery had a persistent, bronchial cough. Roxanne had a vision of germs floating like pollen on the air.
She wondered if hostile people—the gawkers and jackals, the ghoulishly curious, the homegrown experts and lurid trial junkies—carried
germs more virulent than those of friends and allies. Not that there were many well-wishers in the crowd. Most of the men
and women in the courtroom represented the millions of people who hated Simone Duran; and if their germs were half as lethal
as their thinking, Simone would be dead by dinnertime.

Roxanne and her brother-in-law, Johnny Duran, sat in the first row of the gallery, directly behind the defense table. As always
Johnny was impeccably groomed and sleekly handsome; but new gray rimed his black hair, and there were lines engraved around
his eyes and mouth that had not been there six months earlier. He was the owner and president of a multimillion-dollar construction
company specializing in hotels and office complexes, a man with many friends, including the mayor and chief of police; but
since the attempted murder of his children he had become reclusive, spending all his free time with his daughters. He and
Roxanne had everything to say to each other and at the same time nothing. She knew the same question filled his mind as hers
and each knew it was pointless to ask: what could or should they have done differently?

Following her arraignment on multiple counts of attempted murder, Simone had been sent to St. Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital
for ninety days’ observation. Bail was set at a million dollars, and Johnny put the lake house up as collateral. He leased
a condo on a canyon where Simone and their mother, Ellen Vadis, lived after her release from St. Anne’s. Her bail had come
with heavy restrictions. She was forbidden contact with her daughters and confined to the condo, tethered by an electronic
ankle bracelet and permitted to leave only with her attorney on matters pertaining to the case and with her mother for meetings
with her doctor.

Like Johnny, Roxanne visited Simone several times a week. These tense interludes did nothing to lift anyone’s spirits as far
as she could tell. They spent hours on the couch watching television, sometimes holding hands; and while Roxanne often talked
about her life, her work, her friends, any subject that might help the illusion that they were sisters like other sisters,
Simone rarely spoke. Sometimes she asked Roxanne to read to her from a book of fairy tales she’d had since childhood. Stories
of dancing princesses and enchanted swans soothed Simone much as a lullaby might a baby; and more than once Roxanne had left
her, covered by a cashmere throw, asleep on the couch with the book beside her. Lately she had begun to suck her thumb as
she had when she was a child. Roxanne faced the truth: the old Simone, the silly girl with her secrets and demands, her narcissism,
the manic highs and the
black holes where the meany-men lived, even her love, might be gone forever.

A medicine chest of pharmaceuticals taken morning and night kept her awake and put her to sleep, eased her down from mania
toward catatonia and then half up again to something like normal balance. She took drugs that elevated her mood, focused her
attention, flattened her enthusiasm, stifled her anxiety, curbed her imagination, cut back her paranoia, and put a plug in
her curiosity. The atmosphere in the condo was almost unbearably artificial.

Across the nation newspapers, magazines, and blogs were filled with Simone stories passing as truth. Her picture was often
on television screens, usually behind an outraged talking head. Sometimes it was the mug shot taken the day she was booked,
occasionally one of the posed photos from the Judge Roy Price Dinner when she looked so beautiful but was dying inside. The
radio blabmeisters could not stop ranting about her, about what a monster she was. Spinning know-it-alls jammed the call-in
lines. Weekly articles in the supermarket tabloids claimed to know and tell the whole story.

The whole story! If Roxanne had had any sense of humor left she would have cackled at such a preposterous claim. Simone’s
story was also Roxanne’s. And Ellen’s and Johnny’s. They were all of them responsible for what happened that September afternoon.

Roxanne’s husband, Ty Callahan, had offered to put his work at the Salk Institute on hold so he could attend the trial with
her, but she didn’t want him there. He and her friend Elizabeth were links to the world of hopeful, optimistic, ordinary people.
The courtroom would taint that.

The night before, Roxanne and Ty had eaten Chinese takeout; and afterward, while he read, she lay with her head on his lap
searching for the blank space in her mind where repose hid. They went to bed early and made love with surprising urgency,
as if time pressed in upon them, and before it was too late they had to establish their connection in the most basic way.
Roxanne should have slept afterward; instead she got up and watched late-night infomercials for computer careers and miraculous
skin products, finally falling asleep on the couch, where Ty found her in the morning with Chowder, their yellow Labrador,
snoring on the floor beside her, a ball between his front paws.

“Don’t look at me,” she said, sitting up. “I’m a mess.”

“You are.” Ty handed her a mug of coffee, his smile breaking over her like sunlight. “The worst-looking woman I’ve seen this
morning.”

She rested her forehead against his chest and closed her eyes. “Tell me I don’t have to do this today.”

He drew her to him. “We’ll get through it, Rox.”

“But who’ll we be? When it’s over?”

“I guess we just have to wait and see.”

“And you’ll be here?”

“If I think about leaving, I’ll come get you first.”

In the courtroom she closed her eyes and pictured Ty with his postdocs gathered around him, the earnest young men and women
who looked up to him in a way that Roxanne had found sweet and faintly amusing back when she could still laugh. She knew how
her husband worked, the care he took and the careful notations he made in his lab notebooks in his precise draftsman’s hand.
With life falling apart and nothing certain from one day to the next, it was calming—a meditation of sorts—to think of Ty
at work across the city in a lab overlooking the Pacific.

Attorney David Cabot and Simone entered the courtroom and took their places at the defense table. Cabot had been Johnny’s
first choice to defend Simone. Once the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, he had not won many games but was widely admired
for qualities of leadership and character. His win-loss statistics were much better in law than in football. He had made his
name trying controversial cases, and Simone’s was definitely that.

Simone, small and thin, her back as narrow as a child’s, sat beside Cabot, conservatively dressed in a black-and-white wool
dress with a matching jacket and serious shoes in which she could have hiked Cowles Mountain. In her ears she wore the silver-and-turquoise
studs Johnny had given her when they became engaged. As intended, she looked mild and calm, too sweet to commit a crime worse
than jaywalking.