Secrets of Eden

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The fights were horrible, but the silences might have been even worse. No one could do silence like Mom and Dad. Especially Mom. We’re talking plasma TV with the mute button on. It was her way of fighting back, and it just drove Dad crazy. Because the thing was, after he’d hit her, he’d be all contrite and sorry and want to make it up to her. Breakfast in bed, sit with her on the couch and watch whatever she wanted-even Sex and the City reruns (which he hated), if that’s what was on. And that was the time when Mom was in the driver’s seat. Of course, it also meant that the fighting could drag on for days. Dad would hit Mom, Mom would clam up, and Dad would go from sorry to sulking to pissed. Not a promising cycle, if you get my drift.

Now, they had friends. My dad had his buddies in the volunteer fire company and people who worked at his stores and his restaurant. I think he was probably a pretty good boss. And Mom had chums, too. Some people said Dad took away Mom’s friends, and there were definitely some women he didn’t want her hanging around with. That’s true. But he didn’t stop her from seeing everyone. Mom still had the crumblies in the Women’s Circle and Ginny O’Brien-who was also in the Women’s Circle but was a couple generations short of crumbly. And there is nothing that Ginny wouldn’t have done for Mom. Nothing. And I guess she had her friends at the bank. But the thing is this: Even if my mom had had lots of gal pals, the last thing she wanted was for people to think that her marriage was a failure and she was, like, a total victim. A total loser-because she wasn’t a loser, at least in my opinion. This was really clear when I would visit her at the bank branch on Saturday mornings, which I did pretty often by the time I was in middle school, because it was near stores and it was a chance to get out of Haverill. I saw her with the tellers and a man named Frank Albertson who was a commercial loan officer there. She was totally professional. She was completely different from the way she was at home. I wish she had known how good she was.

Sometimes I think Mom put up with a lot of Dad’s worst creepiness because she was afraid if things ever got too crazy-too violent-we’d both wind up at the shelter. We came close a couple of times. Sometimes Mom talked about going to Ginny’s, but we never did, because she was afraid of bringing her friend’s family into our nightmare. And I think she was afraid of what people would think if things ever got totally public. Like, what did it say about her as a mom and a wife that she had put up with this crap for so long? And I guess she figured if we spent even one night with Ginny or even one night in the shelter, there would be no going back. The marriage would be over. And looking back, it’s weird, but I don’t think she was ready for that. Really. I don’t know what freaked out Mom more: the fear that she had sunk so low that she was going to be in the battered-women’s shelter with her kid or the idea that she was walking on eggshells in her own house and no one was supposed to know.

THE SOCIAL WORKERS and the therapists all wanted to know if Dad ever hit me. The short answer is yes. But it’s complicated. I mean, no kid deserves to be hit, but a smart one doesn’t get in the middle of some of the crap that I did. When your mom and dad are in the midst of an electrified-cage match, you steer clear if you want to keep your teeth. (That’s an exaggeration. A: I have never seen a real cage match, just videos of them on YouTube. And B: I have all my teeth. My father never punched me in the mouth.) Twice I made the mistake of thinking I could save my mom alone, and both times I got swatted like one of those gross, slow-moving cluster flies we had in the attic. In all fairness, the first time Dad walloped me was a mistake on his part. He hadn’t meant to. He was in one of his moods, and I don’t even remember anymore what set him off, and my mom was crying pathetically. They were both in their bathroom, and I could hear them through the walls, and I was at my wit’s end and totally furious with him. Maybe even furious with both of them for living the same rerun over and over and over. And so I went in to yell at my dad. I was a bigdeal thirteen, and I think I was going to tell him to grow up. The scene I walked in on was really weird, because it was after dinner and he was, like, shaving. I knew he was worried that the toy store wasn’t making enough money-even I knew that a shop that sold mostly marionettes and wooden puzzles in an age when everyone wanted a PlayStation or Wii was a pretty lame idea-which meant that he was a little stressed. Still, I have no idea why he was shaving. He was also pretty hammered. I’m amazed he could figure out which side of the Bic he was supposed to use on his skin. Anyway, I went in with all this determination, and my timing was just perfect. Totally perfect. He was winding up to whack Mom, who was actually on her knees and pleading with him about who knows what, and I walked straight into his knuckles as he swung them back, taking it right on the ear. And I can tell you that ears have a ton of nerves. I guess hearing cells don’t. But the outer ear? Trust me, it hurt like crazy, and my ears rang for hours. I fell against the frame of the door and then, I’m not sure how, wound up on the floor, half in the bedroom and half in the bathroom. Dad didn’t even realize what he’d walloped at first. I think he thought my head was, like, the door. But my mom knew, and she just threw herself at him, leaping to her feet like a missile, which of course caused him to throw her down onto the floor beside me. And that’s when my dad looked at me like, “Hello? What are you doing here?”

The other time he did hit me on purpose. It was a year later, and we had begun to figure out just how much we hated each other: I hated him for what he did to Mom, and he hated me for knowing he was a jerk and mean and pathetic. And that’s the thing-I knew he was pathetic. I don’t care how successful his restaurant or his stores were. My mom wasn’t the loser: He was. And so he probably despised me. But, in all fairness, it was only that one time that he meant to hit me. Just like that evening he nailed me by accident in the bathroom, he hadn’t hit Mom yet. But I could see where it was going. It was a Friday morning, and the bank was experimenting with casual dress on Friday, so the bankers didn’t have to look as formal as usual. Mom was wearing a pair of black jeans. Nice jeans-not mom jeans. They were tight, and she looked very pretty and very young in them. My dad didn’t know she owned them. Anyway, he had left early to play golf that morning, and so my mom had figured she could wear them to work. Unfortunately, my dad forgot his golf shoes, and so he came back for them and saw what Mom was wearing. His voice got that creepy, sarcastic, I’m-your-daddy tone to it. He almost sounded British when he got like that. And that was always the overture. The warm-up. You knew what was coming next. Mom and I were in the kitchen when he returned, and I was eating a Pop-Tart or something at the counter and making sure I had wedged every binder I would need that day at school into my backpack. (My backpack is always a total wreck.) Mom immediately dropped the lipstick she’d been holding in her fingers into her purse when he started leaning into her. His golf shoes had these pointy metal studs on the soles, and he grabbed one by the top and was holding it like a knife. He ordered her upstairs to the bedroom, where he told her that she was going to put on clothes that didn’t embarrass her or him or his daughter.

And so I told him that Mom’s jeans sure didn’t embarrass me. I said I liked them and thought she looked great. He turned to me and hissed something about how this was none of my business and to get ready for school. I shrugged and held up my backpack with both hands. (And it really did take both hands, because it always seemed to weigh as much as a case of beer, which, just for the record, I only know weighs a ton because I carried them in from the supermarket when I would help Mom with the grocery shopping. In the months after my dad killed my mom, I smoked a lot of dope, but I was never into beer. Too fattening. And it reminded me too much of Dad.) I told him I was all ready for school. And so he said in that case I should go. And Mom said I should, too, and she was practically begging me to get out of the house. But I didn’t want to leave her like this. To leave her to him. So I told my dad that Mom’s jeans were fine and to let it go. I said he didn’t want to miss his tee time. Mom was, like, babbling about how she was going right upstairs to change, she was, and she scooted around Dad so she was between the kitchen and the stairs, and she yelled back at me in a voice that was bizarrely cheerful considering what was going on that I didn’t want to miss the school bus. And I thought, fuck the school bus, this has gone too far. And, in fact, I may even have said that. I can’t recall for sure. All I remember for certain is my dad glaring at me and his eyes getting narrow: Think of a newt. And then, out of the blue, he rammed the toe of the golf shoe into my stomach. It didn’t hurt that much, and it didn’t knock the wind out of me, but it did cause me to drop my backpack and coil up like a spring. My mom screamed at him to stop, but she didn’t need to worry. He was totally shocked at what he’d done. He was stunned. Then he shook his head in disgust and said I was every bit the slut my mom was and walked out of the house with his golf shoes.

That was the only other time he hit me. And it led to the longest cold war my parents ever had. It took him longer than usual to get all syrupy and apologize, maybe because he’d never had the chance that morning to vent the full fury that was always smoldering just underneath his skin. Also, he needed to apologize to me, too, this time. Which he did. I wound up with a new iPod and a hundred bucks on iTunes. I believe it would be months before he would hit Mom again. Not till the autumn, I think. But when he started up again, things would spiral quickly through the holidays. I’m amazed it took Mom until February to find the backbone to get the restraining order and kick him out of the house. It wasn’t just that he was becoming so unbearable to be around and so weirdly scary. It was that by then she had Stephen Drew in her life.

MY MOM IN black jeans? That was never going to embarrass me.

The stuff everyone found in my bedroom that awful Monday in July when they went there to get me some clothes and stuff so I didn’t have to go back inside the house? Now, that was embarrassing. There in the chaos on my bed and on the floor were, like, a whole zoo full of stuffed animals. There was Bunny Jo and Elmo and Scraggles the Bear. There was Eeyore, for crying out loud. There were three American Girl dolls. Obviously I don’t play with American Girl dolls, and I haven’t since I was, like, nine. But I was never able to bring myself to put them in boxes and cart them up to the attic. Once Mom offered to do it for me, and another time she even offered to sell them for me on eBay if I wanted. But I just couldn’t see Samantha and Addy and Kirsten getting all moldy in the attic or being sold to some other family. And so they were right there in my bedroom when Stephen and Ginny and everyone else just popped in and started touching my underwear and my bras and my makeup. Yup, they saw the trolls and the rub-on tattoos in one of my drawers and my thongs and boy shorts in another. Not too weird for them. Not too awkward for me. And yes, it did feel like a violation of sorts. On Sunday it hadn’t crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be back in my house the next day.

They also saw the jewelry Mom had given me on Friday. A pair of earrings that were rubies and diamonds and her own grandmother’s pearl necklace. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, I guess I was touched. It was clearly supposed to be one of those mom-and-daughter bonding moments. On Monday, if she hadn’t died, we were going to put the jewelry in the safe-deposit box at her bank, because the stuff sure as heck didn’t belong in my jewelry box with my ten-dollar hoops.

Of course, the grown-ups didn’t bring me half the stuff from my room that I really wanted. They did fine in the needs department: They brought me, like, every pair of blue jeans and shorts I owned and about seventeen pairs of underwear. They found my retainer. (Oh, joy.) They filled a shoe box with CDs (most of which I had already cherry-picked for my iPod). It was the wants department where things were a little lacking. Shirts? None of my favorites. And way more long-sleeved shirts than I needed in July and not nearly enough T-shirts. And two sweaters I never wore (and wasn’t about to wear in July or August). And none of the DVDs of my favorite shows I would watch in the summer on my laptop before going to sleep. And only about half of the things I used to keep my skin clear, as well as the totally wrong foundation.

But Tina was amazing. So were Ginny and Tina’s mom, Carole. Tina shared everything she owned with me (and I mean everything), and Ginny or Carole seemed to make things magically appear all the time. It was like they could read my mind. I’m sure Tina was telling them the things I needed, but still: It was totally amazing. Ginny wanted to be a superhero and solve all my problems. I think she was okay that I chose to live with my friend, Tina, but I could also tell she was a little disappointed that I didn’t move in with her family. (Sometimes Tina thought Ginny was kind of mental those months, but I reminded her that the woman had just lost her best friend.)

Still, it was incredibly nice of the Cousinos to take me and Lula in. I mean, they didn’t have to take the dog. But they did. Lula and I weren’t super close, but we became a lot closer after Mom and Dad were gone. She seemed to need me a lot more, and I guess I needed her. In the old days (and that was how I came to describe in my mind my life before that Sunday night), she had slept in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Now she slept with me in Tina’s and my bedroom.

At first I felt really guilty that Tina no longer had her room to herself. But she said I shouldn’t worry about it. I should view it like we were in college or boarding school and we were roommates. Tina’s father was an engineer, but his hobby was woodworking, and in his basement he had a workshop that was pretty serious-looking. In August he completely redid Tina’s closet, putting in all these shelves and dividers, and he built this nook with yet more shelves above her bureau. He moved out her night table and replaced her dresser with a much thinner one, and then he brought in my bed and my mattress from the old house and managed to make everything fit in the bedroom. It was cramped but not unpleasant. We both learned to fall asleep with someone else in the room. At first her younger brother and sister-Eddie was in third grade, and Emily was just starting middle school-treated me like I was dying of some terrible disease that might be contagious: They were very nice to me, but they kept their distance. They said as little as possible to me. It wasn’t until a few days before Halloween, when I helped them figure out their Halloween costumes and showed Emily that she could make the mermaid thing work if she wore wheelies instead of regular sneakers (that’s how they made the fish swim when they brought The Little Mermaid to Broadway), that they began to view me as someone who was going to be a part of their lives for at least the next two years and, in some ways, maybe forever.

Did I feel like I was imposing on the family? Totally. I almost didn’t try out for the school play because it would mean weird hours and extra driving time for them, but they insisted I go for it. So I did. I tried to do as much as I could to help around the house, which in all fairness was the exact opposite of what my approach to chores had been when I’d been living at home. I think my new habit of, like, loading my plates in the dishwasher and making my bed in the morning drove Tina crazy sometimes. She would kid me that I was making her look bad, but I knew there was some truth behind the joke.

But Tina also knew since the sixth grade what had gone on in my house. I think that was when I started telling her about what a total cretin my dad was and what a jerk he was to my mom. I think she was very glad I was out of that house.

And here is one more strange thing: I’m sure Tina’s parents fought. Tina told me they did. But I never once witnessed one. Not a single time. Just as I felt I needed to be on my best behavior around them, they thought they needed to be on their best behavior around me. I told Stephen this at one point in September, and he gave me a sheepish little grin and shrugged. He said it was one good thing to come out of that awful Sunday night: We were all striving to be better people. To be kind. To be gentler with one another.

IT WAS ACTUALLY Tina’s idea I get the tattoo. And she got one, too, though it’s so close to her hip bone that no one sees it except her boyfriend. It’s also pretty small. Hers is this fantasy animal that’s part horse and part dragon. A little over a year ago, her horse died. It was this beautiful Appaloosa named Maggie. The vet had had to put her down. And since Tina would be leaving for college in a couple years and her younger brother and sister didn’t ride, the family didn’t get another horse. But Tina missed Maggie, and so when we decided to get the tats, it was natural she’d get this mystical-looking horse that was probably supposed to be immortal.

We went to the place in downtown Rutland where Josie, my social worker, had gotten most of hers. It really wasn’t a big deal. And mine hurt a lot less than Tina’s, even though it’s a lot bigger. The guy wasn’t nearly as creepy as I would have expected. He wasn’t my type, because he shaved his head and he had tattoos everywhere on his arms and neck (and who knows where else), but he was very nice. And he had great breath. He must have lived on peppermint gum.

The biggest difference between Tina’s and mine is that I wanted my tattoo where people could see it. I wanted to flaunt it. So I got mine on my shoulder. My left shoulder. August still had a couple days left, and I knew even in Vermont there was at least a month when I could wear shirts with spaghetti straps. Mine is a big, blooming pink rose, and I had the artist add a stem that ran a few inches down my back and a couple of green leaves. He combined two patterns.

I picked a flower because my mom loved roses. We even had some wild rosebushes at our house. The flowers really didn’t last all that long, but they were pretty. The petals were just starting to fall off when my mom died.

Anyway, my tattoo was sort of a test, I think. Just how much slack were people really cutting me? Answer? A ton. I could have gotten a tattoo of people doing it like dogs (they do have tattoos like that), and all the adults in my life would have hugged me and told me it was very elegant or I had very good taste.

MY MOM’S FUNERAL was completely different from Dad’s. My mom’s was packed. There were people overflowing into the choir loft and downstairs into the community room, where one of the trustees had set up a video feed. I’d had no idea how many people had cared about my mom or me-there were a ton of kids there, some of whom I thought viewed me as a total dork-and I was really touched. Dad’s funeral, which we held a few days later in Buffalo, was just me and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles on his side. Not even my cousins were there for some reason. It was so lightly attended that we used this dark chapel off the main sanctuary and still everything the minister said echoed like we were in a cave. It was very creepy. As I recall, the minister talked about forgiveness and understanding, but I think most of us there were just too ashamed to pay much attention. And we were ashamed-at least I was. I just couldn’t wait to get back to Vermont after that part of the nightmare. Anyway, Stephen and I talked a lot the three days after my parents died, and I’m pretty sure I was the first person in Haverill to know he was going to leave as soon as Mom’s service was behind him.

I must admit, there were times that spring and summer, after he and my mom had stopped seeing each other on the sly, when I was seriously pissed at him. At first I told people I didn’t know about their affair. But I did. Even now I’m not exactly sure who ended it. I mean, my mom never acknowledged to me that they’d even had one, and Stephen only did in a vague sort of way when I confronted him about it after my parents were dead. But I knew what had been going on. And I knew how happy my mom was with him. It was really easy to go into fantasy land, because Dad was living at the lake then and my mom was happy. I could imagine my parents getting divorced and my mom and Stephen getting married and no one using her as a punching bag anymore. I didn’t think too hard about the specifics of Stephen Drew as my stepfather, because I was in tenth grade and way too old to get watery-eyed about a new family. By then I was counting the days until I could leave Haverill once and for all. But I wanted Mom to be happy. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I realized that Stephen was going to get out now, too. I knew right away he was going to feel the loss of my mom a lot more than he might have expected in those months between when they broke up and when my dad killed her.

My friend Cynthia once taught me to say, “I was wrong before. I’m smarter now.” They are two very short sentences, but there are few among us who are comfortable pairing them together. And yet so much of life is about growing smarter: garnering wisdom, accepting the lessons that are offered every day we walk this earth. Almost all cultures but the youth-obsessed narcissism of modern America revere elders for this very reason: With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

And yet so often the angel is portrayed as youthful. I am not referring to the pudgy cherubs that appear in late November like crocuses in March. But think of Botticelli’s angels. Or da Vinci’s. Recall for a moment the angels in any illustrated Bible. Angels in art, regardless of whether they are female or male, are vital and vibrant and vigorous. They are beautiful if they are female, handsome if they are male. Sometimes they verge on androgyny. Always, however, they are charismatic.

The reality, of course, is that angels are ageless. Eternal. Everlasting. Twice I have met with individuals who were quite sure that their angel was elderly. Not frail, mind you. But in both of these instances, the angel’s countenance was lined, her eyes milky, and her fingers starting to gnarl. And both times the individual sharing this story with me was a grandparent.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Usually I told the police whatever I could, but sometimes I told them what they wanted to hear. It was just easier that way. And sometimes I volunteered whatever Stephen suggested I say. I wasn’t nervous about that until I realized that they thought Stephen had killed Dad (maybe even Mom and Dad), and then I found myself thinking long and hard every time I opened my mouth and-what was even more disturbing for me-every time I said something Stephen had advised me to say. Tina said she was surprised I hadn’t been more freaked out around the state troopers. She said after she spoke to them that one time that she didn’t think she could have handled talking to them as much as I did. But I reminded her that everyone, including the police, was really, really worried about me. I was, like, the Vermont Poster Child for Domestic Abuse. I could pretty much do or say whatever I wanted. It wasn’t just the tattoo. I stayed out as late as I felt like, and the Cousinos just smiled and asked if I was okay or needed anything. I cut classes, and the teachers asked me if there was anything they could do. I could have been dealing crack cocaine to five-year-olds and people would have said, “Oh, think of what happened to her parents. Poor kid.” I could have been carving up kittens in the Cousinos’ basement and people would have patted me on the head and asked me if I wanted a different therapist or social worker. Membership in Club Orphan has its privileges, too.

Still, I don’t recommend it. I probably wasn’t nearly as cool a customer as I sound now. One day I had this totally uncontrollable crying jag in the girls’ bathroom at school, and, unfortunately, a teacher found me. And then some days it just felt easier not to talk at all.

Josie Morrison asked me all the time how much I missed my mom, but only once if I missed my dad. I was pretty clear about the fact that I didn’t miss him at all, and that was that.

But my mom was another story. Suddenly I had all these pretend moms in my life, all these women who wanted to mother me like crazy. There was Carole Cousino and Ginny O’Brien for starters, and then there was Josie, who sometimes was the hip young mom and sometimes the badass big sister. She was better in the big-sister role, because not a lot of moms in Vermont have dreads and tats. And there were the female teachers at school and my guidance counselor, Mrs. Degraff. I got some of the best grades of my life that autumn, even though my work was pretty half-assed and my attendance was basically whenever I felt like going to class. But none of those women could even begin to fill the void. I loved my mom. I loved her so much. We had grown incredibly close in the winter when Dad had been gone. She changed. The vibe of the whole house changed. Sometimes Tina would come over and we actually baked with Mom: We made things like coconut cupcakes and pineapple upside-down cake and your basic brownies out of a box. Suddenly Mom and I weren’t walking around the house like scared, silent cats, waiting for Dad to get nasty about something ridiculous. I didn’t spend so much time with my earbuds in, listening to my iPod. She bought me a dock and speakers for the device, and we blared the music as loud as we wanted. She was, like, totally liberated.

Things were so peaceful that I allowed a boy who was interested in me to pick me up one Saturday night and hang around for a couple of hours before we went to a party in the village. He was a senior. He drove. Dad would never have allowed me to date a senior. He would never have allowed me to even go to a party with him. But Alan was fine, totally harmless. He was already into college by then, and we were just having a good time-which, looking back, is exactly why Dad would never have let me near him and why it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to invite Alan to within a hundred yards of our house if Dad had been there.

And Mom and I could talk about Alan. We could talk about Brendan, another boy who I liked a bit, although we only hung around together as friends. (The summer and fall after Mom and Dad died, Brendan and I got a little closer, but I think that was mostly because he had spectacular dope. We didn’t hook up or anything.)

It’s interesting, but the two males Mom and I didn’t talk about very much when Dad was gone were Dad and Stephen. One time I asked her why Dad often seemed so angry, and she said he came from an angry family. I knew what she meant: I know my grandfather. I know my uncles-all those brothers. She also said he was under a lot of pressure at work and sometimes he drank too much, and those were the big reasons why they had problems. But I could tell she was being evasive. She was suffering and didn’t really get it herself.

I didn’t bring up my fantasy that she might divorce Dad, but for a while in February and March there really was this out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing going on. Dad knew how pissed I was at him, and so for a while he kept his distance. But at the end of February, I got a text from him on my cell. It was a joke about something-something he’d seen on TV that he thought would make me smile. And there was something so pathetic about my dad alone at night at the lake watching crap TV that I texted back. And the next week he sent me an e-mail. Short, but with a link to a video on YouTube he thought I’d get a charge out of. Then, the week after that, he sent me a long e-mail, the first of many, and it was all about how sorry he was for being such a crummy husband, because it meant that he had always been a crummy father. But he said he was resolved to be a better person, and he said he was going to look into counseling. He always went on and on about how much he loved Mom and how much he loved me. I wasn’t totally sure what to make of the e-mails and whether I should show them to Mom. I thought I might even just delete them. Mom and I had been living a day-to-day life without Dad, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him gone forever. To want him gone forever. Not necessarily from my life, because that wasn’t going to happen. Already he was insisting we have lunch every week or two in Manchester, where he had his stores and his restaurant. (We would do that beginning the end of March, and it would continue until he came home in May.) But out of the house forever-that sort of gone. And I feared if I showed the e-mails to Mom, it might screw things up with whatever she had going with Stephen.

In the end Dad made the decision for me about whether to show Mom his e-mails. It seems that he had been e-mailing her, too. Or, maybe, calling her. I don’t remember. I just remember that one night in April when we were having dinner, Mom told me that she heard Dad had been sending me some very sweet e-mails and she was wondering if she could read a few of them. I was pretty cornered: I really couldn’t say no. And so she read a couple before we had even cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, and sometimes I wonder if this was the beginning of the end of her relationship with Stephen.

Looking back, I really wish I had just deleted them.

IF MY MOM had been into Facebook or MySpace, here’s a video she would have uploaded for sure: They’re at a wedding reception at some beautiful inn when we still lived in Bennington, and I was about three years old. It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m not in the video, because it’s a pretty rockin’ reception and I was home with a baby-sitter. But I love the dress my mom is wearing. It was a black-and-white zebra print without any sleeves. My mom wore a cardigan sweater over it, more likely because my dad thought it showed too much shoulder than because it was cold in the ballroom. Supposedly when Mom kissed me good night before leaving for the wedding, she said, “See you next year,” and I melted down like a Fudgesicle in July. We’re talking near panic attack, the way Mom would tell the story. The problem was that I didn’t totally get New Year’s Eve yet. Once Mom explained it to me, I chilled, but I gather it was pretty gnarly there for a couple of minutes. Anyway, they’re at this inn that has pushed all the tables in this huge room against the walls so people can dance, and there are still all these tiny white Christmas lights along the ceiling and the windowsills and over the top of the glass doors. There’s a good crowd, and everybody’s dancing-even the bartenders, a guy and this girl in bow ties behind this long table with rows and rows of bottles and glasses. The two of them look like they’re having as much fun as the people on the dance floor. Most of the crowd seems to be in their twenties and thirties, but there are grandparents and aunts and uncles, I guess, sitting at some of those tables. Whoever is holding the video camera must have known it belongs to Mom and Dad, because they’re focusing more on the two of them than on anyone else in the room. And they are really moving. They look more than a little dorky, but I guess it’s sweet that they’re so into the party and so into each other. Suddenly the DJ, wherever he is, says he is going to play something slow now for all the lovers in the room. My mom falls against my dad, and the camera catches them looking into each other’s eyes like they invented romance. Her fingers are on the back of his neck, and when they finally break eye contact, her head falls forward into his chest, she closes her eyes, and she has this smile on her face that looks like she is having the most peaceful and beautiful dream of her life. We’re talking movie moment.

Anyway, it would have been a classic on Facebook. And it reminded me that once, a long time ago, my parents’ marriage hadn’t been the natural disaster that it would soon become and will look like forever to most of the world.

OBVIOUSLY I THINK a lot about what must have been going on at my house that Sunday night while Tina and I were in Albany at the Fray concert. Everyone around me seemed to be concocting whole scenes that August and September, and the only thing they all shared was this: I was lucky as hell that the band was playing a Sunday-night gig, because that’s the only reason I’m alive today. The general consensus is that if I’d been home, I would have been killed. We’ll never know, but I also think it’s possible if I had been there, all three of us would have been alive the next morning. Maybe my mom would have kept to herself whatever it was she said that put my dad over the edge. Maybe Mom and I would have gotten the heck out of there before my dad blew up like a furnace. And maybe, pure and simple, Dad would have been incapable of killing Mom if I’d been in the house.

But everyone who talked to me had a different idea about how the fight might have unfolded, and they were all basing it on their memories of their own parents’ fights-or, I guess, on their own fights with their own spouse or partner or whatever. That’s the thing. We all have recollections of fighting with someone we’re supposed to love, and I figured out at a really young age that what goes on when the doors are closed is anyone’s guess. Still, I have tried to piece together that Sunday night from what I know of their fights (which is, unfortunately, a lot), what Ginny told me, and what the investigators seemed to have figured out in the weeks that followed. Stephen and I talked about it a couple of times before it became clear to me that he was the last person in the world I should have been talking to.

But if I were one of those hidden cameras, here’s what I think I would have seen at my house that Sunday night: I would see my mom in the doorway when Tina and I are starting down the driveway in her parents’ red Subaru wagon. Tina has had her license for about three months, and even though she drives like she’s about ninety years old-we’re talking five miles below the speed limit, always, and she might be the only one of my friends who doesn’t text while she’s passing a manure spreader-my mom is worried. She has worried whenever I have gotten in the car with Tina the first half of the summer. She has no idea that even though I only have a learner’s permit and am only supposed to drive a car when Mom or Dad are right there beside me in the passenger seat, I drive that Subaru all the time around Haverill. Not smart, I know. But not ridiculous, either, because the state police never patrol around here. And so I drive that wagon a lot, and I am, like Tina, a pretty careful driver.

Anyway, Mom is standing in the doorway, and she still has in her arms the big blue bowl with the peas she has plucked from the garden. Her garden. My dad and I really have very little (read: nothing) to do with it. She hasn’t shelled those peas yet. Imagine Auntie Em, but still young and pretty. Remember, my mom was only thirty-eight when she died. I know that’s supposed to seem ancient to a teenager, but it’s not. It’s just not.

So my mom waves once, and I hope I wave back. But there’s no guarantee. Meanwhile my dad is tidying the garage. Organizing. I have absolutely no idea why, but that’s what he is doing late that Sunday afternoon. He doesn’t come out to holler good-bye to me or wave. But the last time I saw him in there, he was drinking a beer. It is at least his second bottle and maybe his third, and the idea has crossed my mind that this is trouble. When he first returned in May, he wasn’t drinking at all. But at a picnic for one of his manager’s birthdays in late June, he started again, and since then he has been ratcheting it up. Mom has said it’s because business is a little slow and we’re in a recession. When things pick up, he’ll-as grown-ups put it-go back on the wagon. But when he drinks, he becomes a total jerk. This month has been three-plus weeks of Mom and me walking on glass, tiptoeing around the house so we don’t piss him off any more than we seem to simply by breathing. Something about Mom’s baptism this morning has ticked him off, and I’ve been unable to put my finger on what it is. Midafternoon I almost asked Mom if it was as obvious as the idea that the baptism involved Stephen, but in theory I don’t know about Stephen, and I have to assume that my dad doesn’t either.

As Tina and I reach the end of the driveway, I have a thought: Dad is puttering around in the garage because Mom never goes there except to pull out the car in the winter. It’s a place where he can hang out and totally avoid Mom and me. Which, with him drinking right now, is probably a good thing for Mom. Something happened on Friday night when I was at a party in Pownal. I don’t know the details, but even by the admittedly very low standards of civility my dad subscribes to, it couldn’t have been pretty. How badly did he hit Mom? I don’t know because I wasn’t home, and almost always he hits her in places no one can see. But since Friday night the house has been especially gloomy, even on the pathetic Happiness Scale in place at the Haywards’. I think he beat her pretty badly, no doubt on the lower back.

After I’ve left, my mom sits down to shell the peas in that bowl. She probably sits down near where I saw her waving, outside in the sun that is still bathing the western side of the lawn in warmth. Eventually she will rise, go back inside, and cook the rest of their dinner. She doesn’t set the kitchen table, because I think they will eat on the front porch tonight. It is a balmy summer evening, and my parents always liked to eat outside on that porch. It didn’t have a table, because it really was just front steps with a landing, and so they will eat that night with their plates on their laps and their drinks on the wooden planking beside them. In my mom’s case, that means iced tea, in my dad’s another beer.

They probably aren’t saying a whole lot as they eat, because by the time they plop themselves down on those steps, Mom is a little scared and my dad is well on the way to being totally hammered. Talking to him right now is like baiting a hungry lion. Why do that? Why go there? The thing is, it could be such a great night for them. Tomorrow is Monday, her day off, and the kid is at a concert and spending the night with a friend. Wouldn’t you think most parents would be having Naked Sunday together?

But not mine. Not that night.

At some point when he is done chewing a bite of chicken, his tongue clearing bits of meat from around his gums in this creepy way that reminds me of a mole tunneling just under the grass, my dad turns to my mom and says something nasty about the meal. Maybe it’s as simple as how her vegetables don’t taste any better than the ones you can buy at the supermarket, but with all the mulch and manure and fertilizer she uses, these ones from her garden actually cost more. Some nights this month, this has been his song. Maybe he says something about her shorts: They’re too short. Too baggy. Too frumpy. Too slutty. My dad had a thing about shorts and my mom’s legs-which were really very sexy for a mom. But most likely it is the baptism he has brought up, planning to use it to find a way to wound her and pick a fight. He says, maybe, that he can’t believe she paraded around like some tramp in a bathing suit before the whole batch of Holy Rollers.

That’s what he called the people who went to the church: Holy Rollers.

He says that everyone must have loved that: Alice Hayward, tarting around at the pond. Now, my dad wasn’t a moron. He has to know on some level that he is being completely ridiculous. So why is he saying these things? So Mom will dispute him.

It was a Speedo, she reminds him, not some bikini. And I was wearing a T-shirt over it, anyway.

Oh, how lovely, he says, his voice taking on that weird, condescending, pretend-upper-class monotone. But do you honestly think that makes it better? Do you think I would prefer to have my wife parading around town like she’s a contestant in a Hooters wet-T-shirt contest?

And my mom will know what’s coming and that she can’t win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there’s no place left to go. And Mom is already hurting from whatever she had endured on Friday night when I was gone. Still, here is the problem she faces: If she disagrees with Dad, he might hit her for challenging him, but if she agrees with him, she is admitting to having dressed like a slut at her baptism, and that will be his grounds for whaling on her.

What does she say? In my mind I see her shaking her head, realizing that she should have gotten out years ago. Or that she should have gone to court when she was supposed to a week or so after she got that temporary restraining order back in February. Or she should have taken the flowers that had started arriving almost daily in May and tossed them into the compost heap. Or she should never have allowed him back in the house when he wheedled his way into a reconciliation just after Mother’s Day. But that isn’t what she did, and now she’s looking at her second beating in three days. And so she stands up with her plate and retreats inside. I have seen her do this before: just take her food and excuse herself from the table. Or excuse herself from the table without taking her food. The upside to this strategy-withdrawal without a word-is that she hasn’t said anything that he can use as a justification for his anger. The downside? She has seriously dissed him. (And when she has done this when I’ve been present, she has also humiliated him in front of his daughter.)

But it is often how Mom played the game, and sometimes it worked. No fighting in the night, and the next morning there would be peace on earth and my dad would apologize for being such a jerk. My guess is that is exactly what my mom does that Sunday night. She leaves him alone on the front steps and finishes eating inside. In the kitchen, reading the newspaper, maybe. Lula is sitting beside her and wagging her tail, waiting for Mom to hand her a few pieces of chicken or cut some up and drop the meat into her dish. The picture to someone who doesn’t know what’s really going on? It’s like Mom lives alone with her dog. Except there’s this teeny-tiny detail that she is scared to death her husband is about to come in and belt her.

Based on the plates that would be found in the sink and how much of the dinner had been cleaned up and put away-at some point I overheard someone saying that the bowls with coleslaw and peas both had plastic covers on them-the strategy worked for a while. I see my dad sitting on the steps, stewing. Drinking. Maybe for a while he goes back to the garage and drinks some more.

But at some point he comes inside, plops himself down on the living-room couch, and turns on the TV set. Is he watching 60 Minutes? Maybe. Sometimes he would turn it on. But he is so drunk by now that he really isn’t watching anything. And pretty quickly he conks out. Falls asleep and isn’t making a sound. It’s the darnedest thing: He never seems to snore. My mom once told me that the only time she could recall him snoring was when he had a sinus infection years ago. (Not snoring is also something he takes weird pride in. I actually heard him brag to people at the annual Father’s Day volunteer firefighters’ barbecue that he never snores. He made it sound like it was some amazing athletic accomplishment.) My mom makes that phone call to Ginny, a conversation that led lots of people to tell me that Ginny was the very last person my mom would talk to. (One time I considered reminding them that they were mistaken: The very last person my mom would talk to was pretty obviously my dad, as she begged him or screamed at him until she could no longer breathe to stop killing her.) My mom peeks into the living room, sees Dad is still out like a light, and changes into her nightgown. The red nightgown.

And then, not too long after Mom has said good night to Ginny and gotten ready for bed, Dad wakes up. Some people say he killed Mom that night because she dropped the bombshell on him that she was leaving. The fight they’d been having outside resumed, but at some point it took a new course and ended with my mom informing him that the marriage was over and she was getting out. Literally. She was leaving him. Leaving the premises. She probably didn’t tell him to get out that night, because how could he? He was drunk. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed his own sorry self by driving into a maple tree at sixty or seventy miles an hour, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to bring some innocent person down with him. She really did worry like crazy about cars. And so she tells him that she is out the door. So long. She is going to get dressed, pack a bag, and split.

And maybe people are right and that is exactly what she said that caused the fight to go nuclear.

But maybe not. Or maybe not right away. I think she had to be driven just a little further before she would say that. When I’m trying and failing to fall asleep at night, I see it continue like this. I see my dad trying hard to get a rise out of Mom, and even if he doesn’t know that she’d been hooking up with Stephen, he knows for a while they were pretty tight. And so he says something about Stephen and manages, if only by accident, to hit just the right nerve in just the right tooth-especially since, maybe, Stephen was the one who ended their affair. I’ve always wondered if maybe she only took Dad back because Stephen broke up with her. All those flowers Dad sent? They only worked because Stephen wasn’t around anymore. I also think that’s the reason Stephen felt so guilty after Mom died. The baptism? Yeah, right. He said that he felt responsible because he’d missed all these signals about how she was ready to die, but that was totally ridiculous. We’re talking fairy tale. More likely Stephen felt like a louse because he’d told my mom early in May that he didn’t want their thing to go public or he didn’t want it to continue. Whatever. And so she takes back her own husband on the rebound, he kills her a couple of months later, and Stephen winds up feeling horrible. As he should.

Anyway, my dad is getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and he says something stupid about Stephen’s sexual orientation. Among my dad’s more pathetic prejudices? Homophobia, big-time. I’d heard him make cracks before about why Stephen wasn’t married. And maybe that night Mom has had just enough of this lunacy, and so she tells Dad that she knows for a fact that Stephen is straight. Very. Remember, I’m not home, so the sexual volleys might be racier and nastier than usual.

The result? Dad is confronted for the first time with the news that Mom has been with someone other than him, and it is-how’s this for an irony?-the leader of those so-called Holy Rollers who Dad thinks are just such total losers. Moreover, for all he knows, Mom has been with Stephen awhile. Maybe not merely when Dad was living out at the lake. Maybe before he left. Maybe even when he was living right here in little old Haverill. It’s around eight o’clock at night. That old school professor’s voice of his is swamped by serious rage: Mom’s latest infraction isn’t just wearing a top that’s too revealing or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. She has tossed a hand grenade down the front of his pants.

You what? I hear him yelling in my head, and she repeats whatever it was that she said the first time about Stephen and her and how they’d been sleeping together. Or how they’d been lovers. I honestly can’t decide the precise wording of the bombshell, because as well as I knew my mom, there were just some things we never talked about. I mean, she had never told me that she and Stephen had been hooking up. But I’m sure there is a moment when my dad can’t believe what he’s hearing and has her repeat herself.

And so my mom does.

And when you repeat things, you add things. The adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Fisher, taught us that. And so I see my mom realizing that for the first time ever, she has wounded Dad, really smacked him back hard, and so she starts piling it on. She tells him whatever it was that Stephen gave her that marriage to my dad doesn’t. She talks about how intelligent and well educated Stephen is (an incredibly sharp dagger for Dad, since he never went to college). Or how tender. Or how gentle. But she always brings it back to the fact that they were lovers, because she has seen that this really ticks him off.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t have a death wish. I really believe that, too. I really don’t think she thought for even a split second that my dad was going to kill her. Hit her? Sure. Pound her a couple of times? Hell, yes. But I am absolutely convinced that she didn’t see him taking his hands and strangling her. Stephen is very smart, but he was wrong about that.

First, of course, my dad probably slugs her. For one of the only times ever, he even hits her in the face. Open hand, backhand, a fist. I don’t know. No one told me a lot about what the medical examiner said about the condition of their bodies, and I don’t even know if you can tell in the end whether a bruise was caused by knuckles or palm. I never asked. Heather would tell me later that she hadn’t asked, either: She hadn’t asked anyone what had gone down when her dad killed her mom. And she told me that she regretted that. But still I didn’t ask. I mean, how could I?

So my dad hits Mom. Does she hit him back? No way. My mom was never going to hit back. Besides, she has just had the wind knocked out of her. Or she has fallen to the floor. Or she has banged into something (that seemed to happen a lot). I see her on the floor in the living room, Dad standing over her. And when she gets her breath back or she gets back in control, she says something more about Stephen. As my grandfather-my dad’s dad-always says, in for a nickel, in for a dime. And Dad is thinking the same thing. I hit her in the head and the sky didn’t fall in. And my wife was sleeping with some dude I don’t really like. Maybe she’s sleeping with him even now. So he beats on her some more. Whacks her in the nose.

And then-then-Mom tells him she’s leaving. That’s what I mean about having to drive my dad to that point. She had to seriously get under his skin. Even my dad needs a little motivation to wrap his hands around Mom’s neck and squeeze till she’s dead. I see my mom holding her nose (because he has hit her there, not because she smells something bad) and wiping away the blood that is trickling slowly over and around her lips. She straightens her back and rises to her full height (which is still shorter than Dad) and announces that he has hit her for the last time. This time there will be no backing down when the day comes to show up in court.

Which is when he kills her. He loses all control. He has his hands around her neck, and he is shaking her, maybe not realizing that this is it-that he has passed the line of all reason-but shaking her and pressing his thumbs against her esophagus. I have tried to see what it must have felt like. One time I even had Tina squeeze my neck till I said, “Enough, I get it.” (She was creeped out, but she understood what I wanted to know, and so she did it.) It must have hurt like crazy. Agony. But here is that expression again: in for a nickel, in for a dime. Once you’ve started to kill your wife, how do you stop?

And so my dad didn’t, even though my mom had to have been trying to get him to. Although I have never asked, I’m sure she fought back, if only because it must have hurt so much. She must have tried to push him away or get his fingers off her neck. She must have tried to hit him or scratch him hard enough that he’d release her, if only for a second.

And then, before he knew it, she was dead in his hands. And that’s the thing about the way he killed her: One minute she was alive in his hands, and the next she was dead. One minute she was struggling, and the next she wasn’t. Fighting. Not fighting. Breathing. Not breathing.

And that, in my opinion, is when my dad polished off the rest of the beers that we had in the house. He was drunk when he killed her, but not nearly as drunk as he’d be when he died.

AND YET ONLY a little more than two months before that nightmare, Mom had taken him back. Had him move in with us again. I thought this was nuts even then and told her that I thought this was a very bad idea. But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just believe whatever we want. And I guess my mom wanted to believe that everything would be different.

I really wasn’t all that surprised when she sat me down one night in May and said Dad was coming home. There had been plenty of signals-Exhibit A, all those flowers. And Dad had been getting goopier and goopier on the telephone, telling me that he was convinced we would soon be reunited as a family and how much this meant to him, since in a few years I would be off to college and he didn’t have a lot of time left with me. (He sure was right about that one.) He had also been saying for weeks that he knew he would still make mistakes in his life because he wasn’t perfect, but he was positive that the worst was behind him. (Okay, he was wrong there.) And he did sound better. Happier. He said he wasn’t drinking.

But there had been signals from Mom, too. The biggest one was that sometime in the late spring something happened between Stephen and her. I don’t know for sure when they first started hooking up, but I think it was before Christmas, when Dad was still living at home. And you could just see Mom opening up like one of her roses that winter. She was less nervous, more confident. She was laughing a lot more. Suddenly anything and everything could be funny. My big worry in the beginning? Dad would figure out something was up and that fight would be the sort they would eventually have in July. (I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he would kill her. But I thought it would be bad with a capital B.) But in early May she started retreating again. Our dinners got quiet. She suggested we eat supper in the living room in front of DVDs of the TV shows I liked, which I knew she did when she didn’t want to talk-when she couldn’t cope. I had been making my own lunch for school for years, but when she was happy that winter and spring, she would insist on offering me advice: She would throw in an apple or a clementine, she would surprise me with the macaroon cookies I liked from the bakery. That changed, too. She might still be in the kitchen when I was making my lunch, but she would sit at the table sipping her coffee, not exactly a zombie, because sometimes she would be toying with a crossword puzzle, but not exactly present, either. She would be dressed for work by then, because a lot of days she would drive me to school before continuing on to the bank. And what she considered dressed for work changed, too. In the winter she had started dressing a lot cooler, especially after Dad was gone. The jeans were a little tighter on Monday, when she didn’t have work, and the skirts were a little tighter the rest of the week. No more of those I’m-running-for-Congress pants suits. Sometimes she even allowed her blouses to show a little cleavage, a hint of bra. After Dad was out the door in February, it was like she had bought a whole new wardrobe. Unfortunately, those clothes went the way of her laughter as summer approached.

I asked her about this once, but she was pretty cagey. That’s one thing I have learned about women like my mom: There are no people in the world who are better at keeping secrets. You want to find a good spy? Pick a battered woman. There are things they won’t tell a soul. And they can really take a punch.

Anyway, Mom sat me down one evening, and I knew instantly what was coming. It was May, so the days were getting long, and I remember there were a ton of birds at the feeders. Mom had three, and they were all on the opposite side of the house from her vegetable garden, because she loved birds, but she loved her garden, too, and she didn’t want the robins or the blue jays eating her seeds. And she had just planted most of the garden and put her freaky clear plastic tepees over her tomato-and pepper-plant seedlings. The tepees always looked like they belonged in a science-fiction movie or video game: You know, the way the human colony grew things on some faraway planet. We were sitting on the steps (the same steps where I have always imagined they ate their last meal together), one of us occasionally stroking Lula behind her ears. Mom sort of beat around the bush for a few minutes, asking about school and what sorts of things Dad and I had been talking about lately when he phoned or at lunch. Then she went on this riff about how complicated adult relationships are, which would have been the absolute perfect moment for me to bring up Stephen. But I didn’t, and that will always be a regret I’ll live with, because now I’ll never know for sure what she was thinking. At any rate, I acted surprised when she said Dad was coming home, because I figured I was supposed to. Then I told her that I really didn’t think this was such a good plan and reminded her of some of the worst fights they’d had in the months before he moved out. But she said things were going to be different now because Dad was going to be different now. She said this had been a real wake-up call for him and he had learned from his mistakes-which was not unlike what my dad had said to me, too, though he’d also said he was still going to make plenty of them. (Yup, that was my dad: a real lifelong learner.)

But the thing that struck me then and I think about now is this: Mom didn’t seem all that happy about Dad coming home to live with us. She seemed resigned to the idea. It was like it was all a big chore that loomed before her. Something we both would just have to endure.

Make no mistake: Although my faith in heaven is unshakable, although I am confident in the angels that reside amongst us, I am as filled with sorrows at endings as you are. I cry at the funerals for friends I have lost, I mourn for lovers with whom, in the end, I will not have the pleasure or privilege of building a life. I grieve for the parents who have outlived their children, and I will always despair for the children who have watched their own parents break the rapture of the night with violence.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When I think of that spring, the first thing that comes to mind is how easy it all was. There had been so much tension in the house for so many years that I hadn’t realized how simple life could be if you weren’t always waiting for the boiler in the basement to explode. And I know my mom felt that way, too-probably even a ton more than I did. There was this massive late-season snowstorm on Easter, but still Mom and I trudged up the hill in our parkas and snow boots for the sunrise service at six in the morning. Obviously we didn’t expect to see the sun rise over the mountains to the east. No one did, and there were about seventy of us who made it there. (Just for the record, it was the first sunrise service I had gone to in three or four years. Usually I slept in and would stagger out of bed for the regular nine forty-five service. And the only reason I went to the sunrise service that year was for Mom.) Stephen was very funny, even though you could only hear about every other word in the gale. But about six-fifteen the wind started to slow and we could all see the sky lightening to the east. Soon there were just a few big flakes floating around, and then even they were gone. We never got actual blue sky that morning, but we could all see this great round lightbulb behind the thin shade of clouds. And that’s what it was like for me when Dad was away. This big storm I had gotten used to was gone, and while there may not have been total sunshine, I could see the light-and I knew that with a little luck even that last veil of clouds would disappear if I gave it more time. And I imagine it was even better for Mom, because she wasn’t being abused and she had this cool thing going with Stephen.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after that when, for whatever the reason, her affair with Stephen began winding down. And then, a little later, the flowers from Dad started coming. It was like he knew that now was the perfect time to wedge the toe of his boot back in the door.

It’s funny, but I have a childhood memory of Mom reading to me in the apartment we had lived in when I was a little girl in Bennington that I link in my mind with that spring. Mom is reading to me from Blueberries for Sal, which I still have, incidentally, and I’m curled up in her arms in this massive rocking chair that she told me once was the chair in which she liked to nurse me when I was a baby. I guess I’m, like, four. The chair went with us when we moved to Haverill. And one Sunday afternoon that spring when Dad was gone, I saw Mom sitting in that chair and reading a novel. The dust jacket had the same blues and yellows as the cover of Blueberries for Sal, and the afternoon sun was coming in through the window just the way it had that day long ago when I was curled up in her lap in Bennington. And just like that day when I was four, I felt totally at peace and totally secure. That’s what that spring had felt like when Dad was gone. And that feeling, I guess, is what my dad had taken away from me for most of my life.

BETWEEN THE FIRST days of February and the last half of May, I never saw my parents together. They had a colossal fight the Sunday night after Groundhog Day. (Looking back, Sunday might have been the night they were most likely to collide. Maybe, like me, my dad just found Sunday nights totally depressing. You know, it’s the end of the weekend and school and work are all you have to look forward to for the next five days. And even though my mom had Mondays off, it’s possible she felt those same end-of-the-weekend blahs, too, because for the rest of the world the weekend was ending.) Nearly three and a half months would pass between the fight that led Mom to get the temporary restraining order and the day I came home from school and there was Dad at the kitchen table. I was living with my mom that whole time, but by the end of March I was seeing my dad again, either in Manchester or one time at our cottage on the lake.

I’m not sure why my dad started that fight in February. Actually, I’m not sure why he started most of their fights. There was never a good reason. Usually he was drunk, but not that Sunday night. I mean, he had been drinking. That I know. But he wasn’t so drunk that he couldn’t drive. After all, he got in his car and drove away on his own when Mom told him to get out. At first he’d said there was no way he was leaving his own house. He reminded Mom that her salary at the bank sure didn’t cover the mortgages on the house or the cottage or the car payments. (I must admit, until that night I didn’t even know we had car payments. I knew we had mortgages. But I hadn’t really thought about how we might not own Dad’s BMW or Mom’s Accord outright.) But she held her ground. She had rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and her turtleneck so she could hold an ice pack on her elbow. Dad had, for reasons that probably didn’t make any sense and certainly no longer matter, pushed her down the stairs. I saw him do it. And, worse, he saw that I had witnessed it. I think we all thought he had broken her arm. He hadn’t, but despite the ice pack it would swell up like she was Popeye. She also had a bruise on her hip that was so black and blue it looked like a screen saver of outer space. I think Dad was torn when Mom told him to get out. Should he get out, like his wife was demanding, or should he take her to the hospital? Mom would say to me later that night that his big concern was his reputation. It wouldn’t look good for him if he had broken his wife’s arm pushing her down the stairs. But my mom also thought it wouldn’t have looked good for her, either. She would go to the hospital the next morning, just in case. But I don’t think she would have gone if Monday hadn’t been her day off. Still, she did get her arm and her back X-rayed. Nothing was broken. But someone at the hospital must have said something to her, because it was on the way back to Haverill that she detoured to the courthouse and got what is called a relief-from-abuse order and had the papers served to Dad before he could come home.

Dad, I assume, had thought he was just leaving for the night. And so it must have been quite the shocker when the police showed up at his little suite of offices above the toy store. I don’t know what he told his secretary or his accountant or anyone else who might have been present about why a couple of policemen were there. But I’m sure he figured out something. He was pretty fast on his feet when he was sober. And, like I said, I’m sure a lot of the world thought he had left Mom, not the other way around. He was, in many people’s eyes, a pretty solid catch.

Months and months later, Josie explained to me that the police had probably told Mom that they could arrest him, if she wanted. But she didn’t want that. She just wanted him out. She just wanted a little peace. And, maybe, she just wanted to be with Stephen.

Anyway, she never went to court when she had the chance.

JUST AS THERE were times when my dad wasn’t a total jerk to my mom, I have memories of him trying to be a pretty good dad with me. (Sometimes he even succeeded.) I used to love to visit him at his stores or that restaurant of his when I was younger. He seemed extremely important, and so that made me feel important. His employees treated me like a princess. He used to do a lot of paperwork for the restaurant at a table near the door to the kitchen, because when it was quiet, he could get work done and when it was crazy busy (which sometimes it was), he could see the whole dining room and get a sense of what worked in the restaurant and what didn’t. He could see how his servers moved in and around the tables. (And, just maybe, he knew that they knew he was watching, and he liked that idea. I mean, if he liked controlling Mom, why wouldn’t he like controlling his employees?) I remember a couple of times doing homework there when I was in the fifth grade, and it made math and geography a lot more fun. The work wasn’t hard, and I ate tons of cornbread with butter and dirty rice. And more than that, Dad seemed to be in a good mood on those occasions, and that always boded well for my mom and for a quiet evening at the house when we got home.

My dad never drank at work, at least on those times when I visited him. Even as a kid I had figured out the connection between the beer and the beatings. That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but my mom used to insist that Dad loved her and things would be fine if it weren’t for the alcohol. I don’t believe that, personally. I know there were times when he was horrible to her when he was completely sober. He may have been worse when he’d had a couple of beers, but there was always the chance he’d be a bastard regardless of whether he’d been drinking.

I MAY HAVE been a little wild that autumn, but in late September I also got coaxed back into the church Youth Group. I liked the older man who was the interim pastor, and I liked the young woman the church had brought in as a special youth pastor. Sometimes I think they brought her in just for me. She had a stud in her nose, too, and she thought my tattoo was beautiful. Her name was Julie. She wouldn’t be around long, because soon she would move on to a much bigger church in Burlington. But she was only, like, twenty-two or twenty-three, and we talked a lot. I remember the third Sunday in October really well. She convinced me to spend the afternoon helping to chaperone the little kids in Haverill who were carving pumpkins. It was the two of us and Tina and a couple of deacons in this big hay field near the center of the village. A few of the parents stayed, but most of them dropped off their kids and ran. And while a lot of the children were in the fourth and fifth grades and were helping their younger brothers and sisters, many of the kids came up to my waist and shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near knives the lengths of their forearms. And there must have been eighty children there.

A fellow in the church named Mr. Humphrey had donated the pumpkins, and he was one of the grown-ups who stayed. He was a little older than my parents had been, and his real business was this beautiful bed-and-breakfast that he and his wife owned. There seemed to be weddings there all the time. They had things like a pumpkin patch and strawberry fields and blueberry bushes, but they were mostly so the guests would feel they were staying on this working farm.

Anyway, the plan that Sunday was that each kid would carve a pumpkin and then Mr. Humphrey was going to stand up on this hay wagon and name them. He did this every year, and he was really pretty funny. Sometimes he’d give the jack-o’-lanterns names that a five-year-old would think were hysterical: Oogly-Boogly if it had massive eyes or Bobby Booger if its most obvious feature was its nose. And sometimes he would name the pumpkin after someone who had been in the news a lot that autumn, and so election years were always easier for him than other years. I mean, he wasn’t Jon Stewart, but he was pretty fast on his feet. And all of the children would howl with laughter no matter what, because they were tanked up on cookies and brownies the Women’s Circle had baked, and no matter what they were going to get a coupon worth a dollar at the Haverill General Store as a prize.

Counting the parents who hung around and Mr. Humphrey, who was mostly just surveying the scene like a rock star, there were about ten adults or young adults looking out for those eighty elementary-school kids. That’s not a bad ratio if the ten adults are schoolteachers who know what they’re doing and the young adults aren’t that young. But it’s not terrific if two of the chaperones are teenagers like Tina and me and two are deacons somewhere between the ages of seventy-five and death.

And then, of course, one of those two teenagers would lose it. That would be me. For about twenty-five minutes, Julie and one of the few moms who stuck around had to care for me off to the side of the field and watch me sit in the mown grass sobbing and sipping apple cider from a paper cup. One minute I would be howling like a kindergartner who was left behind on the school bus, and the next I would be unable to breathe. It was like I had forgotten how. And sobbing without breathing is no easy trick. At one point, Tina told me later, I was braying sort of like a donkey.

What set me off? It was this carving knife that a girl named Alicia was using. Alicia was, I think, five. And the knife had this brown wooden handle with rivets and this long row of ovals along the blade. The ovals didn’t get smaller as the blade narrowed, they simply took up more of the blade. And for a few seconds I watched her struggle to poke the knife through the thick rind of her pumpkin, twisting it sometimes and stabbing it others. (See what I mean about what a disaster just waiting to happen that whole day was? It’s a miracle that none of the kids gouged out one of their own eyes or took off one of their own tiny fingers.) She was bringing her little arm up and down, up and down, but she wasn’t very strong and so the tip never punctured the pumpkin. It kept bouncing off the gourd like it was Super Pumpkin.

And that’s when I had this weird image, which I realized was actually a weird memory. When I was five, I had done something sort of like that with a knife that looked exactly like the one Alicia was using. It had the same rivets on the handle and it had those same ovals along the blade. In my memory I was on the tile floor of our apartment in Bennington, a place I remembered in some ways only because of the pictures in the photo albums and a couple of old videos my mom had transferred onto a disc. And I was trying to puncture something with the knife. A basketball. I was trying to pop my dad’s basketball. When we lived in Bennington and he was younger, he played pretty often with some friends at a school playground with a couple of hoops not far from our apartment. And then there was this memory: I was trying to destroy my dad’s basketball with that knife, because the night before I had seen him threatening my mom. And the knife he’d been using was the very same kind Alicia was using now. It was dark out, and I’d heard a commotion in the kitchen. I came out of the bedroom, and there was my mom in her nightgown pressed up against the cabinet that held the broom and the vacuum and the cleaning stuff (all of which had these labels Mom had put on them that said something like “Mr. Yuck,” so I wouldn’t start guzzling the toilet-bowl cleaner), and my dad had one hand around her neck and was practically lifting her off the floor. In his other hand was the knife, and he was holding it near her cheek. He was talking in such a low voice that I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, but I could tell by the tone it was pretty darn menacing. Looking back, I don’t imagine he was threatening to kill her. When I think about where he was holding the point of the knife, I guess he was only threatening to disfigure her. Scar forever that pretty face.

I must have said something, because Mom saw me out of the corner of her eye-she really couldn’t turn her head-and she must have managed to mumble something to Dad. Because he turned and saw me. And when he did, he looked at the knife in his hand like he didn’t know what it was or how it had even gotten there. He let go of Mom and tossed the knife on the kitchen table, and then he rumpled my hair as he started past me to their bedroom. He was shaking his head, but at what, I couldn’t have said. Meanwhile my mom slid to the kitchen floor, her back still against the cabinet, and she was crying so desperately that for a minute she wasn’t even able to scoot across the tile floor to me. And so I went to her.

It was the next day that I started trying to destroy my dad’s basketball. I didn’t have any more success with the rubber than Alicia was having with the pumpkin rind, but Mom found me before I managed to slice through an artery or cut off a leg. And that night Dad took Mom out to some fancy dinner and I had a baby-sitter. And soon after that they started to build the house in Haverill.

That afternoon at the pumpkin carving, it all grew connected in my mind: the flashback of Dad scaring the hell out of Mom, my getting medieval on a basketball, and the whole path that would lead us from Bennington to Haverill and to the two of them dead in the living room. I think that’s why I lost it that afternoon. I mean, I had plenty of other reasons to lose it that autumn. But I attribute my mini-breakdown at the pumpkin carving to that flashback. Eventually Tina and Julie and that mom got me calmed down, and I returned to the carving. But I’m pretty sure no one handed me a knife, and I helped mostly by scooping out pumpkin guts for the kids, because no seven-or eight-year-old likes pulling out the cold, mealy crap inside a pumpkin.

SOMETIMES I WONDERED if Stephen saw something in Heather that he didn’t see in my mom. When I try to be objective, I guess Heather was a little bit prettier, but my mom was no slouch. I mean that. And while my mom may have put up with more from my dad than she should have, at least she wasn’t seeing angels in parking lots the way most people spy seagulls. And I always try to remind myself of this: Stephen did not dump my mom for Heather. If I were to guess, he and Mom had separated early in May. Stephen wouldn’t even meet Heather until the end of July. Two days after my parents had died.

But my relationship with Heather, distant as it was, was weirdly complicated, too. On the one hand, I really couldn’t help but see her as my mom’s competitor for Stephen’s affections, even though my mom was gone. What did she have that Mom didn’t? And so that would make me want to push her away out of loyalty. But then there was the fact that she understood more about what I was experiencing than any of the social workers or therapists that everyone kept parading before me. She knew what it was like to suddenly be an orphan (and I am an orphan) and to feel all the time like you’re an imposition. And that is what I felt like: If you’re a kid without parents, even a teenager, you’re always forced to depend on the kindness of other people. You feel indebted to everyone. I had known the Cousinos forever, but it’s not like I was their kid. But there I was, living under their roof and eating their food and using their bathrooms. I could have lived with my grandparents in New Hampshire (for obvious reasons, my dad’s parents were never really an option in my mind), but I had lived in the same village since I was six and been friends with the same group of kids for almost a decade. Does any kid really want to move when she only has two years of high school left? No, of course not. So I chose to be a nuisance.

Heather also understood what it was like to see your mom bullied by your dad and be totally powerless to stop it. Sometimes we talked about all the fights we had witnessed. It seemed like her dad would say the same sorts of things as mine and her mom would sometimes hide out in the same ridiculous world of denial. Who knows? Maybe wife beaters really are one-trick ponies. They’re bullies, but about as creative as the bullies you hear about all the time these days who are my age.

And, of course, Heather was famous. Not famous to me, at least not at first. But soon I figured out that she was very well known to a lot of adults. Ginny, for instance, thought she was totally amazing. And there were at least fifteen videos of her that I found on YouTube. She had been on lots of talk shows and seemed right at home on those comfy couches with the beautiful hostesses. And I loved reading what people said about her books at the online bookstores. Some readers thought she was brilliant, and some thought she was in serious need of medication. Anyway, I would be lying if I said that her celebrity didn’t appeal to me. It did. I thought it was very, very cool.

But I kept reminding myself that there’s more to life than being on talk shows and having lots of clips of yourself on YouTube. There’s more to life than selling a boatload of books.

And even after reading both of her books-and I read them carefully-I still didn’t believe there were angels. I’d seen my mom’s bruises, and there was no way I could reconcile those marks with angel wings.

Sometimes I’d wonder if she and Stephen would ever get back together. I didn’t see it happening, but Tina did. When we talked about it, she said I was like that old Aerosmith song “Jaded.” She was wrong (and she was wrong about the song, too, because, I think it’s more about a girl who is spoiled than a girl who is totally cynical), but I understood what she was getting at. She thought Stephen and Heather would be a good pair because they would, like, balance each other out. Maybe. But it would mean that Heather would have to get over the idea that Stephen had killed my dad, and for a million reasons that’s never going to happen. And Stephen? I don’t know. But I think he’s built to live alone.

Anyway, in the end I remained most loyal to my mom when it came to that whole weird Stephen thing. Even if by any standard my mom wasn’t as hip as Heather Laurent, she was still the woman who had raised me and read to me and, until Dad killed her, was going to be there for me no matter what.

WHEN I WENT to the parsonage that Sunday night, Stephen told me to go back to Tina’s house right away and he would deal with the nightmare in my living room. He told me not to tell anyone anything, not even Tina. Later, of course, I did tell Tina. I told her a ton. Not everything. But almost everything. Stephen offered to drive me to Tina’s, but I told him that I had driven to my house and then to his in the Cousinos’ wagon. Aren’t you fifteen? he asked. I said yeah, but then he must have realized that underage driving was the least of my problems that night and sort of shrugged. I think he was in shock, too. In all fairness, when I went from my house to Stephen’s I’d figured that we would go to the police or call for help or do the sorts of things that I had seen on TV. He seemed like the right person, because even though I hadn’t been real good about Youth Group over the last year and a half, he was a minister and I knew he liked me. And I knew he had liked my mom. Now, I’m not sure I would have gone to him if I’d known he would actually go to my house and, as he put it, clean things up. I mean, I thought the two of us were just going to, like, call 911. It was horrible enough for me to see my mom dead that way. I really didn’t want Stephen, who may have loved her for a while, to have to see her that way, too.

The thing is, I had only gone home after the concert to get my laptop. Tina and I wanted to be online at the same time, and that meant that we needed two computers. We wanted to be on Facebook, and we wanted to buy new songs for our iPods, and there were concert videos on YouTube we wanted to find, and so I said I would go get my laptop. It would take ten minutes. And Tina didn’t even offer to drive. She didn’t need to, because I was just going like a mile to my house. She just tossed me her keys from the bottom of her purse.

Anyway, after I saw Stephen, I did what he said. I went back to Tina’s.

The plan, as much as there was one, was that he was going to make it look like my dad had killed himself. He reminded me that my dad had just killed my mom. And that my dad was a horrible man. Stephen didn’t expect that anyone would think he’d murdered my dad. I don’t think it had crossed either of our minds that that would happen. It was supposed to look just like a suicide. Whenever I saw him later that autumn, I told him I was worried he was going to go to jail. Each time he reminded me of something important: There was never going to be any evidence that he’d killed my dad. They might believe that he did it, but they could never prove it. He assured me that looking out for me now was the very least he could do for my mom. I think that was a big reason why he was still hanging around Bennington for a while. He wanted to be there for me till this whole mess blew over.

And doing something for my mom seemed to matter to him like crazy. Whenever we spoke that fall, he was like this uncle or godfather who felt this huge responsibility to my mom. I mean, he was already into Heather (and then broken up with Heather), so it wasn’t like he was pining for a lost love. But he did feel this burden that he was a part of the reason my mom was dead.

He was already living down in Bennington when I told him I thought the police were starting to think I was involved. He chuckled a little bit and said he didn’t think that was likely: He said he was the big suspect and to just keep reading the newspapers. But I told him I was worried because of some of the things they had been asking me, and that’s when he told me to go ahead and incriminate him. He said why not? They already thought he’d done it, but his attorney had assured him that they would never be able to prove it. So, he said, throw a little gas on the fire. He said he would, too. I was supposed to call Heather, but before I did, she showed up out of the blue one afternoon at my school, and I was like a windup toy. I just let it all out, just as Stephen had suggested, and I saw right away that he was absolutely correct. She gave me her cell-phone number, and a little later I did call her and made absolutely sure that she-that everyone-was positive that Stephen had killed my dad.

But he was also right that they were never able to charge him with murder.

Of course, from that point on I also had to steer clear of Stephen. As I said, he was the last person I should have been talking to. After all, the more I talked to him, the more someone might have figured out that we were-and here is one of those great TV terms from the cop shows I watch all the time now-co-conspirators. If I was seen with Stephen, suspect numero uno in my dad’s death, they might have begun to believe that I knew a lot more than I was letting on. Eventually they might even have begun to think that I was the one who had pulled the trigger.

I thought it was really ironic that we read The Brothers Karamazov in an AP English course I was taking that autumn. Suddenly patricide was everywhere. One day I felt so guilty I couldn’t get out of bed, and Tina reminded me of what my dad had done to my mom. No one, she said, should have to see her mom the way I had seen mine that night in July. But the thing was, at first I simply thought she was passed out, too. I mean, the place just reeked of beer. I thought she and my dad were both just sleeping. But then I saw the marks on Mom’s neck, and I knew what had happened. (I find it interesting that I can no longer remember her face when I found her. Really. I have a feeling from what I’ve read on the Internet about death by strangulation that at some point in my life I’m going to recall her eyes, and it won’t be pretty-either the image that will come to me in the night or my reaction. I don’t see her eyes when I think back, but something tells me they were open. Anyway, for now at least, I’m spared knowing for sure if my dad actually hit her in the face or punched her in the nose before he killed her.) And that’s when I went upstairs and decided I would go get the handgun instead of my laptop.

I never did go back for the laptop, and so it would be among the stuff that Ginny and Stephen brought me the next day. When I left, Lula was pacing nervously back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. It was Stephen who had let her out when he went back, and-to be totally honest-I’m pretty sure he kicked her out because she really was lapping up the blood that was all over the place. I don’t remember his exact words, and clearly he regretted like crazy what he’d started to tell me. He was trying to explain why Lula had wound up outside.

Someday, I know, he’ll regret that whole, horrible night. He should have just been a pastor and called the police, but I guess he was afraid I’d go to prison. (One time he said the fact that my dad had been such a psycho might reduce the sentence, but I shouldn’t kid myself: This would be no juvie offense.) If he’d been a dad himself, that’s what he would have done, and maybe ten years from now we’d both be better off.

Anyway, if I live to a very old age, I know I’ll have tons and tons of regrets. I mean that. But somehow I don’t think putting a bullet into my dad’s head is ever going to be one of them.