The Color of Blood

Twenty-nine

A FEW MINUTES LATER, EMILY HOWARD AND JERRY Dalton appeared. Emily had the dollhouse under her arm and an excited, urgent look in her eye. She made straight for me but Denis Finnegan’s body brought her to a halt; she screamed at the sight of the dead man and shook her head in disbelief. I led her to a sofa and calmed her down and filled her in quickly on what had taken place. I left her sitting very still with the dollhouse on her lap and tears in her eyes, whatever she had been about to tell me lost to shock.

Sandra stared at Jerry Dalton blankly; when Shane and Emily explained who he was, she nodded. “Welcome to the family,” she said, with a dark smile on her face that failed to leaven the curse. I wanted to spare her any more pain. But we weren’t done yet.

“Jessica’s parents have arrived in the country. They’re staying at the Radisson,” I said to Sandra. “Her father, the one who isn’t a dead alcoholic actor, and her mother, who didn’t die of ovarian cancer.”

She looked at me as if she had hoped I’d let her off this, at least, as if what we’d been to each other should count for something. It did, but I couldn’t let her see that. Not until it was all finished. Maybe not even then. She winced, as if I had hit her, then nodded, walked from the fireplace to the nearest window and began to open the heavy green velvet curtains.

“Shut out the lights,” she said.

Jerry Dalton went around the room and turned all the lamps off. A cold light spilled in from outside, the deep blue before dawn on a clear day, the first for a long time. There were smears of pink in the sky; the three towers loomed ahead; below them, the dark city, asleep by the bay.

“I was first,” Sandra said. “And that made me feel important. I was thirteen, and he came to my room not long after I’d started my periods. It was exciting…we’d go for drives, and secret walks, and he’d always take me to rugby matches, and of course it was very exciting having secrets from everyone, Mother especially…I felt the others were such babies then…I don’t remember what I thought about the sex…it was messy, I remember thinking, and it seemed silly too, and then frightening when Father got so serious and intense about it all…but I can’t remember actually feeling anything, or rather I felt so many different things…love, fear, disloyalty, the thrill of the forbidden…that it was hard to unravel them from each other. I suppose that’s why it’s been an issue for me later…not that I didn’t enjoy it, I liked lots of things about it, but I don’t think I really felt anything, or enough…except with Stephen. Even if he was seventeen, we shouldn’t have been together. That was so intense. But maybe it was because it was forbidden, because I knew deep down it was wrong…

“Anyway, it ended with Father after two years. It got awful fairly quickly. I thought at first we might run away, that he might be mine, not Mother’s. But of course, when you realize…when I realized what it was…all it could ever be…well, then it just became disgusting. At first he’d bring me presents, new clothes, books, records…but then it became more about Mother not finding out than anything else…so after a while, he just left money under the pillow…I wasn’t even sure what a whore was yet, but I felt like one…so I just wouldn’t let him anymore. Well, that was all right, he didn’t force me…and then one night…Shane, I’m going to talk about this, is that okay?”

“Just keep going,” Shane Howard said.

“I heard screams from Shane’s room. I ran in, and there he was, trying to do Shane…from behind, you know. I just…I screamed and flung myself at him and beat him and clawed and scratched until he ran off…and I stayed with Shane until morning. And that went on for months. Nothing sexual, we never…I…and I know, Shane, I know you thought I was protecting you, and maybe that was part of it. But honestly, I was jealous, if he wasn’t going to have me, he shouldn’t have you…I felt I had been slighted, that when I sent him away, he should have come back with a better offer, he should have taken me off on a white charger…I know that didn’t make any sense…it probably wasn’t even fair…but he started it…Then Marian, who was precocious even by nowadays standards, had breasts and her first period at eleven…and…and I was fifteen…and I just pretended nothing was happening…even though it was obvious, an eleven-year-old wearing makeup, eye shadow, lipstick…and yet she was still such a child, in thrall to the whole princess story, the sleeping beauty, the kiss from a prince…but I knew…”

“I knew too,” Shane said.

“And we did nothing. I don’t know what I thought. Or maybe a part of me thought, I had to put up with it, why shouldn’t she? Maybe that’s what a very cold, cruel part of me thought.”

I looked around the room. Emily’s face was a blizzard of tears. Jerry Dalton knelt by her, holding her hand. Shane had gone back to staring at the floor.

“And then Marian was suddenly, mysteriously ‘ill’…except she wasn’t. We knew she wasn’t, we all knew she was pregnant. We knew it from the way Mother was so unhappy, the way she’d cry herself to sleep at night…the way she couldn’t look at Father anymore, and the way he couldn’t look at anyone…the way no one was allowed to see Marian, or if we were, she wasn’t allowed to say anything to us…we knew she was pregnant and we…and I was jealous…and I blamed her…and it seemed like such a special fuss was being made of her, I wished it was me. We never…well, I never saw the baby…I don’t even know what happened, it was never spoken of…was it stillborn?”

“Eileen Casey thought she heard a baby cry one night,” I said.

“Did she?” Sandra said. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? For a baby to have been born into the world…into this house…and for there to be no trace of it left…it’s about as bad as it could be…and we never spoke of it…never…who knows, did they give it away, or murder it, or what? We never knew.”

“They gave it away,” Shane said. “That’s what I always reckoned, to one of the adoption agencies, or to a home, or some such. That’s why Marian…that’s why she couldn’t…”

“That must be right,” Sandra said. “That’s why she…because she couldn’t. She couldn’t face life without the baby, so she walked into the pool in her nightdress holding the heaviest rock she could find, and laid the rock on her chest, and lay down in the water and couldn’t get up…at least that’s how she was when I found her, that’s how I imagined she did it…Oh God forgive us, she was just a little girl, and we did nothing…”

Sandra began to cry then. Great, wrenching, ugly-sounding sobs filled the room. She made a harsh “mmmm” sound in her throat and in her mouth to make herself stop.

“Keep going, to the end. The only thing we did…Mother gathered Shane and me together, on the day of the funeral, and said, ‘Marian’s room is to be kept like it was the day she left us. It will be cleaned, but it must never be altered, as long as you live in this house. Do you understand?’ And so it never has been, not a jot has been changed or taken from it to this day.

“So what I did then, I completely denied everything that had happened. I think it took me a few years. I think teaching was my way of not following in my father’s footsteps. But I helped to nurse him…”

“Along with Eileen Casey.”

“That’s right.”

“She told me he didn’t rape her.”

“Well, that makes everything all right then,” Sandra said. “After his death…and maybe it was in getting to know Dr. Rock…in seeing, for the first time, a future…I don’t know, it was as if I decided everything had been the opposite of what it was, everything had been perfectly fine…if not for our sake, for the sake of the children we had, that they would never know about it, or be affected by it…but I suppose all I was doing was living a lie, and making them live one too, crippling them under the weight of it. God, what have I done to my little boy?”

She wept again. I wanted to go to her, to hold her, to tell her what I didn’t believe, that it would be all right, that we could be together. I took a step in her direction, and she turned from the window and looked at me, looked through me, and I knew that what we had had, whatever we had had, was gone, gone and best forgotten. I hadn’t been straight with her, and she couldn’t be straight with me; now she looked right through me and I looked right back, and she passed along to where her brother was sitting. She sat on the floor between his outstretched knees, and he slid down off the couch and cradled her in his great arms, just as she had done with him the night Emily was found, the night David Brady and Jessica Howard were murdered, just as she had been doing with him for years; now the years seemed to fall away until they were like children again in their haunted house, waiting out the dark.

Outside, the pink was filling up the sky, slices of grapefruit and salmon frothing one against the other. The sun rose over the bay like a fat blood orange. At long last, after a long long night, on All Souls’ Day, some light.