And Give You Peace Read online

  “Where’s Meg?” he asked, wiping the brown drops from his chin. “I tried calling her this morning, but there was no answer.”

  “Really?” I grabbed Josh’s hand to keep him from splashing. “What did you want?” I hadn’t meant to be rude, but his question surprised me. Matt was a year older than Meggy and they’d been in the same preschool class, but by the time he was old enough for T-ball, he left her behind. Over the years, when our neighborhood had its annual block-party barbecue, Matt usually made an appearance only to grab a hot dog before climbing back up to his tree house, which was the scene of a noisy and endless intergalactic war. Until I left for college, I only saw him mowing lawns or riding his bike. In the summer when the screens were in, we could hear him fighting with his father, Ed, a town selectman who came home drunk most nights and yelled at his wife, Kay, who was my mother’s best friend.

  Now Matt was seventeen, about to be a senior, and he towered so high above me at the pool’s edge that he blocked the sun. He hesitated when I asked him why he was trying to reach Meggy. “Well,” he said, “no real reason. We were talking about going to see Alien, maybe. No big deal.” I could tell he was trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Well, our dad stayed home sick today,” I told him. “Meggy might be doing something with him.”

  The night before, we’d watched Cheers with our father, and then he went, uncharacteristically early, to bed. He shut the door, which was also unlike him. In front of the TV he hadn’t laughed at the things Meggy and I found funny, but we didn’t mention this to each other. Instead she stayed in the living room long after I’d settled down in bed with a book. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I could still hear the TV. I went out to the living room to see if she’d fallen asleep on the couch.

  “Are you awake?” I asked. A talk show blared in the background, but except for the glow from the TV, the room was dark. As I moved to turn on a lamp she made a sound of protest, but the room was already lit, and I saw she was sucking her thumb. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” She frowned and slid her thumb out. Then, in a whisper: “Ana?”

  “What?” Huddled into a corner of the couch, she looked more like my little sister—the girl in purple shorts and Cookie Monster T-shirt—than the angular, moody young woman she’d become during the past year. I hadn’t returned home as much to visit during that year, my last at college, and it shocked me each time I saw her after being away. She was already taller than either Justine or me, and she always wore black clothes, as if her most fervent wish was to blend into the background. My father often brought home blouses with bright colors from expensive stores, but she never put them on. “I can’t stand all that black,” he said to me one night, when it was just the two of us for dinner. “She looks like Morticia on The Addams Family. Or Zorro, for God’s sake.”

  “She’s fifteen, Dad. We can’t tell her what to wear.”

  “I know,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. “Remember those little dresses she used to have? Remember the one with the strawberry pocket?”

  “We all wore that dress. Aunt Rosemary gave it to me.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, but I knew he didn’t have any memories of the same dress on Justine or me.

  The night before she died, Meggy appeared to be deciding whether she should confide something. Finally she shook her head and said, “Never mind.”

  “But what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I said.” She smiled, but I could see her mouth quiver. “Go back to bed.”

  “You sure?” I knew there had to be more, but I was still halfway asleep, and I felt the word bed luring me back.

  Meggy nodded without meeting my eyes. “Okay, then,” I said. “Good night.”

  “’Night,” she murmured, drawing a cushion close. The TV remained on and in my room I fell asleep to the sounds of people shouting at each other and contemptuous applause.

  Now, at the pool, I considered telling Matt that it seemed Meggy had had something on her mind. But since I didn’t know what it was, I decided not to say anything. “I’m sure she’ll be home soon,” I said. “When you get back from swimming, try again.”

  “Okay.” Matt hesitated, and I thought he was about to say something else; he looked nervous, but I told myself he was only squinting at the sun. He gave me a slight, almost guilty smile and headed off toward the pack of teenagers gathered by the deep end of the pool. When they were younger, they all used to sit here in segregated circles. The girls would paint their toenails as they passed around Seventeen, while the boys played tapes of the B-52s on a boom box. Now the sexes blended in a miasma of laughter, the bodies under their bathing suits ropy with suntanned desire.

  When I returned the Melnick kids to their house around five o’clock, I called home and the machine picked up. I wasn’t worried, because there was any number of things Dad and Meggy might be out doing. Still, I felt a pulse of alarm when I remembered leaving my father in the morning, the vacant look in his eyes as he hugged me good-bye. But Meggy would have helped him out of it, by now. She would have taken him to a movie that would have them both laughing. Something silly, starring Bette Midler or Chevy Chase. When I got home he’d tell me about it: “I know I was a little off when I saw you this morning, but Meggo cheered me right up.”

  I was browning ground beef for supper tacos when the doorbell rang. “Can you get that, Sarah?” I called into the TV room. When the bell rang again, I swore and turned the stove down. Donald, the eight-year-old, was blocking my way, holding up a sloshing Sprite bottle.

  “Did I show you my collection of fluids yet?” he asked solemnly. “It’s in here.”

  “Just a minute, Don,” I said. At the screen door I saw two men in police uniforms, and felt a prickle shoot through me as I tried to remember what I had done wrong.

  One of the cops asked me, “Are you Anastasia Dolan?” Josh was hiding behind my legs, but he peeked around the side as I opened the door.

  “Yeah,” I said, hearing the wariness in my voice. Suddenly it occurred to me that something must have happened to Mr. and Mrs. Melnick—a train derailment, a sniper in Times Square. “Josh, go in there with Don and Sarah, okay?” Reluctantly he padded away, still looking over his shoulder at the big men in uniforms.

  “We have some upsetting news,” the officer said. He looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure where I had seen him before. “Bad news,” he added, as if clarifying what he’d said at first. In the kitchen, the meat was still sizzling, and I said, “Let me just turn off the stove,” and the other officer told me, “I’ll get it,” and he clumped heavily back toward the kitchen. While he was gone I said to the first one, “You hungry?” and he started to smile but then caught himself, and this time he put a hand out to touch my arm.

  “It’s your father and your sister,” he said. I thought he meant it as in, There’s your father and your sister, as if they had somehow entered the Melnicks’ house, behind me, and I hadn’t seen them yet. I wasn’t even sure which sister he was referring to, although instinct told me he meant Meggy.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dolan. But we got a call about an hour ago, we went to investigate, and—they’ve suffered fatal injuries.” He cleared his throat when I just frowned at him, and added, “They’ve died.”

  I remember I felt the impulse to laugh; by the time the words reached me, they were pure gibberish. “I have to feed the kids,” I said to the officers, backing my way down the hall and into the kitchen, reaching out to keep my balance against the wall. The officers looked at each other, then followed me.

  In the kitchen, I picked up the wooden spoon I’d been stirring the beef with and added seasoning to the mix. The first officer, the one I knew from somewhere, said, “We need you to come with us. Ms. Dolan?” He came over to the stove and lifted a hand as if he thought I might need support, but when I didn’t sway or fold, he held back his touch.

  “I can’t. The kids.” I gestured at the three of them, lined u
p in the doorway of the family room. I concentrated on making out the scar above Sarah’s eyebrow, the bristles of Donald’s crew cut, the baby’s pillowy knees. “Call me Ana,” I told the officers, hearing what I said but still making no sense of it. “They’re hungry. Their parents are in the city watching a play.”

  “I’ll stay with them,” the second man told me. “You go ahead with Officer Garhart—with Frank here.”

  “Oh,” I said, “Garhart. Monica’s brother. You used to chase us around the house in your Herman Munster mask.”

  “Guilty,” he said, and smiled, but then I saw him remember his purpose here, and his face grew solemn again.

  “What’d she do?” Sarah asked the officers, and I could tell she was afraid to look at me. Then that concern slid into second place. “Frank’s a silly name,” she said. “What are you, a hot dog?” She cracked up at her own joke.

  “I was named after a singer my mom liked,” Frank told her quietly, but he was looking at me.

  I said, “Sinatra?”

  “No. Zappa.”

  “That’s funny too,” Sarah said with delight.

  The other policeman, who had offered to stay behind as baby-sitter, took off his belt and handed it over, with the gun still in its holster, to Monica Garhart’s brother. “Nobody did anything wrong, you guys,” he told the kids. “There was an accident.” Then he took off his badge and held it out to Josh, who looked at his sister for permission before accepting it. I watched all of this, the movement of moments in front of me, without seeing or, it seemed, breathing—but I must have breathed; lungs work, don’t they? even after the mind shuts down. I let Frank lead me by the elbow out the door, not feeling his touch. The children called ’Bye behind me and I called back, without turning, Be good, but it was my father’s voice and not my own saying the words.

  On hard legs I went to get into the backseat of the police car, because that’s how they always did it on TV. But Frank opened the front door instead and helped me into the passenger seat. Lois Phelps and her elderly father were sitting on her porch across the street, and I saw them both lean forward to get a better look. Three houses down, a children’s kickball game on the Shoobys’ front lawn paused in midplay as the kids gathered to watch from around the Frisbee that served as home plate. It was only after I was inside the car that I saw the metal lattice-wall behind me, separating the backseat from the front. “Sorry,” Frank said, seeing me notice. “The cage car was all we had free.”

  “I’ve never seen the inside of a police car before. In real life, I mean.” I was suffocating, slowly. Something I couldn’t see pushed down on me and made the landscape shrink.

  “Well, then, I guess you’ve never broken any laws. Or been caught at it, anyway.” Static flickered over the radio, and Frank reached to turn it down. “I guess if I punched you up in our computer, I wouldn’t find a match.”

  I was having trouble comprehending. When he said, “punched you up,” all I could think of was him punching me in the stomach, and this puzzled me, but in the next instant the puzzlement vanished, along with the memory of what he’d just said. “Where are we going?”

  “I need to take you to the station.”

  “Could I go home first? I want to get a sweater.” It was the end of June, still hot and light outside, but I was shivering. When he didn’t say anything right away, I turned to look at him and saw a wince cross his face. “What?” I said. Something about his silence made the juice in my stomach go sour. “Where were they?”

  “Where were they?” he repeated. Later I would understand that he just wanted to delay my knowing, but at the moment I almost believed he was mocking me—the way children, to be annoying, will echo whatever you say.

  “When they had the accident.” I had it all laid out in my mind: the busy parking lot at the Cinemaxx, somebody speeding through a stop sign and broadsiding my father’s car. Meggy putting her hands up against the windshield; my father, knowing what was about to happen, throwing his arm across her to keep her from hitting the glass.

  “Actually, Ana, they were home.” We had reached the police station, which had been converted to its current use ten years earlier from our old elementary school. Frank parked at the curb, where we used to line up for our buses at the buzzer signaling the end of each school day. I could almost hear the shouts from that time, as if they had been etched indelibly in the atmosphere—You retard! McCany’s a fairy! as he switched off the ignition and turned to me in the seat.

  “What do you mean, they were home?” I said. “How could they have an accident at home?” I felt a rush of hope: if they had been home, that meant they were safe, which meant that all of this had to be a mistake.

  “Let’s go inside first, okay?” Frank got out and came around to my side to open the door, like an old-fashioned date. While I was waiting for him, I looked down at the siren controls on the panel between the seats. Yelp, read one of the dial settings. Underneath that was Wail.

  I followed him inside the building, to the foyer. It was here that Gordon Zukowski, in fifth grade, put on Mrs. Teague’s wet rain bonnet and started singing I Honestly Love You like Olivia Newton-John, making Abigail Knott laugh so hard she peed straight through her underpants onto the floor. In high school Gordon was arrested for soliciting sex in the Shamrock, but that was a long time away from happening (so was Abigail Knott’s self-induced abortion the night before SATs) when we all went to school here together and left our muddy rubber-tracks in the hall.

  Now that it was a police station, you rounded a corner by the old Teachers’ Lounge before you came to the reception area. Frank got there first, and before I came in view of the desk, the man sitting there asked him, “Hey, did Tom Dolan really do his daughter?” Then he saw me and his face blanched as he realized who I must be.

  “Jesus, Len.” Frank turned on his heel fast, as if afraid he might have to run after and catch me. “Ana, listen. Come here.” He led me, again by the elbow, over to a bench by the water fountain, which had been lifted in the wall from the design of grammar-school days. I still didn’t understand what was happening, and I didn’t believe my father and Meggy were dead, because of what Frank had said about their being at home. And the only times I had ever heard the expression “do,” in terms of a man doing a woman, it meant he had had sex with her. So it couldn’t be my father and Meggy the officer was talking about.

  “I hate this,” Frank said, and I could see sweat dotting his upper lip. “I’ve never had to tell anybody something like this before. But your father and your sister—Margaret?”

  “Meggy.” Even though it was our mother’s name, Meggy hated Margaret. She thought it made her sound like an old lady.

  Frank winced again. “Okay. Listen, Ana. They’re dead, and it looks like a murder-suicide. It’s pretty clear. It looks like your father shot—Meggy—and then shot himself.”

  “That’s impossible,” I told him. I actually felt relieved. If he had told me they’d spun into oncoming traffic on the bypass, there would have been no reason not to believe him. The idea of my father with a gun, let alone of him shooting Meggy, was absurd.

  Yet even as I thought about how to say this to Frank, I remembered the look on my father’s face that morning as he sat at the breakfast table. I thought about how odd it felt to know that he had stopped being aware of me even though I was still in the room. And I knew, even though my mind hadn’t caught up with the feeling, that what Frank told me was true.

  “Where’s Justine,” I said. I didn’t even have the energy to make it sound like a question.

  “She’s at the hospital. No, don’t worry—he didn’t—God, let me start over.” Frank bit his lip. “She was the one who—she came home, and that’s how we knew something happened.”

  “She saw them?”

  “I think it was just your father. Then she got sick. You know, shock. She started throwing up and couldn’t stop.” He took a deep breath as if he might be feeling nauseated himself. “I believe she also made so
me gesture toward hurting herself—probably just an impulse, but she cut herself with a stone from the walkway in front of your house. A sharp edge, I guess. They brought her in for observation to make sure she was okay.”

  “I want to go there.” My voice sounded dead.

  “You know, your mother’s on her way out here from—where is it, Delphi? Don’t you want to wait for her? Besides, I think they might have given your sister something to make her sleep.”

  “I don’t care. Take me.” I had forgotten I had a mother until Frank said the word. Maybe not forgotten, exactly. But it was my sister I wanted to see.

  “Okay.” Frank sighed and supported me as I stood up from the bench. The hours after that, in my memory, all converge at a single point, the sensation of being led down the hospital hall to the room where Justine lay curled on a bed in the children’s wing. On the way I passed the lounge, where kids on crutches or attached to machines watched cartoons on a VCR. From a distant room came a cry: “You promised! You promised!” and the sad sound of parents trying to soothe.

  When I reached Justine, she was facing the wall, away from me, and even when I touched her shoulder she didn’t turn. I yanked her roughly, and when her body fell toward me I saw that she was asleep. Or not asleep: they had taken the chemical equivalent of a hammer and knocked her out—every trace of emotion and intelligence had been erased from her features so that her face was remote and blank. She still had on the clothes she’d come home in, a denim shirt over a tank top, and cutoff shorts so tight and tattered that my father would never have let her wear them out of the house if he’d seen her, if he’d been in his right mind.