A Traitor to Memory

He sank back in his chair and, like me, looked over at the dog who so wanted our attention. He said, “No place for a creature with complicated needs,” and I couldn't tell if he was referring to the animal, to himself, to me, or to my sister. “At first it was her heart. An atrioseptal defect, it was called. It wasn't long—just after her birth—when we knew from her colour and her pulse that there was trouble. So they performed an operation on her and we thought, Right. That's taken care of the problem. But then it was her stomach: duodenal stenosis. Very common among Down's children, we were told. As if her being Down's in the first place was as minor an issue as the poor creature having a wandering eye. More surgery then. After that, imperforate anus. Hmm, we were told, this particular little one appears to be at the farthest extreme of the syndrome. So many problems. Let's see if we can cut her open again. And again. And again. And then give her hearing aids. And bottles of medicine. And of course, we can only hope she'll be happy to have her body invaded and probed and rearranged on a regular basis till we get her sorted out.”





“Dad …” I wanted to prevent the rest. He'd said enough. He'd gone through enough: not only to have lived through her suffering but also to have lived through her death. And before that death, to have borne his own grief, my mother's, and no doubt his parents' …





Before I could finish what I'd wanted to say to him, I heard my grandfather all at once again. I felt the breath leave me as if I'd taken a punch to the gut, but I had to ask. I said, “Dad, how did Granddad cope with all this?”





“Cope? He wouldn't attend the trial. He—”





“I don't mean the trial. I mean Sonia. How she … how she was.”





And I can hear him, Dr. Rose. I can hear him howling as he always howled—Lear-like—although the storm that raged round him was not of the moors but of his own mind. Freaks! he's shouting. You're capable of giving me nothing but freaks! There's spittle at the corners of his mouth, and although my grandmother takes his arm and murmurs his name, he hears and is aware of nothing but the wind and the rain and the thunder in his head.

Dad said, “Your grandfather was a troubled man, Gideon. But a great and good man. His demons were fierce, but so was his battle against them.”





“Did he love her?” I asked. “Did he hold her? Did he play with her? Did he think of her as his grandchild?”





“Sonia was ill for a great part of the time she was with us. She was very fragile.”





“So he didn't, did he?” I asked my father. “He didn't … anything.”





Dad made no reply. Instead, he rose and walked to the railing. The Old English sheep dog yelped in near soundlessness, pawing at his own rails with an eagerness that was as obvious as it was pathetic. “Why do they do that to animals?” Dad said. “For the love of God, it's so bloody unnatural. If people want a pet, they should accommodate the pet. If they don't, they should damn well get rid of it.”





“You aren't going to tell me, are you?” I asked him. “About Granddad and Sonia. You aren't going to tell me.”





“Your grandfather was who your grandfather was,” my father replied. And that was the end of it.

8





LIBERTY NEALE KNEW that if she'd only had the luck to meet Rock Peters somewhere in Mexico and to marry him there, she wouldn't have been in her current position because she could have divorced the creep in a micro-flash and that would have been the end of it. But no, she hadn't met him in Mexico. She hadn't even gone to Mexico. She'd come to England because she'd been such a total zero in foreign language in high school that England was the closest place to California that resembled a foreign country, where people spoke a language that Libby understood. Canada hardly counted.