A Traitor to Memory

“No.” Everything was becoming so much clearer. It was as if the shock of learning of her death suddenly blew the fog from my mind. I said, “It doesn't make sense that Katja Wolff would have agreed to your plan. That she would give up so many years of her life … for what, Dad? For me? For you? I wasn't anything to her and neither were you. Isn't that true? You weren't her lover. You weren't the father of her child. Raphael was, wasn't he? So it makes no sense that she agreed. You must have tricked her. You must have … what? Planted evidence? Twisted the facts?”





“How the hell can you accuse me of that?”





“Because I see it. Because I understand. Because how would Granddad have reacted, Dad, to the news that his freak of a granddaughter had just been drowned by her freak of a brother? And that's what it must have come down to in the end: Keep the truth from Granddad no matter what.”





“She was a willing participant because of the money. Twenty thousand pounds for admitting to a negligent act that led to Sonia's death. I explained all that. I told you that we didn't expect the press's reaction to the case or the Crown Prosecutor's passion to put her in prison. We had no idea—”





“You did it to protect me. And all your talk about leaving Sonia in the bath to die—of holding her down yourself—is just that: talk. It serves the same purpose as letting Katja Wolff take the blame twenty years ago. It keeps me playing the violin. Or at least it's supposed to.”





“What are you saying?”





“You know what I'm saying. It's over. Or it will be once I collect the money to pay Katja Wolff her four hundred thousand pounds.”





“No! You don't owe her … For God's sake, think. She may well have been the person who ran over your mother!”





I stared at him. My mouth said the word, “What?” but my voice did not. And my brain could not take in what he was saying.

He continued to talk, saying words that I heard but did not assimilate. Hit-and-run, I heard. No accident, Gideon. A car ploughing over her twice. Three times. A deliberate death. Indeed, a murder.

“I didn't have the money to pay her,” he said. “You didn't know who she was. So she would have tracked down your mother next. And when Eugenie hadn't the money to pay her … You see what happened, don't you? You do see what happened?”





They were words falling against my ears, but they meant nothing to me. I heard them, but I didn't comprehend. All I knew was that my hope for deliverance from my crime was gone. For if I had been unable to believe anything else, I did believe in her. I did believe in my mother.

Why? you ask.

Because she left us, Dr. Rose. And while she might indeed have left us because she couldn't come to terms with her grief over my sister's death, I believe that she left us because she couldn't come to terms with the lie she'd have had to live should she have stayed.

20 November, 2:00 P.M.

Dad departed when it became apparent that I had finished talking. But I was alone ten minutes only—perhaps even less—when Raphael took his place.

He looked like hell. Blood red traced a curve along his lower eyelashes. That and flesh in a shade like ashes were the only colours in his face.

He came to me and put his hand on my shoulder. We faced each other and I watched his features begin to dissolve, as if he had no skull beneath his skin to hold him together but, rather, a substance that had always been soluble, vulnerable to the right element that could melt it.

He said, “She wouldn't stop punishing herself.” His hand tightened and tightened on my shoulder. I wanted to cry out or jerk back from the pain, but I couldn't move because I couldn't risk even a gesture that might make him stop talking. “She couldn't forgive herself, Gideon, but she never—she never, I swear it—stopped thinking of you.”





“Thinking of me?” I repeated numbly as I tried to absorb what he was saying. “How do you know? How do you know she never stopped thinking …?”





His face gave me the answer before he spoke it: He'd not lost contact with my mother in all the years that she'd been gone from our lives. He'd never stopped talking to her on the phone. He'd never stopped seeing her: in pubs, restaurants, hotel lounges, parks, and museums. She would say, “Tell me how Gideon is getting on, Raphael,” and he would supply her with the information that newspapers, critical reviews of my playing, magazine articles, and gossip within the community of classical musicians couldn't give her.

“You've seen her,” I said. “You've seen her. Why?”





“Because she loved you.”





“No. I mean, why did you do it?”





“She wouldn't let me tell you,” he said brokenly. “Gideon, she swore she would stop our meetings if she ever learned that I'd told you I'd seen her.”





“And you couldn't bear that, could you,” I said bitterly, because finally I understood it all. I'd seen the answers in those long-ago flowers he'd brought to her and I read them in his reaction now, when she was gone and he could no longer entertain the fantasy that there might be something of significance that would bloom one day between them. “Because if she stopped seeing you, then what would happen to your little dream?”