Jackie’s words stuck with me: Way things are with your mother, you’re better in Chicago. How much more of a sign did I need to leave Wind Gap? I wondered exactly why she and Adora had fallen out. Had to be more than a forgotten greeting card. I made a mental note to drop by Jackie’s when she was less looped. If she ever was. Then again, I was hardly the one to frown on a drinker.
Sailing on a nice wine buzz, I called the Nashes from the convenience store, and a quivering girl’s voice said hello and then went silent. I could hear breathing, but no answer to my requests to speak with Mom or Dad. Then a slow, sliding click before the line went dead. I decided to try my luck in person.
A boxy disco-era minivan sat in the Nash driveway next to a rusty yellow Trans Am, which I assumed meant both Bob and Betsy were home. The eldest daughter answered the bell, but simply stood inside the screen door staring at my stomach when I asked if her folks were home. The Nashes were built tiny. This one, Ashleigh, I knew was twelve, but like the pudgy boy I’d met on my first visit, she looked several years younger than her age. And acted it. She sucked on her hair and hardly blinked when little Bobby waddled next to her and began crying at the sight of me. Then howling. A good minute went by before Betsy Nash came to the door. She looked as dazed as both her children, and seemed confused when I introduced myself.
“Wind Gap don’t have a local daily paper,” she said.
“Right, I’m from the Chicago Daily Post,” I said. “Up in Chicago. Illinois.”
“Well, my husband deals with purchases like that,” she said, and began running her fingers through her son’s blond hair.
“I’m not selling a subscription or anything…. Is Mr. Nash home? Maybe I could just chat with him real quick?”
All three Nashes moved away from the door en masse, and after another few minutes, Bob Nash had me ushered inside and was throwing laundry off the couch to make room for me to sit.
“Goddammit, this place is a pit,” he muttered loudly toward his wife. “I apologize for the state of our home, Miss Preaker. Things have kinda gone to hell ever since Ann.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it at all,” I said, pulling a pair of tiny boys’ undies from beneath me. “This is what my place looks like all the time.” This was the opposite of true. One quality I did inherit from my mother was a compulsive neatness. I have to stop myself from ironing socks. When I got back from the hospital, I even went through a period of boiling things: tweezers and eyelash curlers, bobby pins and toothbrushes. It was an indulgence I allowed myself. I ended up trashing the tweezers, though. Too many late-night thoughts about their shiny, warm points. Dirty girl, indeed.
I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who’d end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town.
“Mr. Nash, I need to speak some more with you about Ann. For a larger piece,” I started. “You’ve been very kind with your time, and I was hoping to get a little bit more.”
“Anything that might get this case a little attention, we don’t mind,” he said. “What do you need to know?”
“What kind of games did she like, what kind of foods did she like? What would be some words you’d use to describe her? Did she tend to be a ringleader or a follower? Did she have lots of friends or just a few close ones? How did she like school? What did she do on her Saturdays?” The Nashes stared at me in silence for a second. “Just for starters,” I smiled.
“My wife would be the one to answer most of those questions,” Bob Nash said. “She’s the…caregiver.” He turned to Betsy Nash, who was folding and refolding the same dress on her lap.
“She liked pizza and fishsticks,” she said. “And she had lots of girls she was friendly with, but only a few close friends, if you know what I mean. She played by herself a lot.”
“Look, Mommy, Barbie needs clothes,” said Ashleigh, wielding a naked plastic doll in front of her mother’s face. All three of us ignored her, and she tossed the toy to the floor and began twirling around the room in fake ballerina moves. Seeing a rare chance, Tiffanie pounced on the Barbie and began splaying the rubbery tan legs open and shut, open and shut.
“She was tough, she was my toughest,” Bob Nash said. “She could have played football if she’d been a boy. She’d knock herself silly just running around, always had scrapes and bruises.”
“Ann was my mouth,” Betsy said quietly. Then she said no more.
“How is that, Mrs. Nash?”
“She was a real talker, said whatever come into her mind. In a good way. Mostly.” She was silent again for a few beats, but I could see her thinking back behind her eyes so I said nothing. “You know, I thought maybe she’d be a lawyer or college debater or something someday, because she was just…she never stopped to measure her words. Like me. I think everything I say is stupid. Ann thought everyone should hear everything she had to say.”
“You mentioned school, Miss Preaker,” interrupted Bob Nash. “That’s where her talkativeness got her in trouble. She could be a little bossy, and we got a few calls from her teachers over the years about her not taking too well to class. She was a little wild.”
“But sometimes I think it was because she was just so smart,” added Betsy Nash.
“She was whip smart, yup,” Bob Nash nodded. “Sometimes I thought she was smarter than her old man. Sometimes she thought she was smarter than her old man.”
“Look at me, Mommy!” Piggy Tiffanie, who had been chewing mindlessly on Barbie’s toes, ran to the center of the living room and began doing somersaults. Ashleigh, seized by some phantom anger, yelped at the sight of her mother’s attention on the second daughter, and gave her a hard shove. Then yanked her hair emphatically once. Tiffanie’s face split in a red wail, which started Bobby Jr. crying again.
“It’s Tiffanie’s fault,” Ashleigh screamed, and began whimpering also.
I had shattered some delicate dynamic. A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies.
“Betsy,” muttered Bob Nash quietly, eyebrows slightly raised. Bobby Jr. was quickly scooped up and propped on a hip, Tiffanie pulled up from the floor with one hand, another arm around the now inconsolable Ashleigh, and soon the four were moving out of the room.
Bob Nash stared after them a beat.
“Been like that for almost a year now, those girls,” he said. “Them acting like little babies. Thought they were supposed to be anxious to grow up. Ann being gone changes this home more than…” He shifted on the sofa. “It’s just that she was a real person, you know? You think: Nine years old, what’s that? What’s there? But Ann had a personality. I could guess what she’d think about things. I knew, when we were watching TV, what stuff she’d think was funny and what stuff she’d think was dumb. I can’t do that with my other kids. Hell, I can’t do that with my wife. Ann, you just felt her there. I just…” Bob Nash’s throat shut up on him. He stood and turned away from me, turned back once, then away, walked in a circle behind the couch, then stood in front of me. “Goddammit, I want her back. I mean, what now? Is this it?” He threw his hand around the room, toward the doorway where his wife and kids had exited. “Because if this is it, there ain’t much point is there? And goddammit, someone needs to find that man, because he needs to tell me: Why Ann? I need to know that. She was the one I’d always thought would do ok.”
I sat quiet for a second, could feel my pulse in my neck.
“Mr. Nash, it has been suggested to me that maybe Ann’s personality, which you mention was very strong, might have rubbed some people the wrong way. Do you think that could have anything to do with this?”
I could feel him get wary on me, see it in the way he sat down and deliberately leaned back onto the couch, spread his arms and pretended to be casual.
“Rubbed who the wrong way?”
“Well, I understand there were troubles about Ann and a neighbor’s bird? That she may have hurt a neighbor’s bird?”
Bob Nash rubbed his eyes, looked at his feet.
“God, people gossip in this town. No one ever proved Ann did that. She and the neighbors already had bad blood. Joe Duke across the way. His girls, they’re older, they messed with Ann a lot, teased her a lot. Then they have her over to play one day. I don’t really know what happened, but by the time Ann got back here, they were all screaming that she’d killed their goddam bird.” He laughed, shrugged his shoulders. “Be fine by me if she had, it was a noisy old thing.”
“Do you think Ann would be likely to do something like that, if provoked?”
“Well, it was a fool who provoked Ann,” he said. “She didn’t take that kind of thing well. She wasn’t exactly a little lady.”
“Do you think she knew the person who killed her?”
Nash picked up a pink T-shirt from the sofa, folded it in squares like a kerchief. “Used to think no. Now, I think yes. I think she went with someone she knew.”
“Would she be more likely to go with a man or a woman?” I asked.
“So you heard the James Capisi story?”
I nodded.
“Well, a little girl is more likely to trust a person who reminds her of her momma, right?”
Depends on what her momma’s like, I thought.
“But I still think it’s a man. Can’t picture a woman doing all…that to a baby. I hear John Keene has no alibi. Maybe he wanted to kill a little girl, saw Natalie all day every day, and couldn’t take it, the urge, so he went out and killed another little tomboy, girl kind of like Natalie. But then in the end he couldn’t resist, took Natalie too.”
“Is that the talk?” I asked.
“Some of it, I s’pose.”
Betsy Nash appeared suddenly in the doorway. Looking down at her knees, she said, “Bob. Adora is here.” My stomach clenched without my permission.
My mother breezed in, smelling like bright blue water. She looked more comfortable in the Nash house than Mrs. Nash did. It was a natural gift for Adora, making other women feel incidental. Betsy Nash retired from the room, like some maid from a 1930s movie. My mother refused to look at me, but went straight to Bob Nash.
“Bob, Betsy told me there was a reporter here, and I knew right then it was my daughter. I’m so sorry. I can’t apologize enough for the intrusion.”
Bob Nash stared at Adora, then at me. “This is your daughter? I had no idea.”
“No, probably not. Camille’s not the family type.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Nash asked me.
“I told you I was from Wind Gap. I had no idea you’d be interested in who my mother was.”
“Oh, I’m not angry, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that your mother is a very good friend to us,” he said, as if she were some big-hearted patron. “She tutored Ann in English and spelling. Your mother and Ann were very close. Ann was very proud she had an adult friend.”
My mother sat with her hands folded in her lap, skirt spread out along the couch, and blinked at me. I felt as if I were being warned not to say something, but I didn’t know what.
“I had no idea,” I finally said. True. I’d thought my mother was overplaying her mourning, pretending to know those girls. Now I was surprised at how subtle she’d been. But why in the world was she tutoring Ann? She’d done the mother’s-aide thing at my school when I was a kid—mainly to spend time with other Wind Gap housewives—but I couldn’t picture her noblesse oblige extending to spending afternoons with a unkempt girl from the west side of town. Occasionally I underestimated Adora. I suppose.
“Camille, I think you should leave,” Adora said. “I’m here on a social visit and it’s difficult for me to relax around you these days.”
“I’m not quite done talking with Mr. Nash.”
“Yes, you are.” Adora looked at Nash for confirmation, and he smiled awkwardly, like someone staring down the sun.
“Maybe we can pick this up later, Miss…Camille.” A word suddenly flashed on my lower hip: punish. I could feel it getting hot.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Nash,” I said, and strode out of the room, not looking at my mother. I began crying before I’d even reached my car.