The girls loved those groups and those songs because their father did, but there was a whole emotional spectrum of which they were unaware. They hadn’t heard “I Call Your Name” while making out in the back of Terry’s father’s car, Terry’s lips on her neck, Terry’s hand under her sweater. They hadn’t heard “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the current track coming down from upstairs, while sitting on the couch in the first apartment where they’d lived together, holding hands, watching A Hard Day’s Night on the battered VHS they’d picked up at a rummage sale for twenty dollars, the Fab Four young and running amok in black-and-white, Marcy knowing she was going to marry the young man sitting next to her even if he didn’t know it yet. Had John Lennon already been dead when they watched that old tape? Shot down in the street just as her husband had been?
She didn’t know, couldn’t remember. All she knew was she, Sarah, and Grace had gotten through the funeral with their dignity intact, but now the funeral was over, her life as a single mom (oh, that horrible phrase) stretched ahead of her, and the cheerful music was driving her mad with sorrow. Every harmonized vocal, each clever George Harrison riff, was a fresh wound. Twice she had gotten up from where she sat at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of coffee in front of her. Twice she had gone to the foot of the stairs and drawn in breath to shout, No more! Shut it off! And twice she had gone back to the kitchen. They were grieving, too.
This time when she got up, Marcy went to the utensil drawer and pulled it all the way out. She thought there would be nothing there, but her hand found a pack of Winston cigarettes. There were three left inside. No, make that four—one was hiding all the way in back. She hadn’t smoked since her younger daughter’s fifth birthday, when she’d had a coughing fit while mixing the batter for Gracie’s cake, and had vowed there and then to quit forever. Yet instead of throwing these last soldiers of cancer out, she had tossed them in back of the utensil drawer, as if some dark and prescient part of her had known she would eventually need them again.
They’re five years old. They’ll be stale as hell. You’ll probably cough until you pass out.
Good. So much the better.
She took one from the pack, greedy for it already. Smokers never stop, they only pause, she thought. She went to the stairs and cocked her head. “And I Love Her” had given way to “Tell Me Why” (that eternal question). She could imagine the girls sitting on Grace’s bed, not talking, just listening. Holding hands, maybe. Taking the sacrament of Daddy. Daddy’s albums, some bought at Turn Back the Hands of Time, the record store in Cap City, some bought online, all held in the hands that had once held his daughters.
She crossed the living room to the little potbellied stove they lit only on really cold winter nights, and reached blindly for the box of Diamond matches on the nearby shelf, blindly because on that shelf also stood a row of pictures she could not currently bear to look at. Maybe in a month she could. Maybe in a year. How long did it take to recover from the first, rawest stage of grief? She could probably find a fairly definitive answer on WebMD, but was afraid to look.
At least the reporters had gone away after the funeral, rushing back to Cap City to cover some fresh political scandal, and she wouldn’t have to risk the back porch, where one of the girls might look out the window and see her renewing her old vice. Or in the garage, where they might smell the smoke if they came out for a fresh bundle of LPs.
She opened the front door, and there stood Ralph Anderson, with his fist raised to knock.
11
The horror with which she stared at him—as if he were some kind of monster, maybe a zombie from that TV show—struck Ralph like a blow to the chest. He had time to see the disarray of her hair, a splotch of something on the lapel of her robe (which was too big for her; maybe it was Terry’s), the slightly bent cigarette between her fingers. And something else. She had always been a fine-looking woman, but she was losing her looks already. He would have called that impossible.
“Marcy—”
“No. You don’t belong here. You need to get out of here.” Her voice was low, breathless, as if someone had punched her.
“I need to talk to you. Please let me talk to you.”
“You killed my husband. There’s nothing else to say.”
She started to swing the door closed. Ralph held it with his hand. “I didn’t kill him, but yes, I played a part. Call me an accomplice, if that’s what you want. I never should have arrested him the way I did. It was wrong on God knows how many different levels. I had my reasons, but they weren’t good reasons. I—”
“Take your hand off the door. Do it now, or I’ll have you arrested.”
“Marcy—”
“Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that, not after what you did. The only reason I’m not screaming my head off is because my daughters are upstairs, listening to their dead father’s records.”
“Please.” He thought to say, Don’t make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn’t enough. “I’m begging you. Please talk to me.”
She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. “I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here’s the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get . . . the fuck . . . off my doorstep.”
“What if he didn’t do it?”
Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment.
“What if he . . . ? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn’t do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?”
“If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there, and he’s responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours.”
She considered this for a moment, then said: “Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn’t you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy.”
She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away.
12
Marcy stood trembling on her side of the door. She felt her knees go loose, and managed to make it to the bench near the door where people sat when they took off boots or muddy shoes. Upstairs, the Beatle who had been murdered was singing about all the things he was going to do when he got home. Marcy looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if unsure how it had gotten there, then snapped it in two and slipped the pieces into the pocket of the robe she was wearing (it was indeed Terry’s). At least he saved me from starting up that shit again, she thought. Maybe I should write him a thank-you note.
The nerve of him coming to her door, after taking a wrecking bar to her family and flailing around with it until all was in ruins. The pure cruel in-your-face nerve of it. Only . . .
If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there.
And how was she supposed to handle that, when she couldn’t even find the strength to go on WebMD and find out how long the first stage of grief lasted? And why was she supposed to do anything? How was it her responsibility? The police had gotten the wrong man and stubbornly persisted even after checking Terry’s alibi and finding it as solid as Gibraltar. Let them find the right one, if they had the guts to do so. Her job was to get through today without going insane, and then—in some future that was hard to contemplate—figure out what came next in her life. Was she supposed to live here, when half the town believed the man who had assassinated her husband was doing God’s work? Was she supposed to condemn her daughters to those cannibal societies known as middle school and high school, where even wearing the wrong sneakers could get you ridiculed and ostracized?
Sending Anderson away was the right thing. I cannot have him in my house. Yes, I heard the honesty in his voice—at least I think I did—but how can I, after what he did?
If he didn’t, whoever did . . .
“Shut up,” she whispered to herself. “Just shut up, please shut up.”
. . . is still out there.
And what if he did it again?
13