And perhaps it was her mother’s simple equanimity, but suddenly Kristin felt very much a child herself—once more a shamed schoolgirl or rejected girlfriend in need of a little mother’s love. “I will just be so embarrassed when I’m back at school tomorrow. When I’m in the teachers’ lounge and the classroom,” she said, and her voice broke ever so slightly. “How will I face everybody? I feel so…so violated. I feel humiliated.”
Her mother reached across the small circular kitchen table and tenderly, albeit awkwardly, embraced her. She put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and upper back and ran her fingers gently over her linen blouse. Kristin bowed her head against her mother and asked, “How could he do this to us?” And then, much to her surprise, she was crying, her whole body spasming with her sobs. She was vaguely aware that her mother’s gray cashmere sweater was growing wet from her tears and her nose, but she couldn’t stop herself and she didn’t care.
“There, there,” her mother was saying. “There, there.”
…
Melissa ran her fingers over the waist-high border of the wainscoting that ran along the dining room walls. She was afraid to continue into the kitchen because she could hear her mother crying in there. Again.
Before this weekend, the only other times she could recall her mother crying were when Grandfather had died and then, a year later, when Cassandra’s brother—their other cat, Sebastian—passed away. Sebastian had cancer and there was nothing more the veterinarian could do, and so they had put him to sleep. The lumps, and they were everywhere at the end, were horrible. Melissa recalled how she had cried, too. The veterinarian had come to their house, and Sebastian had been in her mother’s lap when the vet had put him down. Her father had sat rubbing her mother’s shoulders. They’d all been in the living room. Even Cassandra.
She recalled Sebastian’s death a little better than her grandfather’s, because she had been younger when Grandfather died. Not too long ago she had asked her dad if Mommy had cried more for Sebastian, and he had explained that she had been in shock when her father had died. It had been so sudden. So horribly sudden. But still, he had said, her mother had cried plenty.
Nevertheless, Melissa knew that the crying she was hearing now was much worse than anything she had heard from her mother before. It was louder. It was almost childlike in its inconsolability. Hysterical. Her grandmother was trying to comfort her, but having very little success.
Melissa understood that these sobs were brought on because her mother was hurt. Her father had done this. Daddy. She had seen the TV coverage, but she couldn’t imagine her father with any woman but Mommy. In truth, she couldn’t even really envision that. But it was clear that this…wailing…was triggered by whatever her father had done with the women at the party, and not because two people had been killed at their house.
Yet when Melissa tried to re-create in her mind whatever had occurred in Bronxville on Friday night, it was the violence that was most real to her. Two dead people. Strangers murdered with knives and guns, their bodies in the living room and the front hall. She recalled the moments she had seen from scary movies; though those moments were few, they were indelible. Surreptitiously—with babysitters or at her friend Claudia’s house—she had seen her share of zombies and vampires and corpses on late-night TV. And though she had been frightened, she had always taken comfort in the idea that this was make-believe. There were no such things as zombies and vampires; the corpses always were actors in Halloween makeup. But whatever had occurred at her home on Friday night? That was very real.
Now she leaned against the wall and listened to her mother blowing her nose. She was telling Grandmother that she had to get her act together for Melissa. She had to figure out what she was going to say to her daughter. A second later the wooden chair slid against the kitchen tile. Her mother was standing up. Quickly Melissa retreated through the dining room and down the corridor to the guest bedroom. She didn’t want her mother to know that she had been listening. But the one question she was going to be sure and ask her mother when her mother joined her in the bedroom was this: Just how much danger were they in? That was what she wanted to know. She was pretty sure her mother would answer “none,” but Melissa was going to try and read her face when she responded. She also wanted to know when Daddy would be back. She feared she was going to need both of her parents to feel secure—but she had a sick feeling that this just wasn’t going to happen.