He waited two days to tell Alex, on a quiet rainy weekend. He didn’t want to do it at night, so he shared the bad news after breakfast and knew he would never forget the ravaged look on her face.
“It’s not true! You’re lying!” Alex shouted at him, then ran up the stairs to her room and slammed the door. He found her on her bed, her head beneath the pillows, sobbing, and it took her hours to calm down. They went for a walk together, and later when she was in bed, he called Vince’s friend in California, and asked about funeral arrangements. Eric wanted to bring Carmen home and bury her next to his first wife, so in later years Alex would know where her mother was. He didn’t want her buried in California in some unmarked grave. The friend gave him the pertinent information, and he called the funeral home the next day and made the arrangements. They said Vince’s body was being sent to his parents in San Diego. But no one had called to claim Carmen. She had no relations that he knew of. Her mother in Havana had died after they got married.
After Eric’s call, Carmen’s body would be in Boston in a few days, for burial. He didn’t tell Alex any of it, and the day after he’d told her of her mother’s death, she handed him a poem she had written for her. It was beautiful and loving and brought tears to his eyes, to think that the woman who had done so little for her had elicited so much love from the child she’d abandoned. It was more than she deserved, and almost more than he could bear.
Chapter 4
Although Alex had always been close to her father, especially since they’d been alone, Carmen’s death brought them even closer. In time, Alex seemed to recover from the shock of losing her mother. Now she no longer had any dashed hopes or expectations of seeing her again, and there was a kind of unspoken closure.
She was reading more than ever. She had graduated to slightly more adult books recently, after finishing the entire Nancy Drew series several months before. Her father had given her some of the gentler “cozy” mysteries, like Agatha Christie, and now Alex was hooked on them. She loved Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, who solved the mysteries, while she tried to figure them out before they did.
She had also been doing a lot of writing. Her fourth grade teacher said she had real talent for writing poetry and haikus. And in fifth grade, she won an English prize for a short story she’d written. It was a very poignant story about a little girl whose mother had been killed. And in sixth grade, two years after her mother’s death, her English teacher, Mr. Farber, called Eric at his office and asked him to come to a meeting at school the next day. The teacher sounded grave, as though Alex had done something terrible, which was hard for her father to imagine since she had never been in trouble at school. He didn’t want to say anything to her about it that evening, until he heard the full story from the teacher.
He went to the meeting with trepidation, and with a somber face, the teacher handed him six pages to read, covered in Alex’s laborious eleven-year-old handwriting.
“I felt that it was important for you to see this, Mr. Winslow. My colleagues and I find it very disturbing.” Eric wondered if Alex had written something shockingly inappropriate, possibly even a hate letter to one of her teachers, or a diatribe about her motherless home life. He was frightened as he began reading after seeing the expression on her teacher’s face. He couldn’t imagine what Alex had written that upset her teacher to that degree. But as he read, he found himself absorbed into a story. She had written it with surprising skill given her age, and a very distinct style all her own.
The first page laid out the characters and initial premise of the story. And by the second page, he was hooked, and wanted to know more. All appeared to be going well by the end of the second page, and on page three she described a gory and terrifying murder, which was pure crime thriller. On the following page, she introduced an intriguing police detective, with a visible sense of humor, despite the horrifying crime. She unveiled several unforeseeable surprises on the fifth page, and on the final page she tied it all together, exposed the murderer, whom one would never have suspected—even Eric didn’t—and sent everyone to jail. It was a brilliant piece of writing and construction for anyone, let alone a child her age, and Eric was grinning proudly as he handed it back to the teacher, thinking he had brought Eric in to congratulate him on his daughter’s writing talent. Their frequent conversations about the crime thrillers he loved to read had obviously paid off and inspired the story.
“Do you realize how shocking it is for a girl of eleven to write something like that?” Mr. Farber said sternly in an accusing tone. “How she can even imagine violence of that nature is something for a psychologist to analyze. Were you aware that she has such morbid thoughts?” he asked Eric reproachfully, who looked stunned for a moment.
“Well, actually, no, I wasn’t aware, but I’m very impressed.” Eric was delighted, and Alex’s English teacher was appalled.
“This is no laughing matter, Mr. Winslow. This story indicates to me that your daughter is a very disturbed young girl.” As he heard it, Eric became severely annoyed.
“It indicates to me that she’s a hell of a writer. The story is flawlessly constructed and even surprised me at the end. I read a lot of crime thrillers, you might say they’re my hobby, and Alex and I discuss them frequently. She appears to pay more attention than I thought.”
“Do you realize how unhealthy and unsuitable it is for a child her age to think about things like this, and have a knowledge of sinister events of this kind? The story reads as though it was written by an adult.”
“I think that’s quite a compliment for her, to have written a short story that can scare the pants off us.”
“You need to take this seriously, Mr. Winslow,” the teacher almost shouted at him.
“I do. She told me several years ago that she wants to write crime thrillers when she grows up. Apparently she was more serious about it than I believed at the time, and this is evidence that with some creative writing classes, she might have the talent to do it.” He refused to believe that her story was the product of a sick mind, but rather the first signs that she might have real ability as a writer, which Eric found exciting. “I am very proud of her,” he said as he stood up. “May I have a copy of the story? I’d like to discuss it with her tonight.” The teacher looked even more outraged, and handed the original to Eric, who folded it and put it in his pocket, and then shook hands with the teacher, who watched him leave his office in disgust.
“You are going to cause her untold psychological damage if you encourage this kind of thing,” were his final words to Eric, and Eric intended to do just that, encourage her. He couldn’t wait to tell her how great her story was.