FOURTEEN

Jake went immediately for the vodka, and when he lifted the pillow from the bar, I saw that the Bat Phone was blinking madly with messages.

“Should I play this?”

“Yes.”

Following the messages from Natalie that she had left the day before was one from Emily, who said she had also left a message on my other phone.

“But this one seems more appropriate somehow,” she continued. “Remember, you are entering a new and exciting period of your life. I’ll try later tonight after I’ve put the kids to bed.”

“I always hear half of what she says as ‘blah, blah, blah,’” I said.

Jake walked into the kitchen in order to retrieve his glass.

Sarah came next. Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor.

“Mom? Fuck, leave me alone, asshole. Sorry, Mom, some jerk likes fat asses, apparently. Listen, your other phone is busy. I’m on my way to Penn Station, and I’m taking the earlier train. I’ll get in around two thirty, okay? If you can’t meet me, I’ll cross over and sit in that hideous T.G.I. Friday’s, if that’s what it is anymore. Maybe get some cheese fries. Die, asshole! I mean it. Sorry, Mom. Two thirty, okay? Bye.”

I paused over the liquor cabinet and waited for the machine to tell me what day and what time the message had been left. This marked the before time, I thought, before my children knew I’d killed their grandmother.

Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.

“That’s your second round today,” I said.

“No rules apply.”

I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father’s letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we’d chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.

While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one café and go to the French-American bookstore. I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marché, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs. Leverton’s house and theirs.

“That gives us two hours,” Jake said. “I’m going to shower. What are you going to tell her, Helen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You better figure it out. Sarah’s no idiot, and this isn’t over the phone.”

“Emily,” I said.

“Call her back.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it,” Jake said, and left the room.

Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child’s memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.

Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout-quite bossily, I always felt-“I do!”

I heard Jake above me in the girls’ bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily’s number.

It rang three times.

No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.

“Jeanine?”

Nothing.

“Jeanine, it’s Grandma. Is Mommy there?”

I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.

“Hello?” I said.

I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.

“Hello?” I called again. Louder this time.

I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.

“What are you doing?” I’d asked.

“Hiding,” she’d said.

I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the closet floor along her left side. I had batted at her gown in order to clean it off.

“Stop hitting me!” she’d shrieked. “Stop hitting me!”

And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.

“I only wanted to change the tablecloth.”

Why hadn’t I told her, “You don’t understand-my mother hides in there”?

I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV. In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television-a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I’d asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders. “Who has time to read?”

I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.

“I suffocated her on the side porch,” I whispered over the phone. There was no response. “I cut off her braid and took it home.”

Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.

I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.

I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the “almost Asian look,” but in herself she saw nothing.

Along with my father’s letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman’s name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I’d composed for effect-corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats-and lit into Emily’s teacher with all my might. This had succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.

I heard Jake gargling on the girls’ side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.