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"Well, he can wear it now. She's gone."
"Tell him she's gone. That's another thing, Zipporah," she said in almost a whisper. "He doesn't act like she's gone. He acts like she's still living in the back of the house in her apartment. Why do you think he's never rented it out?
"What do you mean, he acts like she's there? What does he do?"
"He goes back there at night and talks to her." "How do you know that?" I asked.
"I followed him, and I listened at the door. I told my mother, but she doesn't want to hear about it. She was furious at me for spying on him and was terrified he would find out."
"Maybe . ."
"Maybe what, Zipporah?"
"Maybe he just misses her so much he can't stand it," I suggested. "Lots of people talk to their dead relatives. My mother sometimes says things like, 'Ma, where are you when I need you?' Stuff like that."
"This is very different, Zipporah. He talks to her as if he believes she's right there. And he hears her talk back to him, too. I know he does. I hear him answering her questions. He whines and pleads with her."
"So he's pretending," I said, still trying to make it sound like something not so unusual.
"He's a man in his forties, Zipporah. He should have a grip on reality, don't you think?"
"Yes, of course."
"He's not normal. Take my word for it." She looked away for a moment and then turned back to me. "I actually know more about him than my mother does."
"You do? How come?"
"Because of what I hear him say in that apartment. My mother doesn't know half the things his mother did to him when he was little. She had a nice variation on confining him to his room. Instead, she tied his hands behind his back for hours and hours, sometimes most of the day. You want to hear something disgusting? She didn't even untie him when he had to go to the bathroom, and he was no infant, either."
"That is disgusting."
"I heard lots of disgusting things," she said.
"Why did his father let h
er do those things to him?"
"His father was as afraid of Harry's mother as Harry was, from what I understand, and he wasn't around all that often. There's a lot more, a lot I can't even talk about without getting nauseated myself."
I sat there a little stunned and unsure of what to say next. Now I was the one looking down at my hands in my lap. She was suffering, but she couldn't tell her mother, and her mother didn't know what Karen knew about her mother's own husband? She was making it all sound very confusing, but I was afraid to show it, afraid she would only get mad at me. Then I thought of something.
"That time I saw you had a bruise on your arm. Did Harry do it to you?"
She looked as if she wasn't going to answer, and then she nodded.
"He explodes. He'll get angry and just pout or something, which makes you think that's it, and then all of a sudden, when you least expect it, he does something mean and vicious like grab my arm and shake me or slap me. Once, he nearly pushed me down the stairs."
"What does your mother say about that?"
"She doesn't know about it."
"Didn't you tell her?"
"No. It would only make things worse. She says I'm just acting spoiled or whining whenever I do complain about anything, and she gets as angry as he does. My mother never really wanted me, you know."
"What do you mean?"
"I was a sexual accident. She's told me that a hundred times if she's told it to me once. Why do you think I never had a brother or a sister? She's not cut out to be the motherly type."
