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“Yes,” I said.
“No,” my mother said simultaneously, and crossed the room to put both her hands on my shoulders. She peered into my eyes and gave me a funny half smile.
“Jesus Christ, honey,” she said. “Jack isn’t my boyfriend. He’s my brother.”
22.
1964
Autumn
She is thirty-five on the day it all falls apart.
It will be many years before she understands the truth: that it was all falling apart long before this moment. The life she built had been rotting for years, from the roots on up, from the inside out. But that revelation isn’t for Miriam now. It’s for the old woman she’ll someday become, peering back through the fog of her memories, her mind clouded but her eyes clear. She will see herself for what she was, a foolish young thing who took too much for granted, who couldn’t understand the harm she was causing until it was too far gone to be undone.
Someday. Not today.
Today, there’s only the gut-wrenching sense of the earth suddenly vanishing beneath her feet. There’s nothing to do but fall.
She’s watching the children when it happens. Theodora and little Jack, whose presence in the house feels entirely unremarkable, the tears and shouting and ultimatums over Shelly’s unfortunate situation long since forgotten. Miriam doesn’t even regret anymore that she kept silent about that sailor, though he had indeed turned out to be every bit the scoundrel she’d feared, and more. It was the winter of 1961 when he left for parts unknown, and left Shelly heartbroken and carrying his child; the arguments between Miriam and Theo over whether to send the girl away went on for three months after that. But this was one fight Miriam refused to lose, no matter how her husband blustered and complained, and no matter how people whispered behind their hands when they saw her in town. If Shelly could bear the scorn of being an unwed mother, Miriam said, then surely her employers could weather the comparatively minor scandal of having her remain in their home.
In the face of her stubbornness, Theo had no choice but to relent. Perhaps he remembered that it was only for his wife’s stubbornness that he’d been able to marry her at all—or perhaps he was simply used to losing arguments by then.
Regardless, Miriam could never have sent Shelly away. And even Theo had to admit, eventually, that it was nice to have another little family in the house, and for their youngest daughter to have a playmate closer to her own age. The Whispers felt so much fuller, so much less lonely, with the sounds of children’s laughter and footsteps echoing off its walls.
On this day, Miriam is sitting on the veranda to enjoy the autumn sunset while Shelly fetches an ashtray for their evening smoke. The two women are alone, as they have been for most of the week. Richard and Diana are back at their schools, and Theo is hardly home; two men have chartered his fishing outfit for a span of several days, but they’re more interested in carousing with their captain at the local pub than in actually catching anything. Here at the Whispers, there’s not much to do but smoke and gossip, keeping half an eye on Jack and Theodora as they play. They’re tumbling around in the grass tonight, the light golden all around them. Shrieking and laughing, happy and safe.
But Miriam doesn’t see the beauty of the scene, the lovely glow ofher daughter’s cheeks as the sun kisses them good night. She doesn’t see her daughter at all. She is looking at little Jack. She’s been watching him often lately, watching him without knowing why. Of course he’s a handsome boy. Growing up fast, too: at three and a half, he has lost the generic pudginess that makes babies all look the same, his own unique features beginning to emerge and take shape. Shades of the man he’ll someday become. She can see already that he’ll have his mother’s glossy dark hair, her pouty, downturned mouth—an unfortunate thing for a boy to inherit, she thinks. It’s a feature far more flattering on a woman. But his eyes, his brow line . . . those are not Shelly’s eyes. Not Shelly’s brows. And the way his face scrunches in frustration as he chases after Theodora, the scowl as she outruns him—there’s something about this, especially, that makes her unable to look away. For the first time in a long time she thinks of Shelly’s beau, the damnable sailor who knocked her up and promptly disappeared. What had his name been? Donald or Daniel, one of those two, but she remembers his face better than his name: round and friendly, with a high forehead and a broad smile. No, there’s not even a hint of that man in this dark, intense little boy, and a terrible thought is beginning to tickle at the back of Miriam’s mind. Something she’s avoided knowing for too long, something that has grown tired of being ignored. She leans forward. Gazing at Jack, who is scowling at Theodora, who is twirling circles against the setting sun. A single line creases the little boy’s forehead, just above his brows but slightly off-center. It’s comical, a furrow that deep on the face of someone so young, and Miriam knows it will etch itself into his face early and forever. This one line, before any other. How does she know?
The answer comes immediately—too fast for her to swat it away, too fast for her to do anything but stare at the boy and struggle to breathe, her heart pounding, her mind reeling.
She knows because she has seen it. She’s seen that line all her life, every day since she was eighteen, on Theodore Caravasios’s handsomeface. An identical crease above an identical brow line, arching above deep brown eyes that are the same size and shape.
Like father, like son.
The cigarette she’s holding snaps in two.
An eternity seems to pass before Shelly comes back with the ashtray. Miriam tosses away the broken cigarette. Reaches for another. She takes her time lighting it and takes a drag. Her hand shakes. Her voice doesn’t. She has that odd sense, just as she did at the pond years before, of floating above the scene like a curious observer. Watching the betrayal unfold, wondering what’s going to happen. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” she says.
“What’s that?” Shelly says, her voice light. She doesn’t yet see the look on Miriam’s face, the ice in her eyes.
“I was just thinking about that man you used to run around with. That sailor. What was his name?”
“You mean Dennis?” Shelly lights a cigarette, takes a drag. “Gosh, what are you thinking about him for?”
“I was thinking that Jack doesn’t look much like him.” Miriam pauses. “Nothing like him, really. Not a whit. It’s quite strange.”
Shelly has gone very still, her body tense, the smoke from her cigarette gathering in a cloud above her head. Like a tiny mouse, frozen in the grass as a hawk swoops overhead; if she doesn’t move, if she doesn’t breathe, perhaps the circling predator will forget she’s there and simply disappear. But the silence stretches between them, and Miriam is looking at her, waiting for an answer, and she lets out a nervous little laugh. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she says.
Miriam stands. Unfolding to her full height, so that she looms over Shelly, who seems to shrink and squirm in her chair. Trapped beneath the shadow of a predator who sees her, who was always going to see her sooner or later. It was only a matter of time.
“Oh, but I do,” Miriam says. “I do know.” She sucks in air through her teeth—and she wishes, for a brief and furious moment, that shecould exhale fire instead of air. She wants her next words to hurt, to blister, to burn right through the soft pink flesh of the other woman’s face and leave nothing behind but a black and smoking ruin. She leans in close.
She hisses, “I know what you’ve done, you bitch.”
She waits in the library for Theo to come home, with a book in her lap that she isn’t reading and a whiskey in her hand that she isn’t drinking, only swirling around and around in the glass, watching how the amber liquid catches the light. Her uneaten dinner, the one she was supposed to have with Shelly, is still in its pot on the stove, untouched and slowly congealing. Theodora is in bed, sound asleep. And their now-former housekeeper is gone, long gone, taken away in a taxi with her few paltry belongings packed into an old suitcase and her wailing, confused child clinging to her hip.
Jack’s were the only tears. As much as Miriam would have liked to make a scene, to scream and sob and drag the woman out by her hair, she thought Shelly would have probably liked that, too. To see her not just humiliated but unwound, out of control. And so she said as little as possible until Shelly’s things were collected and her taxicab called, and then watched them go from the library window, standing back to stay hidden behind the drapes. She noticed only at the very last moment that the woman was making her exit still wearing one of Miriam’s own dresses—one of those little gestures that had made Miriam feel magnanimous at the time, offering some of her prettier old clothes to someone who had so few nice things of her own.Doesn’t that just serve me right?she thought, watching Shelly gather her skirt to keep it from catching, exposing one slender ankle just before the cabby closed the door behind her. Theo had always liked that dress. Perhaps Shelly had even been wearing it when—
