False Memory

Satori. Here was Junior, as fair of face as his mother, blessed with her physical grace, as well. And bright. No denying how very bright he was. At her age, he would be her last child, and the only one with the prospect to fulfill her expectations. Here was her last chance to be not merely a woman of ideas, to be not merely the bride to a man of ideas, but to be the mother of a man of ideas. Indeed, in her mind, though not in reality, here was her last chance to be associated with ideas that might move the world, because her first three husbands had proved to be men whose big ideas had no solidity and had popped at the first prick. Even Derek, with all his success, was a chupaflor, not an eagle, and Claudette knew it. Dusty was, in her mind, too pigheaded to fulfill his potential, and Skeet was too fragile. And Dominique, her first child, was long and safely dead. Dusty had never known his half sister, had seen one photo of her, perhaps the only ever taken: her sweet, small, gentle face. Junior was the only hope that remained for Claudette, and she was determined to believe that his mind and his heart were as fair as his face.

While she was still browbeating Skeet, Dusty heard himself say, “Mother, how did Dominique die?”

The question, dangerous in this context, silenced Claudette as nothing else except perhaps another gunshot would have done.

He met her eyes and didn’t turn to stone, as she intended, and shame — rather than a lack of it — kept him from looking away. Shame that he had known the truth, intuitively at first and then through the application of logic and reflection, had known the truth since boyhood and yet had denied it to himself and had never spoken. Shame that he allowed her and Skeet’s pompous father and then Derek Lampton to grind Skeet down, when ferreting out the truth about Dominique might have disarmed them and given Skeet a better life.

“You must have been heartbroken,” Dusty said, “when your first child was born with Down’s syndrome. Such high hopes, and such sad reality.”

“What are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even more highly charged with anger.

The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger of being crushed alive.

“And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant death syndrome. How difficult to endure it. the whispers, the medical inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.”

Martie drew a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said, “Dusty,” meaning Maybe you shouldn’t do this.

He had never spoken up when it might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five, going on six… a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?”

“I guess,” Skeet said shakily.

“They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved not to be the case.”

“My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him.

“Maybe that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.”

Claudette regarded Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what she feared most.

He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph of Dominique.”

She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the air, the blow not struck.

In some respects, this was the hardest thing that Dusty had ever done, and yet in other way sit was so easy that it frightened him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the hallway outside the nursery.”

Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from Dusty.

His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him.

Junior stepped forward protectively.

“Better pick up your crossbow and load it,” Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.”

Although the violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s, Junior backed off.