False Memory

“When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t remember what. But you knew I was there, and you… stopped. At the time, I didn’t know what had almost happened. But later… years later, I did understand, but wouldn’t face it.’

“Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”

Although Dusty had faith in the power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all.

Claudette’s teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws.

“A couple minutes ago, Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even give you pause. Which is odd, because that is a big idea. Worth discussion if ever anything was.”

“Are you done?”

“Not quite. After all these years of putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say. I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we all have, and we’re going to suffer more —”

Clawing at his hand, drawing two thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said, “If Dominique hadn’t been a Down’s baby, and if I hadn’t spared her that half life she would’ve led, and if she were alive here and now, wouldn’t that be worse? Wouldn’t that be infinitely worse?”

The sense she made diminished as the volume of her voice rose, and Dusty had no idea what she meant.

Junior moved closer to his mother’s side. They stood hand in hand, drawing a strange strength from each other.

Pointing toward the dead man sprawled in the foyer below, a gesture that seemed to have no connection to her words, she said, “Down’s was at least an obvious condition. What if she’d seemed normal but then… all grown up, what if she’d been just like her father?”

Dominique’s father, Claudette’s first husband, had been more than twenty years her senior, a psychologist named Lief Reissler, a cold fish with pale eyes and a pencil mustache, who had thankfully played no role in either Dusty’s or Skeet’s life. A cold fish, yes, but not the monster that her question implied he was.

Before Dusty could express his bafflement, Claudette clarified. After three days of shocks that he’d thought had forever inoculated him against surprise, she rocked him with eight words: “What if she’d been just like Mark Ahriman?” The rest was superfluous: “You say he burns down houses, he shoots people, he’s a sociopath, and this crazy man who’s dead downstairs is somehow associated with him. So would you want his child for your half sister?”

She raised Junior’s hand and kissed it, as though to say that she was especially glad that she had spared him the problem of this difficult sister.

When Dusty had claimed to know her worst secrets, all the worst, she assumed he’d been referring to more than the fact that the sudden infant death syndrome that claimed Dominique had truly been ruthless suffocation.

Now, because of his reaction and Martie’s, Claudette realized this revelation need never have been made, but instead of retreating into silence, she tried to explain.

“Lief was infertile. We were never going to be able to have children. I was twenty-one, and Lief was forty-four, and he could have been the perfect father, with his tremendous knowledge, all his insights, his theories of emotional development. Lief had a brilliant child-rearing philosophy.”

Yes, they all had their child-rearing philosophies, their deep insights, and their abiding interest in social engineering. Medicate to educate, and all that.

“Mark Ahriman was just seventeen, but he’d started college soon after his thirteenth birthday, and he’d already earned a doctorate by the time I met him. He was a prodigy’s prodigy, and everyone at the university was in awe of him. A genius almost beyond measure. He was no one’s idea of a perfect father. He was a snooty Hollywood brat. But the genes.”

“Did he know the child was his?”

“Yes. Why not? None of us was that conventional.”

The buzzing in Dusty’s head, which was the accompanying theme music for any visit to this house, had settled into a more ominous tone than usual. “When Dominique was born with Down’s… how did you handle that, Mother?”

She stared at the blood on his hand, which she had drawn with her fingernails, and when she raised her eyes to meet his, she said only, “You know how I handled it.”

Once more, she lifted Junior’s hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles, this time as if to say that all her problems with damaged children had been worth enduring now that she had been given him.