“You kicked him out, Mom. You changed the locks and threw all his books out the window of his den. Then a few years later I asked you about it, and you said you didn’t remember.”
Meg took a deep breath and focused her eyes on the wide window that looked out at the sugar maple that dominated her backyard.
“I had a doctor a while ago, I think it was Doctor Penny, and she told me that one of the advantages of depression was that for lots of people who suffer from it, we don’t always remember it. There are parts of my life I just don’t seem to remember, and it turns out that those parts aren’t worth remembering.”
Despite her mother’s ups and downs, Caroline had probably only ever seen her cry on one or two occasions. But Meg seemed almost close to tears now, her voice throaty, and one of her eyes glistening.
“I’m sorry to be bringing this up,” Caroline said. “It’s just that … it’s obvious, to me at least, that the agents who are investigating this list think that the connection might be between the parents of the people on the list. That’s why they called you, right? They asked you about a series of names?”
“I told them I didn’t know any of those names. Caroline, trust me, if I did, I’d have told them.”
“I know, Mom. I’m not accusing you of holding anything back, but I wonder if there was something from way back when, maybe even when you were a child, that might have some importance. You probably don’t remember this either, but when you’ve been very depressed sometimes you’ve told me that you deserve it, and once you told me that you were a bad child, and that you were paying a price.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I was a very nice child, really. At least according to your grandmother.” Meg moved a piece of chicken onto her fork and put it in her mouth.
“But you can’t remember anything specific?”
“We had a neighbor, I think their last names were Landry, and the little boy was probably about three years younger than me, and he’d come over every day to see if I wanted to play with him. Which I didn’t, of course. At first, I would tell my mother to say I wasn’t there, but then I started going to the door myself when he’d ring the bell, and telling him to meet me down at the park in five minutes. And I just wouldn’t go. The sad thing was, he kept coming back.”
Caroline had heard this story before as an example of her mother’s childhood cruelty. “The FBI didn’t ask you about anyone named Landry, did they?”
“Oh, no. The only name that was vaguely familiar to me was Jack Radebaugh but then I realized that he’s an author of some book I think your father bought. No, Holly, no chicken for you. Maybe after we clean up.” The dog had woken up.
They would normally have taken a walk after lunch, especially with the weather so nice, but it seemed unnecessarily risky, so they made coffee and sat outside on the stone patio. They talked about Grey’s Anatomy, Meg’s favorite show, and they talked about Julius, of course, who had been in a motorcycle accident in Mongolia of all places, and was staying there, recuperating, for now. Dark clouds had moved into the sky, and Caroline’s fingertips had turned white, but her mother didn’t seem to notice. There was a pause in conversation, and Caroline was about to stand up and move them both inside, when her mother said, “I did have a terrible dream when I was a kid, and it’s something I’ve never really stopped thinking about it.”
“Oh, what’s that?” Caroline said.
“It’ll sound silly, I know, but it was so vivid, and I can still see it. I think sometimes I still dream about it, like the way I still keep dreaming that I’ve forgotten my locker combination at school.”
“What was the dream?”
“I am probably around ten or eleven years old, and I’ve run away from home with a bunch of other kids. My friends, I guess, although I can’t really remember who they were. But we’ve all run away, and, somehow, we’ve managed to steal a great big boat and we’re sailing across the ocean. It has two masts and a sail, and it’s a wooden boat, like an old pirate ship, I guess you’d say. And there’s a plank, of course. And what I remember most from the dream is that we all decide that one of us—one of the kids—has to walk the plank. I’m worried it’s going to be me, but we choose another little girl, and we tie her up, and tell her that she has to walk off the end of the plank or we’ll all die.”
A gust of wind whipped her mother’s scarf up across her mouth for a moment, and she pulled it away to keep talking.