I’m not sure how old I was when I realized it. It was gradual at first, little things. She stopped singing. And she slept a lot, sometimes whole afternoons. When I would ask her to retell some of our stories, she would say she was too tired or that she couldn’t remember them. But it felt like something else. It felt like she was afraid. I couldn’t say of what. I thought grown-ups weren’t afraid of anything. But life just seemed to be too much for her. She would lock herself in her room and not come out for days. She wouldn’t eat or bathe or let anyone see her. And then out of nowhere, she would reappear as if nothing had happened, and the sun would shine again. Melancholia, they called it back then.
My father was no help. He had no patience with her when she got that way, so they fought constantly. My sister would sneak down the hall and listen at her bedroom door: him thundering on about disgracing his good name, her wailing about what she’d given up to be his wife. I crept to the door once and tried to listen, but I couldn’t bear it. He hurled such horrible things at her—words I didn’t understand then but do now. He was ashamed of her. Ashamed of her frailties—as a woman and as a human being.
But that part you know.
Her bouts grew more frequent with time and lasted longer. One day, she left the house and stayed gone for three days. They found her at a hotel in New Jersey, registered under an assumed name. The papers had a field day. My father dismissed her doctor after that and called in a specialist in female complaints. He was also known for his discretion. He prescribed pills for her nerves. She got better for a time, more manageable. And then one night, my father was holding an important dinner for potential investors in some new venture, and right there at the table, in the middle of a discussion on Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Michigan Independent, and its revived crusade against the international Jew, she had a sort of breakdown.
I’ve never forgotten that night—though not for want of trying. The commotion was so loud that Cee-Cee and I scurried from our rooms and crouched at the top of the staircase, watching it all unfold. My father, red-faced and grim, leading my mother from the table. My mother’s shrieks ricocheting off the walls as she was forcefully propelled up the stairs. We had to scramble to keep out of sight, but we ducked into one of the guest rooms and watched from the cracked door as my father flung open my mother’s bedroom door, shoved her inside, and locked it behind her.
The sight made me sick to my stomach. To see her so broken. To see that he didn’t care. There was so much I didn’t understand then. But my sister understood. At least she seemed to. I remember her creeping back out into the hall when it was over, listening to my mother’s muffled whimpers with a strange expression on her face, not quite a smile but almost. And then my father’s voice drifting up the stairs from the dining room, explaining to his guests in the gravest of tones that his wife had been struggling since the death of their son.
“She blames herself, you see. No matter how many times we assure her that it was an accident, she refuses to forgive herself. We hoped things would get better with time, but I’m afraid it’s had the reverse effect. It’s all been downhill since the arrival of our youngest daughter.”
Me. He was talking about me. Blaming me.
This wasn’t new. I’d heard him refer to me as a mistake once, while talking to Cee-Cee, but it was worse somehow, hearing him say it to strangers. I was to blame for my mother’s breakdown.
There were murmurs of pity, female voices mostly, the investors’ wives, though I couldn’t make out actual words.
“Yes,” I heard my father say in answer to someone’s question. “It has been difficult. But it’s the girls I worry about. The doctor is afraid their mother’s behavior may have a lingering impact on them. He’s suggested a bit of rest for her, and though I’ve resisted thus far, I believe he might be right.”
Again, the little smile played about Cee-Cee’s mouth, like a cat who’d just licked up the last of the cream. “Now we’ll see,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “Now we’ll just see.”
I remember thinking, Now we’ll see what? But I was still crying when she turned and walked away. The doctor arrived a few hours later, after all the guests were gone. The next morning, an ambulance came to take her away to a place called Craig House in Beacon. “For a rest,” my father said, patting my seven-year-old head as they wheeled her past me, strapped flat to a gurney, unblinking and pale.
I wept so hard that day that I made myself sick. Her room—the room where we had shared so many special afternoons—was shut up, the door locked, the key removed, as if my father feared my mother’s affliction might be contagious.
The house, never a homey place, became a mausoleum, empty and much too still. And as the days stretched, I began to understand. I was told there would be visits. Sunday drives upstate with flowers and boxes of the chocolate-covered cherries she loved. But there weren’t. Not once. And there wouldn’t be. A year later, the day before Christmas, the first since she went away, there was a phone call. One of the orderlies had found her that morning—dead. A fall. A knife. A terrible accident. It wasn’t an accident, though. It was on purpose. They hushed it up. No one wanted to say the word suicide—it makes people uncomfortable—but everyone knew.
These are the things I didn’t say that day when you asked about my mother. Because they were painful. And because they were private. Instead, I told you the good things, the things I could bear to say out loud. But it wasn’t enough for you. Or her.
You ask if I remember the day of that picnic? As if it were possible to forget a single moment of the whirlwind that was us, those few brief months when you whispered forever—and I let myself believe. I remember you listening with your hand over mine and that when I finished, you didn’t press me for more. Come to that, you never pressed me for anything. But then, you didn’t have to. You had other ways of getting what you wanted—as I soon found out.
SIX
ASHLYN
Like people, it is the books with the most scars that have lived the fullest lies. Faded, creased, dusty, broken. These have the best stories to tell, the wisest council to offer.
—Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books
September 29, 1984
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Suicide.
The word throbbed like a toothache as Ashlyn closed the book and set it aside, an exposed nerve reawakened. Like Willa Greer, Helene had chosen to end her life, chosen death over her daughters. Not an accident but a conscious and deliberate choice.
Ashlyn knew firsthand about that kind of loss, the hole left behind when someone you loved left without saying goodbye, without saying they were sorry. She also understood why Belle hadn’t revealed those details to Hemi on the day of the picnic. There was a kind of shame in admitting a parent, a mother especially, had simply opted out. That you hadn’t been worth hanging around for—worth fighting for. They had that in common now, membership in the club no one liked to talk about: survivors forced to live with the knowledge that they hadn’t been enough.
Her own mother’s refusal to pursue cancer treatment had been a passive choice, even a noble one, to hear some tell it, a stoic acceptance of God’s will, while her father’s choice—a shotgun positioned carefully beneath the chin—had been blatant, a lashing out at the God who had taken his wife. Not because he cared for her but because he’d been cheated of something he considered his. Such a thing could not go unpunished. And so he’d climbed up to the attic and, with the twitch of a finger, orphaned his daughter.