In addition to several trust documents and her own jewelry collection, Gosia had left me one other item. A slip of paper in a sealed envelope. It was an airmail envelope, but I don’t think that meant anything. The slip of paper was crude, cut off of something larger. It was unlike Gosia, because all of her gifts, all of her gestures, were grand. She didn’t skimp or try to save money. The information on the slip was meant for a rainy day of sorts and I think it was the only thing in my life that I went after at just the right time. On the outside of the envelope she’d written, Wait until you need.
And inside the fold it had Alice’s full name. It didn’t say sister, but of course I knew. As for Alice, she knew she was conceived illegitimately. She knew her father had an affair with her mother. But at first she didn’t know there was another child already. Her mother told her that her lover and his wife were childless, that the wife couldn’t have children. But, in addition to the ex-lover’s insinuation, Alice found some letters that alluded to a child. She said that the first time I went to her yoga class, she felt a strange tug. It was like magic, and it frightened her.
We looked out the windows as we passed the low buildings, the Home Depot I’d gone to several times looking for new flowers for the rusted bathtub. Looking for a thick board to slide underneath the wobbling chairs on my “patio.” Always I left with nothing. I had no money to spend. It was just nice to drive, to waste the gas, to smell the pine in the place.
Another contraction. A bright scream of pain. I clutched my stomach and bit my lips. She pressed down on my thigh until the pain subsided.
—Why did you leave me? I asked.
—I was very upset. You fucked someone to hurt me.
—I mean the first time.
—I don’t know.
—I was too needy.
—No, she said.
—But what then?
—I don’t know. Something. When the girl came and stayed with you, something changed. I felt something I didn’t want to know.
And then it clicked for me. Eleanor’s presence had kicked up a scent. Alice smelled the past on me. I’d planned on telling her in a way that wouldn’t be off-putting. But when Eleanor arrived, Alice could sense it, the way I was just like the girl. I always knew the right way to deliver information. Everybody else did not.
—I think I know the reason, I said.
—What reason is that?
—I came to California to tell you.
—What? she asked.
—I just want to say. I felt so bad when you left. I loved. I love you.
I worried she wouldn’t say it back.
—I would have come back. But then you fucked him.
—That was disgusting of me.
—I thought I loved him, she said.
—But he’s very stupid.
We laughed. She took my hand and held it tight. She drove with her right hand on my left knee.
—Joan, I love you, too.
We looked at each other; the car almost went off the road. Another contraction split me down the back. We had so much to talk about that we didn’t pay much heed to the fact that I was in labor.
—Do you want to know something crazy? I asked after it passed. She nodded and said of course she did and I started with how Vic had cheated with someone before me. And she laughed for a long time. She said, Now do you see how I was right?
Then I told her I killed Lenny. I asked her please not to leave me again, because of that. I told her how I did it, that it was practically an accident. After the shock wore off, she told me it sounded like a true accident and that I should think of it as such. Then she said, It’s all right, Joan. Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.
She said it destroyed her that she’d never met our father and she wanted me to tell her all about him. Her mother had told her some, they would sit and drink PG Tips and look at the cows in the pasture across the road and talk about his swagger, how he saved lives. Her mother told her how once he’d brought her soup when she was sick with a cold, he’d brought her chicken soup from the drugstore reps, he’d specifically requested they bring the best chicken soup in the world and he arrived at her little place above the oven in a white lab coat and she was delirious with a fever and she felt like she was in heaven and he was God. That’s how society makes us look at doctors, I said. But there were also the nights our father kept her waiting. The nights he never showed up, because of his wife. It was strange to think about where we’d been those nights. Had we been at Maggie’s Pub?
Another contraction tore through my bowels.
—There was one night, she continued, one night in particular my mother told me about. She’d made this soup, this pistou. She spent the whole day. She used the basil she was growing in a little clay pot against the window. And our father never came. He never called. She smashed the pot of basil against the windowsill. Her whole hand was cut up. She told me she went to bed without cleaning it. When she woke up the next morning, she swore she would never be hurt by him again. She swore she would not pass that pain along to her child.
I laid my head against the cool window. Who knew how Alice’s mother might have acted had my father done to her what he did to mine. I’d come to learn, in any case, that it wasn’t my mother who was weak. It was my father who was weak to his own trivial needs. It was my father who had driven my mother mad. But once again, mad is not right. The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.
Staring straight ahead at the road, wavy with heat, I spoke very quietly.
—Do you want to know how our father died? I asked.
—What do you mean? she said.
—He didn’t die of cancer.
—How did he die, then?
—My mother killed him. She stabbed him many times with a regular kitchen knife. And then she slit her wrists in the bathtub. It looked like every movie you’ve ever seen and yet it was my mother. And our father was on the bed. He was in the pajamas I gave him for Christmas. They were wool and brown with four-leaf clovers. Nobody in my family was Irish.
—Why!
—Because of your mother and you.
She was shaking and asked me to please God tell her that wasn’t true and she was carrying on in a way my mother would have found hyperbolic. Another contraction. Alice became more hysterical. I worried about her ability to drive. But I’d been waiting to get to this point for many months. I’d been waiting to tell her. She was the only person who could make me feel less alone. Along the way I worried it was possible he loved her mother more than he loved mine. But that was not the right thing to wonder. The right thing was, Did my father love me as much as I thought he did?
That was why my mother killed him. Not because he cheated, not because he fathered a child with his mistress, not even because she believed he wanted his second family more. Men love a second chance, Gosia told me. They don’t deserve it, not at a woman’s expense.
The reason my mother killed my father was because he didn’t love her—or me—as much as he claimed to. I remember that time we visited Los Angeles and my father bought me that dress with the Peter Pan collar. I saw it in the store and loved it and my mother said I couldn’t have it and then later that night at dinner he passed a shopping bag across the table. The bottom of the bag dipped into the juices of my mother’s pollo alla Valdostana. The coveted dress was inside. I cried with love. When he got up to use the bathroom—perhaps to call his lover—my mother said to me, You love your father better, and that is all right. I thought she was being petty, but suddenly I could call up the pain in her eyes. The unfairness that I thought he was the better of the two of them.