And because elegant Dory Goldman couldn’t stand the stink that particular morning and had to get away from it for just a little while. So Rachel got the duty. Right, friends and neighbors?
Rachel got the duty. Eight years old, pigtails, middy blouse. Rachel got the duty. Rachel could stay and put up with the stink. What did they send her to Camp Sunset in Vermont for six weeks every year, if not to put up with the stink of her dying, insane sister? Ten new shirt-and-jumper combinations for Gage and six new dresses for Ellie and I’ll pay your way through medical school if you’ll stay away from my daughter. . . but where was the overflowing checkbook when your daughter was dying of spinal meningitis and your other daughter was alone with her, you bastard? Where was the R-fucking-N?
Louis sat up, got out of bed.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked, alarmed.
“To get you a Valium.”
“You know I don’t—”
“Tonight you do,” he said.
She took the pill and then told him the rest. Her voice remained calm throughout. The tranquilizer was doing its job.
The next-door neighbor had retrieved eight-year-old Rachel from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming “Zelda’s dead!” over and over. Rachel’s nose had been bleeding. She had blood all over her. The same neighbor had called the ambulance and then her parents; after getting Rachel’s nosebleed stopped and calming her with a cup of hot tea and two aspirins, she was able to get the location of her parents out of her—they were visiting Mr.
and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business.
By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare box. Later—much later—it had become Dory Goldman’s sewing room.
The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been horrified to discover that she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it moving Zelda. In her spurt of adrenaline-powered strength, she had, after all, lifted Zelda with enough force to pull her own blouse apart.
That she had strained herself trying to keep Zelda from choking was simple, obvious, elementary-my-dear-Watson. To everyone, that was, except Rachel herself. Rachel had been sure that this was
Zelda’s revenge from beyond the grave. Zelda knew that Rachel was glad she was dead; Zelda knew that when Rachel burst from the house telling all and sundry Zelda’s dead, Zelda’s dead at the top of her voice, she had been laughing, not screaming; Zelda knew she had been murdered and so had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and soon Rachel’s back would start to twist and change and she too would have to lie in bed, slowly but surely turning into a monster, her hands hooking into claws.
After a while she would begin screaming with the pain, as Zelda had done, and then she would start wetting the bed, and finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. It was Zelda’s revenge.
No one could talk Rachel out of this belief—not her mother, her father, or Dr. Murray, who diagnosed a mild backsprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some—Louis, for instance—would have said) to stop behaving so badly. She ought to remember that her sister had just died, Dr. Murray told her; her parents were prostrate with grief and this was not the time for Rachel to make a childish play for attention. Only the slowly abating pain had been able to convince her that she was neither the victim of Zelda’s supernatural vengeance nor God’s just punishment of the wicked.
For months (or so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel’s hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back.
She had not attended Zelda’s funeral or any funeral since.
“If you’d told me this before,” Louis said, “it would have explained a hell of a lot.”
“Lou, I couldn’t,” she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now.
“Since then I’ve been. . . I guess a little phobic on the subject.”
Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.
“I can’t. . . seem to help it. In my mind I know you’re right, that death is perfectly natural—good, even—but what my mind knows and what happens. . . inside me. .
“Yeah,” he said.
“That day I blew up at you,” she said, “I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea. . . a way of getting used to it. . . but I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Louis.”
“No apology needed,” he said, stroking her hair. “But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.”
She smiled. “It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that’s poisoned part of me for years.”
“Maybe you have.”
Rachel’s eyes slipped closed and then opened again .
slowly. “And don’t blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills—Zelda’s bills—were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off. On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.
“Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda’s death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan, and since then he’s never looked back. But that’s why they’ve always been possessive of me, I think. It’s not just because I’m the only one left—”
“It’s guilt,” Louis said.
“Yes, I suppose. And you won’t be mad at me if I’m sick when they bury Norma?”
“No, honey, I won’t be mad.” He paused and then took her hand.
“May I take Ellie?”
Her hand tightened in his. “Oh, Louis, I don’t know,” she said.
“She’s so young—”
“She’s known where babies come from for a year or more,” he reminded her again.
She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips. “If you think it’s best,” she said finally. “If you think it won’t. . . won’t hurt her.”
“Come over here, Rachel,” he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis’s bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay, and she slept again.
33
“For man—and woman—is like the flowers in the valley, which bloom today and are tomorrow cast into the oven: the time of man is but a season; it cometh, and so it passeth away. Let us pray.”
Ellie, resplendent in a navy blue dress bought especially for the occasion, dropped her head so abruptly that Louis, sitting next to her in the pew, heard her neck creak. Ellie had been in few churches, and of course it was her first funeral; the combination had awed her to unaccustomed silence.
For Louis, it had been a rare occasion with his daughter. Mostly blinded by his love for her, as he was by his love for Gage, he rarely observed her in a detached way; but today he thought he was
seeing what was almost a textbook case of the child nearing the end of life’s first great developmental stage; an organism of almost pure curiosity, storing up information madly in almost endless circuits. Ellie had been quiet even when Jud, looking strange but elegant in his black suit and lace-up shoes (Louis believed it was the first time he had ever seen him in anything but loafers or green rubber boots), had bent over, kissed her, and said: “Glad you could come, honey. And I bet Norma is too.”
Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed.
Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace.
“Will the pallbearers come forward?” he asked.
Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically. She looked scared. “Daddy!” she stage-whispered.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m one of the pallbearers, honey,” Louis said, sitting down beside her again for a moment and putting an arm around her shoulders. “That means I’m going to help carry Norma out. There are four of us that are going to do it—me and two of Jud’s nephews and Norma’s brother.”