A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [109]
We sat down to lunch, the three girls, Theresa, and I. They gave me a review of their morning. They had painted, or made a maze for the hamster. They had dressed up and conquered the world with the old-fashioned female weapons of high heels and strings of pearls. Emma occasionally wanted to know what I had done. “What, again?” she’d say, when I told her I was gathering rocks. She was not impressed by the fact that ice had once come down from the Pole in tremendous solid sheets, a mile thick. So what if all the large and small animals had had to run from the cold as it came pressing upon them. She squirmed in her chair when I tried to explain that piles of stones were dumped right where the glacier melted. “Tell me some other time,” was her refrain as she slid from her chair and ran down the basement stairs with Audrey.
Theresa and I often talked quietly at the kitchen table. Before the children’s interview she worried out loud for me. Who was assigned to the case? Should we tell Alice about the session? What did Rafferty think? Could Theresa herself legitimately call over to the office and talk to Rose Ann Lexin? She’d never met the woman. It was touchy, to put in a word to an unknown quantity. She’d eventually come back to the fact that there was nothing the girls would say to incriminate anyone. On the subject of Alice, Rafferty had said over the phone that there wasn’t any reason to tell her, that she’d feel helpless and panicked in her isolation. To Theresa I said, “I would want to know.”
“You’d want to know,” she answered. “You think you’d want to know. But imagine being in that place and having that kind of worry. You can’t even go outside and run around. You can’t scream, without having a dozen people jump on you. I agree with Rafferty. There’s no point in telling her. I think knowing would drive me close to insanity, Howard, I really do.”
“And afterward?”
“Afterward is afterward. You can tell her when she’s out, play it down. Rafferty’s probably right, that it isn’t anything more than a thorn.”
“Nothing more than a thorn,” I said.
She was kind enough to ask for my permission to talk with the girls about the session. She said that of course she would never bring it up, but if they mentioned it she would reassure them, providing it was all right with me. When we spoke about Emma and Claire, I sometimes had the fleeting sense that we, she and I, were a team with a yoke around our heads, blindly pulling the load behind us. I most often felt that the burden was mine alone, and then at lunch, every day, there was the slightest easing. I’d forget that it was going to lighten until I knocked at her door. “They seem fine, don’t they?” she often said. “They seem fine to me.”
I always said I thought they were fine. When we had exhausted that subject she told me stories about her large family and her Catholic upbringing. Sometimes we sat in an easy silence. The kitchen was cool and clean. I’ve thought since, how effortless life seemed in that house. After lunch I went out to the glassed-in porch that was also air conditioned. I sat on the wicker chair, at the wicker table, to write my daily letter to Alice. Theresa did the dishes and as she worked she sang. She had a light, sweet voice. It was cool in that house, as I said. It was hard to feel terrible there. I was tired and comfortable and full. I had nothing to say. Once or twice I fell asleep with my head on the table.
If I had the energy I’d read Dan’s Wall Street Journal. When there had been the slightest possibility of drought, way back in March,