The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [123]
Max tried to make a case for the nanny having done it herself. She was depressed, he argued. She drank a little.
From her hospital bed, her arms burned, the nanny pleaded ignorance, but Zoe and Max ignored her protests and made a public show of firing her. The incident was in the headlines for a few days, and Zoe doubted the poor woman had ever been able to find work again. But it had been critical to keep the spotlight off the person whom the fire investigators saw as the real culprit: Marti.
Marti denied having had anything to do with the fire, however, and there was no real proof that she’d been involved, so it was easy for Zoe to discount the investigators’ theories. Oh, my, how good she’d been at denial in those days! Don’t ask, don’t tell. That might have been the mantra of the Garson-Pauling household. Neither she nor Max ever wanted to ask Marti if or why she had done something wrong, because then they would have had to deal with the answers. It was far easier to let things slide. And let them slide, they did.
When Marti was being evaluated for entry into boarding school, the counselor had a long talk with Zoe.
Did Marti ever wet the bed? the counselor had asked.
“Yes, until she was twelve,” Zoe had admitted. Max had spanked Marti for her bed-wetting, which he viewed as pure belligerence on her part.
“Aha,” the counselor had replied, jotting something down in her records, and Zoe thought she’d better watch how she answered the questions from then on.
“Did Marti like to play with fire?” the counselor asked. “Did she like to strike matches? Was she fascinated by flames?”
“No,” Zoe said. She blocked the fire in the nanny’s room completely from her mind. It was amazing how easily she could do that.
“Any cruelty to animals?” the counselor asked.
Zoe thought of the kitten, but there had never been any proof that Marti’d had anything to do with the demise of that little ball of fur.
“No,” she’d said. “Why are you asking me such strange questions?”
“Oh, we ask all our parents these questions,” the counselor explained. “You see, there’s a triad of behaviors that predicts some possibly disturbed or violent behavior in later life,” she said. “Bed-wetting in late childhood, fire-setting and cruelty to animals. So it’s just something we like to rule out, as a matter of course, when we’re interviewing a candidate for the school. We don’t see much of it here, of course. It’s mostly something you see in kids who’ve been neglected or abused.”
“Oh,” Zoe had said.
She’d managed to finish the interview and make it all the way out to the street before getting violently sick to her stomach.
It was a moment before Zoe realized that one of the dark fish was right in front of her in the stream, practically taunting her as it dodged between the rocks. Reaching forward with the net, she scooped it up easily and dropped it into the bucket. Another fish just like the first one nearly swam into her net, and there was yet another right behind that one. There must be a whole school of them, she thought, and she caught a few more before deciding she had enough to make a good dinner for the three of them.
And she would make it over a fire. She would study Marti’s face across the flames and wish to God that she had her daughter’s childhood to do over. She would give Marti all the time and love in the world, all she had deserved and been deprived of. But she didn’t have the past to live over. She only had the present, and she would do everything in her power to keep Marti from returning to prison. Marti needed help; she was willing to admit that now. But it was not the sort of help prison could provide for her.
Sophie was sitting on the front step when Zoe got back from the stream. She looked a bit better than she had that morning, although maybe it was just because she was sitting up and her face did not look quite so swollen.
“I caught our dinner,” Zoe said. “Let me get a knife from inside and I’ll clean the fish out here with you.”
“Zoe?” Sophie looked up at her. “I want to go home.”
Zoe placed the bucket