The Two-Family House(35)

The nurse led them back downstairs to fill out Teddy’s discharge papers. Helen spotted Rose and Abe standing by the main desk. Rose was screaming at one of the attendants. “How many times do I have to spell his name for you? How many two-and-a-half-year-old boys could you possibly have admitted in the last hour?”

As soon as Rose saw Teddy she gasped. “Oh my God! Look at his face! What did the doctor say?” She turned from Mort to Helen, demanding answers.

For the first time since the accident, Helen felt a wave of exhaustion overtake her. She was too tired to answer Rose’s questions or pretend to be pleasant. She gave Mort the discharge papers and handed him the ice pack the nurse had given her. “Mort can explain everything,” she said. “Abe and I have to get back and pick up the kids.”

Helen bent down to hug Teddy goodbye, but Rose grabbed her arm and pulled. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what happened.”

Helen’s reaction was visceral; she yanked her arm free and glared.

“You have no right to speak to me that way!” she shouted. “Where were you when Teddy got hurt? Where were you when I was comforting him on the way to the hospital, filling out forms and talking to his doctors? You were gone! You were nowhere! You were hiding from your family and feeling sorry for yourself!”

People were staring and the nurses at the reception desk were silent. “Lower your voice, Helen, please—” Mort began, but Helen waved him aside and took a step closer to Rose. “I’m not taking the blame for it anymore, Rose! Not this time! Do you hear me? You can go ahead and pretend you had no part in this, but we both know the truth. For years you’ve pretended to be the weak one so I would get stuck with the dirty work. You fall apart and I’m the one who has to pick up the pieces. Well, pretend all you want, but you made this happen. You did this!” Helen was shouting so loudly that Teddy started to cry. He was frightened and scurried to grab on to Rose’s leg.

Rose opened her mouth to respond but closed it without saying a word. For an instant, Helen thought she saw a flicker of remorse pass over her sister-in-law’s face, but Rose made no apologies. On the car ride home, Helen decided it was probably just the hospital’s fluorescent lighting that made her look that way. Rose wasn’t sorry at all.





Chapter 27





JUDITH


(April 1952)

The black-and-white clock on the library wall was oversized and easy to read. She would wait twenty minutes more, until the hands pointed to a few minutes past five. Then she would pack up her books and walk carefully down the pitted stone staircase to the side exit. If she walked at her usual pace, she would reach the front door of her house around 5:25. She had to be home by five-thirty or her mother would start to worry.

That’s what Judith told people. “If I’m not home by five-thirty, my mother will start to worry.” But “worry” was a euphemism. An entirely truthful girl would have said this: “If I am not home at exactly five-thirty, my mother will start panicking. At five-thirty-one, she will call my father at work. At five-thirty-two, she will call the police, and at five-thirty-three, she will call the local hospitals. At five-thirty-five, she will sit at the table and start crying. She will tell my sisters and little brother that I am most likely dead, hit by a car or kidnapped by a child molester, and that will make them start to cry. And then, when I walk in at five-thirty-six or five-thirty-eight, she will scream at me and wring her hands. She will call me irresponsible and selfish. I will apologize and promise never to be late again. She will go into her room, slam the door and refuse to come out. I will hug my sisters and tell them everything is fine. I will rock my little brother on my lap until he isn’t scared anymore. I will finish making dinner if my mother has started it, feed my siblings and get them ready for bed. My father, after getting the five-thirty-one warning call, will work late that night and come home between nine and nine-thirty. I will leave a plate for him wrapped in tinfoil on top of the stove. He will eat it alone at the kitchen table, knock on my door before he goes to sleep and call out ‘good night.’ And in the morning, we will all pretend it never happened.”

The first time Rose behaved that way, Judith thought her mother must have been upset about something else. But then it happened a second time and a third. So Judith tried her best never to be late, not from the library or anywhere else. The trouble was, she could never predict when her mother might “worry.” On school days, it was settled that she had to be home by five-thirty from the library. But what if she took Teddy to the park? Or walked to the drugstore for a candy bar on a Saturday afternoon? How many times had she come home to find her mother agitated and hysterical, sometimes when she had only been gone for fifteen minutes? She had lost count.

Judith tried to get her mother’s attention whenever she left the house, to set a return time so they both knew when she was expected. But half the time her mother forgot the time they had agreed upon and ended up “worrying” anyway. Judith tried leaving notes, detailed and clearly printed with her return time circled in red pen. But her mother claimed she never saw them. “How am I supposed to know that I should look for a letter when my child is dead in a ditch somewhere?”

“But I’m not dead in a ditch.”

“How could I have known that? You were twenty minutes late!”