Whisper Me This(41)

“Did you notice anything different with my parents in the last few months?” I ask, steering the conversation toward what I really want to know.

“Besides the part where he hit her over the head and let her lie there for three days without calling for help? If I hadn’t come over to check on her, the poor dear would have died right there in her bed.”

“She had an aneurism. She fell.”

“Or maybe he pushed her.”

And that’s it. My tolerance is done. I don’t care that she’s an old woman. I don’t care that my father isn’t technically my father. I don’t care that I’d planned to try to weasel information out of her about my childhood and my parents and whether she knows anything about Marley.

I’m on my feet, the air crackling around me like I’m about to burst into flames.

“Give me one reason to believe my father would hurt her. Just one.”

Edna cowers back away from me, both hands raised in front of her face as if she thinks I’ll actually hit her. She’s tiny and ancient and bitter. Shame infiltrates my rage, but I don’t back down. Not yet.

“Well?”

“I was just theorizing,” she quavers. “It’s the way of men.”

“Not all men. Not this one.” Another childhood memory rises from the depths, summoned by her words. Edna had a husband once. He’s long dead, but I remember him as lean, stringy, and oddly yellow. I asked my mother about the color of his skin, the yellowed whites of his eyes.

“Too much beer,” she’d said, and that was all. At that age I’d imagined the beer actually settling into his skin and eyes and wondered why it didn’t turn him brown. Now, seeing her hunched up and trembling in the face of my anger, I wonder if the story she’s manufactured for my parents is born out of one of her own.

I make an effort to soften my voice. “Did you hear anything, see anything? Was he shouting at her?”

“You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you. She shouted at him. I heard yelling a couple of times, so loud it came into my house through closed windows. Not to speak ill of the dead.”

“What was she saying?”

Edna settles her face into calm propriety, folding her hands in her lap. “I am not an eavesdropper.”

Right. And birds don’t fly.

On the rare occasions I heard my parents fight, it was always because Dad refused to follow some directive or other. Despite his quiet nature and his abhorrence of fuss and emotional outbursts, if he didn’t agree on something, he would tell her. He went along with her on most things, but every now and then, she’d run up against a streak of iron in him that would not budge or bend. And then the sparks would fly until she accepted the inevitable and either found a way around him or acknowledged that he was right.

Maybe it’s dementia, but the out-of-character things Dad has been doing—burning papers, not calling an ambulance—could also be the result of my mother’s planning. Dad would have fought her at first and then would have given in because what else are you going to do when the woman you love is about to die? And once Dad makes a promise, he keeps it.

“Could you hear what they were fighting about?”

“Mostly I couldn’t make out the words. But the one time I just happened to be standing on the lawn, and I heard him say, ‘God damn it, Leah, don’t you make me do this!’ Just like every abusing lowlife scum ever says, blaming the woman for his behavior. And then she said, ‘And when I’m dead, then how are you going to feel?’”

My stomach twists and twists, putting my own spin on these words rather than the one Mrs. Carlton has manufactured out of her own perspective. I can picture my father, pushed to the breaking point. Mom hammering away at him with a combination of logic and manipulation, with that final, masterful thrust of guilt to finish him off.

“Well,” I say, “I suppose you told this to the cops? That’s why they believe he’s been beating her. Did you ever see her injured? Did she have a black eye?”

“I’m not stupid,” Mrs. Carlton retorts, confirming my suspicions in the way her blue-veined arms unconsciously hug her rib cage. “Men hit where the bruises don’t show.”

I initiate a silent count to ten, trying to rein in my temper, but I’ve forgotten about Elle.

She bounces up off the couch and unexpectedly turns on me, rather than on Mrs. Carlton. “Seriously, Mom? You’re going to just let her say this shit? Grandpa would never hit Grandma. Right? Tell her!”

“Elle—”

“What? This is all so stupid! And they think Grandpa’s crazy.” She bursts into tears and runs out of the room. In the stunned silence that follows in her wake, the slamming of the door is loud and clear.

“Well. I never,” Edna exclaims, but there’s no venom in her words.

“Excuse me. I’ll check in later about the funeral,” I manage, and then I’m down the hall, out the door, and after my daughter. I catch up to her before she makes it across the lawn.

“Elle.” I grab hold of her arm, but she jerks it out of my grip.

Tears track down her cheeks. “How could you let her say all of that . . . shit? She’s a horrible old woman. I hate her!”

“Elle. Elle!”

Back ramrod straight, she marches up the steps and into the house. I follow, all the way down the hall to my old bedroom, where she flings herself facedown on the bed in an abandon of dramatic misery.