The Office of Historical Corrections(25)

I did know, and I knew my mother did too, knew she’d replayed Papa’s last minutes over and over again in her head. I had sat with her when she woke up screaming from nightmares about it, or from the old nightmare, the one she inherited from him, the bullet flying from his gun, ripping through his bunkmate, going straight through whoever else appeared in the dream and tried to stop it. She kept the gun he shot himself with. It was locked in a case in our basement somewhere, unloaded. I had my own nightmares sometimes. I slept quietly, but not well. Lately I’d been dreaming I got a phone call like my mother had. I’d been having her nightmare, only this time it was her with the gun to her head, and I never woke up in time to save her.

Nothing was working out the way I’d wanted it to. Ken Morton was still walking around with his hands in his pockets, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Nancy Morton and my mother were still making tentative small talk about Sarah and Kelli and me and the weather. Kelli had surreptitiously placed her iPod earbuds under the audio tour headphones and was humming a pop song and making eyes at a spiky-haired boy who was taking the tour with his family. Sarah had pulled out a notebook. I tried to peer over her shoulder to read it, but her handwriting was illegible. No one was taking this seriously enough. Even the site itself seemed like a cheap approximation of the sacred ground I’d been expecting. It was more national park than anything else, dozens of people with sunglasses in their pockets clutching souvenir photos of themselves in the mock gallows and checking their watches to make sure they had left enough time for a picnic lunch. Loud talking, shouting, whistling, singing, or other unnecessary noises are prohibited, said the automated tour guide. I took my headphones off altogether. Kids ran by, giggling, their parents calling after them. A group of women in matching purple sun visors kept loudly asking questions of one another although it was clear none of them knew the answers.

My mother paused in front of one of the restored jail cells, and the rest of us stopped behind her. She slid the headphones off of her ears and walked in. Nancy followed her. Even with just the two of them, it was crowded, but Sarah and I squeezed in behind them anyway. Under the circumstances, neither of us quite trusted our mothers to their own devices.

“Tight squeeze,” said Nancy. “Can you even imagine living in here?”

My mother opened and shut her mouth, but no words came out. I could see in her eyes the first of the tears I’d been expecting since she’d lost the appeal, the practiced composure of the past few weeks slipping from her. She sat on the floor of the cell and began to weep, shielding her perfectly made-up face with her hands. Ken Morton, who was still standing awkwardly outside the cell gate, took Kelli’s hand and led her away. I tried to push past Nancy to sit beside my mother and hold her hand, but Nancy sat down beside her first, and let her cry. Sarah tugged at my sleeve, but I didn’t go anywhere. I felt that the whole escapade was my mistake, and I’d be damned if I was going to let my mother’s family screw her up again on my watch.

“That was stupid of me,” said Nancy. She put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Of course you’ve imagined.”

My mother had stopped crying, but she didn’t respond.

“I wanted to say something, you know,” said Nancy. “At the funeral. I saw you sitting by yourself and I knew right away who you were, and I wanted to speak.”

“But you didn’t,” said my mother, the edge I’d missed in her since she’d arrived in San Francisco finally creeping back into her voice. “You didn’t even say hello.”

“I was young,” she said.

“I was younger,” said my mother. “You were the only family I had left when he died. I thought his reputation would matter to you, like it did to me. He was your grandfather too.”

“Not in the same way he was yours,” said Nancy. “And I can’t change that. It took me years to understand why my mother reacted to you the way she did, and when I did, I was ashamed, but I was still her daughter. There was a lot of sorting out to do. I do think she changed some. I think she regretted some of it. I know I did.”

“At least you know what you regret. I’m forty-seven years old and after everything, Cecilia is all I’ve got.”

“That’s not true,” I said, even though I had believed it all my life.

“Sometimes I think I know how Papa felt—I mean,” she said, noting my alarm, “not that I’d ever want to end it the way he did. Just that I don’t know what there is left to try.”

I looked at the metal bars, the scratches and fingerprints on them, the open doorway on the other side. How easy it was to feel stuck; how easy it was to walk out.

“There’s this,” Sarah said finally.

“There’s this,” my mother repeated, in a voice somewhere between a laugh and a sob. From farther down the hall, tourists were gawking at us. Nancy wrapped a protective arm around my mother, who leaned into her shoulder. Sarah grabbed my arm as she stepped away, and I walked out with her, accepting that it was time to let our mothers cry. I was unaccustomed to that then—to leaving while my mother was in need of comfort, to trusting anyone else to know what to do. I let myself be led away because Sarah seemed confident it was possible.

In the museum store, Kelli was laughing and dangling a pair of souvenir handcuffs just out of reach of the spiky-haired boy. Ken Morton was outside already, smoking a cigarette. He nodded in our general direction and went back to his smoking. This, I thought, was one of those times it would be easier to be male, or a smoker, to have a ready excuse to remove myself from emotional proceedings without anyone making an issue of it. Sarah pulled the mints out of her purse again and offered me one. She kept snapping the container open and shut.