Wilde Lake(83)

“Have you talked to Dad about this, Lu?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Because he’d tear you apart for this kind of shabby thinking. Heck, it almost sounds as if you’re Rudy’s defense attorney. He did it. He had cause. He didn’t have cause. He was hired. I mean, what is it? Pick one.”

“I think Davey hired Rudy to kill Nita Flood.”

“As you said, they barely knew each other.”

“His church does a brown-bag giveaway. Every Sunday in North Laurel.”

They are nearing the grove of trees where Ben Flood died. Lu wouldn’t be surprised if AJ decided to pick up the pace, but he slows down, takes in his surroundings. “Things are supposed to get smaller as you get older. But the trees get bigger. Our family home is literally bigger. Everything about our family just gets bigger and bigger. I tried to make my life simpler, and it’s more complicated than ever.”

“Have you even been here, since—”

He stares at the trees, gray green in the dusk. “I don’t really remember any of it. I remember the story, but not the actual event. Does that make sense? I had to tell it so many times, it’s like something I read in a book. I hate that Ben Flood died that night. But it wasn’t my fault.”

“I know.” Lu touches his arm, the one he broke, the one that never quite hangs straight, although he says his years of yoga have helped him regain almost all his flexibility.

“Except—I ran after him. I tackled him—or tried to. I barely grazed his calves with my hand before I fell on the rocks and broke my arm. But he turned—he turned his head to look at me. I’m seeing it now, Lu. I don’t want to see it. It took me so long to stop seeing it—”

“Let’s keep walking.”

It seems cruel now to keep talking about Nita and Davey. They walk another ten minutes in silence. They reach the halfway point, the spot from where they can see their own house across the water, full of light.

“Damn, it really is huge,” AJ says.

“Good thing he bought a double lot all those years ago. AJ—did our mother like the house?”

“I thought so. I mean, when you’re eight, you can’t really tell if your parents are happy or sad. But I think she liked it. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It seems so very much his dream house now, tailored to his tastes.”

“Three massive HVAC units,” AJ says. “That’s quite a carbon footprint you’re leaving.”

“Says the man who just flew to Australia, the man with three rowhouses, disguised to look as if he lives in just one.”

“We try never to use the AC.”

This is true, Lu knows. It’s why they don’t visit her brother June through August.

“Was she sad? Our mother?”

“Lu, she was very ill.”

“I know, I know—the heart thing.”

He is rubbing his left arm now. A long plane trip has probably aggravated the stiffness there. “No, Lu. She was mentally ill. She was a depressive. I’m sorry. I assumed that dad had finally told you everything.”

She stops on the path. “What ‘everything’?”

“I always promised—and I thought by now he would have—look, you have to talk to him. He has to tell you the rest. Because there are questions only he can answer.”

Hadn’t AJ said the same thing about sex almost forty years ago? There are questions only he can answer. Lu was eight and still trying to piece together what really happened when babies were made. But it turned out there were a lot of questions their father could not, would not answer. Most particularly—Why would anyone do that? “Well, we have to have babies,” her father said then. And she knew, the way children always know when they are being lied to, that he was withholding something important. That’s why she had ended up talking to Teensy about the whole messy affair.

But had she really never guessed that their mother’s sadness, which now seems obvious in every anecdote she knows about her, was something more than mere moodiness? That Adele’s parents had guarded her not from the dragons outside their Roland Park castle, but from demons within? Lu cannot wait to get home, send AJ and Lauranne back to Baltimore with the leftover cherry pie, deposit the children in their beds, and confront her father. She wishes she could leave her brother standing here, plunge into the lake, and swim a straight hard line toward the large, light-filled house on the other side.

But life doesn’t work that way when one is an adult. There are Penelope and Justin, who need to go to bed at a decent hour because there’s school tomorrow, a kitchen to clean. Life goes on. Life is relentless. And when the house is finally quiet, Lu discovers her father dozing in his usual chair. She cannot bear to wake him, much less start peppering him with questions.

Instead, she goes to his desk, the planter’s desk that Noel broke all those years ago, scattering her father’s papers, and finds the slen der file that loomed so large in her imagination, one that she used to sneak peeks at when she was a child. It is a plain manila envelope with her mother’s name on it. There are photos, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate.

A death certificate, too, which Lu doesn’t remember ever seeing in this envelope before.

Maybe that’s because it’s dated 1985.