“Hush, now,” Carol Anne said awkwardly, patting Monica on the back. “You did the right thing, hon. She needs help. You remember everything we went through with Terry? They put him right. It was a miracle, Monnie.”
Monica only cried harder. She felt as though something in her chest was tearing open, as though behind the frail cage of her ribs was a terrible box with no smell and no feel to it, a box that had been misheard and unseen, that had never existed at all, and she had opened it up without looking and shoved her daughter inside. She had never liked her daughter. She felt it now, a thought she’d kept wriggling under her thumbnail like an earwig for seventeen years. She had never liked Casey.
“I’m a terrible mother,” she wailed.
Patty McMahon, the League’s chair, took a different approach from Carol Anne’s. In three quick steps she was across the room, frightfully quick in spite of her sixty-four years and considerable bulk, and without expression she slapped Monica across the face hard enough to make her ears ring. When Monica stared up at her in openmouthed shock, Patty hit her again.
“Smarten up,” Patty snapped, adjusting her bifocals on their chain. She rubbed her hand, working stiffness from the joints. “The good Lord wants you up shit creek, you shut your mouth and paddle.”
Later, drifting on a gentle tide of Valium in the back seat of Carol Anne’s Volvo, Monica wondered what had come over her. Wayne wouldn’t send their daughter anywhere dangerous (drown her first), would he? He loved the kids. He was a wonderful father. She just needed to trust him. It has to work, she told herself as Carol Anne and Cynthia Ludgate whispered about her in the front seat, the huge open sky beyond them. It has to be the right thing.
The dreams grew worse. One stifling August night she didn’t sleep at all, just sat awake in the empty living room, staring at the photos on the wall. Wayne and Cal and other men on Wayne’s bass boat, Glory, a huge striper in her grinning husband’s arms. Casey’s fifth-grade ballet recital, not the screaming, kicking two-hour tantrum it had taken to get her into her tutu, but her and the other girls in her class turning clumsy circles up onstage. When Monica could no longer stand the sight of all her memories, she returned to her work. She went over the ministry’s books, in which Wayne, their congregation’s treasurer, sometimes made careless mistakes. She went over grass stains on the knees of Brian’s baseball pants with Didi until her head swam with the fumes.
The next night she slept an hour and a half. She had almost forgotten why she was cleaning when, on the fifth day of the eleventh week of her crusade, as she was knocking dead insects from the dining room fixture’s frosted dome into the trash, there was a knock at the door.
Monica found Casey standing on the front stoop, bags at her feet. The pale, untoned girl the camp’s staff had dragged out to their van three months ago was gone. In her place was a lean, wiry young woman, hair a little bleached from too much sun, a smudge of freckles across her snub nose. For a long moment they stared at each other across the threshold, and Monica felt with a clarity that slid into her breast like a knife that she had made a terrible mistake, that something in her life, in her home, was very wrong, and that she had pushed her little girl straight into its waiting teeth. She was seized with a sudden memory of holding her newborn daughter to her breast, of that little pink body squirming and fussing, refusing to latch. A feeling, which had come with her out of twilight sleep, that this child was not hers. Was no part of her.
Casey stepped across the threshold and wrapped Monica in a tight embrace. She smelled of dust and sweat and something else, something unpleasantly sugary and wet. “I know why you sent me,” Casey said, her voice muffled against Monica’s shoulder.
Monica felt as though Patty McMahon had slapped her again. “What?”
Casey broke away. She wiped her nose on the back of her arm, sniffing. Her eyes were rimmed in red, her cheeks wet with tears. “I know why you sent me,” she said thickly. “I was out of control. I was disrespecting you and Daddy. Pastor Eddie and Mrs. Glover helped me see that I was never really … gay.” She spat the word out like it was a maggot on her tongue. “I was just trying to hurt you, because I was confused. I had the wrong friends. I was trying to fit in with people who weren’t good for me, who didn’t want what was best for me, like you do.”
Monica took a step back.
That night at dinner Casey said grace for the first time in years. Brian and Stevie ignored her. They shoveled chicken Kiev and mashed potatoes into their mouths. Monica thought of their sweetness as toddlers, of their soft little hands and the clean, milky smell of the tops of their heads. Wayne ate without taking his eyes off their daughter, fork and knife moving mechanically between his plate and his mouth.
“I learned so much,” said Casey, smiling shyly. “How to build a fence, how to hull peas, how to milk a cow—”
Brian snickered. Without a word, Wayne reached across the table and slapped him.
“Wayne,” said Monica, but that was all.
“There are ladies present,” said Wayne, ignoring her. “If you can’t behave like a man, you can go to bed right now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Brian, staring at his plate.
Wayne leaned forward. “Are you going to cry now? Is that how I raised you?”
Brian blinked fiercely, his shoulders trembling with what Monica thought was rage. She wondered suddenly if he ever fantasized about killing Wayne, and how he would do it. If he did.
“No, sir.”
“Apologize to your sister.”
Brian turned his simmering gaze on Casey, who stared back at him placidly. “I’m sorry, Casey.”
“Thank you, Brian.” She smiled. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Wayne looked almost surprised. Monica couldn’t remember the last time one of the children had called him that. It made her cringe, that word. Daddy. A performance of weakness. Calculated. Cynical. A cringing ploy for table scraps.
Daddy.
“Your sister’s been through something very hard,” said Wayne in the broad, expansive voice he always used when he thought he was being magnanimous. He had a smear of breading at the corner of his mouth. It made him look like a mental patient, nodding in his chair as an orderly spooned slop into him. “And she’s had to be brave for all of us, so I want us all to give her a little extra respect.”
“Yes, sir,” Brian and Stevie chorused.
After dinner Casey gathered plates without being asked and joined Monica at the sink. For a while she dried and Casey washed, the only sounds Wayne and the boys watching television in the den and the gentle clink of dishes. It felt wrong to have her daughter back so suddenly, to have this helpful girl beside her, uncomplaining and composed. She glanced at Casey. She’d grown her hair out; it looked better, more feminine. Monica still had a scar on the heel of her right hand from a struggle they’d had years ago when she caught Casey trying to shear off her curls in the bathroom. Her daughter had kicked her in the elbow as they wrestled with the scissors. It had taken months to heal.
“Let me finish up, Mom,” said Casey, smiling.
“What?”
Her daughter’s brown eyes glittered under the overhead light. “The house looks so beautiful; you must be working hard. Can I finish the dishes?”
Ungrateful, thought Monica. She didn’t know why she thought it, which made her angrier than the thought itself. “Was dinner that bad?” she said through gritted teeth. “I can’t be trusted to wash a dish?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mom,” said Casey, and somehow being treated as reasonable made Monica even more furious. “No, dinner was so great. Can I do anything to make it up to you?”
“Go watch television,” Monica snapped.
Casey left, looking puzzled. A few moments later, a burst of Wayne’s laughter came from the den. She’s telling them all I’m crazy, thought Monica, scrubbing fiercely at a smear of oily butter. They’re laughing at me. She felt sick to her stomach. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with Casey, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. They’d taken the daughter she’d hated all her life, whose mouth at her breast had felt like a leech’s boneless orifice, who she’d left one day at six months old in the back seat of their old sedan when it was ninety-five degrees. She could still remember the red flush of Casey’s skin, the slick of sweat on her small body. She’d stood beside the car and stared at her child sitting slumped half-conscious in her car seat, and wondered what would happen if she just waited half an hour. That feeling that had always lain between them, unspoken, uncomprehended. Now it was gone.
Now there was … nothing.
Laughter echoed in her ears.
Monica woke just after three from troubled dreams. She had been in the woods, caught in the thorns of a dark and tangled thicket, and something had been creeping closer. The more she’d struggled the deeper the thorns dug. The house was dark and silent, except for the thin whistle of Wayne’s deviated septum. There was no moon, only faint starlight between the blinds. The Kirks’ yard was empty and still outside. Gradually she became aware of the distant thrumming of crickets.
