She sat up and slipped out of bed. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw that Wayne’s closet door was ajar, and the thought that he had taken out the box and opened it while she was sleeping crossed her mind in a horrible rush, a thought like a centipede skittering across a bathroom floor.
There isn’t any box, she told herself. It isn’t real. It was only something I misheard.
The hall was quiet. No light under the boys’ door. No light under Casey’s. In the bathroom Monica splashed cold water on her face, hoping it would take the edge off her prickling nerves. She felt as though she’d rolled through nettles. The least caress of her rayon dressing gown shifting as she moved was enough to make her want to crawl out of her skin. Then she saw it, and her irritation vanished.
There was a light under the basement door. Casey’s down there smoking reefer, she thought with something very like relief. She’s looking at smut. Little hussy. And then, with a twinge of frustrated concern: She’s cutting herself again.
Quietly, carefully, Monica opened the basement door. She took each step with care, stretching to skip the third stair from the top, which creaked. The light, which flickered and buzzed every few seconds, was the bare hanging bulb over Wayne’s workbench. The surface had been dusty with disuse until she’d cleaned it the week before. Wayne had no real interest in woodworking, no real knack for home repair. The sagging love seat and armchair were empty. The old TV, the one Wayne’s father had given them for a housewarming gift, was dark and silent.
Monica sniffed, but the only odor hanging in the air was the last faint trace of mildew she’d been unable to scour and spritz away. The light flickered again. Maybe one of the boys had been messing around with Wayne’s things and had left it on. She crossed the carpet and put a bare foot over the line where it gave way to cold concrete. The boiler loomed dark and silent in its corner. The lightbulb whined. It was nothing. Monica felt curiously deflated. Disappointed, almost.
“Mom?”
Monica screamed, clapping her hand over her own mouth to stifle it as she spun around. Casey was crouched in the shadows under the stairs. In the darkness Monica couldn’t see her daughter’s face, only the soft crescent of her mouth and the faint suggestion of a nose. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I couldn’t sleep.” Casey’s lips curved into a smile. “I came down here to pray.”
“Are you out of your mind?” hissed Monica. “You scared me half to death. And praying? Missy, I have dragged your behind out of bed enough Sunday mornings—”
Casey’s face fell. “You have every right not to trust me.”
Monica slapped her. “Stop it,” she snapped, not caring that she might wake Wayne, not looking at the memory that surfaced like a bubble through thick mud of a little girl with an overbite and big jug ears cowering in front of a shrieking woman in a tatty housedress. That girl’s shoulders had been red with welts. Her ribs had been painted with bruises. She wasn’t real. She was shut up in a box somewhere in the back of a closet, on the highest shelf.
She seized Casey’s shoulders and shook her. “What did they do to you? Did they touch you?”
“Mom, no! Mom!” Terror in those big brown eyes. Real fear. “You’re hurting me!”
Monica let go of her daughter and stepped back, stumbling a little. “Honey, I’m so—I’m—”
Casey burst into tears, hugging herself and doubling up. She cried silently, fat tears falling to vanish into the carpet. Finally she sank onto the floor. “I kn-know why you’re mad.” She gulped. “I know why you don’t trust me, Mom, but I want to show you that you can now. I j-just want to stop hurting you.”
She doesn’t really look anything like me, thought Monica, staring down at Casey’s loose blond curls, her little ears and button nose. She’s all Wayne.
“It’s okay if you c-can’t believe me,” Casey sputtered. Her eyes were red and swollen, her upper lip glazed with snot. “But I’m better, Mom. I r-really am.”
“I didn’t mean to hit you,” said Monica. Her own voice sounded flat and dead to her. She took Casey by the elbow and got her on her feet and over to the old green corduroy couch. They sat side by side, Casey still sniffling, Monica awkwardly holding her arm. “I didn’t—I don’t think we should discuss it outside the family. Do you understand why?”
“I do,” said Casey, eyes downcast.
Monica patted Casey’s arm weakly. She tried to picture her daughter kneeling in the dark under the stairs, eyes closed, lips moving in fervent prayer. “What were you praying for, honey?”
“For you and Daddy and Brian and Stevie,” Casey said. “And for Pastor Eddie, and Mrs. Glover. Everyone at camp. So many of them are still fighting for themselves. For their souls.”
“What was it like?” asked Monica.
“It was hard,” said Casey. “Meredith—Mrs. Glover—told us it’s like suicide to change who you are. That most people are too afraid ever to admit they might be wrong.” Her eyes glistened in the faint, flickering light of the overhead as she stepped out from under the stairs. “I didn’t want to believe her. I was so angry at you and Daddy—”
Daddy.
“—it was like that was all I could feel, even in sessions with Pastor Eddie, when we were talking about, you know, the things I did, and why I did them, I was so angry, I could hardly sleep I was so angry, and then one day a few weeks ago I was scrubbing the floor in the farmhouse—”
Cleaning.
“—and it just … fell away. I felt this light in my chest, this white fire, and all my anger was gone.”
I opened a box, and I put my daughter inside it.
“That’s very good,” said Monica, not knowing what else to say, not knowing why suspicion still gnawed at the pit of her stomach. “I’m … that’s good, Casey.”
Casey leaned her head against Monica’s shoulder. “I love you, Mom,” she whispered.
Monica’s skin crawled.
Days passed, became weeks, then months. Fall blew in over the Rockies.
Casey’s grades improved. She joined the baking club. Sundays she volunteered at the church daycare. Monica had looked in on her once or twice, disturbed somehow by the thought of Casey around little children, but they adored her, crawling over her, demanding stories, cuddling in her lap for naptime. Mrs. Hansen, the harried, bone-thin woman who ran the daycare, said that Casey was so sweet, so responsible, she felt she hardly had anything left to do herself.
By Thanksgiving Monica had almost grown used to this dutiful, even-tempered new daughter. Casey helped her roll out pie crust, bake biscuits, stuff the turkey—a twenty-eight-pound monstrosity from one of Wayne’s fishing buddies who had a farm in Gelton, two towns over—and lay the table. She led the grace at dinner, and that night, once the bones were picked, the talk among her family and Wayne’s was what a fine young woman Monnie’s girl had turned out to be, how gracious, how lovely, how obedient, and what a fine, fine wife she’d make one day soon.
Two days later, Pastor Brian told the congregation that Carol Anne Forester and her son, Terry, had gone home to Jesus in a terrible accident. There were prayers. Tears were shed. The whole church entered mourning. It wasn’t until Monica read it in the paper that she learned the truth: Carol Anne had made her family turkey sandwiches the day after Thanksgiving, then gone into the kitchen and returned with a loaded shotgun. With the first barrel she blew her son’s brains onto the walls. With the second she’d added her own.
“She was always crazy,” said Wayne when she told him.
“No, she wasn’t,” argued Monica. “She was as normal as you or me. I knew her for fifteen years.”
“What do you want me to do about it, Monica?” he snapped, looking at her with faint disgust and irritation. On the television, Pat Robertson was explaining the ways in which teaching children about evolution made them homosexual. “I didn’t ask her to put a sunroof in her head. You lost your friend, well, that’s sad and I’m sorry, but don’t make it my problem.”
She stared at him for a long time as Robertson continued his tirade. She wondered what it would feel like to ask Wayne for a divorce, if he would laugh at her, or hit her, or simply nod and say he’d been meaning to get around to it himself. She would have to find a new congregation. Righteous Heart was full of Wayne’s people, though without her they might soon realize he wasn’t the accounting wizard they believed he was. Marriage is a sacrament, she heard her mother say. She could almost see the ugly purple bruises on Mary Lampell’s throat, the cuts and scrapes on the side of her pretty face. It says in the Bible, “Wives, be subject to your husbands.” Her mother had put up with much worse than she got from Wayne, and she had been a beauty in her day, too. Monica, with her overbite and stuck-out ears, had never turned heads.
At Terry’s funeral—Carol Anne had been quietly cremated and her ashes left in a repository—Monica thought it was strange how Casey wept. The two children had never been close, not even in a playful, teasing way. Could it really be nothing more than that Terry had gone to Camp Resolution a summer earlier? The strength of that place, the strength she and Wayne had prayed for, disturbed her now.
