All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 14
So there it was. Life was good. Dan had found his life’s work. I had a husband and a baby on the way. My God, we were happy.
* * *
—
After I disappeared, Dan was happy with his girlfriend too. She moved into our house, and Dan was utterly blissful. A newlywed again.
Picture this:
One night the new, merged family sat in the den watching TV. Dan and Sarah on the couch, she with her feet crossed in Dan’s lap. Jeff and Jamie in separate chairs. Miranda on the floor, on her stomach, chin propped in her hands.
Sarah moaned, “Mmm.”
The three kids looked over to see Dan idly massaging his girlfriend’s feet. Sarah with eyes closed, back arched. She was practically purring.
“Oh my God, gross,” Jamie said. “Ew. Just stop.”
Jeff made a retching sound.
The two of them fell out of the room together and up the stairs, with groans and eye rolls like soldiers under a mustard gas attack.
“What?” Sarah said. “What did we do?”
Dan shrugged.
“What about you, Mimi?” he said to the last child in the room. “Do you think we’re gross too?”
“Kinda.”
Miranda scrunched up her nose. It was gross. Not just the hint of sex. It was gross because Dan had never rubbed my feet when I was alive or demonstrated his affection so freely in any other way, at least in my daughter’s presence. Now, by choosing Sarah, Dan was necessarily rejecting me, which meant—to trace the steps of Miranda’s thinking—he was abandoning Miranda, too, since the little girl could not imagine herself as anything but my daughter. I was part of her. I was in her skin and her hair and her bones.
The thought of it—of losing her father now as well as her mother, of being truly parentless—stirred a familiar sadness in her. It was just a little fall at first, a fatal shift in mood. She dreaded this feeling, the bump, the first arrival of sorrow, like the first sniffles and sore throat that signal the onset of an illness. Once her dark moods started, she could not control them. Her body seemed to thicken and slow down, as if the blood was sludging in her veins. There was no choice but to ride it out, however long the gloom lasted, two or three days, sometimes more. She was young, but she already knew all this.
Dan should have known it too. He should have seen it in my baby’s eyes. It was not complicated.
Miranda wanted him to see it, certainly, to sense her need and come for her.
But of course he did not. Miranda got up and left the room, and Dan never took his hands off his girlfriend’s slim, lovely feet.
* * *
—
It was not all sadness for Miranda, though. She was in love too. Her visits to the Bowers house a few blocks away became more frequent. After babysitting on a few Saturday nights, she began to go just to visit, often in the afternoon after school, preferring to sit with Mrs. Bowers rather than be at home alone or with Sarah. This became a routine. Miranda would bring homework or books to read, and she was always happy to play with the two little girls. Around five, when the family began to anticipate Mr. Bowers’s return from work, Miranda would slip out, invariably to find her own home duller and sadder than the one she’d just left.
Mrs. Bowers allowed Miranda to come and go, at first with a little wariness, then with real love. If I could return to life even for a few hours, I would thank this kind woman for welcoming my quirky little girl in her home, especially with the shadow over our family. (You see, Jeff and Miranda? There are good people even in this story.)
How kind was she? Listen:
One afternoon Miranda found herself alone in the kitchen with Mrs. Bowers. The girls were playing four square in the driveway, and Mrs. Bowers occasionally went to the window to glance at them or she smiled at the sound of their voices. Miranda had been reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles but she’d put the book down beside her.
“Can I ask you something?” Miranda said.
“Sure.”
“It’s kind of personal.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think I need a bra?”
“A bra. Oh my. Well, let’s see. You could wear a bra, I guess. Do you think you need a bra?”
“Sorta, yeah.”
“Are other girls in your grade wearing bras?”
“Some are.”
“Do you want to wear one?”
“Yes. I kind of—” She sat up straight, shoulders back, straining to look down at her own chest. “I think I’m sticking out. Am I?”
“No!” (This was not exactly true but bless her for saying it.) “You look beautiful, Miranda! But if you’d feel better, then you could wear one. Why not?”
“Where should I get it?”
“Oh, any department store.”
“Will you take me?”
“Me? It’s your first bra. Don’t you think it should be someone you know better?”
“I want it to be you. Anyway, no, there isn’t anybody else.”
“That can’t be true. There must be somebody.”
Mrs. Bowers did not know about Sarah, the quasi stepmother. Miranda had never shared that mortifying detail of her family story.
“What about your grandmother?”
Miranda actually chuckled at the thought of discussing boobs and brassieres with either of her grandmothers. My mother would make too much of it; Dan’s mother too little.
“What about that aunt that you told me about?”
“Katie.”
“What about Aunt Katie? I’m sure she’d take you.”
“It would be weird. I’d have to call her just for this. I don’t want people to talk about it. I want to just…do it.”
“Oh. Okay.” Mrs. Bowers made a concerned face. “I don’t know, sweetie. It feels a little strange.”
“Please. Please take me.”
Mrs. Bowers smiled, relenting, indulgent. “All right, then.”
“Yes! Thank you!”
Beaming, Miranda jumped up and ran to hug her. She wrapped both arms around Mrs. B’s back and laid her head on the woman’s shoulder, eyes closed, and squeezed her tight. In that moment, Miranda felt so much love for this woman and so much comfort in the press of her body against Miranda’s—how perfectly they fit!—that she could not let go.
Mrs. Bowers returned the girl’s hug, then relaxed her arms to signal it was time for the embrace to end. But when she understood that Miranda did not intend to let go, she pulled the girl in, kissed the top of her head, and laid her cheek down on the spot she’d just kissed. She must have found it impossible not to love Miranda, but she must have known, too, that that kiss was a mistake.
* * *
—
In my time, the kids had always done homework in their rooms. Dan insisted they needed quiet and solitude so they could concentrate. Personally, I always liked to have people around even when I was trying to focus, and I suspect the solitude did more harm than good. But Dan won, and it became the kids’ habit to scatter to their rooms after dinner. They would emerge one by one, an hour or two later, bleary-eyed and starved for TV, when they had finished their work. Even Alex, who outgrew his little room by junior year—we used to joke that soon Alex would be so big he would have to back into his room like a hermit crab into its shell—still secluded himself there every evening until he graduated.
That all changed when Jamie moved in. She and Jeff began to do their homework together in the den. It seemed like a small thing. Jeff was being kind, changing his routine so that his new stepsister would not feel lonely in her new home. Jamie was in an odd situation socially, too, because she had not transferred to a school in Newton but stayed on at her old school to finish the year, which meant she had no friends in her new hometown.
One evening in early spring, Jeff was at the little card table in the den, struggling with his Latin, as he always seemed to. He had a bored look on his face—he was a teenager now but could still look just like a little boy—and his eyes wandered to Jamie. She was sitting on the couch with her legs crossed, books scattered around.
She sensed his gaze, raised her head. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Staring.”
“I’m not staring.”
“What do you call it, then?”
“It’s just where my eyes were pointed.”
“Well, point them somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
“Anywhere but me. Get back to work.”
But he didn’t look away. He couldn’t.
And any girl would have known.
* * *
—
Danny made good money as a lawyer right from the start, but he spent it as fast as he made it. He liked good things, expensive whiskey and wine, cigars, Rolexes, cars. He liked visiting New York to have suits custom made or to shop at Paul Stuart. He insisted we join his parents’ golf club, which was so outlandishly expensive I begged him not to. My husband seemed ethereally unaware that money could ever run out.
It drove me crazy, and Danny knew it. At restaurants, he used to shoo me ahead so he could overtip the valet or the maitre d’. One restaurant host in particular—at Charley’s in town—used to make a fuss over Danny and sneak us to the front of the line. He would come fetch us from the crowd and escort us through the bar right to an open table. Then Danny would swipe the tip into his hand with a gesture the two of them seemed to have practiced. “Always nice to see you, Mr. Larkin.” To Danny it was all so ordinary, “A little grease, Jane, it’s just the way things work.” If I objected to any of his lavish spending, he had a stock answer: “It’s my money. I made it. No one can tell me what to do with it.”
He was so at ease, so complacent, that I began to think the crazy one was me. So after a while I stopped arguing. He was right: it was his money. He was making plenty. And what was the point of having it if not to spend it? So I spent too. I collected Courrèges sweaters and Dior dresses and a Corum gold-coin watch. All our friends seemed to be doing the same: we spent every penny we had, and then some. Why save it? At some point, it no longer seemed strange when, despite all the money Danny was earning, we sometimes could not make the mortgage payment at the end of the month. Yet I knew, at the same time, that it was wrong. I knew it. I was not like Danny—I was acting, he was not.
One year—it must have been 1965, Miranda was a baby—we made a big mistake. We were living month to month as usual. Come April, we realized we had not set aside money to pay taxes. (Danny hated taxes, would not talk about them, considered them legalized theft.)
We went to his parents and asked for help. His mother said no. “You got into trouble, now you get out of it.”
I was shocked. I could not imagine my own parents denying me help, no matter how irresponsible I’d been.
But Danny was more than surprised; he was furious. It never dawned on him that his mother’s cool logic was just like his own. Even her peremptory judgment—you got into trouble…—could have come right out of Danny’s own mouth.
Danny and his mother had a huge fight, and when we got home, he called her to scream some more, all to no avail.
After the kids were settled in bed, we sat in the kitchen trying to figure a way out.
Danny was seething. He was drinking Chivas on ice, the glass nearly filled.
We began to run through all the possible sources of quick money we could think of. Did Danny have clients with unpaid bills? Clients who might be willing to pay in advance, maybe in exchange for a discount? Danny suggested he had some clients, connected guys, who would lend us money, but we agreed it was a bad idea.
I said, “Your mother’s right, you know. It’s our own fault.”
Danny’s eyes burned. “Our own fault how?”
“How? Danny, come on. It’s not like we didn’t know tax day was coming. It’s not like we never paid taxes before.”
“We made a mistake, all right? It’s a mistake. People make mistakes. That’s different from what she did.”
“What she did? Your mother? What did she do?”
“She knifed us.”
“Oh, Danny, come on.”
“She did. She knifed us right in the back. Don’t you see that?”
“That’s a little dramatic.”
“Is it? Is it dramatic, Jane? Let me tell you something: we’re in this position for one reason—my mother refused to help us.”
“It’s her money.”
“No. It’s family money. We’re family too. We have a right to some of it, surely.”
“No. Not a right.”
“Jane, you don’t get it. She’s just holding it for us. It’s not really hers.”
“Well, it’s hers for now.”
“She didn’t earn it, though, did she? So how is it hers? Like a fuckin’ queen: You got into trouble, now you can get out of it. Fuck you! I go out and I earn my money. I hustle and I fight and I scratch and claw every day. Every fuckin’ day. And what does she do? Did she earn that money? Did she?”
“No.”
“No. So how is it hers? It’s not.”
“I don’t know, Dan.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well, how is it yours?”
“Simple: I’m her son. Jesus, you’re a pea-brain sometimes.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not a pea-brain.”
“Then stop talking like one.”
A moment. Dan settled down. These little storms overtook him sometimes.
I said, sullenly, “We could sell one of the cars.”
“We’re not selling the cars. It wouldn’t be enough anyway. The minute you drive them off the lot, they lose half their value.”
“Well, there must be some money somewhere, Dan. It can’t all be gone.”
He got up with his drink, retreated to a corner of the room, leaned against the counter. “I do have some money I could get to.”
“You do?”
“Clients’ money. I’m just holding it. I could borrow from that. Nobody’d ever know.”
“What happens if you get caught?”
“I get disbarred.”
“Forget it.”
He frowned, reluctant. “I have some other money too. Some cash.”
“Cash? Where?”
“Banks.”
“No, you don’t. I see all the statements, I balance the checkbook.”
“It’s not a bank account. I mean actual cash. In safe-deposit boxes.”
“You have—what? You have cash in safe-deposit boxes? Why?”
“For a rainy day.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? All this worry and fighting was for nothing?”
“It’s my money.”
“It’s money, Dan. That’s what we need now, is money. Why would you hide that?”
“It’s not completely”—he searched for a word that was opaque, diplomatic, but even here he could not allow himself the imprecision—“legal.”
“Oh no, Danny. What are you up to?”
“Nothing. I have some clients that like to pay me in cash.”
“And you don’t want to pay the taxes.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Some of my clients aren’t the nicest people. I don’t ask where they get their money.”
“You don’t ask because you already know.”
“Are you asking?”
“No.”
“Okay then.”
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me about your clients?”
“Jane, this is my work. I’m a lawyer. There’s no need to tell you every last detail. This is what it is.”
“Okay. So we can use it to pay the taxes?”
“It’s not that easy. There’s some risk.”
“Why? It’s just attorneys’ fees. You earned it, like you said.”
“These aren’t fees. I can’t just put it in the bank.”
“Jesus, Danny, what’s going on?”
“Sometimes these guys need to put their money somewhere. They want to invest in something—a bar, a restaurant, maybe they want to buy a building, a laundromat, a parking lot, whatever. They want to invest, same as everyone else. Only it’s more complicated for them. So I help them. We set up a little corporation or a trust, and we buy the building without their name on it. Or we put my name on it. That kind of thing.”
“You mean money laundering.”
“Listen to you, J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t mean money laundering. It’s just paperwork. I’m not doing anything illegal, Jane, believe me. I wouldn’t do anything to endanger us, you know that.”
“And yet you’re hiding money in safe-deposit boxes.”
