Voices Carry Read online

  “You always called late in the afternoon, after school but before supper.”

  Genna stared at her sister.

  “I used to pick up the extension and listen to your voice. I’d stay on the line even after Momma hung up.”

  “How could she do that, Chris? How could she know that I was there, calling for her, and still hang up on me?”

  “By that time, she’d pretty much gone around the bend herself, I guess. I wasn’t old enough to figure it all out, and back then I didn’t know anything about mental illness. But I do know that was just about the time when she started to fall apart for real. She never could stand up to him, and eventually it broke her. Piece by piece. Just like it broke me.”

  Genna buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

  “I’m sorry.” Crystal sat down next to her on the concrete step, wanting to put an arm around her, but afraid that her offer of comfort would be rejected, sat with her arms folded over her chest, hugging herself as if to ward off a chill. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I should have just let it be. I’m so sorry. I should have known it was a bad idea. I told the psychiatrist that it was a stupid idea, but she thought it would bring closure of sorts. I never stopped to think of what it might do to you. I guess when it comes to you, I never do the right thing. It’s terrible, isn’t it? I’ve always loved you so much, and yet I never seem to do the right thing where you are concerned.”

  “You did the right thing.” Genna shook her head. “This time, you did the right thing.”

  “How can you say that? Look at yourself, you’re obviously distressed—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Okay?” Crystal’s jaw dropped. “You’re doubled over in pain, you’re sobbing and shaking, but it’s okay? What’s okay about that?”

  “I’ve been doubled over in pain for eighteen years.” Genna wiped her wet face on the sleeve of her shirt. “You didn’t bring the pain with you, Chris. It’s been inside me all this time. But telling me was the right thing. I only wish I’d known sooner. It might have helped.”

  “How would it have helped to know that I’d sold you out?” Crystal asked bitterly.

  “Is that how you see this, as you selling me out?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, it’s going to take a while to sort it all out.” Genna ran a hand through her hair. “Very honestly, on the one hand, I want to toss your butt back up to the bus stop for letting me go through all that alone back then. I have never been able to express to anyone what that was like for me then.”

  Genna rose and began to pace.

  “You want to talk about feeling worthless? How much more worthless can a child feel than to know that she’s been abandoned? That she’s done something so unacceptable that she’s not worthy of her parents’ love. And to know that the unacceptable thing that she’s done, was simply to tell the truth about something so terrible. . .” Genna swallowed hard. “If a child can’t go to its parents when something so terrible has happened. . .”

  Crystal buried her face in her hands, unable to bear her sister’s anguish, even now.

  “But those were choices that they made, not you, Crystal.” Genna fought to compose herself, to remain rational. “You were a victim, too. Their victim and his—Brother Michael’s—same as I was.”

  “If I’d spoken up that first time, none of the rest of it would have happened,” Crystal reminded her.

  “What makes you think that they’d have treated you any differently than they’d treated me?” Genna asked. “Why would you think for one minute that they’d have been kinder to you? That they wouldn’t have turned their backs on you just as they did to me?”

  “All that time I let it go on, all those other girls who were hurt by him. . . I could have stopped it. I could have prevented what happened to them.”

  “Any one of them could have stopped it, Chrissie. None of them did.”

  “You did,” Crystal said softly. “You stopped it.”

  “And paid a terrible price for it.”

  “Would you change it? If you had a chance to go back and do it again, would you have told, knowing what was going to happen?”

  “Yes,” Genna said without hesitation. “Yes, I’d tell.”

  “I’ve asked myself that same question over and over a thousand times. What would I do if I could just live that first summer all over again,” Crystal told her, her eyes wide and glistening in the overhead light. “I’d like to think that I’d be the one to tell. And then everything that happened to you, to you and to all those others, never would have.”

  Genna sat down next to her sister and put her arm around her shoulder and drew her close enough that their heads were touching.

  “It’s so hard when you’re little like that and something terrible happens to you and you don’t know what to do.” Crystal sniffed back another round of tears. “You don’t understand that sometimes you only get one chance to do the right thing.”

  “It’s never too late to tell the truth. You did the right thing by telling me now,” Genna assured her. “You’re helping me to understand things that have haunted me all these years.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe she didn’t leave me because she didn’t love me.”

  “Knowing that she was terrified of him makes it better? How could knowing that her fear of him was greater than her love for you make it easier?”

  “Maybe her fear of him, the abuse she suffered at his hands, did things to her that we’ll never know about. Maybe in time, knowing that will help me to understand her a little. I’ve never been able to reconcile the fact that when we were little, she was such a good mother.”

  “Remember how she used to take us to Gramma’s every summer? Back then I used to think it was so that she could see her family,” Crystal said. “Now I think she just wanted to get us away from him. So that someday we could look back and remember a time when we weren’t afraid.”

  “Remember how Gramma used to sneak us peppermints because Daddy didn’t let us have sweets?” Genna’s mouth twisted, half sob, half smile. “Little mints wrapped in cellophane.”

  “And she always wore lily of the valley cologne. Every spring when I see those little white flowers, I think of Gramma. If she’d been alive when all that was going on. . . oh! I almost forgot.” Crystal dug into her jeans pocket. “I brought you this.”

  She took Genna’s hand and placed something in the palm. Genna turned to the light that hung over the door to the lobby and exclaimed, “Oh! Gramma’s pansy pin! I always loved this! Where did you find it?”

  “Under the mattress with the photographs.”

  Genna closed her eyes and remembered the last time she’d seen the dark blue and yellow enameled pin. Her grandmother had worn it on her seventieth birthday. Six months later the beloved woman had died.

  And later that summer, Genna had fallen from grace.

  Everything about that year seemed to blur now in Genna’s mind as she sat holding the enameled pansy. So many images swirled around inside her head that she thought she’d explode.

  “Don’t you ever wonder how things might have been different, if Gramma hadn’t died?” Genna whispered.

  Crystal nodded. “For a long time after she passed on, I used to think that I dreamed she came back for us. Then I realized that when I saw her, I wasn’t asleep, but I wasn’t afraid when she came in my room. She would just sit on the end of my bed and rub my foot, remember how she used to do that? I always thought she’d be there in the morning, and we’d take Momma and we’d come find you and we’d all live in Gramma’s house together. All of us except for Daddy. Gramma wouldn’t have had him under her roof.”

  “Do you think she knew? About how he used to beat us?”

  “She knew when she came to see me, after she passed on.” Crystal dug her fists into her jeans pockets and said, “I know that sounds crazy—maybe that’s what made them first start thinking I was crazy, that
I saw Gramma. Talked to her. But she didn’t know when she was alive. She just thought he was a mean son of a bitch. She didn’t know just how mean until after she passed on.”

  Crystal paused, then asked, “Did you ever see her, Genna? Did she ever come to see you, after she passed on?”

  “No,” Genna shook her head. “She never did.”

  “I wonder why not.”

  “Maybe she thought you needed her more than I did.”

  Genna patted Crystal on the knee. “It’s late. Come on back upstairs with me.”

  “I can’t believe you’d invite me back into your home.”

  “There’s so much more we need to say to each other. So much to learn about each other.” Genna stood and tugged on her sister’s hand. “Now’s as good a time as any to start.”

  Crystal hesitated. “Do you think we can ever learn to be friends again, Gen, like we were when we were little?”

  “Let’s work on learning to be sisters first”—Genna pulled Crystal to her feet—“then we’ll worry about being friends.”

  Genna lay in her bed, trying to make sense of the fact that her sister had shown up out of the blue and told her a story that brought back every feeling of worthlessness and fear she’d fought for her entire adult life. And yet for reasons she could not explain, she felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from her heart.

  Was it easier to accept her mother was psychologically unbalanced, or that she simply hadn’t loved her enough to fight for her? Was the fact that her father had been a dictatorial, abusive tyrant reason enough to forgive her mother for abandoning Genna when he had insisted that she walk out of that courtroom and not look back? Or had the forced abandonment of her child caused the mental breakdown of a woman whose will had already been beaten down? Genna would probably never know for sure.

  She did know, however, that right at that moment, she felt no remorse at learning of her parents’ death. They had died to her so many years ago, as she had to them, that she had mourned them all she could. In truth, the hollow place that had once held her love for her parents was still there, still hollow. How to reconcile that empty place with what she now knew of her mother’s sad life? Was she to be pitied? Despised?

  Genna blew out a steady stream of air and tucked her arms behind her head. And what of Crystal, who now slept on Genna’s sofa, having refused the offer of the apartment’s only bed. What of her part in Genna’s disgrace? What would have happened had she come forward with her own truth all those years ago? Would it have made a difference? Or would her mother have left both of her daughters behind?

  She’d have done whatever he’d demanded she do, Genna knew.

  In her mind’s eye she could see him, small round eyes, humorless and cold. A long thin face and nose, long slightly peaked ears, and straight black hair.

  It occurred to her now, all these years later, that she had never seen her father smile. It was the last thought she’d had before falling asleep, and it was still in her head when she awoke the next morning.

  “Did you ever see him smile?” Genna asked, as she watched Crystal putter in the kitchen, insisting that Genna let her make scrambled eggs and toast for both of them.

  “No.” Crystal shook her head, knowing exactly who he was. “I never did. What made you think of that?”

  “I guess I was wondering what she saw in him. Or why she stayed with him.”

  “She stayed with him out of fear, but before that? I don’t know why she married him. I’ve wondered about that for years. Had she loved him once? Had he ever loved her?” Crystal broke the first of four eggs into a yellow-ware bowl and added, “But I can tell you this, Genna. If that’s what love does to you, I’m not having any of it.”

  “That wasn’t love. That was two weak people sucking the best out of each other, leaving only the worst behind. That isn’t love,” Genna repeated as she plugged in the coffeemaker.

  “Have you ever been married?” Crystal asked.

  “No. Have you?”

  “Nope. Ever come close?”

  Genna thought of her relationship with John, of how close they had been, how much they had shared.

  “Maybe. Once,” she replied before turning her back to take the toast from the toaster.

  “Didn’t work out?”

  “Not that time.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing happened to him. I still see him, if that’s what you mean. Though not so much lately.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have. . . issues,” Genna said succinctly.

  “So resolve them.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “If you care about him enough you will.”

  “Sometimes caring isn’t enough.”

  “What else is there?”

  Genna sighed. “For starters, there’s the fact that he disappeared from my life for almost six months.”

  “Must have been one hell of an argument.”

  “There was no argument. Everything was fine. Perfect. At least, I had thought it was. Then, bingo. Gone. Out of my life. No good-bye, not a word that he was leaving. He was just gone.”

  “Wow. That’s terrible. What happened, he met someone else?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. John had this case—he’s an agent, too—it was really intense. He got a little too caught up with what was going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A few years ago, there was a series of child abductions and murders in Baltimore. The press had nicknamed the killer the Pied Piper, because he lured kids away and they were never seen again.”

  “I remember that. It was on all the news.” Crystal visibly shivered. “Terrible stuff.”

  “Well, that was John’s case. He was just another agent on the investigation until Woods—that was the Piper’s name, Sheldon Woods—took a fancy to him. He started calling John just to talk. Then he called him with details of what he’d done. Soon, he was calling to tell him what he was going to do. As if to taunt John to catch him. Finally, he was calling John while he was in the process of. . . doing what he was doing.”

  “I saw the story on CNN. I remember thinking at the time that having to listen to. . . well, all that agent had been forced to listen to, would have been hell on earth.”

  “It broke John. After Woods was arrested and the paperwork was done, John just took off by himself.”

  “Well, who could blame him?”

  “No, you don’t understand. He just left without telling anyone he was going.”

  “Including you?”

  Genna nodded.

  “That’s pretty terrible, I can see. You must have been frantic, not knowing where he was.”

  “I did find out where he was. He was at his sister’s place at the Jersey shore. Trying to put his head back together, he said.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Did what work?”

  “Was he able to get his head back together okay?”

  “Yes. Eventually.”

  “Good for him. I sure wish it had been that easy for me. Not that I think it was easy, mind you. Facing those broken parts of yourself, well, it never is. I’m sure you were very proud of him.”

  “I was proud of him. His capture of Woods saved the lives of unknown numbers of children.”

  “I meant because he faced his problems straight on and worked them out.”

  “I would have been happier if he’d let me know what was going on. If he’d let me help.”

  “What exactly do you think you could have done?”

  “Well, I could have been there for him. . .” Genna frowned.

  “To do what, watch him suffer?” Crystal shook her head. “Sometimes you just have to leave it be and let a body go through what they have to go through. Alone. Trust me, when you’re wrestling with what’s inside you, the last thing you want is for someone else to be looking on.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “It’s not a matter of sides. It’s just the wa
y it is. There are just some places you have to go to on your own, like it or not. Your John was apparently in one of those places.” Crystal lifted her chin slightly. “Just be glad he came back. I’m sure he had a really rough time of it.”

  “He did, but so did I.”

  “It wasn’t about you,” Crystal said softly.

  Genna said nothing, busy fighting back her indignation over the fact that Crystal seemed only to see John’s side in the matter.

  “So what’s he doing now? Is he back at work?” Crystal asked.

  “Oh, yes. He’s been back. Took six months off, disappeared, came back, spent some time in therapy and then went back to work again. That’s the short version, of course.”

  “I’m impressed that he could do that. He must be quite a guy.”

  “He is quite a guy. If you like them tall, dark, and handsome.”

  “What’s not to like?” Crystal sighed. “And you’d let a little thing like disappearing from your life for six months come between you and a guy like that?”

  “It was a long six months,” Genna grumbled. “He broke my heart.”

  “Well, broken hearts can mend more easily than broken spirits or broken minds. He healed. You can too.”

  “It’s been hard without him,” Genna acknowledged. “He is one pretty terrific guy. Everyone likes him. Even Pats. She loves John.”

  “Pats?”

  “Patsy Wheeler. My foster mother.” Genna let the eggs slide from the frying pan onto a serving plate.

  Crystal followed Genna into the dining room.

  With one hand, Genna placed two plates on the table, with the other, poured coffee into the cups that Crystal had brought in.

  “What was it like? Living in someone else’s home?”

  “Compared to the home I had come from, living with Patsy was paradise.”

  “Was she rich?”

  “No. She was just. . . normal. A well-adjusted, happy, hardworking woman who had—has—an extraordinarily loving and generous heart.”

  “How could the judge just have handed you over to her? I never understood that.”

  “Well, there had been a social worker with me both before and during the trial. When it became apparent that I’d been abandoned, just left there in the courtroom, it seemed that they had a decision to make. Force my parents, who clearly didn’t want me, and who everyone suspected of abusing me, to come back and get me and take me home, or let them go, have the court suspend their parental rights until such time as they petitioned to have me returned to them, and place me with someone I already knew and had learned to trust. Someone the court and social services department knew and trusted. Looking back, it doesn’t seem like much of a choice. Though I didn’t really know much about the legal steps that were taken at the time.”