The Family Tree Read online

  None of which she said as she wound up her explanation to Loulee, not that she owed Loulee an explanation. “Besides, Jared is…well, he’s predictable. I feel like I always know what he’s going to do next.” God knows that was true.

  “How exciting.” Loulee flared a nostril.

  Dora forced another sprinkle of light laughter. “My job is excitement enough. It keeps me busy.”

  “Well, of course it does,” said Loulee. “I just can’t imagine how you became a cop, though. You don’t seem the type. Not at all.”

  “What type am I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You look sort of studious to me. Librarian, maybe, you read so much. Or astronomer, because you’re a stargazer.” She giggled. “But not a cop!”

  Dora knew well enough how she became a cop. Settling things among eight siblings gave you a very good foundation for working with people, and finding out who was really to blame was itself a course in investigating crime. Most importantly, being a cop meant having rules for everything. If you studied the book and did it by the book, you had nothing to blame yourself for. Once you knew the rules, you could relax and be yourself. You didn’t have to second-guess yourself.

  “I like it,” she said.

  “Well, of course, dear, or you wouldn’t do it,” said Loulee. “And you’ve got plenty of time to have a family, don’t you? You’re not even thirty-five yet.”

  She was now. Since yesterday, a fact which everyone seemed to have overlooked, including Jared. Thirty-five years old, thirteen years on the job. Not that she’d ever made a big fuss over her birthday. At home, they’d had three birthday parties a year. One on the fourth of July for the three born in May, June and July; one on Halloween for the four September through December kids; and one on Valentine’s day for the January and March kids. Three sets of cakes and parties was all Dora and Grandma had been able to manage.

  The first of the younger kids, which is what Dora always called the other eight, had been born when Dora was five. That was Michael, and he’d been a howler, and Mama hadn’t felt well enough to walk him or rock him or dandle him, and Daddy had to have his sleep, or, so he said, he couldn’t get anything done the next day (not that he got anything done anyhow), so Dora had done most of the baby tending. All the summer after he was born, and most of the year after that, with only time out for school.

  “Take care of the baby, Dora. You’re his big sister. That’s why babies have big sisters.”

  She remembered Daddy’s voice saying that in his slightly peevish voice. She recalled Little Dora feeling the weight of those words, more burdensome than the weight of Michael in her arms. He was a big baby, hard for her to hold. It was hard becoming big sister. She had to become an entirely different person.

  Sometimes now, when the day had been long and she lay drowsily in her bed with everything quiet, she remembered Little Dora as she might remember a story she had heard. A little girl who had heard ecstatic music in her head. A little girl whose every experience was accompanied by complicated and fantastic sound: the thunder of deep drums, the bray of trumpets or the sonorous clamor of horns. In that child’s remembered life the sun rose to sensuous violins, noons were a stutter of brass, evenings waned in wandering oboe melodies, night faded into plush purple violas and bassoons. Every Little Dora day had been joyous with music.

  Of course, music was appropriate in paradise. She hadn’t called it paradise at the time; she hadn’t called it anything, it was simply her world. When she walked out the front door of the house, she entered a forest of trees, was surrounded by flocks of birds, met all kinds of animals that she talked with, had conversations with. It was as vivid in her mind as if it had been yesterday.

  Until Michael. From the moment Daddy called her “big sister,” the music stopped and other living things became sparse and occasional. The forest became one gaunt tree out back by the ash pit. The flock of birds became one fat crow perched on the fence pecking at something dead held in his talons. The beasts were only the neighbor’s cat, the grocery man’s dog.

  She missed the music most, for it stopped so suddenly she thought she had gone deaf, wished she had gone deaf so she couldn’t hear Michael’s fretful howling and Mama’s petulant “Can’t you quiet that baby?” and Daddy’s “For heaven’s sake, feed that child, Dora, you know where the bottle is.” Michael didn’t tolerate the formula very well. None of them ever tolerated the formula very well. Mama said she had tried to nurse Dora, but she didn’t feel well enough, and besides, she didn’t like it, all that chewing at her, so she wouldn’t try with Michael.

  There hadn’t been another baby until Dora was seven—that was Kathleen—but after that it was like Mama finally got the hang of it, and there’d been Margaret, and Mark and Luke and Millicent for Dora to be big sister to. Then when Mama got pregnant with Polly—Polly was number eight—Grandma arrived out of nowhere like a cyclone of gray hair and starched skirts. She spun around, looking here, looking there, then took thirteen-year-old Dora by the hand and said enough was enough, what was Mama trying to do? Set a new record?

  And Mama just smiled that slow way she had and said she didn’t think using anything was nice. That Daddy wouldn’t like it if she used anything.

  “Well, the two of you have been using something! You’ve been using Dora!” said Grandma. “Look at her! She looks like a dishrag! This child deserves a childhood.” And that was it, because Grandma took Dora with her when she went back to her own house in Denver, and it was like going to heaven, even with all the weeding.

  Meantime, back at home in Omaha, everything went from pillar to post, and two years after Jimbo was born Mama died from something perfectly preventable, except they hadn’t bothered to prevent, and then Daddy fell apart, and Grandma asked him what the hell he expected, a medal?

  That’s when the younger kids had come to Grandma’s house, too. Michael was eleven, and Jimbo was only two. And from then on it was Grandma and Grandpa and Dora and the kids, then after Grandpa died, Grandma and Dora and the kids, and finally just Dora and the three left at home. Daddy was never part of the equation.

  “It hurts to say it about my own, but he always has been useless,” said Grandma. “Takes after my dad. Why my mother married that man, I’ll never know. Nothing in his head but maybe this, maybe that. Sit there for half an hour looking at his shoes, wondering which one to put on first! Both my brothers were just like him. I did my best to compensate, Dora, I swear to God. I picked a man with some gumption to him, but it seems I carried the strain, like a curse in the blood. Your daddy showed the tendency by the time he was two. Most kids, they’ll holler, they’ll reach for things, but not your daddy. Too much trouble. He always did what was least trouble. I thought he’d never learn to walk; he couldn’t decide to stand up. And school, Lord, he’d do just what he was told and not a bit more. If the teacher said pick a topic for a paper, he was a goner. The only thing I ever saw him hot and bothered over was your mama, and I guess it was less trouble for him to marry her than to say no to her mama, and God knows without her supporting you all these years, you’d all have starved.”

  She frowned, shaking her head, pinching her lips together.

  “You never had any other kids, Grandma?”

  “Nope. Not after I saw how your daddy had inherited the diddle gene. Diddle here, diddle there, never get anything done. The world’s got enough fool diddlers. Doesn’t need any more.”

  Grandma was right about Daddy. He was ineffectual. Dora would say we need shoes for Michael, he’s got holes all the way through the sole, we have to have lunch money, school says we have to get immunizations; and Daddy would say, sure, have to pick those up, have to get some change, have to plan a visit to the doctor. Then nothing happened. Nobody ever picked up, nobody ever got, nobody ever remembered the plan. They were always running out of diapers, running out of milk, forgetting to pay the gas bill. There were always notes coming home from school—this child doesn’t do his homework, this child needs polio vaccine,
this child, this child…

  Daddy and Mama just couldn’t get around to doing anything on purpose. The two of them were like leaves before the wind, just skittering along from bedtime to bedtime until they wore out or there was nowhere else to blow. The diddle gene finally killed Daddy when he went to bed with the gas heater on even though he knew it didn’t work right. Have to see to that, he’d said. Have to see to that, someday, sometime, when I get around to it.

  Which was maybe reason enough right there for Dora to have married Jared. Jared never went anywhere or did anything without planning it right down to the molecular level. There was something almost inhumanly rigorous about Jared. With him, you always knew right where you stood.

  Grandpa’d been gone about eight years: stroke. Grandma’d died four years ago: heart. Jimbo’d been only sixteen. Polly was seventeen, ready to start college on a full scholarship. Milly was eighteen, not starting anything, just moping around. Grandma left the house to the girls, and Dora had kept the household together for a year, until the last three had gone: Milly to a cult, Polly to college, Jimbo off God-knows-where.

  The other kids were spread all over the map now, and except for Milly and maybe Jimbo, they’d escaped the worst of the family curse. Michael and Margaret had married, Kathleen had a job in advertising, Mark and Luke had joined the army. They were going to make a career of it and never get married. So they said.

  Milly had inherited the diddle gene, and a cult was easier than thinking, and drugging was easier yet. She’d died of a drug overdose, though Dora had told the others it had been meningitis. Polly had graduated from college the past June with a degree in botany. She’d always been a little soldier, now she wanted to get a graduate degree.

  And the baby, Jimbo…well, God knows what would become of Jimbo. Every now and then he lit on Dora’s doorstep, like a confused migratory bird, not sure whether he was coming or going. He never stayed long, though. Jared didn’t look kindly on people like Jimbo. Jared didn’t look kindly, period.

  Maybe seven out of nine wasn’t that bad. In a family with the diddle gene, seven out of nine was damn near a miracle. Dora didn’t call it the diddle gene now, of course. She knew the curse for what it was. Chronic depression, something you could be born with, something you couldn’t do much about, something you passed from parent to child, begetting misery and suicides and endless dark days of hopelessness and despair. Dora had seen it, firsthand, and why would she want more babies to pass it on to? After all the years, she still missed the music….

  “Did you ever hear music in your head, Grandma?”

  “Like a tune, child?”

  “No. Like a huge orchestra, with all the instruments, and playing the most marvelous music….” She had looked up to find tears in Grandma’s eyes. “Grandma?”

  “Just remembering, child. Oh, yes. I remember the music. The horns of elfland, that’s what it was.”

  “Elfland?”

  “That’s what Tennyson called it. Oh, well, child. I’ve never heard it since I was…maybe ten. It’s a childhood thing, I think. Once we’re grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.”

  Dora shook herself. Enough. Here she was, rolling around in the surf again, letting the undertow take hold of her. Currents of memory. Sadnesses that could turn you upside down, rubbing your face in the sands of what-if. Get up on your hind legs, as Grandma used to say, and put one foot in front of the other!

  She had three days off, and she wanted to wash all the blinds and take the drapes to be cleaned. They were such heavy fabric, stiff as a board. Dora would have preferred light curtains that stirred in the wind, graceful fabric, like the skirts of dancers, but Jared preferred things that remained rigidly in place, always the same. If he hadn’t known the neighbors would laugh at him, he’d have bought plastic rose bushes and plastic hostas, unfading, unchanging, ungrowing.

  She caught herself grinning ruefully. If he hadn’t known the neighbors would laugh, he’d have bought himself a plastic wife.

  Wednesday morning she went out to get the paper, and when she came back to the door, there was the weed again. This time there was no shock. The sight of the unfolding green was almost expected. That smooth root had been the clue. Jared hadn’t even touched the way-down root; it was still there, still pushing up.

  “That was fast,” she commented, leaning against the door. “You’ll duck down behind the stoop if you know what’s good for you. Jared’ll just pull you out again.” He’d have to do it himself. She wasn’t going to help him.

  She was just letting herself through the front door when the phone rang, and it was her partner, Phil Dermont, asking her about some case notes.

  “I’ve got them here, Phil. What’s the problem?”

  He couldn’t read his notes. What was the name of the woman who’d seen that stabbing victim just before he was killed?

  “That’s Manconi’s case. Did he come up with something new on that?”

  “Nah,” he muttered. “I’m just cleaning up the reports.”

  She and Phil had done some interviews for Manconi when his partner had been out sick, but the reports should have been done months ago! On a scale of one to ten, however, Phil’s clerical and note-taking skills were a minus six. Phil sometimes couldn’t decipher his notes five minutes after he took them!

  She harrumphed and put the phone down while she went to dig out her notebooks from her desk. The notes were two books back. The victim had been a doctor, a researcher of some kind. He’d been working late at the medical center; he’d gone down to the parking lot to get his car; somebody had killed him, for no apparent reason. The witness’s name was Fentris, Gerry. She’d seen the victim leaving the building; her hearing was good, she’d heard the guy screaming and yelling at someone to get away and leave him alone. As Dora remembered, he wasn’t robbed; his car wasn’t stolen; his family was close; according to his colleagues, he had no enemies. He was just a clean-looking, small, kind of nerdy guy that somebody had killed, and they hadn’t a clue as to why.

  She read the notes to Phil, waiting while he tapped them into the computer. Actually, the two of them made a pretty good team because she could do what he hated, like type and spell and put words together, and he didn’t mind doing stuff Dora hated, like changing tires if they had a flat or dealing with drunks.

  Jared came in the back door that night, so he didn’t see the weed. Next morning, when Dora stepped out to get the mail before leaving for work, it had grown a foot. The coiled green had uncurled into lacy fronds of leaflets, multiple pairs of them along wiry stems. The top of each frond swayed in the light breeze as though it was nodding to her.

  “Good morning,” she said, bowing a little. It was what Little Dora had done, talking to plants and trees and stray dogs. Even when they quit talking back, she’d kept up the habit. It embarrassed her when she got caught at it, so she’d mostly stopped whenever people were around. Phil was okay about it. He didn’t mind her talking to animals or pigeons or flower gardens. He just thought she was nuts, but then a lot of cops were, one way or another.

  The mailbox held a card from Jimbo. He’d found a job in California, running a cultivator in fruit orchards, lots of other stuff needed doing, so it could be permanent. He was teaching himself to play guitar. Happy Birthday. Good Lord, he sounded almost grown up. Maybe there was hope, after all!

  Kathleen had also remembered her birthday with a funny card covered with dolphins. An all-porpoise birthday card. And there was a letter from Polly, saying she’d be dropping in on Dora Friday for a birthday visit, a couple of days, maybe, on her way to visit friends in Seattle. Dora had always shared the July Fourth birthday cake with Polly and Jimbo, so of course the two of them had remembered her birthday. Dora wished Polly had given her some notice of the impending visit. Jared hated surprises.

  Dora leaned against the door jamb, rereading Polly’s note while the weed went on flirting its tendrils in the wind. “My sister’s coming,” she told it. “She�
��s a botanist. She’ll understand you better than Jared will. If you want to be around to meet her, better duck. Jared won’t let this go on.”

  As Jared didn’t. The minute he drove in that night, he saw the weed. He went on into the garage with a grim look on his face and came out a few minutes later with the sprayer. Dora, who had seen him from the kitchen, went to the living room window to watch him drenching the weed in weed killer. Then he stood there, mouth working, white in the face, his eyes bulged out like some actor in a Kabuki drama, as though waiting for it to cough or utter last words or something. Finally he stomped back into the garage and the door went down.

  Dora went back to her salad making in the kitchen, shredding carrots and cabbage for slaw, not allowing herself to react to what she’d just seen. From Jared’s facial expression you’d think he’d been slaying a monster that had eaten his family.

  Jared slammed into the kitchen, banging the door behind him. “That damn weed came back.” He scowled his way past her. She heard water running, doors jerked open and slammed closed. The banging and hammering diminished, slowly, and he had a less unpleasant expression on his face when he came back to the kitchen. They always ate in the kitchen unless they had “company,” that is, Jared’s mother. Jared didn’t like to mess up the dining room unless they had to.

  “Supper ready?” he asked from the door. He always asked if supper was ready. Even when it was on the table, he asked, as though what was on the table might be leftovers from some other meal she had served to someone else.

  “Just dishing up,” she said, setting the bowl of slaw on the table. “Did you have a good day?”

  “As good as could be expected,” he said, plopping himself down in the chair and reaching for the bread and butter. It was what he always said. Never good. Never bad. Just as good as could be expected. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t ask him, but she always forgot and the question popped out. As though he’d programmed her.