Chapter 39

39

As Audrey tells her story, Ellen walking beside her, she slips back into the past. She thought she would never tell anyone, but now Fred is dead and she doesn’t have to protect him anymore. She knows she can trust Ellen not to say anything. As she speaks, long-buried memories and emotions take over. It’s a relief to finally tell someone after keeping it locked inside for a lifetime.

She tells her about the house they grew up in, a ramshackle rural property in Vermont that had seen better days. Audrey was eleven and Fred was thirteen that summer. Their father had been on a downward trajectory for years. He’d lost one job after another because of his drinking, and Audrey wasn’t sure how her parents were putting food on the table. She thought that sometimes a check would come in the mail from her mother’s parents. But there was always a new bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter every evening, empty by morning when she got up to get herself ready for school. And somehow another one would appear the next evening. She often wondered, embarrassed and bitter when some of the kids on the school bus made fun of her threadbare clothes, where the money for the booze came from.

There was a woodstove in the grubby kitchen. In the living room, on the mantel of the fireplace, was an old, framed photograph of their paternal great-grandfather—whose sole claim to fame was that he’d been hanged for murder. A narrow wooden staircase led upstairs to three bedrooms and a bathroom. Audrey remembers the sound of her parents’ bedroom door slamming. The sound of weeping coming from her mother down the hall.

She never brought friends home from school. Sometimes she would be invited to other girls’ houses, on the school bus route, but she never returned the offer. Somehow the kids understood. People knew her dad was an alcoholic.

But it was worse than that. Their dad was an ugly, angry alcoholic. And the more he drank, the nastier he got. He’d take it out on Fred, if Fred was mouthy, and he was mouthy that summer. He’d slap Fred across the face. Fred never cried. But he got tall and strong that year and finally he slugged his father back, making him crash against the kitchen table and onto the floor as Audrey and her mother watched in disbelief. He never hit Fred again.

Instead he occasionally slapped around their mother. But he was mostly verbally abusive, calling Audrey names, telling her that she was fat and stupid, like her mother. Fred didn’t stick up for his sister, but she worshipped him anyway. She thought of him as the functioning head of the family. She thought that, somehow, he’d get them out of this.

Audrey was desperate to be normal, to pretend that they were like other families. So she cleaned the empties out of her dad’s car—sometimes beer cans but mostly whiskey and vodka bottles—and put them in the trash. She cleaned the house. She made an effort. Her mother soon came to depend on her more and more. Audrey worked hard at school because the one thing she knew was that she didn’t want to end up like her mom and dad; she wanted to get the hell away from home. Sometimes she felt like she and Fred were the grown-ups, taking care of their parents.

Fred was brilliant. Everyone said so. He sailed through school effortlessly, with top grades. Audrey thought her brother was the smartest person she knew. He excelled at sports, attracted friends easily. He was good-looking and all the girls had crushes on him. Audrey made friends easily too, and was good in school, but she was chubby and plain and not good at anything in particular, other than doing what she was told. But Fred was different. He had confidence. He knew he was going places.

Sometimes when things were bad in the house, they’d sit out in the empty barn and talk.

“I wish he was dead,” Fred said one day.

Audrey knew who he was talking about. She felt the same way. Sometimes she’d fantasize about her dad driving drunk and crashing the car, killing himself instantly. In these fantasies, no one else was ever hurt. Maybe there was even insurance money that they didn’t know about. A lot of young Audrey’s daydreams were about coming into a lot of money, since they had so little of it. An unexpected inheritance. A lottery win. Buried treasure.

“If he was dead, we could go back to the city and live with Mom’s sister,” Fred said, as if he’d given it some thought.

Fred liked his aunt Mary, who’d doted on him when he was little, but whom they hadn’t seen in years.

“I thought Mom wasn’t talking to Aunt Mary anymore,” Audrey said.

“You have no clue, do you?” Fred said. “Aunt Mary hates Dad. That’s why she won’t visit.”

“Then why don’t we visit her without him?” Audrey asked.

He gave her a look that told her how dumb she was. “Because we have no money. Dad drinks it all,” he said.

Audrey fell silent. Maybe Aunt Mary was the one sending money. It gave her hope. “Maybe Mom will decide to leave Dad and then we can go live with Aunt Mary.”

He gave her a look of frustration. “She won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s too stupid and too scared.” He sat thinking, silent for a minute. “But I’ve had just about enough of that asshole.”

Things got increasingly tense that summer. Without school, Audrey was at loose ends. Fred “found” an old ten-speed bike and used it to visit his friends, leaving Audrey at home by herself. Her mother had managed to get a part-time job at the grocery store in town. Her father slept all morning, then woke up hungover and nasty. She avoided him as much as she could.

Then one day in August, she was coming back from a walk in the fields in the middle of the afternoon. Fred had gone off on his bike to join his friends at the lake, saying he wouldn’t be back until late. Her mom was working her shift at the grocery store.

As she came past the barn, the door opened and Fred stepped out. He looked flushed and his hair and clothes were rumpled, but he was smiling as if he were pleased with himself. She was surprised to see him there and wondered if there was a girl in the hayloft. She was about to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen him when he spotted her. He went completely still and stared at her, the smile disappearing.

“What are you doing here?” he said sharply.

“Nothing,” she said quickly.

“Have you been watching me?” he asked.

“No. I’ve been out in the fields.”

He seemed to make a decision, then looked back toward the barn door he’d just come out of. “I think our problem is solved,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Audrey asked, not understanding.

He gestured with his head for her to follow him. She walked closer and then stepped into the barn behind him, inhaling the familiar, musty smell of hay. Then her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she screamed.

Her father was hanging from a center beam, a thick rope coiled around his neck. His eyes bulged and his tongue hung out, his neck bent at an unnatural angle. He was grotesque. He hung completely still, clearly dead.

She was still screaming.

“Shut the fuck up,” Fred said, giving her a shake.

She fell silent and looked at her brother. For the first time, he seemed unsure of himself, as if he couldn’t predict what she was going to do. She was only eleven, but she put it together. She looked back at her father and tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. There was an old oil barrel kicked to the side on the earthen floor. It looked like suicide, but she knew better.

“It had to be done,” he said.

She was shocked into silence. She’d never imagined that Fred would do such a thing. She thought he might persuade their mother to leave. She never thought—it had never occurred to her—that he’d do something like this.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll be back later.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Audrey asked, panicked. She didn’t want to be left alone with a dead body in the barn.

“Go look for him around suppertime. You can find him. And then call the police. They won’t suspect anything. He was a total loser. No one will be surprised that he killed himself.”

“But . . .”

“But what?” he said coldly.

“How . . .” She was going to say how could you do it? but she couldn’t get the words out.

He misunderstood. “I told him I had something I wanted to show him in the barn. Once I got him in here, I came up behind him and choked him unconscious with the rope. Then I strung him up. That was the hard part. He’s heavier than he looks.” He added, “You weren’t supposed to see me here.”

She turned to him. “Would you have told me the truth, if I hadn’t seen you?”

He tilted his head at her. “No. But now that you know, you’re going to keep it to yourself.” He wasn’t asking. He was telling her. “I did it for us.”