Dream House Number Four:

A Story of Murder in Vermont

DREAM HOUSE NUMBER FOUR:

A Story of Murder in Vermont

 “Asymptotic freedom” is a force that acts to pull an atomic particle back once it has gone too far from its origins.  Freedom is really only an illusion, even for quarks.  We like to think that we control our own actions and behaviors but they have all been predetermined in our own early universe.  We will always be pulled back to our origins, sometimes, or maybe often, ruthlessly. Until we break free. That’s the big bang.

CHAPTER 1

From the crooked window of Charlie’s bedroom on the second floor of their old farmhouse in Vermont, Amy watched her husband Doug wandering in circles around the front lawn, a jug of milk in each hand.  She could see the top of his thick curly dark brown hair and the long stride of his skinny legs.  She wondered how much longer he would continue, probably for a long time she thought.  He’d already been out there for a while, for ages it seemed.  There’s no point in that she thought.  He needs to get over there now.  He’d been out there going around in circles since returning from the market, since she’d told him what the state trooper had said on the phone.  Lars was dead, murdered.  He lay, bludgeoned to death, on the gravel driveway of his home, forty minutes away.  Doug had gasped stunned then blurted out, “SHE did it.  It was the

Antidepressant!”  They both knew what Iris had done.  Amy had told him just two nights before that something was seriously wrong with his mother’s mind.  The kids were inside the house at this moment, they had all just gotten back from Burlington where Charlie had received the state poetry award for 6^th graders.  Amy had to cook dinner and she wanted to finish planting the weeping cherry she’d bought on the way home, before they knew what had happened to Lars earlier that day.   She frantically held onto those tasks because everything else was suddenly sickeningly gone, evaporated, blown up, annihilated.  It was like they were at the edge of a black hole, almost everything was being sucked in.  Amy would hold onto the tasks, the duties, the chores. That was her way to cope; focus on what has to be done.   She could certainly manage this event horizon of utter despair and cook dinner and plant a weeping cherry tree for fucks’ sake!  She would grasp onto whatever was left.  Focus on the tasks, focus on the shared reality.  Focus on duty.  Forget your thoughts, forget what you are feeling, you don’t even know what you feel anymore, there is work to be done.  Work is salvation.  Doug could focus on fantasy and emotions.  She was a shadow, he was the life force.   She had dived joyously into that role as soon as she started dating Doug over thirty years ago.  He was the would-be writer, the artist.  She had to, NO, wanted to, make sacrifices so he could work on the next great American novel.  She wondered when he was going to leave for the crime scene, fuck, he was still stumbling around the front yard with the milk.  “I think you need to get over there.”, she called down from the window.  He looked up dazed, “You’d better go.” he replied.  I’m not going she thought to herself.  Not this time.  I’m done cleaning up your messes and I’m done with your fucked up family.  She had these thoughts in the midst of the chaos in her mind.  Yet, she was torn.  She wanted to help Iris.  She thought again about going but decided that the children would be better off with her at home, who knew what Doug would say to them if she left.   She wanted to protect them from him, his moods, his lack of awareness that they were children.  She wanted to just cook dinner, plant a tree, mow the lawn, clean up, put the kids to bed, and think about what she’d tell their school principals and her coworkers tomorrow morning.   She wanted all these tasks to be all there was because suddenly everything she thought she had was gone, irrevocably gone.  Someone had to steer the ship, drive the car, keep their family on track.  Her feelings didn’t matter.   No one listened to them anyway, including herself.   That’s what she’d done all through their relationship and marriage.  She’d take care of details.

His friends were writers or artists or literary posers.  Actually, she was finally realizing that they were all alcoholics.  When she met Doug all his literary heroes were drunks.  She now wondered, did he love their writing or did he really just love their drinking and the miserable agonizing chaos of their lives and relationships.  When she’d gotten the call from the State Police her first thought had been to rush over to the house but no, she paused, she’d learned some things in the past few years.  She wanted to stay with the kids.  She had been detaching herself from Doug and his family since they’d returned from Japan less than a year earlier.   She’d lost her status as the most favored daughter-in-law, hell, most-favored daughter over and above Iris’s own two girls, ever since her friends from college came up to visit the first summer they’d bought the old Vermont farmhouse.  That was the summer the spring ran dry and they had no water. This really didn’t matter that much as they had no working toilets with or without a water supply. The bathrooms in the old farmhouse that Doug had bought sight unseen from his office in Hiroshima looked like truck stop restrooms in Tijuana.  Doug didn’t help finance any of the plumbing that Amy had contracted that first summer. He said she was just being Martha Stewart, so unnecessary and unphilosophical.  Across the lawn from the kitchen, in a clump of old lilacs, was a two-seater outhouse.  Problem solved in Doug’s mind. Iris had planned a cookout that same weekend as Amy’s friends were coming for the get-together that had taken a year to plan.  For some reason, Iris couldn’t accept that and kept asking her all summer to change her dates, even saying that she’d come and pick up the kids and take them to her house either way.  Amy found out many years later that Iris had also written letters to her best friends telling them that she was an unfit mother.  She’d told Doe and Charlie that their father should get a new wife.  All because for once, Amy didn’t immediately do exactly what Iris wanted.  Amy was instinctively and emphatically afraid now to go to the murder scene.  She didn’t want to be responsible in any way for the shape of how things would unfold.  Dirk’s wife Lisa had ordered her not to go, “Iris only wants her sons!”  she’d barked in her thick New York accent on the phone after the State Troopers had called.  Lisa had no details other than that Lars was dead.   “What happened, we just had a cookout together two days ago and he was fine!” Amy had exclaimed horrified.  “Amy! The man had cancer!” Lisa shrieked. As though that would explain his battered body in the driveway. There was no emotion of loss or sorrow in Lisa’s aggressive voice.  Amy had seen plenty of hospice patients as a home health nurse.  She knew there was no way he could have just died from his lung cancer which had been surgically removed last year; there was no way he could have died from any natural cause.   He was not a frail man.  They all knew that Iris had murdered him.  Lisa must have already been told by Dirk to pretend it was a natural death, but how?  His skull was shattered.  The State Trooper on the phone had initially thought it was a gun shot injury.  

Doug had stayed home this past year writing glowing resumes of his accomplishments for college English-teaching jobs he never had a change of getting while Amy was driving a hundred miles a day to perform duties as a home health nurse that were extremely anxiety-inducing after not having worked as a nurse for fifteen years.    When she finally called Iris later that night while they were staying at Sally’s, Iris sobbed “Where have you been? Why aren’t you here?”  She momentarily forgot that Amy was on her ‘bad’ person list.  Then Iris started to explain her version of the murder, how she had “found” Lars bludgeoned in the driveway and called 911 and how she had tried CPR.  She said that she had been out all morning playing tennis with friends and then buying a lamp shade.  ‘Please stop.’, Amy begged her.   Amy felt a vortex of darkness and chaos spinning all around.  She’d focus on duty and try to protect the kids from whatever was about to happen now that Iris had done something so unthinkable and horrific that their entire world vanished. 

Amy couldn’t remember how or when she had turned into a kind of hypervigilant automaton.   It was gradual.  Things had to be just right so Doug could work on his novel.  He couldn’t deal with anything outside of fiction, anything real. Over the years Amy had tried to interest him in art but she realized that only prints or images he was ever drawn to were always just in black and white, nothing was ever in color.  It was as though he only saw a world through the colors of the printed page.  Over the years Amy had managed their reality and lost touch with her barely even unconscious dreams. She was there to take care of his dreams.  She was not even fully aware of her pride and arrogance in this self-prescribed role.  He was not good with details, he’d forget things, or lose things constantly.  He couldn’t seem to finish anything.  He was good at teaching.  She made sure that was protected.  He always said his students adored him.  She was the provider of stability and what she mistakenly thought of as sanity.   Doug was always in the moment, entertaining family and friends with stories.  She had been so madly in love with him in the beginning.  They would stay up all night talking about literature and wandering the pastoral campus, lying in the grass looking up at the stars imaging what Hadrian had seen.  She loved listening to him discuss ancient and continental philosophy and describe concepts of time and space and perception, the meaning of intersubjectivity.  They would fuck like rabbits after that, only so so deliciously slow.  She’d never thought anyone could make her throb like that.  They’d had such fun canoe camping, playing tennis for hours and then exploring Vermont together after college but all that was over twenty years ago.  So many dramas and tragedies had taken place since then.

Doug’s oldest brother Dirk, a converted Catholic and an estate lawyer was already at the house when he got there.  That was odd as he had an almost five hour drive up from Long Island.  How could he be there already?  Had Iris called him first?  She finally did call 911 and they arrived around 1:30 pm and surmised that Lars had been dead for several hours.  The EMTs called the sheriff and his crew arrived within minutes.  Amy had gotten the phone call from the State Police late in the afternoon which meant that Dirk shouldn’t have gotten there until around seven that night.  That was a question she never got an answer for. Dirk was the golden boy of the family and Iris had depended on him since he was a child.  Dirk could always make her laugh and she became so alive whenever he was around.  He’d spent his youth looking out for her and making her laugh.  He had been a wild teen but had settled down with his own family.  His brothers knew he was the favored son, the eldest, the lawyer like his wealthy grandfather.  The three sons told the police at the house in Jamaica, Vermont, that Lars, who lay dead in the driveway-turned crime scene, with multiple punctures to the skull and two large skull fractures, with medical papers from a manila folder strewn around him, had most likely fallen while trying to get into his Jeep.  He was old and frail after all, they said.  The gravel of the driveway had cut into what remained of Lars’s face and left ear.  He’d been struck with great force several times after the initial blow which had felled him.  Amy would learn that the wound pattern resembled the old wrought -iron garden rake he always kept by the compost pile at the end of the driveway.  That tool was now nowhere to be found.  He seemed to have been trying to get to his Jeep.  Was he escaping, was he running?  “Do you have any idea who could have done this?”  the state trooper asked.  “No, absolutely none.” Dirk blithely responded.  Later, after the funeral service, Dirk took one of Lars’s sons from his first marriage, a retired Air Force jet fighter pilot, whom he had not seen for decades, over to the site in the driveway where Lars had lain and said “See, look, this is where your Dad fell out of the Jeep.” 

At the trial eighteen months later, the defense asked why the witnesses for the prosecution hadn’t come forward on the day of the murder, “What you have to say now must not be very important if you waited so long to come forward. You must only be gossiping about Iris because of resentment.”  On the contrary, it was HUGE.  That is why Erica and Sally had waited., they didn’t know what to do, who would?  Erica was Iris’s closest friend and the owner of the Inn just down the hill from the beautiful home where Lars lay in the gravel driveway, his head looking like a road-kill.   She just assumed that as soon as the family arrived on the scene that they would get help for Iris.   She assumed the police would obviously see the truth and the family would confirm it. 

Erica had spent more hours than any of them listening to Iris’s increasing complaints about her marriage.  Just hours after the murder when she asked Iris “WHY?”  Iris calmly replied, “I just snapped.”  Then Iris asked her to go remove the bloody trash bags out of the dog food bag in the basement.  What a request,! How like Iris.  Oh, could you just do a little thing for me, like be an accessory to the murder I just committed.  Had she used the bags to suffocate Lars as he lay there?  Iris had been running around trying to ‘clean up’, this murder was not part of her original plan it seemed.  She had attempted CPR on what remained of Lar’s face.  The EMTs had met her previously because they also worked in construction and were laying the foundation for Lar’s and Iris’s new house, dream house number four, just up the road.   This home, now crime-scene, had just been sold and they were building a fourth dreamhouse on the hill, with a better view.   It would obstruct their neighbors view but Iris had just shrugged at that.    The EMTs must have thought that Iris was not so attractive now with dark blood clots crusting over her lower jaw after giving fake CPR to a face that didn’t exist anymore.

A few months before the murder Lars had bumped into Erica at the P.O. and asked if he could talk to her.  He knew that Iris was going up the hill at night to see her lover.   “Why don’t you just leave?” Erica asked him.  “Just find a place of your own.”    He said he couldn’t do that.  He couldn’t leave Iris.  Yet, Iris did quite well on her own during the almost two years that she was out on bail awaiting trial for his murder.

Erica finally contacted the police, after the funeral.  That was when Sally also called them.  No one wants to be involved in actions that may result in a beloved friend, someone with no previous history of any violence, someone who was fun and charismatic and beautiful, going to prison.  They had both witnessed Iris’s agitated and explosive behavior in the months before the murder.  They had both gone out to lunch with her the very day before she bludgeoned Lars to death.   Iris had organized a luncheon and a drive out to see her llamas in their new home.  Several months before Lars’s murder Iris had systematically gotten rid of all her animals.  Her childhood best friend had latter told Alex, Iris’s youngest daughter, that she had been absolutely stunned by this.  Iris had always loved animals and had always had a menagerie.  Both Sally and Erica recounted being terrified on that drive.   Iris had been swerving all over the road.  Later, Amy also testified that Iris was not herself during the days before the murder.  She was erratic and agitated.  She was manic and irrational.  She was obsessed with blaming Lars for everything she thought wrong with her life.

Sally lived up the mountain from Lars and Iris.   The mountain that Peter, Iris’s lover also lived on.  Sally had been widowed for many years and her vacation home in Vermont was one that she and her husband, a former ski instructor, had bought to fix up and use on their trips up from Long Island, New York where Iris and Lars had also grown up.   Sally’s mother, whom she had taken care for many years, had just passed away that spring.  The luncheon that Iris had planned was also to commemorate Sally’s mother’s passing.  In Iris’s mind it was probably more to celebrate Sally’s freedom from caregiving and in a sense to celebrate what she believed would soon be her own newfound freedom, but not in the way that it ultimately occurred.   Iris never confessed to her act (except to her two close friends a few hours after the fact) and so no one ever learned what her entire plan was but everyone knew she wanted to be free from Lars.  The evidence suggested that she had tried to poison Lars or maybe dope him up so he’d have an accident on the drive to the Dartmouth Hitchcock medical center where he wrongly thought he had an appointment that day.  The jury learned that there was a large amount of Ambien in his coffee that morning.   Iris had gone so far as to tell the town librarian while volunteering there, that she wanted Lars to die and that she was considering poisoning him.   Iris didn’t seem too interested in reshelving the books the librarian had told the jury.  

Iris had introduced herself to Sally while walking her dogs.  Iris always had at least three dogs and an uncertain number of house/barn cats.  There was always a Labrador retriever, a smaller wire hair terrier or dachshund, and a mixed breed.   Iris took her dogs on long walks every day, often down Old Route 30 along the West River.   The fact that she never leashed her dogs was a definite annoyance to her neighbors but she didn’t care.  Old Route 30 is a pot-holed one-lane road, following the meandering river past beaver dams and patient herons down to the Townshend Dam where Iris had been planning to have a family reunion to celebrate Lars’s upcoming birthday that very August, just two months away.   The family swam in the West River every summer, jumping off the sun-warmed granite boulders to float in the amber current, tickled by bubbly jets of frigid spring water eddying around them.  They’d all spent many lazy summer hours along the river and at the dam, swimming, kayaking, and canoeing.  Iris and Lars’ homes were a paradise for the grandkids.  They would exhaust themselves bouncing on the trampoline under the trees, their lips and tongues purple from blackberries .  They’d hunt for the golden raspberries and gorge on their bounty up in the tree house.  In the fall they’d gather apples from the old gnarly trees in the orchard and Lars would make delicious applesauce.   Once, on the last evening of a summer vacation Alex had jumped into the river fully clothed enroute to her flight back to southern California.  She’d dry out on the way to Logan Airiport and take the river with her she said.   It was always a golden blue and green paradise at their house.  They loved having the children and grandchildren visit.

Further down the Old Route 30 the grandchildren had learned to jump off the covered bridge, twenty feet above the river.   Uncle Brad’s (Lars and Iris’s only child together) daring chocolate labs used to jump in after him.  The current there was faster and one summer they’d had to rescue a playmate’s grandmother before she had drifted all the way into Brattleboro.  No one ever thought then that they’d be spending time at Brattleboro’s Windham County Courthouse for a murder trial.  Amy cherished all those memories of sparkling blue and green Vermont summer days.  Lars was the one who had introduced his children to summers swimming and winters skiing at their second house in Waitsfield, Vermont.       

Sally had been driving up the dirt road that day and seen all the police cars at Iris’s and immediately went to see if she could be of help. The medical examiner and the detectives were still in the driveway.  Sally offered to make Iris a cup of tea.  They were in the living room on the comfy chintz sofas with the dogs and cats, surrounded by antique furniture and family pictures when a detective came in and told them that they had finally agreed to conclude that Lars had in fact been murdered.  The odds of a man like Lars being found violently murdered in his rural driveway in a town with no crime, with nothing robbed from the house, with his wallet still in his pocket, and his dogs not even barking, were low.   The next obvious thing might have been to arrest Iris but she was such a beautiful woman, with the blood now cleaned off her face.  She was rich and sophisticated.  Sally, who had only recently starting living alone for the first time in her life was terrified.  She turned to Iris and stammered “Oh my God Iris, there’s a murderer loose in the woods!”  Iris laid a hand on her arm, “Don’t worry.” she whispered sipping her tea, “I did it.”.  Poor Sally.  That was the one thing Amy was most terrified to hear from Iris. As long as she didn’t say it, it couldn’t be true and she wouldn’t have any responsibility, she wouldn’t have to do anything.   That night Iris and her sons and all her dogs slept at Sally’s small house up the hill.  Sally was dumbfounded. Doug told Amy that the dogs’ tails kept swiping knick-knacks off the end tables although no one but Sally seemed to mind. 

Lars had studied forestry in college, on his way to becoming a landscape architect.  He’d spent many summers in the Adirondacks.  He’d grown up in the Bronx at a time when it still had wildernesses to explore.  He’d been an Eagle Scout and then he chose to attend Syracuse University.   He was a quiet and private man who loved nature, loved working in his gardens, loved reading.  He read the New York Times from first to last page every day.  He read history. He was a thoughtful, patient man, reared in a moralistic Calvinist tradition.  His first wife had left him with three little sons at a time when extramarital affairs were rampant in affluent Long Island suburbs.  After his divorce, Lars met and married Iris and adopted her five children.  Together they had a sixth child, their son Brad.  What you might consider his good qualities were perceived as weaknesses by his new family.  Dirk liked to make fun of him.  They all did.  Lars could not express affection physically or verbally.  He was intelligent and curious about everything, but he was not expressive.  Doug said he never received a hug as a child, or a pat on the head.  Amy could see that Lars tried to atone for this in later years.  While they lived in Japan, he sent Doug letters at least once a week with articles of interest he’d cut out.  He expressed his love in acts of service like this rather than in embraces.  During the trial Iris’s lover said that she had told him that unlike Lars, he knew how to hug.  He appeared to know how to do some other things as well.

Lars and Iris had left Long Island in 1973 for an antique Dutch Farm House in the Hudson River Valley, on forty acres.  Only Alex and Brad were still in school.  Lars and Iris set to work renovating the old farmhouse which still had a brick bread-baking oven by the large kitchen hearth.  Iris started to build her menagerie.  One spring all her ewes had multiple births, not just twins but triplets.  She was like that woman in Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude whose life energies imbued everything around her with amazing fecundity.  The llamas would come to the paddock fence to greet visitors and blow chevre-smelling kisses on their faces.  One early spring morning when the mist was rising off the pond and the grass heavy with dew, Iris had gone down to the barn for her morning chores and saw one of the llamas ambling up the hill accompanied by a baby deer.  As they got closer she realized it was a baby llama!  She hadn’t even known the mother was pregnant.  She bounded back into the house bursting to tell Lars.  There were times of love amid all their conflicts but everything changed at the end.  They built two more “dream houses” after their beautiful home in the Hudson River valley, each with gorgeous gardens designed by Lars and cared for by both of them together.  They were building their fourth dream house when she murdered him.  She kept finding new places to live, ruthlessly discarding old objects, her only problem was that he always came along. 

The grandchildren loved to swim in the large ponds they created at each home.  Iris would get new inflatable swim toys every summer, huge rainbow unicorns or the shiny red ‘Lobsta Boat’ with a bell to ring.   Lars had built a dock for the launching of these vessels of glee and there was a raft they could swim out to and dive off.  There were canoes for the cousins to launch in and wage sea-faring battles.  The kids were in Nirvana. There were bullfrogs to catch, fish to try to catch, hens to chase after and eggs to rob!  At Christmas they’d skate on the ponds and let the toboggan run out onto the ice as far as it could go. 

Iris bought all the types of ducks she’d fed as a little girl in the parks in Glen Cove, Long Island.   Pekin ducks, Crested ducks, Muscovy ducks, and Chinese and Roman geese swam on the lower pond.  The chicken coop next to the barn was full of little Bantam hens who laid tiny bluish eggs.  There were also Rhode Island Reds, Barred Plymouth Rock, and vibrant noisy Chanticleer roosters.   The African pygmy goats went back to the seller after they refused to stop crashing all the family cookouts.  Lars put a deep perennial bed in front of the tall wooden fence surrounding their pool.  It bloomed all summer long from expansive beds of purple, yellow, and apricot-colored irises in the spring to scarlet bee balm in August with huge spikes of electric blue and purple delphinium and pink hollyhocks in between. The pool had a diving board and a wall of trees along the back where the land dropped off into a ravine, making it jungle-like but not too shady.  Amy loved to think about that pool as a cool green and turquoise oasis of family summers before this nightmare.  Lars laid brick walkways and patios.  He reclaimed an old store-room with heavy antique wooden beams so they would have a bigger space for the Christmas tree and all the family.  The back deck surrounded an old tree and they would sit there and watch the sheep and horses in the fields around the barn across the pond.  A huge bay window shelf in the kitchen held Lars unique house plants and his binoculars and field books.  Amy loved watching all the birds come to the feeder outside this window while she enjoyed Iris’s breakfasts of homemade muffins and fresh eggs. All their dreamhouses had these same elements.  At this last house Lars built a greenhouse and tried his hand at orchids and Japanese Bonsai.  Amy had always made a point of taking him to the horticultural parks and Bonsai exhibits, as well as the traditional gardens, when they visited Japan.  He was a great traveler, open to all new experiences unlike Iris who hated traveling and couldn’t understand why the Japanese waiters didn’t grasp her requests for Chardonnay.  There was so much joyful energy in their home.  It was always sunny and there was always something adventurous and fun to do. 

Iris was beautiful and ageless, trim and athletic, always laughing, tossing back her thick blond curls.   She had a rich musical laugh and her voice could be recognized in the choir at church.  One summer they’d rented cabins on Long Lake in the Adirondacks.  Iris got up on water skis her first try and laughed her way around the lake as Dirk steered the boat.  Amy was in awe of her.  Iris must have been in her early sixties then although her kids seemed never to know her real age.  It turned out that she didn’t want them to know that her first pregnancy occurred while still a high school teenager.   All her children could water and snow ski like champions.  Lee, who died in a car accident while a high school senior, was an Olympic-caliber downhill skier.  Amy’s family never took vacations really.  Her father, a salesman, would bring them along to see his accounts sometimes.  They saw Niagara Falls several times and Nova Scotia once through the windows of their station wagon. Those were peaceful good times though.  They counted as a vacation but it was nothing like what Iris’s family did.

Iris loved family gatherings but Amy gradually became aware that the whole family was never all together at once.  There was always one person missing, one person in their family that Iris intentionally excluded because they had fallen out of favor.  Usually it was her eldest daughter, Vera.   Then it was Amy.

There was an exteriority in Iris and all her children.  Amy’s family was neat, cautious, methodical, dutybound.  They seemed to always to be waiting for permission to live from some higher future entity that never came to offer it.  Iris’s family was chaotic and libidinal.  Life entered them, they were permeable, they were part of things.  They had fun and took pleasure in life.  Amy’s family was always saving for that future that never came or came too late to be any fun. Nothing changed the suburban routines of Amy’s family.  She’d left for college at seventeen and rarely went back to see them.  She chose not to care about equal time for the grandparents and Iris always expected them to be with her anyway.  Amy was infatuated with Iris and the whole family from the minute she first met them at their beautiful Dutch farm house.   She loved the loud energy and spontaneity, the noisy siblings, the animals, the gardens.  Lars and Iris did things; they spent money and there seemed to be an endless supply of money.  Iris cooked sumptuous meals with elaborate desserts.  She loved to entertain her constant stream of new friends.   She’d feed all the leftovers to the animals.  Lars liked to forage for elderberries to make blackish purple jam.  He’d turn the fall bounty from their orchards into canned pears with a hit of clove and allspice or delicious delicate pink applesauce.  He was always putting in new raspberry canes or blueberry bushes.  Along with the perennial gardens and orchards were meadows to walk the dogs and ride the horses or cross-country ski; and forests where Lars had tried to cultivate ginseng.  Doug used to tease him about his schemes to try to find a cash crop.  In the beginning, Amy and Iris would pour over new recipes for cookouts or for the fruit and berry pies that were always on the counter after a full course meal.  Nobody cooked like Iris, she was like Fanny Farmer, making traditional full-course American meals of roasted beef or lamb, roasted potatoes, braised parsnips and the best gravy ever with real popovers, casseroles, lasagna, you name it.  Summer was a time for family cookouts with friends and neighbors.   Iris and Lars’ homes were always comfortable and inviting, with rooms full of light from skylights and walls of sliding glass doors that opened onto the decks overlooking abundance.  Amy saw them work together as a couple and saw the problems but at the time she did not understand the history of their relationship and the resentment Iris harbored and how this particular antidepressant would unleash those floodgates.  Amy was also starting to realize that Iris was not quite right.  There had been lots of hints over the thirty years that Amy had been with Doug but she chose to ignore them all.   Looking back Amy remembered so many things that had made her uncomfortable but she’d just told herself at the time that she was silly to feel that way.  After all, whatever she felt had to be wrong.  What did she know?? She had no right to say what was normal.   Doug had so generously and clearly clarified and elaborated all her faults and idiotic ideas and values.  He had so thoroughly elaborated her psychic weaknesses.  Thank God for that, right.  Amy felt certain of nothing.  Suddenly however, now, she felt with absolute conviction the line between right and wrong and she emphatically wanted to be on the right side now. 

Iris had no tolerance for frustration.  Things had to be her way or else.  Amy had never realized this because from the moment she’d met Iris she had just wanted to follow along with her every idea, every plan.  She’d never thought it odd that Iris invited herself to come on Doug and her own family vacations.   She’d enjoyed her company.  Early on, Iris had been loving and kind and fun.  She had slept on a sofa and cooked all their meals for a month after Doe was born.  It had been wonderful.

The weekend before the murder, Doug and Amy had taken the kids to Boston for a school field trip and had stopped at Iris and Lars’ on the way home.  Lars looked tan and robust.  He’d been out working in the garden earlier.  He had on one of his plaid L.L. Bean summer shirts and some clean jeans with a belt and his Chukka boots.  He had stopped using the glaucoma medication that had caused his anorexia and fatigue the past fall and winter.  The previous summer, Lars had had part of his right lung removed due to cancer.  His surgeon was pleased and somewhat impressed with his quick uncomplicated recovery. The cancer had not spread to other areas and the surgeon felt that they had successfully removed it all.   He hadn’t even ordered radiation or chemotherapy.  Things looked good except that Lars was so fatigued the following winter.  He spent a great deal of time in his teal leather reclining chair taking naps.  He’d also lost his appetite and lost weight which was troubling as he was thin to begin with.    It turned out that these symptoms were not related to his lung surgery but were side effects of his glaucoma medication.   During this time, Iris would call Doug almost daily and ask if he thought Lars was dying.  She didn’t talk with Amy, the home health nurse who was no longer to be trusted.  Amy was on the ‘unfavored status list’. There was actually no way off this list.  Iris simply got rid of people who no longer served her.  She had always done this.  Starting with Doug’s biological father.   

Doug had been home daily since leaving Japan.  He’d sit in the room designated as his office, off the library of the old farmhouse, tweaking resumes extolling his talents for jobs he’d never get.   He continued to be mortified that he wasn’t getting any offers for the few college-English-teacher openings in their area.  Less than a year earlier, the family had returned from twelve years of living in Japan where Doug had taught American Literature after failing to find a position in the United States.  Amy had been a full professor of Gerontological Nursing in Japan. She’d learned to lecture in Japanese.   She found if almost funny that after attaining a PhD she now had to learn to express all that knowledge in another language.  Well, she could do it she thought, she had to.   She’d already re-invented herself several times to fit in with Doug’s plans for greatness.  Shockingly, Doug hadn’t gotten any job offers when he completed his PhD.  He’d been disgusted by the suggestion that his dissertation should include a nonEuropean or at least a female author or POC.  Anyone who couldn’t be totally satisfied with Heidegger, Joseph Conrad, Faulkner, and Melville was a moron he’d argued.  My God, what more could anyone want. The novels he discussed had everything in them, nothing else mattered.  They’d taken the offer to teach in Japan thinking that would give him more time to publish his dissertation.  It never did get published.  Life was good in Japan and they loved raising their children there.  So this past year, as he worked on his resumes, Iris would call daily, mainly to ask if he thought Lars was dying.   Doug would not always answer her calls.  He never drove over to check on them.

Caregiving was not Iris’s forte.  It had bothered her that Lars had cancer.  Just like it bothered her that he limped from a car accident decades earlier after a drunken Christmas party.  She wanted to hike and he couldn’t. She loved the outdoors.  She skied in winter and walked every day she could.  She wanted to camp.  Lars really did his best but his left knee was fused and there was no way around that.  Doug said that as a mother she was not empathetic. She’d sent her kids to camp every summer and made them play sports all school year so they wouldn’t be around.   Doug said that she would literally push his crying, skinny body out the car door to football practice in junior high.  On the plus side, her kids were all great athletes.  They were also a bit reckless and fearless at times. Vera was the more theatrical one.  She could sing and dance and had starred in summer camp and high school plays and studied dance in college.  When Amy first met Vera she had just received a Fulbright Scholarship to study traditional dance in Bali.  Vera was sensual and exotic.  She’d had affairs with married men and professors.  She had friends who were real artists.  She was powerful.   Amy was terrified of her initially.  The day after Lars car accident Iris took all the kids up to their house in Waitsfield to go skiing.  Lars drank in their early marriage, there were missed dinners and loud arguments in their huge house in an exclusive part of Port Washington, Long Island, NY.   Iris took care of herself, that was always the priority.  Her grandparents were rich and whatever Lars didn’t agree to she’d ask them for, or make the kids ask them.  Amy would learn more about that during the days she stayed with her at the house after the murder.

At the house that weekend, two days before the murder, they had watched Doe and Charlie run around the barns and play down by the pond, while Lars grilled the salmon for Memorial Day.  It was early evening, the sunlight was golden on the back deck above the thick perennial garden.  They sat outside enjoying the early evening light while the birds sang, sipping chilled glasses of white wine.  This was the last time they would ever all be together.  Lars said he wanted to tour the Freedom Trail and see Paul Revere’s house but in two days he would be dead, murdered.  While they were washing dishes later, Iris started telling Amy how much she had enjoyed going out to a concert without Lars the previous night.  Iris was literally gushing.  Amy had never seen her quite like that.  Her face was flushed red and she repeated several times in an emphatic and loud voice “I had so much fun.  Thank GOD Lars didn’t come!”  She said the neighbors had asked him again to come but hallelujah, he’d stayed home.   It was like she had a sense of newly found omnipotence, like she had just realized that she could do things without Lars which was odd as she had always done things without him.  She talked about the new people she met and how she planned to join them in volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.  Iris loved to meet new people and was always getting involved in new groups and causes but it was usually temporary and there would be some falling out or she’d just be on to a new project. Amy was appalled when Lars walked into the kitchen and Iris continued to say how much fun she had because he was not there.  He was standing there at the other end of the large butcher block counter and she kept saying how glad she was that he wasn’t there at the concert.   He just stood there looking so ashamed and then turned and walked out.  Amy wanted to say something at the time to get Iris to understand that Lars was not the reason that she was unhappy with her present life.   She wanted her to understand that he was not the cause of everything that Iris seemed to think was wrong.  Iris was convinced that her life would be instantaneously made perfect if Lars was simply erased from the picture.  That was what she had done with her first husband.  Amy used to ask Doug about his biological father.  Doug would get very agitated and say things like, I don’t remember him but he was a bad person, a terrible man.  Why? she’d ask, what had he done?   Doug had no answer for that but didn’t even seem to realize that he had no answer.  Amy knew that Iris was different since she had started taking antidepressants sometime the previous fall.  She was almost manic.  Iris was completely convinced that Lars was the source, an external source, of all her problems.  She felt capable of such greatly deserved happiness if only this last impediment, i.e. Lars, could be done away with.  When you read about the side effects of antidepressants, they list things like dry mouth and constipation, or increased or decreased weight.  The real side effects are the explosive outbursts, the family conflicts, the divorces and yes, the homicides.  In fact, these effects are main effects.  They may be undesired but they are just as “main” as the desired effect. The drug companies euphemistically phrase these unwanted effects as “side effects”, like the near crashes that airlines refer to as “near misses”.   Antidepressants may help countless people. Iris was not one of them and her medication had been prescribed by a primary care physician who had little knowledge of how to evaluate these changes in her personality.

That night at the cookout Amy was suddenly struck by the fact that Iris’s complaints were of a whole new order of magnitude.  Iris had been complaining about different aspects of Lars for forever, but never with this vehemence.  This was different.  Yet she said nothing to her.  She was afraid to oppose her or excite her more.  Like all working mothers, she was tired and wanted to get the kids home for school the next day.   She ignored this opportunity but how could she imagine it would be the last.  How could she predict what Iris would do to Lars in two days. 

When they were leaving that Memorial Day Lars had kissed Amy goodbye twice.  There was something new in his face.  She felt like he was trying to reach out to her to tell her something.   Maybe he was trying to say a final goodbye.  Maybe he knew Iris was going to kill him.  He wouldn’t try to stop her.  Amy remembers him on the kitchen step, made from a huge stone he’d found in the meadow, his eyes saying goodbye, kissing her again in the fading summer twilight.  She never asked him what was wrong and she never saw him alive again.  

When they got home that night Amy told Doug about the conversation in the kitchen with his mother.  She’d been trying to get him to really talk with Iris all year.  They both knew something was wrong.  He said, “It’s the antidepressant.”  They had both just learned that she’d started taking it that previous fall and could trace back her erratic behaviors to that very time.   It was clear that something had to be done.  Amy pleaded with Doug, ‘You really need to go over there and talk to her’.  He had plenty of time since he had not worked since they got back from Japan.   In two days it wouldn’t matter, they’d be too late.  Iris would murder Lars.  

 As you grow older you realize that there are many versions of the truth.  This is not the only one.  It will be downright wrong in some people’s eyes.   It’s easy to critique decisions when the course is already set and you are not the captain. 

CHAPTER 2

Amy kept to the routine for the Doe and Charlie.  They went to school and she went to work.  She had to.  She’d go crazy otherwise.  She’d told Doe and Charlie that Grandpa was dead but had not given them any details yet although their friends’ parents would see the newspapers.  It was the biggest news in the state, it was no secret.  It was on all the news channels and the front page of all the newspapers.  Everyone knew the kids’ grandfather had been murdered, what they didn’t know yet was that Grandma had done it.  Amy agonizingly waited for a phone call from Doug after he’d left for the crime scene last Wednesday.  She called repeatedly for the next three days but he wouldn’t answer or call her back.  When he finally got home on Sunday he said the phone service was bad.   He acted like a zombie, a cult member, someone brainwashed.  He told Amy “No one knows what happened.  They can’t prove she did it.”  He refused to discuss it.  Actually, he never really did come home.  What came home was some inhuman robot spouting legal jargon like “it’s all conjecture”.   She’d look into his eyes and he wasn’t there.  Didn’t he want to help his mother? Amy begged.  She felt frantic.  Did he really want to go along with this fantasy that someone else had come and murdered Lars.   Wasn’t he the expert on Dostoevsky for God’s sake!  Amy believed that Iris knew she had done a horrible thing and wanted penance and absolution.  Doug’s course of action would deny her this.  This was all wrong.  Doug didn’t care at all about what Amy thought or felt but why would she expect him to now when he never had.  Dirk, the supposedly devout Catholic would choose this?  She was reeling.  She couldn’t understand.  Amy thought that the man she married never came back that day but gradually she realized that he did come back.  She had just never seen that this was who he really was until now. She had always stubbornly and arrogantly pretended he was someone else.  She was so busy pretending to be who she thought she needed to be.  She thought she could make him into someone else, his ideal self.  She had always been invisible to him and that was what she really wanted.  She didn’t want to be a real person, she wanted to be a follower, a helper.   No that’s not true.  She wanted to ‘be’ in terms of responding to someone else’s needs and wants, never her own which she had no idea of anyway.  She had needed him to suffer for, to sacrifice for, to give up all aspirations of her own self-hood for.  That was it.  When they met, he was going to write the next great American novel and she would enable that to occur through her own self-sacrifice.  He’d told her he was exceptional, she believed it.  She’d be the practical one.  She gave up her dreams of literature and art.  She was bred to suffer silently.  That was her role in life, to disappear.  She was the martyr par excellence, the one who did all the work, unnoticed, and gave all the credit to others, mainly Doug.  Didn’t she write her own PhD dissertation on the kitchen table while Doug had the other bedroom as his office.  Didn’t she plan and present huge Thanksgiving dinners on this same table for Lars and Iris.  She’d clear off the articles, over one hundred for her literature review;  huge towers of research articles stacked in the dining room corners, time to make gravy.  No, Amy chose this life of self-abnegation.  It was not a conscious choice, it just was.  Wasn’t this what women did.  Look at Simone de Beauvoir.  Jane Austen composed all her magnificent novels on a corner table.  Didn’t Marian Evans publish as George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte as Currer Bell.   Amy was grandiose in her humility. 

 Dirk and his brothers were making all the decisions regarding the murder in secret.  They were not interested in using her antidepressant as a reason despite Amy and Vera and Alex’s protestations.  There was literature all over the internet connecting this particular antidepressant with uncontrollable anger, rage, hostility, impulsivity, even homicides.  They all knew that something was very wrong with Iris and had been ever since she started taking it.  What no one had ever imagined was that she would actually kill Lars.

Dirk had sped up from Long Island, Brad came in from Albany and the course of action that would determine the destruction of the entire family and result in a verdict of 2^nd degree murder for Iris was put into place in the driveway the very day of the murder.  From that moment on, the course would not be replotted.  No insights on the part of family members would be used to mark alternative routes.  There was no compass, no thought of a compass.   No dialogues would be engaged in to come up with other ports of call.  The vast ocean of misery was about to be traversed and the coordinates would not be replotted no matter what obstacles or forces of nature arose in the path. The course of action that would separate family members from each other forever, the course of action that led to more collateral damage than they still even know, was started and none of them even knew it.  They were each on a separate life raft, plunging up and down the swells.

All Doug thought about now was accepting the offer he had just received to teach at the University of Guam.  None of the places he’d applied to in the U.S were interested in hiring him.  Guam was.  He’d decided he’d go back overseas where his great genius and knowledge, his brilliance, were better appreciated.  This was a blessing for Amy.  Amy didn’t want him around anymore, his narcissism was suffocating.  He didn’t earn a living and wouldn’t help with the housework or with the children.   He was only available for fun, mainly with Charlie, not Doe.   He seemed to be making Doe feel worse about herself.  He seemed to be pitting Charlie against her.  He also didn’t know how to fix or repair anything to do with the old farm house.  He didn’t seem to be able to manage bureaucratic paperwork either.  Amy would have known more about his deficits if she’d ever asked him to help with anything but she never had. He was to be the great author, these mundane issues were irrelevant.  Those could be delegated to the peasants.   She could take care of everything, she always had.  If she could enable space for him to create then the world would eventually know his genius too.   She hadn’t ever wanted to ask for his help. What if he had left her?  If she did not serve him well, then he might leave her.  That was her pathetic self initially but over the past few years she had become independent of him emotionally and psychologically.  She had always been financially independent from him.  He had never given her access to his bank account, checks, ATM card, credit cards, nothing.  Not even after she had the kids and was out of work briefly.    

She now looked forward to the day he would fly away but she felt that she was sacrificing Charlie.  She wanted to be there for him but she didn’t want him to know of the rift between her and Doug.   She also didn’t want him to stay in Vermont.  She didn’t want to admit it but she didn’t want Charlie around Doe.   Doe was attracted to trouble.  It was like she could not help herself.  Amy had known this was coming.  She’d seen it in Doug’s family.  His sister Lee had been a very troubled teen.  She’d run away, gotten into drugs.  She ended up was paralyzed from the neck down, after crashing a car she’d stolen while drinking. She died soon after during surgery.  Amy wanted to get help for Doe.  She knew she couldn’t do that while Doug was around.  Amy said she’d move to Guam after Doe finished high school but she knew it was over.  She didn’t want Doug around Doe anymore.  It seemed he got an almost sadistic pleasure out of her turmoil, her emotions, her pain.  He’d actually say that she was going to end up like Lee.  What a sick fuck Amy thought.  She couldn’t wait for him to leave but she had no idea what she was going to do to get Charlie back.  She also had no idea how to help Doe. 

Doug said Amy was like Ahab, that her obsession with her version of the truth was ruining their family.    It didn’t matter what Iris had done he’d said.   Who was she, Amy, to say what was right and what was wrong.  Who was she to think that there should be some kind of justice.  After all, wasn’t their life in Vermont just dandy in this dilapidated farm house that he had bought sight unseen seven years ago from Japan.   Amy had been too busy teaching and taking care of the kids to pay attention to the details of this house purchase.  She stupidly assumed it would be a normal house after all the time he had spent looking for one.   Oh, but they did have that lovely two-seater outhouse, the door of which Doug had failed to open after attacking it with a chainsaw.  Actually, the outhouse and the old chicken coop were the most stable structures on the property.  The house was a disaster, it almost made her sea sick as the floors were so uneven.  Still, she fixed it up and it was pretty inside with huge drafty old windows which the winter winds blew right through. It was minus twenty degrees every night the first February they lived there.  She bought all the furniture.  Doug was supposedly putting money in the kid’s college funds which he’d later empty to buy a condo and new car.  So she furnished the house as she had all the others and decorated it with the Japanese antiques she had collected over the years.

Doug had grown up as the fourth child in a turbulent family.  He was used to being unseen, unheard, ignored.   He had grown up listening to whatever his older brother told him.  Iris had always depended on Dirk.  Now Doug would simply do as Dirk told him to do. He was lying right to Amy’s face, you’re all murderers Amy thought.   They all knew it was a lie but they were going to give it legs and see if it walked.  She never really spoke with her husband after the murder.  They argued but Doug was essentially gone, unreachable.   He never once opened up to her about the murder.  He treated her like a stranger.  After all she’d done for him.  He never saw any of it anyway.  He was never grateful.  He had always assumed it was a privilege for others to help him.   Amy knew that he didn’t even know the topic of her PhD dissertation.  He’d be hard pressed to even name the academic department she had been in.  Once he got to Guam he never called and rarely answered the phone that had taken him close to a month to get while Amy was distraught with worry over Charlie.  Doug had said it was complicated to get a phone in Guam.  He found everything other than rereading novels and teaching undergraduates to be extremely complicated.  She’d call to talk with Charlie every Friday night but gradually Charlie stopped talking with her.  This caused her excruciating anguish.   She later found out that he couldn’t speak to her if Doug was around as he would be making grimaces the whole time.  The life she knew was gone and she would start over somehow with Doe and she’d get Charlie back and protect him.  That was all that mattered.   After all Amy thought, it’s possible to walk around the whole world if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The yellow crime scene tape was taken down, Iris was allowed to get back into the house.  Dirk was returning to Long Island with his wife Lisa, Vera was on her way up from Philadelphia and Alex was flying in from LAX.  Amy was told by the brothers that it was now the girls turn to stay with Iris and make sure she was safe.  There was speculation that Iris might harm herself but Amy doubted that.  Vera and Alex were not even aware of the murder for two days.  Dirk had told the others not to contact them while he found a defense lawyer.  He would make the district attorney’s office and the police do all the work to prove that Iris had murdered Lars.   Amy thought, isn’t that going to use up a lot of tax dollars?  Why should people have to pay for this fucking family’s fucking lie.  What was the good in that?!  It was so obvious Iris was guilty.   She was afraid to tell the police what she thought.

Amy had been trying to find out where’s Lars’s body had been taken.  Doug said he didn’t know.  Dirk said he didn’t know. She contacted the director of the local funeral parlor.  The small Vermont town was in an uproar over the murder.   “We can work with the body” the funeral director reassured her.    “Just gather his favorite clothes and some photos.  If we have to close the coffin partly then we can put photos there.  You’ll still be able to see his hands.”  he offered.  She wanted to see his hands.  The hands that had created so much beauty but were unable to caress.  Hands that had no signs of a defensive struggle.  He never knew what hit him.  Well, actually, she struck him from behind.  When they found him in the driveway there was speculation that he was on his way to Dartmouth to see his oncologist but there was no appointment although Iris had said that’s where he was going.  No struggle. How like Lars, or was that due to all the Ambien.  But how did he get to the car?  What happened when she came back from tennis?  Was he not supposed to be there?  Was he supposed to have fallen asleep at the wheel after all the zolpidem she gave him in his coffee and swerved off one of the winding mountain roads?  Was that what caused her fury?

Doug finally told Amy before she left for Iris’s, that they had decided there would be no funeral.  A quiet memorial with just immediate family would happen in a few months or so he’d said.  Amy was livid, that’s like a second murder she thought.  What about townspeople, the friends, the people who really cared about him who want to say goodbye.  Amy was a very slow learner, after thirty years with this family she still couldn’t figure them out.  She was so blind, so arrogant, so willful in her fantasy of what she thought her life was.  She had really believed that if she gave up everything she had wanted for herself and focused just on helping Doug get what he wanted, that it would work out, it’d all be fine.

Vera had been the one to call Alex two days after the murder.   “Are you sitting down?” she asked.  “Dad’s been murdered.”  “What!?  How?!”    “His head was bludgeoned.”  Alex and her family were just getting into the car to take their oldest daughter out for a birthday dinner celebration.  Alex knew instinctively that her mother had killed Lars.   “I know.” agreed Vera. 

Iris had flown out to see Alex and her family just two months earlier.  Iris got the kids one of those huge timber swing sets with a jungle gym.  It took up the whole backyard.  Alex’s husband Cliff was pissed.  He’d had other plans for that space.   You had to do whatever Iris wanted or she would make you suffer for it.  She would manipulate, ostracize, all covertly.  She was brilliant at it.  She didn’t like anything less than complete obedience.  She loved being the “fun grandma” but she always looked forward to returning to the quiet of Vermont after the SoCal suburbs.   It was during that last visit, just two months before the murder that Alex realized that her mother was “different”.

Iris had told Alex over the phone that she had something to tell her when she saw her.  She told Alex that she was madly in love, that’d she’d found the love of her life, Peter.  She was finally happy in an intimate relationship! She gushed.  Alex was not completely surprised. This had happened before but something was different about her mother now. Iris had been lonely in her marriage and all the kids knew it and were aware of her flings.  This time she acted omnipotent, like she could do anything if only Lars, the impediment, were removed.   Iris was flummoxed that he had recovered after the lung surgery.  He had stopped the glaucoma medication, he was regaining his strength.  She had imagined that he would soon be out of her life, NOT getting better.  After Iris left, Cliff kept making “Arsenic and Old Lace” jokes.  It was that obvious.  It was a joke because the thought of her ever doing anyone any real physical harm was absolutely inconceivable.  There was no history of any physical violence, it was not part of her nature.   Alex and Cliff remembered that Iris was impatient that trip, she had blown up over something their toddler son had done.  That was very unlike her.  It had bothered them. 

 Vera told Alex that she was not supposed to fly out to see her mother.  “There’ll be a Memorial service sometime later.”  That’s what Dirk and Lisa had told her.  Cliff was mortified by this news and told Alex to get on a plane immediately.  He’d take care of the kids and do whatever was needed.  “Your mother has murdered your father! Go !”  Alex was close to her father.  They had spoken on the phone the very day before the murder.   Similar to Lars, Alex was a landscape and interior horticultural designer.  Over the years she’d grown in appreciation of his knowledge and experience and had taken to regularly asking his advice on various projects.  He knew the names of everything she’d ever describe to him, even the names of the mosses and ferns let alone shrubs. Iris and Dirk repeatedly called Alex and told her not to come.. When it was finally clear to them that she was coming on her own, Dirk called her to say that Iris wanted him to pick her up at Logan airport in Boston.  Alex had been the most happy-go-lucky of the children.  She was athletic and loved camping and hiking.  She was kind and generous.  She was incredibly artistic with a unique eye for color and design.  As the youngest of Iris’s children from her first marriage she had managed to avoid the family’s obsession with depending on the rich great grandfather to finance their lives.  Alex chose to be free from that. She had made it on her own.  

When Alex got out of the gate at Logan Airport, Dirk and Brad were there to meet her.  They were like strangers, “business-like”.  She was heartbroken but she wanted the truth.  They tried to get her to cancel her rental car but she persevered against the tide of their increasingly bizarre behaviors and drove up by herself.  At one point, they all pulled into a rest area and talked.  They were sniffing her out, trying to find out where she stood.  They asked if she thought Iris did it.  When Alex said “yes” their eyes turned dark like a steel gate coming down.  All further conversation was over.  She couldn’t understand their behavior at all.  What was motivating their behavior?  MY GOD, they were her brothers !  She loved them!  How could anyone heal this way?  Alex was on a mission.  She had a goal to find out what had happened and to make it right somehow.   She had the support of her husband and she had an island of repose in this hurricane as well, she would stay in Brattleboro at the home of her best friend from childhood.  Jennifer knew Iris and Lars well.  Alex went to Jennifer’s house first and arrived at Iris’s just as her sister Vera was getting in from Philadelphia and Amy was arriving from Castleton.  None of them had seen Iris yet and Iris was no longer happy to see any of them.  In Iris’s mind her daughters and Amy were traitors. They needed to be dealt with.  The sons would fix this.   The money would fix this. 

Alex was the most vocal opponent of the secret plan that was emerging for how to deal with the murder.  When Alex got to the house she looked Iris right in the eyes and demanded, “What happened here?  I want to know what happened?”.   Iris’s terrified and confused look was confession enough.   “I can’t talk about it.”  Iris blurted turning away.

The girls had all just learned of Dirk’s clandestine decision to have Lars’s cremated as soon as his battered body was released from the medical examiner’s in Burlington.  Vera and Alex were dumbfounded.  Iris killed Lars, the brothers pretend it didn’t happen, and then they deny Lars a funeral?    They deny the community a chance to heal and they want the state to pay for a trial?! Amy ached to have a funeral for Lars.  On some level Amy could forgive Iris the awful thing that she had done as she was convinced that the person who yielded that murder weapon, the weapon that was never found, but that was capable of making deep puncture wounds to the skull behind Lars’s ear and causing two fracture lines, was not Iris.  It was a chemically altered and pharmacologically enhanced version of Iris, one that lacked the frontal brain ability to control rage.  One who had shown increasingly poor judgement, one who in fact no longer had any adult problem-solving skills.   Maybe Iris had never had those in the first place.  Amy could forgive the murder if Iris would just confess to it but she could not wrap her mind around the premediated and cold-blooded decision NOT to have a funeral for Lars??

It was an overcast Sunday afternoon when the girls convened at the house.  Dirk and Lisa left for Long Island saying that even if there were a funeral service that they would be too busy to come back up for it.  Brad had gone back to Albany.  On the way to the house in Townshend that day Amy had passed by the church that Lars and Iris attended in Jamaica.  It was Sunday morning.  Maybe the minister is still there she wondered.  She  quickly pulled in and parked her car and found herself walking into the church.  ‘Hello’ she said to the attractive young woman organizing hymnals inside the clean white vestibule. “Are you the minister? I’m Lars Carpenter’s daughter-in-law” she cautiously added.  Relief burst across the minister’s face.  ‘I’m Emily. Thank God you’re here’.   Emily said that the congregation was in a tumult over the murder.  She’d had no news from the family and didn’t know what to tell people.  Everyone was concerned and in shock over the loss of Lars and they wanted to offer condolences.  Amy suggested that Emily come over to the house as soon as she could get free and try to persuade Iris to have a funeral service as soon as possible.  Amy asked Emily not to mention that they had talked.  She knew that if anyone knew she had anything to do with funeral plans there would be trouble.  When Emily arrived she told Iris that she’d been getting numerous inquiries from members of the congregation.  The community was in shock and horror and wanted to show their support for the family and to grieve with them.  They still believed that there was a horrible murderous fiend on the loose.  Lars was reserved but not a recluse.  He had been a Deacon in this church and was active and well-liked in the community.  Lars liked to socialize with neighbors, he liked to go to the post office /general store and chat.  Emily told Iris that she felt that the town needed to mourn this event and have some closure and that this was important.  They were all sitting out on the large back deck overlooking the barn and paddocks and pond and the terraced gardens Lars had been working on with local field stones still stacked in piles on the lawn   Vera and Alex cautiously encouraged the idea, adding that the sooner the funeral service was over, the quicker Iris would be able to stop thinking about all of it.  This idea seemed to have an immediate appeal to Iris and she finally agreed.  There would be a funeral then for Lars in the coming week.  They set the date for Wednesday, exactly one week after the murder.   Amy was surprised that Iris agreed.  It seemed that she still had some awareness of normal social codes of conduct although she was still delusional about Lars.  She still could not tolerate the sight of any of his things.  Initially, she had scoffed in private that no one would come to a funeral for Lars anyway.  What an absurd idea she laughed!  I mean, he was so worthless!   Gradually, as she listened to Emily, Iris realized that people did want to come.  Even though Lars was completely worthless in her delusional eyes, she was able to realize, with assistance, that not everyone shared that view.  She still assumed that her immediate family members were convinced of his worthlessness and of the necessity for his murder.  In her mind really, he just had to go.  What other option did she have?  He deserved it.  Lars had just been a barrier, just a nuisance, an inconvenience that was best removed.   Iris assumed that her family felt the same.  Well, she was certain that the good family members, the sons, felt the same.  After all, Dirk was a lawyer and she would give him total access to her estate.  She’d control the others that way too.  The problem was with Alex.  She had never cared about the family money. Amy didn’t matter.  She was not blood.  The daughters had always been a bit of a problem for Iris.  The fact that she agreed to the funeral suggests that she may have agreed to plead guilty and that would have kept the family and their fortune together.  Although they were never really together as a family in the first place.  How could they not have seen her delusional state in the months prior to the murder?  No one had tried to help her and she had needed help. 

Emily asked Iris what hymns Lars would have wanted and Iris’s eyes grew dark for a moment then she just shrugged a bit and put her hand gently on Emily’s arm and smiled graciously “Oh, you knew him, I’ll let you decide.”  Iris was so effective in manipulating people that way.  She was so charming and charismatic.  The truth was that she couldn’t stand to have a single thought about Lars in her head at this time. Fuck him, what hymns did he like?  Who gives a fuck!  How should I know, Iris thought.  Who cares!  Iris was only marginally aware that her present mindset was the least little bit aberrant.  She was too busy throwing out all Lars’s personal belongings. 

During the time Vera and Amy stayed at the house, from Sunday until the funeral service on Wednesday, Iris did not discuss Lars at all other than tell Amy to get rid of his belongings as quickly as possible.  Iris had greeted Alex’s friend Jennifer by telling her to take an Old El Paso Taco Dinner kit that Lars had bought.  It clearly irritated her.  “Lars got this.  I’ll never use it. Here, you can have it.”  Hasta la vista baby.  Jennifer nodded in dismay and left the box somewhere around the kitchen, only to find on leaving that Iris had actually gone out and put it in her car.  She couldn’t stand to have any thing around that reminded her of him in any way.  The object her disgust was most vehemently directed at was his teal leather reclining chair.

That first night after dinner at the house Vera sat on the floor amid decades of family albums and boxes filled with photos of Lars’s life.  These were to be displayed at the funeral.  Amy wondered if maybe she shouldn’t be cutting up all those old family albums, maybe some people would want them, she wanted them.   Vera sat in a trance sorting through fifty years of family photos of trips to Vermont and Hilton Head, of memories of Christmases and other holidays, of black and white images of Lars and his buddies as forestry students in the Adirondacks.  She spread them out over the heavy oriental rug spilling onto the beautiful hardwood floors.   It was like they were burning into her brain.  She knew each image by heart.  She had always loved the family history.  As the eldest daughter she was the chronicler. She was the one always looking for the family truth.  She would exclaim every few minutes, “Oh, look at this one!  Here’s one of him in Forestry School !! Look how young he is, how handsome!”  Vera had been warned by an irate Iris not to include any photos of her and Lars together.

Vera was the emotional voice of the family. Her focus was always on feelings.  Iris had always tried to exclude her and make fun of her artistic emotional nature.  She also didn’t like the fact that Vera wanted a different truth about her childhood from the one Iris had constructed for her own benefit.  Vera had been in touch with her biological father, she had invited him to her first wedding.  Iris never forgave that.  Iris had been ruthless to Vera.  She’d arrange family holidays and cookouts and birthdays at the house in Vermont and order the rest of the family not to tell Vera.  Then they’d all make fun of Vera when she’d inevitably become aware of this and desperately try to join in with her three girls.  Despite this, Vera loved her family to the core and whenever anyone was really in trouble and needed to talk to someone, she was the one they went to.  She stayed up that whole night looking at photos and crying and making the posters for Lars’s funeral service.  She was inexhaustible and always had been.

No one had really slept for days and they were all hyperalert.   After dinner Vera and Amy had sat out on the grass by the driveway, up on the hill by the old apple orchard, far from the spot where Lars had lain.  Under the black sky filled with stars they finished the dinner wine and laughed with exhaustion “Hey, shouldn’t we be worried sitting out here?  After all, there’s a murderer on the loose according to Dirk!”  “No. It’s more dangerous inside the house!”  Amy retorted.  They couldn’t understand why the police hadn’t already arrested Iris.  It was so obvious. 

Amy slept fitfully on the pullout couch in the TV room where Lars recliner stood. Next to it rested the wood-carving he’d been working on for the mantle piece.    Iris had offered her a sleeping pill that night, Ambien.  Amy finally had to agree take it, she spit it out in the bathroom as soon as she could.  She woke up early to find Iris looming over her.  She’d been trying to lift Lars’s reclining chair.  “You’ve got to take this chair to the Salvation Army today!” Iris panted. Amy promised to get right on it, then she found Vera, and they called the lawyers who convinced Iris that it was probably in her best interests to wait a while to get rid of all Lars’s things. “Oh! I should be worried about what people will think??”  Iris pondered this for a moment then laughed.  Iris was obsessed with removing every trace of Lars just as she had done with her first husband Jack, Amy now realized.  The kids had all been trained to hate Jack but in the past when Amy had asked Doug what he had done, he’d looked confused and couldn’t describe anything.   When Iris saw the photo collages Vera had worked on she warned her again that any photos showing her and Lars together were to be removed.  It was not something to be discussed.  They did as they were told.  There were errands to be done that day.  They wanted to meet with Alex in Brattleboro to go over the plans for the funeral service.  Someone had to make phone calls to friends and family to let them know that a funeral was to take place.  Vera and Amy stopped for groceries at the Brattleboro Coop and headed out to see Alex at Jennifer’s house so they could divide all the tasks they needed to do. They were all so thankful and relieved that the funeral was going to occur. 

Vera, a fantastic gourmet cook, prepared dinner Monday night.   They opened a bottle of wine and sat around the dining room table while the daylight turned to dusk, the gloaming hour.  Amy cleared dishes and Vera served fresh raspberries and strawberries with lemon curd and clotted cream.  Iris started to talk.   Amy didn’t want to upset her or confront her in any way.  She just wanted the funeral to take place with as few complications as possible.  Lars deserved this and it had to happen. It HAD to happen. Everything else could wait.  She felt like a Judas as she listened to Iris’s story, the one she’d never been able to piece together before, the one Vera wanted to understand.    Iris’s voice came across the dusk while Amy looked out at Lars beautiful back lawn with the terraced rock gardens going up to the old orchards, now disappearing in the dark.   Iris said that when Doug was three, she’d left her five young children and gone to Mexico with a lover, a man from the neighborhood who’d left his own wife and kids.  She’d stayed away for over a year, returning to work in Manhattan as some type of secretary.  The only thing that brought her back to her five children was a promise from her wealthy grandparents of Sands Point Long Island, that they’d generously financially support her, and that they’d prevent her now ex-husband from ever seeing the kids again.   Her grandfather was a prominent estate lawyer at the time.  Iris said that she realized that something had been wrong with her domestic life when she’d lost the desire to get out of bed in the morning.   To Iris, that lack of joie de vivre was totally unacceptable, intolerable.  It had to be someone else’s fault and they had to be dealt with and excised from her life.  Her norm was total exuberance and freedom.  Nothing was allowed to get in the way of that.  That was the thing that had always drawn Amy to her, this instinct to enjoy life with no fetters.  Her love of life was contagious—but it had always been well subsidized by the work efforts of others.  She had inherited money and Lars was wealthy.   As Iris talked there was no introspection, no psychological analysis of what had been wrong in her early married life, no mention of the children she abandoned.  Doug had always claimed to have no memory of his early years other than a vague memory of his little sister Alex lying in the middle of a big bed in diapers crying and crying and no one coming to her. That and the stream of new maids who couldn’t speak any English were all he recalled.  Iris was never an introspective woman and she had no grasp of her own psychological motivations.    She was like a giant rapacious toddler, no conscience.  As they sat around the table in the beautiful dining room, five days after she had murdered her husband, the long shadows had disappeared, it was dark.  They could barely make out the shape of the remaining dishes on the table when Iris concluded her story.  Then she turned to Amy and grasped her arm resting on the table, “You have to do what you HAVE to do to SURVIVE!”  “You have to survive!” she stated emphatically watching Amy’s face which was now thankfully invisible in the dark.  Her words made Amy shiver.  They would have been impressive if it hadn’t been for what this antidepressant had done to this primal drive in the context of her long-standing lack of problem-solving skills.  Amy felt that Iris offered this story as a way to explain what she'd just done.   Amy pretended that she understood.

 The next day, while walking up the dirt road, Amy bumped into the couple Iris had gone to the concert with.  “Is Iris okay?” they asked with true compassion.  She felt sick, she would have to lie and pretend Iris didn’t do it.   She was dreading the funeral service for that reason, as much as she wanted it.    She wanted it for Lar’s sake and for the sake of the community but she didn’t want to have to pretend she didn’t know who had murdered him.  Amy was not good at this.  It nauseated her. God, she felt sick to her root.

The funeral service on Wednesday at the Jamaica Community Church was packed. All the pews were full, the side aisles, and the back of the church held people standing.  There was a news crew set up on the lawn in front of the church as well.  Vera’s husband and three daughters had come up from Philadelphia. The youngest, a violin prodigy, was to play a concerto with the middle daughter on flute.  Dirk gave a eulogy during which Lisa clucked proudly, “Oh, see how he pulls on his right earlobe, just like when he’s talking at meetings!” His whole attitude was so cavalier and disrespectful. Amy cringed in her pew.  Who was Dirk talking about, it wasn’t a Lars that any of them knew, please make him stop.  Doug read a wonderful poem he had written about his father and Brad spoke eloquently of Lars character and strengths as well.  Iris’s brother and his family had all come, along with Lars’s brother and family and all of Lars’s sons from his first marriage, as well as his first wife.   It made Amy so happy that the church was packed.  Lars deserved this.

After the service the congregation had prepared a brunch down on the ground level.   That was a blur to Amy, she felt it was a sham.  She felt sick being there, unworthy, and soiled.  She looked in the eyes of these friends and saw only goodness.  She pretended that a suspect existed, someone who had dropped in from somewhere and killed Lars.  Too bad there weren’t suspects to frame in rural Vermont although after the trial’s guilty verdict Dirk and Brad tried to appeal stating that the murderer could be the salvage yard owner where Lars had gotten truck parts over 3 years earlier.  It was all speculation, based on the meaningless ramblings of a convict who liked to watch CourtTV and call in with “suggestions”.  A fifth-grader could have come up with a better appeal idea.  How about antidepressant-induced mania for one?  Everyone Amy met at the church that day of the funeral was so concerned.  Was everyone in this town so caring?  How could we do this to them?   She saw now that this family had always violated other people like this, in varying degrees.  She saw that she had been intentionally blind to it. 

Vera had displayed all the photo collages of Lars.  People kept coming up to the family and giving their condolences.  A man from the town lister’s office where Lars had volunteered, cornered Amy and told her that he knew Iris did it.  She felt numb. This man held on to her arm and repeated it until his wife dragged him away.  Amy fought the urge to run around and tell everyone how sorry she was to make them go through this charade.  She wanted to tell the people trying to comfort Iris that she was the murderer. They didn’t have to be afraid.  In the back of her mind she kept thinking that the truth will come out.  It has to.  She kept her mouth shut because deep down she knew that was the right thing to do for now.  She would wait. 

After the brunch, the immediate family went to the historic graveyard in Townshend for the burial.  Iris had ordered the free Veteran’s urn for Lars’s ashes, Brad had reminded her of this opportunity.  Brad was very much looking forward to an inheritance now.  His life had never really taken off.   His ever-shifting jobs had never really supported his tastes and he had relied on regular funding from both Iris and Lars.   This urn was a tiny unimpressive metal box, an insult really. The gravesite was just a tiny square of overturned earth.  They all stood in a circle around the site each taking a turn to share their memories of Lars. Each of Lars’ first sons spoke emotionally and eloquently about the man they loved, wiping away their tears.  This was their second, more unbearable, loss of him.  The first having been the divorce when they were children.  During their early marriage Iris had eventually forbidden Lars to spend time with his first children.  As usual, he gave in to her incessant nagging.  There were times when he raised his voice at Iris but only after he couldn’t tolerate her nagging anymore.  Alex spoke of how Lars had always been there for her and Lee’s adolescent travails and she sang a Cat Stevens song for him while wobbling on the crutches she needed after she had injured her knee on the flight out from LA.  Amy felt a pit in her stomach, she was waiting and waiting.  What was Iris going to say?  Now everyone was done speaking except Iris.  All eyes had turned to her in the circle.  It was her turn to speak.  What would she say?!  Amy’s heart beat against her chest.  They all held their breath.  Iris stood silent, then she fumbled for her brother Bill’s arm and together they walked slowly across the grass to the insignificant little hole in the ground where all that remained of Lars had been placed.  She stooped to pick up a handful of dirt, “Bye Lars” she tearlessly and casually remarked as she chucked the dirt on the metal box with his ashes, turned, and walked away.    He was dead and she was glad.

The family and friends headed back to Lars’ house, the third dream house.  The ladies from church had brought over the trays towering with the remaining sandwiches and desserts and Amy had filled some ice chests with drinks.  It was odd to be together with Bill, Iris’s brother, and his family, as Iris had been planning a big family reunion that summer for Lars’s birthday.  They were all supposed to get together in August, not now.  People milled around the house. Doug was enjoying talking with Lars’s sons whom he hadn’t gotten to spend much time with since their early joint camping trips decades ago, when it had been allowed.  He had liked them.  Old friends from the days on Long Island were also there but not Sally and not Erica.  Only people who did not yet know the truth were there.  However, Amy was sure that they suspected the truth.  They had to.  It was just too impossible to speak of.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Guests wandered from side deck to back deck for a few hours.  Amy started to clean up the kitchen as the guests started to leave.  Iris was out on the back deck with Dirk and Lisa, overlooking the barn and pond.  She came into the kitchen expecting a mess but saw Amy tying the final Hefty bag closed.  “Did you do this?” she asked in shock, “Did you clean all this up?”  Amy felt uncomfortable as they hadn’t spoken to each other during the past few days other than the story after dinner that night in the dusk.  This was a moment where all defenses were down.  “Well,” Amy stammered, “It’s the least I could do.”  She was usually the one to clean up, it had been her role in her own family and in this one.   Iris kept repeating in a broken voice, “You did this for me?”  Amy broke down sobbing in tears, “Well, it’s the least I could do after all you’ve done for us, for my family.”  What was she saying she wondered.  The truth was that Iris had done a lot for them in the past.  She’d been a wonderful loving caring mother-in-law and grandmother for years.   She really had been loving and kind and caring.  “All I’ve done?” Iris asked “Oh my God. What have I DONE, oh my God, what have I DONE!” she sobbed covering her face as she fell into Amy’s arms.   Lisa and Dirk rushed to separate them and take Iris away to another room.  They never stood face to face again.  Amy would not see Iris again until the day she testified for the prosecution almost two years later.  The funeral was the last time they were all together. 

The family had all abandoned Iris in the months prior to the murder.  They had missed all her calls for help.  They had no idea that she had been telling people in town, people whom she barely knew, that she had a lover and wanted Lars to die.  Erica’s question of “WHY” to Iris as Lars lay dead in the driveway, revealed that there were so many other options.  Iris lacked the ability to identify a workable course of action and implement it.  That takes reasoning, judgment, patience, and a certain type of intelligence that we acquire with age.  All that had been evaporating in the months that she had been on the antidepressant and she did not have vast reserves of coping skills to begin with.  In the months prior to the murder none of her family took a moment out from their busy self-important lives to realize that this was a woman desperately crying out for help.   

CHAPTER 3

The day after the funeral, once everyone had dispersed, the girls started calling each other.  What was going to happen now?  They had wanted to take Iris to a psychiatric unit.   They wanted her to plead guilty and get help   She needed a psychiatric evaluation.  Amy knew that Dartmouth Medical Center had an inpatient geriatric psychiatric unit, she’d presented a paper there a few months earlier.  Amy felt that Iris could get off the antidepressant safely there and get the treatment, whatever it was, that she needed.  That would be her defense, antidepressant-induced mania or psychosis she thought.  Maybe there was a blood test or some type of psychological evaluation that would show that she couldn’t tolerate it Amy desperately hoped.  Vera suggested that Amy go back to the house and convince Iris to go to Dartmouth with her, “I don’t think Mom will go unless you go with her. She’ll go if you’re admitted too.”  Amy was stunned.  Seriously?  She frantically pondered the pros and cons of this idea, it didn’t seem like a good one she thought.  What about the kids?!  This family has absolutely no boundaries she thought.  They’re all nuts.  A few years earlier Amy would have probably agreed to be admitted.  They finally decided that they would each call the police and tell them that Iris was going to harm herself and ask if they would please check in on her.  What Amy didn’t know was that on her way to the airport Alex actually went to the state police headquarters to tell them that she knew her mother was the murderer.   “Don’t worry” the officer had responded, “Someone’s at the house right now.”  What the girls didn’t know was that they’d brought hand cuffs.  They went there to arrest her.   Iris was taken into custody and finally charged with the murder.  She was put in detention.  There’d be a hearing in three days.  Amy and Vera and Alex were relieved.  Amy was grateful that she didn’t have to be the one to tell the police that Iris murdered Lars.  They had all been dancing around that responsibility, the girls were afraid of what Iris and Dirk would do to them.   Only Alex had the guts to do the right thing.  Amy wanted to tell the police but she had hesitated because she was still married to Doug.  This would totally alienate her from the family and might affect her own children.  She felt in her gut that she would be risking too much to say those words to the police.  She’d waited.  The fact was, she was still being obedient.  Thanks to the courage and moral fortitude of others, Iris was charged with the murder of Lars.  

Amy and Doug spent a sleepless night and got up at dawn to drive to the nearest convenience store for a copy of the Rutland Herald. There was Iris, in handcuffs, leaving “dream house” number three, right on the front page. She was released on $100,000 bail at the hearing.  When she returned to her home three days later, she immediately told Doug that she wanted to become a social worker. She told him that she’d met so many young women in the jail and just knew that she could help them.  She was ecstatic, she’d found her calling.  Instead, she spent her time before the trial redecorating their chalet which was right across the road from the house where she had murdered Lars.  They had planned to move into this chalet and stay there while “dream house number four” was being completed.    The chalet looked luxuriously Alpine when Sotheby’s finally sold it once the guilty verdict was turned in almost two years later.  Interestingly, the couple who moved into her previous home, the murder site, became close friends.  As Iris left her driveway each day she would not be able to avoid seeing the driveway where Lars had lain.   

The day after Iris was released on bail, Dirk’s wife Lisa took her to the Bellow’s Falls’ Courthouse and Alex was cut out of the will.   Alex was the only child to look her mother in the eye and tell her that she knew she murdered Lars.  Alex was the only one with any real guts or decency.  She paid dearly for that.  She tried to reconcile with Dirk later but the thick tear-stained etter she wrote him came back stamped ‘return to sender’.  She was heart-broken and bereft.  Soon she’d have no family left at all.

Amy and Doug continued to argue relentlessly every day, circling each other like wild dogs, waiting to get outside the house to yell at each other on the dirt road.  Amy didn’t want the kids to know they were arguing.  As though they didn’t already know.  At home, they’d keep their mouths shut and try not look at each other.  Then they’d tell the kids that they were going out for a walk.  Once outside it would start, like pit bulls in a ring.   They’d walk up and down the dirt road under the canopy of trees in front of the farm house.  They’d argue what was right, what should have been done; arguments that were the eternal recurrence of the same.  “Why didn’t you try to help her?” Amy would obsessively ask.  Doug continued to pretend that he didn’t know that Iris murdered Lars.  Instead, he’d accuse Amy of being self-righteous, ‘How do you know what’s right?? Who are you to know?  What gives you the authority?  She suffered, her marriage was awful!”   Well, so was Lar’s she thought. Maybe I have grounds for murdering you then Amy thought.  “Your problem is you’ve never read philosophy.” Doug would accuse her.  “You have no ability to change things.”  For a man who claimed to have read the entire opus of existentialist philosophy from the Stoics to Kierkegaard and inside out of Sartre, Amy thought this an odd remark.  Isn’t existentialism ultimately relational.  It posits a world of others and although there is personal freedom this exists in the context of other’s freedoms. It is ultimately humanistic and finally all about love.  Didn’t the French existentialists oppose Hitler!  Wasn’t that the point of the French Resistance.  Didn’t Hannah Arendt, one of Heidegger’s students, Doug loved Heidegger, say that doing nothing in response to evil was the same as doing evil.  Didn’t Aristotle say murder was WRONG in all cases?!  Isn’t that the point of the 4^th commandment?  And what about Kant and the universality of morality.  There was no relativism in a murder like this.  Lars was not a warm, emotional man.  It was not his character. However, he was anything but a monster.  He expressed love through actions, through service. He had never hurt Iris.  He was not intentionally cruel to her.  He was blind, in the same way we all are.  Amy had seen him get frustrated with Iris’s constant nagging at times.   In the two months before he left, Amy and Doug never had a moment of shared understanding.  No comfort, no true intersubjectivity, a favorite philosophical concept of Doug’s.  But that was never really part of their marriage in the first place.  They thought they were protecting the kids but the kids felt it all.  When Amy finally told the kids that Iris had murdered their grandfather she explained that it was because of a medication she was taking.  “This drug made Grandma go out of her mind.”  she’d said.  Charlie was quiet but Doe said ‘Mom, are you worried what people will think?  Don’t worry Mom, most of my friends have a family member in prison.  It’s no big deal.”  Thank God for your spirit Amy thought.  Doe was always the first to offer comfort to others and the last to receive it herself.  Her words did make Amy, always the perfectionist and idealist, feel better.

Doe had always marched to her own drummer.  Amy didn’t understand her at all.  It bothered her that she couldn’t understand her.  It made her feel that she was a bad mother.  She had taken that out on Doe in the past.  She had been impatient with her, frustrated, angry.  She lost her compassion.  She hated herself for that.  Doe seemed to never tell her the truth.  Doe didn’t care about school work but she was intensely dedicated to her friends.  Amy would struggle with Doe every summer when they returned to Vermont to complete the massive amount of homework Japanese kids got over their brief summer vacation.  Doug never helped.  Iris would get involved and tell Amy to leave Doe alone but Amy knew the consequences and if Doe would just sit down with her for fifteen minutes a day it would all be done.   Doe excelled at sports, she excelled in music.  She had friends who loved her.  She was devoted to them.  Amy didn’t understand her and Doe never confided in her.  Doe was a leader on the kindergarten playground in Japan.  She was the first to do daring deeds on the monkey bars.  She’d flip and spin around the iron bars like a circus performer.  Kindergarten was for three years in Hiroshima.  Charlie was born a few months after they arrived in Japan.   He grew up watching Doe and all the kids on the playground.  He loved it.  He always wanted to be in the midst of the pandemonium, the chaos.  He’d struggle up the steps of the tall playground slide.  He’d play with the other toddlers, stumbling around with his huge blue eyes and blond curls.   The mothers loved him.  When they all sat in circles on the tatami mats at each other’s apartments after school he’d stand in the middle then teeter around the circle kissing the Moms on their cheeks. They loved it.  They’d laugh hysterically when he danced to the traditional Enka music, his diaper-clad bum bouncing up and down to the beat.  His favorite movie was Home Alone. He loved to watch big extended families having fun, laughing in the chaos.   All that disappeared after the murder.  There was no family for him on Guam.  No more beautiful green and blue Vermont summers with swimming holes and cousins.  In Guam, Doug would drag him to faculty parties and then scream and yell at him on the way home for not having talked to anyone. 

Ever since Doe was a baby they had read books in bed at night.  This had continued in Japan.  Amy read all of Little House on the Prairie, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, to the kids.  She’d read Austen and the Bronte’s and Dickens.  Doe would be entranced.  Amy would read to the kids as they all lay on the futons in the tatami room until they fell asleep. It was a joy to reread these novels.  They were completely different now compared to when she had read them in college.  Doe remembered every word.  If Amy lost her place Doe would tell her exactly where they had stopped the night before.  It was also the only time the kids heard the English language other than the conversations at home. Once the kids were outside the house their world was entirely Japanese. 

They’d moved to Japan after Doug finished his PhD in Philosophy and Literature, his PhD dissertation containing no women writers, no indigenous peoples, was not a big hit with interviewers.  What they thought would be a year in Japan turned into twelve years.  They were actually happy there.  Amy had made sure that Doug didn’t have to do anything other than teach.  His students spoke English so he had never learned Japanese.  She took care of all the details so that he could focus on his writing.  He was heavily into writing book reviews.

Gradually, Amy realized that they had all been in cultural shock the year they moved back to Vermont, the year in which Lars was murdered, not even a full year.  The funny thing with culture shock is that you don’t recognize it while you’re in it.  It takes about three years to realize that your values are completely different from those of everyone around you. It’s like a jet-lag of the mind.  Charlie had worked so hard that first year in Vermont.  He’d gotten the state poetry award, he’d received the President’s Award.  He was on the basketball team and in Little League.  Doug helped coach the team and they’d played on a beautiful little field next to an old school house where Amy took her first yoga class. That teacher taught her that everything you need is already right at hand.   It was at yoga that she realized she had to move away from Vermont after the murder, to get a better life for the kids.  And she realized that she could do it. 

Doug and Amy had moved to Vermont the summer before the murder to be closer to Iris and Lars.  Lars had lung cancer, Doe had trouble with school.  Doug wanted to go back to the US.  Amy was lonely and she was worried about Doe.  She hated to uproot Charlie from all his friends.  He was only eleven and loved his life in Japan.  He was a great student, he was popular, poised, happy.  His teachers loved him.  Doug had taught American literature at a Japanese university and Amy had run the division of gerontological nursing at another university. After her BA in English she had gotten a BS in nursing and a PhD in Health Services Research with a concentration in Gerontology. 

They’d come back to live in America, driven by images of the small-town American family life that they’d always felt so nostalgic for while living overseas.  In Vermont, Charlie had sleep-overs and made new friends.  He’d tried so hard and now he was going to Guam to start all over again.  He went out of a sense of duty.  How much can an eleven-year-old express verbally?  Amy knew he went because he didn’t want his Dad to be alone.  He loved him and he cared more for a sense of duty than for himself.  Amy wanted to get help for Doe.  Charlie understood that Doe needed to stay in the U.S. to finish high school.   Amy wanted answers for Doe.  She could only find them in America, in her own language, in her own culture.  This was too complex to try to translate. She wanted to find out why Doe couldn’t do her school work and why she had such debilitating mood swings and bursts of anger. She had never gotten any useful information from her teachers in Japan.  Doe had seemed to have adapted to her high school in Vermont. She had already made friends during their summers at the house in Vermont.  She had school friends and she was in an ESL program to help her with homework.   She was on the tennis team.  She was trying to figure out the cultural norms here in America.  It was so different but she liked it.  Here in America Doe felt pretty, in Japan she had just felt that she had been weird looking with her golden hair and blue eyes. 

American’s have so much.  The happiest time for Amy’s little family in Japan was in a two-room apartment where the shower opened onto the kitchen.   She barely had to move her feet to clean it all.  She had more time to just enjoy the children and she did.  They went to the crowded city parks full of Japanese Moms and toddlers.  In Japan, the whole family slept together on the tatami mat floors on soft light futons.  New tatami is greenish gold and smells like freshly mown hay.  The mats all have a standard dimension and that is used to measure space.  Everything is a multiple of a ‘jo’ or tatami mat.  Everything is standardized.  There is such a shared world view in Japan. She hadn’t been able to grasp that prior to living there. 

Doe and Charlie had been the only Americans in their kindergarten, elementary, and junior high schools.  They’d decided to send their kids to regular Japanese public schools.  The International school was too small and too transient.  Amy wanted them to have a real childhood.   In sixth grade, Doe and her best friends all played trombone in the marching band.  They won a school band competition in Hiroshima.  Her award-winning music teacher used to shout during practice that they should blow the trombone “like the way a goldfish poops.” “not the way a rabbit poops.”  Every kid knew how goldfish poop as they were a favorite prize at summer festivals, floating inside clear little water-filled balloons.  They knew about rabbits because every grade school has outdoor cages with rabbits and chickens so the kids could take turns feeding and cleaning them, or rather pretending to clean them.   Although Japan is a highly evolved culture both socially and aesthetically, they aren’t ashamed to talk about bodily functions.  The application for kindergarten had included a list of things your child needed to be able to do such as button a blouse, hold chopsticks, and go number two by themselves, preferably every morning before school.  Doe’s first grade teacher used to ask the kids every morning to raise their hand if they had pooped at home before coming to school.   It makes sense considering the large number of kids, the small number of teachers, and the antiquated plumbing in most Japanese schools.  It was Charlie, at barely age three, who figured out that the control panel on the side of their home toilet could adjust not only the seat temperature but also the temperature, direction, and force of water and hot air to clean and dry your bum while you sat there.   Their first winter in Vermont everyone really missed that domestic Japanese heated hi-tech toilet.  It’s all about the little things in Japan. 

Doe had been a champion on the track team in junior high and had always excelled on Sport’s Day all through kindergarten and elementary school.  Charlie had run around with packs of friends.  Amy had loved living in Japan.  Every day was an adventure.  The Japanese like to plan ahead, anticipate every potential source of conflict or discomfort and strive to avoid it, or to at least unanimously agree to accept it after discussing it in great detail for a very long time.   She had hoped that her family would do this for Iris.  In contrast, there had been absolutely no discussion of options and possible outcomes.  None at all. 

Homes in Hiroshima didn’t have central heating although it got cold enough to snow a few times every winter.   Rooms were heated with kerosene space heaters most often and only while occupied.  Japan is a very energy efficient culture.  However, burn injuries are common.  Classrooms are also heated by big kerosene heaters.  The kids around the heaters fall asleep while those at the front of the classroom are freezing.  Japan developed an entire sub-technology of electric devices to micromanage domestic heating.  In winter, futons are placed on an electric carpet and electric blankets are used.  Amy once asked her students to tell her about the most important thing in their tiny apartments.  The kotatsu was the hands-down winner.  This is a low table that has an electric heating element underneath and a top that lifts off so you can put a quilt over the frame and replace the table top and sit around it wrapping yourself up in the toasty blanket.  When Amy first saw a kotatsu at her Japanese teacher’s house she thought it looked ridiculous but she came to love it.  When the kids would get up for school, they’d struggle to get their uniforms on in the cold air then crawl under the kotatsu and be fast asleep again by the time she had breakfast ready.  She’d drag Charlie out from under it, like a warm, wet noodle.  Some mothers ended up getting rid of their kotatsu as it was too great a source of contention when getting the kids ready for school.  The kids walked to school in assigned groups for forty minutes through bamboo groves and past rice fields and shrines or jinja.  If they failed to properly greet one of the elderly farm owners on the way they would be reported to the principal and receive a lecture on the need for politeness and proper manners.  No matter what the weather, they walked in their navy blazers and shorts or skirts, and plastic slip-on sneakers, often along the snowy rice fields. The Japanese culture loves contrasts.  There’s nothing comparable to the toastiness of a kotatsu while you can still see your breath in the air around your head.  The traditional thing to do with your family around the kotatsu at New Year’s was to watch hysterical comedy shows that parody every aspect of their highly ritualized and formalized lives while eating tons of mikans.  These are tiny tangerine type fruit that grow from late fall to early winter in the temperate islands of the Inland Sea or Setonai kai and elsewhere.  Amy had taken the kids mikan-picking on the steep slopes of these islands many times.  Their first apartment had been near the harbor in Hiroshima.   It was easy to hop on the ferries with their bikes.  The mikan farms were usually owned by older couples, the islands have a serious problem with out-migration of young people.

New Year’s is the major national holiday in Japan and it is a zealously guarded sanctuary of down-time.  All the shops close over the holiday, everything shuts down.  For several days prior, housewives are cooking the special dishes that will go into the five-story obento or lunch box that will provide all the holiday food.  The Buddhist priest’s wife at the temple across the street always brought over a sampling of all the New Year’s delicacies that went into her family’s obento.  “This is how my family prepares osechi ryori” she would explain.  New Year’s was a time for winter fish and for delicious hard sacks of tiny pale yellow cod eggs called kazunoko.  Ko is the word for child, or any offspring.  Black beans, kuro mame, boiled in a sugar syrup were another staple.  Most traditional Japanese dishes are an acquired taste. Giant shrimp eaten with the shell on and barazushi, a mild vinegar-flavored rice with tasty morsels of tofu and egg in it, filled up the box. After cooking the obento delicacies for several days, the home kitchen would shut down completely.  There is supposed to be NO cooking over New Years.  What an awesome idea.  This was a culture that really knew how to relax. 

The second time Iris and Lars came to visit Amy and Doug in Japan they took them to a traditional ryokan on the Japan Sea in the beautiful castle town of Hagi.  Hagi is one of the historic pottery centers in Japan and has a rich history of feudal lords and samuri.  Today the original clay deposits are gone and the artisans actually bought clay from the family of one of Charlie’s best elementary school friends, Tomiya-kun.  He lived on a farm on the way to school with huge nendo or clay pits.  They’d catch snakes, disturb hornet nests, slide down mud slopes into questionable water filled with frogs, and have a ball.  One time they “borrowed” another kid’s Pocket Monster Cards and Tomiya-kun’s mother came to Amy’s door so they could go and apologize to this neighbor, there was a lot of bowing involved.  As usual, Amy had no idea what was going on at the time, but Charlie latter explained it.   It took several years of arduous study to learn enough Japanese to get by and to be able to lecture her nursing students.

 Unlike the gentle Inland Sea, the Japan Sea on the northern coast has huge surf and great beaches.  Their ryokan in Hagi was right on the water.  A Japanese ryokan makes you feel like royalty.  Graceful kimono-clad girls line up to greet you at the entrance and escort you to your room.  A lot of bowing goes on.  The entrances are always beautiful with natural stones and small gardens wet from their morning cleanse.  Cleanliness is a very spiritually relaxing thing in Japanese culture.  Amy used to see salary men around their first apartment in Hiroshima hosing down the entrance of their office buildings each morning.   One of the essential treats of a ryokan, aside from the amazing food, is the bathing.   Iris and Lars had their own tatami room with futons and they had no hesitation about trying the onsen or bathing pool.  These are divided for the sexes, not communal.  The onsen at this ryokan was huge with a grotto, cave, and waterfall.  A wall of glass looked out on a nearby jetty where men stood surf fishing. A row of faucets, handheld showers, and stools ran along this wall.  Iris and Amy and Doe sat down on teak stools to scrub before entering the bath.  There is a pecific process to this and for Amy the bottom line was NEVER to finish scrubbing yourself before someone else who was there before you finishes.  The Japanese literally do scrub between each toe.  No body part is ignored and at public places everyone brings their own scrub brushes.   Once your skin is thoroughly clean you step into the onsen.  The hotter the better.  The Japanese don’t guess with temperature.  They use a digital thermometer and set the water at what feels like one degree below the temperature that denatures proteins.  It feels unbearably hot, until it isn’t and then you feel more relaxed than you’ve ever felt in your life.  Iris and Amy looked down at their naked bellies and legs which were turning lobster red.  Are we okay Iris asked.  Let’s give it a minute Amy replied.  Gradually, they adjusted and when they got out of the water they felt as though their very bones had been massaged.  Iris asked at one point, can those men over there fishing see us?  No, Amy lied.  It had been a wonderful trip.  Iris could not stand the food though and the kimono-clad servers were very distressed trying to figure out meal options for her.  She hated the raw fish.  She ended up eating all the souvenir cookies she had bought. 

Amy had been amazed to learn that her neighbors in Hiroshima really did take a nightly bath.  When they moved out of the city into the country-side around the new Hiroshima University campus, she could hear her neighbors bathing as she nightly walked the dog that Doe had ‘rescued’.  Amy had doubted the uniformity of what she had been told about life in Japan but in Hiroshima it really did apply.  Everyone seemed to be on the same page.  Bathrooms had a digital temperature control for the tub.  You could leave the water standing for the next family member for hours and at the push of a button it would instantly be recirculated and come out at the desired temperature.  Since Japan is an island where resources are valued, there was a siphon thing to pump the used tub water into the washing machine, always in the adjoining room, for the first wash cycle.

Japanese work-life is not as compulsively productive as some US documentaries like to portray.  However, it is compulsively group-oriented in a way Americans cannot imagine.  There is no such thing as a solo project at the office.   It was a sign of ignorance and immaturity to refer to yourself, to use the word “I”, in regard to work.  It indicates you are a potentially difficult person to work with.   You all work on things together and if one of you has not done your assignment then none of you can go home.  This is an unwritten law to save one’s ass.  Essentially, no one wants to be known as the person who went home early while Tanaka san stayed there until midnight.  Work is a major part of life and it had better be harmonious.  Amy realized that many of the customs involving group behavior were a well-thought-out way to avoid conflict down the road.  She realized that she had tried to apply these principles with Doug’s family during the murder but they all thought she was an idiot.  Dirk just went ahead on his own and made all the decisions. 

The classrooms in Doe and Charlie’s elementary school looked just the same as they must have in the 1920s, thirties, and forties.  There were no class room computers.  The Japanese school system is very regimented.  Kids learn to function in a group, to stand in line, to wait, to obey.  School operates a bit like the kotatsu.  It provides a great contrast to outside life.  The normal educational experience is regimented, everyone is the same, everyone wears a uniform.  However, free time is very fun.  There is a serious commitment to making the most of free time. When Amy traveled to conferences in the US with her Japanese colleagues they had wanted to see everything, eat everything, do everything.  One enthusiastic colleague had said, “we can sleep on the flight back.”

The love of contrasts is part of the Japanese approach to food.  You are supposed to enjoy food much more when you are hungry, so there is no snack at school and kids are very hungry by the time lunch is served.  When Doe started kindergarten Amy had packed a chocolate cookie only to be politely told by her teacher that no one ever eats sweets in school.  School is not a time for sweets, it is a time for learning.  Didn’t she know that? the teacher had queried.  Of course, there are special times at school when kids have rare and celebratory ice cream or puff pastries. 

In Hiroshima elementary schools, all the kids eat the same thing for lunch.  You don’t bring a lunch, there are no options. The prefecture provides the food and it will be eaten by all.  This does lead to occasional problems.  Half-way through the middle of third grade Charlie commented that he wished he could go out to recess.  What’s wrong Amy asked.  “Well, if I don’t finish my lunch, Takagawa sensei won’t let me go out.”  She wrote a note explaining that Charlie had an allergy to squid and octopus but it failed to convince.  

Despite the rules in Japanese society, comfort is the main focus of everyday life and openly strived for in all aspects of the mundane.  At the beauty salon, the person shampooing you will ask several times if your position is comfortable, is the water is too hot, would you like a hard massage or a gentle one?  They use a lot of fresh clean towels.  Amy wondered if this awareness of comfort came from growing up with grandparents.  By the time you’re sixty you know what you like and don’t want to tolerate anything less than total comfort. Grandparents play a big role in raising Japanese kids.  There were several multi-generational families in her neighborhood but it wasn’t the norm.  Usually, multigenerational households are found on working farms.  Nevertheless, there were always grandparents around, escorting kids to meet up with their walking groups to school in the early morning, or pushing baby strollers, or just sitting in the playground watching their grandkids.  Doe’s little friend Haruka chan would always ask Amy if she would like a shoulder massage if they were sitting together on the tatami. This is something the grandparents teach the kids to do.

 Amy remembered when a pregnant neighbor came over to tell her that she’d be leaving to go home to stay with her parents in another prefecture.  Amy was puzzled until the woman explained that she was going home to have her baby so her mother could take care of her.  Her husband would be living here on his own for a while she explained.  Neighbors always announce changes in routines like this or if they are having a party or some construction or something.  At that time, where they lived, most women still went home to stay with their mother for up to three months after childbirth to “recover” and be taken care of.  When Charlie was born in Hiroshima a few months after they’d moved there, Amy was delighted to find out that she could stay at the hospital for five nights.  This ended up being much cheaper than her drive-thru delivery with Doe had been in Pennsylvania, while in graduate school.   First time moms got to stay for ten nights; it depended on how much you knew.  This is a prime opportunity to teach the mother’s how to bathe and breastfeed their babies.  Charlie’s birth was such a different experience.  Firstly, Amy was told that good milk production was dependent on breast massage.  She was told not to drink anything during the first day after delivery.  This made sense as she’d ended up with rock-hard breasts after pushing fluids in the US.  Her American friend who’d just had baby number three a month before said, “Hey, the culture’s thousands of years old, they know what they’re doing.”  The nurse came in and examined Amy’s nipples, rubbed them vigorously, squeezed them, then counted the number of “spigots” or milk duct openings in each one.  Then she vigorously grabbed one breast at a time and started squeezing with excruciating pressure.  So much for breast massage. Amy didn’t fare much better at adhering to the feeding protocols.  She was supposed to weigh Charlie after each feeding but she couldn’t be bothered.  She knew that since she was a gaijin, they considered her hopelessly ignorant.  She lay in bed with Charlie, reading Dashiell Hammett and being scolded by the nurses because they believed that reading after giving birth will damage your eyes and that you shouldn’t room in with your baby.  At over ten pounds Charlie was twice as big as the other infants in the nursery.   She’d been told not to gain any weight by the Japanese OB, which was the norm.  She was also told to limit milk intake so the baby’s skull would be softer and pass through the birth canal easier. She actually lost weight during that pregnancy as she couldn’t figure out what any of the food was in the grocery stores. However, Charlie was still over ten pounds.   Her labor was so much easier without the forty pounds she’d gained with Doe four years earlier.  When Charlie was born there was no such thing as pain medication for laboring Moms (in Hiroshima at least).  Amy had doubted this but once in the hospital it was proven true.  She used to wonder how can all these things be so universal over here.  Japan is a very homogenous country.  Pain management during labor is available now in Tokyo and other places.  She asked her Japanese friends why there was no pain medication for labor and they all told her the same thing, “Oh, don’t you know?  The greater the woman’s pain, the more she loves the baby!”  Oddly, there was some truth in that.  Natural opiates or endorphins do kick in during labor and they sure do make you feel WONDERFUL when it is over. 

The Japanese public school system had been one of the main reasons they stayed so long in Japan.  The initial plan was to spend a year or two there while Amy had Charlie and got to spend time with the kids.  Doug would certainly find a tenure track position in America by then.  However, Japan was a wonderful place to raise kids and they didn’t want to leave.  When Amy had taken Doe to the public parks in State College it was lonely.  They were empty.  All the kids were in daycare.  When she took Charlie went to the neighborhood parks in Hiroshima they were packed with other mothers and kids.   They also liked the salary.  The Japanese companies paid a living wage.  They actually wanted to pay men enough so that mothers didn’t have to go out to work.  The country really supported families. It sounded sexist but Amy, the great feminist, liked it.  The country really respected what woman as caregivers provided to society.  The care and feeding of baby humans was important and respected.  Amy and Doug received a housing stipend and a mileage stipend from their universities. Employers would calculate exactly how far you drove to get to work, or how much the train cost, and reimburse that exact amount monthly.  They also gave enormous bonuses twice a year.  So although they had only planned to stay for a year or two they ended up staying for twelve years.  Amy wondered if they should never have left.

There were no school buses for public elementary school.  Walking was part of the plan.  Everything was micromanaged.  That used to bother Amy intensely but it worked for society.  At the end of the summer all the neighborhood mothers would host a party and the kids would be assigned to their new walking groups.  There could be no changes.  There were over 100 children in their neighborhood.  The uniform was very prescribed.  In addition to the navy blazer and skirt or shorts they had to wear a white blouse, a golf type cotton hat, white socks, white sneakers, and a randeseru or sturdy bright red leather backpack of German design.  No individual accessories were allowed.  Many aspects of the Japanese educational system were adopted from Germany in the late 1800s.  Japanese admire German engineering and precision. Even today when doctors write in patient medical charts they often use German terms.  Amy’s students had assumed she knew that an “arbeito”, was a part-time job.  “Arbeit” being the German term for “work”. 

Ideally, the randeseru was purchased, along with a standard desk, by grandparents before the child enters first grade.  A good randeseru will be about four hundred dollars and still look new when they finish sixth grade although it’s been crammed with books and gym clothes almost every day for six years.  When children start school you’re given a very detailed list of what they need.  This includes the randeseru, the desk at home, all the uniform components including a special gym uniform, and a pencil case which should have exactly two number 2 pencils (Amy was reprimanded for putting in more), an eraser, a red pen, and a ruler.  Pencil cases and their contents are the only source of diversity school kids are allowed and hence they acquire a special status.  Entire stores, and sections within stores, were devoted to “bun bogu” or tools for writing.  Amy and the kids missed these stores with their aisles full of different types of pens, pencils, and paper products.  Even college students and adults still continue to use pencil cases.  Amy was originally surprised when her “cool” college students, with their motorcycle helmets under their desks, took out their ancient Snoopy or Doramon cartoon pencil cases at the start of every class.  She once asked her students to write an English essay introducing her to their pencil cases.  They loved talking about their pencil cases or fude bako (brush box), many of which they’d had since junior high and had been with them through all their entrance exams. “American students don’t’ have pencil case?!” What do they do?!” “How can they study?” they wrote in dismay.  “Doesn’t their bag get all dirty from pencil lead?  How can they find things?” One student wrote in concern “I highly recommend you tell your students in America about the need for a pencil case.” 

The Japanese couldn’t understand the laissez-faire attitude of Americans and Amy grew to prefer their high standards for trying to find solutions for everything from how to make a cup of green tea to how to live together in harmony.  When they moved to a rental house in Japan, the movers took their shoes off and put them back on with every piece of furniture they moved in and out.  It did not seem to prolong the time, in fact, the movers were stronger and faster it seemed than Americans twice their size.  Nothing was ever broken, scratched, or misplaced.  The Japanese railway system was fantastic, all the trains ran on time down to the minute.  When you got gas for your car, they’d wash all your windows, take out your garbage, give you a clean dry towel to wipe off the interior, and occasionally give you some reward such as toilet paper or a box of donuts.   When repairmen came to the house they’d ask for your vacuum, to clean up before they left.   They worked, it worked, the whole country worked—at least where they lived, when they lived there. 

Another thing you had to buy for school was a real calligraphy set with an ink block and a stone to grind the ink, with brushes, and a place for paper.  Kids practice the art of calligraphy or shouji several times throughout the year and you know when they do from all the ink smears on their fingers and uniforms.   Being able to draw beautiful kanj characters is a prized skill and provides great insight into personality Amy was told.  When you write the kanji the order of the strokes matters.  Some characters may have only two or three strokes while others may have seventeen, each laid down in a precise stroke order.  School kids learn the same predetermined kanji for each grade until they know enough to finally be able to read a newspaper when they finish high school.  The kanji or Chinese characters are not the only alphabet in Japan.  There are two phonetic systems called Hiragana and Katakana.  

Amy had loved life in Japan, she loved the people, the values, the food, the culture. It all seemed to fit her. She felt for the first time that she really belonged.  She finally landed a job as a full professor in a school of nursing.  As the head of Geronotological nursing she could do research and publish.  She felt she needed to publish, her PhD had been a traineeship and she felt she owed back.    It took a while to find a colleague who understood the type of research she wanted to do.  Morimoto sensei was a blessing. She was just as driven to do research as Amy. Together they collected data and published papers.  Amy liked to help her faculty.  She’d carve up the data so that they could each present a paper at conferences.  All her team got promotions.  Later, when she returned to teach in the department where she earned her PhD she was shocked by the lack of compassion the tenured faculty had for the young hires.  They never shared data with them, never threw them a life line.  They were so arrogant and greedy for recognition with what she increasingly saw as their boring and irrelevant research grants. 

Japan was really a great place to live.  Health care was nationalized.  There was very little crime.  The kids were happy and there was no advantage at all to returning to the US while the kids were young.  Amy worked hard to learn the language and the culture. She knew she was a guest.  There were things she originally railed against but she grew to understand and respect the culture. It was their country, she was a foreigner.  No one had begged her to be there.  Charlie, although born there, would never be a Japanese citizen. It was not allowed.   

Amy took Doug and Charlie to the Albany airport to leave for Guam on August first 2004, a mere two months after Lars was murdered.  On Guam, Doug could be an island unto himself and there would be no bells tolling a call to action.  His mother killed his father and that blew up his family but beaches are nice and he had finally found an English-speaking college where he could teach modern literature again and be a big fish in a very small pond.  He could talk about Moby Dick and existentialist philosophy uninterrupted forever now.   

She sobbed the entire three hours back to Castleton while Doe slept in the back seat.  Her memory kept turning around the image of her son’s face as he paused to wave after passing through security.  He’d gone through so much that year in the transition from Japan to rural Vermont and then the horrible murder of his grandfather by his grandmother and the strain in the relationship between his parents.  Now he would have a whole new culture to adapt to.  Charlie was gone, their happy life was gone.  The event horizon had sucked them all into this black hole.   Amy and Doe would face another winter in that dilapidated and drafty house in the woods on a dirt road off another dirt road.  Amy prayed things would be better for Charlie. 

Amy was still sobbing when they passed the little baseball field all green and sparkling in the late afternoon sun.  Her son and husband were on their way to Guam.  Charlie had hit many home runs and one last grand slam on this field. He’d introduced his buddies to the art of throwing wasabi-covered peas in the air and catching them in their mouths in the darkening summer dusk.  It’s all gone now she sobbed.   “What have I done? What have I done?”  Iris had sobbed in her arms that day at the end of the funeral gathering.  Oh my God Amy thought now, what have I done?  My family is broken and nothing will ever fix it again.

Amy still wondered if she should have gone immediately to the crime scene, would she then have been able to convince Iris to seek psychiatric care.  She was afraid to hear Iris’s confession.  She was afraid to have that burden.  She knew that even her own husband would not have supported her efforts.  She hadn’t known what to do, what do you do in a murder?  She’d apparently slept through that lecture in grad school.    She didn’t know if she could legally take Iris to the psychiatric unit.  She had thought that the police, state troopers, medical investigator, and all those trained personnel would tell the her the right thing to do.   Years later she called Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center to ask about psychiatric admission for murder suspects.  She was transferred through several people and they said they would contact risk management and get back to her. They never did. 

Amy hadn’t gone to help Iris at the crime scene and that made her feel like a gutless Lord Jim.  Conrad’s characters had decisions to make, decisions resulting in actions, actions that would affect their life and lives of others.  There was only a moment to decide, to act.  It was irrevocable.  It revealed who you really were.  Doug said that Aristotle’s definition of ethics is how one acts.  Ethics is behavior.  Yet he had continued to do nothing but plan his own evacuation to Guam.  Soldiers who’ve gone through battle have a bond that’s been tested, Amy felt she had failed her test.  She felt her life was a lie, she was just a coward.   A little voice had taken up residence in her mind. “You’re a failure” it said, ‘Nothing you’ve done matters’, ‘You’ve accomplished nothing’ ‘You’re worthless.’ it droned on all day and all night.   She was starting to realize that she was a coward long before all this.  She was a coward to have given up selfhood so early in her life, just after puberty really.  She chose to be a martyr, a victim.  It was so easy and so morally superior.  She chose to be with a narcissist so that she wouldn’t have to create an autonomous self, she would just have to react and be useful.  That was only partially true.  She had chosen to study English and Art but not work in those fields because she somehow felt that was selfish.  She couldn’t focus on what she loved. She had to focus on what other people expected and needed.  There was still a buried core of an original intrinsic self  nside her, but she barely knew that.  This is what happens to cowards she thought.

CHAPTER 4

One spring while they were living in Japan, Doug and Amy had decided to take a family holiday on Saipan, the second largest island of the Mariana Islands, a neighbor of Guam.  The Mariana Archipelago is part of a larger group of 2100, give or take a few, islands which comprise Micronesia, an area of about 3 million square miles or roughly the size of the continental U.S.  The islands are grouped into larger political entities referred to as the Eastern and Western Caroline Islands and into smaller entities such as the Marianas Islands in the west and the Marshall Islands in the east.  Few people, other than divers and oceanographers ever hear of the Republic of Palau, or the States of Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpie, and Kosrae which lie south of Guam, not too far above the equator.  These states and republics are usually named after the largest and most populated town in their island clusters but even Guamanians don’t know all their names. 

One dusk they ventured off the resort property to a local festival in the old town market place.  Crackly music piped in from loud speakers, the main street was crowded with stalls selling native beef and pork barbeque, grilled fish, fried twinkies, and sweet syrupy deserts made with coconut and tropical leaves.  It was hot but breezes blew in off the ocean.  Huge plastic buckets of melting ice held coconuts whose tops were dexterously lopped off with machetes so the kids could drink the cold coconut water with straws.    The street opened up into a square with light bulbs strung along the sides, a group of smiling brown teenagers and small children, drenched in sweat, were giving a dance performance with huge smiles on all their faces.  They were happy and completely uninhibited.  They were having fun, a thing that seemed almost alien to Amy.  Where was the adolescent angst?  When the kids finished dancing an older woman in blue jeans with long, gray hair flowing down her back moved onto the dance area.  She swayed as she thumped her feet and gently gestured with her arms.  This traditional dance wasn’t trying to defy gravity.   Their upscale resort hotel had a troop of hula-glad dancers with male drummers and conch shells trumpeters who provided a sunset salute in the hotel lagoon.  That was for the tourists.  This dance was totally different.  It was slow and open and flowing.  The woman danced up to everyone along the perimeter and looked them in the eyes, her poignant face smiling.  “It’s such a simple thing to be a human.”  her presence seemed to say.   “We are given such a beautiful world to live in, can’t we enjoy it together and give back to each other the things we need?”  This was unlike any dance Amy had ever seen, it wasn’t a performance, it was a gift.  As she watched, her throat tightened and she struggled, gulping to stop her burning tears. That was her first introduction to the Chamorro people of the Marianas Islands.  Later, her daughter Doe would come to love one of these boys.

What got Amy through that first winter after the murder, other than studded snow tires, was the knowledge that Doug and Charlie would fly to San Diego and they’d all spend Christmas at Amy’s parents.  The trial was still pending.  The sons in the family were still not communicating with the daughters.  Doug had been excommunicated as well, as a punishment for moving to Guam.  He had tried to call Dirk after a few months in Guam but Lisa immediately hung up on him.  “What did you say to them?!” he’d accused Amy but she’d had no contact at all with his brothers or mother.  She was a traitor.  Maybe Lisa didn’t like the fact that it all fell on Dirk’s shoulders to clean up the messes, the moves from house to chalet and chalet to prison; but lawyers know how to bill and he was the lawyer for the estate.  Interestingly, he’d just bought a summer home in the Adirondacks. 

The girls were still talking with each other.  Vera had finally reached out to Dirk.  She couldn’t bear not to be in contact with him.  They were the oldest and had more memories of their early turbulent life.  Vera would do whatever Dirk wanted now.  She said she had to.  She needed money as her husband had left her. 

Looking forward to Christmas was the only thing that got Amy out of bed in the morning that first year after the murder. She didn’t take any time off so she could save all her days for that event.  Her good friend from college came up from New York City for Thanksgiving.   She ordered a fresh local turkey from a farm in Orwell.  They’d have oyster stuffing and real mash potatoes and peas and gravy and corn souffle and cranberry bread and lots of pies.  She used to cook Thanksgiving for all the expats in their circle in Hiroshima.  There’d be faculty and her friends from the International Woman’s Club. They’d have 30 people sitting on zabutons on the tatami floor around the low tables.  The meal preparation was like a military operation.  She’d order the turkey months ahead from a 'foreign' import company in Kobe.  Once it came from Belgium and still had feathers left on which they all laughed about.  She’d stock up on goods during the summer trips, like Cope's Amish Cracked Corn, cranberry sauce, things that were simply not to be had in Japan.  She’d plan the work flow strategically as Japanese kitchens often have no oven and are small and narrow like a ship galley with very little counter space. She had a medium size convection oven and the turkey would usually rotate 358 degrees, get stuck and swing back around and do that for 6 hours.  One year her friend's toddler thought the pumpkin bread must have been a football and lobbed it down the table for a touchdown.  It was always chaos and great fun, especially to the girlfriends of the expat English teachers.  They were a bit repulsed by how much food there was and how big it all was.  In Japan you use chopsticks to pick up small tidbits that can easily pop in your mouth.  The Americans were carving a huge bird, a disgusting thing called a tu-ro-ke!

In contrast to the thousands-year old civilization in Japan, Vermont was a barbarous place.   That first fall on their own, Amy and Doe’s neighbors had a huge roaring outdoor bonfire.  They hitched up their gigantic, gentle, Belgian Draft horses for a wagon ride through snow-covered hay fields.  Vermont was so beautiful but when they returned from San Diego after Christmas Amy knew that she had to find a better place for Doe.   They had to leave Vermont.  The trial had been repeatedly postponed but was now looming on the horizon.  Amy didn’t want her daughter to go through that and she ached to be with her own family in San Diego.  They were all she had now and they loved her despite her neglect over the past decades.  She told her parents and two brothers her plans.   Alex and her husband said that they could live with them until they were settled.  Amy wanted to be around family desperately after living as a foreigner for twelve years and then going through the annihilation of her husband’s family.  She wanted to have the luxury of just dropping in on her folks and seeing how they were doing.   They’d camp out on the floor at Alex and Cliff’s tiny place along with their three kids.  She didn’t think Doe would be too happy about that, but things would get better.  She thought about selling the house and taking the money to build a room over her parent’s garage. She just wanted to be together with people who loved each other. 

Amy thought incessantly about Charlie on Guam, wracked with guilt over her decision.

Doug had taken almost a month to get a phone.  She couldn’t figure out he why he didn’t

just call from his office on campus. He could have brought Charlie into the office.  She

looked up island activities on a website. There was hiking club on Guam and an outrigger

canoe club.  She told Doug. He promised that they’d join.  Instead, he got Charlie a

bigger computer for gaming.  The islanders are different from us thought Amy.  What

they value is different.  They have a “solar economy”.  In place of the motivating

paradigm of competition for scarce resources that defines Western political systems, the

islanders see abundance.  Instead of individualism and independence they see community

and cooperation. There’s a Chamorro word for this, “Inafa'maolek”, which means

interdependence.   There was no sense of “private property” in the traditional society. 

Amy remembered that when Sally was asked during her testimony for the prosecution if

she noticed anything in particular about the family when Iris, Dirk, Doug, and Brad had

stayed with her immediately after the murder, she thought for a moment and then said “I

thought they didn’t act like a family.”

The indigenous people of Guam and the neighboring islands of this Mariana Archipelago, arrived around 4000 or so years ago, most likely from Malaysia, the Philippines, or Indonesia, in vessels with sails and paddles.  They are called the Chamorro which means “noble” to them although the Spaniards thought it meant bald-headed.   In the 16^th century, a member of Magellan’s voyage described these islanders as tall and strong with brown skin and long black hair, with powerful necks and shoulders intended for lifting and canoeing.  Mammoth stone pillars dot the islands where the ancient homes used to stand.  Not too long ago, wagon-wheel sized disks of limestone coral harvested in Pelau were still being transported by canoe to Yap and used as currency.  You can see these in the local museums or along some of the roads. 

Magellan had been impressed by the speed of the Chamorro outriggers or “proas”, which could outrun the Spanish galleons.  The Chamorros traveled great distances around Micronesia with a navigational skill then unknown to Westerners and now referred to as the sidereal or Micronesian compass.   They could read the waves patterns and currents and judge how far they were from land through these subtle signals.   Later, the Spaniards destroyed all the native proas and outlawed their construction. The art of shipbuilding is only now being revived on Guam.  Everything that was beautiful and strong and natural in their lives had been not just taken away but violated and desecrated. Amy had spent thirty years in Doug’s family and still had no clue how to navigate it.  She’d ignored all the waves, been intentionally oblivious to the currents.  She’d seen nothing, felt nothing or rather suppressed and denied all that she’d felt.  After all, her feelings were not to be trusted, she’d been taught that or learned that somewhere.   She’d focused on her own forced solutions of how she thought life should be and how she should be.  She’d been a coward, a spectator, a martyr.  It was all a lie. 

Amy would look at the map of Guam every night.  The island was about half the size of

her home health nursing territory.  She would think of this as she drove around seeing

patients every day in the falling, then melting, snow.  In a typical workday she figured

that she circumnavigated Guam several times. In fact, the entire thirty-mile length of

Guam was less than the distance it took to get blood samples back up to the hospital in

Middlebury.    Yet Guam had over four times as many people as rural Addison County

and more than double the percent under age five. Although Vermont is not known as an

education state, twice as many Vermonters finish high school.  Unemployment, poverty,

and infant mortality in Guam are slightly higher than the average for the U.S. 

Today, there are supposedly no longer any pure Chamorros.  The island is populated with Chamorro descendants and is an Asian melting pot of Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, and Indians. A good number of students at the University of Guam come from the neighboring islands. This influx is stimulated by the fact that Guam is the nearest bit of America in the Pacific, or as the Navy likes to say “America’s day begins here.” It’s on the other side of the International Date Line.  Guam is considered a US territory.  It’s not a state and therefore is not entitled to all the rights of a state in terms of Federal Assistance.  

The islanders first contact with Europeans followed a standard course of exploitation and colonization.    First came the Portuguese, then the Spaniards, then the British and American whale ships in the 1800s.  Melville was on one of these.  The US acquired Guam from Japan after WWII.   “Naval Base Guam” is the largest submarine base in the Western Pacific and Andersen AFB has the longest jet air strip.    The Mariana Islands are renown to scuba divers for their incredible graveyards of sunken WWII ordnance which lie in the bays around resort hotels, growing coral and harboring a phenomenal array of marine life.  The reefs boast vibrant neon yellow, green, pink and purple corals of all shapes and sizes with fish to match.  Further out, Manta Rays with sixteen-foot-wide wingspans glide along undersea waterways. 

Guam is under the span of control of the U.S. Department of the Interior which ironically has a buffalo on its seal.  So much for protecting indigenous resources.  The published mission of the DOI is to provide and protect access to our Nation’s natural and cultural heritage.  The last report on the state of the islands listed on the Insular Affairs website includes discussion of water, sewage, waste, and new buildings that were completed such as the Koror jail.  The report describes the Federated States of Micronesia as containing no “exploitable resources”. 

Amy had originally gone to nursing school out of economic exigency, fueled by the prevalence of ads for nurses in the Burlington newspaper. She couldn’t think of anything else available in rural Vermont where she had moved so Doug, the would-be novelist, could act out his writer-fantasy to be like Malcom and Marjorie Lowry in the wilderness of British Columbia.  Iris suggested nursing to her.  Amy had gone to college as a pre-med but had switched to Literature and Art History, her great loves.   Iris had gone to nursing school at a community college on Long Island in her thirties.  Amy had mentioned going to medical school after they had first moved to Vermont.

In college, Amy had poured over 17^th century history, Metaphysical poetry, and baroque art and architecture.  In Vermont, Doug managed a diner while she waited tables at night.  She ended up going to nursing school with other women from various backgrounds, some with Master’s degrees, some mothers, some midwives.  There were also traditional students, native Vermonters; warm, caring, humorous girls whose comfortableness with patients she envied. Nursing was a good thing, it was a helping profession, Amy wanted to help people.  It was a good job for someone who wanted to have children and that was really the only thing that Amy had ever known she wanted.  She wanted kids, lots of kids, five at least.   

Amy chose to work as a psychiatric nurse while still a student and then full-time after graduating. It was as close to English literature as possible. Her patients were the storytellers of fascinating narratives.  She’d listen all day.   She’d been reading phenomenological psychology and psychiatry.  She’d read a great deal of Freud and Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Otto Rank, Rollo May, Fritz Perls, Victor Frankl, Carl Rodgers,  RD Lang, Erving Goffman, Anselm Strauss, and Ludwig Binswanger who was a favorite.  She longed to talk about these brilliant minds and how their work applied to the patients but she could not find anyone to share these theories with.  During psychiatric grand rounds all they talked about was pharmacology.  She read feminist theory too, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristiva, Helen Cixous, Kate Millet, Betty Freidan, Germaine Greer.  Anything she could get her hands on.   Psych nursing was exhausting. It’s hard to be around someone whose ego pole is spinning like a compass needle next to a magnet.  “Help me” middle-aged soon-to-be-divorced women would beg with terror in their eyes before their antipsychotics had kicked in.  They were living in Columbia, South Carolina at that time.  Doug was in a creative writing master’s program that he never finished.  Virtually all Amy’s psychiatric patients were women and they all had the same diagnosis: ‘Dependent Personality Disorder’, the DSMIII had no ‘Independent Personality Disorder’.   None of the normal male behaviors were considered pathological while all of the female ones seemed to be.  Patients were there to get away from husbands who stalked them and raped them if they had talked to the boy bagging their groceries.  One woman’s husband actually accused her of hiding sharp things in her vagina.  Vagina dentata! In desperation she had gone to her gynecologist and he had told her “Now Boncie, I birthed all your babies, you know there ain’t nuthin’ like that up there!”  

When Doug decided to enter a PhD program at a rural university in Pennsylvania with no major hospitals or health facilities nearby Amy realized the opportunity to go to graduate school.  He actually encouraged her and she was grateful.  She applied and got an assistantship and was teaching classes in Health Policy and Administration in a few months.  The university didn’t have schools of medicine or public health, her first choices. She forgot all about nurses and nursing, which was surprisingly easy to do in a department called Health Policy and Administration.  She had Doe her first semester in the doctoral program and matriculated with a PhD in Health Services Research.   Her course work was rich with research methodology, statistics, instrumentation, measurement.  It was a far cry from Baroque Art and Architecture but Amy found it fascinating.  It was applied and pragmatic and she felt that meant it was important.  She was somewhat ashamed that she had spent so many years after her BA reading nineteenth and twentieth century novels. 

In Japan, Amy’s nursing degree was her salvation.  It almost didn’t matter that she a PhD in something that was impossible to translate to anyone over there.  She had something better, she was a NURSE.  A new university was being built and they needed more PhDs for their School of Nursing.  Amy had been editing medical articles for faculty and was offered a position.  She became a full professor of Gerontological Nursing.   The timing was perfect, Charlie was old enough for kindergarten.  She’d kept both children home with her until they were three.  Then she’d enrolled them in pre-schools for a few hours a day.  She remembered her doctoral advisor asking her if she was planning to get an abortion when she’d told her she was pregnant. Her professor’s next words were an admonition to get on a preschool waiting list as soon as possible.  No one wanted children in academia. At conferences she’d hear other women talking about how one was too many.  This appalled her.  She believed that nothing was more important than growing the next generation.  She loved the fact that being a stay-at-home mother was a fulltime respected job in Japan.

It wasn’t until they decided to move back to the US after twelve years in Japan that she realized she wanted to go back and actually work as a nurse again.  During her interview at the home health agency, she told Sharon the director, ‘I can’t do anything’.  Not only had she not touched a patient for over thirteen years, but she hadn’t done much other than listen to them the first time around.  “You’ll have protocols for me to follow right?  You’ll have case conferences so I can learn what to do, right?”  “Sure, sure”, Sharon assuaged her.  “You went to the University of Vermont.”  she said, “I know what you learned. You had a good education, you know the nursing process, you can do it!”  Amy stared at her in doubt, Sharon’s eyes darkened for a second.  “But you did have a solid med-surg nursing experience didn’t you?” “Honestly, no” Amy replied “I never did anything.” “Well don’t worry.” Sharon said, “You’ll learn. We’ll help you out.” 

They did and Amy eventually learned, but it was not easy. The first winter, while Lars was still alive, she had endless cold sores on her lips and chronic bronchitis.  She coughed so long and hard she had to wear incontinence pads as she drove around to patients’ homes in the minus twenty--degree weather. She skid off the roads twice, to be pulled out of ditches by amazingly kind and good-looking men with big Dodge pickups who had spare time and heavy chains.  Her patients were wonderful, kind, big-hearted Vermonters.  They introduced her to their hopes, their family members, their pets, they fed her.   She was a friend, a savior, a nurse; that was big. 

It was hard to believe that this job stressed her out more than having to translate all her gerontology lectures into Japanese for 150 nursing students.  She stayed up late at night pouring over clinical textbooks on how to change an ostomy or a catheter, or how to dress a wound, or draw blood, or clean a trach, or empty a chest tube or wound drain.  She knew she sucked at everything but she’d do anything to help her patients and prayed she’d never harm them.  The bottom line was to always ask for help and never to pretend to know what you didn’t know or be what you weren’t.   She had learned to give up a lot of her ego in Japan. She realized how language is often a means for deception, manipulation, self-promotion.  For the first few years in Japan she simply was.  She was what she appeared, not what she said she was.  She had no linguistic trail of identity, no excuses, no verbiage.   She was a mother, a wife, a foreigner.  Most of the time she knew she appeared simply ignorant.  She was really lost in translation. She couldn’t explain what she had spent the last six years doing in graduate school.   She felt this was a good thing.  It enabled her to completely give up excuses.  She could not excuse or defend herself, she had to be simply what people saw in the moment.  That was a great exercise in humility.  She felt she needed that.   So what, she thought, if the kindergarten teacher thinks I don’t know what a whale is because I don’t know the word kujira.

She was in awe of the other home health nurses and the fact that they never blew her off.   No matter that they had ten complicated patients to see that day, they’d take the time to tell her what to prep for a case: “you’d better bring a Coude-tipped catheter as his discharge form says prostate hypertrophy” they’d forewarn her. They knew what type of dressing to use to get a wound to heal and how to use a rubber catheter instead of a syringe to flush an infected wound.  They told her what to always carry in her car for backup. When you’re driving 100 miles a day in the snow you don’t want to forget things and you don’t want too many things that will freeze or spoil.   She’d be terrified as she drove to someone’s house to draw blood. “It’s 50 miles away and if I blow it they’ll have to send someone else in the snow.” she’d obsess.   “Just get the job done, just get the job done.” she’d chant.  After all, her father had been a WWII bomber pilot.  Shame on her for not being able to do this.  The other nurses would stop by her desk when it had become dark outside and snow was flurrying and tell her that they remembered how hard it had been for them at first.  Boy, she’d think, I must really look awful, so obvious to all that I am struggling with my cold sores and incontinence pads.  The paper work was horrendous. She got tendonitis from documenting on triplicates. When she’d finally get home she’d cook dinner for Doe and Charlie and then read them a story and then listen to Doug read the latest version of his resume out loud. 

 Sharon, a woman with forty years of experience as a nurse, had seen every kind of human suffering and every emotion, both sacred and profane.  She was a solace to Amy.    “Don’t worry.” she said when Amy told her of her mother-in-law’s arrest, “Today’s news is in tomorrow’s rubbish bin.  This will all blow over soon.”  And in a way she was right.  Although this was so huge to Amy, it was not even on the screen of people who lived outside of Vermont until Nancy Grace and Oxygen broadcast it.

Amy could not remember much of that Christmas vacation in San Diego other than Charlie finding her in the lobby of the hotel a few hours before he was to fly back to Guam with his Dad.  He nervously told her that he didn’t want to go back, looking over his shoulder. He hated it.  It was ruining his life.  What about your friends she implored.  I have none he said.  What about your games, the things you love.  None of that matters anymore he’d said.  Amy felt her stomach drop.  Oh my God she thought, “What should I do?” Again, she didn’t’ know what to do.  She didn’t want Charlie to be around Doe.  Doe was getting into trouble.  She hadn’t realized how awful his life was there.  No one had said anything to her.  She had seriously overestimated Doug’s ability to act as a parent.  He was completely incapable of caring for another human.  Why didn’t she see that, hadn’t she seen enough of that in her own life with him??  How could she be so stupid, so blind, hadn’t she learned anything?!  She didn’t know what to do and so Charlie went back to Guam and when she visited a few months later in the spring it was like he didn’t know her anymore.  She was devastated, broken.

During that visit she also interviewed at the School of Nursing.  The faculty told her of the large extended families who took care of each other.  They talked about home health and hospice and what dying was like there.  All the family members come to the home, the room would be packed, there would be singing.  She saw large extended families out playing and picnicking as she drove around the island that week.   Charlie was so distant.  She felt like he avoided her.  They went to a water park.  He had a Korean friend.   Doug was encouraging her to take the job with the nursing faculty but she thought working there would be another uphill slog where she’d end up explaining how to do valid research all the time, like she had in Japan.  The faculty took her to meet several other ‘researchers’ who had tried to collect gerontological data but Amy could see that nothing of a serious nature really went on. It was all just a bunch of ideas that sounded good in faculty meetings.   She didn’t have the strength to recreate herself all over again in another culture and she didn’t trust Doug.   Mainly, she just wanted to find help for Doe and for Charlie.  She had no idea how to do that.  She didn’t know what they needed and she couldn’t figure out how to ask for help, what kind of help?

Amy focused on getting a better life for her children without Doug.  She’d navigate a new life.  She hoped she could follow the right currents, be aware, recognize signs, and respond to signals but she still wasn’t sure that she really knew what she was doing at all.   In fact, she knew that she wasn’t seeing things the way she probably should.  It was a gut feeling, vague but ever present.  She was missing something but couldn’t figure out what it was.   How can you fix a problem that you are colorblind to.  Her visit to Guam had confirmed that Charlie needed to come back to America.  Amy found someone who wanted to rent the farmhouse.  They were finally leaving. Doe needed help.  She’d try to get Charlie to come back and they’d all live in California.  She’d already starting shipping boxes to Alex and Cliff. 

Dirk had pled not guilty for Iris, he had managed the lawyers who had obeyed his order not to speak with the girls, he would manage the appeal and the estate, all on his own terms.  There was no family discussion, no consensus building, no exploration of options.  The murder case would drag on to trial, repeatedly delayed by requests from Iris’s defense lawyers.  Iris would eventually be convicted of the murder she committed and sentenced to seventeen years to life.   All the family money would disappear.  Vera’s middle daughter, the one who had played the flute at the funeral, would die from tainted heroin a few years later.  Vera’s husband would leave her and later die in a plane crash.  Then a few years after that Vera would be found alone in bed, in a cold apartment in Philadelphia, dead from heart failure.  Alex would never recover and eventually she’d leave Cliff and their children to live on her own in relentless sorrow.  Brad disappeared and would eventually be incarcerated as a pedophile.    Dirk bought a second home on a lake and continued to be a seemingly upstanding lawyer, husband, and father.  Doug would continue to teach Moby Dick in Guam.   Amy decided she would prevail, in spite of the voices in her head telling her she was a failure.   She told herself, “Things will get better with time.  Things will get better.”   She wanted her children to have a good life.  That will take some time she thought.  She wanted to figure out who she really was and finally be that person.

CHAPTER 5.

The farmhouse was rented out furnished.  Boxes had been shipped to California.  Remaining personal things were locked in a storeroom at the house.  Doug and Charlie flew back to enjoy a few weeks of the Vermont summer before the drive to California.  Doug was okay with Charlie living with Amy now for some reason.   Maybe he was being kind and caring but that would have been impossible really.   Maybe he was looking forward to being with other women.  Amy loaded up the car with some clothes and personal items for herself and the kids, she only brought what she felt was absolutely necessary: a vacuum, an iron, the kids’ school and medical records, some legal documents, and some family photo albums. She worked at the home health agency until July 17^th and then they all left for California.  Cliff told her that her boxes of clothing and other essentials had been arriving.

They stopped on the way to California in State College PA where they had both gotten their PhDs and where Doe had been born.  They wanted to share this with the kids.  There were wide sidewalks and unlocked homes on lovely tree-lined streets.  It was civilized and organized. There was a lot to lack in terms of cultural diversity, but Amy started to think this was a better option than California.  She still knew people here, Doe was born here.  It will be cheaper and easier than California she thought.  She was running out of money.  She’d had saved as much as she could from work. She’d never had access to any funds other than her own wages during her marriage.  Doug had never allowed her access to his bank account, or credit cards, or checks.  She remembered going back to her part-time job teaching English a few days after Charlie had been born. Her Japanese students were shocked.  “Where’s the baby?” they had frantically asked.  The idea that you could have a baby and not have it literally attached to your body for a full year afterward was inconceivable.  Amy had seen women on the subway and local playgrounds wearing coats with pouches for their infants.  There was a whole line of clothing for this.  Doug had always offered to watch the kids so she could work. 

They left State College and headed out to Boulder to spend a few days with her twin brother and his family.  Doug had already made plans to fly back to Guam from Denver and Amy, Doe, and Charlie headed back to State College, PA.  Doug had liked this idea better than California.  Another factor in Amy’s decision to live in State College and not Southern California was her car.  She’d bought a used Jeep Cherokee about seven years earlier.  They’d leave it in the barn in Vermont when they’d go back to Japan at the end of each summer.  She’d put thousands of miles on it as a home health nurse and it had some problems now.  It wouldn’t go faster than twenty miles an hour up hill.  Amy had been putting transmission fluid in it all summer as a home health nurse.  She had poured over maps showing the routes to California and the only way with no mountains was through the desert.  What if they broke down there?  She didn’t want to risk it.  State College was small, safe, walkable.  It never occurred to her to get a new car.  It never occurred to her that Doug might have noticed this or offered to help.  He had a good income now.   It never occurred to her to ask anyone for help.

She called Cliff and her folks. They all thought she was having a nervous breakdown.  “What?!  You’re not coming here to live?”  She explained that she could find a nursing job, get a cheap place to live, and get the kids into good schools in State College.  Maybe she could pick up teaching some sections in her old department.  So Amy, Doe, and Charlie headed back to State College.   She had no job and no place to live and her money was running out.   Doug had never shared his income with Amy.  She always had to work.  Her income would pay for all their daily expenses.  His would go towards retirement and the kids’ college funds.  Amy never questioned this but it was hard on her.  Later, when it was time for college Doe got a letter from the IRS requesting that she pay tax on something she’d never heard of.  Doug had liquidated the kids’ UTMAs and bought a condo and new car for himself Guam.  Amy would have to pay for college too now.

She tried to make it a fun trip back cross country to State College but Charlie was quiet the whole time.  She thought constantly of last Christmas in San Diego. The Christmas when he had tried to talk with her, when he asked her for help and she gave none.  He was depressed, she didn’t’ know what would be the best for him. She was in agony over that.  She’d made the wrong decision again and ruined his life again.  What could she do now to fix it.  He wouldn’t or couldn’t explain more.  He wouldn’t talk to her.  She was heart-broken.  Doe had been disappearing and drinking and doing God knew what else in Vermont.  Amy had thought that this would be too much for Charlie.    Amy had no control over Doe.  She’d lie right to Amy’s face.  Amy didn’t want Charlie to see this or be around it but now they’d all be together in State College.  Doe’s moods were getting worse.  Amy had tried to discuss the kids with Doug but he shut her up immediately and laughed it off.  “Charlie’s fine.” he laughed loudly.  “Don’t be ridiculous”.    Charlie was now going to be around Doe but at least in State College Amy felt she had a better chance of getting the help Doe needed and she hoped Charlie would go back to his former happy self.

Doe was enjoying herself on their road trip.  She was always the optimist.  She talked on her phone with her friends from Vermont. Doe was always able to make the most of everything.  Each time they’d cross a state line Amy would stop and take a picture of the kids at the visitor center.  Charlie never smiled.  They stopped one night at a hotel in Kearney Nebraska, the home of God-Stock music festival. Their room was near the huge indoor pool surrounded by Astro-turf where the high school proms were hosted.   It broke Amy’s heart now to see these simple unassuming things that normal people did.  The murder had destroyed all sense of that:  destroyed all sense of being able to have fun, to trust, to hope.  The air was so thick with chlorine it made your eyes burn, a good excuse for her tears.   She barely remembers that trip.  She doesn’t remember eating at all.  She’d take the kids to a restaurant and then go outside to call her parents or brother for emotional support.  She couldn’t figure out why her pants were getting so big, she needed a new belt. 

They arrived in State College around dusk one evening in late July.  Amy remembered a little motel she would pass when she lived there before her world blew up.  She checked them in.  The next morning she got a job as a home health nurse.  Next she had to find an apartment.  She took the kids around and  three days later they ended up with a furnished two-bedroom apartment with all utilities included. 

The apartment was very clean and they had sunlight and a nice view of the mountain ridges.  She could walk to campus in 30 minutes.  She had sobbed after she signed the lease.  She didn’t realize until later that the second floor was an assisted living facility.  The kids wanted to know why there were so many old people in the lobby.  Well, Amy thought, this is a good experience for you. Young kids today don’t have any contact with older people.  Now her kids had to help hold doors and carry groceries and wait and wait for people with walkers to come and go.  They had to deal with evening smells of what must have been diaper change time and Sunday dinner smells of institutional food like gravy and Salisbury steak.  The other thing about this apartment was that it was practically next door to the high school so Doe could walk and Amy foolishly thought she could keep a better eye on her.    Charlie would start eight grade and Doe would be a junior. 

The voice in Amy’s head was especially loud after they’d moved to the apartment.  She’d try to fall sleep on the living room couch at night and hear that voice taking over her mind again. You’re a failure, nothing you’ve ever done matters. Your life is a waste.  She’d look away from their seventh-floor balcony.  It will get better she’d chant to herself, it will take time but IT WILL get better.  It will get better.  Meanwhile, she told herself, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

Americans need more wisdom from people who’ve lived longer she’d think.  In Japan, you were thought to be pretty stupid if you didn’t listen to your elders.  Face it, someone who’s been around for sixty plus years may actually have a few tips for you.  Japanese youth actually listened to what older people said.  In the US no one knows how to run a house but no one wants to hear any suggestions from their parents, particularly in regard to child rearing. In Japan, the parents work and the grandparents raise the children in many cases.    Japan was domestic-goddess paradise.    When you hung your laundry outside your neighbor would show you the right way so it would dry fastest and the right way to fold it and smack it so it didn’t need ironing.  There was a right way to clean sliding glass windows so they really shined.  Her neighbors taught her things they had learned from their mother’s and grandmothers.   There really was a better way to cook rice, clean windows, prevent mold (which grows rampantly in Japan due to the humidity), and figure out how to live in a tiny space.  There was a right way to think and behave in order to get along with people.  They had a system for everything in Japan and T.V. shows to teach you the latest life hacks.  They had humility in place of arrogance.

Amy called Doug every week on Friday night, Saturday morning his time.   She was running out of money but he explained that he had none to give her.   “You see”, he’d say “Ahab is ruining the voyage for everyone, you have ruined our family, our little ship, our  voyage of life.”  He’d say, “There was nothing inherently wrong with the whale, it was all an objective correlative fallacy on the part of Ahab.  He was the one with the problem, not the whale.”  So Amy was the problem.  It was all in her head.   She was the destroyer, her and her alone. 

So here they were, the three of them, living in a two-bedroom apartment in a place that had an assisted living facility on the second floor and stank of institutional meals and urine, but was close enough to the high school for Doe to walk.  The bus to Charlie’s  Middle School stopped right out front.   There were quite a few kids waiting for it each day, mostly children of international graduate students, but he never talked to a single one the whole year that he lived there.  Amy was in agony knowing that she had ruined his life, irrevocably, irredeemably. 

The first order of business was to get a school evaluation for Doe. She was finally diagnosed with ADD and responded dramatically to the medication and got A’s for one semester.  Then she realized that she could trade this medication with  other students for things like Vicodin..  Amy took her to several therapists but they didn’t seem to see any problem. She tried to get her into a drug and alcohol recovery program.  Doe would have none of that.   Amy was at a loss and didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. 

Amy was ashamed of where they lived.  She’d remember the Afghani pharmacist, Fatima, who had come to her university’s exchange program in Japan.  She had four kids, one had been delivered while she was enroute to Pakistan, fleeing Soviet Troops.  It was a dry labor she said and there were no doctors, no medications.  It was very painful she said with a sad smile.  Amy thought of her and her four children and her husband who was so depressed he hadn’t been able to work for ten years.  My problems are relative she’d think.  My father-in-law’s been murdered by my mother-in-law, my son is depressed, my daughter has ADD and something else, my husband is 7000 miles away, my husband’s family, with the exception of Alex, won’t speak to me.   However, she had her daughter and her son.  They both needed things but she didn’t know what they were or how to provide them but she was trying and would keep on trying.   She focused on the fact they were healthy, that she had a job, that there was food.   This is paradise compared to what Fatima went through she’d think.  In response to 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan the day after Fatima had arrived for training.  Amy had brought some tote bags and suitcases into school to give to her.  They looked into each other’s faces that morning and Amy burst into tears.  Fatima was the one who held her and comforted her.  Amy took Fatima and the other Afghani student, a girl really, just twenty, out to see the ocean for the first time in their lives.  They rolled up their burkas and splashed in the freezing water.  Then they went shopping.  While Fatima bought calculators and mechanical pencils and pens with refills for her children, Marian insisted on going all over the electronics district to find a place that would sell her a nonprogrammed mobile phone, apparently illegal in Japan, or at the very least a five deck CD player.  Fatima and Amy rolled their eyes at each other.  Marian said her father chastised her and her brothers all the time for being indifferent to their country, for not caring about the need to rebuild it.  “My father is always quoting John F. Kennedy speeches to us.” she moaned to Amy.

Amy had international friends in Japan whose parents would move over for six months at a time to help with their grandchildren.  They would cook and shop and sleep on futons with the babies.  Whatever other life they had was considered insignificant compared to helping with the next generation. Amy marveled at this.  Her parents took vacations with other rich retirees.  They’d go around the world.  They did come and visit in Japan but the house was too small and the customs too annoying.   Her father would start calling to confirm his return flight by the 3^rd day he was with them.  He was annoyed by everything. He couldn’t stand the language; it was like Julius Caesar returning to Rome and deciding they should adopt hieroglyphics, he’d say.  Her Dad would grump “What’s the point of this ridiculous way of writing?” several times a day.  Amy would disagree but later learned that many Japanese engineers, researchers, and scientists felt the same way.  The Japanese language is both beautiful and annoying.  It is certainly a great international barrier. That may be a very good thing.

After President Bush declared the ‘Global War on Terror” Amy developed the habit of telling people outside of work that she was Canadian.  She’d tell the Japanese taxi-drivers or local shop owners that she was from Toronto.  Their first question would always be “what do you think of the US.?” It was an opening into a conversation filled with disdain for global hegemony and capitalism and everything they believed America represented.  Amy wasn’t ashamed to be American, she just wanted to know what people really thought.  Living overseas had taught her that there were many great things in America.  There were problems but there was excellence and freedom.  Americans took the freedom totally for granted. 

Once they had settled into the apartment in State College, Amy spoke with the Department Head of her old doctoral program and was hired as a full-time instructor.  She gave up the position as a home health nurse, the agency was nothing like the one she had worked for in Addison County where love had ruled the day.  At Penn State she would have good health insurance for herself and the kids and they had tuition discounts down the road.  She had six new courses to teach and would help one of the faculty with a research project on long term care.  She decided that she would not try for a better position in the department. She wanted to get a Master’s in Nursing.  She had never become a medical doctor but she decided she’d become the next best thing, a Nurse Practitioner.  She enrolled in the School of Nursing.  She became a full-time Master’s student, with six new classes of her own to teach in the Department of Health Policy and Administration, and two troubled adolescents to worry about.  In her spare time she pondered the difference between the people of Japan, the people of Guam, and the people in her life.  

The trial finally took place the first spring they were in State College.  Amy hadn’t tried to hide the reason she was back in State College with no husband but she hadn’t gone around advertising it.  Now the murder would be aired on national TV by Nancy Grace.  It was fascinating to watch odd bits of the broadcasts and realize how little the writers knew of the real story, virtually nothing.  They relied on sources so extraneous to the family.  Amy had been asked to testify for the prosecution and she was thrilled to do so at that point.  She wanted to finally stand up for justice against this unethical family that she had been a willing member of for thirty years.  She was flown up to Vermont and got to spend time with Alex who was also there to testify.   The Defense lawyer had tried to play the game that she was only testifying against Iris out of some kind of pettiness.  How absurd and stupid.  As though you would accuse someone of MURDER just because they stole your cookie recipe or slighted you somehow.  When the lawyer asked Amy to describe her relationship with Iris, Amy pondered the options.  “There is no relationship” she finally said.  Iris burst into tears, sobbing for the first time during the trial.  Later the defense attorney accosted Amy in the hall and told her that she was despicable.  Normally gentle Amy really wanted to punch her in the face.  You stupid bitch she thought.  Do you have ANY idea what this HAS DONE TO MY WORLD!  MY KIDS WORLD !!  Amy waited a few months for the verdict and was elated, truly elated when Iris was found guilty.   Her faith in humanity got a much-needed boost.  Fuck that family she thought.  Fuck their idiotic plan and their total disrespect for society.  She spoke with Alex who said “I hate where she is but I want her to stay there.  That’s where she deserves to be, needs to be.”  Amy’s testimony did not matter but it made her feel good to go there and be in the court.  It had made her feel ethical and brave although as she went to sit on the witness stand that day she found herself suppressing hysterical laughter.  This shocked her.  There was absolutely nothing funny going on and yet it was suddenly hysterically funny, just an absurd game.  What was she doing here?  She wanted to run and hug her mother-in-law.   She hadn’t seen her for so long!  There she was, sitting with the defense.  Her mother-in-law whom she’d loved so much, so deeply, for so many years.  This woman was the center of her life for decades!  There she sat, still beautiful, in a murder trial!   Wearing a lovely scarf.  How absurd!  She’d murdered Lars.  Impossible!!   Amy almost couldn’t think, she couldn’t hear them asking her to be sworn in, was she speaking?  She dared not look at the jury.  She couldn’t laugh, the next thing would be sobs, if she let go she’d be racked with uncontrollable hysterical sobs.  She dug her fingernails into her palms and gulped.

Charlie finished eighth grade living in that apartment in State College then he decided to return to Guam for high school.  He’d been miserable and wouldn’t talk with Amy no matter how hard she tried.  She knew she was trying too hard.  She felt pathetic, why would he want to talk with her of all people? She couldn’t stop acting pathetic.  She couldn’t find the humor in anything anymore.  She could barely walk up the seven flights of stairs to the apartment after work each day.  She hated the smells in the elevator.  She had never been so tired in her whole life. 

The summer after that first year in State College Doug flew to Vermont and Amy and the kids met him there.  They couldn’t go to the house as it was rented so they stayed at motels and hotels.  Then Doug and Charlie flew back to Guam and Amy and Doe went back to State College for Doe’s senior year.  At this point their life was just one long misery.  There was no happiness in the family anymore.  They were acting out togetherness but everyone was each alone in their miser, alone on their rafts, floating further away from any source of rescue.  Doe had played tennis her junior year but refused to join the team this year despite the coach’s imploring phone calls.  She was a gifted tennis player but hadn’t liked the other girls on the team.  Amy went back to teaching full time and being a full-time student in the nurse practitioner program.  She recalls little of this year.  They had flown out to San Diego again at Christmas to see her family.  Doug and Charlie met them and it was the same script of pretending to be a family.  Doe was continuing to experiment with more drugs.  She had close friends and was staying out of trouble for the most part except for being caught for under-age drinking on campus.  She was furious when Amy made her do community service but ended up liking it.   The year passed quickly.  That spring Doe graduated high school with the help of amazing women in the resource center.  She had decided she was not ready for college and Amy agreed.  Doe got a job working at a restaurant downtown.  

That summer Amy and Doug agreed to put the Vermont farmhouse up for sale.  The tenant had left early in summer so they could stay at the house again.  She drove to Albany to pick up Doug and Charlie for a trip to Vermont one last time.   Doe had refused to come on this trip because she said she had to work but Amy was worried about what might happen in her absence.  She tried to get Doug to fix up the farmhouse for sale. They needed a new front door.  He focused on selecting which remaining books from his enormous library to take back to Guam.   Charlie seemed so impenetrable. Nothing she could say or do seemed to reach him.  She had tried to talk honestly with Doug about their marriage while they were swimming one afternoon.  He told her that he’d already started dating other women.  That would have been nice to know Amy thought.  She had been faithful to him.  She didn’t want to date.  She knew something was wrong with her but still didn’t know what it was.  She didn’t seem to be able to recognize when people took advantage of her.  She couldn’t protect herself.  Amy and Doug never talked about his mother now.  Despite everything, she still cared for Iris.  She’d sent her a card every week.  Nothing written on it, just a beautiful card of nature or Dublin’s doors, something like that.  She didn’t realize that her name was on a list so that nothing she sent to Iris would ever be delivered to her, not even the cash or shampoo. 

She drove Doug and Charlie to the Albany airport again after a few weeks together in Vermont. The drive home seemed so flat.  She returned to the farmhouse to get it ready for sale.  The front door was on saw-horses in the barn, not even ready to be attached.  Doug had left it all for her to clean up.  She had tried to make love to him that trip but he acted surprised, acted like that was inappropriate somehow.  Why was he still asking her to move to Guam then?  He had already started dating other woman he said.  He just wanted help with expenses Amy realized.  Later she thought, he’s seeing someone else, maybe he has an STD but if so he would have more likely just given it to her, but that would have been implicating so maybe that was the motivation, certainly not concern for her wellbeing.  She felt degraded and disgusted having these thoughts.  Doug had never shown concern for anyone’s wellbeing, he was a genius after all, too busy with very important thoughts to ever waste time thinking of others.  She stayed a few more days until the house was secure then went back to State College.  The voice in Amy’s head had been subdued a bit by now.  When it still tried to take over she would actively beat it back.  She had started to feel freer, more in charge of her life.  Her children were all that mattered.  The Vermont house would be going on the market.

When she got back to State College she was invited on a motorcycle ride by one of the faculty in her department, Spence.  His wife had just passed away that summer after a long battle with breast cancer.  Amy had worked as his teaching/research assistant early on in grad school, 15 years ago.  She had always wanted to ride motorcycles and was grateful that he had offered to take her out before the semester started.  They had a formal relationship as professor and former graduate student.  They stopped for lunch on the ride through the rolling, green, farm country surrounding Penn State University.  She debated whether to be honest or not over French fries.  Fuck it she thought.  “You know, I never liked being in this department.” she heard herself tell him.   “The faculty know nothing about the health care system.”   She was currently working on a nursing home project where the lead investigator had never even been in a nursing home. They had no passion, no love for their work.  They’d take the grant money and publish their findings then go to conferences at 5-star resorts.  Spence was dumbstruck, then his eyes lit up and he became animated.  They had a lot in common.  He had been trained as an epidemiologist and had carved out a niche of public health that he was passionate about, performance-enhancing drugs in sports.  He was a loner in the department. The rest of the faculty were chasing research money wherever the feds were throwing it, usually gerontology or health economic topics related to insurance coverage or Medicare.  It was dreary boring research. There was no contact with the research subjects, it was all distal and quantitative.  Spence had followed his passion and worked closely with his subjects.   His work was well-published and he was nationally and internationally recognized but his own faculty ignored it;  his research was about sports and real people, how plebian.  Amy’s research in Japan had likewise been embedded.  She didn’t send out surveys or have other people collect data, she went to the facilities and observed and interviewed with her team. She translated and validated instruments personally.  She collected the data, cleaned the data, analyzed the data scrupulously.  She had published a fair amount in high tier journals and was very proud of her work in Japan.  She really despised the faculty in this department although that made her feel guilty. They just took the federal dollars and studied whatever it was from a great distance, then entered their meaningless survey data into computers and spit out meaningless findings staying as far away as possible from the thing they were supposed to be studying.  They also had no compassion for the young tenure-track faculty..  Young faculty would come and go, lives would be ruined and they’d just look away.  It was just like in Gulliver’s Travels where Swift parodies the Academy by describing a room in which blind men are mixing the paint for painters!! That was her department!  Spence felt exactly the same way.  After the ride, he’d asked her to call him if she wanted to go out again.  Amy felt a little frightened.  She called her best friend from graduate school to ask what she should do.  “GO OUT with him!” her friend exclaimed, “He’s a catch!  You’re both adults!” Well, Amy thought, well one of us is.  She had noticed that Spence had pretty big muscles in his arms on that a bike ride.  He also had lots of tools in his garage and apparently knew how to use all of them.  His home was clean and well cared for.  His neighbors liked him and he had lots of friends in the community.  He appeared terrifyingly normal. 

Doe was supportive, “Mom, you deserve this.  It’s about time.”  That was so like Doe.  She was always looking out for others, she really was.  She had tried so hard to be a big sister to Charlie.  Yes, she had problems but she was loving and kind.  Charlie would not give her an inch.  He had been coached by his father to disdain her, after all, Doug always had said she’d end up like his sister Lee, the one who died.  Amy knew that she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet.  She knew something was wrong with her, she just couldn’t see what it was.  Whatever it was, if she didn’t figure it out it would persist.  she knew that she couldn’t be in a relationship until she had figured it out but she felt that if she waited she’d be making a mistake.  She felt that if her mind was strongly telling her to just stay in her own lane and not take any risks then that had to be the wrong advice.  She started seeing Spence.

Amy’s parents wanted to take everyone on a cruise that coming Christmas.  Charlie would fly into LA from Guam and stay with Alex and Cliff and and then they’d all go on the cruise.  After much discussion Amy decided not to include Doug.  He protested greatly about this.  Fuck him Amy thought.  He didn’t deserve it, she was tired of accommodating him.  Plus, Spence was not keen on the idea.  Her parents had been very upset by the murder of Lars.  After all, he was the father-in-law of not just one of their children, but two.  Alex’s husband Cliff, was Amy’s brother.  They had met each other at Amy and Doug’s wedding.  Amy’s Dad was a quiet man who always kept his opinion to himself but he wrote a letter to Iris after the murder.  He never mailed it.  He felt that she had tainted the family name, he was right.  Prior to the cruise, Amy had booked cruise excursions but her own family was not communicating well.  It turned out that no one else had booked the excursions she thought they had all agreed on.  The effects of the murder were rippling through everything.  Everything felt off balance.  She went with Charlie to a sea turtle farm; she’d never realized that sea turtles could be so depressing.   She watched the other families from the cruise laughing and enjoying seafood platters and pineapple drinks together.  It was also clear that something was wrong with Amy’s mother.  She was confused and forgetful.  She had a long history of stomach ulcers but had been taking high doses of naproxen on the cruise.   Amy had repeatedly told her never to take NSAIDs but her mother had no recollection of that.  After the cruise her mother had an MI from hypovolemia due to a GI bleed.    Her Dad didn’t call her, he’d told her brother that their mother was at a hotel.  Amy now realized that both parents had signs of dementia. 

The cruise had sailed out of San Diego harbor along the Mexican coast for a week, returning on New Year’s Day.  On New Year’s Eve Doe stormed off to attend a shipboard party with some guy she’d met named Marcus.  She had gotten upset over some imagined affront.  She wouldn’t listen to Amy.  Amy spent the night traversing the ship, looking for her all over the huge vessel.  Doe finally returned to their cabin in the early hours just as the ship was pulling into San Diego harbor.  She stood on the sunny chilly balcony in her neon pink lace bra and panties waving to everyone on passing ships in the harbor and then she passed out just as the horn blew to disembark.  She was so intoxicated she could barely walk.  It was chaos.  Half of Doe’s luggage was forgotten and she had packed to move to Guam.  

The plan was that Doe would accompany Charlie back to Guam after the cruise.  She felt that there was nothing for her in State College. Her friends were all gone to colleges. She had always had friends who were good students, for the most part.  Amy and Charlie drove to LAX with Doe in the back seat passed out, the car reeking from her alcohol breath.  Charlie was a comfort to Amy on that trip. He held her hand at the hotel at LAX.  They had ordered room service.  Doe threw it all up.  They both left on the plane the next morning.  Amy would be alone now for the first time.  She had one more year of study and could then be a nurse practitioner, able to work wherever the kids were.  She drove down to see her folks again before flying back from San Diego.  They were so sweet. They thought the cruise was so wonderful, they had no idea how awful it had been for her.  She was so worried about them but they said they were fine. They didn’t need any help.  They’d let her know when they did they told her with smiles.  She returned to State College.  She sublet her apartment and moved in with Spence.  Doe and Charlie were now both on Guam and she hoped they’d be able to watch over each other.  

The week before the cruise Amy had taken Doe to see a psychiatrist. For some reason, she’d never thought to take her to a psychiatrist before. The psychologists and rehab workers had been no help at all.  Doe had let Amy stay in the room and she’d been very honest with the psychiatrist.  That was another thing about her children, they were honest and sincere.  Charlie was incapable of lying and Doe was very honest except when lying to Amy about her exploits.  Doe told the doctor that she was drinking a quart of vodka a day.  Amy had no idea.  She didn’t know anything about alcoholics or alcoholism.  Later she realized this explained Doe’s anger on the ship, she was probably in withdrawal. Amy realized now that Doug was an alcoholic and she started to realize that her mother was as well.  The psychiatrist realized that Doe had a mood disorder and wanted to put her on medications.  Amy told Doug about the psychiatrist’s recommendations and found a mental health center on Guam that had psychiatrists.   Doug had no intention of ever following up on that.  After all, he insisted, no one in his family had any mental illness.

Doug took Doe to get a job the day after she arrived in Mangilao, Guam.   She started out at a resort hotel where her Japanese was a huge asset.  That’s where she met Pabst, a wonderful Chamorro boy.  She then went to work at DFS, in cosmetics, selling thousands of dollars of Chanel and Dior to Japanese tourists who were shocked by her fluency in their language.  Doug made her pay rent which was a good thing.  There were times when his selfishness was a benefit to those around him.  After two years Doe and Pabst decided to move to America.   He had never been off Guam.  Doe spent the summer in San Diego with her grandparents, Amy’s parents.  Amy wanted her to keep an eye on them as their dementia was worsening. Then Doe moved to San Antonio to be with Pabst and a bunch of his aunties and cousins.  She seemed to be better, she was not drinking.  She had loved living on Guam and getting to know Pabst’s culture but she now wanted to go to college.  Amy was excited.  It seemed like the time in Guam had been good for her.  Doug was not a loving father but that had encouraged Doe’s independence.  Pabst was a warm and caring young man who was obviously madly in love with Doe.  He was funny too.  Doe felt that the University of Colorado in Boulder would be a good match for her and she and Pabst moved there.  Amy’s twin brother and his family also lived there. Doe worked two jobs for a year to get residency and then started a program at the University of Colorado Boulder in International Studies.  Pabst was a loving caring young man, clearly in love with Doe but he was not adjusting well to life in America. He was depressed and very dependent on Doe.  She was working and going to school full-time.  He was sleeping most of the day and working at a movie theatre at night.  Doe was stressed out and that worried Amy. 

Amy had asked Charlie to come back for the summer the first year she and Spence were together so that they could meet each other.  Doe was still on Guam at that time.   Things went really well at first then Charlie clammed up.  Spence had taken him to a car show in Bellefonte and they’d toured muscle cars and bikes and all kinds of vintage cars.  Charlie had been excited and happy but then something happened.  Amy finally figured out that he had been too happy on the phone with his Dad later that night.  Doug had accused him of having found a new or better father, something like that.  Charlie was crushed that after all his loyalty and devotion, his father would say something like that to him.  He never really talked to Spence again.  A huge dark and suffocating silence, like a predator, a monster, loomed over the table every night at dinner now.  All Amy could think about was digging something under her fingernails to get rid of the pain in her heart.   It was unbearable.  She’d made another mistake. She never should have started seeing Spence.  It was too soon, too early. She hadn’t figured herself out yet and she wanted to focus on her children.   She didn’t want another commitment. She didn’t want to fall back into giving up herself and taking care of someone else, focusing all her energy on another man.  She knew she was falling into that pattern again, it was like a sickness, she couldn’t stop herself.  She was watching herself, what was she doing? Why was she doing this?   Her children needed her.  Why was she getting involved with another man?  She was immature.  She never asked herself if Spence was right for her children.  She should have.  Why didn’t she.  Once again she thought that her relationships don’t matter to others, or don’t affect others.  She thought she could control everyone and everything, like little stick figures on a stage or in a dollhouse.  She didn’t even know that she thought that.  And something else worried her as well.  Spence seemed to take Charlie ‘s silence as aggression or disrespect.  He didn’t seem to want to understand that Charlie was just a fifteen-year-ear old boy who had been through a lot of horrible changes in the past four years, not only from the unspeakable murder but also huge cultural changes from Japan to Vermont to Guam, and all with the presence of a narcissistic father.  He was hurting and in need of love and compassion and Spence was not able to provide that.  Amy did not stand up for Charlie the way she wanted to.  In the dark in bed at night she would beg Spence to try to understand.  Did she really think that just because Spence wanted her, that he would love her kids? She thought he would change.  She thought she could make him understand how it really was with her children so they could all get along. He had no interest in any of that.  His own daughter was more than 20 years older than Doe. 

CHAPTER 6

Amy’s parents loved Spence from the start.   Her Dad had been so excited to have someone he could talk to about WWII and his experience as a fighter pilot.  Spence would listen to him for hours.  His own father had been in the 101^st Airborne and dropped into France on D-Day.  Spence had run the board of one of the largest military museums in the country while he was at Penn State.  He was kind and loving and patient with Amy’s parents.  Spence seemed to do much better with older people than with children. 

Doug had always made fun of her parents, that was what he did behind the back of ‘normal people’.  He was an academic and a self-professed writer and genius.  Normal people were to be ridiculed.  Anyone who cared about their property, their lawn, or their country, was a source of ridicule; so pedestrian.   

Amy had been a liberal all her life.  Her brothers used to joke that she was a socialist.  She had been referred to as ‘Miss Social Justice Warrior’ by her family.  She had volunteered at various charities since high school and worked at the Free Clinic for her Nurse Practitioner degree.  She had also spent hours arguing with her father over the need for social safety nets.  Spence was a conservative.  She forgave him his ignorance.  However, Amy was starting to realize that the standard she held for herself, was not the one she held for others.  She expected a lot from herself, no excuses.  However, she always made excuses for others, for her students, especially if they were minorities.  She was starting to realize just how privileged and insulting this attitude was.  She realized that this attitude was really promulgated on a tacit assumption that she was so much better than them, so much smarter, kinder, more virtuous.  She wasn’t helping others with this attitude, she was just encouraging them to never expect more of themselves.  She was lying to them and letting them think it was okay to be less, or okay to not even know that there were higher standards.  She realized again that she was a coward. One night as she was leaving the family room Spence asked if maybe she wanted to stay to watch the Republican National Convention.  She laughed.  God no!  She had no tolerance of Republicans and had thought Regan, Bush Sr and Jr and their crew were all idiots, monsters.  However, she realized that she had never really listened to ‘their’ side.  She’d read only the NY Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic.  Okay, she thought.  If I’m going to be opposed to something then I ought to really experience it and try to get to know exactly what it is that I’m opposed to, experience the thing itself directly.   She smugly sat down for what she knew would be an hour of torture and self-righteous affirmation.  Instead, she started to sob half way through the televised Republican convention. She was shocked and confused. These people, these Republicans, were articulate, polite, knowledgeable.  They had plans. They were saying all the things she cared about. They wanted to help the country, to help the vulnerable, to care about each other, to improve education and access to health care, to help women and children, to bring back compassion!  What the heck was going on!!!  She was starting to realize that she had been massively lied to.  Here was Sarah Palin, a mother, a wife to a native Indian, a governor, with five children, the youngest with Down’s syndrome.  Wasn’t that the epitome of diversity, feminism, smarts, and compassion.  She really felt struck down, everything she had believed in politically was also turning out to be a lie.   She had only ever listened to one side.

Charlie agreed to come back and stay with them the second summer.  He had just finished 10th grade.  Spence, now retired, suggested a road trip.  Spence wanted to ride his Harley cross-country, all the way to Amy’s parents in Cardiff by the Sea.  Amy and Charlie would fly to Denver and they’d all stay with her twin brother and his second wife who had just had boy-girl twins.  Amy offered to take their older son from his first marriage, who was Charlie’s age, with them to California.  She rented a car in Denver and they followed Spence on his motorcycle through Colorado and into Utah enroute to Southern California.  The boys sat in the back seat talking about World of War Craft as the incredible scenery rolled by.  Charlie gently suggested Hunter stop trying to explain the game to his mother as she was never going to understand, he had tried before.  This was true.  Charlie was heavily into gaming now and extremely talented it at.  Amy perceived this but worried about him.  She wished she could learn World of Warcraft. She could be on some kind of team with him, she could have one of those things, those avatars, and they could save the world together and then only later would Amy tell him that it was her, it was his mother who helped save the day!   She was actually a hero, not this pathetic wimp who couldn’t be happy.  See, I’m not really worthless after all, I just helped you save the world!  The trip was fun though with his cousin and they were happy.  Utah was a geologic wonderland.   Charlie said it reminded him of “No Country for Old Men’.  They had stopped in Bryce and Zion on the way out. They hiked Angel’s Landing.  Charlie seemed to fly up the trail.  He was amazing.   It was a big deal for Spence. He loved motorcycles but he really was not much into hiking.  He’d stopped half way up and pointed to a distant summit where people who looked as tiny as ants, were climbing.  “That’s dangerous!” he’d remarked. Amy said, ‘That’s where we’re headed.”  He started to protest so she explained that he could wait at the halfway point with Hunter whom her brother had forgotten to tell her was afraid of heights and had a long list of dietary requirements.   Spence adamantly refused that suggestion.  He made it to the top.  Amy was so proud of Charlie.  He was a great hiker and he was kind and considerate of Hunter.  He was such a gentle soul.  They finally arrived in Cardiff at her folks.  After a few days Charlie flew back to Guam to start his junior year at the Catholic High School there.  Hunter went back to Boulder and Amy got on the back of the CVO Harley Ultra for the trip back to Pennsylvania.    She didn’t know then that Charlie’s hiking days would be over in two years and it would be her fault. 

Amy had finished her course work for the Nurse Practitioner Master’s Degree. She passed all the classes and finished her clinicals.  She studied for the certification exam on the back of Spence’s Harley.  They followed back roads to and through National Parks on their way to Sturgis, South Dakota.   They saw Yosemite, The Redwoods, then the Oregon Outback to Yellowstone, the Tetons, Devils Tower, The Black Hills. It was astounding.  The closer they got to Sturgis, the more bikes joined them on the route like some mystical convergence.  It never rained a single day.  They were in love and having a great time.  They had no fixed itinerary, they’d book the next room the night before and they even got a room at the Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone, overlooking the geyser.  It would have been total paradise but Amy was still in anguish over the fact that Charlie and Spence were not getting along.   

 Amy passed her nurse practitioner board certification exam.   She’d lucked into a clinical rotation in rheumatology as a student and the rheumatologist was now looking for a nurse practitioner.  He and his partner were incredible mentors, allowing her to follow them for virtually an entire year before she saw patients on her own.  They both taught in a rheumatology fellowship program and invited her to attend seminars.  The knowledge was overwhelming.  She was totally lost and confused. Maybe this is like reading The Canterbury Tales she told herself, it will all make sense in about twenty years.  She kept on absorbing as much information as she could hoping that at some point it would all coalesce.  

Spence had proposed and they were to be married to at her parent’s house that next fall.  She was both thrilled that Spence wanted to marry her and terrified.  Spence knew stuff, not just about epidemiology and research, and cars and bikes, and HVAC systems but also about sex.  That was never her forte.  She was worried about that.  Sex had never been a big part of her relationship with Doug.  She fell in love with him because he loved literature and knew philosophy.  They’d talk about books for hours and hours.  She also felt that she was not being a good mother.   She felt that Spence would be happier if she didn’t have children or at least these particular children, one who was clearly abusing substances and the other who refused to talk with him.  Yet, she wanted to marry Spence.  They had so much in common and it seemed that this was meant to be, everything had fallen into place like it was a miracle:  the timing of her move to State College, her going back to work at the department, his wife’s passing.  It all seemed like a gift.  Except she came with two children who meant more than the world to her, but not to him.   She felt that she had to fix this, that it was all on her.  She had to change Spence’s attitude and she had to change her kids.  She really thought this was possible. She’d learned nothing.  She didn’t  know how to stand up for herself and her beliefs.  She did not know how to communicate and she really believed that she was not good enough and her children were not good enough.  She wanted Spence to not only love her but also love her children.

While they were in Cardiff the previous summer she’d talked with her Mom about her wedding plans.  However, when she called back later her Mom seemed to have no recollection of any details.  That was not surprising, just further confirmation of her dementia.  Amy flew out a few times that year to try to arrange home care for her folks but again they saw absolutely no need for that!  They promised they’d let her know when they needed that, indicating it would be a long way down the road.  The wedding was to be at the pool club house in her parent’s community. It had a beautiful view overlooking the Pacific. It was to be just a small wedding with immediate family.  Amy was worried about her Mom.  It wasn’t just the dementia.  It was like her mother had checked out mentally.  She stopped all the knitting she’d been doing for the grand-kids, various sweaters lay unfinished on their needles like some exhibit from the lives of Pompei.  Her Mom was so distant.  Both her parents had lost a great deal of weight. The food in the refrigerator was moldy and the washing machine had been broken for months.  It was like her parents were in some slow-motion repetitive dreamscape. The day of the wedding she had no idea what her mother would wear but was happy to see that she’d actually gone shopping and was dressed in a beautiful royal blue silk shantung suit.  Her dad kept asking her all day if it was time to get dressed yet but they were both so sweet and happy for her.  She stayed with them and Spence stayed with his best man at a hotel.  Charlie and Doe stayed with her at the house and the cousins were there too.  Her twin brother brought his twins who were now just over a year old.  It was wonderful to have everyone together.  Doe did Amy’s makeup as she was quite skilled in this now from her job in Guam.  It was a beautiful day.

Amy had been so happy to see Spence waiting for her at parent’s pool house with his best man.  She felt shocked for an instant, wow, he was really there, on time, no, he was AHEAD of time.  He stood by the beautiful lattice archway that Alex had decorated with fresh flowers. Alex had also hung beautiful illuminated Japanese silk lanterns from the pergola beams.  There were pillars of candles and vases of flowers all around.  Alex was so gifted artistically.  She’d made the pool house into a romantic paradise overlooking the Pacific.  Amy couldn’t believe that Spence actually wanted to marry her.  After the afternoon ceremony they had an amazing catered dinner in the club house and everyone danced together for hours. 

Soon after the wedding Doe and Charlie flew back to Guam.  Doe had seemed so sophisticated and determined during that visit.  At that time she was still on Guam and doing great at her job at DFS and happy with Pabst.  Amy was elated.  Charlie went back to finish 11^th grade.   Amy and Spence had a year of time to themselves, a honeymoon.  They were very much in love but Amy was constantly worrying about her children.  Sadly, Amy’s father passed away less than a year after the wedding from brain cancer.  Spence felt the loss intensely as they had bonded so strongly in such a short time.  Three months earlier Amy’s brother (Alex’s husband) Cliff had moved both parents into an assisted living facility near him.  They didn’t know they were moving and neither did Amy. Her efforts to secure services like home health and meals-on-wheels for them at home had all failed.  After her Dad passed her mother became almost psychotic.  She had to be moved to the memory unit.  She has lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit.  She was almost unrecognizable.  Amy wanted to bring her back to State College.  She took an unpaid month off from work and flew out with Spence to stay in the house and get it ready for sale so they could bring her mother back to State College.  Amy had found a nice facility with a memory care unit just down the road from their house in State College.  Her mother’s mind was really gone, she did not recognize her own furniture, she was always trying to find her husband, or get back to him, or include him in their activities.  Amy would take her out for ice cream and her mother would want to get back to see him and then later she wanted to see her own mother, long dead.  She couldn’t remember anything but interestingly she still wanted a cigarette every time she saw Amy.  She also never forgot Spence’s name and would remind Amy that she needed to get back to him when they were out on their weekly drives.   None of her relatives ever forgot Spence’s name either and always asked how he was doing.  She sensed that they felt she had a good man, she sensed they hoped she was smart enough to know that.  She wasn’t sure she was.  Spence was very patient with her Mom and they all enjoyed weekly outings and dinners at restaurants.  Deep inside her mother there was still a personality, it was her personality; this self was able to persist without recent memories.  When they are out driving one afternoon her mother asked again where Dad was.   Amy told her again that he died from a brain tumor and her mother recited a whole litany of detailed medical prognoses for brain tumors.  She KNEW!! Amy now realized that both parents knew her Dad had a brain tumor, they had hid it.  Her mother knew and that is why she had “checked out”.  That is why all the sweaters were left half knitted hanging on their needles. 

That summer Charlie came to visit again.  He was entering his senior year of high school The visit did not go well.  There was so much tension in the silence at the house.  It was suffocating.  His silence was interpreted by Spence as almost an insult.  Every meal was agony.  Amy thought that it would be best for Charlie to graduate high school in the US.  The Catholic high school in Guam was undeniably inferior and out of touch. The math teacher spoke Tagalog better than English.  She was worried that Charlie was not doing well academically.   He deserved more.  She thought that graduating from the high school in State College would make it easier to get into college but she was wrong once again.  She was distraught all the time about the fact that Charlie and Spence did not get along.   She starts to hate Spence for this, deep inside there is a part of her that hates him for not loving her son. 

Charlie reluctantly agreed to her plan to finish high school in State College.  Doe and Pabst visited that summer from Boulder and they all drove to Vermont and hiked.  Doe convinced Charlie that he would like the high school and he studied the curriculum and signed up for Arabic and other courses that he seemed to be excited about.  He stayed out of a sense of duty. He was deeply torn but Amy couldn’t even see that she was part of the problem.  Her guilt over divorcing his father and getting remarried, her anguish over the fact that Spence does not love her children, is driving her crazy and not helping anyone.  She has no idea that all her kids want is for her to be happy.   She still feels a frantic responsibility to fix everything.  Everything that is wrong is her fault.  Spence’s only child Sammie is in her forties and long independent.  Amy feels that Spence is too needy, she has made him this way with her desperate need to do everything and fix everything and constantly seek approval and appreciation.  She is cooking every night and going on weekend motorcycle trips when she should be fixing her kids or studying rheumatology.    He does not really want an adolescent in his life at this point.  His own daughter has been out of the house for well over twenty years.

Charlie started State College High school and his initial excitement rapidly faded. That Christmas they go to Boulder to see Doe and Pabst and her twin brother’s family.  Doe has started snowboarding and Amy wanted to take everyone skiing.  The first day on the slopes they all have a great time and Charlie is actually smiling and having fun.  Amy has not seen him like this for years. The next day Charlie says he doesn’t want to go, he’s tired and doesn’t feel good but Amy forces him to ski.  He passes out on the second run and hits a tree shattering a lumbar vertebra, breaking his right clavicle and two or three ribs, and puncturing a lobe in his right lung.  He is life-flighted to the Children’s Hospital.   After several consults, after a horrific flight home, Charlie declines surgery.  He has to complete the rest of his senior year at home in bed.  A wonderful assistant brings all his homework for him and he finishes his work and graduates in absentia.   He returns to Guam.   He has chronic pain now and his mobility is limited.   Amy knows it is all her fault. He didn’t want to go out that second day and she forced him.  She is wholly responsible for this.  She had secretly hoped that this awful injury might provide an opportunity for closeness.  Wrong.  Charlie kept his walls tightly around him the whole time.  So much agony in her heart.  He won’t let her in and she keeps meddling with his life and hurting him. She has hurt him mentally, emotionally and now physically.  This knowledge is destroying her.

Spence had been thinking about moving to a warmer climate for years so he can ride his motorcycles more often.  They go to Lynchburg, Virginia for a job interview at a rheumatology practice and fall in love with the town.  That summer Charlie comes to help them move to Lynchburg.  He has chronic radicular back pian and his fractured clavicle still bothers him.  He never complains.  Amy arranges for him to see a physiatrist where she works and he goes to PT.  There was a lot to move, including Amy’s mother.  They settle into their new home in Lynchburg.  Charlie is painting now.  He paints a lovely image of their garden.   Interestingly, the town has a rich history of art.  A local college, Randolph, has just sold a Bellow’s masterpiece to the National Gallery in London and they will see that in a few years.  Amy is working at a new rheumatology practice.  They love the area.  Her Mom is happy at her new facility.   Charlie goes back to Guam and completes two years at the University of Guam.   Her Mom passes in 2014.  Charlie flies back for the memorial service in southern California, Doe comes in from Boulder.  Amy is still hoping Charlie will agree to finish college at Randolph College, right in Lynchburg ; it has an excellent studio art program.   Amy takes the kids to London and Scotland the next summer and Charlie agrees to transfer to Randolph College.  He will live on a campus for the first time.  It is now 2015, eleven years have passed since the murder but it is always there.    It was wonderful to share a bit of Europe with her children.  She focused on showing museums to them both but Doe would have liked a bit of the night life and shopping.   Doe focused on making Charlie happy but he did not see that.  Doe finally convinces them to do the “Hop On Hop Off” double decker bus tour and they have a delightful finale to the trip.  They get back to Lynchburg just in time for Charlie to start a Fine Arts degree program at Randolph. 

Doe and Pabst are struggling in Boulder.  Doe is trying to finish her degree. Amy sees this but there is nothing she can do other than continue to send money.  She thinks this is helping alleviate stress but finds out years later that they just used it to buy drugs.  She can not talk honestly with Doe about her substance abuse; it terrifies her.   She can not tell her she is worried.  She is a coward again.  Doe is protecting her from the truth.  She doesn’t want to upset her or impact her own marriage.  Pabst had been very depressed the first three years in Colorado.  He’d never been off Guam before, a place where it seemed like every other person had been some type of cousin.  Now he was land-locked, with the ocean days and days away and family impossibly far.  It was an awful time for them.  Doe calls her one afternoon and she tells her that she has been using heroine.  She asks for help.  Amy makes an appointment to meet with the loan officer at the bank.  She talks to some people and gets recommendations for a good rehab facility but Doe doesn’t stay.  Amy doesn’t want Spence to know any of this and tries to hide it but they end up fighting about something stupid and trivial.  She tells him what is really wrong. She was so good at hiding her feelings but this was unbearable.  Spence is horrified but supportive of Amy, not Doe.  She wanted him to be supportive of Doe.  Doe begins and ends up staying on suboxone for seven years.  Amy continues to help pay for things but she is unconsciously afraid to go to therapy with Doe or to really deal with any of this.  She simply can not believe that her daughter has done heroine, is a heroine addict.  She simply can not accept that this has to be openly discussed and learned about and worked on.  Oh, there has to be recovery, that’s it.  She has no concept of this.   Doe continues to work for income, she works on her recovery, she breaks up with Pabst and starts seeing a guy who is also in recovery.  Amy is ashamed that Spence knows this.  She constantly feels that she has to atone for this somehow, has to try to make it up to him somehow.

Amy flies out to Boulder to take Doe skiing the next winter.  She meets the new boyfriend. Doe had moved in with him after the trip to England.  Amy flew them both out to Virginia the following Christmas.  This new boyfriend, Jonah, arrived on crutches.  He’d fractured a heel bone from some vague accident that they didn’t elaborate on.  He’d hop on one foot down their wooden staircase, making the whole house reverberate.  He didn’t eat much; his stomach always seemed to bother him.  He would hang over his food, a mop of dyed black hair almost grazing the dinner plate and say, ‘Babe, I don’t think I can eat.”  Doe said that she wanted to marry him.  She said that he was going to apply to pilot school. He looked dopey most of the time, eyes glazed over, rubbing his stomach constantly, his shock of dyed black hair hanging over his furtive eyes.  He’d corned Amy at one point and formally told her that he wanted to marry Doe.  He was asking her permission.  Privately Amy thought, over my fucking dead body, but to him she said, “Well, let’s see how things work out in terms of finishing your education.”  His father had a PhD and was a researcher in Boulder.  He came from what would be considered a very good family. 

She invited Doe to meet her in Vermont for a mother-daughter hike the following summer.  They’d visit all the swimming holes they loved and go hiking and just enjoy the state.  They’d pay respects to Lar’s grave.  Vermont was their paradise in summer.  Doe had been excited but as the time neared she started to sound anxious on the phone.  She explained that her boyfriend wanted to come to Vermont as well. 

While Amy was waiting for their flight to arrive at the airport in Burlington Doe called to say they had missed their connection.  Amy had already gotten the rental car and gone to the hotel and checked in.  Doe sounded upset, she said they’d missed their connecting flight and that they were trying to get on the next one.  She said she couldn’t talk, she’d call back with more details later.  Amy waited.  After a few more hours Doe called back, there were more complications but they were getting on a flight now and would land in Burlington in an hour.  They finally walked through the airport gate around 9 p.m., Doe looked beautiful and sober.  She was so thin now.  Too thin.  She had on a nice white blouse and jeans with her long golden hair flowing.  The Golem, that what Amy now called her boyfriend, was a mess.  He strove for a Goth or Emo look.  He was sickly pale with that long black mop of hair still hanging over one glazed furtive eye.  His too small shirt was stuck to his skinny flabby sweaty body.  He looked confused.  Doe was talking fast, apologizing but her story as to why they were delayed made no sense.  Amy later learned that the truth was that they had been kicked off the plane after the first leg. They got in the car and headed to the hotel.  The plan was to get up early, have breakfast, then drive around Vermont visiting swimming holes the next day.   Doe and the Golem missed breakfast the next morning and she didn’t see them until noon. 

As Amy finally drove to the swimming hole that afternoon she looked in the rearview mirror at the Golem.  His pupils were very dilated and oddly he’d forgotten to pack a bathing suit so they had to waste time finding one at a local strip mall.  Doe was livid by now.  Amy could almost see the heat waves of rage radiating off her.  The Golem kept reaching up from the back seat of the car to stroke her shoulder and plead “What’s wrong Babe, are you okay Babe”.  Doe had her headphones on and Amy could hear the blaring heavy metal music.  Good, Amy thought, this is good.  She parked the car along the dirt road and explained at great length the need to leave all their valuables hidden in the car.  They’d only bring their towels and flip flops, she’d hide the key in the wheel well.  She’d had many things stolen over the years at swimming holes in Vermont.   The Golem nodded with complete comprehension and a look of authority.  They crossed the road, walked through the woods to the cliff and Doe and Amy jumped into the bottle green freezing pool of water at the base of Bristol Falls on the Lincoln Gap Road from Bristol to Warren.  The Golem finally jumped in and paddled over.  Doe suddenly looked upset and started to swim away.  “Where are you going?!” Amy yelled above the roar of the waterfall.  Doe said she had to get back up the cliff because the Golem had left his wallet on top of his shorts.  Dear God thought Amy, he is totally fucked up.  They swam in the frigid water for a while.  Amy kept yelling out to the Golem to stay off the slippery moss-covered rocks.  He kept trying to climb them to get up behind the waterfall.  They left and headed south to where they used to live. They visited Grandpa Lars’ grave and left him cigarettes and drank a shot of whisky, leaving the small bottle. On the drive back Doe was so sleepy. She couldn’t seem to hold her head up.  They stopped in Castleton at her favorite diner and she ate like someone who had been starved for weeks.  The next day Doe and Amy went to the farmers market in down town Burlington and bought maple sugar cotton candy and beautiful French pastries, which the Golem devoured secretly in their room later that night.  He seemed to only ingest sweets.  After the market they had lunch on the waterfront and bought makeup at a chichi boutique but Doe was distracted.  When they got back to the hotel the Golem was still sick and couldn’t leave the room   Amy went to get a manicure and had dinner at the hotel bar by herself.   The plan was to check out of this hotel and head to Stowe.  Amy had had fantasies for years about staying at the Golden Eagle Motel with family. It was so sweet there.  Last time she was there with Spence on the motorcycle she imagined what it would be like to see her own grandchildren tottering around the pool.  When they checked in the reservation was screwed up and so she had to find another place. Doe and the Golem would stay there. She ended up at the beautiful resort at the top of the mountain. As she sat alone in the hot tub that evening she watched happy families playing with their innocent toddlers by the pool edge.  None of them were on drugs she thought.  She found herself watching other families all the time now, listening to their accounts of the fun they had that day hiking or mountain biking.  So normal, yet so extraordinary in her mind.  It was beautiful at the pool, clear and bright, the sun was just starting to set.  She called Spence.  He was so sympathetic and caring.  She wished he was in the hot tub with her.  She looked down at the bubbly water and saw that her bathing suit was on inside out.

Why was Doe so groggy Amy wondered, she knew she was taking the suboxone, she saw her take it several times a day.  She knew that Doe had to be passing her drug screens every 30 days in order to get the suboxone.  Later she’d come to know that the Golem was dosing her with benzodiazepam-type drugs he was buying from China off the internet.  These drugs didn’t show up on the US drug screens.  The next day they were to hike up Mt Mansfield from the Stowe side.  Doe loved hiking, Amy had taken her and her friends hiking often when they lived in Vermont.  She went to pick them up, Doe’s eyes were all puffy and red, she wasn’t ready and she was upset, almost distraught.    They’d had a fight, she’d thrown her engagement ring across the room. They searched the room.  Oddly, the Golem found it right where Amy had just looked.  Later he found Amy’s driver’s license but she knew she hadn’t lost it.  He’d taken it out of her pack in the back seat.  Amy suggested several hiking trails up Mt Mansfield.  Doe chose the most difficult steepest trail in the state.  Good ! Amy thought, maybe my daughter is still in there somewhere, buried in this awful life with this Golem drug addict. 

The Golem was very white and very flabby.   He was well over six feet tall but had no muscles due to being on methadone for so long.   Amy later found out that he’d started adding fentanyl to his methadone regimen.  He had the body of a gigantic eight-year old.  Amy wondered how he would make it up the trail but she felt that they had to do this.  This would show Doe how worthless he was.   He had on long tight black hipster shorts and Keds-type flat sneakers.  The hike was horrific.  She spent hours stopped on the trail waiting for them to catch up and trying to smile casually at the robust hikers passing by inquiring if everything was okay.  Her stomach was in a knot.  The Golem was stumbling and Doe was telling him where to put each foot. Again, Amy marveled at how little you can manage to do while taking drugs.   They made it up to above the tree-line.  This was where a steep granite slope with really no hand holds had to be negotiated.  By now, the Golem was looking pretty bad.  Turned out that he’d forgotten to pack his water bottle although Amy had reminded him about this twenty times before they’d left the motel.  She ended up giving him all her water., which he took with no concern for her lack.  His dyed black hair was plastered across his shock white skin.  His sneakers and shorts were filthy.  Up until now Doe had been prancing around in her denim cutoffs, her red-bandana-wrapped ponytail bouncing behind her, taking endless selfies.  Now the Golem looked anxious and sick.  He tossed his backpack to Doe and scrambled up the steep rocks like some poisonous black spider.  Doe sat down, opened her pack, unpeeled the kielbasa and bit off a huge chunk, the same for the Grafton cheddar cheese.  After she swallowed, she yelled at Amy, “This is all your fault, you’re trying to kill my fiancé! I hate you!” she screamed accusingly.   Well, actually thought Amy, a little slip off a cliff might not be a bad idea but she didn’t want the expense of having to locate his corpse and transport it.  His parents might not be too happy either, or they might be elated since he’d started heroine at age fourteen, ever the precocious prodigy.  After finishing her snack Doe furiously slung her pack onto her back, strapped the Golem’s pack onto her chest and lithely scrambled up the granite boulders.   Amy was no longer confident in her own hiking strength, she felt somewhat dehydrated and dizzy now but she had to get up that slope.  Once on top, she heard Doe wailing plaintively, “Jonah, where are you?” she wailed plaintively again and again sounding like the little boy in Shane, a movie Amy remembered watching with her repeatedly as a child.  The summit was full of very healthy Nordic-looking people who were trying to ignore Doe as she jumped from lichen-covered rock to rock crying out for her beloved.  Finally, the Golem crawled out on all fours from under some low scrub blueberry-type bushes in a crevice filled with other Alpine plants that were supposed to be protected.    He pulled up his pants and furtively looked around and threw Amy’s bandana at her.  He said he didn’t want it now, nor did she.  Next, was really to be the most challenging part of the hike, they had to get down the Cliff Trail before the gondola stopped running and Amy didn’t know if they would make it.  She had planned more than enough time but they had taken so incredibly long to get to the summit.  This final trail had ladders and chains.  Amy knew that as she’d hiked it with Spence the summer before on the motorcycle trip.  They finally did get on the last gondola, Amy had asked the worker to hold it for a few minutes, explaining that her daughter’s charming boyfriend was coming but he’d forgotten his insulin so was not doing too well.  At the base, she ran to get the car as the Golem couldn’t even walk by this point.  Doe and Amy got him in the back seat where he passed out.  They drove down the mountain road stopping at a convenience store to get some salty snacks and electrolyte drinks.  Amy told Doe to put him in the motel shower to cool him off and give him the electrolytes.  Doe wasn’t speaking to her but she didn’t seem too worried about the Golem either.  Good, thought Amy.  This was the start of Doe breaking away from him. She stayed with him for another year and a half.  The Christmas after this trip Amy got a call from the Golem’s mother saying Doe had overdosed but was alive.  The EMTs had given her five Narcan.   Doe had been trying to finish her degree at UCB.  The Golem had been poisoning her with benzos.  That night as she worked on a term paper, he laced her water bottle with fentanyl. He’d been titrating up on fentanyl and was taking an incredibly high dose.  Doe had stuck to her rehab, she was on suboxone.  That fentanyl killed her, she was resuscitated by those EMTs.  Amy wanted to adopt them, embrace them.  Amy flew out with Charlie, to bring her back to Lynchburg.  Charlie had finished his studies in studio art and graduated with honors from Randolph that spring. He was working in town and living on his own at a nearby apartment that was also his studio.     

 Doe was not interested in communicating with Amy on that trip but she would talk with Charlie.  She knew that the Golem had tried to kill her but she chose to forget it, deny it.  Amy became the real villain.  Doe was not yet ready to leave him.  Amy took it all.  Doe wouldn’t talk with her, everything was her fault Doe said.  Amy didn’t care, she knew that there was a part of Doe that knew the truth and wanted to be saved.  Amy was going to fucking win this battle.  She would get Doe back so that she could have the chance to live a good life, the Golem would be vanquished.   Charlie was a fantastic companion on that trip.  He was fun and wanted to try different restaurants and local beers.  He was sane and level headed. They stayed at a quaint log motel with red shuttered cabins on the creek.  It was Christmas and the decorations in town looked beautiful, colorfully glowing in the snow.  Charlie would be on the internet at night typing and laughing with his friends.  Amy was distraught over Doe but happy about Charlie at the same time.  She covered her narrow motel bed with scribbled notes on different treatment facilities and options.  She called dozens of places but they were full or ridiculously expensive and there was no financial or government support.  It was impossibly difficult to navigate the drug rehab sector.  It seemed like there really was no care for these kids on drugs and there were so many of them.   She’d gone to her first Alanon meeting the week before.  The book was with her and she read the first two steps again and again and suddenly felt a deep loving peace wash over her for the first time ever in her whole life.  Doe was going to be all right.   Amy knew it.

When she had learned of the overdose Amy thought she was losing her mind. She couldn’t fix this. She’d fixed a lot of things but this was too much.  She felt like she couldn’t do what she wanted to do for her daughter and please Spence at the same time. She felt like if she did what he thought was right then her daughter would die.  No one was giving in on either side, there were no compromises. She was stuck in the middle, on the rack.  She went to EAP at work and they told her she needed Alanon.  She went.  She has never stopped going and continues to learn and grow.  Her group is called “In Search of Serenity”. 

Doe stayed with the Golem for a year after that but it was over and she spent the time planning to leave. Of course, that would not occur in any semblance of a rational fashion.  They got into a fight and the Golem came after her with a machete.  She grabbed a small manicure scissors and stabbed at him scratching his chest.  She ran outside in the December snow and the police came and arrested her for assault although they had trouble understanding what the Golem said as he could barely stand and was slurring and smelled of alcohol and appeared to have wet himself.   He had called 911 so he was the victim.   Doe went to detention then to an inpatient psychiatric unit where a kind psychiatrist sedated her as she had not slept for months.  Then Amy flew out and packed up Doe’s things with a police officer guarding her while Doe stayed in hiding at a hotel.  Amy found a lawyer and the judge allowed Doe to leave the state awaiting trial for a felony assault charge. They drove cross country and arrived in Lynchburg Virginia on January 1^st 2019.    Doe stayed with Amy and Spence until her felony charge was dropped.  Things started out well but Doe got tired of trying to please Spence and he got tired of tolerating her.  She finally got her first driver’s license, got a job, and moved into her own place in June of 2019 and overall has done pretty damn well since then.  It’s a process. 

One morning, after the move to State College years earlier, Amy had woken up sobbing from a dream, her face was wet and matted into the pillow.  In the dream, they were all at a warm and comforting country house down a long dirt road with a paddock out front.   It was a white country cottage with a porch, like an old Connecticut country house.   The scene alternated between a room with dark wooden beams and a fire in the hearth and comfortable floral chintzy chairs and lots of family photos, to the outside where there were animals and mud.  It’s early spring.  Amy walks over to some library shelves, past the chintz-cushioned chairs to pick up one of framed photos of the happy family who must live there.  Lisa and Dirk are there and they tell her she has no right to touch the photos but she senses it’s her last chance to get an image of their once happy times.  Outside, a large woman in a brown uniform with an official-looking van has come to take away all their cats, who are running around inside the muddy paddock in the front yard.  The woman grabs them struggling and scratching, one by one, and throws them in the back of the van.  Amy runs out after her screaming that it’s a mistake.  “Are you the one that called??” The uniformed matron demands. “No, it’s a mistake!”, Amy tries to explain desperately screaming at her.  The matron stops.  Then Amy is falling, with Doe, through the sky from someplace incredibly high, as high as an airplane.  They’re together, she’s terrified but she remains calm and focused.   Doe tells her that they’ll survive this and Amy completely trusts her.  There’s a woolen blanket now between them.  They each hold on to the billowing corners and somehow drift down for a gentle landing on hillocks of thick mossy green grass. Amy thinks, Doe has always been my salvation.  I thought I was hers, but that was never the case.

Charlie had decided to move back to Guam the summer of 2018 so that he could apply for a scholarship to study painting in Japan.  He got the scholarship and left to start a Master’s Degree at a university in Kyoto in October of 2019.   He is an oil painter and grows more accomplished each day.  He paints beautiful magical scenes of ruins and lost worlds in a style reminiscent of the old masters like DaVinci or Rembrandt.  His paintings are beautiful but sad and lonely and he is not ready to change that.  He is growing every day as well.  He struggles with anxiety but Amy knows that he will conquer it and have a wife and a family someday if that is still his wish.  Amy wishes that Charlie and Doe had gotten to be in Lynchburg together.  She calls Charlie weekly.  Amy wants him to change and still does not understand that it is not her business.  After four years in Alanon she is still lacks the wisdom to know the difference between the things she can change and the things she can not.  Charlie will be fine, she knows this, but still meddles.  It grieves her that he is lonely, she still feels that this is all her fault.

CHAPTER 7 

"Life begins on the other side of despair" Jean Paul Sartre

"Yet, our knowledge is still remarkably limited. We test what we have tests for, focus on those behaviors we have some knowledge of, and ignore those deficits we have not been taught to recognize. Even the simple act of looking into another person's eyes---a behavior that is indeed altered by brain disorders-has received little attention, despite being one of the most eloquent and expressive events in human communication."

(Orrin Devinsky, 1991 from 100 Maxims in Neurology)

The first submersible to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench was called the Trieste.  It took over five hours to get to the ocean floor and withstood a pressure of 16,000 pounds per square inch.  The seas comprise the largest habitat for life on the planet.  More than five thousand new species have been discovered in explorations of the deep seas.   We know less about the deep seas than about outer space. There are strange creatures at these depths, creatures who can withstand water temperatures of 235 degrees fahrenheit around the hydrothermal vents and others that can withstand the extreme cold and glow in the dark like bioluminescent fireflies.  Some of these creatures have unusually long life-spans and they explode when researchers attempt to bring them to the surface where the pressure is so much lower.  The reality is that we know less about ourselves than we do of either the deep sea or outer space.

You can live in the deep, in the dark, under great pressure, if you adapt.  Amy had always thought that she could do that.  She had put herself under tremendous pressure, it wasn’t normal, but she couldn’t see that.   She had submerged all her feelings, her identity.  She lived in the dark.  She didn’t know herself.  Now, she was trying to surface and see things and figure it out.  She was exploding on the way up.  She had adapted to so many things,  her first marriage, graduate school, motherhood, life in urban and rural Japan, rural life in Vermont, home-health nursing, but not to the murder and not to her own children becoming adults and not to her second marriage. All her life she had believed “I can adapt, I will adapt!”.    She is working on this now;  trying to work on it.  Trying to understand her thoughts and see herself as she is seen which means understanding others.

Until moving to Japan she’d really thought that the whole world was psychologically basically like the US, just with different languages being spoken, but basically expressing the same values, concepts, and beliefs.  She couldn’t have been more wrong.  After all her education she knew nothing of the world at all, knew nothing of other people.  When they first arrived in Hiroshima they had to go to the town hall with one of the professors to get their “Alien ID cards” with fingerprints.   They were sponsored immigrants in Japan but even with work-visas they were not completely welcome. She couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long.  They were debating in great detail how to spell her name in Japanese. She impatiently thought, just use your characters for S and C and H and R for heaven’s sake, not realizing that none of those phonemes existed in Japanese.  All consonants are connected to vowels in Japanese so a name like Smith comes out like SU MI TSU in their phonemes.  She didn’t figure this out for several years but it also helped explain why the young man holding the MacDonald’s bag in the Hondori literally ran away when she asked where MacDonald’s was.  It is pronounced ‘Makudohnararudozu”, not her way.   Not everyone has the same values and beliefs, expectations and desires. This awareness is so obvious but so rarely lived by in day to day life.  The things that were valued, respected, considered polite,  considered ‘normal’ were very different in Japan.   

Amy was realizing that she was a terrible communicator.  She expected Spence to have telepathy.   She was completely passive in communication.  She had spent her life creating her own little microcosms of suffering, no one else saw it at all but she had thought they did.  She expected others to have the same awareness.  Why did she choose to suffer so much, what was the point, what was she constantly doing penance for?  She was now really seeing her desperate need for love, recognition, approval and her underlying conviction that she was a bad person.  That was the gift of Doe apparently, to teach her the way out of all this.  All the things that Amy had considered her virtues and strengths, the things she thought other people wanted and expected of her, were simply not.  Her concepts of virtue and duty were NOT unanimous.  Perhaps people thought that the problem with the world was that there were too many people like Amy.  Too many people who thought they knew what was best for others.  She understood this now, she could see it sort of, like through a haze. 

Her children are adults.  They are no longer Amy’s sole focus.  There remains an undercurrent of anger about her kids between Amy and Spence.  She resents it when he asks about them. She feels he has no right to ask as he does not love them.  Her daughter is a recovering drug addict and an amazing creative loving soul, her son is a shy introverted talented artist.  Spence thinks that they are different and less.  Amy still harbors anger and resentment over her financial losses, over how stupid and trusting she had been with Doug.  This is affecting her life and her relationship with Spence who has been incredibly generous to her. There is much conflict in their marriage now. Amy now wants to put up all the boundaries she has spent her life ignoring.  Spence is confused.  She wants to change him.  She sees none of his good qualities and all of his ‘bad’.  He is not allowed to be him.  He must be just like her.  She still has no idea what she is doing or where her thoughts come from.   She decides she does not want to be married.  She wants to sell everything of hers and travel around the world but she realizes that this may be very lonely.  Amy starts to realize that her focus in Alanon is no longer Doe, it is Spence, it is her marriage   She thinks Spence is destroying her serenity but she is the one. She is constantly angry with him.  She realizes that her mood is bringing out the worst in him. She wants to change this but is addicted to her thoughts it seems. 

She sees that her job was toxic.  She made her job into her first marriage.  She took on all the responsibility and got no help and none of the credit.  She was an autonomous nurse practitioner but her colleague had ‘quiet quit” years earlier.  She kept trying to grow the practice while he essentially wanted it to disappear.  He refused to see new patients even when they were urgent so Amy would add them to her schedule every day making it exhausting and stressful.  She had to set the highest standard for herself and just assumed it would be recognized and rewarded.  How naïve.  She was stupid and she trusted people who didn’t deserve it, who didn’t earn it.  She failed to see the signs and she failed to move on.  It’s her pattern.  She realizes that she has been so incredibly arrogant, even in her humility.  Spence has stood by her the whole time.  She has stopped being grateful or compassionate with him.   She made her work into her abusive first marriage and punished him for it.  

Amy’s ex-husband’s family had been her life for 30 years, since she was nineteen.  The first time she met Dirk he borrowed her car, drove to NYC, got drunk, and the car was vandalized.  There was no apology, no effort to rectify the wrong.  Dirk was always in a hurry, never listening.  She should have known that decades later he would do the same.  His wife Lisa had told Amy, “There’s a lot you have to learn about this family.” as soon as they met.  All the signs were there to indicate that this family was to be avoided but she ignored these and ran straight to them.  She was drawn to them.  She thought she could fix things, change things. She thought she was the only one who understood the true worth of Doug.  They were secret sharers, soul mates.  Maybe he got drunk and destroyed things when he was with his brother but no one knew him or understood him like SHE did. She ignored the drinking, the carelessness, the selfishness, the lack of respect for others.  She was drawn to the chaos.  It was so much easier to sit in the back seat and criticize and judge and feel self-righteous.  But there was also a part of her that was like Doug, a selfish narcissistic part.  She followed the rules but liked it that Doug never did.  To make up for this, she suffered.  Her tradeoff for being with selfish arrogant people was that she could suffer for all of them.  How magnanimous of her!!  The arrogance!.  There was no mountain she could not climb, alone, all by herself.  But who did she think wanted this from her and why??

She has been rereading Jane Austen.  The young women in her novels were so discerning, so discriminating.   She remembered initially being so annoyed by Fanny in Mansfield Park.  Why did she make everything into such a big deal, why could she never speak up and act on impulse.  Now, 30 years later, she realizes what a mess she’s made of her own life simply because she rushed headlong into things, didn’t look at the warning signs, didn’t take time to make decisions that irrevocably determined the course of her life and from which there was no going back. She didn’t think to ask family and friends.  She never thought to turn to others to get help.  Oh, she was so much smarter.  But also, on some level she didn’t care.  She didn’t take her life seriously.  Character is destiny.  She has a bad character, that’s it.  She now wishes she was more like Fanny, or Elinor Dashwood, or Elizabeth Bennet.

The study of human character seems so overlooked in daily life.  We are living in a period of de-evolution of human consciousness and emotion.  Emotions come from love, attachment, longing, human intimacy.  She’s amazed at how long it takes for Austen’s characters to form an opinion of each other.  The plot is a stage for the revealing of character.  This ‘reveal’ which can occur during a simple walk, a sudden rain, a dance, a chance meeting.  The simplest event can be fodder for the grist mill of discernment. 

Austen’s protagonists are defined by the effort they exert in trying to comprehend others, to plumb the depth of character of the people around them, particularly the potential suitors.  Austen was obsessed with marriage because that was the main venue for women to have an impact on the world.  The choice of a spouse was the single most important decision facing women.  A woman would either grow and flourish or wither on the vine almost entirely depending on who they chose to marry.  Austen’s heroines do not intend to marry just anyone who wants them, whether he has money or not, they intend to marry someone with virtues.  Virtue is the state of character which makes a human good and makes them do good work.  Characters who are less virtuous are those “with little attention to the comfort of others”.  Austen talks repeatedly of feelings, affection, warmth, amiability, she talks of dispositions and about prudence, the need to govern emotions with judgement.  Edward, who has captured Elinor’s heart, is described as “not handsome”, but quiet and unobtrusive.   Marianne accuses him of being spiritless but Elinor says he is shy and reserved and that all of these characteristics are made better by the simple fact that he is responsive to the comfort of others.  She mentions his eyes and the sweetness of his countenance. Once Willoughby has been unmasked as a rogue, her mother says there was something in his eyes she never liked.  Virtues and all that is good involves our ability to care about each other and treat each other essentially by the Golden Rule.

Murder is a sin, a crime, a horrible event. Murder destroys all trust.  It’s antithetical to civilization.   Amy is still obsessed with watching other families at parks, or ball games, or the beach, or anywhere.  She watches them in the moment trusting each other, looking at a future where everything is peaceful and predictable in their circle of love.  After the murder everything was broken, their lives were shattered and couldn’t be put back together in any way resembling the past.  But maybe they can be mended and still be beautiful like those cracked ancient Japanese tea vessels held together with golden seams to become if not watertight again at least still enjoyable. 

She had studied the art of tea ceremony while living in Japan.  She loved it from the first moment.   She was with Doe in her little Madeline-type French kindergarten uniform and Charlie was in his stroller the first time she watched a beautiful kimono-clad young woman perform Chado.  She felt like she was having a ‘mind- massage’.  It was beautiful, orderly, calm, quiet.  It was like being swept into what heaven would feel like.  And the tea smelled so wonderful, like fresh mown hay in the summer.   She found a teacher and would practice for hours, sitting on the tatami mat in her sensei’s cha shitsu.   She felt as though she was in a cozy tree house with everything she’d ever need and no worries.  They’d take turns performing the ceremony, so orderly and harmonious, so peaceful, such a gift to the other.  A perfect moment.  The initial greeting from the host to the guests is ‘Ichigo Ichiae’ which means ‘this moment but once in a life time’ it.   The greeting inside the tea room is essentially, “I would graciously like to give you this moment of bliss.”  Spence had laughed when she said she was still a novice after studying cha no yu for 10 years.  It was not false modesty, it was true.  In Japan there is an expression related to the mastery of a hobby or art or skill, “oku ga fukai” or ‘the way is deep’.  This knowledge is so woven into everyday life over there.  One Christmas Spence bought her a beautiful iron tea vessel and all the accouterments she needed for practice.  

She wants to have fun with Spence, in whatever time they have left, and there is really not a lot of time left.  She has to accept him and stop trying to change him.  She has to accept herself and stop trying to change herself.   She has a sense, a glimmer, an inkling, that it is not him spoiling everything.  It is really HER. 

She flies to Japan to finally see her son after a four and a half year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic.  He is having his first gallery art show.  His oil paintings are incredibly beautiful and mysterious.  Some of them are disturbing.  She is shocked that his paintings don’t make sense to her.  She wants to understand his vision but feels shut out.  What do they mean she wonders.  They almost make her nervous.  Actually, his paintings make her ashamed of herself.  There it all is, right there on his canvases, her FAILURE as a mother.  She feels this while realizing that it the most selfish narcissistic thought she could possibly have.  His paintings are lonely and anguished.  She is anguished that her son is lonely and sad. It her fault she thinks but she realized we all feel this at times.  Why does she expect him to have a life of insipid fake happiness like a TV ad.  She cries most of the time they are together. Not just in sadness, also in happiness that she is finally with him and he is a good man.  He is kind and loving but also quick to anger with her, at times embarrassed by her.  She is devastated a bit, but expects this somewhat.  She sees that she is acting like an idiot because that is what he expects.  She is fluent in Japanese but embarrassed to speak around him.  She is acting out her impression of what she thinks he expects her to be.  Fuck that.  When will she learn. She wants to really talk really COMMUNICATE with him.  He still does not trust her, still feels the pain of the lies that his father constantly told him about her.

Regardless, Amy has a wonderful time with her beautiful son.  He’s become a real artist.  The gallery show goes amazingly well and he sells basically everything.   She is elated that so many people seem to grasp his work.  They travel to Hiroshima to see their old apartments and home.  They go to his pre-school and elementary school. They have lunch with old friends.  It is a wonderful trip.  They stay at a hotel down by the harbor and take the ferry to the sacred island of Miyajima.  They make the incredibly steep hike all the way to the summit with the ancient temples and eternal fire.  The weather is beautiful. Charlie runs further up the trail at one point to find water for her as she is so exhausted.   Back down in the village here is a tiny café where they stop for tea.  It turns out that they perform tea ceremony there and the woman knows Amy’s old Sado teacher.  She is overcome by nostalgia and gratitude for her former teacher who had the patience and kindness to attempt to instruct an illiterate foreigner in the art of Sado almost thirty years ago.  While Charlie explores another temple she sits and drinks more matcha, weeping silently in the temple garden.  So grateful. 

Amy retired a year ago and is learning how to use her free time.  She is learning how to witness and share her feelings in a kind way.  Trying to be authentic. Trying not to feel angry at Spence all the time. She is trying to understand what makes her happy, how she wants to live this last act of her life.  She is trying to stay on her side of the road.

Her children are adults now.  They are not the adults she thought she wanted.  They are actually so much better.  For some reason that she can’t really understand, both of her children are living authentic lives, doing what they love.  They are struggling and they have no money but in every other way, they are wealthy beyond belief.  She feels now that they will be fine.  She would like to have grandchildren someday, hopefully soon.  A new generation that will be more aware of their emotions and moods.  A new generation that will hopefully not have to make so many mistakes.  Who knows.  Let it go and give it to the universe.  The divine center is within each of us, our origin is all the same.  We just have to learn to listen to it.

She finally realizes that she has spent her whole life trying to be a man with all her degrees and commitment to research and statistics and logic; with her total relinquishment of her feelings and her body, of art and literature.  She also finally realizes that she is unconsciously expecting Spence to become a woman!  She wants, no DEMANDS, that he be empathetic, caring, even eloquent in discussing feelings and vulnerabilities.  She has learned to ride a motorcycle and shoot guns.  She opened herself up to learn these things because she had never experienced them and Spence enjoys these pursuits.  If she could try to be a man then why can’t he try to be a woman!  She wants him to know that love is all there is and that love is infinite. It’s the sun.  It’s actually the highest form of reason.  She wants him to stop being jealous of her love for her kids and to experience the bliss of infinite love and the knowledge that we are all the same. She wants him to let go of his assumption that he is fine just the way he is.  The problem is that she can NOT figure out if she is asking too much.  Who is she to want more?  What does she have to offer?    She wants to effortlessly waltz through this last stage of life in grace and beauty and fun.  Why is that not happening?  It frankly is making her insane.  

She vows to wake up every morning and be a better person.  She reads and meditates and journals her thoughts and feelings.  She and tries hard to imagine what she could do to make their relationship more harmonious yet at the same time not let her build up so much resentment.  Yes, it would be more harmonious if she was a Mormon wife and had none of these needs and desires and feelings but she has negated herself her entire life and now she wants to be known and wants a partner who really gets her.  She doesn’t want to read any more books telling her that she can learn to dance alone.  She wants to fly, soar, to run naked through the woods, with a MAN!; who is also a woman?   In the mean time she will work on loving Spence. This is a process.  There will be progress.  The idea of perfection has to be jettisoned daily.   

Then, one day it finally all works.  The anger and impatience is all gone.  She is able to express her feelings to Spence with love and kindness.  She hears and heeds her inner voice with compassion.  She is able to really listen to what he is trying to say and find that actually, they are usually in agreement.  She finds that life is so much better this way    They start having fun again. 

She gets a text from the excommunicated and self-exiled Alex!   She has not seen or spoken with Alex for fifteen years.  They talk for hours.  So many memories, so much love shared.  They arrange to meet.  Amy is taking Doe to Kyoto to see Charlie in a few mo

nths and they will stop in California on the way and spend some long yearned for time catching up with Alex and her daughter. 

There is another reality on the other side of a black hole and that is where she is headed.  She wants her children to love each other and share their lives with each other.  She wants Spence to love her children.  She wants her whole family healed.  It may or may not happen but she can enjoy the journey now!

THE END