The theory of the dark unknown
28 (the penultimate chapter before Theories of Haunting is taken down!)
The pediatrician visits that afternoon. Dolly is medically ready to go home, but she will need to leave with her father. He arrives an hour later, a smudged version of himself, as gray and haunted as the figures on Deb’s TAT cards. Numbly, he accepts the baby into his arms, almost without looking at her, and lays her in the baby bed in the backseat of the car. Deb offers to drive, and he nods in agreement. On the way home, he says suddenly, “You know her better than almost anyone. Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Deb replies, her eyes glued to the flat, gray ribbon of road, acutely aware of the tiny movements coming from the backseat. She eases carefully over a pothole. “We hadn’t spoken in years. I don’t know her as well as you think.”
“You do,” he says, sounding almost angry. “You know her better than any of us. She cared about you. Listened to you. You had influence.”
“Do you think I have something to do with this?”
“You show up for the first time in years. And suddenly she wants you in the delivery room. You! She hasn’t been herself for a week, ever since you showed up. I’d like to know what you’ve been saying to my wife.”
“Nothing!” Deb risks a look away from the road to shoot him a glare. “I told her about work. We mostly talked about the kids. Normal stuff.”
“You talked about your work? What did you say? I’ve heard you’re doing nasty shit over at that lab. Your Mom told us. Some real low-level stuff. With drugs. She was vulnerable, Deb. She wasn’t in her right mind to listen to that garbage.”
Of course, he couldn’t know how much Deb actually agrees with him about the nastiness of the work. But still. “I agree, Violet wasn’t in her right mind. She’d never leave her children unless something horrible was happening to her. Possibly for years.” Deb points her voice at him.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Deb’s eyes are still on the road, but she can see in her peripherals the shadow of his anger rising up and cresting in her direction. She pulls the car over.
“You accuse me of swooping in and causing Violet to abandon her children? In just a week, you think I could have that kind of influence? More likely, it was something else, something that’s been simmering for a long time. You put her through the ringer, Jim. You used her for breeding. You couldn’t keep it in your pants long enough to let her body heal. To the point that she had to run away just to stay alive!”
“Your sister,” Jim quivers, “wanted every single one of those pregnancies. Even when I told her it was too soon. Even when I knew her body needed to heal. I tried to stop her. Her doctor tried to stop her. But she was adamant. She begged me. Ever since you went off to college, ever since we had Sunny, it’s all she’s talked about. More children. More, more. It’s become her obsession, to be the best mother to as many children as possible. It’s like she stopped knowing how to be anything else. I tried to distract her. Have her take a job as a secretary at my office. I even tried one of your bullshit psychoanalysts, but all he talked about was how Violet really just wants to fuck her father.”
Deb’s face is pale, the world drained of color. “You’re lying. She never told me any of that.”
“I don’t imagine she would have. How long did you say it’s been since you’ve talked to your sister?”
“I still don’t understand why you thought the best answer was to get her pregnant. It was killing her!”
His face vacillates between sorrow and guilt. “She’s so good with the children. It’s her natural calling, to be a mother. With each baby, I thought maybe she’d snap out of it.”
Deb scoffs. “Her natural calling? Are you serious? Do you even know Violet? Do you know how smart she is? How much she had going for her?”
“Maybe,” Jim says in a deadly quiet voice, “it’s that kind of thinking that caused all of this. As if a mother is a shameful thing to be. No wonder she stopped talking to you.”
“Fuck you,” Deb spits. Her hands feel itchy, loose, like a hornet ready to sting. She slides from behind the wheel and starts walking in the opposite direction, back toward the hospital. Jim gets out of the car, slams the driver’s door, and speeds away, gravel stuttering behind the tires and Deb’s heart stammering, thinking of Dolly in the backseat.
Neither could know how right and how wrong they were. They don’t have a word for it yet, the thing that happens to so many women after birthing babies. Post-partum anxiety, depression, psychosis. Stretching sometimes for weeks, months, years.
When Deb finally walks back to the house, she discovers her mother and father are gone. They are at the police station handing over their latest photographs of Violet to be circulated in the newspaper: Violet pulling a tray of muffins from the oven; Violet being buried beneath the bodies of her adoring children, her grin a gash in her face; Violet sitting in a rocking chair, staring out of a window, unaware of the camera pointed at her, a slant of sunlight bisecting her face, her hair loose and white and wild with light.
Deb follows the sounds of Dolly’s screams to the kitchen where Jim is boiling a pan of milk. When he sees Deb, he says, “She needs a bottle. And I don’t know how to fix one.” Deb nods, pulls the pot off the stove. It will need to be thrown out, the milk scalded to burnt. She begins to measure out a tablespoon of syrup into a glass baby bottle, Dolly propped in the crook of her father’s arm, and Jim watching.
It’s in this way, without acknowledgment or apology, in a tentative truce based on the children’s survival, that two people who so thoroughly hate one another are able to live together in the same house. They pass a week this way, Deb helping to care for Dolly while her mother and father do their best to wrangle the rest of the children. Jim goes back to work after a few days.
They still haven’t heard from Violet. For the first couple of days after her disappearance, the police come by at least twice a day to ask more questions, gather more evidence. They poke around Violet and Jim’s bedroom, take away a bottle of pills, a journal that Violet left behind, and the phone number of her psychoanalyst. The first forty-eight to seventy-two hours are crucial, they tell the family. But they never explain what happens after.
At the end of that first week, Deb begins to pack up to return to Harvard. Her mother knocks and when Deb tells her to come in, she perches at the edge of the bed. “Deb?” she says, and it’s the tone of her voice—questioning, unsure, hesitating, so unlike the mother who grew up making demands of her children, especially unruly Deborah—that hooks Deb’s attention. “You know that your father and I are getting older.”
“Yes.” Deb refrains from saying that’s generally how age works.
“Nine children, a newborn being one of them,” her mother continues, “it’s too much for us to take on at our age.”
“Okay,” Deb says slowly. “But it’s not just you. There’s Jim, too.”
Her mother shakes her head. “He’s working.”
“So hire a nanny.”
“There’s no way he can afford that.”
Deb grips the sweater she’s been folding as if she is strangling it. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”
Her mother sighs. “Yes, you do, Deb. Think about it.”
Later that evening, her father comes. “Family takes care of each other,” he tells Deb, and she suppresses a snort.
“Then Jim can take care of his family.”
“It’s nine children, Deborah.”
“Violet took care of all of them. She managed it.”
“He isn’t Violet,” he says. “The children need you.”
When her father leaves, Deb cries bitterly. Her luggage remains open, splayed, spilling its guts like an animal on the side of the road. She isn’t Violet, either.
Her mother visits again in the morning. She comes prepared and launches into all the ways this will be good for Deb, to be closer to family and away from that horrid lab. “Please, Deborah,” she says in the end, and in this plea, Deb hears her mother’s acknowledgement of the sacrifice this requires of Deb. It is perhaps the first time in her life that Deb feels understood by her mother. Please, she seems to say, because I know what leaving means to you. I know what Harvard and the lab mean to you. Your rats, your work. And research. And future.
It’s the please that breaks her down.
On the train, Deb goes over her script, but the words sound hollow in her mouth. Perhaps because she doesn’t believe them herself—how does she expect Peter to?
But he agrees more readily than she expected. “Of course you need to be there for your family. Take a few months—however long you need. I’m so sorry this is happening, Deb.”
“I can try to sort through the data in the evenings when the kids go down. I’ll bring the typewriter with me.”
“Oh sweetheart,” Peter says, kissing her forehead. “There’s no way we’ll be able to send classified material that far. It’s a security risk.”
She had hoped in an outrageous part of her heart that Peter would drop the research and come with her. They could begin their research anew, perhaps even return to Smith now that it had been years since their professor-student affair.
She begins to pack up her life, but there is so little of it. Clothes, toiletries, a few books. Peter digs through her belongings to ensure that none of her research notebooks make the trip with her. She throws the TAT cards in the top of her suitcase.
Before she leaves, she visits the laboratory again. There are the rats, still, so puppy-dog-like with their clean fur and bright eyes and an intelligence that rivals chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, elephants—animals that are smart, adored, adorable, their exhibits beloved at zoos, who have no idea what it is to be considered a menace to society. Rats, though: their intelligence is a mark against them. It makes them more difficult to control. For thousands of years, humans have found cleverer ways of killing, through poison, through traps, targeting adults, then targeting the pups. But the rats prevail.
Trusting as ever, it’s easy for Deb to pluck one from its cage. It is warm, solid, the same heft and weight of a human heart. Its fur is white, wiry, its nose pink and wriggling, scenting the air for food, for danger, for companions. “Quiet,” she murmurs, wrapping it in her sweater and slipping it into her purse. It thrashes once then stills as Deb shifts the purse to her shoulder. She smiles goodbye to the lab assistants and guards. She kisses Peter at the train station. She lifts her luggage into the overhead bin and holds her purse in her lap, life quivering in the dark cave of the unknown.
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