Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell

“So why did you hang in there as long as you did?”

He knelt before her. He took her hands and pressed them to his upper lip and breathed in the smell of them. “You,” he said. “I would have stayed because of you and puked in the driveway every night and gotten an ulcer and early heart disease and every other possible malady if it meant I could have raised you.”

He let go of her hands and sat on the coffee table in front of her.

“But,” she managed.

“But,” he said, “your mother knew that. She knew I had no legal footing but she knew I’d stay in your life, whether she liked it or not. So one night, the last night we ever made love, I remember that well, I woke up and she was gone. I ran to your room and you were there, sleeping away. I walked around the house. There was no note, no Elizabeth. No cell phones back then and we hadn’t made any friends I could call.”

“You’d been there two years by that point. You had no friends?”

He nodded. “Two and a half.” He leaned forward on the edge of the coffee table. “Your mother torpedoed any attempts at a social life. I couldn’t see it at the time — we were so overwhelmed with work and having a baby and then a newborn and all the labor-intensive stages of, well, having a child. So I’m not even sure I noticed how cut off we were until that night. I taught in Worcester back then, at Holy Cross. My commute was a bear, and your mother sure wasn’t going to socialize in Worcester. But when I’d suggest going out with her coworkers, fellow faculty and such, she’d say, ‘So-and-so secretly hates women,’ or ‘So-and-so is just so pretentious,’ or, the nuclear option, ‘So-and-so looks at Rachel funny.’”

“Me?”

He nodded. “How was I going to respond to that?”

“She used to do the same thing with my friends,” Rachel said. “All these backhanded slights, you know? ‘Jennifer seems nice... for someone with her insecurities.’ Or ‘Chloe could be so pretty but why does she dress that way? Does she know the message she’s sending?’” Rachel rolled her eyes at it now, but she could feel the stab of it just below her rib cage to realize how many friendships her mother had shamed her out of.

Jeremy said, “Sometimes she’d actually make plans with another couple or a group of coworkers and we’d be all set to go. And then, right at the last minute, it would fall through. The sitter’s car broke down, Elizabeth felt ill, you looked like you were coming down with something — ‘Doesn’t she feel hot, JJ?’ — the other couple called to cancel, even though I couldn’t recall hearing the phone ring. The excuses always seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment. It was only over time, in the rearview, that I saw how they piled up. Either way, we had no friends.”

“So this night she disappeared?”

“She came back at dawn,” he said. “She’d been beaten.” He looked at the floor. “And worse. All the visible injuries were to her body, not her face. But she’d been raped and battered.”

“By who?”

He met her eyes. “There’s the question. She’d been to the police, though. Had pictures taken. She consented to a rape kit.” He sucked a wet breath to the back of his throat. “She told the police she wouldn’t identify her attacker. Not then anyway. But once she came home and told me, she assured me that if I didn’t come to my senses and admit the truth, she—”

“Wait a minute,” Rachel said, “what truth?”

“That I’d impregnated her.”

“But you hadn’t.”

“Right.”

“So...”

“So she insisted I say I had. She said the only way we could be together was if I was wholly honest with her and stopped lying about fathering you. I said, ‘Elizabeth, I’ll tell the world I’m Rachel’s father. I’ll sign all documents to that effect. If we divorce, I’ll pay child support until she’s eighteen. But what I won’t do, what I can’t do, what it is categorically insane to ask me to do is to claim to you, her mother, that I planted the seed. That’s too much to ask of anyone.’”

“And what did she say to that?” Rachel asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.

“She asked me why I insisted on lying. She asked me what sickness was in me that I would try to make her seem as if she were being unreasonable about something so crucial. She asked me to admit that I was trying to make her look as if she were insane.” He pressed his palms together, as if in prayer, and his voice grew very soft, almost a whisper. “The game, as I understood it, was that she could never believe I loved her unless I agreed to abide by an unreasonable contract. The unreasonable aspect of the demand was the point. That was her deal breaker — meet me there in the cave of my own insanity or meet me nowhere.”

“And you chose nowhere.”

“I chose the truth.” He leaned back on the table. “And my sanity.”

Rachel felt a bitter smile tug the corners of her mouth. “She didn’t like that, did she?”

“She told me if I was determined to live a life of cowardice and lies, then I could never see you again. If I left that house, I was leaving your life forever.”

“And you left.”

“And I left.”

“And never attempted contact?”

He shook his head. “That was her checkmate, in the end.” He leaned forward. Placed his palms softly on her kneecaps. “If I ever tried to make contact, your mother told me, she’d tell the police that I was the man who’d raped her.”

Rachel tried to get her head around it. Would her mother have gone to those lengths to drive Jeremy James — or anyone for that matter — from her life? That would be beyond the pale even for Elizabeth, wouldn’t it? But then Rachel recalled the fates of others who’d run afoul of Elizabeth Childs during her childhood. There’d been a dean whom Elizabeth had ever so gradually poisoned the faculty against; a fellow psych professor whose contract was not renewed; a janitor who was fired; an employee at the town bakery who was let go. All these people and a couple more had crossed Elizabeth Childs — or she believed they had — and her retaliation was heartless and calculated. Her mother, she knew all too well, had thought at all times in tactical terms.

“Do you think she was raped?” she asked Jeremy.

He shook his head. “I think she had sex with me and then she either paid or coerced someone into beating her up. I’ve had years to think about it and that’s the scenario I find likeliest.”

“Because you wouldn’t live a lie within your own home?”

He nodded. “And because I’d seen the depths of her own insanity. And that she could never forgive.”

Rachel kept twirling it in her head, over and over. Eventually she admitted to the man who should have been her father, “When I think of her — and I think of her too much — I sometimes wonder if she was evil.”

Jeremy shook his head. “No. She wasn’t. She was just the most profoundly damaged human being I’ve ever met. And she was relentlessly hostile if crossed, I’ll give you that. But there was great love in her heart.”

Rachel laughed. “For who?”

He gave her a look of dark befuddlement. “For you, Rachel. For you.”

After she met the man she’d mistakenly believed to be her father, a surprising thing happened — she and Jeremy James became friends. There wasn’t much tentative about it; they dove in, more like long-lost siblings than a sixty-three-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who turned out not to be related.

When Elizabeth Childs died, Jeremy and his family had been in Normandy, where Jeremy had used his sabbatical to research a subject that had long fascinated him — the possible link between luminism and expressionism. Now, as his academic career was winding down and retirement loomed, Jeremy was trying to write his book on luminism, an American style of landscape painting often confused with impressionism. As Jeremy explained it to Rachel, who knew less than zero about art, luminism grew out of the Hudson River School. It was Jeremy’s belief that the two schools shared a link, even if prevailing theory — dogma actually, Jeremy would scoff — held that the two schools had developed independently of each other in the late 1800s on opposite sides of the Atlantic.