"Same to you, Kelly." I never knew if Kelly was his first name or his last.

"Your girls okay?"

"Doing better, thanks."

Being on the news had made my family public property. That which I'd dreaded my entire life had come true; the newspapers had ripped away my privacy. After their initial traumatized silence, the girls had peppered me with questions about their grandfather and grandmother. They hadn't asked to meet my father, but the day would arrive; which day remained the only mystery.

I tried not to be angry at Merry. Truly, I didn't think I was, but nothing felt the same. Merry had forced my life out of alignment.

The hospice unit of Cabot Hospital, despite signaling impending death, offered more comfort to me than the rest of the hospital. Without machines blinking and hissing and with fewer tubes tangled around beds, a sense of humanity seeped in. Frail and weak as Audra appeared, she looked like a person again, not an experiment in medical carnage.

Audra seemed to be napping, but the moment I walked into the room, her eyes opened. "Doctor," she whispered. She seemed thinned to transparency. "Thank you for coming."

"You don't have to thank me, Audra."

"You've had a rough time." She coughed, then worked to catch her breath. "Your poor daughters."

"Don't worry about the girls. They're fine." I gave her ankle a whisper of a tap.

"And yourself?" Audra reached for my hand, and I offered it to her, careful of her easily bruised skin. "Children bring us closer to G.o.d, but sometimes so close we get burned. All my hardest moments, where I truly believed I might die from fright, were around my children."

Seeing that man's hand around Ruby's throat had frightened me more than Teenie's ap.r.o.n soaking up Mama's blood. More than Merry almost dying by my father's hand, and that had almost destroyed me. Without Ruby or Ca.s.sandra, I couldn't envision living. People did, but how? What kind of strength did they tap?

How had my father put a knife to his child?

Merry always said she didn't remember anything. I found it hard to believe. Had she screamed and screamed while I got Teenie? Did she see my father kill my mother? Had she watched? Was that why my father tried to kill Merry and himself, to take away the pain of knowing, to erase that picture?

I needed to know.

A washcloth rested in an ice bath. "It's snowing like crazy outside," I said, wringing out the cloth and wiping Audra's lips.

"Open the blinds. I want to see." Audra turned toward the window. After letting in the light, I tucked extra pillows behind her back. The bank of windows revealed the whirling storm. We sat quietly, watching.

"It's so lovely," Audra said. "G.o.d's work."

I envied Audra's comfort of faith. "It's lovely when you're not walking in it. I wouldn't mind if G.o.d skipped the snowstorms."

"Everything has a place in the universe."

"War? Children dying?" I watched snow melt from the heat of contact and slide down the window.

"Maybe that's what I hope death brings, putting all the pieces of all the puzzles together. Perhaps these things are meant to test us. To separate the wheat from the chaff."

"But why?"

"You know what I've learned?" Audra said. "Dying is easier than watching your children in pain." She looked away from the hypnotic storm and faced me. She placed a delicate finger on my forehead and swept away the stray hairs moisture had unraveled from the rest. "Maybe when we recognize the trivial for what it is, we can concentrate on what we love most, what we most treasure."

Staten Island seemed so ordinary. I guess I'd expected fire and brimstone lining the road to Richmond Prison.

Drew steered the car down a road lined with AutoZone, T.J.Maxx, and gas stations. I tried to picture Merry traveling these roads as a child, as a teenager, as a woman.

Merry hadn't seen our father since he sent the letter announcing his upcoming release. Despite his pleading Christmas card, Merry remained implacable. She wasn't ready to see him and couldn't predict when she would be again. Never, I hoped. After a lifetime of burying her anger in service to our father, seeing the letter opener held at Ruby's neck had broken his hold on Merry, broken it so wide open she wouldn't even write him to explain why she wouldn't go see him.

For me, seeing Ruby in danger had made it imperative to see him.

So here I was.

Drew parked the car in a lot adjacent to the prison. Black wire fencing all around seemed held together by teta.n.u.s and rust. Our simple car shone among the scabrous clunkers filling the lot.

"Are you sure you don't want me to come in with you?" Drew turned off the engine.

"I need to do this alone."

He gripped my knee hard. "There's no reward in that. We're a team, Lu."

I laced my fingers to calm my shaking hands and held them to my mouth. Lavender-scented hand lotion couldn't cover the bitter smell of my dread. I had made poor Drew stop at every McDonald's and Burger King on the way to Staten Island, needing constant bathroom breaks for my contracting bladder and tepid ginger ale to calm my roiling stomach.

"If I don't confront this alone, I won't go deep enough. I'm not sure what I'll say, but if you're with me, it might end up being easier just to let you handle the hard parts."

"Would that be so awful?" Drew put a hand on my shoulder. The weight pulled at me with the promise of deliverance. "You've done it alone your whole life, with your father."

I shook my head. "I'm not even sure why I'm here." I'd told myself I'd planned this visit for Merry, to help make up for the years I'd built barriers and left my sister to slam into the walls.

"To face your ghosts?"

"I don't know." I worried the edge of my worn leather pocketbook. I wiped my sweaty hands on my plain black wool pants. Black winter boots suffocated my feet in the hot car. I wore a simple gray sweater. Mourning clothes, it seemed. What did you wear to meet the father who murdered your mother almost thirty-two years before?

What did you talk about?

I had asked Merry.

Anything and nothing. My job. Ruby and Ca.s.sandra. You.

My skin iced over knowing she'd brought my girls into the prison. Brought me.

"Talk to me, Lu. Let me help you." Drew placed a warm hand on my leg.

I loosened my grip on myself. "You help me every day." I wove my fingers into my husband's strong ones. "Knowing you'll be here when I come out is all I need."

I started to open the car door, stopping halfway and blurting out the words that had been choking me since 1971. "I always thought Mama dying was my fault."

"Why?" By not rushing to say oh, no or tell me that's impossible, but instead asking why? Drew gave me a present, one more reason to love him.

"When Mama said 'He's going to kill me. Get Teenie. . . .' " I stopped and brought my hand to my mouth.

"Whatever you say is fine. You're fine." Drew rubbed a small circle on my back. "We're fine."

"I waited, Drew. I froze."

"It felt like a long time," Drew said. "But it wasn't."

"How could you know?"

"Because I don't care how old you were, I know you."

"Maybe if I was faster she would have lived."

"No. You couldn't have stopped your father. You were a little kid." Drew hugged me. I felt as frozen as I had that July day when Teenie and I found my mother's body. I barely felt my husband's arms.

I left the car.

Stinging wind hit my face as I walked toward the sign marked VISITORS in chipped enamel paint, a faded red on the black metal door. Merry had told me what to expect, yet nothing but seeing this place for myself could make it exist, could make me realize how hard coming here must have been for my sister.

I carried only my license and a small pack of tissues, both tucked in my pocket, as Merry had instructed. She'd warned me about toilet paper running out in the visitors' bathroom. I stood in line behind a skeletal old woman. All fat beneath her flesh had disappeared, leaving her desiccated as a dried apple doll. She clutched a lilac cardigan around her shoulders. Sad, droopy curls covered her head.

She turned to me. "Husband or father?"

"Excuse me?" I asked, shocked by her voice. I'd imagined this scene as a close-up of my father and me. Other characters had never entered the picture.

"Who are you visiting?" She sounded impatient. Perhaps her question was standard procedure. Merry hadn't told me people talked while waiting. If anything, I'd imagined invisible walls of shame separating visitors. "Your husband?" she asked. "I've never seen you before."

"My father." People prefer talking about themselves to hearing about others, so I asked a question, presuming she wanted to confess something. "Who brings you here?"

She snorted. "My son. The bane of my existence."

Why was she here for her bane of a son? What had her son done? I had no knowledge of the prison protocols, what the visiting women traded, and it was mainly women here. Coinage mattered in every society, and one had to be aware of the proper trading materials. I nodded as if I understood, while praying the line would move quickly.

"He promised he'd never be back in," she said. My sympathetic nods offered encouragement. "The drugs, they can't shake it once they get hold, am I right?"

"That's certainly true," I agreed.

"You seem like an educated woman. Am I right?"

"I went to college."

"I could tell. So maybe you know what's wrong with this world. Is it just evil?" She patted a curl, seeming rea.s.sured by the little roll. "My boy, he sold my rings." She held up her bare hands as evidence. "And yet, here I am. Do we ever learn our lessons?"

I thought of Grandma's eternal loyalty to my father. Would I travel that far down the road for Ruby or Ca.s.sandra? "Being a mother demands our whole life, I suppose."

"Oh, it's my turn." Her cherry lipstick smile revealed bright, even false teeth. She patted my hand. "Good luck, dear. Our cross, right?"

Our cross. I touched a gold-glittered macaroni earring, the childhood project made long lasting by Drew. The banes of our existences these men? The word bane came from Old English: slayer, murderer.

The guard frowned at me, despite my easy-to-search clothes-no pockets, no cuffs-not acknowledging my good manners or decent clothes, as though no one pa.s.sing through the prison gates deserved his respect.

He pa.s.sed me on, and now the only obstacle I faced was seeing my father. I walked forward.

The visiting room reeked of ammonia, reminding me of my month in the morgue, when the odor of formaldehyde had crept into everything I owned. Tables and benches bolted to the floor lined the room. No gla.s.s barriers protected me. Merry had warned me that there would be no shield between us and that people hugged, however briefly. A torturous image.

Merry had told me he'd recognize me, he'd seen pictures. I didn't think I'd know him, but I knew him immediately. Though thinner, with his black hair silvered, wearing gla.s.ses I supposed he'd made, this man carried the ghost of my young father superimposed over his orange prison clothes. His eyes were too eager, too wide, too starving for the sight of me. I shrank back, wishing for Drew.

I walked over resolutely, not giving myself time to stop and think. I crossed my arms over my chest. Don't come close, my arms warned.

"Lulu. Oh, Jesus, it's really you. When they told me you were coming, I couldn't believe it." He dabbed his eyes, swiping at them with his prison orange arm. He reached out. I didn't pull away fast enough; he drew me to him and kissed me. His bristly cheek touched mine. He smelled of sanitizer, like the liquid gel we pumped over our hands at the hospital. Had he rubbed this stuff on for me?

"Hands!" a guard called.

My father pulled away. "Not allowed more than a second for a hug here." He smiled. Christ. His eyes, those eyes were eating me up.

Stop looking at me.

"But it won't be long now. Your sister told you, right? That I'm getting out?"

I nodded.

"Cat got your tongue?" He laughed. "It's okay, sweetheart. It's been a long time. I understand."

Sure has been a long time since you killed Mama.

He sat and indicated I should sit across from him. "Right there, honey."

I sat up straight on the backless bench, folding my hands in my lap.

"You didn't come here just to stare at me, did you?" He poked his head forward as he had when I was a child and he was about to tell jokes.

"Knock, knock!" My father tapped his forehead, trying to get me started in our game.

Knock, knock!

Who's there?

Police.

Police who?

Police let us in; it's cold out here!

"You're supposed to say 'Who's there?' remember?" His smile faded a bit.

Knock, knock!

Who's there?

Doris.

Doris who?

Doris locked, that's why I had to knock!