======================

The Great Doors of Silence

by Kate Wilhelm

======================

First published in Redbook, July 1986 under the title "Never Tell Anyone"

Fictionwise Contemporary

Contemporary

---------------------------------

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks.

---------------------------------

Cass Mercer is alone, driving the long distance from San Francisco to Phoenix. She is not yet thirty, slender, dark haired, the kind of woman younger girls envy for her freedom, her self-assurance. She does have an enviable job; she is an architectural landscape designer for a major firm in Seattle. She has brought along some of her work on this trip. In the motel later she will add azaleas or rhododendrons to the drawing, and perhaps several dogwood trees. And tomorrow and the following few days in Phoenix she will absent herself now and then from the family reunion pleading work. In truth, the job could wait, but she planned it this way so that she will have an excuse to withdraw when she wants to. She used the work as her reason for excluding Dan from the family get-together.

Dan wants to marry her. He is a computer systems analyst, probably a genius, she thinks. They have lived together for a year, and during this time her life has been exciting, exhilarating, serene, good in all ways, but she is not certain it would continue idyllic if they were married. She has been slow to respond to his proposal.

The Nevada desert speeds past; she is driving twenty miles over the limit. She usually does. Now and then she edges up to eighty and when she notices, she makes an effort to slow down and hold the speed nearer the limit, but that never lasts more than a few minutes. There is nothing to see except the desert fringed with indistinct hills and mountains, too far away to register as peaks and chasms and abysses. The distant range is no more than an irregular skyline with streamers of clouds. The road is straight with nothing on it as far as she can see ahead and through the rearview mirror.

On their way from Seattle to San Francisco where Dan has business to take care of, he asked if she was ashamed of him. They were not using the air conditioner then; the wind, whipping her hair, whipped the words past her almost before she could catch them. Now the windows are closed and the air conditioner is blowing cool air on her legs, and against her midsection. No matter how she adjusts it, the stream of air hits her like an assault.

"Have you told them about us yet?" he asked.

"No. I will when I'm down there."

"I should come meet your family. Are you ashamed of me?"

"Dan!"

"Well, solid middle class family, lawyers, Episcopalians, southerners -- they might not like a nice Jewish boy like me."

"They're not bigots! I hadn't even given that a thought!" She really had not. She does not know if he believed her.

* * * *

If she were keeping a travel journal, she thinks the next day, she would start it: And on the fourth day we entered the state of Arizona, having traveled through rain forests of the northwest, and the California valleys, across mountains and the high plateau...

She told her father she could stay for no more than three days; distances in the west were too great for a longer visit.

"You can fly down," he answered reasonably. "It would be cheaper in the long run."

She agrees. It would have been. Now the heat assails her each time she leaves the car; the glare of the sun on the road, on the cactus spines, on the hood of the car stuns her eyes through her dark glasses. From time to time she adds pomade to her lips and nose; her skin is an incompetent barrier against the withering aridity.

She rounds a bend in the mountainous road and nods at the new vista, almost as if she has been expecting something this strange. Grotesquely shaped Joshua trees appear like an alien army in random disarray, frozen in time, shepherded by a few tall seguaro guards, caught, paralyzed as they came over the crest of a hill, marched down the long slope toward a valley. Has anyone ever put up markers, kept watch day and night, month after month to make certain they are really motionless? She can imagine them moving at some infinitesimally slow rate, but only when no one is looking, during periods of the dark moon, or the black hours between moonset and sunrise. They flash by, stiffly pious and proper, pillars of the desert, arms outspread under the glaring light as if to demonstrate there is nothing to hide, and, she feels, they are aware of her. When no one can see, they move; only her presence now on the road compels them to stillness.

She has not seen her father for seven years, since her graduation from college. She has not seen her brother Eric for even longer than that, and she has not seen her younger sister in five years. Her family lived in a pod under pressure for all their lives, and when a rent appeared, when it split apart, the children were expelled with such force that if they never had met again, it would have been reasonable. Eric lives in Texas, she in Seattle, and Rebecca in New York, and now for the first time since they left adolescence, they will be together for a few days. To measure growth against the wall, leaving tangible marks behind to prove they have been there? To compare school experiences, job experiences, childhood reminiscences? Not that, she is certain.

"If it weren't for my grandparents," she said to Dan on their way to San Francisco, "it would be different. But they're too old to accept our living together. They wouldn't understand." Her grandparents will celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary in three days.

She loves to watch the transformation that changes Dan's face from a dark, brooding, rather solemn mask to a lighted, open look of happiness when he searches a restaurant and finally finds her. She loves the way his hand touches her now and then throughout the night, as if to reassure himself that she is there. She loves his surprises: a catered dinner once in their apartment; his own cooking on Sundays; a cluster of helium-filled mylar balloons that stayed aloft for weeks, were named, became pets.

Dan loves her, but Dan wants to buy property, wants his own house with a fireplace, and woods edging up to the backyard, wants her at his side on rainy nights. Dan wants a family. They could afford house help, help with a child, with children. He does not want her to stop working; he is proud of her work, of her promising future.

She drives through the Joshua Tree National Forest, and it is so foreign to anything she has ever seen before, she could be in another solar system, on another planet. Speeding toward her alien family.

* * * *

How much Eric's voice sounds like her father's, she thinks that night, sitting on the wide, covered terrace behind her father's house. It is not cool outside, but they have come out to sit almost as if it were a ritual: the clan gathered before the immense swimming pool, the most telling symbol of affluence, gazing at it instead of each other. They are not in darkness -- too much light spills from the various floor-to-ceiling glass doors and windows on this side of the house -- but decently shadowed, revealing little that is meant to be hidden.

Eric has put on twenty pounds, a tall, stout man now, with a deep voice, a good lawyer's voice, with the same rhythms and cadences that her father always used. How did he learn to do that? she wonders, listening to the sound of the words, not their meaning.

Rita, Eric's wife, strikes Cass as a mistake, not a Texas woman. She is untanned, delicate looking, tall but somehow frail.

Their three-year-old child, Jason, is as brown as a walnut and incredibly busy. Cass never realized how busy such a small child could be. He dashes in and out of the house, chases runaway balls and electric cars and building blocks that mysteriously sail through the air.

Cass is suffering the deja vu effect of seeing her father and simultaneously her grandfather in him, seeing another evening. Her mother was there, making it an incident from her very early childhood, before she was five. Her mother died when Cass was six, and for the year before her death, she had been ill. But the night Cass is remembering included her mother, alive, well, but quiet. She was always quiet. They were back from a visit to ... she cannot remember what, only that they were returning and it was dark; the grandparents were with them, visiting them? Rebecca was running back and forth, manic with excitement. _For God's sake!_ her father exclaimed suddenly in his good lawyer's voice, deep, vibrant, resonating. _Put her to bed!_ And her grandfather's voice followed, equally rich, deep, _These kids are running wild!_

There is no more of the memory. It is as if her father and Eric moved up the game board to assume new roles, and a new player, Jason, has joined in the game.

"Put him to bed!" Eric says suddenly. "He's driving me crazy!"

Rita stands up and calls to Jason that it is bedtime, but he cries and clings to Florence until Eric takes him inside himself. They can hear Jason screaming.

No one speaks until Eric returns and resumes his seat, lifts his glass and drinks deeply. Father continues where he left off, talking about the real estate market in Arizona.

The automatic cleaning system is like a snake in the pool, in constant motion, searching for something, coiling, uncoiling, lashing out, even flipping above the water now and again, splashing water on the walk around the pool. The spilled water dries rapidly, sucked up into the dry air, lost forever.

"I wish Rebecca had come today," Florence says to Rita softly, not interrupting the men. They are onto wills now. Arizona is Mecca for a lawyer who specializes in estate planning, trust funds, wills. That is Father's specialty. "Rebecca is the real scholar of the family," Florence goes on. "Already a Ph.D. in literature, and only twenty-seven. She was at Oxford for a year, you know."

Cass lived with Florence from the time she was ten until she went away to school at seventeen and never said anything to her or heard anything from her that was not one of the social phrases that allow people to inhabit the same house without open hatred poisoning the air.

Florence is fifty now, and putting on fat around her hips and waist, giving her a tubular shape. Her legs are very good, and her face is youthful, unlined. She avoids the sun through most of the day, swims before ten, shops late in the afternoon. Every day she takes a nap. She always did. Cass remembers how puzzled she was as a child when an adult who obviously was not sick went to bed every single day in the middle of the day. She and Florence have been exceptionally polite to each other this evening.

Cass realizes with a start that Rita is talking about her next baby; she is pregnant again, three months apparently. They want a girl next time.

Abruptly Cass stands up. "I'll get more coffee," she says. "Anyone else want anything?"

No one does and she escapes inside the house where she can hear Jason crying. From the kitchen window she can see the group on the terrace and she stares at her father. Years and years ago he reached his peak, but he has not started down the other side.

He is fifty-nine, as rich as he chooses to be, drives a Lincoln Continental, plays golf, serves on committees, is generous with his checkbook and his time for worthy causes. Does he know that he is edging into his own father's shadow day by day, that Eric is drawing closer to his space all the time? Does he see Eric in the child Jason, who is still crying in a distant bedroom? She felt a shock on her arrival at how large her father is. It seemed strange to be embraced by him; she had thought she remembered his largeness only because she had been a small child, but her memory is correct after all: he is very tall and heavy without being fat.

She adds a dash of bourbon to her coffee and returns to the terrace, allowing herself another half hour before she will plead the pressure of work and go to her room. Perhaps by then Jason will be asleep.

"Hey, Cassie," Eric says, "want to go to Vegas tomorrow?"

"Thanks, but no. I'm driven out for the time being."

"I'm driving," Father says. "Plenty of room. Becky's not due until sometime after dinner. Her fault if no one's here to meet her."

Cass remembers the quarters she dropped into her purse. In the lobby of her motel last night there was a row of slot machines. She put in two quarters and walked away with both hands full of coins. She has not even counted them. She shakes her head. "I'll get some work done." How strange, she is thinking; she did not care if she won or lost. Losing meant nothing; winning twenty, thirty quarters meant nothing either.

"Do they dress up much?" Rita asks, and the talk goes on to the Vegas style of clothes and Cass is not listening. Ten more minutes. She drinks her bourbon and coffee.

* * * *

She was so tired when she went to bed that it was a long time before she could relax enough to sleep; at six-thirty Jason wakes her. Irritably she pulls the pillow over her head, and drifts back to sleep, this time to dream.

She is very small, lost in an unfamiliar place with menacing trees and shrubs. Far in the distance she can see the edges of gigantic doors coming together in slow motion. She is desperate to reach the doors before they meet because she knows she is too small to open them again, and she has to get through, out of this place. She runs, dodges around bushes, bumps into trees, darts this way and that, and all the time the doors are closing at the same steady rate. She stumbles and falls, runs again, is bruised and sore, and finally she reaches the clearing before the doors only to see them come together. They are so high she cannot see the top of them. There is no handle, no doorknob, her fists make no sound as she beats on them in misery and frustration.

She wakes up again, feeling suffocated. Her hair is wet with sweat from being under the pillow. She decides to swim before breakfast, swim until she is able to shake the aftereffects of a dream that already is fading from memory, but leaving an unpleasant sense of dread.

"You won't actually be baby-sitting," Eric says at the table later, finished with his own breakfast. "Mildred will be here, and she'll stay until we get home if you want her to."

"That would be silly. Don't worry about him. Between us Mildred and I will take care of him. I'll be here all night."

"Just don't let him out by the pool alone," Rita says, worried that they actually will be leaving him apparently. "He isn't used to a pool without a fence."

"We never fenced kids out of anything," Father says. "You can't fence off every danger. You've got to train the child, not try to protect him that way."

"It was already there when we bought the house."

"Jason, come here!" Eric calls brusquely, obviously impatient to be starting, impatient with the last-minute anxieties that have Rita looking hesitant.

Jason comes to the doorway and stops. Eric waits for him to approach the group at the table and then says sternly, "You stay away from that pool, you hear me? And you be good today or you know what I'll do when I come home?"

Jason says nothing. His face is twisting as if he is going to cry.

"Don't you start that again! We'll be back after a while. Aunt Cassie will stay with you. And Mildred. And you better be good!"

Jason mumbles something and looks at Rita and does start to cry. Eric pushes his chair back angrily, but before he can reach Jason, Cass lifts him and carries him from the room.

"Just go on," she says. "He'll be fine as soon as you're all gone." Jason is arching his back, screaming, kicking with both feet. He is very strong to be so little.

He does stop howling as soon as they leave and she puts him down. His eyes are red and swollen and he is soaked with perspiration.

"That was some show, kid," Cass says, regarding him gloomily. What do you do with a three-year-old, she is wondering, trying to remember what Rebecca used to do. She has not been with a child since then. "Want to show me your toys?"

There are battery-operated cars, the building blocks, wooden beads to string, several balls, and a few stuffed animals. He shows her the toys one by one silently.

"Can you talk?"

He nods.

"What do you want from the toy store?"

"Bicycle."

"Okay. Let's go see what we can find." She tosses a fluffy pig back into the toy box and stands up. "First you have to wash your face."

She tells Mildred, the cook/housekeeper, that they will be back before lunch, and gets directions from her about the nearest shopping center with a toy store, and they leave. Jason won't sit down in the car and finally she makes him get in the backseat where he can kneel if he wants to, or stand on the floor. She is beginning to feel sympathy for Eric, she realizes, driving slowly, afraid of bouncing the child off the seat altogether. He is on it and off it endlessly. Hyperactive? She hopes not, hopes no one will suggest that they start him on speed to calm him down.

In the toy store she buys him a tricycle, oversized crayons, a large pad of newsprint, a few books, and a swim board. When he starts to cry for a fire engine, she says coolly, "Would you rather have a horn or a bell for your bicycle?"

He stops crying immediately and tries out the horn and the bell, back and forth, and finally picks the bell. Terrific, she thinks. Father will love it! He doesn't want it wrapped, and he rings it all the way home, standing on the floor in the back, the bell on the seat, ringing, ringing, over and over.

He won't sit on the tricycle, but wants to push it from behind and Cass knows this is dangerous. It could get away from him, make him fall on his face.

"That isn't how to do it," she says. "You have to sit on the seat and put your feet on the pedals and push them. That's how it works."

She picks him up and tries to position him on the trike; he screams until she puts him down again. "Okay! You win! We'll do it your way. Put your foot here. You have to hold both handles, Jason." Slowly, laboriously she teaches him how to stand on the foot rest and push until he can go for a short distance alone on it. At least he can't ring the bell this way. She realizes that he has wet himself and she leaves him with Mildred while she checks her car for a puddle. When she returns Jason backs away from her.

"Don't spank! No spank!"

She stops at the look of terror on his face. "I'm not going to spank you, Jason." There is a sudden sickness in the pit of her stomach as she stares at the child. She looks up from him to Mildred, a stolid, heavy-set Chicano. Mildred turns away.

"I'll have his lunch ready in a minute, Miss." She leaves.

"Let's get some clean clothes on, honey," Cass says. "You have to wash your hands for lunch. After you eat, I'll read you a story. Okay?"

When she strips him, she tries not to see the bruises on his buttocks, tries to believe he fell down, tries not to remember Rebecca's buttocks with the same pattern of bruises, all the times when she herself chose not to sit down, chose to wear long sleeves, refused to go swimming, afraid others would see the marks, the ugly blue-turning-to-green-and-purple marks.

She examines him carefully, pretending to be wiping his sweaty body, trying not to show her revulsion and sickness. There is a slight discoloration on his left shoulder, almost faded completely. On his right upper arm is another bruise, old, but plainly visible. How incredibly small his fingers are, his wrist bones.

After his lunch, she reads to him and then he naps for two hours. Later they play in the breakfast room, drawing silly animals on the newsprint, coloring them, making up stories as they create life. Very late in the day she takes him into the pool and shows him how to use the swim board, how to propel himself around the pool. She chases him through the water, never quite able to catch up, and they both laugh a lot. He splashes water in her face whenever she draws near him, then, arms working furiously, paddles himself away from her. It is a lovely game with him.

Mildred comes out to tell her there is a phone call, and for a moment Jason's face wrinkles up to cry when she says they have to get out of the pool. He regards her intently, then starts to splash his way to the end where the steps are. She swims at his side, holds the board while he gets off, and they leave the water together. Mildred takes him inside for a bath and Cass sits in the shade to use the terrace phone. The caller is her sister.

"I'm not coming," Rebecca says without preliminary. "Just tell them something came up, will you?"

"Sure. How are you?"

"I'm okay, same as always. You?"

"Same as always."

There is a long pause and then Rebecca asks, "Is it awful?"

"Worse than that. Becky ... do you really want to know?"

"No. I have to go, Cass. If you ever get to New York..."

"And you, if you ever get to Seattle."

She watches the water snake whip around the pool for several minutes after hanging up.

"Ancassie, will you eat with me?" Jason asks at her elbow.

"Sure. Who else would I eat with? The chair? A goat? A pig? The tree?"

He giggles and takes her hand, pulls her toward the dining room doors.

"I have to dress, monkey. I can't eat in a wet bathing suit." When they sit down to eat, she sends Mildred home. After Jason has finished his dinner she asks, as casually as she can manage, "How did you get such a sore fanny?"

She can see the change that comes over his face but cannot immediately identify what it means. It is almost as if he is gone, the face is empty with no one behind it.

"I fell down," he says looking straight at her, and she remembers. Tell me you know I'm lying, that is what that look means. Make me confess I'm lying to you, make me tell you the truth; that is what that look signals.

She nods. "You know someone has to do the dishes now, don't you?" He comes back from where he has been.

"The dishwasher does it," he says seriously.

"Hey, dishwasher, get out here and do these dishes!" she yells, then looks at him with dismay. "It can't hear, I guess."

"You have to carry them to it," he says. "I'll show you how."

* * * *

Jason sleeps like an infant, knees drawn up under him, his butt sticking up in the air, his thumb in his mouth. She leaves his door open in order to hear him if he cries out, but he sleeps quietly.

She keeps thinking of her Aunt Edie, her mother's only sister. Aunt Edie drank, she remembers. Father detested her; he still hates for women to drink anything stronger than a little wine with meals. Aunt Edie suspected -- knew -- and was helpless because everyone lied to her. _I fell down. I crashed my bike. Eric and I were fighting_. She wanted to help. If she had been able to find a way, perhaps she would have helped. But the real problem, Cass admits, was not Aunt Edie, or even Florence, but Mother. Why did she tolerate it? That was the real problem for as far back as she can remember. Why didn't she make him stop? Suddenly she is overwhelmed with despair and guilt, the way she always is when she tries to make sense of her own past.

"We didn't kill our mother!" she says aloud and starts at the sound of her voice. Saying it does not make her believe it. He had to punish them for hurting their mother, for making too much noise, for lying, for fighting among themselves, for all the terrible things they did that worried their mother and finally killed her. Mother didn't stop him because he was right. They deserved their punishment.

She paces the silent house, goes to the terrace and back inside, and finally opens the sliding glass door and leaves it open, so that she can sit on the terrace and still hear Jason if he wakes up. The house will get hot and humid, she thinks angrily. Let it! She wishes her father were home so she could repeat that to him.

She is remembering the last time her father beat Eric. He was fourteen, had not spurted upward yet the way he would in the next year. Rebecca sobbing in her bed, beaten for something or other; Cass nursing a sore arm where he had yanked her away from her sister, thrown her against the wall so that he could get to Rebecca, and Eric ... Walking into the house, yelling something, unaware that Father was home. He took off his belt with deliberate care, moving slowly, his eyes fastened on Eric who was transfixed with fear. Eric forced to take off his pants in front of his sisters, turn around, bend over ... And later, whispering, praying for his death, plotting his death.

The intensity of the memory is terrifying. This is the first time she has ever examined that particular memory; she is shaking violently as she remembers her own words, her own prayers that night.

Then Florence came and she thought it was all over. For Eric it truly was over. He grew, made the high school football team, planned to become a lawyer, became a model son, and stopped talking to his sisters, especially Cass. It worked, she thinks dully. For Eric it worked. Father molded him into the perfect son. He never took his belt to her. He never had to. His hands were enough. Why didn't she run away? She can't remember now why she didn't run away. Because of Rebecca? She knows that is not the reason, although there was a time when she said it was. She was too afraid. If he caught her, and he would have, he would have used his belt. That was reason enough.

The memories are making her stomach spasm, making her head ache with a dull pounding beat. Her hands are wet as it gets closer to midnight. They will be back soon and she has no idea of what she will do, what she can do. There is no one to talk to, no one to whom she can explain how it was. Who would even believe her? Eric is the president of the junior chamber of commerce, or something like that, a pillar of society, an up and coming attorney with impeccable manners, married to the daughter of someone equally upright and highly regarded. Who would believe her? Who would have believed it of her father?

You don't tell them because you're so ashamed, she thinks, feeling the fire on her cheeks at the thought of telling anyone that her father beat her regularly until she was sixteen years old. She feels a sudden bitter jealousy of Rebecca who has chosen not to know, not to come back, and she cannot think why she came back. It has something to do with Dan.

Stop hating, she thought a long time ago when Dan asked her to marry him. First she had to stop hating, stop being afraid. Then, the hatred and fear were deep; neither had any effect on her from day to day. Now she is under assault by waves of fear and the hatred is thick in her throat; it makes her heart thump painfully.

She finds herself pacing again until she ends up at the telephone in her father's study. She sits at his desk, looks up the Houston area code, and dials information, her fingers trembling so hard she has to start over twice. There is a children's services division with an emergency number. She writes down the number and puts the slip of paper in her pocket, leaves the study, feeling feverish and light-headed. She wants a drink but knows she must not have alcohol on her breath when she confronts her brother. That was how her father always discredited Aunt Edie, calling her boozy, a wino, a common drunk ... She has ice water.

It is nearly one when the car drives into the garage and they come into the house with Eric in boisterous good spirits. Father looks tired and for the first time he looks old.

"Cassie, you should have come along!" Eric cries. "Everything I touched turned into money. I won over six hundred!"

"I have to talk to you."

"Did something happen with Jason?" Rita asks. She looks tired also, and very pale.

"He's fine. No problems. Eric, I do have to talk to you."

"For God's sake, not tonight!" Father says roughly. "We've had a strenuous day, even if you didn't. It'll keep until morning. Is Becky here?"

"No, she called. Something came up." His face tightens in a familiar way and she turns to look again at Eric. "Let's go out to the terrace."

Florence leaves the room quickly with a mumbled good night. No one pays any attention. Now Rita hurries out.

"I'll check Jason," she says.

"Cass, go to bed," Father orders. "Eric, you want a drink? I sure do."

"I'll get some ice," Eric says and goes to the kitchen, leaving Cass with her father in the living room.

"I told you to go to bed!"

She watches him go to the bar and pour bourbon into two glasses. He should have been a trial lawyer, she thinks: he is handsome and physically attractive in the way he moves, the way he holds his head. His hair is silvery gray and thick, with a touch of wave. He could have been a politician. Eric may yet go into politics, he said earlier. He will look like Father in a few more years; he will be a good politician.

Father turns from the bar and appears surprised that she is standing there. "In my house," he says icily, "I am still the master. I expect a guest in my house to conform to my wishes."

"I'll leave as soon as I talk to Eric."

"You'll either go on to your room and go to bed, or you'll leave now, this minute."

She shakes her head, not trusting her voice again. Is that what she meant, that she would leave the house, not just the room? She is not certain. When he takes a step toward her, fear races through her body, brings out sweat on her face, churns her stomach. He knows she is afraid. She feels a deep humiliation and shame.

"You still up? Look, Cass, give me a break. Okay?" Eric reenters with a jug of water and a bowl of ice cubes. "Honestly, I'll spend as much time as you want tomorrow talking it out, whatever it is."

"Now. Tonight. And I don't want to talk with you and Father. I want to talk to you alone."

"There's nothing you have to say to him that I can't hear. Spit it out, Cass. You've been spoiling for a fight ever since you got here, sitting back, watching everyone else all the time. Let's have it and get it over with." Father turns his back on her again to put ice and water in his drink. "Say when, son." He adds a little water to the second glass and stops when Eric motions. "Well, cheers. It's been a hell of a day!"

It's hopeless, Cass thinks with despair. "Don't you remember how it was?" she whispers desperately. "You must remember!"

There is no answering flicker in Eric's eyes. He hardly glances at her, crosses the room to a deep chair and lowers himself into it tiredly. "It's after one," he says. "I'm having a nightcap and then I'm going to bed. Is that what you had to say?"

"You can't do it to Jason. For God's sake, Eric! Don't do it to him."

"Has he been lying to you? He knows I won't put up with that."

"I'll report you," she says, hardly audible now.

"You'll report nothing," Father says brusquely. "Eric disciplines his son only to the extent that he needs it. I can testify to that. So can Florence. You came into this house hating your brother and jealous of him and his family. You've always been jealous of Eric. Always a troublemaker. You'll report nothing. You'll not bring disgrace to this family! You hear me?"

She backs away from him, sees Rita in the doorway, her eyes bulging, terrified at the scene.

"Tell her, honey," Eric says, leaning back in his chair, swirling the ice in his drink, watching it. "Doesn't Jason fall down a lot?"

She nods, moistens her lips. "He's forever falling down. I ... I don't feel well. I'm going to bed." She flees.

"Cass," Eric says, watching the ice, "think about it. My parents, her parents, my grandparents. They're my witnesses, you know. How much of your life do you want dragged out into the open?"

"Why do you do it? He's a baby! You need therapy..." Her father is moving toward her; he is going to hit her, she realizes, and suddenly she turns and runs from the room, runs to her bedroom and slams the door, leans against it shaking. When she is able to move, she throws her things into her suitcase. She has unpacked very little; it does not take long. She washes her face and forgets to put on lipstick although she is holding it. When she is ready to leave, she goes quietly through the hall to the living room. He is there waiting. She does not enter, but backs up soundlessly to the dining room, out to the terrace through the glass doors, and lets herself out the backyard through a high wooden gate.

For a long time she drives aimlessly in circles, afraid to go out on the desert at this time of night, too tired to know where she is going. Do they know what they do? Do they really think it's discipline? She has to know the answer, she thinks fiercely, or she can do nothing. If they really, honestly believe they are right ... There is no way to end the thought. He gave them good food, a good house, clothes, allowances, sent them to good schools ... You can't weigh that against the other, she tells herself. It isn't possible to weigh the good things against the hell they had to live in.

She can't marry Dan now. She has to cleanse herself of the hatred and the cowardice and fear that dominate her. What if Dan changed? What if his gentleness turned into brutality? What if he beat their child? What if she did? Maybe this is the secret everyone carries around and no one talks about.

She is lost and the street signs are blurred; she runs a red light before she can even think about stopping. Finally she sees a motel with a vacancy sign and she checks in, finds her room, locks the door, and then falls across the bed into a restless sleep. She dreams of the terror-filled, strange place where the trees and shrubs make it impossible for her to reach the great doors as they silently draw together. She beats on them and wakes up drenched with sweat, weeping.

She fumbles in her pocket for the slip of paper with the emergency number for the children's services division of the Houston city government, and, weeping, she dials. She thinks no one is going to answer, but at last a pleasant voice says hello, and Cass begins to talk.

-----------------------

At www.fictionwise.com you can:

* Rate this story

* Find more stories by this author

* Get story recommendations