Living Witness(33)
Alice wound a scarf around her neck. It could have been hers, or it could have been Lyman’s. They didn’t make distinctions. Out the back door she could see the snow and the icicles that had been hanging around for days. It ought to be spring by now, but it wasn’t, at least not as the weather went. Annie-Vic was up at the hospital these days, lying in a bed with tubes coming out of her. One of the women in church worked as a volunteer there, taking the gift cart around and handing out pamphlets. She’d seen Annie-Vic all trussed up like a turkey, and looking bad enough to die.
Bad enough to die, Alice thought, and suddenly her day felt much better.
Annie-Vic was bad enough off to die, and then what would happen to her? She would end up face to face with God, that was what would happen to her, and then she’d spend eternity in a lake of fire. It said so, in the Bible, and it said that believers would have all eternity to watch the suffering of the souls in Hell.
Alice honestly thought she’d like that very much.
2
When Judy Cornish first got the call from Catherine Marbledale, she was panicked. Then Ms. Marbledale let her speak to Mallory directly, and after that, she was all right. She was better than all right, really. Judy had expected what she’d gotten the last time that venomous little Barbie McGuffie had gone after Mallory and Stacey, meaning hysteria and tears, but Mallory had sounded downright calm. Eerily calm. It was like listening to a grown woman who had just decided to kill her husband. There was no trace of emotion in that voice at all and quite a lot of rigidly controlled anger.
Judy had been in her kitchen when the call came. It was a spectacular kitchen, better than the one she had had in Somerville when they had been living near Boston. Housing was not a minor consideration for Judy. She liked ten-foot ceilings and two-story great rooms and all those little rooms that made life so much easier. In this house she had a laundry room as large as the dining room had been in their first house, and a mud room with built-in benches and cabinets so that people didn’t track in dirt and snow when they came in from school, and a clutter room that was was for messy school projects like posters and dioramas. This was the kind of thing you got when you worked hard and applied yourself—especially when you applied yourself at school. Education was the key to everything, and that meant education at a name college. The Ivy League would be best, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. Anything in the first tier would do. If you didn’t get that, you might as well curl up and die, as far as Judy was concerned. You might be able to pull your life out of your ass if you managed to get into a first-rate graduate school, but not many people managed to do that, and Judy thought she knew why. Being a slacker was like having a disease. It might even be catching.
The mud room was in the back, in a sort of passage to the garage, although it had a door to the real outside, so that the children could use it coming in from the yard. Judy had loved her own childhood. It had been full of things to do, things she’d found unavailable in Snow Hill to give to her own children. She had had piano lessons, and tennis lessons, and gymnastics lessons. She had had sleepaway camp for two weeks every summer—although that, she’d managed, even from here. She sent Mallory and Hannah to her own camp in New Hampshire, and Danny to Camp Awosting in Connecticut. Stacey Niederman went to camp with Mallory and Hannah. Sometimes Judy thought they were all out here re-creating civilization from scratch, as if there’d been a nuclear holocaust or some kind of supervirus that had wiped out all traces of it across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It was scary to think about it, but maybe it was like this over most of the United States. Maybe that was what “red states” were about, and that explained why the country kept voting in Republicans. Judy couldn’t understand why anybody ever voted for Republicans, although her mother told her that all the best people used to, the people like the ones they’d grown up with.
“It was in about 1980 that it started to change,” Judy’s mother had said. “And I don’t know what happened, really, but suddenly it was all about those religious people, and so I changed parties. I had to, don’t you think?”
Judy didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine what the Republican Party had been like before “all those religious people.” She didn’t care. She took her best parka out of her own personal cubicle—it had her name stenciled on it above the hook, at the top—and headed out to the garage and the Volvo. She’d been seven years old when her mother sat her down at the kitchen table with a pile of what looked like books and told her the way the world worked. The pile had not been of books but of college catalogues, which Judy’s mother had sent away for even though Judy wasn’t out of primary school.