Family History Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY DANI SHAPIRO

  Copyright Page

  For Michael

  I shall never know why

  our lives took a turn for the worse, nor will you.

  Clouds sank into my arms and my arms rose.

  They are rising now.

  —Mark Strand, “The Man in the Tree”

  Acclaim for Dani Shapiro’s

  FAMILY HISTORY

  “Shapiro’s small observations of motherhood are keen and astute; they demand empathy. . . . Realistic and heartbreaking.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A brutal firecracker of a novel that chronicles the dissolution of a cinematically perfect New England family.”

  —Newsday

  “Shapiro has both a bestselling writer’s instinct for plot and pacing and a fine literary sensibility. . . . A powerful, penetrating illumination of the hidden agendas and consequences of family relationships.”

  — Elle

  “A gripping, contemporary story of guilt, love and redemption.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Keeps us flipping pages late into the night. Through seamless writing and a good plot, Shapiro manages to impart to us Rachel’s frenetic desire to understand the past.” —The Oregonian

  “Riveting.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Shapiro displays a sharp eye for the tiny epiphanies of everyday life, the quiet contentments we all have taken for granted.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Dani Shapiro has the gift. That a book as harrowing as Family History can be such a page-turner is testimony to the primal power of storytelling and the saving grace of art.” —David Gates

  “Absorbing . . . elegantly written, wry and unsettling.”

  —Fresh Air, NPR

  “A gripping account of a contemporary Massachusetts family of four unraveling as problems with the eldest daughter start to rip the delicate fabric of love and partnership.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “From the first page to the last, Family History is virtually impossible to put down: a beautifully structured, tightly woven exploration of the mysteries of adolescent pain, and the brutal efficiency with which a crisis can engulf a family and transform it into something unrecognizable.”

  —Jennifer Egan

  “Start reading Dani Shapiro’s Family History and you’ll be wishing you didn’t have to put it down for anything. Let the kids wait for their ride home from school; let the phone ring; cancel the doctor’s appointment you waited six weeks for. This writer has a story to tell.”

  — Calgary Herald

  “Dani Shapiro’s new novel strikes at the heart of every mother who has ever worried that she has failed her child . . . readers will fly through this book. A contemporary domestic drama . . . a quick powerful read.”

  — Chattanooga Times Free Press

  “Graceful.”

  —Glamour

  “Shapiro’s suspenseful novel movingly explores the fragility of family life. . . . The overall effect is to create a web that lures readers in, curious to find out who is guilty of what and whether the ending will be happy.”

  —People

  “Spare, compelling, and heartbreakingly authentic. . . . Shapiro has fashioned a deeply moving, beautifully crafted story. Once begun it is impossible to put down.”

  —Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Texas)

  1

  I LIE IN BED THESE DAYS AND WATCH HOME MOVIES—A useless exercise, to be sure, but I can’t stop myself. Ned’s an amateur filmmaker, and ever since we got our first video camera when Kate was born, he has documented our family’s life, not just birthday parties and anniversaries but smaller, more telling moments. When I appear in these tapes, I’m usually laughing and covering my face, saying No, no, I look terrible. Ned is almost always behind the camera. Kate, Kate, Katie, his deep voice cajoles, come here, baby doll. And then, after Kate as a baby, a toddler, a blurry little blond girl, she begins to become sharper and clearer, her features morphing themselves into a face of such extraordinary beauty that sometimes I felt shocked to realize she was my daughter.

  My bedroom is dark, the shades drawn against the sun. Even though no one is home, the door is closed. Outside, the occasional car. Voices rise and fall. The dull thud of heels on the street. The walls of this old house are thick, but the windows are made of ancient wavy glass. We had always planned to replace the glass, but we never got around to it. I used to like the way I could hear everything going on outside. It made me feel like part of the world. Now, all I want is to be sealed off. People come and go. They drive their cars to and from work. They take their children to one another’s houses. They go out to dinner and drive slowly, carefully home, protecting what is theirs.

  The people on the screen are strangers to me: that pretty young woman, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail; that man next to her, with faint laugh lines under his eyes. Everything was so easy then. That’s what I see in Ned’s home movies. I had no idea my life was easy. We didn’t have enough money, or space, or hours in the day. The boiler had a leak; the dog needed a bath. Little things got the better of me. Now, all that seems absurd. If I could reach a hand back to that last summer, I would slap myself. Hard. Snap out of it! I would scream.

  KATE WAS THIRTEEN. SHE HAD BEEN A SKINNY LITTLE KID with long stringy hair, always coming home with scrapes and bruises. She’d broken more bones than I could count, playing field hockey, soccer, basketball, softball. Kate was single-minded about winning. She threw her whole body into the final assist, the winning goal, even if it meant a torn ligament, a sprain, a fracture. And to listen to her tell it afterward, after the casts or Ace bandages, the hot and cold compresses, it was a saga: “Jenny McCauley fouled me, but the referee—that would be her father, Mr. McCauley— didn’t call it. And then I got mad and told myself I wouldn’t miss a single other shot,” she said. Her cheeks were bright pink circles, and her blue eyes were framed by long dark lashes. Kate had a sense of competition—we called it “healthy competition” but secretly I wasn’t so sure—that amazed Ned and me. She got straight As and was captain of everything in school. Ned and I hadn’t been like that as kids, and we certainly weren’t overachievers as grown-ups. Of course, we each had our ambitions, but they had changed over time. We wanted our family to be safe and happy. We wanted to make enough money to keep our roof over our heads and have a nice dinner out every once in a while.

  Over that last summer Kate had gone away to camp, and I could tell, even through the tone of her letters, that something had changed. Dear Mother, she would begin. Mother? She didn’t say she missed us or dot her i’s with hearts the way she used to. She didn’t write about archery or color war. She sounded hot and querulous when we called her on the phone. I wondered what was going on, but truthfully I put it out of my mind as much as I could and tried to enjoy the quiet, our new freedom to leave the house whenever we felt like it or to climb back into bed on a Sunday morning. For the first time in thirteen years we had nowhere to be: no car pool, no soccer practice, no Sunday school. I was almost scared, when Kate first left. I wondered how it would be, alone with my husband. So much of our time together had been spent discussing Kate and the logistics
of Kate. “All Kate, all the time,” we joked. And while we were immersed in the details of parenthood, the years were rolling by and we were getting older. I worried that having Kate early in our marriage had made us prematurely middle-aged. But it turned out I had nothing to worry about: within days of Kate’s leaving, we were like newlyweds, enjoying each other, falling into long late-night talks, sleeping wrapped together for the first time in years. We blinked, and time fell away.

  Our first Saturday night alone in the house, Ned cooked dinner. I had been out all afternoon, doing the usual errands—dry cleaner, butcher, grocery store, buying a baby shower gift—and when I returned, Ned had set the picnic table in the backyard with our best crystal, china plates, linen napkins rolled into napkin rings. His grandmother’s hurricane lanterns rested in the center of the table, beeswax candles already flickering in the pale-orange early evening light.

  “What’s this?” I set my bags down on the kitchen floor. The house smelled sweet, a mix of Indian spices. Ned didn’t cook often, but when he did, whatever he made was ambitious and elaborate. I saw several open cookbooks; three pots simmered on the stove.

  “Never you mind. Just go outside,” said Ned. He pushed my hair away from my face and kissed my ear.

  “But I need to—”

  “You need to do nothing,” he said. He uncorked a chilled bottle of wine—one of our few really good chardonnays—and poured me a glass. “I’ll be out in a bit.”

  I was confused. Was this a special day I had somehow missed, an obscure anniversary? Through all the years we had been together, we still celebrated the day we met and the day we got engaged, along with our wedding anniversary.

  “Relax, Rach,” Ned said, reading my mind. “I just wanted to make you a nice dinner.”

  The screen door slapped shut behind me as I walked out back. I particularly loved our backyard in the summer. We mowed the lawn just around the perimeter of the house, and the rest was meadow. Tall grass rustled in the breeze, blowing bits of dandelion fluff through the air. The sun was setting over the tin roof of the barn.

  I kicked my shoes off, climbed into the hammock, and balanced the glass of wine on my stomach. It was an odd sensation, having this empty, quiet time. I didn’t exactly mind it, but I wasn’t sure how to do nothing.

  “Here you are.” Ned crouched down next to the hammock. He popped something into my mouth.

  “What is it?” I asked, chewing. It was delicious.

  “A date stuffed with ground almonds and wrapped in bacon.”

  “Yum. A nice low-cholesterol snack.”

  “Yeah, and after this we’re having that lobster curry thing.”

  “You’ve been a busy boy.”

  He squinted up at me and grinned. His dirty-blond hair flopped over his forehead, and he shook it away, a gesture I had seen a thousand times in our daughter.

  I grabbed Ned’s hand and turned it, palm up, then held it to my cheek. I felt a familiar stinging against the backs of my eyes, tears I was embarrassed to let him see. Some people were able to take this for granted—this beauty, this bounty. But no matter how many years we had been together, I still felt it as something amazing, thoroughly undeserved. How had I gotten so lucky?

  Ned kissed me on the forehead. Then he stood up, with a slight middle-aged groan, and went back inside the house.

  WEEKS DRIFTED BY BEFORE WE ADMITTED TO EACH OTHER how much we missed Kate. Sure, there were advantages to not having her around: sex with the bedroom door open, a clean kitchen sink, listening to Coltrane instead of ’N Sync. But by the time she was due home, we longed for her. At the end of the summer, we picked her up in the parking lot of the A&P. She got off the bus wearing a flowery little tank top I had never seen before, her hair was bleached orangey-yellow, and she had a tattoo of a leaf on her ankle.

  Here she is, standing in a group of new camp friends, exchanging hugs and phone numbers. “Katie!” Ned’s voice cracks in the video as he calls her, waving with one hand and holding the camera with the other. I am standing next to our old Volvo wagon with the hatchback open and ready for her mountains of dirty laundry. Ned turns the camera on me for a second, and I grin self-consciously. I’m wearing big dark glasses and no makeup, and again I am struck by how young I look. I was thirty-eight that summer but I could have passed for thirty, especially with the dark glasses.

  The camera jerks as I grab it and focus on Ned. He looks like an overgrown college boy himself, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a faded sweatshirt. I’d been looking forward to seeing Ned and Kate together. It was a secret pleasure of mine, quietly watching them as they played basketball or watched television or went over Kate’s math homework at the kitchen table. I start to move toward Kate, but she shakes her head, her eyes narrow in warning, and I stop. She turns her back, squaring her little shoulders resolutely away from me. The movie ends there. I turned off the camera and stood alone in a crowd of parents, my arms dangling uselessly by my sides.

  DOWNSTAIRS, THE DOORBELL RINGS. I CLIMB OUT OF BED, the bottoms of my socks collecting dust on the floor. The windows are covered with heavy blue curtains. I peek out, squinting in the glaring light. A Federal Express truck, with its cheery purple-and-orange logo, is parked by the curb. It can be nothing good: a legal document, a collection notice. I go back upstairs. The digital clock reads 1:57. I have to pick up Joshua at preschool at three. I should get out of my pajamas. Slap some cold water on my face, under my arms. Run a comb through my hair. Have I even eaten today?

  This was once such a happy house. The sunny kitchen with its refrigerator covered with magnets and drawings; the dining room dwarfed by an enormous old pine table, a bowl of fresh fruit in a ceramic bowl at its center; flowers arranged in empty wine bottles along the windowsills and side tables. I took pride in our house, in the accumulation of objects that had character and meaning for us. Other people could buy expensive photographs, but they wouldn’t have the framed black-and-white photo Ned took of a fence curving along the dunes on Nantucket one summer, when we were visiting our old friends Tommy and Liza Mendel. Our summers with the Mendels are another thing I miss. Every August, our families spent a few weeks together at their house on the beach; their daughter Sophie was a year younger than Kate. Tommy and Liza had done phenomenally well over the years. Tommy had started a series of restaurant and hotel guides, then sold his company to a big German corporation. And Liza was a senior partner at a small prestigious Boston law firm. Our daily lives may have been worlds apart, but the Mendels were like family to us.

  That photograph, along with a lovely one of Kate and Sophie, still hangs on the landing. And then this room, the bedroom: the bed is soft and creaky, and the wing chair needs reupholstering. The Art Deco vanity we found in a flea market on the Cape before we were married is gathering dust. My perfume bottles, seven of them, are arranged on a china tray, next to a jumble of jewelry: African silver earrings, a pair of gold hoops, some dangling semi-precious stones. The good pillows and sheets I bought from a catalog a few years ago have served me well. Who knew how much time I would spend here, by myself?

  If I let my mind wander, I can recall nearly every moment we spent in this house, in this room. I don’t need Ned’s video to see Kate at two, climbing onto the bench at the foot of our bed and flopping down on the old patchwork quilt we used to have there, giggling. Or Ned, up on one elbow, his gray-green eyes looking down at me as my belly swelled with Joshua, whispering that he was so lucky to be a new father all over again. On the mantel above the fireplace is a photograph in a hammered silver frame: Ned, Kate, and I are standing together near the base of Stratton Mountain. (There are no photographs of the four of us—not a single picture of Kate and her baby brother together.) It is early fall, and we are dressed lightly in sweatshirts, shorts, and hiking boots. I remember Kate’s confusion when I said I wasn’t hiking. I was always first one up the mountain. “Do you feel okay?” she asked, in a rare moment of concern. I wasn’t ready to tell her the reason why. Too soon. The waistband
of my shorts was a bit snug around my waist, and my breasts were sore and heavy, but no one would have known. “I’m fine, honey,” I said. I sat at a picnic table and watched over my newspaper as my husband and daughter began climbing until they disappeared from sight.

  THE PHONE RINGS ALL MORNING, BUT I DON’T PICK IT UP. The caller ID flashes UNAVAILABLE. I want to know who’s calling me before I answer. A thin stream of light from between the curtains plays against the wood beams, shadows of leaves from the elm tree out front flickering against the chipped white paint. Ned and I made love countless times in this bed. Sleepy too-tired-to-do-it sex. Wild, scratching, grasping sex. Makeup sex, both of us bruised and tender. All of it here, under this quilt, in this place where I now lie with so little sensation in my body it’s hard to imagine ever having given or received pleasure. I try to bring Ned into bed with me in my mind. I’ve lost his smell. It was the first thing I loved about him, breathing him in and knowing, inexplicably, that I was home. I remember his long fingers and the way he brushed my skin lightly with the back of his hand until I shivered. I can describe it, but I can no longer feel it. I still see him, though: his strong, powerful chest with just the right amount of curly blond hair; the way that hair got thicker below his belly button and thicker still until it ended in a soft tangle. The phone rings again, and I reach over and unplug it.

  Lately, I’ve come to think about what it takes to unravel a life, not just one life, but the fabric of a family, carefully woven together with love and faith over the years. It doesn’t happen in a moment but in series of moments—insults, improbabilities, just plain bad luck—that finally begin to pile up until all hope is gone. Recently, I saw a story on the news about a man who lived somewhere out west. He went into his attic after dinner, loaded a shotgun, and killed his whole family: wife, two kids, and then himself. When they interviewed the neighbors on the news, they shook their heads and described him the way these people are always described: quiet, no trouble, never saw it coming. But it turned out that the man had been fired from his job and had no prospects and no health insurance; his wife was having an affair; the younger child had a chronic illness. It must have seemed to him, that cold and starless night, that there was nothing left to do but destroy what remained.