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  For Art, in memory of a lost August

  Acknowledgments

  The writing and production of a good novel take the hard work and cooperation of dozens of men and women. My full gratitude list would cover a dozen pages and even then be incomplete because the truth is, anything and anyone can inspire me. Twenty years ago I saw a woman wrench her three-year-old from aisle to aisle in the supermarket, scowling and snarling as he wailed louder and louder. Her spirit lives in The Good Sister as does the memory of exhaustion written on the faces of my son and daughter-in-law as they learned to manage life with a newborn. I wish I could thank you all, but for now let me name just a few.

  First, and always, my immeasurable gratitude goes to Art, who makes me laugh and keeps me steady.

  To Margaret, my own good sister. The best.

  To my mother for a lifetime of love and encouragement.

  To Nikki, my daughter-in-law, for her courage and her always honest answers to my often ignorant and intrusive questions.

  To my excellent sons, Rocky and Matt. Who’d have thought those little boys would grow up to be my rudder and compass.

  To my agent, Angela Rinaldi, who has shown repeatedly that she can talk me down off the ledge and up off the floor.

  To my stellar editors at Grand Central: Karen Kosztolnyik and Beth de Guzman, for their patience, insight, and high standards. Karen deserves special kudos for her diplomacy in the face of terrible first drafts.

  At Grand Central, my thanks go to Bruce Paonessa, Chris Barba, Karen Torres, Martha Otis, Harvey-Jane Kowal, and Jamie Raab, who are responsible for turning The Good Sister into a book we can hold in our hands. Thank you also to Liz Connor for her haunting cover and to Celia Johnson for nagging me gently.

  Many women shared with me their deeply personal experiences of motherhood and depression. Your trust and honesty moved me deeply. My heart goes out to the millions of mothers who for centuries have suffered from the gradations of postpartum depression alone, misunderstood, and often condemned.

  Finally, thank you to the Ladies of the Arrowhead Association, the mothers, sisters, and friends who make it all possible.

  Home—the private journal where we learn who

  we are by recording who we love.

  —Judith Tate O’Brien

  Chapter 1

  San Diego, California

  The State of California v. Simone Duran

  March 2010

  On the first day of Simone Duran’s trial for the attempted murder of her children, the elements conspired to throw their worst at Southern California. Arctic storms that had all winter stalled or washed out north of Los Angeles chose the second week of March to break for the south and were now lined up, a phalanx of wind and rain stretching north into Alaska. In San Diego a timid sprinkle began after midnight, gathered force around dawn, and now, with a hard northwest wind behind it, deluged the city with a driving rain. Roxanne Callahan had lived in San Diego all her life and she’d never seen weather like this.

  In the stuffy courtroom a draft found the nape of her neck, driving a shudder down her spine to the small of her back: she feared that if the temperature dropped just one degree she’d start shaking and wouldn’t be able to stop. Behind her, someone in the gallery had a persistent, bronchial cough. Roxanne had a vision of germs floating like pollen on the air. She wondered if hostile people—the gawkers and jackals, the ghoulishly curious, the homegrown experts and lurid trial junkies—carried germs more virulent than those of friends and allies. Not that there were many well-wishers in the crowd. Most of the men and women in the courtroom represented the millions of people who hated Simone Duran; and if their germs were half as lethal as their thinking, Simone would be dead by dinnertime.

  Roxanne and her brother-in-law, Johnny Duran, sat in the first row of the gallery, directly behind the defense table. As always Johnny was impeccably groomed and sleekly handsome; but new gray rimed his black hair, and there were lines engraved around his eyes and mouth that had not been there six months earlier. He was the owner and president of a multimillion-dollar construction company specializing in hotels and office complexes, a man with many friends, including the mayor and chief of police; but since the attempted murder of his children he had become reclusive, spending all his free time with his daughters. He and Roxanne had everything to say to each other and at the same time nothing. She knew the same question filled his mind as hers and each knew it was pointless to ask: what could or should they have done differently?

  Following her arraignment on multiple counts of attempted murder, Simone had been sent to St. Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital for ninety days’ observation. Bail was set at a million dollars, and Johnny put the lake house up as collateral. He leased a condo on a canyon where Simone and their mother, Ellen Vadis, lived after her release from St. Anne’s. Her bail had come with heavy restrictions. She was forbidden contact with her daughters and confined to the condo, tethered by an electronic ankle bracelet and permitted to leave only with her attorney on matters pertaining to the case and with her mother for meetings with her doctor.

  Like Johnny, Roxanne visited Simone several times a week. These tense interludes did nothing to lift anyone’s spirits as far as she could tell. They spent hours on the couch watching television, sometimes holding hands; and while Roxanne often talked about her life, her work, her friends, any subject that might help the illusion that they were sisters like other sisters, Simone rarely spoke. Sometimes she asked Roxanne to read to her from a book of fairy tales she’d had since childhood. Stories of dancing princesses and enchanted swans soothed Simone much as a lullaby might a baby; and more than once Roxanne had left her, covered by a cashmere throw, asleep on the couch with the book beside her. Lately she had begun to suck her thumb as she had when she was a child. Roxanne faced the truth: the old Simone, the silly girl with her secrets and demands, her narcissism, the manic highs and the black holes where the meany-men lived, even her love, might be gone forever.

  A medicine chest of pharmaceuticals taken morning and night kept her awake and put her to sleep, eased her down from mania toward catatonia and then half up again to something like normal balance. She took drugs that elevated her mood, focused her attention, flattened her enthusiasm, stifled her anxiety, curbed her imagination, cut back her paranoia, and put a plug in her curiosity. The atmosphere in the condo was almost unbearably artificial.

  Across the nation newspapers, magazines, and blogs were filled with Simone stories passing as truth. Her picture was often on television screens, usually behind an outraged talking head. Sometimes it was the mug shot taken the day she was booked, occasionally one of the posed photos from the Judge Roy Price Dinner when she looked so beautiful but was dying inside. The radio blabmeisters could not stop ranting about her, about what a monster she was. Spinning know-it-alls jammed the call-in lines. Weekly articles in the supermarket tabloids claimed to know and tell the whole story.

  The whole story! If Roxanne had had any sense of humor left she would have cackled at such a preposterous claim. Simone’s story was also Roxanne’s. And Ellen’s and Johnny’s. They were all of them responsible for what hap
pened that September afternoon.

  Roxanne’s husband, Ty Callahan, had offered to put his work at the Salk Institute on hold so he could attend the trial with her, but she didn’t want him there. He and her friend Elizabeth were links to the world of hopeful, optimistic, ordinary people. The courtroom would taint that.

  The night before, Roxanne and Ty had eaten Chinese takeout; and afterward, while he read, she lay with her head on his lap searching for the blank space in her mind where repose hid. They went to bed early and made love with surprising urgency, as if time pressed in upon them, and before it was too late they had to establish their connection in the most basic way. Roxanne should have slept afterward; instead she got up and watched late-night infomercials for computer careers and miraculous skin products, finally falling asleep on the couch, where Ty found her in the morning with Chowder, their yellow Labrador, snoring on the floor beside her, a ball between his front paws.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said, sitting up. “I’m a mess.”

  “You are.” Ty handed her a mug of coffee, his smile breaking over her like sunlight. “The worst-looking woman I’ve seen this morning.”

  She rested her forehead against his chest and closed her eyes. “Tell me I don’t have to do this today.”

  He drew her to him. “We’ll get through it, Rox.”

  “But who’ll we be? When it’s over?”

  “I guess we just have to wait and see.”

  “And you’ll be here?”

  “If I think about leaving, I’ll come get you first.”

  In the courtroom she closed her eyes and pictured Ty with his postdocs gathered around him, the earnest young men and women who looked up to him in a way that Roxanne had found sweet and faintly amusing back when she could still laugh. She knew how her husband worked, the care he took and the careful notations he made in his lab notebooks in his precise draftsman’s hand. With life falling apart and nothing certain from one day to the next, it was calming—a meditation of sorts—to think of Ty at work across the city in a lab overlooking the Pacific.

  Attorney David Cabot and Simone entered the courtroom and took their places at the defense table. Cabot had been Johnny’s first choice to defend Simone. Once the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, he had not won many games but was widely admired for qualities of leadership and character. His win-loss statistics were much better in law than in football. He had made his name trying controversial cases, and Simone’s was definitely that.

  Simone, small and thin, her back as narrow as a child’s, sat beside Cabot, conservatively dressed in a black-and-white wool dress with a matching jacket and serious shoes in which she could have hiked Cowles Mountain. In her ears she wore the silver-and-turquoise studs Johnny had given her when they became engaged. As intended, she looked mild and calm, too sweet to commit a crime worse than jaywalking.

  Conversation in the gallery hushed as the jurors entered and took their seats. One, a college student, looked sideways at Simone; but the others directed their gazes across the courtroom to the wall of rain-beaten windows. Among the twelve there were two Hispanic women in their mid-twenties, one of them a college student; three men and a woman, all retired professionals; a Vietnamese manicurist; and one middle-aged black woman, the co-owner of a copy shop. Roxanne tried to see intelligence and tolerance and wisdom in their faces, but all she saw was an ordinary sampling of San Diego residents. For them to be a true jury of Simone’s peers at least one should be a deep depressive, one extravagantly rich, and another pathologically helpless.

  Just let them be good people, Roxanne prayed. Good and sensitive and clear-thinking. Let them be honest. Let them see into my sister and know that she is not a monster.

  Chapter 2

  August 1977

  Roxanne’s mommy said they were going for a long trip in the car, and that it would be an adventure; but she wouldn’t say where they were going or how long they would be gone. When Roxanne asked questions she just walked away, sat at the table in the kitchen, and smoked cigarettes.

  In less than two weeks Roxanne would begin first grade in Mrs. Enos’s class at Logan Hills Elementary School in San Diego, and she wanted to stay home and get ready. Mrs. Enos’s classroom was on the edge of the playground in a temporary building that didn’t look like it had ever been painted. Mommy called the building a portable and said it had been around since Jesus Christ wore diapers. Roxanne didn’t know who Jesus Christ was, but she liked the portable classroom because it seemed like a clubhouse and the door opened right onto the playground. She didn’t care that there were no trees on the playground and barely any equipment to climb or swing on, and she didn’t care if Logan Hills Elementary had mice and roaches shiny as black olives because in the first grade she was going to learn about numbers.

  She was already a good reader. Her mother and Mrs. Edison said it was spooky the way she had taught herself. They asked her how she did it, but she couldn’t tell them. She just paid attention to words like the ones in Mrs. Edison’s recipe book and the sounds that went with them until the squiggles on the page started to make sense. Plus she watched Sesame Street at Mrs. Edison’s house. That was also how she had learned to count, but any dummy with fingers and toes could do that.

  While Mommy went to work Roxanne stayed next door with Mrs. Edison, a soft, blond woman who had no children of her own and appreciated the extra cash. It was she who had walked Roxanne to the elementary school, shown her the portable classroom, and introduced her to Mrs. Enos. The teacher was tall and had brown skin and frizzy orange hair. She crouched down to say hello, eye to eye. “You’re going to love this one,” Mrs. Edison said, wagging her eyebrows; and Roxanne’s face got hot because she knew Mrs. Edison was talking about her.

  When she said good-bye Mrs. Enos gave Roxanne a silver pinwheel that spun blurry-fast.

  Mrs. Edison’s husband and Daddy were both in the Marines, but that didn’t mean they were best friends. On his own time, Daddy played poker and pool across the street at the Royal Flush. Mr. Edison’s nose was always stuck in a copy of Popular Mechanics. Mommy said he was going places in the Marines, and Daddy said big effing deal.

  Grown-ups spoke a peculiar language full of words and mystery phrases like big effing deal that Roxanne didn’t know. One day Mrs. Edison took her to the library, and she looked up effing in the big blue dictionary. It wasn’t there, and that got her started worrying how she would ever learn the meaning of all the words people spoke. On television children talked to their parents and their parents talked back. Questions and answers were called conversation; and while no one ever said it, not exactly, Roxanne knew Mommy and Daddy didn’t want to have conversation with her.

  If Mrs. Edison was in a good mood she answered Roxanne’s questions but she told her to watch out, curiosity killed the cat. Mrs. Edison had a yellow cat named Tom but he’d be hard to kill because he had nine lives. Roxanne talked to other people and knew the postman had been bitten by a dog and got ten stitches in his arm, and the woman at Von’s market was having a baby and she hoped it was a girl so she could call her Rashida. Up and down the street she spoke to everyone, including the woman on the corner who always wore a scarf. All this talking, the words she didn’t know and the contradictory things that people said, confused her. She had decided there must be rules for what was right to say and feel, rules for when to talk and when to listen, and sometimes she was afraid of what would happen to her if she never learned these rules. She didn’t want to be like the homeless woman who wore a red wool cap even in the summertime and talked gibberish to herself as she pushed her shopping cart along the sidewalk in front of Roxanne’s house.

  Roxanne’s world was full of dos and don’ts—don’t cross the street on a red light or touch a hot stove, do lock the doors at night, and don’t talk to strangers—so it made sense that there must be rules that applied to how people talked and what they did. Maybe if she read enough books and learned all the words in the dictionary and if she never stopped watchin
g and listening, she would understand why mothers on television loved their daughters, but hers didn’t.

  At dinner Mommy said, “You’re going to stay with your grandmother for a while.”

  This was the first Roxanne had heard of a grandmother.

  “We’ll leave tomorrow after breakfast. Put what you need in that pink backpack and don’t forget your toothbrush.” Mommy went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  The questions lined up like Marines in Roxanne’s logical mind, a platoon of them beginning with why and who and when and what would happen if she missed the first day of school.

  She heard the sound of water running into the tub. In a minute steam would seep out from under the door like smoke. Mommy must be nervous. She always took a bath when she was nervous. The medicine cabinet opened and clicked shut; the lid of the toilet seat hit the tank behind it. These were normal sounds and nothing to worry about. But if everything was normal, why did Roxanne feel like something big and mean and cold as a polar bear had walked in the front door and was right now standing in the middle of the room, staring at her?

  “Are you mad at me, Mommy?” They sat at the card table eating spaghetti.

  “Why? What have you done?”

  This trip to her grandmother felt like trouble.

  “Eat your dinner. Let me think.” Mommy twirled the spaghetti around the fork in her right hand; she held a cigarette in her left.

  Her mother’s name was Ellen and she was prettier than most of the moms on television. Mrs. Edison said she had hair to kill for. At the roots it was dark brown like Roxanne’s but every few weeks Mommy washed it with something stinky that came in a box and turned it a silvery-yellow color. She wore her hair in long loose curls and looked like one of Charlie’s Angels. Her face reminded Roxanne of the kittens in cages at the pet store when they pushed their noses against the wire and mewed at her. Roxanne wanted to take them all home, but Mommy said over her dead body.