False Memory

are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even more highly charged with anger.
    The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger of being crushed alive.
    “And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant death syndrome. How difficult to endure it... the whispers, the medical inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.”
    Martie drew a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said, “Dusty,” meaning Maybe you shouldn’t do this.
    He had never spoken up when it might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five, going on six... a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?”
    “I guess,” Skeet said shakily.
    “They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved not to be the case.”
    “My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him.
    “Maybe that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.”
    Claudette regarded Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what she feared most.
    He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph of Dominique.”
    She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the air, the blow not struck.
    In some respects, this was the hardest thing that Dusty had ever done, and yet in other ways it was so easy that it frightened him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the hallway outside the nursery.”
    Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from Dusty.
    His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him.
    Junior stepped forward protectively.
    “Better pick up your crossbow and load it,” Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.”
    Although the violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s, Junior backed off.
    “When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t remember what. But you knew I was there, and you... stopped. At the time, I didn’t know what had almost happened. But later... years later, I did understand, but wouldn’t face it.,’
    “Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”
    Although Dusty had faith in the power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all.
    Claudette’s teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws.
    “A couple minutes ago, Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even give you pause. Which is odd, because that is a big idea. Worth discussion if ever anything was.”
    “Are you done?”
    “Not quite. After all these years of putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say. I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we all have, and we’re going to suffer more—”
    Clawing at his hand, drawing two thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said, “If Dominique