The Family Tree Read Free

working with people, and finding out who was really to blame was itself a course in investigating crime. Most importantly, being a cop meant having rules for everything. If you studied the book and did it by the book, you had nothing to blame yourself for. Once you knew the rules, you could relax and be yourself. You didn’t have to second-guess yourself.
    “I like it,” she said.
    “Well, of course, dear, or you wouldn’t do it,” said Loulee. “And you’ve got plenty of time to have a family, don’t you? You’re not even thirty-five yet.”
    She was now. Since yesterday, a fact which everyone seemed to have overlooked, including Jared. Thirty-five years old, thirteen years on the job. Not that she’d ever made a big fuss over her birthday. At home, they’d hadthree birthday parties a year. One on the fourth of July for the three born in May, June and July; one on Halloween for the four September through December kids; and one on Valentine’s day for the January and March kids. Three sets of cakes and parties was all Dora and Grandma had been able to manage.
    The first of the younger kids, which is what Dora always called the other eight, had been born when Dora was five. That was Michael, and he’d been a howler, and Mama hadn’t felt well enough to walk him or rock him or dandle him, and Daddy had to have his sleep, or, so he said, he couldn’t get anything done the next day (not that he got anything done anyhow), so Dora had done most of the baby tending. All the summer after he was born, and most of the year after that, with only time out for school.
    “Take care of the baby, Dora. You’re his big sister. That’s why babies have big sisters.”
    She remembered Daddy’s voice saying that in his slightly peevish voice. She recalled Little Dora feeling the weight of those words, more burdensome than the weight of Michael in her arms. He was a big baby, hard for her to hold. It was hard becoming big sister. She had to become an entirely different person.
    Sometimes now, when the day had been long and she lay drowsily in her bed with everything quiet, she remembered Little Dora as she might remember a story she had heard. A little girl who had heard ecstatic music in her head. A little girl whose every experience was accompanied by complicated and fantastic sound: the thunder of deep drums, the bray of trumpets or the sonorous clamor of horns. In that child’s remembered life the sun rose to sensuous violins, noons were a stutter of brass, evenings waned in wandering oboe melodies, night faded into plush purple violas and bassoons. Every Little Dora day had been joyous with music.
    Of course, music was appropriate in paradise. She hadn’t called it paradise at the time; she hadn’t called it anything, it was simply her world. When she walked outthe front door of the house, she entered a forest of trees, was surrounded by flocks of birds, met all kinds of animals that she talked with, had conversations with. It was as vivid in her mind as if it had been yesterday.
    Until Michael. From the moment Daddy called her “big sister,” the music stopped and other living things became sparse and occasional. The forest became one gaunt tree out back by the ash pit. The flock of birds became one fat crow perched on the fence pecking at something dead held in his talons. The beasts were only the neighbor’s cat, the grocery man’s dog.
    She missed the music most, for it stopped so suddenly she thought she had gone deaf, wished she had gone deaf so she couldn’t hear Michael’s fretful howling and Mama’s petulant “Can’t you quiet that baby?” and Daddy’s “For heaven’s sake, feed that child, Dora, you know where the bottle is.” Michael didn’t tolerate the formula very well. None of them ever tolerated the formula very well. Mama said she had tried to nurse Dora, but she didn’t feel well enough, and besides, she didn’t like it, all that chewing at her, so she wouldn’t try with