The Wall Behind My Baby’s Crib

In the days after Roy’s crew tore the wall open the rest of the way, I could not stop myself from asking around Caldwell about Eleanor Porter, the way you cannot stop pressing on a bruise once you know it is there. I started with our next door neighbor, a widow named Marge Dutton who had lived on Sycamore Street for forty years and who brought over a casserole the week we moved in without my ever having to ask.

Marge was the one who finally told me, sitting at my kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug she did not drink from, that Eleanor Porter had been sick for the better part of three years before she died, a slow, wasting kind of sick that nobody in town ever quite settled on a name for. “We all just said it was her heart,” Marge told me. “Gene said it was her heart. The way he said it, so sure of himself, nobody thought to argue.” She remembered visiting near the end, remembered a headache Eleanor complained about that never fully lifted, remembered a cough that got worse every evening and eased some mornings when Gene wheeled her chair out onto the porch for the fresh air. She remembered, too, a smell in the house toward the back hallway that everyone politely never mentioned, the kind of thing you learn not to comment on in a sickroom.

“You think he knew,” Marge said. It was not a question.

I told her what Roy had told us, about the leak, about the two coats of paint eight years apart, and I watched Marge’s face go through the same collapse I would later watch happen to Gene himself on the courthouse lawn, disbelief curdling slowly into something closer to grief. “He always did hate spending money on things nobody else could see,” she said finally. “I used to think that was frugality. I am ashamed to say I used to admire it.”

It was Marge, in the end, who told me Gene would be at the Harvest Festival that Saturday, seated by the cider booth same as every year, because missing it would have raised more questions in Caldwell than showing up ever would. She did not tell me to go looking for a confrontation. She did not have to. I had already decided, sometime between the tobacco tin and the pediatrician’s office, that I was not going to let this be a secret that only lived in my kitchen and Roy’s clipboard and a dead woman’s ribbon-tied lock of hair. I wanted Gene Porter to hear, from me, in front of the town that trusted him, exactly what his silence had cost.