“Very, very rarely in the winter.”
“I can’t imagine coming to work by plane every day,” Biddy’s mother said.
It wasn’t that expensive, Mr. Carver said. And the time difference was significant.
“How long’s it take to drive?”
“Three and a half hours. That’s opposed to a ten-minute flight.”
“That’s right,” his mother said. “He has to go all the way into the city and back out.”
“You take the Long Island Expressway?” his father asked.
“The L.I.E. to 95, yes.”
“I just think it’s quite a way to begin and end a day, flying,” his mother said.
Carver nodded and sipped his drink.
“When will you be flying again?” Biddy asked.
Mr. Carver peered over at him, mildly surprised at what Biddy realized was an interruption of a sort. “Oh, I expect I’ll be going again when the weather gets better.” He shifted comfortably in his chair. “The cold I don’t mind, but there’s no sense fighting everything else.”
He pressed ahead into the silence, feeling incautious but emboldened by his earlier, still resonating impression of having glimpsed a mechanism of events beginning to take shape. “Which is harder, taking off or landing?”
“Oh, landing,” Carver said without hesitation, and didn’t elaborate. The conversation drifted to other things and dinner was announced. The beef was praised lavishly, though he saw nothing special in it. Afterward the adults slumped in their chairs, lazy with four courses, after-dinner drinks, and coffee. Carols played quietly on the stereo.
He sat at Carver’s feet at the base of the tree. His father seemed lost in the songs, a drink on his thigh; his mother spoke quietly with Mrs. Carver across the room. He asked about the takeoff checklist. He asked about yaw and cruising range. And finally, when he sensed Carver’s attention focusing on the glitter of the ornaments spread before him like the watch fob of a hypnotist, he asked about airport security.
The adults’ argument over nuclear war later that evening raised the possibility in his mind that in fact what he had been doing was simply stockpiling all this information, and although it was being stockpiled there was no inevitability, necessarily, in its ever being used. He drew a double line under the last of the questions that had been answered and shut the note pad and put it away, the Cessna closer than ever and having to wait for the weather. He released the image from his concentration, resolving halfheartedly to give Christmas its chance.
The next night, Mickey was his official guest. The visit wasn’t his idea; they hadn’t said more than a few words to each other since Thanksgiving. Mickey had never explained his earlier behavior and Biddy had long since lost the energy to press for an explanation. Dom and Ginnie were making an annual Christmas trip to Pittsfield to visit friends. Mickey, who hated the trip, was being allowed to stay with the Sieberts, who, Biddy was sure, had only occurred to him in a moment of desperation. Cindy had gotten out of the trip as well, he’d related indignantly to Biddy over the phone, claiming she had other friends to see upstate, near Hartford, so there was no reason he should have to go. Louis alone was going. Long car trips never bothered him, and he bore all strangers and distant relations with equanimity.
They played Nerf Basketball and War and Sports Illustrated Football and then, although he’d never shown anyone else the game and hadn’t touched the dice in months himself, he tried dice baseball. Mickey was bored in minutes and lost interest by the fifth inning.
“This game sucks,” he said. “You got anything else? You got Atari?”
Biddy shook his head. There was nothing on television, either.
“I got Stratamatic Baseball,” Mickey said, without enthusiasm. “Wanna play that?”
Biddy felt himself a host, his guest’s happiness his responsibility. Mickey’s boredom was his failure. “Sure,” he said.
It was at his house. Biddy protested his parents would never let them out so late, but Mickey interrupted impatiently that they would just say they were going out in the yard, to build a snow fort or something. Biddy relented, and after some discussion his parents did as well.
They walked along the road in single file, the wind cold and the snow crunching in the moonlight. The sky seemed a deep blue curtain in the distance over the airport. The plan was to pick up the game and return, pretending Mickey had had it all along.
There seemed to be no cars on the road, nothing stirring.
“It’s so quiet,” he murmured.
“Yeah.” Mickey took it as a complaint.
“Won’t your door be locked?”
“There’s an extra key in the garage.”
They scraped on in silence. Powdery snow drifted across ice and pavement like sand on a dune. They could hear the hiss of snow tires on a nearby street. He was bundled and secure in his coat.
They turned onto Ryegate Terrace and Mickey said, “Someone’s home.”
A warm, feeble light was visible in the downstairs bedroom.
“Ronnie’s here,” Biddy said. His car was behind Cindy’s.
“My sister, too. What a liar.” Mickey wiped his nose with a mitten, the smear across it shining under the streetlight. “We should spy on them.” He seemed to have no interest in the idea.
They came up the driveway quietly and Mickey tested the door. “It’s unlocked,” he said. He creaked it open. It occurred to Biddy while he waited that something shameful or illicit or exciting might be going on, but the door was swinging open and he followed Mickey in.
They could make out Ronnie at the kitchen table, his finger to his lips. He wasn’t moving.
“What are you doing in the dark?” Mickey whispered, quieted more by the lack of light than by Ronnie’s gesture.
“Be quiet,” Ronnie said. A radio was softly playing in another room. They came into the kitchen soundlessly. Ronnie still hadn’t moved, frozen in his chair. His voice came out of the darkness like a recording. “What’re you doing here?”
“Came to get a game,” Mickey said faintly. “Where’s Cindy?”
“Go get it. Go upstairs. Don’t make a sound.”
Mickey edged past him into the hallway and disappeared.
“You too,” he said. Biddy couldn’t see his eyes. “Get out of here. Go upstairs.”
“What’s wrong?” The whispering, the sitting in the dark, the tone of Ronnie’s voice scared him.
“Go upstairs.”
Biddy slipped past him through the hallway and into the living room, shrinking into the shadows against the wall. He could make out other noises in the bedroom as well as the radio, but they were muffled and intermittent.
Ronnie was still perfectly silent. The pendulum of the clock near him clicked steadily. Finally there was the slightest noise, of the chair on the linoleum floor, and the faint clatter of the cutlery drawer being opened. Something was slid out, the sound like that of a single stroke of a knife on a sharpening steel.
Biddy waited, the only sounds coming from the bedroom. When he couldn’t bear it any longer he eased forward and was about to peek around the corner into the kitchen when Ronnie moved noiselessly past, their faces only inches apart, with the wall between them. He disappeared down the hall. After a moment Biddy followed, amazed at himself. The hall closet door was slightly ajar and he slipped behind it, his feet nudging aside clothes baskets and boxes of detergent on the floor. He edged in until, leaning on the inside wall, he could peer out of the crack under the hinge between the door and the jamb.
Ronnie stood framed in his vision, pausing at the bedroom door. His hand was closed around the knob. The noises inside were more distinct now and Biddy could distinguish Cindy’s murmurs. Ronnie had a knife in his hand.