For a moment I stared at the two pictures together, the wedding photo, and next to it my mother’s motionless body, imagining the slow crawl of time that divided them, the invisible span of days and months and years that stretched from the smiling bride to the immobile corpse so neatly laid out behind the closed bedroom curtains. Suddenly, I saw my mother alive again, squatting by the little flower garden in the early evening, digging at the ground with her rusty spade as my father’s brown van pulled into the driveway.
Often during those last weeks, he had not gotten out of the van immediately, but had remained inside, sitting behind the wheel, watching my mother silently while he smoked a cigarette, his light blue eyes piercing through the curling fog as they settled frozenly on my mother like the cross hairs of a telescopic sight.
“I can’t imagine why he did it, Rebecca,” I said.
She looked at me pointedly, but said nothing.
“But I think he knew why,” I added.
I told about the time I’d gone down into the basement not long before the murders and found my father at work on the bicycle. I described his body clothed in gray flannel, his hands working steadily at the bicycle until they’d stopped abruptly, and he’d looked up at me, his eyes eerily motionless and sad, but utterly clear at the same time. I told her about standing on the third step, watching my father silently until he’d finally noticed me, lifted his eyes and held me in his gaze for a long moment before telling me cryptically that “this” was all he wanted.
Rebecca did not write any of it down in the little pad she’d placed at her right hand. She merely listened attentively until I repeated my inevitable conclusion.
“I think my father was very conscious that there was something missing in his life,” I told her. I recalled his face again, the way he’d looked that night, the unreadable sadness I’d glimpsed in his eyes.
Once again my eyes swept down to the photograph, my father’s face shining toward me from the picture taken on his wedding day. There was no doubt of his happiness on that day, of the delight he’d felt. He had the look of a man who believed that he’d accomplished something.
“Something missing,” I repeated as I glanced back up at her again. “Which made him want to kill us all.”
Rebecca’s next question surprised me. “Why do you think he didn’t kill you, Steve?”
“I think he intended to,” I told her, “but that he got scared off by the phone calls.”
“The ones Mrs. Fields made,” Rebecca said. She took a pen out of her briefcase and held it over the blank page of her notebook. “So you don’t think he spared you because he had some special feeling for you?” she asked. “Or maybe even because you were his youngest son.”
“Well, he killed his oldest son,” I said, “so why wouldn’t he have killed me?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think he intentionally spared me. I think that if I’d come home on time that afternoon, he’d have killed me just like he killed the others.”
She paused a moment before asking her next question. “What’s your most vivid memory of your father?”
I hesitated before answering, though not in an attempt to keep her in suspense, but only because, at first, I wasn’t sure. Finally, I said, “I remember how much my sister loved him.”
Rebecca’s eyes softened, as if this gentle answer had reached her unexpectedly.
“I don’t know what she saw in my father,” I added. “He always seemed so ordinary to me.”
The word “ordinary” appeared to surprise her.
“I mean, he didn’t have any special skills,” I explained. “He wasn’t a great talker, or anything like that. The only thing that ever really interested him was those bicycles of his.”
Rebecca looked at me curiously. “Bicycles?”
I nodded. “He imported very expensive racing bikes from England. Special ones. Rodger and Windsor. They were always red, he sold them in that little hardware store he owned. It was like some kind of obsession. He would assemble them himself, and he was always down in the basement doing that.”
“Down in the basement? Would your sister sometimes go down there?”
I’d never thought of it before, but Rebecca’s question brought it all back.
“Yes, she would,” I said. “I’d sometimes hear them talking together.”
Even at that moment, with Rebecca sitting across from me as evening fell outside the glass windows, I could hear those voices as if they were still lifting toward me, rising like smoke through the floor. They were soft voices, almost in whispers, secretive, intimate.
“Do you have any idea what they talked about?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t think Laura ever told me.”
I let my mind drift back. I could see Laura moving across the living room, her bare feet padding across the beige carpet, her long dark hair flowing down her back as she headed for the door that led down the stairs to the basement. I could hear my father’s hammer tapping just below me, then the sound of Laura’s feet as she walked down the stairs. It was at that point, as I remembered, that the tapping had always stopped. Stopped entirely, and never started again until Laura had come back up the stairs. The memory produced a faintly alarming realization.
“She was the only one in the family who could draw him away from that obsession he had with bicycles,” I said. “I guess you could say she was the only person who had any real power over him.”
“What kind of power?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there are only a few kinds,” Rebecca said, ticking them off one by one. “There’s money, of course, and love. Kinship. Desire.” Rebecca stared at me intently. “And duty. These men are always dutiful.”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “My father was dutiful.”
As I spoke, I saw him join the ranks of these other men. Like them, he’d been dutiful down to the last second. For a moment, I envisioned him as a ghostly, scooped-out man in gray flannels, trudging wearily up the aisle of the hardware store, his arms laden with tools or boxes of nails. I wondered how often during that long walk up the same dusty aisle he’d searched for some way out of his vast responsibilities, a pathway through the bramble, before he’d settled upon murder. I imagined him making another choice, to live and let us live, going on, year after year, growing old and gray and bent as he sat behind the wheel of the brown van. I imagined my mother aging into a crippled husk, unable to bend any longer over her desolate little flower garden. I saw Jamie fattening into middle age, Laura drying into a parched doll. Had my father seen all that, too? Had he glimpsed the whole dark game, seen it play out move by move in a process so unbearable that he’d finally settled on murder as a way to break the rules?
“Very dutiful,” I repeated. “Despite the way life is.”
“The way life is?” Rebecca repeated, as if puzzled by the phrase.
“You know, the way people live,” I said. “Going to work every day. Sticking to the same job. Coming home at the same time. Day after day, the same rooms, the same faces.”
Rebecca began to write in her notebook. I watched her hand, the slender fingers wrapped delicately around the dark shaft of the pen. I’d heard the strange contempt which had risen into my voice as I’d described the mundane nature of everyday life, and as I watched Rebecca’s pen skirt across the open page of her notebook, I felt that somehow I had exposed myself. It was an uneasy and unsettling feeling, and for an instant I regretted that I’d ever agreed to talk to her.
“You know, sometimes I’m not really sure I can go on with this,” I said.
She looked at me squarely. “You can stop whenever you want.”
But I knew that I couldn’t in the least do that. I knew that I’d become enamored of a mystery, that I wanted to feel the edgy tension and exhilaration of closing in upon a dangerous and undiscovered thing.