But he did no such thing. After a few more impossibly tense seconds, he simply rose silently and left us, a lean, disjointed figure striding awkwardly across the green summer lawn.
Laura had resumed teaching me about the knight by the time Jamie had finally disappeared into the house. She went directly to its moves, to various ways of using it. She didn’t try to explain what she’d meant with that angry, nearly whispered “Sort of,” and I never heard her say anything so cryptic to Jamie after that.
So what had my sister meant that day beneath the maple tree?
For well over thirty years, it was a question I’d never asked. Then, that Sunday morning, as Peter and Marie slept upstairs and I sat at my desk, with both Rebecca and her mission steadily gaining force in my own mind, I tried to find out. I went to the box I’d brought up from the basement the day before, hoping that the answer might be there.
Within a matter of only a few minutes, I discovered that it was.
EIGHT
THREE DAYS LATER, Rebecca had hardly taken her seat across from me at the restaurant before I handed her the document I’d found in the box. She took it from my hand and began to read it. What I gave her that evening was something she’d already asked for, my father’s army records. After the war, he’d taken a few college classes under the GI Bill of Rights. A short application process had been required, and he’d submitted several forms to prove that he’d been in the army. One of them was a listing of his whereabouts during all that time. It began with Newark, New Jersey, where he’d been inducted in June of 1940, and ended with New York City, where he’d been mustered out on a medical discharge, an injured knee, in May of 1942. All the places my father had lived during those two years of military service were listed in the document, along with all of his official leaves. What it showed unmistakably was that he had lived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from July of 1941 until April of 1942, when he’d been given leave to return to New Jersey, and where, on April 1, he’d married my mother in a civil ceremony in Somerset.
When Rebecca finished reading, she looked up, her face very still. She had instantly put it together.
“Jamie was not your father’s son,” she said.
“No, he couldn’t have been. My father was in North Carolina when my brother was conceived.”
“And so he must have known that he wasn’t the father of the child your mother was carrying. Even on the day he married her,” Rebecca added wonderingly.
“Yes, he had to have known that.”
She thought a moment, then asked, “So who was Jamie’s father?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “How could I know? It all happened a long time before I was born.” Then something occurred to me. “Do you have the pictures you showed me last time?”
“Yes.” Rebecca took them out and spread them across the table.
I lifted the one that showed my mother posed alluringly against the stone wall and handed it to Rebecca. “I think maybe the man who took this was Jamie’s father,” I said. “I mean, look at my mother, at the way her face is shining.”
Rebecca let her eyes dwell on the picture as I continued.
“I think my mother was in love that day,” I said. “She was satisfied in every way. I don’t think my father ever made her feel like that.”
Rebecca returned the photograph to the table. She remained silent.
“Reading all those romance novels, that was the way my mother went back to that time in her life,” I told her. “She never forgot him. She never forgot the way he made her feel.” I glanced over at the picture of my father. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear, that he was going to live the rest of his life in the shadow of my mother’s first love.”
“Which might explain your mother’s murder, and perhaps even Jamie’s,” Rebecca said. “But what about Laura?”
I had no answer, and after a moment, Rebecca’s eyes returned to the picture of my father on his wedding day. “Even though he must have known about the child, he looks very happy in this picture,” she said.
“He was happy, I think,” I admitted. “It’s the only picture he ever looked that happy in.”
She thought a while longer, then returned her attention to the military document that had revealed everything. “Where did you find this?”
“In some papers my aunt left me,” I said, “but there was something else I couldn’t find.”
I told her about the blue papers, the ones Laura had found in the garage that day, the ones, I felt sure now, that had told her everything about Jamie, that he was only “sort of” a member of our family.
“So Laura knew,” I said when I’d finished, “and she used that knowledge against Jamie at least once.”
I went through the story of the argument beneath the maple tree.
“Do you think Jamie knew what Laura meant?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know.”
Rebecca considered everything I’d told her for a few seconds. “What were the blue papers?” she asked finally. “They weren’t documents, were they?”
“No … I think they could have been love letters,” I answered slowly, “from Jamie’s real father. Letters she couldn’t part with.”
“Even at the risk of their being found.”
“Yes.”
And so all my old surmises about my mother had been wrong. “Poor Dottie” had swooned to someone’s touch, had caught her breath, taken a stunning risk, and in doing that had lived for just a moment the life she only read about from then on, in novels piled beside her bed.
Rebecca leaned back in her seat and remained very quiet for a long time. She was still thinking about my mother, I believe, but my mind had shifted over to my father, to the smiling figure in the photograph, triumphant on his wedding day.
“He must have loved my mother a great deal to marry her knowing that she was already carrying another man’s child,” I said.
Rebecca didn’t look so sure.
I remembered the look on my father’s face the night I’d gone down into the basement, stopped on the third step, and watched him work silently on his latest Rodger and Windsor until his eyes had finally lifted toward me. I heard his words again: This is all I want.
“Or maybe all he ever wanted was just a wife and kids,” I said.
Rebecca looked at me. “Except that he killed his wife, and two of his children,” she said sharply, “slaughtered them one by one, in cold blood.”
It was at that moment that the full ruin of my family struck me in all its horror. In a weird, nightmarish vision, I felt myself pass effortlessly through the walls of 417 McDonald Drive as if they were nothing more than stage scrims, solid at one moment, dreamily transparent at the next, so that I could see through the whole house at a single glance, see one day’s death unroll before me in far more grisly and exact detail than I had ever been able to imagine it before.
My father’s old brown van glides into the rainswept driveway, its slick black tires throwing arcs of water into the air behind them. From its gloomy interior, my father’s face stares at me from behind the van’s black, serrated wheel, his eyes glowing from its gray interior like unblinking small blue lights. He does not linger inside the van, but emerges quickly and determinedly, then walks at a measured, unhurried pace toward the side door of the house. Once inside, he slaps his old gray hat softly against the side of his leg, sending a shower of shimmering droplets across the gleaming, checked tile of the kitchen floor. For a single, suspended moment, he stares about the room, taking in its empty, lifeless space, his face a rigid, wooden mask, with nothing moving in it but his eyes. They settle finally on the basement door.
He walks down the stairs to the tall metal cabinet he has always used to store his tools. He opens it in a single smooth, untroubled movement, all indecision long behind him, and withdraws a long object which years ago he had stored away, wrapping it in brown paper and binding it haphazardly with a length of frazzled twine. At the small workbench he had once used to assemble his Rodger and Windsor bicycles, he unwraps the shotgun and lays it out across the wooden worktable. For a few seconds he strokes its wooden stock deliciously, as if it were a woman’s smooth, brown thigh.