“We began it in the afternoon,” I told her. “Then we had a long meeting in the general contractor’s trailer.”
For a moment she seemed vaguely embarrassed, as if by her own dark thoughts. “Oh,” she said, her voice less accusatory, though a strained quality lingered in it. Then she smiled faintly. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re home,” she said.
“Me, too,” I told her, though I knew it was a lie, that I wanted to be with Rebecca instead.
“Any more questions?” I asked half jokingly.
“I guess not.”
I offered a quick smile, then headed upstairs. It was a gesture of flight, I recognized, a darting-away from the seaminess of the lie I’d just told Marie, perhaps even a flight from the uneasiness and foreboding I’d felt at the moment of telling it.
Once alone in the bedroom, I thought of my father, of the way he’d hurled the book at my mother’s chest that night on Cape Cod. I wondered if he’d felt the same restriction I felt now. Had there been some place outside his home that had called to him with an irresistible urgency? Later on that balmy summer night on Cape Cod, as I remembered now, I’d glimpsed him in the yard, standing beside my mother in the moonlight, his arm draped loosely around her shoulder. They’d returned from a long walk, and for a moment, as they’d stood together in the darkness, they’d actually looked like a couple in love. For a moment, he’d drawn her in more closely and kissed her hair. I wondered now if that gesture had been nothing more than part of a vast deception. Had my father really wanted to be with her that night? Had he wanted to be with any of us? Or had he secretly yearned for another life, one in which every moment was filled with challenge and surprise, a life from which we blocked him simply by being alive?
I thought of each of us in turn. I saw Jamie in his sullen anger and isolation; Laura in her reeling moods, walking the house in the blue twilight; my mother forever locked within the folds of her red housedress; myself, a small, ordinary boy, indistinguishable from any other. Last I saw my father, still distant and mysterious, a figure walking behind us, the grip of the shotgun nestled, almost gently, in his hands.
I remembered Rebecca’s purpose again, her search for whatever it was in life that these men had been unable to bear, and in my father’s case it occurred to me that the unbearable thing for which Rebecca was still searching might have been nothing more mysterious than ourselves, that we were, each of us, in our own individual lives, unbearable to him, the living proof that his life had come to nothing.
I walked to the bedroom window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The lights from the suburban street seemed dull and lifeless. For years I’d been able to look out that same window without the slightest sense of disturbance. Now the very look of it made me cringe, for it seemed to me that my life, like all the other lives around me, possessed only the manageable level of risk, and no real jeopardy at all. Lived within its confines, we hunted the appropriate game, settled for the reachable star. We made the roads straight and flat. We turned on the light before we headed down the corridor, and grabbed the railing as we inched cautiously down the padded stairs. We grew old in a world of shallow breaths, feared both gasps and sighs.
And yet, for all that, the very next morning I went on with my routine as if nothing were changing in my life. I sat at the breakfast table and made small talk with Marie and Peter. Dutifully, I asked about Marie’s latest bid, about Peter’s work in school. But even as I listened to them, their voices sometimes faded, their faces drifted off” into a blur, as if they were becoming mere white noise.
“Finish up, Peter,” I heard Marie say as she got to her feet, “you’re going to be late for school.”
I remained at the table while Marie went upstairs to finish dressing and Peter darted to his room to get his jacket. Seconds later, I heard him dash by me. He gave me a quick “Bye, Dad,” then bolted out the door.
“Are you still here?” Marie said later when she came into the kitchen.
I looked at her. “What time is it?”
I could see that the question struck her as odd. “You’re wearing a watch, Steve,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, then glanced down at it, but didn’t move.
“Shouldn’t you be leaving?” Marie asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
I got up and went to my car. As I began to guide it out of the driveway, Marie came out of the kitchen and walked toward me. I stopped the car as she came near.
“You don’t look well, Steve,” she said worriedly. “Do you want to stay home today?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine,” I said with a small, dismissive smile.
Marie didn’t smile back. “You need to take care of yourself, Steve,” she said in a voice as full of real concern as I’d ever heard, a voice that should have comforted and relieved me, but didn’t.
I shrugged. “I’m fine,” I repeated, then let the car begin to drift away again.
She said nothing more, but simply stepped away from the car and watched, without waving good-bye, as I glided down the driveway. Now, when I think of her, I often see her in that pose, standing in the grass, her arms folded over her chest, watching silently as I drifted from her sight.
Once at my office, I went directly to my desk and began working on the library I’d been designing. But even as I worked, adding lines and filling in details, I felt that I was continually returning to the house on McDonald Drive. Curiously, I no longer dreaded these returns. Instead, I seemed to move back toward that lost place with an increasing sense of rendezvous and complicity. My companion was always Rebecca, and I sometimes felt that I was walking hand in hand with her through the separate murder rooms. I could hear her voice, as if in whispers, pointing out details, the open textbook on Jamie’s desk, my sister’s bare feet. The bodies of my dead family seemed to lie sensually before us, as if we were joined in the rapture of my father’s crime.
It was over a week before I saw her again, and it seemed an infinitely long time. Each time the phone rang on my desk, I hoped that it would be she, whispering to me with a grave intimacy, as if we were lovers, bursting with breathless communications.
She called on a Wednesday afternoon, and we met at her cottage the following evening. I expected to exchange a few pleasantries, but Rebecca got right down to business instead.
She’d gotten some additional information from Swenson, she told me, and even as we began where we’d left off the week before, I sensed that she was holding something back. Even so, I didn’t press the point. By then I’d become quite willing to go at whatever pace Rebecca set. Perhaps I’d even sensed that to know everything Rebecca knew would dull the intensity of the journey we were making together—something I didn’t want to happen. What I wanted was to feel that intensity and peril all the time, to tremble forever at the edge of some sudden, apocalyptic discovery.
And so I followed Rebecca’s lead, anticipating nothing, merely letting her questions guide me back.
“You said that things became more tender between your father and Laura after that night on the beach,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But they’d always had a close relationship, hadn’t they?”
“Yes,” I said. “But he seemed to pay even more attention to her after that. It was almost as if he were studying her, trying to get an idea of what was going on inside.”
“And you only noticed this change after you’d returned from the Cape?”
“Yes.”
We’d gotten back on a Monday night, Labor Day 1959, all of us crammed into the dark brown station wagon. My father drove, of course, while my mother sat in the front seat, her right shoulder pressed tightly up against the door, her face pale and bloodless as she stared straight ahead. Her eyes seemed lifeless, drained of light, and the sallow skin of the face that surrounded them made her look like a department store mannequin.