“It’s a lot of things, Rebecca,” I admitted. “It’s not just my past.”
At the car, I stopped and stood very near to her. I could almost feel her breath.
“When do you want to meet again?” I asked.
She watched me hesitantly, but said nothing.
I smiled. “Don’t worry, Rebecca. I’ll go all the way through it with you.”
She nodded. “In all the other cases, there were no survivors,” she said. “I guess I should have known how hard it would be for you, but I just hadn’t had the experience before.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her.
I opened the door and started to get in, but she touched my arm and drew me back around to face her.
“You should only go as far as you want to, Steve,” she said. “No farther.”
“I know,” I told her.
I could feel her hand at my arm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it tightly for a long time. But I knew that close as it seemed to me, her hand might as well have been in another universe.
“Well, good night, then,” she said as she let it drop from my shoulder.
“Good night,” I said, then got into my car.
It was still early, so I stopped off at a small restaurant and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee before going home.
Marie was at the sink when I walked into the kitchen. Peter was at the table, chopping celery.
“You’re home early,” Marie said. “We’re making a tuna dish.”
“I’ve already eaten,” I said idly.
Marie’s eyes shot over to me. “You’ve already eaten?”
I nodded obliviously.
“You got off early and didn’t come home to have dinner with Peter and me?” she asked, in a voice that struck me even then as deeply troubled, as if in this small twist of behavior she’d already begun to detect the approach of her destruction.
“I guess I did,” I said, then added defensively, “Sorry. I just wasn’t thinking.”
Marie looked at me brokenly, but I did nothing to ease her distress.
“I’m going to lie down for a while,” I said, then headed up the stairs.
Once upstairs, I lay down on the bed, my eyes staring at the blank ceiling. Below me, I could hear Peter and Marie as they continued to make their dinner together. Below me, as I realize now, they were shrinking. I should have seen it, like a murderous vision, as I lay alone on my bed that evening. I should have seen Peter fleeing down a dark corridor, Marie cringing behind a cardboard box. I should have seen the circle tightening, felt the first bite of the noose.
But that evening I felt nothing but my own distress. I remembered Rebecca as she’d stood beside me only a short time before, and I knew that I’d wanted to draw her into my arms. Perhaps, at the time, I’d even imagined that she was all I really needed to solve the riddle of my life. But I realize now that Rebecca was only the symbol of those other things I had wanted even more.
“In the deepest and most inchoate longings of these men,”
Rebecca would later write, “there was a central yearning to be embattled, a fierce need for a fierce engagement, so that they saw themselves in that single, searing instant not as killers slaughtering women and children, but as soldiers in the midst of battle, men heroically and perilously engaged in the act of returning fire.”
It was months later, and I was alone, when I read that passage. By then, I was wifeless, childless, homeless. Everything was gone, except my one need to “return fire” as my father had, in an act of sudden and avenging violence.
ELEVEN
DURING THE LAST days of October, as fall retreated and the first wintry rains began, I felt as if some sort of countdown had begun. It wasn’t a radical change, only a shift in direction, a sense of moving into the final phase of something. There was a helplessness about it, a feeling that I no longer controlled my life, that perhaps, a creature of disastrous circumstances, I had never actually controlled it. It seemed my father had destroyed that web of connections which might have given me context, a place to stand in the world. After that, I’d drifted here and there, but always in reaction to something outside myself. I was an accidental architect, an accidental husband, an accidental father—an accidental man.
“They felt their lives were dissolving, didn’t they?” I said to Rebecca at one of our meetings toward the end of October.
Her reply went to the center of how I’d come to feel. “No,” she said. “They felt that in some way they had never lived.”
But rather than thinking of myself at that moment, my mind focused once again on my father, and I remembered how, in the days preceding the murders, he’d seemed to sink into a profound nothingness. For many hours he would sit alone in the solarium, silent, nebulous, hardly there at all. At other times, he would stand by the old wooden fence, his hands deep in his pockets, staring emptily across the lawn. At the very end, he had even stopped answering the phone when it rang at the house on McDonald Drive. It was as if he could no longer imagine that the call might be for him.
“He’d become a worthless shell,” I told Rebecca at one point. “He’d been stripped of everything by then.”
It was the word “stripped” that seemed to catch in Rebecca’s mind. She repeated it slowly, as if it had conjured up something even darker than my father’s crime.
“Stripped to the bone,” I said assuredly. “There was nothing left of him.”
I recalled the dreadful baiting which Jamie had continued to inflict on Laura, and how, in the last weeks, my father had sat by and let it go on day after day. The force that had once moved him to defend my sister had dissipated.
Rebecca didn’t challenge my description of my father’s disintegration, but I could see that it disturbed her. For a time, she even seemed curiously disoriented, as if she’d lost her way somehow. At the next meeting, her questions skirted away from the final days of my family’s life. Instead, she concentrated on other issues, our routines and schedules, the division of chores, all the minutiae of my family’s existence.
Then suddenly, during the second week of November, she regained her direction. It was as if after standing poised at the edge of something for a long time, she’d now decided to plunge over the side.
I arrived at her cottage late on a Thursday afternoon. She’d already started a small fire in the hearth, and it was blazing warmly when I arrived.
“It’s cold out,” she said as I came through the door.
I nodded and began to take off my coat.
“I like November,” she added. “I think it’s my favorite month.”
It struck me as an odd choice. “Why?”
She thought a moment. “I guess because it’s cold enough to make it clear that winter really is coming,” she said, “and that we need shelter.”
I shook my head. “Too rainy,” I said. “Too confining.” I shook my shoulders uncomfortably. “It gets into your bones.”
I sat down in my usual seat, then waited for Rebecca to ease herself into the chair across from me.
But she didn’t do that. She took a seat at the table by the window instead, her briefcase already open before her. For a few seconds, she hesitated, her eyes glancing first out the window, then back to her briefcase, then at last to me.
“Do you remember saying that these men had actually seen the monster?” she asked. “That they’d looked it in the eye?”
“Yes.”
“We have to do that, too,” she said. She picked up a single photograph and handed it to me. “We have to look it in the eye.”
It was a picture of my father standing in front of the hardware store on Sycamore Street. It had been taken the day he’d opened the store, and all of us were with him. I, an infant, slept obliviously in my mother’s arms, while Jamie and Laura seemed to hang like small sacks from my father’s hands.