I once said as much to Quentin. “I loved my sister,” I told him. “Yes, of course you did,” he said. “No, Uncle Quentin,” I added pointedly, “I loved my sister.” He waved his hand and laughed. “You were only nine years old, Steve,” he said, then stood up and headed for the bathroom, something he always did when the conversation suddenly took a turn he didn’t like.
But he knew.
I think he always knew that our house, the one with the dark green shutters and neat Tudor roof, held within its prim walls the most primitive and violent hopes, needs, and fears. And so he pulled me away from it, as if it were a whirling saw or an exposed electrical wire, snatched me away, and brought me north to the idyllic sterility of coastal Maine, to a landscape that seemed frozen in a rigid self-control. “You have to keep a tight grip on everything,” he once told me. “Remember what happens when you don’t.”
Remember, in other words, my father.
William Patrick Farris, age forty-four.
What I could never fathom was how much Laura loved him, how powerfully she was drawn to him, how much she craved his admiration. Often, in her nightly wanderings, she would move down the stairs to the small solarium which led off from the living room. My mother had placed a few plants there, mostly indistinguishable green vines, along with two white wicker chairs and a glass-topped table. I remember seeing the two of them together in that room, sitting silently opposite each other in the early hours, light gathering outside, while their eyes remained steady, their faces nearly motionless, as if after hours of struggle, they’d finally come to a grave understanding. At those moments, they seemed to share a peculiar exhaustion, their eyes glassy from lost sleep, their skin pale, muscles limp from too much strain.
Even as a young boy, watching them secretively from my place at the top of the stairs, I had felt a mysterious connection between them. Their voices at such moments were always soft, and when they touched each other, it was with an eerie grace.
Later, I imagined that it was at these dawn meetings that she must have revealed herself to him, told him all those secrets she would never have told me.
And so, even before I came to hate my father for what he did to my family, I had envied his relationship with Laura, the whispery conclave the two of them shared, a society that excluded and infuriated me. I wanted to know exactly what kind of power he had over her, break the code by which they spoke to each other, usurp his place in her esteem.
A few weeks before she died, I saw them together in the solarium for the last time. Laura was sitting on the floor, her back pressed against my father’s long, thin legs, her hands resting loosely in her lap while he sat above her in the white wicker chair, gazing out into the early morning light. For once, she looked rested, almost serene, her eyes opening and closing slowly as if she were about to fall asleep.
As for the way my father looked at that moment, I can only say that I’d never seen a man who looked more troubled. It was as if the very thing that had brought Laura such peace that morning had filled my father with an all but unbearable anguish.
Perhaps, even then, he had sensed how she would end.
This way: lying on her back, faceup, her white arms stretched over her head, splattered with blood, two fingers and half the palm of the right hand blown away, as if she’d thrust it toward him at the moment he had fired.
Her legs spread wide apart as if in a vulgar pose, her white bathrobe pulled upward from her soiled bare feet, revealing her thighs and a thin line of white cotton panties.
Her chest blown open, ribs shattered like bits of porcelain, her flesh torn and mangled as if a bomb had gone off behind her heart.
Her mouth flung open, red and gaping, giving her face an attitude of grave surprise, one corner of the white towel she’d wrapped around her wet hair hanging limply, almost clownishly, over a single, blue, wide-open eye.
Along with Jamie and my mother, Laura died at approximately four in the afternoon. It was almost two hours later that Mrs. Hamilton, a neighbor from across the street, saw my father walk out of the house, climb into the Ford station wagon, and drive away. He was wearing a black raincoat and an old floppy hat. He was not carrying anything, not so much as a small overnight bag.
During those long two hours in which he remained in the house, my father washed my mother’s body, changed her into a pair of blue pajamas, and arranged her neatly on the bed. After that, he made a ham sandwich and ate it at the small table in the kitchen. I know it was his sandwich, because in the police photographs, there was a ring of raw onion on the side of the plate. No one but my father ate raw onion. He drank a cup of coffee, leaving both the plate and the cup in the sink as he always did, as if expecting them to be washed later, as normally they would have been.
He didn’t pack anything, because he left with nothing; not so much as a pair of socks was missing from his closet.
He didn’t reenter either Laura or Jamie’s rooms. He made no attempt to clean up the frightful mess that had been made of them.
And yet, for no apparent reason, he remained in the house for a full two hours, alone, silent, surrounded by nothing but the bodies of his murdered wife and children.
What had he been waiting for?
When I became old enough to ponder that question seriously—I was probably around Laura’s age, sixteen—I came up with a great many possibilities. He was waiting for some mysterious phone call. Or he was waiting to go to the airport at just the right time to catch some flight he’d booked weeks in advance. He was waiting to be picked up by gangsters, foreign agents, Communists. My own theory changed each time I considered the question.
Then, rather suddenly, on a spring day as I sat on a rock watching the waves, I arrived at the answer that had no doubt come to the police and Aunt Edna and Uncle Quentin long before, but which they’d kept to themselves, perhaps hoping that the question would never actually occur to me, that I would never seek its answer. But I did seek it, and it did come: He was waiting for me.
Once it had occurred to me, the answer was entirely obvious. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been home from school by three-fifteen in the afternoon, just as Jamie and Laura would. But I’d gone to Bobby Fields’s house instead, a play date my mother had known about all week, but of which my father knew nothing.
And so for nearly two hours my father had waited for me.
It’s possible that he might have waited as long as necessary had not Mrs. Fields made two phone calls to the house on McDonald Drive. According to the statement she later gave police, she made the first call at around 5:30 P.M. When no one answered, she called again twenty minutes later. There was still no answer.
Five minutes or so after that last call, Mrs. Hamilton from across the street saw my father walk through the rain to the Ford station wagon, get in, and drive away.
A half hour later, Mrs. Fields decided, after a good deal of protest from Bobby and me, that she couldn’t take me to the movies without getting parental permission first. She then drove directly to my house, and while Bobby and I remained in the back seat, she got out of the car and walked to the side entrance, which was nearest to the driveway, the one that led directly into the kitchen. She knocked at the door, glancing in as she did so, and saw a plate with a curl of raw onion and an empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink. Glancing idly to the left, she also saw a shotgun laid lengthwise across the small cutting board my mother kept in the corner beside the basement door.