“Because of what happened the next morning.”
I had gotten up early, just at dawn, a little boy needing to go to the bathroom. The light was pouring through the high window to the right of Jamie’s desk, and some of it spread out into the hallway when I opened the door and headed for the downstairs bathroom.
It was located to the left of the stairs, just off the kitchen, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I saw my father working furiously inside its cramped space. He was going through all the drawers of the small cabinet that we used to store such things as toothpaste and extra rolls of toilet paper. The door of the mirrored medicine chest that hung above the small white porcelain sink, and which my mother used to store the family’s various medicines, was open. My father had assembled a large number of bottles and plastic pill containers along the rim of the sink, and he was intently reading the labels of each of them in turn, his eyes squinting fiercely as he read. After reading a label, he would either return the container to the medicine chest or drop it into the plain gray shoe box he’d placed on top of the toilet.
“So from all this, you’ve come to believe that your mother had tried to kill herself that night?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes.”
“And that the next morning your father had tried to find out what she’d used so that he could get rid of it?”
I nodded. “Because later that morning, I saw him put the shoe box in his van.”
Rebecca scribbled a few notes into her notebook, then glanced up at me. “When did you see your mother again?”
“Later that day,” I answered. “She looked very weak. Like an old woman, frail.”
But she looked more than weak, more than frail. She looked devastated.
I had arrived home from school just a few minutes earlier and was busily making myself a peanut butter sandwich when I saw her make her way shakily down the stairs. The house was empty save for the two of us. Neither Laura nor Jamie had gotten back home yet, and my father was still at work in the hardware store downtown.
“She must have heard me fiddling around in the kitchen,” I told Rebecca. “That’s probably why she came down.” In my mind, I saw her drag herself down that long flight of stairs, still exhausted and probably in some kind of pain, so that she could say the three barely audible words as she drew herself into the kitchen.
“‘Welcome home, Stevie,’ that’s what she said to me. That’s all she said. Just ‘Welcome home, Stevie.’” I shook my head. “Poor Dottie,” I said. “She died in that same old red housedress she wore when she came down to the kitchen that afternoon.”
Rebecca’s pen stopped dead. “No, she didn’t,” she said. “She was killed in a regular skirt and blouse.”
“She was?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why did you think she’d been wearing the red housedress?”
I shook my head, astonished and a little unnerved by my own weird conjectures. “I don’t know why I thought that,” I said.
Rebecca watched me with a kind of eerie wariness, as if, perhaps, she already did.
TWELVE
PETER WAS at the small desk in the den, intently tracing a map, when I got home from my evening with Rebecca. It was part of that night’s schoolwork, and he was working at it diligently, as he always did. He barely looked up as I passed, and when he did, a fringe of blond hair fell over his right eye.
“Hi, Dad,” he said, then returned to the map.
I nodded toward him as I headed on down the corridor. I could see the light shining in Marie’s office, and some part of me wanted to avoid it, to slink up the stairs, away from her increasingly uneasy gaze. But the stairs themselves rested at the end of the corridor. Only a ghost could have made it past her door unseen.
She was behind her desk, as usual, a classical piece playing softly in the background, something I didn’t recognize.
“How’s it going?” I asked casually as I stopped at her door.
She glanced up and smiled somewhat tiredly. “Fine,” she said. She was wearing her reading glasses, but she took them off to look at me thoughtfully for a moment, her face very quiet, one part of it in shadow, the other brightly illuminated by the lamp at her right.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” Marie answered in a strange, uncertain reply.
“All your projects moving along?”
It clearly struck her as a spiritless question, with an answer neither wanted nor expected, but she did not make an issue of it. Instead, her mind appeared to shift to a more casual concern. “I thought we might call out for a pizza for dinner,” she said.
I nodded. “Fine with me.”
The thoughtful look returned, studious, concentrated, as if she were trying to read something written on my forehead. “You’ve been getting home at such odd hours for the past few weeks, it’s hard to know exactly when to cook,” she said.
I nodded. “We’re finishing up a few big drafting jobs at the office,” I told her, though she had not asked for any further explanation of my unusual absences.
“Finishing up?” she asked. “So things should be back to normal soon?”
“Yeah, pretty soon.”
She smiled, though a little stiffly. “That’s good,” she said.
“Anything else?” I asked.
The question seemed to strike her as more serious than I had meant it. She looked at me solemnly. “Should there be?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of.”
“Okay,” Marie said, but with an unmistakable tone of resignation, as if a chance had been offered, but not taken. Then she reached for the phone, though her eyes never left me. “With anchovies?” she asked, in a voice that sounded unexpectedly sad.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I told her, drawing away from the door. “I just need to go wash up.”
I walked up the stairs to our bathroom and washed my hands. As I did so, the phrase Marie had used, “back to normal,” lingered uncomfortably in my mind. For Marie, it meant the return to a precious predictability and routine. To me, however, it meant the end of something exciting and full of unexpected discovery. As I dried my hands that evening, I felt like a man who’d lived for many years on a deserted island, only to spot, for a single, shining hour, the approach of a long white ship, the dream of rescue growing wildly with each passing moment, until, after an excruciating interval of anticipation, the great ship had drifted once again toward the far horizon, and, at last, disappeared beneath the flat gray of the sea.
“Steve?”
It was Marie calling from downstairs, but I couldn’t answer. I stood, as if transfixed by the misty glass of the bathroom mirror.
“Steve, the pizza’s here.”
The pizza had arrived, and moving as if on automatic pilot, I went downstairs, paid the delivery boy, and brought the large square box into the kitchen.
Peter and Marie gathered around, and I methodically gave each of them a slice, then got one of my own, eating it silently with them at the kitchen table.
Across from me, I could see Peter’s blond head lowered over his plate, but I didn’t think of him, or of Marie. Instead, I returned to my father.
I saw him in his long silences, in the lair he’d made for himself in the gray basement. I saw him as he watched each of us go through our daily, unexalted lives, and I wondered at the process by which we had been reduced to nothing in his eyes. Nothing, at least, beyond profound intrusions. Had he spent night after night in the house on McDonald Drive, listening mutely to our squabbling, and thought only of how he might be released from us, set free, at last, to go to … what?
Was it to his own, still undiscovered version of Rebecca?
Was it the pain of not being with her that he had, at last, found impossible to bear?
It was hard to imagine, and yet I had no choice. I wondered if during the long, drab dinners at our kitchen table, my father had dreamed of a “someone else” while he’d listened absently to our quarreling or our dull school day gossip. Had he dreamed of spiriting her away to his own dream house, a cottage in the hills, perhaps? And each time, had that rapturous vision foundered on the banks of our daily bickering and mundane pettiness?