Rebecca looked as if I’d just confirmed something that had only been a conjecture before.
“He’d never asked me to do that before.”
“And then you went to school just like always?” Rebecca asked.
I nodded. “Yes, we all went together. Well, at least Laura and I did. Jamie always went ahead of us.”
“Did you and Laura talk about anything in particular that morning?”
“No,” I said. “We just walked to school like always. She left me at my school, then walked on to hers, about three blocks down the road.”
“When did you see Laura again?”
“She was waiting at the corner for me right after school,” I said. “She always did that.”
For a moment, as I remembered her standing on the corner waiting for me that afternoon, her books in her arms, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, I felt her loss again, but this time with a piercing depth, as if all the conversations I might have had with her in life, all the good and comforting times we might have had together, had suddenly swept over me in a great wave of imagined days. I saw us share all that we had not been allowed to share, the keenest experiences of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, the approach of middle age, all that my father had abruptly and mysteriously canceled as surely as he’d canceled those two plane tickets to Mexico.
“I loved my sister,” I said, though barely above a whisper. “And I think she loved me.”
Rebecca’s next question came at me like a slap in the face. “And Jamie,” she asked, “did you love him?”
I answered without hesitation. “No.”
“Did anyone in the family love him?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “He always seemed alone.”
Alone in his bunk, alone at his desk, alone beneath the tree in the backyard, always alone.
“So Jamie never waited for you after school?” Rebecca asked.
“No, only Laura did that,” I answered. “She was always there, waiting on the corner, just like she was that first day of school.”
Despite the warmth of the weather, as I recalled then, the first leaves of autumn had already begun to drift down upon us. I saw them fall slowly, but thickly, as Laura and I made our way down Ontario Street, and I felt a great sadness settle upon me, like the leaves.
“The leaves were falling,” I said to Rebecca. “They were very red.”
But they could not have been red, I realized. I was not thinking of leaves. I was thinking of my sister’s death, and Jamie’s and my mother’s. I was thinking of their thickly falling blood.
“Did you and your sister talk much on the way home that afternoon?” Rebecca asked.
“Not that I recall.”
“You walked silently, all the way home?”
Something came back vaguely, a tiny detail. “No, I don’t think we walked all the way home together that day,” I said slowly, unsure. “I think she went into Oscar’s, that little convenience store on the corner.”
Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “Why would you remember that?” she asked.
“Because it was so unusual,” I answered. “But I do remember it now.”
I saw Laura turn to me, felt her hand release mine. “Go on home, Stevie,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then she walked away, moving slowly toward the convenience store, and finally disappearing inside of it. As I headed home, I saw her standing by the window, her eyes fixed on me, as if she were waiting for me to leave.
“So you walked the rest of the way home by yourself?” Rebecca asked.
I nodded. “Laura told me to go on home without her, and so I did.”
“Was Jamie home when you got there?” Rebecca asked.
“No,” I said. I could feel it returning to me slowly, a picture of that afternoon. “No one was home,” I added, “not even my mother.”
It had never occurred to me before, but for the first and only time I could remember, my mother had not been at home when I arrived from school. I had returned to an empty house.
“I was alone in the house for a while,” I said, “then Laura arrived, and Jamie a few minutes after that.”
Jamie had gone directly to our room, but Laura had walked into the solarium instead. Later, when I’d approached her, skipping jauntily across the living room carpet, she’d looked up at me fiercely, and snapped, “Stop it, Stevie.” Then she’d turned away, letting her eyes drift out toward the empty street.
“Laura was not in a very good mood that afternoon,” I told Rebecca. “I could tell that something was bothering her.”
Rebecca glanced down at her notebook. “When did your mother get home?”
“Soon after the rest of us, I guess,” I told her. Then I remembered something else. “My father brought her. They came home in his van.”
Once again an odd certainty swept into Rebecca’s face. She leaned forward and began to dig through the briefcase, finally withdrawing several sheets of paper. It looked like a report of some kind, very official, with all the pages stapled together in the left-hand corner.
“This is the autopsy report on your mother,” she said. “I had never read it because the cause of her death was so obvious.” She flipped back the first two pages. “But while I was with Swenson yesterday, he made an aside about your mother being ‘doomed anyway.’“ She lifted the report toward me. “When I asked him what he meant, he gave me this.”
She’d already turned to the page that mattered. She’d even underlined the relevant passage. I read it, then handed the report back to her, dazed.
“She had a brain tumor,” I said, astonished. “Is that why she tried to kill herself?”
Rebecca nodded. “Probably.”
I saw my mother as I’d seen her that night, trudging wearily down the stairs, shoulders bowed, head down, a single shaky hand gripping the wooden banister. How alone she must have felt at that moment, how sealed within a black solitude.
“Your mother’s doctor told Swenson that your mother had come in for an X-ray examination on September 3, and that your father had come with her,” Rebecca said.
“September 3,” I said, laboring to make those connections I was certain Rebecca had already made. “So when my father and Laura had that conversation by the fence the night we got back from the Cape, he was telling her that my mother was sick, and that she was going for an examination the next day?”
“Probably,” Rebecca said. She looked back down at her notebook, read a few pages to herself, then glanced back up at me. “The doctor said that your mother arrived on schedule for her appointment. He remembered that your father brought her in, and that later, when the examination was over, he came to pick her up.”
“Yes, he brought her home that afternoon,” I told her.
Rebecca seemed hardly to hear me. “Over the next few weeks the doctor had several conversations with your father,” she went on. The kind of conversations male doctors had with men in those days.”
“What do you mean?”
Rebecca seemed surprised by the question, as if any further explanation should have been unnecessary. “Well, in certain cases a doctor and the husband of a female patient would get together to decide just how much a wife should know.”
“And so this doctor, he talked to my father about my mother’s illness, but not to her?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “According to Swenson’s case notes, the doctor told your father that your mother’s tumor was inoperable, and after that, they discussed quite a few alternatives. The doctor called several specialists in the field. He got back answers that weren’t very encouraging.”
“I see.”
“And finally, on October 10, the doctor told your father that there was nothing that could be done,” Rebecca said, “that your mother was going to die.” Her eyes drifted down to her notebook, then back up to me. “The two tickets to Mexico City were canceled that same afternoon.”