“You left out your father,” Rebecca reminded me. “What did he think of Jamie during this time?”
Once again I recalled the moment years before when all three of us, Laura and Jamie and myself, had erupted into noisy battle in the backyard. My father had stepped out onto the second-floor patio and stared down silently, bringing the conflict to an immediate end. Even from that distance, I could tell that his eyes had swept smoothly from my upturned face to Laura’s, then back to mine, leaving out the third point in what should have been the triangle of his assembled children. Even in that moment of disciplinary concern, his eyes had not once moved toward Jamie. The following years, it struck me now, had only widened the abyss which separated them.
“I think that toward the end, my father just gave up on Jamie.”
“In what way?”
“Gave up trying to love him, to be a father to him.”
“Do you think Jamie felt that ‘giving up’?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes,” I said.
And for the first time, I saw Jamie captured in the deep well of his isolation. Not really his father’s son, yet unaware of that dreadful fact, he had been kept outside the circle of our kinship, a prodigal and an outcast. To have killed him in so lonely and bereft a state, the only one among us who had never loved nor been loved by another, struck me as the single, saddest aspect of my father’s crime.
A wave of empty, helpless grief must have passed over me at that moment, because when I looked back toward Rebecca, she appeared almost frightened by what she saw in my face.
“We don’t have to finish everything tonight,” she said.
Finish everything. Those were the words she used. And so I knew that within hours, perhaps minutes, I would be returned to that dreadful state of “back to normal” to which Marie had seemed to look forward with such anxious anticipation. I felt a pall descend, the atmosphere thickening and congealing around me. My destiny was being sealed. I was being buried alive. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Do you want to stop for the night, Steve?” Rebecca asked.
I lifted my head. “No, let’s finish it tonight,” I told her, now anxious to finish everything, to leave Rebecca behind, to go on to whatever it was that awaited me, and to do it quickly, cleanly, without ever looking back.
She nodded, glanced down at her notes, let Jamie slip back into his long oblivion, and renewed her focus upon Laura.
“You said that Laura treated your mother very gently for a time,” she began.
“It was just a brief change,” I said quickly, already pushing toward the next question, driving forward relentlessly, almost a man in flight.
“And after that how did Laura treat her?”
“She went back to the same attitude she’d always had toward her,” I answered. “She seemed resentful of her. She avoided her most of the time, but once in a while, she would say something rather harsh.”
“Harsh? Like what?”
“I can’t remember any specific word,” I told her crisply, almost curtly, urging her on at a steadily accelerating pace.
“You don’t remember any particular episode of harsh treatment?” Rebecca asked.
“No.”
“Did Laura act this way in your father’s presence?”
“No. Never.”
“And you said that this change occurred about a month or so after you got back from Cape Cod?”
“Yes.”
“In early October then?”
I nodded.
Rebecca wrote the date down in her notebook. “But your father didn’t change, is that right?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Do you recall any particular incident between them? Some special act of kindness?”
“No.”
Rebecca continued to pursue the point. “Did anything at all strike you as different in your family during this time?”
“No.”
“So as far as you know, nothing at all changed in the family during the month before the murders?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
And yet, as I sat there, responding to Rebecca’s questions with clipped, one-word answers, I could nonetheless feel the slowly building sense of doom that had begun to invade those final days. A heaviness had descended upon us, as if the house at 417 McDonald Drive had been filled with a thick, transparent gelatin through which Laura, Jamie, my mother, and even my father moved slowly and trudgingly, like weary, exhausted creatures, struggling to draw what were their final breaths. One by one, each of them isolated from the other, I saw them all a final time: Jamie, embittered by successive waves of rejection, entombed behind the closed door of his room; Laura slouched sullenly in the wicker chair of the solarium; my mother in her bed behind the tightly drawn floral curtains, a bomb already lit inside her brain; and finally my father, alone now in the basement, bereft, solitary and morose, slowly turning forward the thin black wheel. They had all been dying during those last weeks, I realized, like flowers past their season.
It began to rain, and Rebecca rose and closed the window. “And so everything remained the same up until the last day?” she asked as she returned to her seat.
“The last day,” I repeated, remembering it now as fully as I thought I ever would.
“It was raining,” I said.
It was raining, and had been raining for days. The lawns along McDonald Drive were brown and soggy. Rain battered against the windowpanes of our rooms and thumped down loudly against the mock Tudor gables. The white cords of the basketball net hung limply in a gray, sodden web. The day before, my mother had hung our laundry beneath a bright mid-morning sun, but now, drenched and rain-beaten, it drooped heavily toward the saturated ground. Alone among all our clothes, only my sister’s bra had been set free by a sudden burst of wind. It lay in a mangled, mud-spattered pile beneath a line of bathroom towels.
“Did everything seem normal that morning?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, everything seemed ‘normal,’” I said evenly, almost choking on the word. “We were all back to normal on that last day,” I said bitterly, my voice coming through nearly clenched teeth. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear.”
I saw Rebecca’s face stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe that’s why he killed them,” I said coldly. “Because the kind of life they represented made him sick.”
Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of life are you talking about, Steve?” she asked, but warily, as if she were closing in on a dangerous animal she’d studied and knew well.
“A pinched, little life,” I said, brutally, the raw edge of my own vast discontent piercing through the mask behind which I’d hidden so long. “A dull, stupid life, with nothing in it that lifted him, that gave him hope, that had some possibility of escape.”
Rebecca’s face filled with recognition. “Escape from what?” she asked.
“From them” I blurted. “From the way they were killing him before he decided to take it by the balls … and kill them instead.”
The words seemed to hit her like bullets. She drew away from me, her eyes glaring fiercely. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she closed her notebook with an abrupt finality.
“I think we can end it here,” she said, in a steely voice, her tone beyond any feeble gesture I might make at either apology or explanation.
I started to speak, but she rose instantly, walked to the door, and jerked it open. “I’ll send you all the materials I’ve collected on the case,” she said tensely.
I remained in my chair, my own last words washing over me like a hot wave.
“Rebecca, I …”
She remained at the door, her body rigid. “I’ll also send you a copy of the book,” she added.
I knew that all she might have felt for me before that moment—respect, esteem, perhaps even some affection—had been reduced to this single, brutal and explosive kernel. She’d seen the face of “these men” in my face, and there was no way for me to creep back into my former self.