I got to my feet. "I'm leaving," I told him.
This time, my father made no effort to stop me. "Suit yourself," he said.
"I'm not sure I'll be coming back, Dad," I added sourly.
He stared at the fire. "Have I ever asked you to come here?" His eyes slithered over to me. "Have I ever asked you for one fucking thing, Eric?" Before I could answer he whipped his eyes away and settled them angrily on the lashing flames. "Just go."
I hesitated a moment longer, let my gaze take him in, the bony shoulders beneath the robe, the shrunken eyes, how at this moment he had absolutely nothing, a penury deeper than I'd have imagined possible only a few days before. But I could not approach him now, felt not the slightest inclination to regain any footing for us. And with that recognition, I knew that this was the last time I would see my father alive.
I took in the scene with a quick blink of the eye, then wheeled around and returned to my car. Slumped behind the wheel, I hesitated, glancing back toward the bleak little residence where I knew my father was doomed to slog through what remained of his days. He would grow brittle and still more bitter, I supposed, speaking sharply to anyone who approached him. In time, both staff and fellow residents would learn to keep their distance, so that in the final hour, when they came and found him slumped in his chair or faceup in bed, a little wave of secret pleasure would sweep through the halls and common rooms at the news of his death. Such would be his parting gift to his fellow man—the brief relief of knowing that he was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
As I drove toward home, mothers long ordeal returned to me in a series of small grainy photographs that seemed to rise from some previously forgotten album in my mind. I saw her standing beneath the large oak that graced our neatly manicured front lawn. I saw her walking in the rain. I saw her lying awake in a dark bedroom, her face illuminated by a single white candle. I saw her in the dimly lit garage, sitting alone behind the wheel of the dark blue Chrysler, her hands in her lap, head slightly bowed.
In fact, I had only glimpsed these images of my mother's final weeks, glimpsed them as I'd hurried past her on my way to school or returned from it, far more interested in the day's boyish transactions than in the adult world that was eating her alive.
But now, as evening fell, I tried to measure the weight that lay upon her: an unloving and unsuccessful husband, a beloved daughter dead, a son—Warren—saddled with his father's contempt, and me, the other son, who barely saw her when he passed. So little to leave behind, she must have thought, as she sat behind the wheel in the shadowy garage, so little she would miss.
For the first rime in years, I felt burdened beyond my strength, desperate to share the load with another human being. It was at that moment, I suppose, that the full value of marriage proclaimed itself. I had laughed at a thousand jokes about married life. And what a huge target it was, after all. The idea that you would share your entire life with one person, expect that man or woman to satisfy a vast array of needs, from the most passionate to the most mundane—on its face, it was absurd. How could it ever work?
Suddenly, I knew. It worked because in a shifting world you wanted one person you could trust to be there when you needed her.
It was a short ride down Route 6, no more than twenty-minutes. The college sat on a rise, all brick and glass, one of those purely functional structures architects despise, but whose charmlessness is hardly noticed by the legions of students who obliviously come and go. It was a junior college, after all, a holding cell between high school and university, unremarkable and doomed to be unremembered, save as a launching pad toward some less-humble institution.
I pulled into the lot designated VISITORS, and made my way up the cement walkway toward Meredith's office. In the distance, I could see her car parked in the lot reserved for faculty, and something in its sturdy familiarity was oddly comforting.
Meredith's office was on the second floor. I knocked, but there was no answer. I glanced at the office hours she'd posted on the door, 4:30 to 6:30. I glanced at my watch. It was 5:45, so I assumed Meredith would be back soon, that she'd gone to the bathroom or was lingering in the faculty lounge.
A few folding metal chairs dotted the corridor, places where students could seat themselves while waiting for their scheduled appointments. I sat down, plucked a newspaper from the chair next to me, and idly went through it. There was little about Amy's disappearance, save that the police were still "following various leads."
I perused the paper a few more minutes, then glanced at my watch. It was 6:05. I looked down the empty corridor, hoping to see Meredith at the end of it. I even imagined her coming through the double doors, munching an apple, the early-evening snack she often took in order to quell her appetite before coming home.
But the corridor remained empty, and so I went through the paper again, this time reading articles that didn't interest me very much, the sports and financial pages, something about a new treatment for baldness.
When I'd read the last of them, I put down the paper and again looked at my watch. 6:15.
I stood up, walked to her office, and knocked again on the unlikely chance that she hadn't heard me the first time. There was no answer, but I could see a sliver of light coming from inside. She'd left the lights on, something she wouldn't have done if she hadn't been planning to come back.
On that evidence, I returned to my chair and waited. As the minutes passed, I thought again of my father, the terrible things he'd told me, which I suddenly believed were true. I don't know why I came to that conclusion as I sat waiting for Meredith that evening, only that with each passing second, the certainty built, and one by one, every dark suspicion took on a fatal substance. I believed that my mother had had an affair. I believed that she'd taken out an insurance policy on herself. I believed that she'd committed suicide. But at the same time, I also believed that my father had wanted her dead, might even have toyed with the idea of killing her, perhaps even killing us all.
I felt the air darken around me, thicken like smoke, felt my breathing take on a strange, frantic pace, as if I were being forced to run fester and faster along an unlit path, to leap obstacles I could barely see and twist around gaping pits and snares. A kind of rumbling shook me from within, distant as a building storm, and I found myself staring at the sliver of light beneath Meredith's door wondering if perhaps she were actually inside, knew I was in the corridor, but remained behind the locked door ... hiding.
But from what?
I stood suddenly, jerked up by my own volcanic anxiety, marched to the door, and knocked again, this time harder, more insistently. Then, out of nowhere, her name broke from my lips in a strange, animal cry—"Meredith!"
I realized that I'd called her name much more loudly than I'd intended. I could hear it echoing down the hall. It sounded desperate, even theatrical, like Stanley Kowalski screaming for Stella.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself, but my skin felt hot, and beneath it, hotter still, as if deep inside, a furnace was being madly stoked.
It was past 6:30 now, and as I looked at the otherwise inconsequential time of day, it took on a fatal quality, like the hour of execution, the prisoner now being led out. It was as if I had given my wife until that moment to explain herself, which she had failed to do, and so was now condemned.