I inspected Alwyn’s stepdad, his new hiking boots, his expensive watch. Maybe this variety of blindness was his husbandly mandate; maybe, like my father, it was not his role to understand his remote wife, or to act as her spokesperson to her offspring. Still, it seemed undeniably evident that his wife had played a role in Alwyn’s Alwyn-ness in that she’d refused to play a role. She’d been an emotional absence, a neglectful null.
I corrected my original thinking. Indeed, problems do arise from nothing, arguably the most vicious ones do.
We have a lot in common, you and I.
It turned out that Alwyn and I did.
Alwyn’s stepfather and I stared into the fire. He was a nice man, not just because he’d given me his sweater, or because he reminded me of my own dad in a way, a man who interpreted his “protector” role as an internal affair. He was not protecting his family members from outside threats; he was protecting them from each other.
“My mother killed herself when I was a month old,” I said.
He took this in professional stride.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“There’s no need to be sorry,” I said. “That’s why I don’t tell people.”
He asked for the details: I told him that she’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills while I’d been napping in the next room. The fact that she’d killed herself in such close proximity to me was often cited by our town gossips as proof of her derangement: What kind of person could have killed herself with her infant so nearby?
But why? I’d always wanted to ask. Was death contagious? Did it release a toxin into the air? Why did I need to be protected from her, from it? Because wasn’t it more caring for her to die with me asleep in the next room? Wasn’t this the more compelling expression of maternal love, of her inability to be apart from me, even as she guaranteed that she would forever be apart from me? I preferred to route my understanding of the situation through Sylvia Plath’s children, for whom plates of toast had been left and an insulating towel wedged beneath the bedroom door while their mother went about her business in the kitchen below, these details meant to signal to them, when they awoke, both her maternal commitment and her level of pitiable derangement, also the sad ways that a mother’s love can be amplified or reduced to acts both monumentally considerate and monumentally selfish. A towel. An oven. A plate of toast.
“She must have been suffering from postpartum psychosis,” he said.
“So it’s my fault,” I joked.
“I’m sure you’ve spent a great portion of your life wondering if it was,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. But not in a way that I take personally, if that makes any sense.”
“Maybe she believed she’d do more harm to you alive than dead,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. She was a bad person, you see. Maybe she understood herself as a form of human contagion. Thus she eradicated herself, and my father helped, via his periodic small disclosures, to regularly inoculate me against any trace remnants of her unique disease, in hopes that I would not catch it.
“Whatever the reason,” I said, “she did what she thought was necessary, despite the hideous personal cost. Thus I refuse to experience her absence as some great tragedy I must spend my life overcoming.”
Alwyn’s stepfather examined me dubiously.
“I’d like to think,” he said, “despite any polite hopes that my daughters — I have two from a previous marriage—” he clarified, “could live happy lives without me, that my death would also, in some irreparable way, ruin them.”
“How candid,” I said.
“I thought that’s what we were being,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “In the interests of candor, let me ask you this: why haven’t you or your wife seen Alwyn’s vanishing film?”
He squinted at me.
“Is that what she’s calling it?” he said.
“You might find it therapeutic,” I said.
“Might I,” he said. “Somehow I can’t imagine that watching one’s stepdaughter engage in pornographic acts with strangers qualifies as therapeutic under any circumstance.”
“You have the wrong idea,” I said. I guessed he’d seen one of Alwyn’s porn homages to Varga.
“I don’t think I have,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be in a hotel room on a business trip, and to be flipping through the television channels, and to stumble across a film of your stepdaughter, from whom you’ve heard not a single word in a year, performing fellatio? Although perform isn’t the right word. Being penetrated, via the mouth, while she lies there unmoving. I watched long enough to determine that she wasn’t dead.”
(A sidebar me was impressed that Alwyn’s work had been so widely distributed; these porn films were not just “hobbies.”)
“In her defense,” I said, “she saw these films as art.”
His eyes watered. He poked at the fire.
“When Alwyn deigned to contact us, it was to invite us to a screening of another of these repugnant films. For the sake of our mental health, I counseled my wife to refuse to be an audience to Alwyn’s narcissistic theatricality. She believes her daughter made a heartfelt confessional film. She has no idea.”
She did make a heartfelt confessional film, I almost said. But I didn’t. I had no idea what kind of vanishing film Alwyn had made. Maybe hers was as stiff and unrevealing as mine had been — an attempt to explain what was not explainable or forgivable. Would her mother and stepfather have learned any more about her by watching it? Maybe not. Maybe the porn films she’d made were the more accidentally revealing documents.
“If that’s how you felt,” I said, “then why did you hire the detective?”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“You and your wife hired a detective. And yet it seems you have no interest in finding her.”
This, for whatever reason, stunned him.
“She told you we’d hired a detective?” he said.
I confirmed this; meanwhile, a heavy dread settled in my gut.
“Well,” her stepfather said hoarsely. “I’d find that lie comical if it weren’t so utterly heartrending.”
He cleared his throat, scrubbed his cheek with his knuckles.
There was nothing left for us to say.
He handed me a coal hod and asked me to fill it with dirt so he could smother the fire.
Outside, the rain had thinned to a mist. I turned my face upward, allowing the moisture to settle on my skin. My hands jittered, my stomach adrenaline-queasy. I recalled Alwyn’s professed envy over the fact that someone hated me enough to attack me. Hate, she’d said, is a form of emotional attachment. How had I missed that Alwyn had been lying to me about the detective, how had I missed that she was maybe really suffering? She’d vanished herself, after all. She’d been suicidal, once. It was my error not to understand: anyone can find themselves on the brink. Anyone can wake up one morning and decide against living. Every single day, the very healthiest among us might be seen to have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
The ground swamped and sagged under my feet. I’d eaten something that didn’t agree with me for breakfast, I thought. I was dehydrated. But then the post-quarantine side effects Mike warned me about — the reason he’d recommended a gradual reentry — started to take hold. Or at least that seemed the most logical explanation for what happened next. Sounds torqued and amplified — each leaf rustle and twig skitter a sonic boom. Each millibar of dropping air pressure a thunderclap. I heard a horrible sandpapery grating I could not place, but which seemed to occur every time I blinked. I experienced a vertigo so intense it was as though I had been gutted by a suction nozzle.