Mortal Memory

FIFTEEN

RODGER AND WINDSOR.

Rebecca had made an immensely persuasive case that the men she’d studied had been unable to live without their private romantic totems. In my desperate need to find him, it struck me at last that my father might have been no less obsessed than the rest of them, that the sleek red racing bikes he’d imported from England had perhaps made the same romantic claim upon his mind as foreign stamps and safari hats had made upon the other men in Rebecca’s book.

It was a wet, fall day when I reached Rodger and Windsor’s offices in New York City. The cold drizzle I’d walked through had given me an even more desolate appearance than usual, and because of that, the neat young man who came out to the front desk to greet me seemed hesitant to come too close.

“May I help you?” he said.

“I’m looking for my father,” I told him.

“Your father?” he asked me, puzzled. “Does he work here?”

“No,” I answered.

Then, in all its appalling detail, I told him the story of my father’s crime. One by one I showed him the crime-scene photographs of my mother, Laura, and Jamie. At each picture, he flinched a little.

“Your father did all that?” he asked finally.

I nodded, then took out Rebecca’s book and read him the relevant passage. He listened with a rapt intensity.

“My father was obsessed with these bikes,” I told him, “he wouldn’t be able to live without getting one.” I waited, then added, “And I’m sure it would be red.”

From the look on his face, I could tell that the young man in the starched white shirt and plain gray tie had decided to do everything he could to help me. Something exciting had unexpectedly come into his life, and as I looked at the eagerness I could see building in his eyes, I wondered if I had been like him on that day Rebecca had first arrived at the offices of Simpson and Lowe. Had I been nothing more than a clerk with a clerk’s long day looming before him? Was that the secret of my fall? Was it no more than the flight from boredom that had killed my wife and son?

I thought of my father, too, the way he’d trudged up the narrow aisles of his hardware store day after day. I saw the listlessness in his eyes, the weary rhythm of his gait, and it struck me more powerfully than ever before just how dangerous a man may become when he suddenly feels no compelling reason any longer to live as he has always lived.

The clerk nodded. “And you want me to help you find him?”

“Yes,” I said, then added, “I have reason to believe that my father crossed the border into Mexico.”

The clerk smiled. “Then let’s start in Mexico,” he said.

And so we began there, going back through the stacks of sales invoices that stretched toward the present from the distant year of 1959. With a continually deepening level of engagement, we stalked the passing years. It was the clerk who found the first hint of my father’s new abode. He pulled a single sheet of paper from the file. “Could it be this?” he asked.

I took the paper and looked at it. The order was dated March 17, 1962, and it was for a single red Rodger and Windsor bike. It had been received from a bicycle shop located in a small town on the western coast of Mexico. The man who’d signed the order had used the name Antonio Dias. There had been other orders from other places, of course, but this was the only bicycle shop that had ordered only one Rodger and Windsor, and that had specifically stipulated that its color must be red.

During the next twenty years, as the clerk discovered, this same Antonio Dias had ordered thirty-two red Rodger and Windsor bikes. The shipping invoices showed that during that same time he’d moved to nine different towns, each time farther south until he’d finally reached the border of Honduras.

In 1982, the orders had abruptly stopped. For the next three years there were no orders from Antonio Dias. Then, in November of 1985, one appeared again. This time, however, it had not come from Mexico, but from far more distant Spain, from a town about the size of Somerset, but located on the Mediterranean, and which bore the exotic and romantic name of Alicante. At the rate of nearly two a year, the orders had continued to arrive over the next seven years. The last one had been received only two months before.

The clerk looked at me significantly. “If this Antonio Dias is your father,” he said, “then my guess is, he’s still in Alicante.”

And so I made my plans to go. I renewed my passport, then waited in my hotel room for it to arrive. During that time I watched no television nor read a book. I wrote no letters nor read any that I received. I didn’t want to be distracted. As the days passed, I sank deeper into my own closed world. I no longer nodded to people on the street. I didn’t answer when they spoke to me. The days passed, and my world grew smaller. At last, I shrank into a small, dark seed.

The passport arrived, and I bought a ticket to Madrid. From there, I took a bus to Alicante.

It was nearly midnight when I arrived. A foreigner, with no knowledge of the language, I took the first hotel room I could find and stretched out on the small, narrow bed to await the morning. Through the night, I thought of my father, of how near I sensed he was. I tried to imagine his face webbed in dark wrinkles, the sound of his voice as it spoke in a foreign language. But he remained as elusive as always, still as remote and towering as he had been the day he’d stood on the veranda and silenced all of us with nothing more commanding than his gaze.

I awoke very early, just after first light. Across from my bed, I could see a small sink, a wrinkled towel that hung limply from its bare metal rack, and a battered armoire. They didn’t look the same as in my escapist dream, however. Nothing was the same. Outside my window, where light blue, rather than white, curtains lifted languidly in the warm morning breeze, there were no tiled roofs or dark spires. There was only a sprawling modern town gathered around a much older one.

It was still early when I left the hotel. Across the street was a large market, decked with bright-colored vegetables and row upon row of sleek, silvery fish. Pointing first to one thing, then another, I bought a piece of bread and a cup of coffee, eating as I continued on my way.

I’d written the address to which the last Rodger and Windsor had been sent on a piece of paper, and for nearly an hour after leaving the market, I moved from person to person, showing each the address, then following an array of hand signals, since I could not understand what was said to me. Block by block, turn by turn, I closed in on my father, moving deeper and deeper into the old Moorish quarter of the city. Perched on a high hill, a huge fortress loomed above me, its massive yellow walls glowing in the sun.

At last I found the street I’d been looking for. Madre de Dios it was called, Mother of God. It curled near the center of a warren of other narrow, nearly identical streets, and at its far end, half hidden in the shadows, I saw a sign. It was carelessly painted, and hung at an angle, the way I knew he would have painted and hung it. It read BICICLETAS.

I approached the store slowly, with a sensation of shrinking, of returning to the size of a little boy. I felt as I had felt that night I’d gone down the basement stairs, hesitant, unsure, eerily afraid of the man who stood behind the large black wheel.

And so, once I reached the shop, I found that I couldn’t go in. Through a single, dusty window, I could see a figure moving in its dim interior, moving as he had moved, haphazardly from place to place, but I could not approach it. Each time my hand moved toward the door, it was seized by a terrible trembling, as if I expected the shotgun still to be cradled in his arms.

After a moment, I turned abruptly and walked across the street, standing rigidly, unable to move, while a stream of men and women, some with children at their sides, casually went in and out, ringing the little bell he’d hung above the door.

There was a small, dusty plaza just up from the store, a place of scrubby trees and cement benches. I went there and continued to watch the entrance of the shop. As the hours passed, I remained in place, my back pressed up against the spindly gray trunk of an olive tree. To the right, a gathering of women, their faces hung in black scarves, talked idly while young children scrambled playfully at their feet. At the far end of the square, old men in black berets tossed wooden balls across a dusty court, their faces shaded beneath a canopy of palms.

Time crawled by, minute by minute. The sun rose, then began to lower.

While I waited, I imagined it again.

I imagined following him as he made his way out of the little bicycle shop. Using the landscape that now surrounded me, I saw him trudge along the deserted street, winding uphill toward the ancient fortress, its gigantic walls glowing yellow above him, striking and unreal. I imagined stalking him steadily as he crossed the little plaza, his feet shuffling cautiously over the rubble of its broken walkway. I saw myself close in upon him as he turned into a narrow, nearly unlighted alleyway, passed under a low, crumbling balcony, and disappeared behind its veil of hanging flowers. It was there I saw myself sweep in behind him, rushing beneath the balcony, the two of us suddenly gathered together behind the dense curtain. I heard myself say, “Father,” then watch as he turned toward me. I knew that I would give him time to turn, time for him to see me, time for his body to stiffen as the word continued to echo in his mind, as he wondered hopelessly, and with a wrenching sense of terror, if it could be true.

Then and only then, I would strike, raising the blade above his trembling, horror-stricken face. This is for Laura,” I would tell him as I delivered the first blow. “And this is for Peter and Marie.”

For the next hour or so, I continued to luxuriate in my father’s murder, reliving it again and again, rejoicing in his agony, while the sun sank farther toward the sea, and still, he did not come out. By then the other shops had closed, their owners marching off to the nearest tavern to while away the remainder of the afternoon, while my father remained inside his shop. I’d seen the door of my father’s shop close, as well, then a hand draw down a curtain, but nothing more. At first, I imagined him still inside, perhaps piddling with his latest Rodger and Windsor. But as the hours passed, a graver thought occurred to me. Perhaps he had escaped again. In my mind, I saw him crawling out a dusty window, then trotting down a narrow alley to where a small boat waited for him, bobbing lightly in a peaceful sea.

For a moment, I felt a great terror sweep over me, the fear not only that he’d escaped again, but that he’d escaped from me, as if, from the beginning, from that first flight into the rain, that had been his one true aim.

I stood up and peered out toward the shop, my eyes squinting against the still-bright sun, and almost at that instant the hand appeared again, and the curtain rose.

With the afternoon siesta over, customers began to come and go again. There were not many of them, as I noticed, but then my father had never been one to attract a steady clientele.

The light began to change with the final waning of the afternoon, darkening steadily until the first blue haze of evening descended upon the street. At last, the first lights began to shine from the shop windows that lined the narrow, winding route of Madre de Dios.

It was already full night when those lights began to blink off again. The one that shined beneath the tilted sign for BICICLETAS finally blinked off, too.

Seconds later, I saw him back out of the shop, pulling the door closed behind him, then turn slowly to face the plaza. A streetlight cast a silver veil over him, and in its light I could see that he was dressed like the other old men of the region, in a dark suit, with a faded white shirt that looked slightly frayed at the collar, and no tie.

He turned up the street, and then I saw his yellow cane as it hung limply from his hand. He placed it firmly on the ground and began to walk slowly up the hill, the cane tapping lightly in the nearly deserted street.

As he moved toward me, I could see that he was still tall, though bent now, his shoulders slightly rounded. His hair was white, and his face was brown and leathery, drier than I remembered it, parched by his long years in the sun. The only thing that remained the same was his piercingly blue eyes.

They didn’t glance in my direction as he headed across the street, then into the little plaza, finally going by me at a distance of no more than ten or fifteen feet. A woman nodded toward him as she passed and an old man waved from the other end of the square, but my father didn’t stop to talk to either of them.

He continued on, his feet plowing unsteadily across the dusty plaza. When he was near the middle of it, I stood up and watched him closely, as if expecting him to vanish magically into the air. In the distance, I could see him moving past the old men tossing balls in the courtyard, the women with their children, his feet raising a little cloud of dust behind him.

He was almost at the end of the plaza before I fell in behind him, trailing him at a distance, the eyes of the people in the square following me almost as intently as I followed my father.

Slowly, with an old man’s gait, he made his way up a narrow street, then, to my surprise, turned abruptly to the right and entered a small tavern.

He’d already taken a seat behind a round, wooden table when I entered the same tavern seconds later. There were other men around him, men at other tables, old men who looked as weathered as he, their eyes deep-set and encircled by spidery webs of dark lines, their skin deeply furrowed. But they were shorter and rounder than my father, who still retained something of the tall, lean figure I remembered from my youth. It was clear that they knew him, perhaps even associated him with the American cowboys they’d seen in movies and on television, the silent, solitary, lethal men whose brave adventures made their dull, familial lives seem small and cowardly and of little worth.

I took a seat across the room and watched as my father ordered his first drink. When it came, I saw that it was sherry, a drink that struck me as quite bland for a man who on a rainy November day had, with the help of “someone else,” taken a shotgun to his family.

Sherry, I thought, my father drinks sherry, and suddenly I saw him as a man of tastes and appetites, an old man who walked slowly through the dusty streets, his shadow moving jaggedly along the flat stone walls. The specter of my youth, the gray figure in the basement, the slaughterer of my family, there he was before me, drinking sherry and wiping his wet lips with a soiled handkerchief.

There he was, but still I found that I couldn’t approach him. And so I watched from a distant corner, my fingers tapping rhythmically against my knees, my eyes moving toward him, then away, as if fleeing a flash of brutal light.

The night deepened hour by hour, but my father didn’t leave his chair. One sherry, sipped slowly, was followed by another. He ordered a plate of sliced ham and a piece of bread smeared with tomato, eating his dinner at a leisurely pace, his blue eyes closing from time to time as he leaned back tiredly against the tiled wall.

From time to time, other men would sit down with him and chat awhile, but my father seemed to greet them distantly, talk to them absently, pay them little mind. As each one left, he merely nodded slowly and said, “Adios,” in a tone that seemed faintly sorrowful, so that even in the grip of my hatred I sensed that there had been a loneliness to his exile, things he had endured, losses he had silently absorbed. For a moment, I was able to imagine the long night of his escape, the flight to a distant land, the constant shifting from town to town, the years of fear and dread. What at 417 McDonald Drive, I wondered, could have been worth such a deep and endless sacrifice?

At around ten, as he continued to sit alone and unmolested, an African trader in black trousers and a billowy purple shirt approached his table. A lavender turban was wound loosely around his head. He smiled at my father and drew several carved figures from a cloth bag, elephants of various sizes, a giraffe. He arranged them on my father’s table. My father glanced at them, then shook his head.

The trader remained in place, persistent, trying to make a sale. My father shook his head again, then turned away, his eyes settling on one of the tile paintings that adorned the opposite wall, the head of a woman wreathed in luscious purple grapes. His eyes lingered on it, the eyelids slightly drooped, the skin wrinkled, but the eyes themselves still luminously blue, the way they’d looked that night as I’d stood, facing him from the third step.

The trader drew a wooden mask from the dark sack. It was crudely carved and sloppily lacquered, a work done without interest and for little pay. He placed it on my father’s table, edging one of the elephants away.

My father didn’t look at the mask, but only waved his hand languidly, refusing once again.

The trader returned the carvings to his bag, then glanced about the tavern, his eyes large and bulging, his black skin nearly blue in the dimly lighted room. He saw no other likely customers and headed for the door.

My father watched him as he walked away, the lavender turban weaving gently through a cloud of thick white smoke. A woman at the adjoining table gave my father a knowing glance, but my father only shrugged and lifted his glass in a faint, halfhearted toast.

As I sat only a few yards from him, I wondered to what it was he might still offer even so weak a toast. Was it to life? To death? Could he toast others, or were they only doll-sized figures on a featureless landscape, things like a wife and children, things he could do without?

It was nearly midnight when he rose suddenly, startling me far more than I had thought possible. I saw him rise and come toward me from the choking, smoke-filled depths of the tavern. He was upon me almost instantly, his shadow moving in a dark gray wave across my table. As he passed, I felt him brush my shoulder. I looked up and saw him glance down at me, nodding quickly, as if in apology, before he suddenly stopped dead and peered at me frozenly. For an instant, I thought he might have recognized me, and I quickly turned away. By the time I looked around again, he’d disappeared.

But he didn’t go far, only a little way down the same narrow street, and into another tavern. It was emptier than the first, and he took a table at the back. I took a table not far away, and watched him more closely, as if afraid that he might vanish once again.

Under the light which hung above him, I could see the dust that had settled upon the shoulders of his jacket. There was dust on his sleeves, as well, and dust on his shoes. As I sat, watching him, I imagined dust in great brown lumps pressing in upon his guts, his lungs, his brain. I imagined his veins thick with dust, a brown mud clogging the valves of his heart. I could even envision a thick, dusty blood pouring from him as I jerked the blade upward, gutting him in one swift thrust.

He leaned back against the wall of the tavern and closed his eyes. I wondered if, at such a moment, he’d ever allowed his mind to return to McDonald Drive. Or did he go there only in a nightmare in which he watched helplessly as a little boy came down the basement stairs, stopped on the third step, and grimly leveled a shotgun at his panicked and unblinking eyes?

His eyes opened suddenly, and I saw that they were aimed at me. He glanced away and didn’t look at me again. His hand lifted to his mouth, brushed against his lips, then drifted back down to his lap.

I could see a torpor in his movements, a languidness which seemed to pull even at the sharp, sudden darting of his eyes. Moments later, when a dark-haired beauty strolled past his table, he didn’t follow her appreciatively, but simply let his eyes drop toward the glass he cradled gently in his right hand. At that moment he seemed quite shy, captured in shyness, almost shrunken, made of straw, himself a weightless miniature.

And yet I was still afraid of him, afraid of the scenes with his mind, the long walk up the stairs, the look on Jamie’s still-living face, the backward plunge my sister’s ruptured body must have made as the volley struck her, the plaintive, begging eyes of my mother as she’d crouched behind the cardboard box. I knew that there was a hideous gallery of such pictures in his brain, though the fact that he’d lived with them for so long seemed unimaginable to me.

Time passed, but my fear did not.

I could feel my hand tremble each time I thought of approaching him, and it struck me as unseemly to be so afraid of such a spiritless old man. What could he possibly do to me at this point in our lives? His physical force entirely diminished, his moral force long ago destroyed, he was nothing but an empty shell, a shadow.

And yet, I was afraid.

I was afraid because, for all his weakness and frailty, he was still my father, and the line that connected us was still a line that he somehow controlled. In his presence, I felt myself become the little boy who’d moved down the stairs, felt his gaze stop me dead.

I was afraid, and I knew why. I watched his eyes and knew exactly what I feared.

After all these months of hating him, I was afraid that when we met at last, and after I’d confronted him with everything he’d done, rubbed his face in the blood of those he’d murdered, that after all that excruciating pain had been unearthed again, and he sat, stunned, stricken, his blue eyes resting upon mine, that at that moment I would see again, know again, only this time with perfect clarity, that he had never loved me.

It was that which made me hate him again with a fierce, blinding passion. I hated him because he had not loved me enough to take me with him in his flight.

I felt my body rise suddenly, as if called to duty by an overwhelming need. I felt it move forward smoothly, righteously, with an angelic, missionary grace.

His eyes lifted toward me as I approached his table. Once I reached it, I started to speak, but to my amazement, he spoke first.

“Stevie,” he said.

Stunned at the sound of his voice, thrown entirely off track by the fact that he had spoken first, I didn’t answer him.

“Stevie,” he repeated softly, “sit down.”

Still, I couldn’t speak. And so I snatched the envelope from my pocket instead, took out the three photographs, and arranged them quickly on the table before him. There, beneath the weaving candle, he could see them in a dreadful line, my mother in her bed, Jamie on his back, Laura sprawled across the floor of her room.

Then, at last, a voice leaped out at him. “Why did you do this?”

He watched me, utterly calm. He seemed beyond fear or regret, beyond anything but the long travail of his seclusion. His eyes regarded me coolly. His hands didn’t tremble. The ancient power of his fatherhood surrounded him like a fortress wall.

“We had happy times,” he said at last. “You remember them, don’t you, Stevie?” He leaned back, the broad shoulders pressed firmly against the tile wall. His eyes dropped toward the photographs, then leaped back up at me. “Happy times,” he said again.

The face that watched me seemed hardly recognizable, the “happy times” little more than sparkling shards thrown up by a blasted family. I remembered other things, instead, the icy immobility of his face as he’d stared out at “Poor Dottie” from the smoky interior of the old brown van.

“You didn’t love my mother, did you?” I asked.

He looked surprised by the question, but unwilling to lie.

“No,” he said.

“She was dying.”

Again the surprise, followed by the admission. “Yes, she was, Stevie.”

“But you killed her anyway.”

He started to speak, but I rushed ahead. “Why did you clean her up after that? Why did you put her in the bed that way:

He shook his head slowly. “Respect, maybe, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Pity.”

I could feel my mouth curl down in a cruel rebuke. “Respect? Pity? That’s why you laid her out like that?”

“Yes, it is,” he answered firmly, as if it were a source of pride. “She was a very modest woman. I didn’t want her to be seen like that.”

“What about Jamie?” I shot back. “You didn’t care how he was seen, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Leaving him in his room the way you did,” I told him brutally, “lying on his back like that, with his face blown off.”

He turned away, flinching slightly. It was the first emotion he had shown, and I felt a cruel delight in its suggestion that I had at least some small power to wound him.

“And what about Laura?” I asked tauntingly. “What about her?”

He didn’t answer.

I tapped the photograph that showed her on her back, her chest blown open, her bare, soiled feet pressing toward the lens.

“You left her like Jamie,” I said, “lying in her blood.”

He nodded, almost curtly. “Yes, I did.”

My legs dissolved beneath me as if I were being pressed down by the sudden weight of his complete admission. I sank down into the chair opposite him and released a long, exhausted breath.

“Why did you kill Laura?” I asked.

The light blue eyes squeezed together. “Because I had to,” he said sharply, “because I had no choice.”

It was a flat, factual response, with no hint of apology within it.

I scoffed at the notion of his being forced to carry out such a crime. “You had to kill Laura?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The old rigidity returned to his face. He stared at me stonily. “Once it started, I had to finish it.”

“Once it started?”

He shifted slightly and drew his hands back slowly until they finally dropped over the edge of the table. “The killing.” His eyes darted away, then returned. “It wasn’t what I wanted, Stevie.”

Suddenly Swenson’s words rushed toward me. Someone else. Someone else was in that house. I stared at him evenly. “Who made you do it then?” I demanded. “Who did you do it for?”

For the first time he seemed reluctant to answer.

I looked at him determinedly. “Who wanted us all dead?”

His face tensed. I could see that he was going back now, that I was forcing him back.

I glared at him lethally. “Tell me what happened that day.”

He looked at me as if I knew nothing, as if I’d just been born, something marvelous in its innocence, but which had to be despoiled.

“That’s not when it began, that day,” he said. “It didn’t just happen, you know.”

“Of course not,” I told him. “You’d planned it for a long time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those two tickets, remember?” I said. Then, so that he could have no doubt as to just how much I already knew, I added, Those two tickets to Mexico City, the ones you bought in June.”

His face tightened. “You knew about that?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know?”

“The police found out,” I said.

He looked strangely relieved. “Oh,” he said, “the police.”

“They found out everything,” I told him.

He leaned forward slowly, his hands clasped together on the table. “No, they didn’t,” he said.

“Everything except who helped you kill them,” I said.

“Helped me?”

“Yes.”

“No one helped me, Stevie,” he said. “What I did, I did alone.”

I stared at him doubtfully. “Two tickets,” I repeated, “one for you, and one for someone else.” I paused a moment. “Who was she?” I demanded, my voice almost a hiss, visions of Yo-landa Dawes circling in my mind.

His face softened, his eyes resting almost gently upon me. “Do you remember that morning when we were all having breakfast and Laura was talking about a report she’d done in school, and Jamie kept attacking her, belittling her?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Jamie was always at Laura,” he said, “always trying to humiliate her, to take away her dreams.”

He was right, of course, and it was easy for me to see everything that had happened that morning, the terrible hatred my brother had shown for my sister, the delight he’d taken in chipping away at her vibrant, striving character. That morning he’d been even worse than usual, his small eyes focused upon her with a deadly earnest: You’re not going anywhere.

My father turned away for a moment, drew in a deep breath, then looked back toward me. “I couldn’t take it that morning,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t stand to see what he was doing to your sister.” He smiled. “I knew how much she wanted out of life, you see,” he went on, “how much she wanted her life to be different.”

“Different from what?” I asked.

“Different from my life, Stevie,” he said. “Different from your mother’s life, and what Jamie’s life would probably have been.” He stopped, as if remembering her again in the full glory of her extravagant desire. “She talked to me about it, you know,” he added after a moment. “About all she wanted to do in her life, all the places she wanted to go.” He smiled softly. “She would come down in the basement where I was, and she would talk to me about it.” His eyes drifted away slightly. “Always barefoot, remember?” he said, almost wistfully. “I used to tell her to put on her shoes, but she never would. She was like that, untamed. She’d always go back up with her feet covered with that grit from the basement floor.” He grew silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “that morning after Jamie had acted the way he did, I went out and sat down in that little room we had, the one with the vines.” He stopped, his voice a little harder when he spoke again. “That’s when I decided that it couldn’t go on like it was, Stevie,” he said. “That something had to be done about it.”

“You mean, something had to be done about Jamie?”

“About what he was doing to your sister,” my father answered. “Something had to be done about that.”

I remembered the look on his face as he’d sat alone in the solarium that morning. It was a grim, determined face, all doubt removed. It was then that he’d decided that “something had to be done,” I supposed, not while he’d sat gazing at my mother as she stooped over the flower garden, but that spring morning when Jamie had launched his attack upon the daughter that my father loved.

My father’s hands drew back, each of them finally drifting over the edge of the table. “I told Laura about it a week later,” he said. “She came down to the solarium one night. It must have been toward the middle of that last summer.” He drew in a deep breath. “I told her what I wanted to do.”

I looked at him, astonished. “Kill us,” I muttered.

His eyes widened, staring at me unbelievingly. “What?”

“That you were going to kill us,” I said, “you told Laura that?”

He shook his head. “No, Stevie,” he said, “not that.” He paused a moment, watching me brokenly. “Never that.”

“What then?”

“I told her that I’d decided to take her away,” my father said, “that I’d looked through a lot of travel brochures, and that I’d already decided on the place.” He looked at me solemnly. “I told her that I’d already bought two tickets to Mexico, and that I was going to take her there.”

“And leave the rest of us?” I asked.

“Jamie wouldn’t have cared,” my father said. “And your mother, she’d always wanted to move back to Maine, where she’d grown up.” His face took on the look of a mournful revelation. “There was someone there, Stevie. Waiting for her, you might say. Someone from way back. Someone she’d never forgotten.”

It was the phantom lover, of course, Jamie’s real father, a man in a mountain cabin, as I imagined him at that moment, writing letters to my mother on soft blue paper.

“Jamie and your mother would both have been better off in another place,” my father said.

“And me?”

“You’re what made it hard, Stevie,” my father said. “I hadn’t really decided about you.”

I stared at him bitterly. “At the time you killed them, you mean?” I asked brutally.

My father did not so much as flinch. “I chose to save my daughter,” he said with a grave resignation.

A strange pride gathered in his voice, and suddenly I recognized that at that moment when he’d told Laura of his plan to take her away, at that precise moment in his life, and perhaps for the only time, his love had taken on a fabled sweep, had become a thing of knights on horseback and maidens in dire distress, a romantic mission of preservation and defense, one far different from the type undertaken by those other men with whom Rebecca had already forever linked his name.

“I never saw Laura more happy when I told her about Mexico,” my father said.

In my mind, I saw them together in the little solarium with its windows draped in vines, my father in the white wicker chair, Laura below him, her face resting peacefully, as if she were still a little girl.

“Why didn’t you go then?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just take her and go away?”

“Because toward the end of the summer I found out your mother was dying,” my father said. “I couldn’t leave her in a situation like that. So I canceled the tickets.” He shook his head helplessly. “I didn’t tell Laura right way, and when I did, she looked as if her whole world had collapsed.” He seemed to bring her back into his mind, fully, in all her furious need. “Laura wasn’t like me,” he said again, “there was something great in her.” He stopped, then added, “But there was something wrong, too, something out of control.”

“When did you tell Laura that you’d canceled the tickets?”

“Around the middle of October.”

“Did you tell her why?”

“I’d already told her that your mother was very sick,” he answered, “but I’m not sure she realized that it had made me change our plans until I actually told her that I’d canceled the tickets, that we wouldn’t be going to Mexico together.”

I stared at him evenly, remembering the sudden, wrenching illness that had gripped my mother the night of the fireworks. I remembered how Laura had prepared her a glass of milk after we’d returned.

“Laura tried to kill her, didn’t she?” I asked coolly.

He nodded. “Yes, she did,” he said. “I thought it was over, after that. She’d done something terrible, but I thought that would be the end of it.” He looked at me pointedly. “Until that day.”

That day.

“It was raining,” I said softly, “that’s almost all I remember.”

He drew in a quick breath. “Yes, it was raining,” he said. He waited a moment, as if deciding whether or not to go on. “I was at the store downtown like always,” he began finally. “I was alone. There was so much rain. No one was on the streets.” The old mournfulness swept into his eyes. Then the phone rang,” he said. “It was Laura. She said that your mother had gotten sick, and she told me to come home.”

“When was this?”

“Around a quarter after three, I guess,” my father said. “I went home right away.”

I could feel a silence gather around us as we sat facing each other in the small tavern, vast and empty, as if ours were the only voices that had survived a holocaust.

“Laura met me in the kitchen,” my father said. “She’d made me a ham sandwich, and for a minute, I thought that the long time she’d been so angry with me, that it was finally over.”

“Where was my mother?”

“Laura said that she was upstairs,” my father answered, “that she was a little better, that she was taking a nap.”

And so, suspecting nothing, my father had sat down at the kitchen table, and taken a few bites of the ham sandwich Laura had made for him. She had disappeared upstairs almost immediately, and after a time my father had wandered out to the solarium and slumped down in one of its white wicker chairs.

“I wasn’t there very long,” he said, “when I heard someone coming down the stairs. It was your mother.”

Perhaps more fully than I had ever thought possible, I now saw my mother in all her lost and loveless beauty. I saw her move softly down the carpeted stairs in her fluffy house shoes, her hand clutching the throat of her blouse, a woman perhaps less foolish than any of us had thought, her mind already wondering which of her children would try to kill her next.

“From where I was sitting, I just saw her go by,” my father said. “Then I heard the basement door open, and I knew she was going down there.”

He heard her feet move down the wooden stairs, then went back to the little book he’d found in the solarium, reading it slowly, as he always did, his eyes moving lethargically across the slender columns.

“Jamie came in after that,” he said.

Encased in a vast solitude, rudderless and without direction, my brother came through the kitchen door, trails of rainwater dripping from his hair. He glanced coldly toward my father, but didn’t speak. Instead he simply bounded up the stairs.

“I heard him close the door to his room,” my father said. “He made a point of slamming it.”

After that, but for only a few, precious moments, a silence had descended upon 417 McDonald Drive. For a time, as he read in the solarium, my father had heard nothing but the rain.

Then a blast of incredible magnitude rocked the house.

“I thought it was a gas explosion,” my father said, “something like that. I couldn’t imagine what else it might be.”

He jumped to his feet, the book sliding to the floor of the solarium. He stared around a moment, not knowing where to go. In a blur of speed, he saw Laura fly past the open space that divided the living room from the downstairs corridor.

“The way she was running, I thought something must have happened upstairs,” my father said, “so I ran up there, thinking that Jamie might be hurt, that things might be on fire.”

And so he rushed up the stairs, taking them in broad leaps, plummeting down the corridor where he could see a blue smoke coming through the open door of Jamie’s room.

“I ran into his room, thinking that he must be hurt, that I had to pull him out,” my father said.

What he saw was a boy without a face.

“And I still didn’t know what had happened,” my father said, breathless, already exhausted, as if he had only now made that dreadful run. “I still didn’t realize at that point that Jamie had been shot,” he said wonderingly, as if, through all the years, this was the strangest thing of all.

He ran to him, picked him up slightly, his shoes already soaking up Jamie’s rich, red blood. Still stunned, dazed, unable to think, he heard a roar from down below.

“Then I knew, I think,” he said, “but even then … even then …”

Even then, he didn’t know for sure that his family was being slaughtered.

“And so I just stood there, in the middle of Jamie’s room,” my fathet said.

Just stood there, his eyes darting about wildly until he finally bolted toward the basement.

“From out of nowhere, I thought that it must be someone else,” he said, “that some killer had broken into the house somehow.” He looked at me, the astonishment still visible in his face. “I thought that it was this killer who must have chased Laura down the stairs, that she’d been running from someone else when I’d seen her fly past me that time before.”

And so he began to run again, into the bedroom across the hall, then down the stairs, taking long, desperate strides as he searched for “someone else” in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, his bloody tracks leading everywhere until, at last, they led down the basement stairs.

He stopped on the third step, stricken by what he saw.

“Your mother was behind a big cardboard box,” my father said. “Laura was standing just a few feet away. My old shotgun was in her hands. The barrel was still smoking.” He looked at me unbelievingly. “She was barefoot, like always.”

Barefoot, yes. Like she was in the photograph that should have told me everything, her bare feet stretched toward the camera, their upturned soles covered with the dark grit she’d picked up from the basement floor as she’d stood and aimed the shotgun at my mother.

Swenson’s words came rushing back to me: “Someone else. Someone in the house. Someone helping.”

Laura.

My father shook his head slowly. “She just looked at me, and she said, ‘Now we have to go!’” He stared at me pointedly. “She meant Mexico,” he said, “that now, after what she’d done, that I had no choice but to take her there.”

After that, they’d gone back up to the kitchen together, my father shaken, lost, unable to register the events that had just swept over him.

“I knew she’d done something to your mother a month before,” he said, “but I’d never dreamed that she would do the same to Jamie or to …” He stopped and looked at me emptily.

“To me?” I said.

He leaned forward, his eyes very gentle. “She wanted me to do it, Stevie,” he said. “She said she couldn’t.”

Then she had gone upstairs to her room, walking briskly up the stairs, like someone who’d just been released from prison.

“I stayed in the kitchen,” my father told me. “I thought about it all for a while.”

For a while, but not for long. Only for that short interval which Mrs. Hamilton had noticed between the second shot and the final one.

“I knew Laura had to die,” my father said, “and I knew that if I killed her, they would blame all of it on me, that you would never know what she’d done to them.”

Or had planned to do to me.

“So I wiped her fingerprints off the gun,” my father said. “Then I walked upstairs and …” He stopped, his eyes glancing away for a moment, then returning to me. “It was instant,” he whispered.

I saw my sister turn, saw her eyes widen in disbelief, her hand lift futilely as he pulled the trigger.

“That left you,” my father said.

That left me, yes.

To live on, though alone, remembering the love of my sister.

My father watched me a moment, leaning back, as if to get a better view. He seemed infinitely relieved, though carrying the same, ancient burden he’d carried through it all.

“I hadn’t really had time to think about anything,” my father said. “But after Laura, I went downstairs and thought about what I should do. Later I went back upstairs to change my clothes.”

And so the bloody shoes had never gone below the third step, though by then I knew that my father had.

“But I decided to clean things up a little,” my father said. “I knew you’d be coming home any minute, and I didn’t want you to see …” He shrugged, the sentence trailing off into a brief silence before he began again. “After I’d finished with your mother,” he said, “I decided that maybe I should take you with me.” The blue eyes softened. “So I waited for you, Stevie. I didn’t do anything about Laura or Jamie. I just left them where they were and waited for you to come home.” He looked at me plaintively, as if in apology. “But you never came,” he said. “The phone kept ringing. I thought it might be you, but I was afraid to pick it up.”

And so, at last, he’d walked out into the rain.

“I went to the store and got what money I could,” he told me. “Then I drove to Oscar’s and bought a few things.” He looked at me tenderly. “The last thing I did was call the house. I thought you might be there. Just come in, maybe. Not seen anything. I didn’t think it was possible, but I wanted to give it one last chance.”

One last chance, to take me with him.

“But you still weren’t there,” he said.

I looked away from him, stared at the wall. I felt my hand rise and press down upon my lips. I didn’t speak.

“I did see you one more time, though,” he said. “After I left the house that day, I drove up to a place near my parents’ farm. I knew there was a cabin in the woods. You may remember it yourself. We all went up there one time.”

“I remember it,” I answered softly.

“I stayed there for over a month,” my father told me, “then I decided to head south.” He paused a moment, his eyes settling gently on my face. “On the way down, I drove by Somerset and took some flowers to the graves. I’d just finished putting some on Jamie’s grave when I saw you and Edna coming up the hill.” His voice seemed about to break as he continued. “I ran off into the woods. I could see you at the graves.” He fell silent for a time, then added, “I’ve lived alone since then. I never married. Never had more children.” He watched me, as if not sure he had the right to inquire into my life.

“How about you, Stevie?” he asked finally, tentatively.

“Yes, I got married,” I told him quietly.

He seemed pleased, though he didn’t smile. “Any kids?” he asked.

“A son.”

“Where’s your family now?”

I shrugged, but not indifferently.

“Gone,” I told him.

I saw a terrible bleakness come into his face, a father’s grief for the losses of his son. “Sorry,” was all he said.

Once again, we sat silently for a time, then walked out of the tavern together. It was very dark, and so my father guided me through the twisting, ebony streets, past the olives and the palms, through what was left of the labyrinth, until we reached the unlighted beach.

“Stevie?” my father began, then stopped, as if brought to a halt by the look he’d glimpsed upon my face.

I didn’t answer.

Far in the distance, through the immense stillness, I could see a ship in the darkness, sailing blindly, it seemed to me, toward its nightbound home.