Mortal Memory

SEVEN

NIGHT HAD FULLY FALLEN by the time I got home. Marie and Peter were in the kitchen, both of them working at the evening’s dinner, Marie chopping onions, Peter shaping hamburger patties.

She stopped as I came through the door and looked at me closely. “You look tired,” she said.

“There’s a lot of work at the office,” I told her.

“Are you going to be staying late often?”

“Maybe.”

She nodded, then returned to the cutting board. “I finished the bid this afternoon.”

“Bid?”

She glanced at me, puzzled. The Bridgeport bid,” she said, “the one I’ve been working on so long.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “You think you’ll get the contract?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. You never know.”

I began to set the table, one of the “family time” jobs that had fallen to me. Peter continued slapping at the raw meat, making a game of it.

“Do it right,” I told him, a little sharply.

Marie looked at me, surprised by the edginess in my voice. “Are you okay, Steve?”

I nodded. “Yeah, why?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she returned to her work. “I thought it might be nice to visit my parents tomorrow,” she said after a moment. “We haven’t seen them in several weeks.”

I nodded. “It’s fine with me.”

“So you don’t have to go in to work tomorrow?”

“No.”

Marie smiled. “Good,” she said, “we’ll have a nice day in the country, then.”

Peter finished making the hamburger patties and handed them to Marie.

“Good job, Peter,” she said lightly, as she took them from him.

We ate dinner shortly after that, then Peter went to the den to watch television while Marie and I cleaned up the kitchen.

“What exactly are you working on now?” she asked.

“A library for a little town in Massachusetts,” I answered.

She looked surprised. “And that’s what kept you at the office tonight?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Lowe has a personal interest in the project. It’s for his hometown, and so I want it to be right before he sees it.”

The real reason for my being late in coming home swam into my mind, and I saw Rebecca’s face staring at me questioningly. I remembered the request she’d made for more information about my father’s life, the chronology she was trying to construct, her interest in his army records.

“Do you remember when Aunt Edna died, and we went to her house, and found that box of papers that had belonged to my father?”

Marie nodded.

“You took it out of the car when we got back,” I reminded her. “Do you remember what you did with it?”

“It’s in the basement,” Marie answered. “I wrote ‘Somerset’ on the side of it. I think it’s on the top shelf.” She looked at me curiously. “Why?”

“I thought I might look through it,” I answered. “I never have.”

Marie smiled half-mockingly. “You’re not gearing up for a midlife crisis, are you, Steve?” she asked. “You know, trying to get in touch with yourself, going back over things?” The smile broadened. “Reliving your ‘significant life experiences,’ that sort of thing?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m just curious about what’s in the box.”

My answer appeared to satisfy her. She turned to another subject, something about Peter wanting to try out for the school basketball team, and not long after that she joined him in the den. I could hear them laughing together at whatever it was they were watching.

I walked down the corridor to the stairs that led to the basement. The box was exactly where Marie had said it would be, on the top shelf, the word SOMERSET marked in large, block letters. I dragged it down and carried it back upstairs to my own small office.

I put the box on my desk and opened it. Inside, I could see a disordered mound of papers. They were all that remained of my father, a scattering of letters, documents, a few photographs. I doubted that there could be anything among them that Rebecca would find useful.

I started to reach for the first of the papers when I glanced up and saw Marie at my office door.

She was looking at the box. “Well, you sure didn’t waste any time finding it,” she said.

“It was where you said it would be.”

She smiled. “Peter wants you to come into the den.”

“Why?”

“So we can all watch his favorite show together.”

I didn’t move.

“You got home very late tonight,” Marie added. “I think he sort of missed you.” She stretched her hand toward me. “Come on,” she said softly.

I rose slowly, reluctantly, and went with her. We walked down the corridor together. In the family room, I watched television with my wife and son, talking occasionally, laughing when they laughed, but only out of duty. The force that had once compelled me to such small acts of devotion was already losing speed.

We left the house at around ten the next morning. The drive north toward the Massachusetts border was along winding, country roads. Peter sat in the back, working with a portable video game, while Marie leaned against the door on the passenger side, the window open, the rush of air continually blowing through the red highlights in her hair.

Was she beautiful?

Marie would insist that I say no. She would insist that I admit that it was beauty which formed the grim core of what happened in the end, her own beauty either faded or familiar, Rebecca’s either new or in full bloom. She would insist that it was desire which drove me forward, desire alone, since, as she would say to me that final night, “It was never love …”

We arrived at her parents’ small country house only an hour or so after leaving Old Salsbury. It was a medium-sized, wooden house, painted white, with a large, wraparound porch. In his retirement, Carl had taken up furniture making, and in typical style, had overdone the labor, making far more plain wooden rocking chairs than were strictly needed. As I pulled into the unpaved driveway, I could see several of them on the front porch or scattered randomly about the lawn, rocking eerily when a strong burst of wind swept down from the mountains.

For all the abundance of empty chairs, Carl was sitting on the front steps of the house when we pulled up. Marie had called her mother earlier that morning and let Amelia know that we were coming, but from the pleasantly surprised look on Carl’s face, I realized that she’d never gotten around to telling him to expect us.

He rose slowly, pulling himself up by one of the wooden banisters which bordered the stairs, then waved broadly as we all got out of the car. He was a tall man, with narrow shoulders and long, thin legs. He wore a pair of light brown flannel work pants and a short-sleeved checkered shirt. From a distance he appeared to have a thick head of snowy white hair, but up close, his pink scalp easily showed through it. I’d first met him only a month or so after meeting Marie, the two of us driving up from New York City. He’d tried his best to be light-hearted that evening, but even then, he’d had the aging factory worker’s sense of the bulkiness of things, their ironclad inflexibility.

Marie made it to him first, pressing herself into his arms, then kissing him lightly on the cheek.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

He held her tightly for a moment, as old people sometimes do, never knowing which embrace will be the last. Then he turned to me and shook my hand with his firm, industrial grip.

“How you doing, Steve?” he asked.

“Fine.”

It was Peter’s turn then, and Carl all but yanked him from the ground.

“You got a girlfriend yet?” he demanded.

Peter had not had time to answer before Amelia’s voice came booming toward us from above.

“Don’t ask personal questions, Carl,” she snapped, but in a friendly, joking tone. She shook her head with comic exasperation. “What am I going to do with him?”

She was a tall, slender woman, with thin arms and a somewhat hawkish face. She seemed to hop down the stairs toward us, nervous and bird-like. Once at the bottom of them, she swept Peter into her arms, then Marie. Finally she turned to me, gave me a quick, no-nonsense hug, then firmly pushed me away.

In her youth, Amelia had been a great beauty, locally renowned, and I assumed that the glancing, cautious way she had always embraced and separated from me was a holdover from those bygone days when her slightest touch had given too strong a signal to the breathless men who’d flocked around her. According to Carl, these same men, old now, with shaking heads, still spoke of her in the social club downtown. They still can’t get over that I had her every night,” he’d once told me with a wry, self-satisfied grin, then added significantly, “And she was just eighteen years old, Steve. Can you imagine that?”

Now she was seventy-one, still tall and dignified, like her daughter, but with withered skin, iron-gray hair, and hasty, nervous eyes that glanced about restlessly, as if trying to get a glimpse of where it had all gone.

We followed her into the house, all of us climbing up the stairs toward the open front door. Carl brought up the rear, pulling himself up by means of the old wooden rail.

Marie and her mother disappeared into the back of the house while Carl and I sat down in the front room. I looked at him silently, smiling amiably, as I watched him ease himself down into the overstuffed chair by the piano. A mild heart attack had shaken him three years before, and only last summer he’d fallen in the garden behind the house, and, unable to get up, had wallowed in the tomato plants for nearly ten minutes before Amelia had finally spotted him and come running to his side.

Now, as I watched him, he seemed to age almost by the minute, his hair whitening, his skin wrinkling, his long legs drawing up under the cuffs of his trousers.

For a moment he remained silent, then he nodded idly toward the piano.

“You don’t play, do you, Steve?” he asked, a question he had asked me several times before, always forgetting my answer.

“No,” I said.

“Amy used to play,” Carl said. He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a quick, exhausted rush, as if the burden of holding in his breath were becoming too much for him. “She played for the Knights of Columbus,” he went on. “At a dance one night when Jimmy Doyle didn’t show up.” He winked boyishly. “She wasn’t that good, but she gave it a good try.”

I smiled.

“All you can ask, right?” Carl added. “To give it a good try.”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s the same for life,” Carl said. “You can’t do more than give it a good try.”

I nodded softly, letting my eyes drift away, hoping that with that gesture I could avoid giving Carl any further encouragement toward sharing his philosophy. In the past few years, as old age had overtaken him, he’d become increasingly homespun and folksy, dotting his conversation with empty truisms that annoyed Marie, but which Amelia seemed hardly to notice.

“I wouldn’t say Amy was at a professional level,” Carl went on. “But she was pretty good.” He pulled a red handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers and began to wipe his face, his eyes drifting over the room.

It was a room that Amelia dominated entirely, pictures of her lined up on top of the piano or hanging from the walls, all of them taken much earlier, in the days of her youthful glory. She’d been her father’s favorite, and probably her mother’s, too, and she’d grown up beneath the gaze of a thousand desperately admiring eyes. From that spawning pool of frantically beseeching men, she’d selected a factory worker named Carl. It had been a choice which had baffled, disturbed, and finally embittered her parents. In the end, they’d entirely rejected Carl, an experience he’d never forgotten. “My wife’s parents froze me out,” he told me that first weekend when Marie brought me to his home. “My wife was so pretty, you see. They thought that was her ticket to a brighter future, you know? Then, poor thing, she got tied up with me.”

It was precisely that brighter future that seemed to shine from the photographs which cluttered and overwhelmed the room, all of them taken during Amelia’s glory days, first as a little girl in her father’s arms, later as an adolescent growing toward a stunning womanhood, and finally as a young woman posing by the lake on that single, breathless day her beauty reached its frail, already fading peak.

I drew my eyes away from that last picture and toward the woman herself as Amelia suddenly came back into the room. She was carrying a large picnic basket, and Marie and Peter were standing just behind her, both of them holding a few lightweight folding chairs.

“We thought we’d go on a picnic,” Amelia said. Her eyes swept over to Carl. “What do you think, hon? Just a short walk over to the spring?”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. I’m up for that,” he said, already pulling himself to his feet.

I looked at Marie. She was smiling at Carl with great cheerfulness and affection, which were still on her face when she turned to me.

“Okay with you, Steve?” she asked.

“Sure.”

The spring was small, and it flowed in gentle curves through a glade of trees. It was no more than a short walk from the house, but Carl’s pace was slow and halting, so it was almost twenty minutes later when we reached the shady embankment Amelia had already designated for the picnic.

By that time it was early afternoon, the sun still high and very bright in a cloudless blue. Amelia and Marie spread a large checkered cloth over the grass and began to take the various sandwich meats and breads out of the basket. Peter opened the folding chairs and after a while we were all seated comfortably by the water.

“It’s pretty here, don’t you think?” Amelia asked, though to no one in particular.

Marie nodded, her eyes on me. “Dad and I used to fish in this little stream.”

Carl chuckled. “You never caught anything though, did you, Marie?”

Marie shook her head. “How could I? All I had was that little plastic pole, remember? The one you bought at the dime store downtown?”

“He bought you that for Christmas one year,” Amelia added, “and you had to wait several months for the ice to break before you could use it.” She glanced at Carl. “I told you it would drive her crazy giving her a thing like that in the winter, a thing she couldn’t play with right away.”

Carl laughed again as he glanced toward Marie. “It did just about drive you crazy, too,” he said. “We went fishing the first day the ice broke up.” He shivered. “It was cold as hell.”

In my mind, I could see them by the little spring, the winter thaw barely a few days old, a snowy border on both sides of the stream, the trees bare and creaking in the frozen breeze as they dipped their hooks into the icy, Ashless water.

“You really kept at it, though,” Carl said to Marie admiringly. “We must have stayed out here a couple hours. You just wouldn’t go back in.” He looked at Amelia. “How old was she that year, Amy?”

“Six,” Amelia answered, almost wistfully. “She was six years old.”

I looked over at Peter, remembered him at six years old, a little boy with reddish cheeks and gleaming eyes. It was the year I’d taken him to the state fair in Danbury, taken pictures of him as he was led about on a small, spotted pony, fed him hot dogs and cotton candy until he’d finally puked behind a huge green circus tent.

I laughed suddenly at the thought of it.

Marie looked at me, a smile playing on her lips. “What are you laughing about, Steve?”

“I was just remembering the first time we took Peter to the Danbury Fair.”

I could see the whole day playing through Marie’s memory, sweet, almost delectable, even down to the last unsavory moment. “He threw up,” she said, “behind this big tent.”

Peter grimaced. “I did?”

Carl waved his hand. “Everybody throws up,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and lifted his face upward slightly, as if trying to get some sun.

“Careful there, hon,” Amelia warned. “Don’t tip back too far.”

Carl waved his hand as he leaned back a bit farther. “A man’s got to take a risk, right, Steve?” he said as he pressed himself back farther, Amelia watching him steadily, growing tense until he bolted forward suddenly and caught her eyes in his.

“Scared you, didn’t I?” he joked.

Amelia’s face relaxed. “He’s always trying to get at me,” she said, her eyes now on me. She began a story about some other occasion when Carl had “gotten her,” as she put it, then followed with another.

While she spoke, I felt my mind drift away, drift along the shaded stream, as if skating lightly across the glassy surface of the water. I could hear Amelia’s voice, as well as the laughter of the others as she continued with her tale. I heard names and places, dates, weather reports, ages. I could even feel the overall warmth of the moment we were all sharing, its calmness, pleasure, and serenity.

And yet, I could also feel myself moving away from it, down the softly winding stream, its twin banks gliding smoothly along either side, as if I were being carried on a small canoe. Overhead, I could see the flow of the trees as they passed above me, flowing like another stream, this one suspended surreally above my head. Slowly, almost without my realizing it, the stream became a sleek blue road, winding through a maze of suburban streets, neat lines of houses flowing past on both sides, until, in the distance, I could see the mock Tudor house at 417 McDonald Drive. It was silent, and not at all threatening, and as I continued to drift toward it in my mind, I could feel a grave attraction for it, an excitement at drawing near it, as if it were a place of assignation.

A burst of laughter brought me back, loud and wrenching as a sudden gunshot. I blinked quickly and stared around me. Everyone was laughing—Marie, Peter, Carl. Everyone but Amelia, who, as I noticed, was staring directly toward me with steady, evaluating eyes.

“Where were you, Steve?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She didn’t seem to believe me. Her eyes remained very still, her face framed by the swirling circular maelstrom of her old straw hat. “Just in some other world, I guess,” she said, in a strangely cool and brooding voice.

I nodded, but added nothing else.

Amelia returned her attention to the others. Carl was telling some story about Marie as a little girl, and a few feet away Peter was listening very attentively, as if surprised by the fact that his mother had ever been a child.

I listened attentively too, though from time to time my eye would return to the spring, follow a leaf as it flowed through the dappled shade until it disappeared around the nearest bend.

Toward the end of the afternoon, we repacked the picnic basket, gathered up the folding chairs, and returned to the house. Carl and Amelia walked in the lead, arm in arm, chatting quietly on the way. I could not make out any of what they were saying to each other, but from the quiet glances they exchanged it seemed one of those intimate, deeply familiar conversations one sometimes sees in older people, the sense of completedness, of everything having passed the trial stage.

Marie walked along beside me, her arm in mine, her head pressed lightly against my shoulder. She seemed contented, happy with how the day had gone, with the choices she’d made in her life so far, with me as her husband, with Peter as her son. It was the kind of satisfaction that seemed complete in itself, rather than the product of a thinly disguised resignation.

As we neared the house, Peter shot ahead, running through the tall grass, his blond hair glistening in the sunlight. I felt Marie press her head more firmly against my shoulder.

I glanced down at her.

She was staring up at me affectionately, as if marveling at her own contentment. Then she lifted her face toward me and kissed me on the mouth. Bathed in such sweetness and familiarity, the product of such a long and enduring love, it should have been the single most thrilling kiss I had ever known.

Toward evening, Carl made a fire in the old hearth, and we all sat around it, talking quietly. Marie sat beside me on the sofa, her feet balled up beneath her, her shoulder pressed up snugly against mine. Peter slept next to her, his head resting delicately in her lap.

“Everything going okay at work, Steve?” Carl asked idly, by then puffing on the white meerschaum pipe Marie had given him the preceding Christmas.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’ll probably be made a partner soon,” Marie said.

Carl looked at her. “How about your business?”

“It’s fine,” Marie told him. “I put in a bid for a job in Bridgeport last week.”

I glanced over toward Amelia. She was rocking softly in one of the chairs Carl had made, but her eyes seemed not to move at all as she stared at me.

“So I guess everything’s okay, then?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

I expected her to smile, or give some sign of satisfaction, but she didn’t. She turned toward the fire instead, and held her eyes there, the light playing on her face in the way of old romantic movies.

We left an hour later, Peter piling groggily into the back seat while Marie and I said good-bye. Carl hugged each of us in turn, then stepped back to allow Amelia to do the same.

“Nice seeing you again,” she said easily, then glanced over at me. “Be good, Steve,” she told me in a voice that seemed stern and full of warning.

Marie sat close to me on the drive home, breathing softly as we drove through the dark countryside. Once back in Old Salsbury, we led Peter to his room, and watched, amused and smiling, as he collapsed onto his bed.

Later, in bed ourselves, Marie inched toward me, stroking me slowly. We made love sweetly and well, with that correctness of pace and expertise that only custom can attain. After that, Marie moved quietly into a restful sleep.

Toward dawn I felt her awaken slightly. She lifted her head in the early light, smiled, kissed my chest, then lowered her head down on it again and closed her eyes. While I waited for the morning, I stroked her hair.

So it was never love, as she would say to me that last night, it was never love … that was missing.

***

Marie was still sleeping in the morning when I got up and headed downstairs to my office. It was smaller than Marie’s, since I’d always done most of my work at Simpson and Lowe, while Marie did most of hers at home. It contained little more than a drafting table, a large light, and a few metal filing cabinets.

I sat down at the table, pulled out the latest plans for my dream house, and began to go over the details again, searching for places where I could remove yet another enclosed area from what was already an impossibly airy and unreal space. But as I worked, I found myself increasingly unable to concentrate on the plans before me. It was as if the dream house had become, at last, pure dream, nothing more than idle whimsy, an idea for which I no longer felt any genuine conviction. It was Rebecca and her search that seemed real to me now, and I even allowed myself to hope that from time to time Rebecca might sense my presence beside her, silent, determined, armed as she was armed, with the same grisly instruments of night, the two of us equally committed to tracking down “these men,” poking at the ashes they had left behind, closing in on their distant hiding places.

I remembered the photograph she’d shown me on Friday afternoon. I saw my father standing in the open, his army cap cocked to the side. The smile on his face had seemed absolutely genuine. It had given his face an immense happiness, a joy and sense of triumph that I’d never seen before. Not in life. Not in any other photograph. That day, April 1, 1942, I realized with complete certainty, had been his finest moment.

Rebecca had already noted that my mother had to have been pregnant with Jamie by then, but it wasn’t the fact of my brother’s technical illegitimacy which struck me suddenly. It was something else, a curious memory of something that had happened when I was eight years old, a year or more before the murders, but which I could now recall very clearly.

It was a spring day, and my father had been doing some kind of repair work in the basement. He’d asked Laura to bring him something from the garage. Laura had gone to find it, but after several minutes, she still hadn’t come back into the house, and so my father had turned to me.

“Go get Laura,” he told me.

I went up the stairs, out the kitchen door, and into the garage, expecting to find Laura still searching through the usual disarray to find whatever it was my father wanted. But she was sitting in a far corner instead, her body in a dusky, yellow light. A pile of blue papers was scattered at her feet, all of them spilling out of a small shoe box that had obviously fallen from the shelf overhead. She had one of the light blue pieces of paper in her hand, but she was no longer reading it. She was simply sitting motionlessly, deep in thought, her eyes lifted toward the dark, wooden ceiling.

I called to her, but very softly. “Laura?”

She looked at me directly, her body still motionless, except for the way her fingers slowly curled around the blue paper, as if to conceal it.

“What do you want, Stevie?” she asked stiffly.

“Dad wants you,” I told her.

She drew her hands behind her, the blue note disappearing behind her back. “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute,” she said. “I have to clean up this mess.”

I did as she told me, and for a while my father seemed satisfied that Laura was on her way. But later, with his typical impatience, he finally headed up the stairs and out to the garage. I followed behind him, a dog at his heels.

Laura was still in the same corner as we entered the garage, the same blue paper in her hand. She tried to hide it again, which surprised me, since I’d never before seen her try to conceal anything from my father.

His eyes fixed on the paper. “What is that?” he asked.

Laura didn’t answer.

My father walked through the dusky light and drew the paper from Laura’s fingers.

From my place at the front of the garage, I watched as he read it. When he’d finished, he turned to me.

“Go play, Stevie,” he said.

I was in the backyard a few minutes later when the two of them came out of the garage. Laura was nestled beneath my father’s arm, and they were walking slowly toward the house.

My mother came home a short time later. She’d been grocery shopping, I remember, and as she headed up the stairs, her arms around an enormous brown bag, my father stepped out of the house, took the bag from her, and returned it to the car. Then he motioned for her to follow him and the two of them walked past me and over to the very edge of the yard. I was too far away from them to make out any of what they said, but I remember having the distinct feeling that they were talking about the blue papers Laura had found in the garage.

After a while they walked back toward the house. They were still talking, and as they passed, I heard my mother say, “You told her not to …” She didn’t finish, because Jamie suddenly came rushing around the corner of the house. At the sight of him, both my father and my mother froze, each of them staring at him with such frightened, startled looks that I had sensed even then that the blue papers, and everything that had happened since I’d seen Laura reading them, had had something to do with Jamie.

During the next few days, however, the entire incident slipped from my mind. Everything returned to its normal pattern, except that my mother seemed even more subdued. There were times, forever after that, when she seemed to flee from any notion of command. Steadily over the next few years, she became more vaporous, slowly giving up the prerogatives of wife and mother so that in the end she seemed more like some distant relative we’d saved from poverty or shame, one who lived with us but had no standing among us, no office or authority, incontestably by then the “poor Dottie” of my aunt’s unforgiving judgment.

But for the rest of us, nothing seemed to change, and as I sat at my desk that morning, remembering the blue papers, it struck me that I wouldn’t have remembered it at all if something else hadn’t happened, something which I always believed was connected in some way to what had been written in them.

It was about three months later. My father had recently put a redwood picnic table under the large maple tree that stood beside the rear fence, and Laura and I had begun meeting there to play Monopoly or checkers or some other game. That particular day, Laura had begun to teach me chess. Slowly, with infinite patience, she introduced me to each piece. I had only played checkers before, and it was not easy for me to get a grip on this much more complicated game.

We’d been at it for nearly an hour before Jamie strode across the backyard and sat himself down on the bench beside me.

Laura hardly registered his presence. Instead, she continued to concentrate on teaching me the game. Jamie watched sullenly while she did it, as if evaluating each word my sister spoke, each gesture she made, second-guessing and inwardly ridiculing her, at times even smiling snidely when she got something slightly wrong or out of order and had to correct herself.

As the minutes passed, I could feel the air heating up and turning sour around us. It was as if the peaceful little island that Laura and I created when we were together had been invaded by a poisonous wind.

Finally, the storm broke.

“You’re doing it all wrong, Laura,” Jamie snapped. “It’s stupid the way you’re teaching him.”

Laura didn’t so much as look at him. She picked up the knight, and began to explain its move.

“You’re going to screw it up, as usual,” Jamie barked.

Laura’s eyes shot over to him. “You’re not supposed to talk like that in front of Stevie.”

“I’m trying to keep him from being a loser, Laura,” Jamie fired back. “The way you’re teaching him this game, he’ll play it like a sissy.”

Laura’s eyes narrowed lethally. “Nobody asked you, anyway, Jamie,” she hissed angrily. “Nobody asked you to come over here and bother us.”

Jamie leaned toward her threateningly. “I don’t have to be asked,” he said. “It’s my yard, too, you know.”

For a flaming instant, Laura glared at him with a terrible ferocity. Then she turned her attention back to the game, but not before muttering a single, indecipherable phrase. “Sort of,” she said.

It had been said under her breath, but loud enough for us to hear it.

“What did you say?” Jamie demanded.

Laura didn’t answer. She picked up one of the knights and pressed it toward me. I could see that it was trembling in her hand.

“What did you say, Laura?” Jamie repeated, only this time in a tone that was more than teenage anger. Cold. Severe. A prelude to explosive rage.

Laura locked her eyes on mine. “This is the knight,” she said evenly, “it moves like this.” She lowered the knight to the board and demonstrated the move.

Jamie continued to stare at her with a terrible, quivering hatred. I remember bracing myself, my own mind racing to decide what I would do if he lunged forward and hit her.

But he did no such thing. After a few more impossibly tense seconds, he simply rose silently and left us, a lean, disjointed figure striding awkwardly across the green summer lawn.

Laura had resumed teaching me about the knight by the time Jamie had finally disappeared into the house. She went directly to its moves, to various ways of using it. She didn’t try to explain what she’d meant with that angry, nearly whispered “Sort of,” and I never heard her say anything so cryptic to Jamie after that.

So what had my sister meant that day beneath the maple tree?

For well over thirty years, it was a question I’d never asked. Then, that Sunday morning, as Peter and Marie slept upstairs and I sat at my desk, with both Rebecca and her mission steadily gaining force in my own mind, I tried to find out. I went to the box I’d brought up from the basement the day before, hoping that the answer might be there.

Within a matter of only a few minutes, I discovered that it was.