Mortal Memory

NINE

A WEEK PASSED before we met again. As always, it began with a phone call to my office, and it ended with the two of us seated in the front room of her cottage by the lake.

From the beginning, it was clear that during the intervening days, Rebecca had thought a great deal about our last conversation. She began with a reference to it.

“We were talking about faking love,” she said, as she took a seat opposite me. “You were saying that your father might have faked it from the beginning.”

I nodded.

“What about his love for Laura?” Rebecca asked. “Was he faking that, too?”

I shook my head determinedly. “No. Absolutely not.”

Rebecca took a picture from her briefcase and handed it to me. It showed Laura as she lay on her back, her chest blown open, her soiled feet pressed toward the camera. I gave the picture back to her.

“I don’t care what that shows,” I told her. “I saw his face when he was with her. She relieved him. She gave him the only happiness he may have had in our family.”

I could tell Rebecca remained doubtful.

“I know that my father loved Laura,” I repeated, almost wistfully. “Because I loved her too. Especially toward the end. Especially that last year when it became …” I hesitated to say it, but found that I couldn’t keep it back. “… romantic.” I shrugged. “Or at least that’s the way it felt.”

Laura was sixteen that year, and so beautiful that there were times when I’d catch her in my eye, and simply stop, dead still, and watch until she passed from view. So beautiful that I’d begun to dream about her. They weren’t the sweaty, lustful fantasies of teenage boys, but the atmosphere was always luscious nonetheless, a sensual world of glades and humid leaves, warm mists and jungle fragrances.

In dreams, Laura came to me in such places. Of course, it was never really Laura, but only a presence I recognized as her, a smell, a taste, but never the person that she really was, the teenage girl who ate dinner across the table from me, and slept in the room next door. Still, it was a powerful presence, and after each dream, I was left with the odd sensation of her actually having passed through me, like a wind through a cloud, leaving me in a strangely suspended state of excitement and delight. The following morning, while she ate her eggs obliviously across the table, I would smile inwardly, remembering my dream, and with the strange sense that I’d cunningly stolen something from her during the night, then triumphantly slinked away.

“I was in love with my sister,” I said. “If we’d been allowed to grow up together, I’m sure I would have found another romantic object.” I shook my head. “But she died at the height of her power over me, and so, I had all this love left over, like money I couldn’t spend.”

“You couldn’t spend it with your wife?”

“It’s not the same.”

I half expected Rebecca to lean toward me and begin a wholly different inquiry, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked at me very shrewdly, as if taking some part of me in for the first time. Then she said, “I know.”

For a moment, we stared at each other softly. During that brief time, I felt an undeniable connection to her, a sense of having shared the same dark space. But it lasted only an instant, for almost immediately, Rebecca shifted in her seat, as if to break free of some invisible net.

“How about Laura?” she said. “Did she have a ‘romantic object’ in her life?”

I suppose it was not until that moment that I fully realized just how much I’d buried since the murders, how much I’d repressed.

“Yes, she did,” I said. “A boy named Teddy Lawford.”

Rebecca drew a small pad from the table beside her chair. “Was he from Somerset?”

“No. They met on Cape Cod. My father had rented a cottage there for the last week in August 1959.” The nearness of that day in November struck me. “It was just three months before the murders.”

Rebecca’s eyes tensed slightly, but she said nothing. Instead, she merely allowed me to continue, her pen still poised above the white paper which bore nothing but Teddy Lawford’s name.

“Teddy was seventeen,” I began.

As I spoke, I could see him quite clearly in my mind, tall and lanky, with light brown hair. He had grayish eyes that seemed to change depending on the light, something Laura had later commented on. His amiable, divorced father was a large, beer-barrel of a man who’d spent his life selling auto parts in Boston. He’d rented the cottage next to ours for the summer, and Teddy had watched a series of families move in and out of it over the preceding weeks, some staying no longer than a few days before they were replaced by another. But we had been the first, I later heard Mr. Lawford say, who’d shown up with a lovely girl nearly his son’s age.

“I think Teddy’s father was anxious for him to meet someone,” I said.

Rebecca looked at me. “You mean a girl his son could have a sexual experience with?”

“Yes, probably,” I answered. “He must have seen Laura at some point, although I don’t know exactly when that might have been.”

Perhaps from behind the tattered paper shades of his own cottage, perhaps from the screened porch that looked out over the sea. In any event, Mr. Lawford had no doubt glimpsed her, had let his eyes settle upon her body as she moved along the side of the house, or strolled through the tall green sea grass to the beach below, all the time brokenly aware, as he must have been, that she was well beyond him, that he was too old and bald and fat to inspire anything but repulsion in such a beautiful young girl, but that she might make a suitable offering for his son.

“Mr. Lawford invited us over to his cottage the second night we were on the Cape,” I said. “My mother hadn’t really wanted to go. Jamie, either. But both of them had finally come along with the rest of us.”

It was early evening, and a gorgeous red sun was lowering on the horizon. I’d never seen a sunset on the sea, or even the kind of deep blue light that descended upon us that evening. It was warm, and Laura was dressed in a pair of white shorts and a dark green blouse, its ends knotted at the front. I remember that Teddy came to attention as she walked into the backyard, his dark eyes clinging to her like talons.

“Teddy fell for my sister at first sight,” I told Rebecca. “They hadn’t even spoken, but he was crazy about her.”

“So it wasn’t exactly love,” Rebecca said.

I shook my head. “Love? No, it didn’t have time to be love.”

But it was very powerful nonetheless, and it grew unabatedly during the entire evening, as Laura and Teddy inched their way into a different universe. The contrast between them and the rest of us must have been amazing. Jamie sat morosely by himself, dully watching the sea. My father and Mr. Lawford talked idly and passionlessly of business matters, my mother listening to them silently, her hands folded in her lap. As for me, I scuffled with Mr. Lawford’s cocker spaniel, both of us rolling mindlessly across the sandy lawn.

And yet, even as I rolled around that evening, I could sense the emergence of a new state of being, a world that had suddenly sprung into existence, and which floated in the air between Teddy Lawford and my sister. I didn’t know what it was, but only that it was something that had been mysteriously created, and that its movements were infinitely fast.

“It wasn’t love,” I told Rebecca once again. “But once you’d felt it, you wouldn’t want to live without it.”

Rebecca lifted her face slightly. “It was romance,” she said firmly.

“Well, whatever it was, Teddy was in the full grip of it. He came over to our house the very next morning.”

He was dressed in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a white T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up above his shoulders. I saw him lope across the yard, pause a moment at the little stone walkway that led to our house, then bolt forward, as if, in those few hesitant moments, he’d thought it all over and decided the issue once and for all.

Though it was still early, Laura had been awake for a long time. I’d glimpsed her sitting alone on the screen porch, then later strolling absently in the backyard, making odd, aimless turns, her long hair blowing in the early morning breeze. Despite the chill, she’d gone into the yard wearing nothing but the bottom of her bathing suit beneath a loose-fitting blouse, purposely leaving behind her thin blue windbreaker, the one she’d tightly wrapped around herself while she’d remained on the porch.

“Laura had gone out to attract Teddy,” I told Rebecca. “You might say, to display herself. She was very beautiful that summer, and I’m sure Teddy was completely overwhelmed by that.”

And so, that morning I watched as Teddy bounded down the walkway toward our cottage, not even able to control his stride. I was at the window, and it was only a few feet from there to the door, but Laura was at the door even before I could get to it, answering his knock instantly. A wave of white light swept over her when she opened it, and for a moment, as I watched, she seemed encased in its radiance. She stood quite still, talking to him, her hands toying nervously with the loose ends of her blouse. I can still remember the words that passed between them, so ordinary they seemed to burst in the heated air:

“Oh, hi, Teddy.”

“Hi, Laura.”

“Have you already eaten?”

“No, not yet.”

“There’s a little diner down the road. It’s not so great, but I go there for breakfast. You want to come with me?”

“Well, my father’s still asleep, you know?”

I had come up quite close to them by then, walking very slowly from the window to the door, listening intently as I moved toward them.

Laura looked at me, and I noticed that, despite the chill, small beads of sweat had formed a moist line across her upper lip.

In an instant, she was gone, the two of them disappearing behind a curve in the road. She hadn’t asked my father’s permission. She hadn’t said so much as a “see you later, Stevie” to me. It was as if a mighty wind had picked her up and blown her out the door.

“She was completely swept away,” I told Rebecca. “I couldn’t imagine what was going on in her. I couldn’t believe that she’d just left without saying anything to my father.”

He woke up an hour later, fully alert, the way he always did, as if, each morning, he returned to himself in a sudden, startling realization. He was dressed in a pair of blue trousers and a checked shirt, and he barely offered a passing wave as he headed for the kitchen. I heard him making a pot of coffee, then, after it was made, I saw him walk out onto the back porch and stare out across the field of high, green sea grass that stretched almost to the beach. The morning light was even brighter by then, and it framed him eerily as he stood, his back to me, peering out toward the bay, the black mug of coffee rising and falling rhythmically before he finally spun around, as if alerted by some sound, and looked at me:

“Where’s Laura?” he asked.

“Laura?” I repeated hesitantly, stalling for time, but remembering the look she’d given to me as she’d left with Teddy, a look that had unmistakably commanded me to lie. “I don’t know, Dad,” I answered. “I haven’t seen her.”

He nodded slowly and lowered himself into one of the rusty metal chairs on the back porch. It was only then that the oddity of his initial question struck me. How had he known that Laura was not in the house, not sleeping in her bed like his wife was? I know that the question rose in my mind that morning, but only in a child’s mind, quick, glancing, devoid of further investigation. It was not until I’d related the whole story of that morning to Rebecca that the answer actually occurred to me.

“He had expected to find her waiting for him on the porch,” I told her. “And when he walked out onto the back porch and saw she wasn’t there, he knew something was wrong.”

“What did he do?”

“He had another cup of coffee.”

And another and another, while the sun rose steadily and my mother slept mindlessly, and I wandered in the backyard, glancing apprehensively toward him from time to time. Something had gone wrong, and I knew it; some mysterious and confusing element had entered into our lives. I could see it in my father’s face. For even though his features remained very still, I could sense that wheels were spinning wildly behind them.

My mother got up at around ten that morning, but she didn’t join my father on the back porch. Instead, she mechanically made breakfast for herself, the usual boiled egg and toast, then walked out into the living room and ate it absently, as if it were merely tasteless fodder, fit for nothing but the maintenance of life.

I went out to play in the backyard. Mr. Lawford’s spaniel spotted me and ran over for another round of tussling in the grass, and this occupied me fully for quite some time. The strange dread I’d felt vanished in the frolic, and so it was not until I saw my father come to his feet that I even noticed that he still remained on the back porch.

He stood very tall, a lean man with wavy black hair, the checked shirt billowing slightly as he came out into the yard. He didn’t notice me at all, but walked directly to the edge of the yard, the place where it began its sharp decline toward the beach.

I walked over to him and stood at his side, looking down, as he did, toward Laura.

“Laura came back about an hour later,” I told Rebecca, “but not by way of the road. She came up the beach instead, and she was alone.”

Alone, because she must have known that whatever lie I’d come up with to tell my father, it surely hadn’t included Teddy.

Standing beside my father, I could see her moving slowly, her head bowed slightly, as if she were looking for shells. She was barefoot, her brown leather sandals dangling from one hand, as she waded through the weaving lines of white lacy foam.

“There she is.”

That was all my father said, and it was no more than a whisper, three words carried on a single, expelled breath. Then he returned to the house, without waiting, as I did, for Laura to make the hard climb up the stairs along the sandy hill to our cottage.

She was out of breath by the time she reached me, her long hair slightly moist with sea spray. She wasted no time in getting to the subject:

“I saw Dad up here.”

“He went back into the house.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I didn’t know where you were.”

“Good. Thanks, Stevie.”

“Where were you, Laura?”

She didn’t answer me, but only walked directly back to the house and joined my father on the small back porch. While I played in the backyard, I could see them sitting together, their faces gray behind the screen, smoke from my father’s cigarette drifting out into the summer air.

A few hours later we all went down to the beach, trudging cautiously through the deep sea grass, my father lugging a huge picnic basket, Jamie dragging along behind, looking as morose as he had the preceding day.

Teddy came bounding down a few minutes later. My mother invited him to have one of the ham sandwiches she’d made, and he accepted without hesitation. For a time, he chatted amiably with us all, although his eyes often fell upon Laura with a deadly earnest. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of having met earlier that morning, but I remember having the distinct impression that my father knew that they had. Perhaps Laura had told him while the two of them sat behind the gray screen. Or perhaps he’d sensed it in the looks that sometimes passed between Teddy and Laura while we all sat together on the blanket my mother had spread over the sand.

It was very hot that day, and not long after lunch, Laura, Teddy, and I all went into the water for relief. My mother, who never swam, gathered everything up and wandered back to the house, leaving my father alone on the beach. He sat there for several hours, his long legs sticking out of a dark blue bathing suit, watching us distantly, with that strange attitude of concentration which I’d only seen in the basement before, and which I associated only with the assembling of fancy European bicycles. And yet it was there on his face, that look of intense study and attention.

It was not directed at me, of course, but at Laura and Teddy as they moved farther and farther out into the sea. Glancing toward them from time to time, I would see hardly more than two heads bobbing happily in the blue water, although I am sure now that my father saw a good deal more.

Rebecca looked at me quizzically. “What more did your father see?” she asked. “I mean besides what was obvious, two teenagers attracted to each other.”

“I’m not sure, but I think it was something about life.” I remembered Rebecca’s earlier remark about what she was looking for in these men. “Maybe something unbearable,” I added.

I could see my father’s face as it had appeared that day. Although in his youth he’d been a pale, skinny boy, middle age had filled him out a bit. He was still slender, of course, but his face had aged into an unmistakable handsomeness, his sharper features less bird-like, the eyes more deeply set and piercing. His curly black hair framed his face well, and when the wind tossed it, as it did that afternoon, it gave him a wild, curiously appealing look. Because of that, I realized that I’d been completely mistaken in what I’d just told Rebecca. “No, he didn’t look like a man about to break,” I said. “He didn’t look like that at all.”

I watched her quietly for a moment, certain now that I was following behind her in some strange way, covering ground she’d already covered.

“My father wasn’t some little gray man who crumbled under pressure,” I said finally. “Why have I always wanted to think of him that way?”

I instantly thought of the other men Rebecca had chosen for her study. None of them had been inept or inconsequential; none had seemed to lack a certain undeniable dignity.

I saw my father again as he’d appeared that day on the beach, his legs stretched out before him, leaning back slightly, propped up on his elbows, his eyes focused on Laura and Teddy as they bounced up and down in the heaving waves.

In my imagination, his features took on a classical solidity and force, almost the military bearing of one who had chosen to defend the city, no matter what the cost.

I looked at Rebecca, amazed by my own reassessment. “My father had a certain courage, I think.”

It was then that the utter loneliness of my father hit me with its full force, the darkness within him, his long silence, the terrible hunger he carried with him into the basement night after night, and which, I realized now, Laura had sensed as well, and perhaps even tried to relieve from time to time, like someone visiting a prisoner in his cell.

Rebecca looked at me questioningly. “Did something happen on the Cape, Steve?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Rebecca seemed almost reluctant to continue, as if she felt herself being drawn down in a world even she was not quite prepared to enter. “Do you want to stop now,” she asked, “or do you want to go on?”

“I want to go on, Rebecca.”

And so I did.

I told her how Teddy and Laura had spent almost all their time together after that first morning, how my mother had remained almost like an invalid, reading her romance novels, how, at last, my father had seized the gray back porch like a conquered province, sitting hour after hour in the little metal chair, his eyes trained on the sea.

Finally, I arrived at the place where I’d been heading all along, that last night on Cape Cod.

“Nothing really strange happened until the end of that week,” I began, “the night before we headed back to Somerset.”

Early that afternoon, it had begun to rain. By evening, it had developed into a full summer storm, with sheets of windblown rain slapping against the cottage’s rattling windowpanes. While the rest of us retreated into the house, my father remained on the back porch, still in that same chair, his eyes fixed on the violently churning sea.

“Lost in thought, that’s how I’d describe him,” I told Rebecca. “Lost in thought.”

“But you don’t know what he was thinking about?”

A possibility occurred to me: “Killing us, perhaps.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because, over dinner that night, he did something cruel to my mother.”

She’d called him in to a hastily prepared dinner of hot dogs and baked beans, and he’d taken his usual seat. He looked preoccupied, intensely engaged in something within him. He remained silent while the rest of us chatted, mostly about the things that still had to be done before we could leave the next morning. A couple of times during the meal, Laura had tried to engage him, but he’d only answered her in quick, terse phrases, little more than a yes or no, sometimes not even that, but only a brisk nod of the head.

My mother had watched all of this for some time, yet had said nothing. Finally, she got up and headed back to her chair in the living room, inadvertently leaving one of her novels on the table near my father. She was almost all the way out of the room when he called to her suddenly:

“Dottie.”

She turned quickly, as if surprised by the sound of her name in his mouth, unsure of the context in which he’d used it, already gathering her red housedress around herself more tightly:

“Dottie.”

My mother had already turned all the way around to face him before he spoke to her again. She didn’t answer him, but only stood, very still, as if waiting for his next word.

My father added nothing else for a moment, and I remember he looked regretful that he’d called her name at all. Still, he had started something which he could not help but finish:

“You forgot to take your book, Dottie.”

And with that, he picked it up and hurled it toward her violently, its pages flapping hysterically in the air until it struck my mother in the chest and fluttered to the floor.

My mother stared at him, stricken, and my father seemed to collapse beneath her broken, helpless gaze. His face was ashen, as if mortified by what he’d done. He stood up, walked over to where the book lay lifelessly on the floor, retrieved it, and handed it to my mother:

“I’m sorry, Dottie.”

She took it from him, retreated into the living room, and slumped down in her accustomed position. The book lay in her lap. She made no effort to read it that night. Instead, she remained in her chair, the yellow lamplight flooding over her, her eyes fixed on the small painting that hung on the opposite wall.

I gave Rebecca a penetrating look as the thought struck me.

“She knew it was coming,” I said. “From that moment, I think, she knew he was going to kill us.”

Rebecca didn’t question this. She jotted a note in her black book and looked back up.

“What was Laura’s reaction to what your father did?” she asked.

I remembered the look on her face in great detail. She had been sitting across from me, so that the book had flown between us as it hurled toward my mother. Laura’s eyes had followed it briefly, then shot over to my father. What I saw in them astonished me.

“It was admiration,” I told Rebecca. “Laura looked at my father as if he’d done something gallant, like he was some kind of knight in shining armor.” I released a sharp, ironic chuckle. “All he’d done was throw a book at a helpless woman,” I said. That’s not exactly Sir Lancelot, is it?”

Then why did Laura look at him that way?”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t seem to believe me. “Are you sure you don’t know?”

“What are you getting at, Rebecca?”

Before she could answer, I already knew. It had undoubtedly been admiration that I’d seen in my sister’s eyes, but I hadn’t guessed the nature of what it was she admired until that moment.

“Action,” I said. “She admired him for actually doing something. It was hostile, and it was cruel, but at least it was something. “

It was perhaps the same thing Quentin had admired not long before he died, muttering about how my father had “taken it by the balls.” I thought about it a little while longer, remembering the softness in my sister’s eyes, the love she had for my father, the small, almost undetectable smile that had quivered on her lips as she’d glanced over at him that night. It led me to the final moment of my narrative.

“That wasn’t all my father did that night,” I said.

Rebecca looked at me thoughtfully. I knew that she could hear the slight strain that had suddenly entered my voice as I began:

“It was much later that night, and …”

I’d already been in bed for several hours when I heard someone moving softly in the adjoining room. I crawled out of bed, walked to the door, and opened it. In the darkness, I could see Laura as she headed stealthily toward the back porch, through its creaking screen door and out into the yard. Her posture was different than I’d ever seen it, slightly crouched, as if she were trying to make herself smaller, less easily seen.

I followed her as far as the back porch, then stood, staring through the gray metal web of the screen. I could see my sister as she made her way across the wet grass, the white folds of her nightgown rippling softly in the wind that came toward her from the sea. In that same wind, her long hair lifted like a black wave, falling softly to her shoulders and down her back.

I remember that I pressed my face into the screen, as if trying to pass through it bodilessly, like a ghost, and float out toward the tall green reeds into which she had wholly disappeared.

I stood for a long time by the screen, half expecting Laura to reemerge from the sea grass, perhaps with a shell in her hand, or some article she’d forgotten to retrieve from the beach earlier in the day.

But she didn’t come back, and so, after a moment, I drew away from the screen and turned back toward the house.

That was when I saw my father.

He was sitting motionlessly in the far corner of the porch, his long legs folded under the metal chair, his light blue eyes oddly luminous in the darkness. In the eerie stillness, he looked like a serpent sunning itself on a stone, but entirely inverted, drawing warmth and comfort from the darkness.

He didn’t speak to me at first, but merely let his eyes drift over to me, hold for a moment, then leap back to their original position, peering out at the wall of gently waving reeds. Then he spoke:

“Go back to bed, Stevie.”

“Where’s Laura going?”

“Go back to bed.”

His eyes returned to me, and I felt myself shrink back, moving away from him cautiously and fearfully, as if he were coming toward me with a knife.

Within seconds I was back in my room, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind latched on to Laura, to her white gown billowing in the breeze, and I remember feeling frightened for her somehow. Normally, the fear would have come from the simple knowledge that she was out in the darkness alone. But that wasn’t the origin of my dread. It was him. It was the feeling that he was going to go after her, stalk her in the reeds, do something unimaginable.

I looked at Rebecca, shaken suddenly by my own unexpected insight. “So I was really the one who knew all along that he was going to kill us,” I told her. “I was the one who sensed it. Not my mother or Jamie or Laura.”

Rebecca’s face was very still. “Go on,” she said.

And so I did, relating the story in as much detail as I could recall, reliving it.

After a time I walked back to the porch, although very stealthily, intending only to peer surreptitiously around the corner of the door to assure myself that my father was still there, that he hadn’t followed my sister into the reeds.

But he was gone, the chair empty, a cigarette butt still smoldering in the little ashtray he kept beside it. I knew that he hadn’t returned to the bedroom he shared with my mother. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was as clear to me as if I’d seen him disappear into the tall grass or heard the creak of the screen door as it closed behind him. I knew, absolutely, that he’d decided to go after my sister.

I stood, frozen on the porch, poised between the warmth of my childhood bed and the darkness beyond the house. I don’t know what I thought, if I thought anything at all. Perhaps I was already beyond thought, already operating at a more primitive level, sensing the storm that was building within my father the way an animal lifts its face to the air and senses danger in the bush.

“What did you do?” Rebecca asked.

“I went after my father.”

A curious expression rose in Rebecca’s face. “You weren’t thinking of it as going after Laura?”

“No.”

And it was true. Even as I opened the screen door and stepped out onto the wet lawn, I knew absolutely that I was pursuing my father rather than moving to protect my sister, that my intent, shadowy and vaguely understood, was to join him in the tall grass, commit myself to whatever it was he had committed to the moment he’d crushed the cigarette butt into the ashtray beside his chair and headed out into the night.

The grass was tall and still wet with rain, and the blades, as they pressed my arms and legs, felt very cool and damp. The ground was soft, and I could feel my feet sink into it slightly with each step. The reeds had parted as my father had moved through them, leaving a wide trail for me to follow, already crouching as I went forward, moving slowly and secretly, as if I already had much to hide.

The trail led down the hill toward the sea. I could hear the waves tumbling not far away, but I couldn’t see them until the clouds parted suddenly and a broad expanse of light fell over the beach. It was then that I glimpsed my father’s head, saw his tangled black hair and sharp, angular face just for an instant before he sank down, squatting over the wet earth. I could tell by the motionlessness of the grass that he’d stopped, and for a moment, I stopped as well and stood, sinking imperceptibly into the rain-soaked ground.

For a little while I listened intently, my head cocked like some primordial creature. I could hear only the waves as they tumbled toward shore a few yards away and the wind as it swept through the reeds that surrounded me.

I don’t know exactly when I began to move forward again, or why, or what I was thinking as I did so. I remember only the sudden desire to penetrate more deeply into the green wall and the inability to draw back once I’d begun to move again.

I walked slowly, very silently, as if stalking a prey almost as cunning as myself. I remember shifting to the right somewhat, because I didn’t want to come upon my father. I’d glimpsed his position in a wedge of light, and I carefully edged myself away from him as I continued to slink forward through the reeds.

I didn’t stop until I heard a shifting in the grass, the slow, rhythmic friction of blades rubbing softly against other blades. As I continued forward, I could hear someone breathing, then two people breathing in short, quick spasms.

I stopped and peered out, gently drawing away the curtain of reeds that blocked my vision. That was when I saw her.

“Laura,” Rebecca whispered.

“Yes.”

At first my sister’s body appeared to me in a blur of white and black, her long hair shifting back and forth over her naked shoulders. She seemed to be rising and falling on a completely separate cushion of pale flesh. I could only partially see the body beneath her, the one which shuddered violently each time my sister rose and fell above it. It came to me only as a headless ghost, white against the dark ground, moaning softly each time my sister lifted the lower part of her body then eased herself down upon him again.

I could see his slightly hairy thighs, the nest of dark hair into which they disappeared, and finally the long pale shaft that seemed to pierce and then withdraw itself from the body of my sister.

It was 1959, I was nine years old, and so I’m sure I didn’t know what was happening there in front of me. Still, I knew that it was something powerful, occult, primitive, and at last profoundly private. I felt the need to withdraw, to sink back into the reeds and return to my bed, but something held me there, and for a moment, I continued to watch, shamed perhaps, but also mesmerized by the spectacle before me.

I don’t know how long I watched, but I do remember that during that time the idea that my father could be anywhere near such a scene completely left me. I remained fixed on the two bodies, as if dazzled by the continually building intensity of their motions, the rising force and deep needfulness I could hear in their breathing.

Suddenly, my sister arched her back and released a long, luxurious sigh. She shook her head, and her dark hair brushed back and forth along the lower quarters of her naked back. Then she fell forward in a spent, exhausted motion, the wall of her flesh suddenly collapsing so that I could see the green reeds beyond her, and deep within those reeds, my father’s pale blue eyes, motionless and vaguely hooded, with nothing at all in them of the voyeur’s seamy lust, but only staring toward mine in an instant of unspeakable collusion.

For a few seconds, we continued to stare frozenly at each other while Laura and Teddy hurriedly dressed themselves, took a final, strangely passionless kiss, then rushed away, Laura moving up toward our cottage, Teddy toward his.

Once both of them were out of sight my father stood up and started walking back to the cottage. I trailed after him, just a few feet behind. He didn’t look back at me. Perhaps he was too ashamed. I will never know.

Rebecca peered at me unbelievingly. “You mean that he never said anything to you about that night?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did he seem different after that?”

“Yes, but not toward me,” I answered. “Only toward Laura.”

Rebecca’s pen remained motionless above the still nearly blank pad. She’d taken very few notes, but I knew she’d absorbed every bit of my story, every nuance and detail.

“How did he change toward Laura?” she asked.

“He got even closer to her,” I answered. I considered it a moment, trying to find precisely the right word. “He became … more tender.”

For the first time Rebecca looked vaguely alarmed, as if the word had caught her by surprise.

Still, it was undoubtedly the right word to describe the change that came over the relationship between Laura and my father during the few weeks before he killed her.

They were very tender with each other after that night on the beach,” I said. They’d always been very close, but they got even closer for a while.” I did a quick calculation in my head. “My sister had seventy-nine days to live.”

The starkness of the number, the brevity of my sister’s life, shook me slightly, but only slightly, not with the disoriented unease I’d experienced in the restaurant days before.

Still, Rebecca noticed the reaction. “This is hard, I know,” she said.

Her eyes were very soft when she said it, and I knew that I wanted to touch her, and that everything about such a grave desire seemed right to me at that moment, while everything that stood in the way of its completion, the whole vast structure of fidelity and restraint, seemed profoundly wrong.

“Rebecca, I …”

I stopped, quickly glanced away from her, and let my eyes settle once again on the lake beyond her window. The clouds had parted by then, and the moon was bright against its ebony surface. It gave the sense of a world turned upside down, of the past devouring the future, of all life’s elements twisted and inverted, so that I seemed to be staring down into the waters of the sky.