Mortal Memory

TEN

IT WAS NEARLY midnight by the time I got back home that evening. I’d expected to find Marie either working in her office or asleep. But she was waiting in the den instead, sitting beneath the reading lamp, her face very stern when she spoke to me.

“Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.

I looked at her innocently. “What do you mean? I’ve been at work.”

“You mean at the office?”

“That’s right.”

“I called the office,” Marie said. “I spoke to Wally. He said that …”

“I was doing a site inspection,” I interrupted quickly. “At that office complex on the north side of town.”

She looked at me a long moment, and I could see the wheels turning, the whole machinery of her suspicion fully exposed in her eyes.

“A site inspection at night?” she said doubtfully.

“We began it in the afternoon,” I told her. “Then we had a long meeting in the general contractor’s trailer.”

For a moment she seemed vaguely embarrassed, as if by her own dark thoughts. “Oh,” she said, her voice less accusatory, though a strained quality lingered in it. Then she smiled faintly. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re home,” she said.

“Me, too,” I told her, though I knew it was a lie, that I wanted to be with Rebecca instead.

“Any more questions?” I asked half jokingly.

“I guess not.”

I offered a quick smile, then headed upstairs. It was a gesture of flight, I recognized, a darting-away from the seaminess of the lie I’d just told Marie, perhaps even a flight from the uneasiness and foreboding I’d felt at the moment of telling it.

Once alone in the bedroom, I thought of my father, of the way he’d hurled the book at my mother’s chest that night on Cape Cod. I wondered if he’d felt the same restriction I felt now. Had there been some place outside his home that had called to him with an irresistible urgency? Later on that balmy summer night on Cape Cod, as I remembered now, I’d glimpsed him in the yard, standing beside my mother in the moonlight, his arm draped loosely around her shoulder. They’d returned from a long walk, and for a moment, as they’d stood together in the darkness, they’d actually looked like a couple in love. For a moment, he’d drawn her in more closely and kissed her hair. I wondered now if that gesture had been nothing more than part of a vast deception. Had my father really wanted to be with her that night? Had he wanted to be with any of us? Or had he secretly yearned for another life, one in which every moment was filled with challenge and surprise, a life from which we blocked him simply by being alive?

I thought of each of us in turn. I saw Jamie in his sullen anger and isolation; Laura in her reeling moods, walking the house in the blue twilight; my mother forever locked within the folds of her red housedress; myself, a small, ordinary boy, indistinguishable from any other. Last I saw my father, still distant and mysterious, a figure walking behind us, the grip of the shotgun nestled, almost gently, in his hands.

I remembered Rebecca’s purpose again, her search for whatever it was in life that these men had been unable to bear, and in my father’s case it occurred to me that the unbearable thing for which Rebecca was still searching might have been nothing more mysterious than ourselves, that we were, each of us, in our own individual lives, unbearable to him, the living proof that his life had come to nothing.

I walked to the bedroom window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The lights from the suburban street seemed dull and lifeless. For years I’d been able to look out that same window without the slightest sense of disturbance. Now the very look of it made me cringe, for it seemed to me that my life, like all the other lives around me, possessed only the manageable level of risk, and no real jeopardy at all. Lived within its confines, we hunted the appropriate game, settled for the reachable star. We made the roads straight and flat. We turned on the light before we headed down the corridor, and grabbed the railing as we inched cautiously down the padded stairs. We grew old in a world of shallow breaths, feared both gasps and sighs.

And yet, for all that, the very next morning I went on with my routine as if nothing were changing in my life. I sat at the breakfast table and made small talk with Marie and Peter. Dutifully, I asked about Marie’s latest bid, about Peter’s work in school. But even as I listened to them, their voices sometimes faded, their faces drifted off” into a blur, as if they were becoming mere white noise.

“Finish up, Peter,” I heard Marie say as she got to her feet, “you’re going to be late for school.”

I remained at the table while Marie went upstairs to finish dressing and Peter darted to his room to get his jacket. Seconds later, I heard him dash by me. He gave me a quick “Bye, Dad,” then bolted out the door.

“Are you still here?” Marie said later when she came into the kitchen.

I looked at her. “What time is it?”

I could see that the question struck her as odd. “You’re wearing a watch, Steve,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, then glanced down at it, but didn’t move.

“Shouldn’t you be leaving?” Marie asked.

“Yeah, I guess.”

I got up and went to my car. As I began to guide it out of the driveway, Marie came out of the kitchen and walked toward me. I stopped the car as she came near.

“You don’t look well, Steve,” she said worriedly. “Do you want to stay home today?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m fine,” I said with a small, dismissive smile.

Marie didn’t smile back. “You need to take care of yourself, Steve,” she said in a voice as full of real concern as I’d ever heard, a voice that should have comforted and relieved me, but didn’t.

I shrugged. “I’m fine,” I repeated, then let the car begin to drift away again.

She said nothing more, but simply stepped away from the car and watched, without waving good-bye, as I glided down the driveway. Now, when I think of her, I often see her in that pose, standing in the grass, her arms folded over her chest, watching silently as I drifted from her sight.

Once at my office, I went directly to my desk and began working on the library I’d been designing. But even as I worked, adding lines and filling in details, I felt that I was continually returning to the house on McDonald Drive. Curiously, I no longer dreaded these returns. Instead, I seemed to move back toward that lost place with an increasing sense of rendezvous and complicity. My companion was always Rebecca, and I sometimes felt that I was walking hand in hand with her through the separate murder rooms. I could hear her voice, as if in whispers, pointing out details, the open textbook on Jamie’s desk, my sister’s bare feet. The bodies of my dead family seemed to lie sensually before us, as if we were joined in the rapture of my father’s crime.

It was over a week before I saw her again, and it seemed an infinitely long time. Each time the phone rang on my desk, I hoped that it would be she, whispering to me with a grave intimacy, as if we were lovers, bursting with breathless communications.

She called on a Wednesday afternoon, and we met at her cottage the following evening. I expected to exchange a few pleasantries, but Rebecca got right down to business instead.

She’d gotten some additional information from Swenson, she told me, and even as we began where we’d left off the week before, I sensed that she was holding something back. Even so, I didn’t press the point. By then I’d become quite willing to go at whatever pace Rebecca set. Perhaps I’d even sensed that to know everything Rebecca knew would dull the intensity of the journey we were making together—something I didn’t want to happen. What I wanted was to feel that intensity and peril all the time, to tremble forever at the edge of some sudden, apocalyptic discovery.

And so I followed Rebecca’s lead, anticipating nothing, merely letting her questions guide me back.

“You said that things became more tender between your father and Laura after that night on the beach,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But they’d always had a close relationship, hadn’t they?”

“Yes,” I said. “But he seemed to pay even more attention to her after that. It was almost as if he were studying her, trying to get an idea of what was going on inside.”

“And you only noticed this change after you’d returned from the Cape?”

“Yes.”

We’d gotten back on a Monday night, Labor Day 1959, all of us crammed into the dark brown station wagon. My father drove, of course, while my mother sat in the front seat, her right shoulder pressed tightly up against the door, her face pale and bloodless as she stared straight ahead. Her eyes seemed lifeless, drained of light, and the sallow skin of the face that surrounded them made her look like a department store mannequin.

Laura and I sat together in the back seat while Jamie lay crouched up and constantly complaining in the small square of trunk space that lay just behind us. He had absented himself as much as possible from the rest of us during the preceding week, but this last effort at self-imposed exile was certainly his most extreme, a punishing act of ostracism which Laura found ridiculous and contemptible, but which my father, lost in his own thoughts, seemed hardly to notice.

We’d planned to leave early that Monday morning, but things had gotten scattered and confused during the day, and we’d finally pulled away from the little cottage at nearly four in the afternoon. By that time, the off-Cape traffic had reached its dreadful end-of-season peak, and we’d staggered along toward the Sagamore Bridge at a snail’s pace, inching down the highway one jerk at a time, Jamie groaning uncomfortably with each movement of the car.

It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the house on McDonald Drive, but my father didn’t seem particularly tired. He pulled himself briskly out of the old station wagon and immediately began to unload the week’s supplies while my mother staggered wearily into the house, then up the stairs to the bedroom.

Laura regarded my mother’s bedraggled retreat into the house as nothing more than a way of avoiding the work involved in unpacking the car, and she clearly resented it.

“Why doesn’t Mom help unpack?” she demanded sharply as my father handed her a large cardboard box. “The rest of us have to work at it.”

My father did not reply. He simply drew another box from the back of the car while he listened as Laura railed on about my mother.

“Why is she so special?” she asked hotly. “Why does she get to go up to bed?”

Once again, my father refused to answer her. Instead, he yelled for Jamie, tossed him a heavy box, and commanded him to take it into the basement. Then, when Jamie was safely out of sight, he turned toward Laura, his eyes staring pointedly into hers. There was a kind of fierceness in his gaze, and I remember being quite drawn by the strangeness of it, as if he were about to pronounce some vital truth that he’d kept to himself all these years, waiting for the right moment to reveal it. But when he spoke, no such great truth emerged. Instead, after he’d settled his eyes on Laura for a moment, he said to her, almost in a whisper, but very distinctly nonetheless, and with that air of unchallengeable authority he often had, “You should know.”

Rebecca wrote the words in her notebook, then looked at me. “Where were you when your father said that?”

“I was standing next to Laura.”

“What did Laura say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“What do you think your father meant by, ‘You should know’?”

“I have no idea,” I told her. “But Laura knew what he meant. I know she did, because of the way she reacted.”

I was standing only a few inches from her. I saw her fire her final question, then heard my father’s reply, his voice neither sharp, nor angry, nor resigned. Instead, it seemed to carry a sense of severe scolding which struck Laura like a slap in the face, so that she shrank back from him immediately and lowered her eyes. Then, almost in the same motion, she stepped toward my father again, placed her hand very briefly on his shoulder, then turned and made her way into the house. She did not come back out to help us unload the car, but remained inside with my mother.

“Actually with my mother,” I told Rebecca emphatically. “In the same room with her, not just the same house.”

It wasn’t until we’d finished unloading the car that I finally returned to the house. My father and Jamie continued putting various things away in the garage outside, but that was heavy labor, unsuited for a nine-year-old boy, and so I’d left them and gone back inside. It was nearly one in the morning by then, and I was very tired and wanted to get in bed as soon as possible.

I’d passed the threshold of the stairs and was headed down the corridor toward the room I shared with Jamie when I saw Laura and my mother. It was enough to make me stop.

“They were together in my mother’s room,” I told Rebecca. “Sitting side by side on the bed. I’d never seen my sister sit that close to my mother. It seemed very strange.”

They were facing away from me. My mother had changed into her red housedress, and she was bent forward slightly, as if she were about to pick something up from the floor. I could see that Laura had draped her arm over my mother’s shoulder comfortingly, and though I didn’t know it then, the soft shaking motion I noticed in my mother’s body undoubtedly was caused by the fact that she was crying.

Rebecca looked up sharply from her notebook. “Crying?” she asked.

“It must have been that,” I said. “I don’t know what else it could have been.”

“But what was she crying about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction,” I said. “You know, delayed from earlier, when my father had thrown that romance novel at her.”

“And Laura was comforting her, you said?”

“Well, not exactly,” I answered, remembering it with a fierce clarity.

Rebecca looked at me, puzzled.

“It wasn’t real,” I said, “the sympathy. None of what Laura was doing was real. Not the way she’d slung her arm over my mother’s shoulder. Probably not even the words she must have said to her while they sat on the bed together.”

Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “How do you know that?” she asked.

“By the way my sister looked at me,” I answered, glimpsing that look again, a chill moving over me, as if a ghost had suddenly drifted past, brushing my shoulder with its pale robe. “It was a strange look,” I added.

In all the years I’d known her, Laura had never glared at me in such a forbidding way as she did that night. I’d climbed the stairs wearily, innocently seeking only the shortest route to my bed. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. And yet, as Laura’s head swiveled slowly in my direction, I saw her face stiffen hideously, her eyes take on a dreadful anger.

“She looked like an animal,” I told Rebecca, “trapped, like a creature driven into a corner.”

Rebecca jotted a note into her notebook, but didn’t speak. Even then, as I told Rebecca about that one brief incident, the look in my sister’s face chilled me, and I remembered that during the few seconds she’d stared at me, I’d felt as if I were under fire, bullets slamming toward me, chewing up the floor beneath my feet, riddling the plaster wall behind me, spewing dust into the air.

“I all but dove into my room,” I said, “just to get out of her sight.”

But I’d done more than that. Once in my room, I’d locked the door behind me, then pressed my back against it like some terrorized child in a grade-B horror movie.

I’d still been standing in the same position a few minutes later when I felt the doorknob turn.

“Stevie? You in there?”

It was Jamie.

“Stevie?” he called again. “Stevie, you in there?”

I opened the door, glancing around his lean body toward the empty corridor. The door to my mother’s room was closed. To my right, only a few feet down the dark corridor, the door to Laura’s room was closed too, though I could see a line of bright light just beneath it.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jamie demanded irritably. “You hiding something? Why was the door locked?”

I shrugged, unable to come up with an explanation that would have made any sense to him. “I didn’t know it was locked,” I said finally.

To my surprise, Jamie didn’t challenge the completely illogical nature of my answer, perhaps because the childhood sense of the magical and miraculous which lingers on in adolescence was still so much a part of the way he saw the world that he could casually accept the otherwise impossible notion that doors could sometimes lock themselves.

In any event, he merely walked to the bed, pulled himself up to his upper bunk, and lost himself in one of the sports magazines that were always piled in a jagged stack at the foot of his bed.

For a long time, I remained in the room, sitting in the lower bunk. The weariness I’d felt before as I’d trudged up the stairs had disappeared, and in its place I could feel nothing but a disquieting tension. After a time, it drove me from my bed to the window. By that time, Jamie had fallen asleep, the sports magazine still open on his chest.

It was a clear summer night, and I could see the whole shadowy stretch of the backyard as if it were illuminated by a pale blue light. It was very warm, as well, and the window was fully open, a light breeze rustling the curtains quietly.

I don’t know how long I stood by the window, but after a time, I heard the door at the side of the house—the kitchen door, the one that Mrs. Fields would approach only a few weeks later, then shrink back from in sudden dread—I heard it open, then close, and after that, the muffled sound of footsteps as they moved down the short flight of stairs to the walkway which divided the house from the garage and which led in a gentle curve to the backyard.

My father appeared seconds later, walking alone over the dark green lawn. He was taking long, slow strides, as he moved from the western to the eastern corner of the yard, then back again, a cloud of white smoke trailing behind him like the pale exhaust of an old steam engine.

I don’t know exactly how long he paced the yard alone that night, but only that after a few minutes, I heard the kitchen door open again.

This time it was Laura.

She came around the corner of the house, dressed in her white sleeping gown, her long dark hair hanging in a black wave down her back. She was barefoot, and I could see her white feet as they padded across the dark green grass toward where my father stood, now leaning slightly against the solid wooden fence he’d built along the rear edge of the yard.

He didn’t turn toward her, although he must have heard the door open, just as I had heard it. He didn’t turn because, unlike me, he already knew who’d opened the kitchen door.

“It was obviously a prearranged meeting,” I told Rebecca, “something the two of them had already planned.”

Rebecca didn’t look surprised, and I could tell from her face that she’d fully accepted the conspiratorial nature of my father and my sister’s relationship, its eerie sense of secret conclave.

“Laura walked over to him,” I went on, “and the two of them stood by the fence and talked for a long time.”

From just behind the plain white curtains, while my brother lay snoozing a few feet away, the sports magazine rising and falling to the rhythm of his breath, I watched as my father and sister talked quietly, but very intently, their eyes resting steadily upon each other.

It was probably exactly that feeling of intensity that kept me posted by the window during the next few minutes. It was in every element of their posture, in every glance that passed between them, even in the sharp whispers I could hear but not make out, as if their voices were distant instruments scraping at the air.

They were in plain sight, of course, both of them posed starkly against the moonlight, and yet I felt the inexplicable need to hide behind the white shroud of the bedroom curtains. I didn’t know why, but only that despite their outward show of openness, the fully illuminated yard, even the nearly ostentatious brightness of my sister’s gown, the predominant mood of their meeting was surreptitious and collusive. Perhaps even a little arrogant, as if they both presumed with perfect certainty that the rest of us were sleeping in the dark house, that no matter what they said or how loudly they said it, neither Jamie nor my mother nor I would hear or see anything.

“It was as if, as far as they were concerned, we were already dead,” I said.

Rebecca glanced down at her notebook, as if trying to avoid my eyes. “Did you ever get any idea of what they talked about that night?” she asked, but in a voice that was deliberately flat.

“No.”

But I suspected even then that it was something of the deepest significance to them both. My father had remained rigidly in place throughout the conversation, his eyes focused intently on my sister. For her part, Laura had remained almost as motionless as my father. From a distance, she appeared locked in a stony, reptilian stillness which went against the often frantic quality of her movements, the fidgety fingers and continually bouncing feet. It was as if this stillness had been imposed upon her by the gravity of what was transpiring between them, the sheer awesomeness of its content.

“So you never heard any part of what they said?” Rebecca asked, as if she were still in doubt about the truth of my first answer.

“Well, only a few words at the very end,” I admitted, “but that was after they’d come back into the house.”

I’m not sure how long they’d talked together before my father suddenly nodded sharply, as if in conclusion, then began walking back toward the house. Laura walked beside him, her hand holding to his arm. When they had made it almost halfway across the yard, my father stopped, looked down at my sister for a moment, then lifted his right hand and very gently stroked her hair. It was a gesture that seemed to melt her, so that she leaned toward him and buried her face in his shoulder. My father looked away from her, as if unable to bear what he’d seen in her eyes. Then, in a slow, surprisingly dramatic movement, he lifted his face toward the bright, overhanging moon. They stood in just this position for a long time, she in her pale gown, he in his stone-gray work clothes, the light washing over them, so that they looked vaguely like marble figures, motionless and cold.

Then they separated and walked, without touching, back toward the kitchen door. Seconds later, I heard them pad up the short flight of stairs toward their separate rooms.

I ran to the door of my room and opened it slightly. Through the small slit, I could see my father and Laura as they mounted the stairs, moving slowly, until they came to a stop at the top of the landing. For a brief, suspended instant, they stood, facing each other silently.

Then my father said, “Are you all right?”

And my sister said, “Yes, I’m fine.”

With that, they headed up the corridor, moving directly toward my room. I shrank away from them, not wanting to be seen, and eased my door back so that it was almost closed when they passed. Because of that, I could see only the broad outlines of their two bodies as they swept by my door, featureless and without detail, little more than gliding shapes.

“I heard my father say, Tomorrow.”

And my sister said, “So soon?”

My father did not answer her. Or, if he did, it was later, in some place beyond my hearing. For after that, I heard nothing but the sound of his feet as they moved on down the carpeted hallway, then the sound of his bedroom door as it opened and closed.

Minutes later, I heard Laura open the door to her own room, so I know that for a short time she stood alone in the unlighted corridor. I don’t know why she waited for those few extra minutes, or what thoughts played through her mind as she stood in the darkness outside her room, as if afraid to go in alone.

“And that’s all you heard them say?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes.”

She glanced down at her notes, quietly, thoughtfully, as if she were processing and rearranging information that she alone possessed. Watching her, I felt as if she’d rowed out onto a dark lake, leaving me on shore.

“The ‘tomorrow’ your father talked about,” she said finally, “that would have been the first Tuesday in September?”

“I suppose.”

“The first day of school,” she added, almost to herself. Then she came back to me suddenly, her dark eyes darting over to mine. “Did anything unusual happen that next day?” she asked. “Did you notice any change in anything?”

“No,” I said.

Again, Rebecca appeared to draw into herself, her mind deep in thought, as if she were unable to accept what appeared to be the routine notion that “tomorrow” had been nothing more than my father’s idle reference to the beginning of school, and Laura’s whispered reply just a schoolchild’s regret.

I leaned forward slightly. “Should I have seen something different that day?” I asked. “Was something going on?”

She didn’t answer, but only flipped back a few pages in her notebook, scanning the lines she’d written until she found the right one.

“You said before that when Laura and your father were down by the fence, that they hadn’t been concerned that anyone in the house might be watching them,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“You said that it was as if they thought the people in the house were already dead.”

I knew then what she was getting at. “How long had he been planning it, Rebecca?”

“Maybe longer than you think, Steve.” She waited, trying to gauge how the latest information might affect me. “At least three or four months,” she said finally.

“How do you know that?”

“Because of something Swenson found,” she told me. “Travel brochures. A lot of them.”

Occasionally, I’d seen my father reading an adventure novel, always slowly, taking weeks to slog through each one. I’d also seen him idly turning the pages of the local newspaper. But I’d never seen him browsing through anything that resembled a travel brochure.

“He found quite a few of them in that little office your father had at the rear of the store,” Rebecca added, without emphasis.

It was little more than a stockroom, as I recalled then, small and cramped, but more secure, with many locks. It was the place he’d kept the unassembled Rodger and Windsor bicycles before bringing them home. Once or twice I’d seen him there with Nellie Grimes, the bookkeeper he’d hired some years before, but on all other occasions, he’d been in the room alone. Because of that, it was easy for me to think of it as the place of his solitude, the cluttered little room which he’d set aside for his plotting, the careful working out both of his crime and his escape.

“These brochures,” I said. “Where did they come from?”

“He got them through the mail,” Rebecca answered. “There was no indication that he ever went to a travel agency.”

I shrugged. “I don’t ever remember seeing any travel brochures around the house.”

“That’s because they weren’t mailed to McDonald Drive,” Rebecca said. “They were all mailed to the hardware store downtown.” She paused a moment, then added, “Some had been mailed as long as three months before the murders.”

I leaned back, as if unable to absorb this latest bit of information, the full-blown proof, as if any had still been necessary, of my father’s plot.

“The brochures were from all over,” Rebecca said. “Mexico, Europe, Asia, South America. That’s why they weren’t much help to the police.”

“So they never had any idea where he went?”

“Not until they found the car,” Rebecca said.

“That was in Texas, wasn’t it?” I said tentatively, only vaguely recalling something Quentin had told me. “Near the Mexican border?”

“Right on the border, actually,” Rebecca said. “In Laredo.”

I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “I remember that Quentin told me about them finding the car.”

“Swenson brought it back,” Rebecca said, “but no one ever claimed it.”

So that it still sat in the shadowy corner of the police garage in Somerset, as Rebecca went on to inform me, a dark, eerie symbol of my father’s flight. I could see it there, rusting, abandoned, the odor of my father’s cigarettes still lingering in the ragged brown upholstery, dust gathering on the black, serrated wheel where he had laid his hands.

“You could claim it if you wanted,” Rebecca added softly.

I shook my head wearily. “No, I don’t want it,” I whispered.

But I remembered it, nonetheless, as I told her.

Then I related a time when my father had driven all of us far out into the woods, to where an old cabin, not much more than a log shack, sat in a primeval forest.

It was probably four years or so before the murders, and we’d all gone out in that same old car in which he’d later made his escape—Laura and Jamie and I scrunched up together in the back seat; my mother, looking vaguely content on the passenger side; my father, his big hands on the wheel, smiling with a kind of gleeful adventurousness as we bumped along the barely passable road.

He’d stumbled upon the cabin while hunting as a boy, and I suppose there was something about it which had suddenly called him back. “I want to show you all something,” he’d said at the breakfast table that morning.

We hit the road about an hour later, drove for a long time, paved roads eventually giving way to unpaved ones, then at last on to what were little more than ancient logging trails. It was already early in the afternoon by the time we finally reached the cabin.

It was set in a deep wood, near a winding brook, and I could tell by the way my father looked at it that it represented something to him, perhaps his ideal of a forest paradise, remote, primitive, and uncomplicated. When he looked at it, his face took on the kind of expression I would later see in paintings of the saints when they saw God, that here before them was the true, abiding majesty. That day, he even seemed like them, saintly, a father out of the great book of fatherhood, a man of mythic kindness and commitment, capable of making an epic sacrifice.

He played with us in the forest, a long game of hide-and-seek, in which we skirted behind bushes and fallen trees, while my mother watched us from her place on the cabin’s small, dilapidated porch. We played tag, and he ran after us, lifting Laura into the air each time he caught up with her, their faces nearly touching as he lowered her to the ground again.

Toward evening, it began to snow, and while the rest of us gathered up our things and prepared to leave, my father walked out into the woods again and stood alone among the trees, his arms lifted slightly, hands open, catching snowflakes in his palms.

As I finished relating this episode, I realized that my eyes had grown moist.

“I’m all right,” I assured Rebecca quickly, gathering myself in again. “I just got a little nostalgic, I guess.”

It was more than that, though. I’d entered a new realm of feeling in regard to my family’s slaughter. I realized that it was no longer the explosive instant which horrified me, as it had in the restaurant days before, but the long decay of love, the slow stages of its dissolution.

I could see that Rebecca understood that, but what she could not have known was that only part of my anguish was connected to the dark reliving of my family’s death. The rest had to do with me, the volcanic discontent I had come to feel in the presence of everything that had grounded and sustained me in the past. It was as if that airy, unreal dream house I’d been working on for so long was now the only one in which I wanted to live. It was without walls. It had no foundation. It was pure fantasy. And yet it seemed right in a way that made everything else seem wrong.

After a moment, my eyes settled upon Rebecca. “They actually saw the monster, didn’t they?” I asked. “My father and the rest of them? Whatever it was that was eating them alive, they actually looked it in the eye.”

Rebecca didn’t answer me directly, but grew distant, perhaps even apprehensive. “Maybe we should end the interview for tonight, Steve.”

“Why?”

“I just think it would be best,” Rebecca said firmly, leaving no doubt that the interview was over.

She walked to the door, opened it, then followed me out into the darkness, slowly walking me to my car as a swirl of leaves played at our feet.

“I’m sorry this is so hard for you,” she said.

“It’s a lot of things, Rebecca,” I admitted. “It’s not just my past.”

At the car, I stopped and stood very near to her. I could almost feel her breath.

“When do you want to meet again?” I asked.

She watched me hesitantly, but said nothing.

I smiled. “Don’t worry, Rebecca. I’ll go all the way through it with you.”

She nodded. “In all the other cases, there were no survivors,” she said. “I guess I should have known how hard it would be for you, but I just hadn’t had the experience before.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her.

I opened the door and started to get in, but she touched my arm and drew me back around to face her.

“You should only go as far as you want to, Steve,” she said. “No farther.”

“I know,” I told her.

I could feel her hand at my arm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it tightly for a long time. But I knew that close as it seemed to me, her hand might as well have been in another universe.

“Well, good night, then,” she said as she let it drop from my shoulder.

“Good night,” I said, then got into my car.

It was still early, so I stopped off at a small restaurant and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee before going home.

Marie was at the sink when I walked into the kitchen. Peter was at the table, chopping celery.

“You’re home early,” Marie said. “We’re making a tuna dish.”

“I’ve already eaten,” I said idly.

Marie’s eyes shot over to me. “You’ve already eaten?”

I nodded obliviously.

“You got off early and didn’t come home to have dinner with Peter and me?” she asked, in a voice that struck me even then as deeply troubled, as if in this small twist of behavior she’d already begun to detect the approach of her destruction.

“I guess I did,” I said, then added defensively, “Sorry. I just wasn’t thinking.”

Marie looked at me brokenly, but I did nothing to ease her distress.

“I’m going to lie down for a while,” I said, then headed up the stairs.

Once upstairs, I lay down on the bed, my eyes staring at the blank ceiling. Below me, I could hear Peter and Marie as they continued to make their dinner together. Below me, as I realize now, they were shrinking. I should have seen it, like a murderous vision, as I lay alone on my bed that evening. I should have seen Peter fleeing down a dark corridor, Marie cringing behind a cardboard box. I should have seen the circle tightening, felt the first bite of the noose.

But that evening I felt nothing but my own distress. I remembered Rebecca as she’d stood beside me only a short time before, and I knew that I’d wanted to draw her into my arms. Perhaps, at the time, I’d even imagined that she was all I really needed to solve the riddle of my life. But I realize now that Rebecca was only the symbol of those other things I had wanted even more.

“In the deepest and most inchoate longings of these men,”

Rebecca would later write, “there was a central yearning to be embattled, a fierce need for a fierce engagement, so that they saw themselves in that single, searing instant not as killers slaughtering women and children, but as soldiers in the midst of battle, men heroically and perilously engaged in the act of returning fire.”

It was months later, and I was alone, when I read that passage. By then, I was wifeless, childless, homeless. Everything was gone, except my one need to “return fire” as my father had, in an act of sudden and avenging violence.