I realize that we are all unconsciously waiting for someone.
Henley. But he isn’t coming.
“Okay,” I say. “We have to all agree to stop playing this game. Henley was murdered. We have to find out why and who did it.”
“Murdered?!” exclaims Bernard.
“The Game Master sent us all the snuff film!” I say. “It was murder. And that means that any one of us could be next.”
“Not any one of us,” says Bernard. “Strictly speaking. Only whoever loses.”
“Right, and Alistair is down to one life, which means he’s next on the chopping block.”
“It was Dad’s game,” Bernard points out. “What are you suggesting? That somehow Dad was responsible for killing Henley?”
The notion is preposterous. Dad, a killer? Yet it makes me think back to all the rumors surrounding our mother’s death. To all the detectives who interviewed me, all the women they brought in wearing blue gloves who were overly nice to me, but who still asked me to tell them the same story again and again, of walking into the White Room and seeing the bright red sprayed out all over everything.
I think back to the suspicions of my mother’s family in Alabama and the ensuing custody battles over who would raise the five of us. My father had pulled my mother’s entire family out of poverty, but they weren’t even remotely grateful for it. He didn’t cut them off. But we didn’t really see them anymore after that, either. That was the trade.
We all knew that our father had nothing to do with the death of our mother. Why would a goofy patrician with a love for games and diversions, who found success in business thanks to his creative concepts, murder the mother of his five children in cold blood in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be running a scavenger hunt for all the neighborhood children?
No, it didn’t make any sense at all. Plus, we all knew how depressed our mother was. How she seemed to hate life and even seemed to hate us.
I remember when Alistair and I were entering the first grade at Aviators, the private primary school for the richest and most fashionable children in the city.
“Bet you two little shitheads think you’re really something special,” our mom told us, holding our hands like iron as she walked us down the sidewalk.
I did indeed think I was something special. In fact, I knew it. But I could tell that Alistair was freaking out on account of being forced to be around children who would be a year older than him, and he wasn’t taking it well. He was scared and upset that he wouldn’t be in the same class as the few friends he had made in kindergarten.
Our mother stopped in front of the school and sat down on the sidewalk, still holding both our hands, hanging her head. She smelled like alcohol and cigarettes and patchouli. She started weeping so hard that her shoulders shook. Her lank hair hung down in front of her face like blond curtains.
“Why did you stop here, Mommy?” asked Alistair, who was perpetually insensitive to our mother’s moods and who never knew when to just shut up and let her vent. He was always taking her moods personally, as if her insane rages and catatonic despairs had anything to do with him. He put his free hand under her arm, trying to drag her to her feet.
“You’re embarrassing us… ” Alistair said.
That was when she straight-up cold-cocked him, right in the side of the head, knocking him to the pavement in front of all the other mothers. He was more stunned than hurt, but he lay there for a while with the air knocked out of him. Our mother stood up and looked around at all the stunned faces of the other mothers. She had just haymakered a first grader.
Now, this was the early eighties, so violence against your own children was more tolerated and understood, but still, these were a bunch of very liberal parents and she had used a fist and it was clearly done in anger. She was shocked at herself. She knew that what she had done was unforgivable.
“Oh, sweetie, what happened?” she said, trying to remake reality. “You scared me, I thought you were someone else!”
It didn’t work. Actually, after that, we had to go to a different, still extremely elite elementary school on the Upper West Side. She couldn’t deal with seeing the other Aviators mothers.
After her suicide, the detective didn’t just want to know the details of what I saw when I stumbled upon her messy corpse. He wanted to know if my mother had ever had unusual mood swings, or if she had ever talked about taking her own life, or if she had been fighting with my father.
Nobody had ever asked me what I thought about my own mother before. The weird intimacy of it, and the invitation to discuss my feelings, caught me off guard. I gushed to the police detective about my mother’s fits of madness, about her ups and downs, about her neglect followed by her hyperattentiveness, about her perpetual giddy strangeness and her comfort with—almost glee at—violence and cruelty.
Even as young as I was, I knew why a person might want to die. And even as young as I was, I knew that I was helping my father by telling the truth about how crazy my mother had always been. I also knew I was helping my father by leaving out the fact that she sometimes fought with him as well. Because who didn’t fight with my mother?
My eyes dart to the anxious faces of my remaining siblings as I come out of my reverie. “Dad has nothing to do with any of this,” I say. “We just have to figure out who
