The other memory, the one he meant to tend so carefully, was untethered and would arrive on its own schedule, flagellate him, evaporate, then reconstitute, a time-lapse shot of a cloud on an endless loop. The blue sky, the pool, the body. It came and went like the weather, and because when the memory was gone it left no trace, every time it reappeared it was a fresh pot of scalding water. This was the horror that he did not want to outlive.
When was it that he began to regard his inner life as nothing more than a slightly mysterious facet of his physical being? Love was an ache in the center of his mass. Lust, a hard-on. Sadness was a dragging, salty ache at the back of the throat, an emptiness like hunger. When emotions acted in a disorderly fashion, he put them in a headlock and choked them until they submitted to his will. He shoved them into the sunlight when he felt blue, whipped them when his courage failed, strangled his unmentionable desires, and applied exacting reason in those rare instances when he couldn’t force the stubborn beast to correct its course. When confronted with an undeniable truth about himself, a jag in his otherwise linear existence, he reflected the inquisitorial beam back onto his family, his colleagues, whoever happened to be available to lash to the pyre and torch in sacrifice to the gods of self-ignorance. Feelings! Gibberish language, a translation of a translation of a translation, distractions no sane person needed to spend more than the bare minimum of time wrestling into submission. Feelings were a tactic women invoked when they didn’t get what they wanted.
So inexperienced in matters of his own heart, he’d barely managed to develop a rudimentary language for the sorrow that came after the boy’s death, but then when Sydney died he had to create yet another lexicon of grief, and that was beyond even the great mind of Albert Caldwell.
Someone was slamming cabinet doors in the kitchen. Albert listened, looked around, and waited for his brain to make sense of it. Fil was at his desk, one hand full of unopened mail, the other flipping through the checkbook ledger—platter-sized, three checks per page, green pleather with an embossed gold border.
She’d gotten through to Erica on the phone, but the girl would say nothing more than she no longer needed the work, about as naturally as a hostage reading off a cue card.
Stop bothering my things, Filomena, Albert said. Come back over here.
Daddy, last time. What did you do to Erica?
Albert leveled his eyes on her. I don’t remember.
I’ll get to the bottom of it, she said. Honestly, Daddy. Look, I’ve told you not to worry about writing checks.
What are you talking about? Albert said.
Daddy, I pay all the bills. Erica leaves them here for me. She held up the rubber-banded stack of envelopes.
Of course you do. What are telling me not to write checks for? I know full well you’ve robbed me of every adult responsibility.
Just stop writing checks. I’m leaving you a note here that says, No Checks, okay? And where in the world are you getting these numbers? Two forty-nine to D’Agostino’s?
Delivery charge, he shot back.
Daddy, Erica shops with you. You two go to the store on Tuesday and Friday.
I’m fully aware of that, he said. He looked around for Tracy, hoping for confirmation that her sister was behaving unreasonably, but apparently Tracy was the one banging around in the kitchen.
Fil carried over the ledger and laid it in his lap.
What, Filomena, what? he said. I thought I wasn’t to write any more checks. Get this off me.
Daddy, look here. If you want to get away with it, you’ll need to stop documenting your crimes so carefully. These receipts. This one, and this one. You’re too meticulous for your own good.
There it was, handwriting that exactly matched his own. A jolt, as if he’d touched a live wire. He flipped through the stubs.
Fil went back to the desk, opening and shutting drawers until she found what she was after. Good god, Daddy. Here, look. One drawer was packed solid with signed, uncashed checks. You really went on a tear this week, didn’t you? Fil said.
Not so long ago he was still trying to mail them, but recently he’d taken to stashing them all over the desk, a disheartening adjustment, Fil realized, because it meant that the task of writing the check, addressing the envelope, sealing it, locating a stamp, and posting the letter had become too much for him.
She dropped the stack of checks onto the ledger in his lap. Albert glanced down at them, casually, as though assessing a bowl of peanuts put out by a bartender. Fil waited. He picked them up. There were about thirty, all bearing his signature. He hummed to himself as he went through them.
Even confronted with written proof, he could not bring himself to believe that it was his memory that had failed to retain the image of his pen scraping across the check’s pale green surface. Surely it hadn’t been he who had written all these. No, quite impossible. There’d be an imagistic flicker, a tickle somewhere in his brain. Surely it wasn’t he who’d written the checks. It had been someone else.
This is outrageous, he said. It’s the girl. She’s been forging my signature.
Daddy, said Fil, her fingertip tapping at the ink, you wrote these checks. It’s your handwriting. It doesn’t matter that you’ve forgotten. Just acknowledge that you did it.
I’m not
