Before his father could stumble upon him out here in the open, where he could neither hide nor take a proper stand, where he was still mired in confusion and filled, from one moment to the next, with anger, fear, sorrow, and a surprising strain of relief, Kit rose to his feet and made his way back to the house. The day felt old, but Kit had spent only an hour with Holly, and his father had not yet come downstairs. Still in bed, perhaps. Kit was grateful for the reprieve.
While he still could, he shut himself up in his bedroom and thought about what he ought to do. He believed everything Holly had told him. And yet, he felt so numb and in some ways so removed from what had happened to her that he could not decide on a course of action. Everything of importance had happened years ago. And none of it had been nearly as bad as it might have been. If it happened at all, a small part of him murmured, refusing to be gagged.
It would be easy, he realized, to do what he had intended, spend the summer as his father’s apprentice, play golf, do the things he’d always done. But it would also be terribly hard.
Kit decided, in the end, to give himself the day. He would spend it with his father, watching him, studying him, looking for an explanation. Perhaps a solution would present itself. Perhaps by the end of the day Kit would know what he ought to do.
And then, if he chose well, perhaps he would be rewarded that night with a dream that would take him back for a second glimpse of the things he had forgotten.
All that day, Kit watched his father carefully. He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he imagined making the most awful kinds of discoveries: noticing, all at once, that the skin of his father’s face was lifting away at the edges and that a moldy skull peeked out from underneath. It was easier now to acknowledge that the time they spent together had often seemed to require rehearsal. Kit realized that he had always planned what he would say and how he would behave around his father, but he found himself too deeply confused to understand why this might be so.
He was furious with his father and afraid for himself. Whenever he thought about his sister, pinned in her bed, he wanted to rip the drapes from their rods and pull the paintings from their frames. At times he wanted to get back in his car and drive away somewhere. But he had only just come home, eager to be with his father again, and a part of him was still looking for a reason to stay.
He found himself acting toward his father as a young boy might toward an older brother: following him around yet having nothing to say, nothing to offer, feeling like an intruder and yet unable to be anywhere in the entire house without wondering where his father was, what he was doing, how he looked when he thought no one was watching.
He knew that he could not confront his father, not without betraying Holly’s trust. She had begged him to wait a few more months, until they turned twenty-one and she could run. “I’ve kept quiet for a long time now, Kit,” she’d said. “You can do it for a while.” But he wasn’t sure that he could do it for a single day.
“What’s on your mind, Kit?” His father was sitting in the living room with a scotch and, inevitably, a newspaper. Kit had come in quietly to lean up against the wall, his hands behind his back, like an odd stick of furniture. It was almost evening, almost time for them to sit down to a meal together, and Kit couldn’t imagine looking across the table at his father as he’d done thousands of times before, breaking bread with this man, without asking him even one of the questions that were again squeezing into every cranny of his skull.
“Nothing, Dad,” he said. “I guess I’m still getting used to being home. It takes me a while, after exams, to unwind. That’s all.”
“You make me nervous, lurking around the house. You should be out, at the club, chasing girls. Playing some golf while you can. I’m putting you to work in another week.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Get yourself a new suit. Two. Can’t have you at the office dressed like that.”
“Give me some credit, Dad.” Kit pushed himself away from the wall.
“When it’s due,” his father said, raised an eyebrow at his son, swallowed some scotch. “Looking forward to having you aboard again, Kit.”
“Likewise.” He was saying the words first inside his head, so that when they left his mouth they sounded to him like an echo. “I learn more from you over the summer than I do at Yale all year.”
“Hmmm. Not sure I like the sound of that. Not sure I don’t.”
And with that, Chad Barrows gathered up his paper and walked straight out of the room, and it was all Kit could do not to follow him.
And so it went. From one hour to the next, Kit did not know what to think or how to feel. Home for only a day, he felt as if he had been stranded on this plot of land for years, completely out of touch with the world beyond. He wanted to be away, gone, if only for a while, but when he pondered destinations, none seemed to suit. He balked, too, at the idea of explaining such a trip to his father. He could think of no acceptable reason for leaving home now—not even for a day or two—after he’d just come back. His work would
