complete silence fell over the backyard as the three of us stood in place, saying nothing, only watching him as he watched us during that brief, oddly delicious instant before he turned and walked away.
What had we felt at that moment?
As a child, it would have been impossible for me to say. But that morning, as I unexpectedly recalled this single incident with all the detail of something that had happened only minutes before, it seemed to me that I had felt the sweet and awesome luxury of a hand that stayed my hand. I had sensed my father’s restraining firmness, and because of it, perhaps because of nothing more than his exercise of it, I had loved him deeply and inexpressibly. The solitary killer who’d crouched beneath that mask of paternal care and responsibility had never appeared to me. Instead, I’d glimpsed only that part of him that was beautiful and grave and unreachable, that figure of a father, steadfast and enduring, that all men wish to have and wish to be.
And so, it struck me that morning that my father’s life had to have been a vast deception, a lie he’d lived in while he’d lived with us, harboring whatever resentment and bitterness it was that had finally boiled over on that day in November.
I was still thinking about him when I got to the office a few minutes later.
The architectural offices of Simpson and Lowe were on the top floor of a five-story cubicle structure made of steel and tinted glass. It was a purely functional design, and no one but Mr. Lowe, the firm’s sole surviving founder, ever liked it. Over the years the rest of us had either resented it or been embarrassed by it, thinking it a rather unimaginative structure, unlikely to impress prospective clients, especially those who might be interested in more innovative designs for their own projects.
But despite all our criticism, Mr. Lowe had remained firm in his commitment to it, stubbornly holding on out of loyalty to its aging pipes and circuits, its squeaky hinges and buckling tile. Wally had been arguing for years that we should move the whole operation to the new business center north of the city, but Mr. Lowe had always refused, shaking his head with that enormous dignity he still maintained despite the palsy that rocked his hands. “Don’t abandon things,” he once told Wally scoldingly at the end of one of these discussions. Then he rose and left the room, knowing that Wally remained behind to mutter against him resentfully, but wholly indifferent to anything he might say, as if all his malicious whisperings were nothing more than a light desert breeze.
Wally was already at his desk, meticulously going over the details for a new office building, when I arrived that morning.
“Another day at the venerable old firm,” he said with a wink as I passed his desk.
I’d worked as an architect for Simpson and Lowe for almost fifteen years by then, and I realize now that it was no accident that I chose architecture as my profession, even though I had no great ability at geometry or drawing or any of the other skills the work requires. Rather, I chose it because it fulfilled an abiding need, appealed to one of the deeper strains of my character, my desperate need for order. For all its creativity, architecture is finally about predictability. It runs on what is known, rather than what is not. In a fully executed building, one knows with a comforting certainty exactly what the materials will do, their durabilities, the precise level of strain which each can bear and still hold on to its essential shape and function. It is a world which has no room for chance, which has doggedly eliminated the speculative and hypothetical from its principal calculations. Reality is its basis. It makes room for nothing else.
Before Rebecca, it was home.
I was working at my desk, when Wally appeared before me, a peculiar expression on his face.
“There’s someone here to see you, Steve,” he said. “Rebecca something. I lost the last name. I think I was in a daze.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go see for yourself.”
She was in the small waiting room, seated on a dark red sofa, her face very serious as she rose. She put out her hand and I shook it as she introduced herself, her voice deep but not masculine, a fine, somber voice, though somewhat edgy, distant, intensely formal.
“My name is Rebecca Soltero,” she said.
“Steve Farris. Did we have an appointment?”
“No, we didn’t,” Rebecca answered. “I believe in doing things face-to-face. That’s why I didn’t call or write you first.”
She was very direct, a woman with a mission, though I had no idea what it was.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“I’ve come about your father.”
She could not have said a stranger thing, nor one more utterly unexpected. It was as if he had suddenly materialized again, magically, in the form of a beautiful woman.
“My father?”
For an instant, I thought perhaps the police or the FBI, or some other agency, had actually begun to look for him again, had, in a moment of unconscious whimsy, assigned an alluring woman to track him down, bring him back, and make him pay, at last, for what he’d done to his family.
“But you must know that my father …”
“Yes. That’s why I want to talk to you,” Rebecca said. “I’d like to hear what you remember about him.”
“Why?”
“I’m writing a book about men who’ve killed their families,” she said.
It was strange, but until that moment, I’d never thought of my father as one of a type, a member of some definable human subcategory. Instead, he’d always come to me as a lone wolf, cut from the pack and set adrift by the awesome nature of his crime. I’d never seen anything in him that suggested a common thread, a link with the rest of us.
“I’ve already done a lot of work,” Rebecca added, “particularly with one of the men who investigated the case.”
