“I want to find out what it was in life that they couldn’t bear,” she said.
“And because of that, killed their families?”
“Yes.”
I looked at her, puzzled. “And you think that in each of them it was the same thing?”
She peered closely into my eyes, as if trying to gauge what my response might be to her next remark. “The same thing,” she said finally, “in almost every man.”
I was still going over that peculiar remark when I got home a few minutes later. It was still early, and Peter was in the small family room watching some sort of situation comedy on television.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked him as I strolled into the room.
“In her office.”
“Did you have dinner?”
“She fixed one of those cheese things.”
I walked out of the room, down a short corridor, and opened the door to Marie’s office. She looked up, startled.
“Please don’t do that, Steve,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Come in like that. Through the door all of a sudden.”
I laughed mockingly. “What do you think I am, Marie, some crazed axe murderer?”
She did not seem amused. She went back to her work without saying anything else.
I remained at the door, looking at her. She was typing something at her computer, something that was probably businesslike, but uninspired, a bid for the job in Bridgeport, I supposed, a banal proposal for interior design. I compared it to the project upon which Rebecca had embarked, a far more profound investigation of a far deeper interior. Marie’s work seemed small and inconsequential compared to that, scarcely more than the busywork of a life that had settled for too little, a life that had been lived … like mine.
Without warning, an odd sense of desolation suddenly overwhelmed me, and I left Marie to her work, walked to the kitchen, snatched the cheese thing from the refrigerator, and ate it pleasurelessly at the dining room table.
When I’d finished, I returned to the family room. Peter was still watching television, and for a few minutes I watched along with him, an action picture of some sort, all car chases and shattering glass.
He went to bed at ten, without speaking, a slender figure in red pajamas padding up the carpeted stairs to a room he had come to consider as his private domain, and which his mother and I had been forbidden to enter without permission.
I remained in the family room, my mind in a kind of featureless limbo until Rebecca’s final remark came back into my mind, and I began to think over the cases she’d written about. I saw Harold Fuller leaning on his baseball bat, Gerald Stringer sitting rigidly upright in his big recliner, Herbert Parks slowly walking his two daughters hand- in-hand back into the house, Hollis Townsend beating his breasts beside the bright blue pool. What was it in any of these men that so fascinated her?
Finally, inevitably, I thought about my father, too, asking the same questions I thought Rebecca must be asking: Who was he? Why did he do it? From what dark, volcanic core had so much murder come?
At that early stage, I couldn’t have answered any of these questions. Still, I felt the urge to pursue them, to press on toward finding some kind of solution to the mystery of my father’s crime. Certainly, part of that urge came from Rebecca, but part of it also came from me, the need to touch the center of something, to reach the final depth … no matter where it lay.
SIX
“STEVE, IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY.”
It was Marie calling from downstairs.
I got up slowly, showered, and dressed.
Marie and Peter were seated at the breakfast table. Peter was chattering on about some atrocity his teacher had committed against another student. As he talked, Marie watched him quietly, nodding from time to time as she chewed a final bit of toast.
When Peter had finished, we all fell silent, and after a moment, I found myself remembering those other family breakfasts I’d had so long ago at the little oval-shaped Formica table on McDonald Drive. Often, we’d all fallen silent, too, sitting for long stretches in a gloomy quiet. But it was not a moment like that which came back to me. Instead it was one of those rare occasions when my father and Laura, normally so withdrawn from the rest of us, had talked quite openly at the breakfast table, chatting with a rare spiritedness and candor, as if they were alone.
Laura had begun it, talking about some report she’d been working on in her geography class. It had had to do with an Oriental country. I don’t remember the particular place, but only that my sister had spoken almost mystically about the beauty of the land, the strangeness of the people, all those bizarre landscapes and customs which would have fascinated any sixteen-year-old girl as high-strung and curious as Laura.
In any event, she’d finished by saying that she intended to go there at some point in her life, an ambition, as I noticed, which had spontaneously and very powerfully appealed to my father. As much as I ever saw his love pour out to her, I saw it at that moment in the little kitchen. It was a look of unqualified admiration, but a look that also seemed a kind of plea that she hold forever to this longing for distant things and lost, mysterious places.
