Jamie saw it, too, however, and something in it infuriated him.
“You’re never going anywhere,” he sneered at Laura. “Who do you think you are, some kind of princess?”
Laura glared at him angrily. “Oh, shut up, Jamie,” she snapped.
“Just big ideas, that’s all,” Jamie fired back. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I said, shut up, Jamie,” Laura screamed, “just shut up.”
It continued in this way for some time, both Jamie and Laura growing hotter by the minute, my mother lamely attempting to quell the riot, but with her usual lack of force.
I don’t know exactly at what point I became aware that my father had left the room. I hadn’t seen him rise, walk around the table, and disappear into some other part of the house. It was as if he’d simply vanished.
The battle continued in his absence, growing more furious and abusive by the moment. My mother left after a time, coughing slightly, as if escaping from a smoke-filled room. I remained in my seat, of course, watching the battle like a child, fascinated by the flames. I was still there when it died away suddenly, and both Laura and Jamie moved out into the open air, Jamie to the basketball hoop, Laura to a chair in the backyard.
Later, coming from the upstairs bathroom, I glimpsed my mother as she lay on her back in the bed, one hand at her side, the other balanced palm up on her forehead, as if she were wiping a line of sweat from her brow.
A terrible silence had descended upon the house by then, one which no one seemed willing to break, as if this sullen, unhappy peace was the only kind of quiet we could know. I remember that in order not to break it, I had actually tiptoed down the stairs.
I was near the bottom of them when I saw my father sitting alone in the solarium. His legs stretched out before him, his arms hanging limply at his sides, he no longer looked like that commanding figure who’d once stepped out onto the balcony and brought all of us to attention.
At that point I might have thought him broken, I suppose, a pitiful shell in gray work clothes, but suddenly he looked over at me, and the man I saw was not weak, nor timid, nor lacking in resolve. Rather, he seemed to smolder with a strangely building purpose, the eyes small, intense, deeply engaged, the jaw firmly set. It was a face I’d seen in old cowboy movies, a man about to draw.
Now, as I sat in the silence of my own kitchen, my eyes moving slowly from Peter to Marie, I wondered if it was at that precise moment that my father had decided that he would bear no more, that he would kill us all.
“These men,” Rebecca would later write, “shouldered all they had been taught to shoulder, until their shoulders broke.”
Until their shoulders broke, and they reached for the pistol, the baseball bat, the pellets encrusted with cyanide. Until their shoulders broke, and they stood on the third step and followed the little watery footprints as they led toward the empty cardboard box … and fired.
Or was it only the slow wearing away she wanted to explore, the long descent toward that explosive second when the shoulders cracked and the savagery began?
“What are you thinking about, Steve?”
I glanced toward Marie. “What?”
“You looked like you were thinking about something.”
“Just something at work,” I said.
Marie took me at my word and didn’t press the matter. She went back to her breakfast, and after finishing it, walked upstairs to finish dressing.
I walked to my car and drove to work. Wally was leaning against my desk when I arrived. He handed me a note.
“Phone message,” he said with a leering grin.
I glanced at the message: “Call Rebecca,” and then a number.
“Thanks,” I said to Wally, as I pocketed the note and slid in behind my desk.
Wally continued to stare at me knowingly. “So, is she a nice woman, Steve?” he asked with a quick wink.
“Very,” I told him, but without emphasis, in the same way I might have said it of a business acquaintance.
Wally grinned. “Glad to hear it,” he said, then walked away.
I dialed the number, and Rebecca answered the phone right away. “Hello.”
“It’s me.”
“Who?”
“Steve Farris.”
“Oh, Steve, thanks for calling,” she said. “Listen, I was wondering if we might meet again this Friday.”
For the first time, I felt the pull of her voice as something alluring.
“I suppose so.”
“The same place? Around five?”
“Okay.”
Rebecca thanked me, then hung up. I went back to my work, but even as I continued sketching the design for the Massachusetts library, I felt both Rebecca and the task she had set herself lingering in the air around me. It gave a peculiar energy to my thoughts, a direction that hadn’t been there before. It was as if, before Rebecca, a space had existed in my mind, empty and featureless, but which I had always felt as an odd, persistent ache. And so, as the days passed, and I went through the routine of work and home, I looked forward to my meeting with
