“No, he probably didn’t mind that at all,” Rebecca said. “These men rarely do.”
I could see “these men” more fully now. I could see them in their game rooms and their basements, in their trucks and station wagons, standing in their driveways and out beside their glittering blue swimming pools, men with baseball bats and rifles, who later killed their families in inconceivable acts of annihilating violence. Step by step, they were becoming less abstract to me, less headlines glimpsed in newspapers than faces emerging slowly from a pale white cloud.
I shook my head as I studied my father’s smiling face on his wedding day. “I would never have guessed that my father would have ended up as one of ‘these men,’ as you always call them,” I said.
For a moment I stared at the two pictures together, the wedding photo, and next to it my mother’s motionless body, imagining the slow crawl of time that divided them, the invisible span of days and months and years that stretched from the smiling bride to the immobile corpse so neatly laid out behind the closed bedroom curtains. Suddenly, I saw my mother alive again, squatting by the little flower garden in the early evening, digging at the ground with her rusty spade as my father’s brown van pulled into the driveway.
Often during those last weeks, he had not gotten out of the van immediately, but had remained inside, sitting behind the wheel, watching my mother silently while he smoked a cigarette, his light blue eyes piercing through the curling fog as they settled frozenly on my mother like the cross hairs of a telescopic sight.
“I can’t imagine why he did it, Rebecca,” I said.
She looked at me pointedly, but said nothing.
“But I think he knew why,” I added.
I told about the time I’d gone down into the basement not long before the murders and found my father at work on the bicycle. I described his body clothed in gray flannel, his hands working steadily at the bicycle until they’d stopped abruptly, and he’d looked up at me, his eyes eerily motionless and sad, but utterly clear at the same time. I told her about standing on the third step, watching my father silently until he’d finally noticed me, lifted his eyes and held me in his gaze for a long moment before telling me cryptically that “this” was all he wanted.
Rebecca did not write any of it down in the little pad she’d placed at her right hand. She merely listened attentively until I repeated my inevitable conclusion.
“I think my father was very conscious that there was something missing in his life,” I told her. I recalled his face again, the way he’d looked that night, the unreadable sadness I’d glimpsed in his eyes.
Once again my eyes swept down to the photograph, my father’s face shining toward me from the picture taken on his wedding day. There was no doubt of his happiness on that day, of the delight he’d felt. He had the look of a man who believed that he’d accomplished something.
“Something missing,” I repeated as I glanced back up at her again. “Which made him want to kill us all.”
Rebecca’s next question surprised me. “Why do you think he didn’t kill you, Steve?”
“I think he intended to,” I told her, “but that he got scared off by the phone calls.”
“The ones Mrs. Fields made,” Rebecca said. She took a pen out of her briefcase and held it over the blank page of her notebook. “So you don’t think he spared you because he had some special feeling for you?” she asked. “Or maybe even because you were his youngest son.”
“Well, he killed his oldest son,” I said, “so why wouldn’t he have killed me?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think he intentionally spared me. I think that if I’d come home on time that afternoon, he’d have killed me just like he killed the others.”
She paused a moment before asking her next question. “What’s your most vivid memory of your father?”
I hesitated before answering, though not in an attempt to keep her in suspense, but only because, at first, I wasn’t sure. Finally, I said, “I remember how much my sister loved him.”
Rebecca’s eyes softened, as if this gentle answer had reached her unexpectedly.
“I don’t know what she saw in my father,” I added. “He always seemed so ordinary to me.”
The word “ordinary” appeared to surprise her.
“I mean, he didn’t have any special skills,” I explained. “He wasn’t a great talker, or anything like that. The only thing that ever really interested him was those bicycles of his.”
Rebecca looked at me curiously. “Bicycles?”
I nodded. “He imported very expensive racing bikes from England. Special ones. Rodger and Windsor. They were always red, he sold them in that little hardware store he owned. It was like some kind of obsession. He would assemble them himself, and he was always down in the basement doing that.”
“Down in the basement? Would your sister sometimes go down there?”
I’d never thought of it before, but Rebecca’s question brought it all back.
“Yes, she would,” I said. “I’d sometimes hear them talking together.”
Even at that moment, with Rebecca sitting across from me as evening fell outside the glass windows, I could hear those voices as if they were still lifting toward me, rising like smoke through the floor. They were soft voices, almost in whispers, secretive, intimate.
“Do you have any idea what they talked about?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t think Laura ever told me.”
I let my mind drift back. I could see Laura moving across the living room, her bare feet padding across the beige carpet, her long dark hair flowing down her back as she headed for the door that led down the stairs to the basement. I could hear my father’s hammer tapping just below me, then the sound of Laura’s feet as she walked down the stairs. It was at that point, as I remembered, that the tapping had always stopped. Stopped entirely, and never started again until Laura had come back up the stairs. The memory produced a faintly alarming realization.
