“She was the only one in the family who could draw him away from that obsession he had with bicycles,” I said. “I guess you could say she was the only person who had any real power over him.”
“What kind of power?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there are only a few kinds,” Rebecca said, ticking them off one by one. “There’s money, of course, and love. Kinship. Desire.” Rebecca stared at me intently. “And duty. These men are always dutiful.”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “My father was dutiful.”
As I spoke, I saw him join the ranks of these other men. Like them, he’d been dutiful down to the last second. For a moment, I envisioned him as a ghostly, scooped-out man in gray flannels, trudging wearily up the aisle of the hardware store, his arms laden with tools or boxes of nails. I wondered how often during that long walk up the same dusty aisle he’d searched for some way out of his vast responsibilities, a pathway through the bramble, before he’d settled upon murder. I imagined him making another choice, to live and let us live, going on, year after year, growing old and gray and bent as he sat behind the wheel of the brown van. I imagined my mother aging into a crippled husk, unable to bend any longer over her desolate little flower garden. I saw Jamie fattening into middle age, Laura drying into a parched doll. Had my father seen all that, too? Had he glimpsed the whole dark game, seen it play out move by move in a process so unbearable that he’d finally settled on murder as a way to break the rules?
“Very dutiful,” I repeated. “Despite the way life is.”
“The way life is?” Rebecca repeated, as if puzzled by the phrase.
“You know, the way people live,” I said. “Going to work every day. Sticking to the same job. Coming home at the same time. Day after day, the same rooms, the same faces.”
Rebecca began to write in her notebook. I watched her hand, the slender fingers wrapped delicately around the dark shaft of the pen. I’d heard the strange contempt which had risen into my voice as I’d described the mundane nature of everyday life, and as I watched Rebecca’s pen skirt across the open page of her notebook, I felt that somehow I had exposed myself. It was an uneasy and unsettling feeling, and for an instant I regretted that I’d ever agreed to talk to her.
“You know, sometimes I’m not really sure I can go on with this,” I said.
She looked at me squarely. “You can stop whenever you want.”
But I knew that I couldn’t in the least do that. I knew that I’d become enamored of a mystery, that I wanted to feel the edgy tension and exhilaration of closing in upon a dangerous and undiscovered thing.
For a moment, I let my eyes linger on her as she wrote, her head bent forward slightly, the long dark hair falling nearly to her pen. When she looked up again, I thought I saw a subtle recognition in her face, an uneasiness that made me glance away, my eyes fleeing toward the large glass window to my left and the darkening landscape beyond it. Far away, I could see night descending over the distant hills. It seemed to fall helplessly, out of control, to spin and tumble as it fell.
SEVEN
NIGHT HAD FULLY FALLEN by the time I got home. Marie and Peter were in the kitchen, both of them working at the evening’s dinner, Marie chopping onions, Peter shaping hamburger patties.
She stopped as I came through the door and looked at me closely. “You look tired,” she said.
“There’s a lot of work at the office,” I told her.
“Are you going to be staying late often?”
“Maybe.”
She nodded, then returned to the cutting board. “I finished the bid this afternoon.”
“Bid?”
She glanced at me, puzzled. The Bridgeport bid,” she said, “the one I’ve been working on so long.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “You think you’ll get the contract?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. You never know.”
I began to set the table, one of the “family time” jobs that had fallen to me. Peter continued slapping at the raw meat, making a game of it.
“Do it right,” I told him, a little sharply.
Marie looked at me, surprised by the edginess in my voice. “Are you okay, Steve?”
I nodded. “Yeah, why?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she returned to her work. “I thought it might be nice to visit my parents tomorrow,” she said after a moment. “We haven’t seen them in several weeks.”
I nodded. “It’s fine with me.”
“So you don’t have to go in to work tomorrow?”
“No.”
Marie smiled. “Good,” she said, “we’ll have a nice day in the country, then.”
Peter finished making the hamburger patties and handed them to Marie.
“Good job, Peter,” she said lightly, as she took them from him.
