“Do you think Jamie knew what Laura meant?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know.”
Rebecca considered everything I’d told her for a few seconds. “What were the blue papers?” she asked finally. “They weren’t documents, were they?”
“No … I think they could have been love letters,” I answered slowly, “from Jamie’s real father. Letters she couldn’t part with.”
“Even at the risk of their being found.”
“Yes.”
And so all my old surmises about my mother had been wrong. “Poor Dottie” had swooned to someone’s touch, had caught her breath, taken a stunning risk, and in doing that had lived for just a moment the life she only read about from then on, in novels piled beside her bed.
Rebecca leaned back in her seat and remained very quiet for a long time. She was still thinking about my mother, I believe, but my mind had shifted over to my father, to the smiling figure in the photograph, triumphant on his wedding day.
“He must have loved my mother a great deal to marry her knowing that she was already carrying another man’s child,” I said.
Rebecca didn’t look so sure.
I remembered the look on my father’s face the night I’d gone down into the basement, stopped on the third step, and watched him work silently on his latest Rodger and Windsor until his eyes had finally lifted toward me. I heard his words again:
“Or maybe all he ever wanted was just a wife and kids,” I said.
Rebecca looked at me. “Except that he killed his wife, and two of his children,” she said sharply, “slaughtered them one by one, in cold blood.”
It was at that moment that the full ruin of my family struck me in all its horror. In a weird, nightmarish vision, I felt myself pass effortlessly through the walls of 417 McDonald Drive as if they were nothing more than stage scrims, solid at one moment, dreamily transparent at the next, so that I could see through the whole house at a single glance, see one day’s death unroll before me in far more grisly and exact detail than I had ever been able to imagine it before.
My father’s old brown van glides into the rainswept driveway, its slick black tires throwing arcs of water into the air behind them. From its gloomy interior, my father’s face stares at me from behind the van’s black, serrated wheel, his eyes glowing from its gray interior like unblinking small blue lights. He does not linger inside the van, but emerges quickly and determinedly, then walks at a measured, unhurried pace toward the side door of the house. Once inside, he slaps his old gray hat softly against the side of his leg, sending a shower of shimmering droplets across the gleaming, checked tile of the kitchen floor. For a single, suspended moment, he stares about the room, taking in its empty, lifeless space, his face a rigid, wooden mask, with nothing moving in it but his eyes. They settle finally on the basement door.
He walks down the stairs to the tall metal cabinet he has always used to store his tools. He opens it in a single smooth, untroubled movement, all indecision long behind him, and withdraws a long object which years ago he had stored away, wrapping it in brown paper and binding it haphazardly with a length of frazzled twine. At the small workbench he had once used to assemble his Rodger and Windsor bicycles, he unwraps the shotgun and lays it out across the wooden worktable. For a few seconds he strokes its wooden stock deliciously, as if it were a woman’s smooth, brown thigh.
Upstairs, each in their separate rooms, those who are about to die continue through the iron motions of their quickly dwindling lives.
Alone in his room, Jamie hunches over his desk, working mightily to keep his attention on the biology textbook the police photographs would later show still open on his desk.
A few feet down the corridor, Laura emerges from the bathroom, her body wrapped up in her long white robe. She enters her own room, walks to the small dressing table by the window, and begins to run a brush through her long dark hair.
Across the hallway, my mother rises from her bed. She stares about wearily, still in the fog of her late afternoon nap. She plucks one of her romance novels from the table by the bed and heads softly down the corridor to the stairs, moving down them slowly just as my father, still in the basement several feet below, presses two red, cylindrical 12-gauge shells into the twin chambers of the shotgun.
Upstairs, Jamie grimaces, shakes his head, closes the text, thinks better of it, and wearily opens it again.
Laura makes a final sweep through her hair, then opens the center drawer of her dressing table. She withdraws a tube of lipstick, pulls off its shiny cap, and leans in closer to the mirror as she brings its dark red tip to her mouth.
Below them, in the basement’s faded light, my father turns and begins his ascent up the plain wooden stairs that lead to the kitchen.
Now on the first floor, clutching at the collar of her red housedress, my mother turns to the right and advances into the living room just as my father reaches the top of the basement stairs. She is in the solarium, easing herself down into one of its white wicker chairs by the time he steps out into the kitchen, the long black barrel of the shotgun weaving as he glances, very briefly, out the window toward the rain.
For a single, breathless instant, I see all motion stop, as if at that final, precipitous moment, my family had been given one more chance. I feel like screaming at them from my great distance: “Stop, please stop! We can find some other way!”
They do not hear me.
They begin to move again.
My father mounts the stairs toward the second floor, his eyes staring toward the upper reaches of the house until he passes the threshold and confronts a dimly lighted hallway and three closed doors.
