would have cared enough to do it— and who was still alive—except my father?”
“Did your father care for Jamie?” Rebecca asked directly.
“I think he tried to, yes,” I said.
“You never noticed him showing any particular resentment toward him?”
“No,” I said. “Even now, knowing what we’ve learned, I still don’t remember seeing any great resentment toward Jamie on my father’s part.”
“But they didn’t get along, did they?”
“No, they didn’t.” I thought a moment, then added, “But Jamie was not a lovable person, and he was always after Laura, always belittling her. And since my father loved Laura so much, I’m sure that Jamie’s behavior made it hard for my father to reach out to him.” I glanced toward the window, fixed my eyes on the dark lake beyond it, the wild currents I imagined to be swirling just beneath its black, unmoving surface. “It was getting all tangled up,” I said quietly.
“What was?”
“Us. All of us. We were getting all tangled up in things.”
For a moment, I saw my father as I’d often seen him, standing alone by the fence, smoking. There were times when I’d awakened near dawn, gone to the bathroom down the hall, then returned to bed. As I’d crawled back beneath the covers, I’d sometimes glimpsed him there, a solitary figure, standing in the smoky gray of early morning light, very still and deep in thought, as if he were trying to find a way out.
“Maybe that’s what he couldn’t bear,” I said.
“What were you getting tangled up in?” Rebecca asked.
The answer came to me without hesitation. “In each other,” I said. “All knotted up in each other.” I considered my answer longer, then added, “And in love, or faking it, anyway.”
“Faking love?”
“Yes. Pretending to love, when we really didn’t. That’s the hardest thing in life. Imagine doing it for years.” I saw my father by the fence again, caught in his arctic solitude. “The way my father did.”
Rebecca said nothing, but I could see a growing intensity in her eyes, as if I had alerted her to something.
“The men you’re studying, they were all doing that, weren’t they?” I asked. “They were all faking love.”
Rebecca responded with a question of her own. “If that was true, that your father was faking love, when did that be gin?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted. “But I knew who he loved the least.”
So did Rebecca, and to demonstrate it, she drew another picture from her stack. It showed Jamie’s body sprawled across the floor, his head like an exploded melon, scattered in bits and pieces across the floor and wall.
“Poor Jamie,” I said softly. “He had no idea what was coming toward him.”
I remembered all the times my father had gone out and shot baskets with my brother, how often even that had ended in some kind of brawl, ended with Jamie stomping up to his room, slamming the door behind him. At those times, my father had often lingered beneath the net, the ball bouncing up and down on the cement drive, rhythmic as a heartbeat, while he stared vacantly toward the backyard. I could see the look on his face, an expression of helplessness and bafflement, as if he were lost in a terrible bramble, pricked and bleeding, with no way out.
“My father was confused,” I told Rebecca. “Maybe, in the end, he just wanted to get out of that confusion.” I looked up at her emphatically. “Things were heating up in our house,” I told her. “Tension. Hatred. Maybe he couldn’t find any other way to clear the air.” I considered it a moment. “So he just blasted his way out.”
“A sudden explosion, is that what you’re saying?” Rebecca asked. That your father just blew up one afternoon?”
I nodded.
Rebecca said nothing.
“Maybe Jamie was the focal point of that confusion,” I added after a time, “the center of the storm, you might say, but not the whole thing.”
“Did you ever see them talking?” Rebecca asked. “Jamie and your father?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“So they weren’t faking love anymore?”
“No, they’d gone beyond that point, I think,” I said.
It struck me that perhaps this was the line that my father, and all these men, had finally crossed, the one that divided genuine from counterfeit devotion. Somewhere, they had decided that they would no longer live behind their own paternal mask, that the long masquerade was over.
My eyes drew over to the picture of my father on his wedding day, the luminous smile that adorned his face. “Maybe that’s where the fakery began,” I said as I tapped the photograph softly, “from right here, from the very first day.”
Rebecca watched me silently.
“So that his whole family life was a lie,” I added quietly, in a voice that was even, controlled.
In a rush of images, I saw all the postcard moments of our family life, the holidays spent together, the bloated turkey on Thanksgiving, the lighted tree at Christmastime. I saw all our little celebrations, saw my father as he’d stood beside the blazing candles of countless birthday cakes. Each in turn, I watched him lift us into the uncluttered air, Jamie when he turned five, Laura the day she won the fourth-grade spelling bee, me on the day I first rode my
