bike without training wheels.
“All a lie,” I repeated softly, my lips hardly parting with the words. “Can that be possible?”
Rebecca’s eyes fell toward the picture of my brother in his ruin, a gesture that gave me the only answer I required at the time.
NINE
A WEEK PASSED before we met again. As always, it began with a phone call to my office, and it ended with the two of us seated in the front room of her cottage by the lake.
From the beginning, it was clear that during the intervening days, Rebecca had thought a great deal about our last conversation. She began with a reference to it.
“We were talking about faking love,” she said, as she took a seat opposite me. “You were saying that your father might have faked it from the beginning.”
I nodded.
“What about his love for Laura?” Rebecca asked. “Was he faking that, too?”
I shook my head determinedly. “No. Absolutely not.”
Rebecca took a picture from her briefcase and handed it to me. It showed Laura as she lay on her back, her chest blown open, her soiled feet pressed toward the camera. I gave the picture back to her.
“I don’t care what that shows,” I told her. “I saw his face when he was with her. She relieved him. She gave him the only happiness he may have had in our family.”
I could tell Rebecca remained doubtful.
“I know that my father loved Laura,” I repeated, almost wistfully. “Because I loved her too. Especially toward the end. Especially that last year when it became …” I hesitated to say it, but found that I couldn’t keep it back. “… romantic.” I shrugged. “Or at least that’s the way it felt.”
Laura was sixteen that year, and so beautiful that there were times when I’d catch her in my eye, and simply stop, dead still, and watch until she passed from view. So beautiful that I’d begun to dream about her. They weren’t the sweaty, lustful fantasies of teenage boys, but the atmosphere was always luscious nonetheless, a sensual world of glades and humid leaves, warm mists and jungle fragrances.
In dreams, Laura came to me in such places. Of course, it was never really Laura, but only a presence I recognized as her, a smell, a taste, but never the person that she really was, the teenage girl who ate dinner across the table from me, and slept in the room next door. Still, it was a powerful presence, and after each dream, I was left with the odd sensation of her actually having passed through me, like a wind through a cloud, leaving me in a strangely suspended state of excitement and delight. The following morning, while she ate her eggs obliviously across the table, I would smile inwardly, remembering my dream, and with the strange sense that I’d cunningly stolen something from her during the night, then triumphantly slinked away.
“I was in love with my sister,” I said. “If we’d been allowed to grow up together, I’m sure I would have found another romantic object.” I shook my head. “But she died at the height of her power over me, and so, I had all this love left over, like money I couldn’t spend.”
“You couldn’t spend it with your wife?”
“It’s not the same.”
I half expected Rebecca to lean toward me and begin a wholly different inquiry, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked at me very shrewdly, as if taking some part of me in for the first time. Then she said, “I know.”
For a moment, we stared at each other softly. During that brief time, I felt an undeniable connection to her, a sense of having shared the same dark space. But it lasted only an instant, for almost immediately, Rebecca shifted in her seat, as if to break free of some invisible net.
“How about Laura?” she said. “Did she have a ‘romantic object’ in her life?”
I suppose it was not until that moment that I fully realized just how much I’d buried since the murders, how much I’d repressed.
“Yes, she did,” I said. “A boy named Teddy Lawford.”
Rebecca drew a small pad from the table beside her chair. “Was he from Somerset?”
“No. They met on Cape Cod. My father had rented a cottage there for the last week in August 1959.” The nearness of that day in November struck me. “It was just three months before the murders.”
Rebecca’s eyes tensed slightly, but she said nothing. Instead, she merely allowed me to continue, her pen still poised above the white paper which bore nothing but Teddy Lawford’s name.
“Teddy was seventeen,” I began.
As I spoke, I could see him quite clearly in my mind, tall and lanky, with light brown hair. He had grayish eyes that seemed to change depending on the light, something Laura had later commented on. His amiable, divorced father was a large, beer-barrel of a man who’d spent his life selling auto parts in Boston. He’d rented the cottage next to ours for the summer, and Teddy had watched a series of families move in and out of it over the preceding weeks, some staying no longer than a few days before they were replaced by another. But we had been the first, I later heard Mr. Lawford say, who’d shown up with a lovely girl nearly his son’s age.
“I think Teddy’s father was anxious for him to meet someone,” I said.
Rebecca looked at me. “You mean a girl his son could have a sexual experience with?”
“Yes, probably,” I answered. “He must have seen Laura at some point, although I don’t know exactly when that might have been.”
