Mortal Memory

I gave Rebecca a penetrating look as the thought struck me.

“She knew it was coming,” I said. “From that moment, I think, she knew he was going to kill us.”

Rebecca didn’t question this. She jotted a note in her black book and looked back up.

“What was Laura’s reaction to what your father did?” she asked.

I remembered the look on her face in great detail. She had been sitting across from me, so that the book had flown between us as it hurled toward my mother. Laura’s eyes had followed it briefly, then shot over to my father. What I saw in them astonished me.

“It was admiration,” I told Rebecca. “Laura looked at my father as if he’d done something gallant, like he was some kind of knight in shining armor.” I released a sharp, ironic chuckle. “All he’d done was throw a book at a helpless woman,” I said. That’s not exactly Sir Lancelot, is it?”

Then why did Laura look at him that way?”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t seem to believe me. “Are you sure you don’t know?”

“What are you getting at, Rebecca?”

Before she could answer, I already knew. It had undoubtedly been admiration that I’d seen in my sister’s eyes, but I hadn’t guessed the nature of what it was she admired until that moment.

“Action,” I said. “She admired him for actually doing something. It was hostile, and it was cruel, but at least it was something. “

It was perhaps the same thing Quentin had admired not long before he died, muttering about how my father had “taken it by the balls.” I thought about it a little while longer, remembering the softness in my sister’s eyes, the love she had for my father, the small, almost undetectable smile that had quivered on her lips as she’d glanced over at him that night. It led me to the final moment of my narrative.

“That wasn’t all my father did that night,” I said.

Rebecca looked at me thoughtfully. I knew that she could hear the slight strain that had suddenly entered my voice as I began:

“It was much later that night, and …”

I’d already been in bed for several hours when I heard someone moving softly in the adjoining room. I crawled out of bed, walked to the door, and opened it. In the darkness, I could see Laura as she headed stealthily toward the back porch, through its creaking screen door and out into the yard. Her posture was different than I’d ever seen it, slightly crouched, as if she were trying to make herself smaller, less easily seen.

I followed her as far as the back porch, then stood, staring through the gray metal web of the screen. I could see my sister as she made her way across the wet grass, the white folds of her nightgown rippling softly in the wind that came toward her from the sea. In that same wind, her long hair lifted like a black wave, falling softly to her shoulders and down her back.

I remember that I pressed my face into the screen, as if trying to pass through it bodilessly, like a ghost, and float out toward the tall green reeds into which she had wholly disappeared.

I stood for a long time by the screen, half expecting Laura to reemerge from the sea grass, perhaps with a shell in her hand, or some article she’d forgotten to retrieve from the beach earlier in the day.

But she didn’t come back, and so, after a moment, I drew away from the screen and turned back toward the house.

That was when I saw my father.

He was sitting motionlessly in the far corner of the porch, his long legs folded under the metal chair, his light blue eyes oddly luminous in the darkness. In the eerie stillness, he looked like a serpent sunning itself on a stone, but entirely inverted, drawing warmth and comfort from the darkness.

He didn’t speak to me at first, but merely let his eyes drift over to me, hold for a moment, then leap back to their original position, peering out at the wall of gently waving reeds. Then he spoke:

“Go back to bed, Stevie.”

“Where’s Laura going?”

“Go back to bed.”

His eyes returned to me, and I felt myself shrink back, moving away from him cautiously and fearfully, as if he were coming toward me with a knife.

Within seconds I was back in my room, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind latched on to Laura, to her white gown billowing in the breeze, and I remember feeling frightened for her somehow. Normally, the fear would have come from the simple knowledge that she was out in the darkness alone. But that wasn’t the origin of my dread. It was him. It was the feeling that he was going to go after her, stalk her in the reeds, do something unimaginable.

I looked at Rebecca, shaken suddenly by my own unexpected insight. “So I was really the one who knew all along that he was going to kill us,” I told her. “I was the one who sensed it. Not my mother or Jamie or Laura.”

Rebecca’s face was very still. “Go on,” she said.

And so I did, relating the story in as much detail as I could recall, reliving it.

After a time I walked back to the porch, although very stealthily, intending only to peer surreptitiously around the corner of the door to assure myself that my father was still there, that he hadn’t followed my sister into the reeds.

But he was gone, the chair empty, a cigarette butt still smoldering in the little ashtray he kept beside it. I knew that he hadn’t returned to the bedroom he shared with my mother. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was as clear to me as if I’d seen him disappear into the tall grass or heard the creak of the screen door as it closed behind