“He got even closer to her,” I answered. I considered it a moment, trying to find precisely the right word. “He became … more tender.”
For the first time Rebecca looked vaguely alarmed, as if the word had caught her by surprise.
Still, it was undoubtedly the right word to describe the change that came over the relationship between Laura and my father during the few weeks before he killed her.
They were very tender with each other after that night on the beach,” I said. They’d always been very close, but they got even closer for a while.” I did a quick calculation in my head. “My sister had seventy-nine days to live.”
The starkness of the number, the brevity of my sister’s life, shook me slightly, but only slightly, not with the disoriented unease I’d experienced in the restaurant days before.
Still, Rebecca noticed the reaction. “This is hard, I know,” she said.
Her eyes were very soft when she said it, and I knew that I wanted to touch her, and that everything about such a grave desire seemed right to me at that moment, while everything that stood in the way of its completion, the whole vast structure of fidelity and restraint, seemed profoundly wrong.
“Rebecca, I …”
I stopped, quickly glanced away from her, and let my eyes settle once again on the lake beyond her window. The clouds had parted by then, and the moon was bright against its ebony surface. It gave the sense of a world turned upside down, of the past devouring the future, of all life’s elements twisted and inverted, so that I seemed to be staring down into the waters of the sky.
TEN
IT WAS NEARLY midnight by the time I got back home that evening. I’d expected to find Marie either working in her office or asleep. But she was waiting in the den instead, sitting beneath the reading lamp, her face very stern when she spoke to me.
“Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.
I looked at her innocently. “What do you mean? I’ve been at work.”
“You mean at the office?”
“That’s right.”
“I called the office,” Marie said. “I spoke to Wally. He said that …”
“I was doing a site inspection,” I interrupted quickly. “At that office complex on the north side of town.”
She looked at me a long moment, and I could see the wheels turning, the whole machinery of her suspicion fully exposed in her eyes.
“A site inspection at night?” she said doubtfully.
“We began it in the afternoon,” I told her. “Then we had a long meeting in the general contractor’s trailer.”
For a moment she seemed vaguely embarrassed, as if by her own dark thoughts. “Oh,” she said, her voice less accusatory, though a strained quality lingered in it. Then she smiled faintly. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re home,” she said.
“Me, too,” I told her, though I knew it was a lie, that I wanted to be with Rebecca instead.
“Any more questions?” I asked half jokingly.
“I guess not.”
I offered a quick smile, then headed upstairs. It was a gesture of flight, I recognized, a darting-away from the seaminess of the lie I’d just told Marie, perhaps even a flight from the uneasiness and foreboding I’d felt at the moment of telling it.
Once alone in the bedroom, I thought of my father, of the way he’d hurled the book at my mother’s chest that night on Cape Cod. I wondered if he’d felt the same restriction I felt now. Had there been some place outside his home that had called to him with an irresistible urgency? Later on that balmy summer night on Cape Cod, as I remembered now, I’d glimpsed him in the yard, standing beside my mother in the moonlight, his arm draped loosely around her shoulder. They’d returned from a long walk, and for a moment, as they’d stood together in the darkness, they’d actually looked like a couple in love. For a moment, he’d drawn her in more closely and kissed her hair. I wondered now if that gesture had been nothing more than part of a vast deception. Had my father really wanted to be with her that night? Had he wanted to be with any of us? Or had he secretly yearned for another life, one in which every moment was filled with challenge and surprise, a life from which we blocked him simply by being alive?
I thought of each of us in turn. I saw Jamie in his sullen anger and isolation; Laura in her reeling moods, walking the house in the blue twilight; my mother forever locked within the folds of her red housedress; myself, a small, ordinary boy, indistinguishable from any other. Last I saw my father, still distant and mysterious, a figure walking behind us, the grip of the shotgun nestled, almost gently, in his hands.
I remembered Rebecca’s purpose again, her search for whatever it was in life that these men had been unable to bear, and in my father’s case it occurred to me that the unbearable thing for which Rebecca was still searching might have been nothing more mysterious than ourselves, that we were, each of us, in our own individual lives, unbearable to him, the living proof that his life had come to nothing.
I walked to the bedroom window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The lights from the suburban street seemed dull and lifeless. For years I’d been able to look out that same window without the slightest sense of disturbance. Now the very look of it made me cringe, for it seemed to me that my life, like all the other lives around me, possessed only the manageable level of risk, and no real jeopardy at all. Lived within its confines, we hunted the appropriate game, settled for the reachable star. We made the roads straight and flat. We turned on the light before we headed down the corridor, and grabbed the railing as we inched cautiously down the padded stairs. We
