grew old in a world of shallow breaths, feared both gasps and sighs.
And yet, for all that, the very next morning I went on with my routine as if nothing were changing in my life. I sat at the breakfast table and made small talk with Marie and Peter. Dutifully, I asked about Marie’s latest bid, about Peter’s work in school. But even as I listened to them, their voices sometimes faded, their faces drifted off” into a blur, as if they were becoming mere white noise.
“Finish up, Peter,” I heard Marie say as she got to her feet, “you’re going to be late for school.”
I remained at the table while Marie went upstairs to finish dressing and Peter darted to his room to get his jacket. Seconds later, I heard him dash by me. He gave me a quick “Bye, Dad,” then bolted out the door.
“Are you still here?” Marie said later when she came into the kitchen.
I looked at her. “What time is it?”
I could see that the question struck her as odd. “You’re wearing a watch, Steve,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, then glanced down at it, but didn’t move.
“Shouldn’t you be leaving?” Marie asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
I got up and went to my car. As I began to guide it out of the driveway, Marie came out of the kitchen and walked toward me. I stopped the car as she came near.
“You don’t look well, Steve,” she said worriedly. “Do you want to stay home today?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine,” I said with a small, dismissive smile.
Marie didn’t smile back. “You need to take care of yourself, Steve,” she said in a voice as full of real concern as I’d ever heard, a voice that should have comforted and relieved me, but didn’t.
I shrugged. “I’m fine,” I repeated, then let the car begin to drift away again.
She said nothing more, but simply stepped away from the car and watched, without waving good-bye, as I glided down the driveway. Now, when I think of her, I often see her in that pose, standing in the grass, her arms folded over her chest, watching silently as I drifted from her sight.
Once at my office, I went directly to my desk and began working on the library I’d been designing. But even as I worked, adding lines and filling in details, I felt that I was continually returning to the house on McDonald Drive. Curiously, I no longer dreaded these returns. Instead, I seemed to move back toward that lost place with an increasing sense of rendezvous and complicity. My companion was always Rebecca, and I sometimes felt that I was walking hand in hand with her through the separate murder rooms. I could hear her voice, as if in whispers, pointing out details, the open textbook on Jamie’s desk, my sister’s bare feet. The bodies of my dead family seemed to lie sensually before us, as if we were joined in the rapture of my father’s crime.
It was over a week before I saw her again, and it seemed an infinitely long time. Each time the phone rang on my desk, I hoped that it would be she, whispering to me with a grave intimacy, as if we were lovers, bursting with breathless communications.
She called on a Wednesday afternoon, and we met at her cottage the following evening. I expected to exchange a few pleasantries, but Rebecca got right down to business instead.
She’d gotten some additional information from Swenson, she told me, and even as we began where we’d left off the week before, I sensed that she was holding something back. Even so, I didn’t press the point. By then I’d become quite willing to go at whatever pace Rebecca set. Perhaps I’d even sensed that to know everything Rebecca knew would dull the intensity of the journey we were making together—something I didn’t want to happen. What I wanted was to feel that intensity and peril all the time, to tremble forever at the edge of some sudden, apocalyptic discovery.
And so I followed Rebecca’s lead, anticipating nothing, merely letting her questions guide me back.
“You said that things became more tender between your father and Laura after that night on the beach,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But they’d always had a close relationship, hadn’t they?”
“Yes,” I said. “But he seemed to pay even more attention to her after that. It was almost as if he were studying her, trying to get an idea of what was going on inside.”
“And you only noticed this change after you’d returned from the Cape?”
“Yes.”
We’d gotten back on a Monday night, Labor Day 1959, all of us crammed into the dark brown station wagon. My father drove, of course, while my mother sat in the front seat, her right shoulder pressed tightly up against the door, her face pale and bloodless as she stared straight ahead. Her eyes seemed lifeless, drained of light, and the sallow skin of the face that surrounded them made her look like a department store mannequin.
Laura and I sat together in the back seat while Jamie lay crouched up and constantly complaining in the small square of trunk space that lay just behind us. He had absented himself as much as possible from the rest of us during the preceding week, but this last effort at self-imposed exile was certainly his most extreme, a punishing act of ostracism which Laura found ridiculous and contemptible, but which my father, lost in his own thoughts, seemed hardly to notice.
We’d planned to leave early that Monday morning, but things had gotten scattered and confused during the day, and we’d finally pulled away from the little cottage at nearly four in the afternoon. By that time, the off-Cape traffic had reached its dreadful end-of-season peak, and we’d staggered along toward the Sagamore Bridge at a snail’s pace, inching down the highway one jerk at a time, Jamie groaning uncomfortably with each movement of the car.
It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the house on McDonald Drive, but my father didn’t seem particularly tired. He pulled himself briskly out of the old station wagon and immediately began to unload the week’s supplies while my mother staggered wearily into the house, then up the stairs to the bedroom.
