I’d still been standing in the same position a few minutes later when I felt the doorknob turn.
“Stevie? You in there?”
It was Jamie.
“Stevie?” he called again. “Stevie, you in there?”
I opened the door, glancing around his lean body toward the empty corridor. The door to my mother’s room was closed. To my right, only a few feet down the dark corridor, the door to Laura’s room was closed too, though I could see a line of bright light just beneath it.
“What’s the matter with you?” Jamie demanded irritably. “You hiding something? Why was the door locked?”
I shrugged, unable to come up with an explanation that would have made any sense to him. “I didn’t know it was locked,” I said finally.
To my surprise, Jamie didn’t challenge the completely illogical nature of my answer, perhaps because the childhood sense of the magical and miraculous which lingers on in adolescence was still so much a part of the way he saw the world that he could casually accept the otherwise impossible notion that doors could sometimes lock themselves.
In any event, he merely walked to the bed, pulled himself up to his upper bunk, and lost himself in one of the sports magazines that were always piled in a jagged stack at the foot of his bed.
For a long time, I remained in the room, sitting in the lower bunk. The weariness I’d felt before as I’d trudged up the stairs had disappeared, and in its place I could feel nothing but a disquieting tension. After a time, it drove me from my bed to the window. By that time, Jamie had fallen asleep, the sports magazine still open on his chest.
It was a clear summer night, and I could see the whole shadowy stretch of the backyard as if it were illuminated by a pale blue light. It was very warm, as well, and the window was fully open, a light breeze rustling the curtains quietly.
I don’t know how long I stood by the window, but after a time, I heard the door at the side of the house—the kitchen door, the one that Mrs. Fields would approach only a few weeks later, then shrink back from in sudden dread—I heard it open, then close, and after that, the muffled sound of footsteps as they moved down the short flight of stairs to the walkway which divided the house from the garage and which led in a gentle curve to the backyard.
My father appeared seconds later, walking alone over the dark green lawn. He was taking long, slow strides, as he moved from the western to the eastern corner of the yard, then back again, a cloud of white smoke trailing behind him like the pale exhaust of an old steam engine.
I don’t know exactly how long he paced the yard alone that night, but only that after a few minutes, I heard the kitchen door open again.
This time it was Laura.
She came around the corner of the house, dressed in her white sleeping gown, her long dark hair hanging in a black wave down her back. She was barefoot, and I could see her white feet as they padded across the dark green grass toward where my father stood, now leaning slightly against the solid wooden fence he’d built along the rear edge of the yard.
He didn’t turn toward her, although he must have heard the door open, just as I had heard it. He didn’t turn because, unlike me, he already knew who’d opened the kitchen door.
“It was obviously a prearranged meeting,” I told Rebecca, “something the two of them had already planned.”
Rebecca didn’t look surprised, and I could tell from her face that she’d fully accepted the conspiratorial nature of my father and my sister’s relationship, its eerie sense of secret conclave.
“Laura walked over to him,” I went on, “and the two of them stood by the fence and talked for a long time.”
From just behind the plain white curtains, while my brother lay snoozing a few feet away, the sports magazine rising and falling to the rhythm of his breath, I watched as my father and sister talked quietly, but very intently, their eyes resting steadily upon each other.
It was probably exactly that feeling of intensity that kept me posted by the window during the next few minutes. It was in every element of their posture, in every glance that passed between them, even in the sharp whispers I could hear but not make out, as if their voices were distant instruments scraping at the air.
They were in plain sight, of course, both of them posed starkly against the moonlight, and yet I felt the inexplicable need to hide behind the white shroud of the bedroom curtains. I didn’t know why, but only that despite their outward show of openness, the fully illuminated yard, even the nearly ostentatious brightness of my sister’s gown, the predominant mood of their meeting was surreptitious and collusive. Perhaps even a little arrogant, as if they both presumed with perfect certainty that the rest of us were sleeping in the dark house, that no matter what they said or how loudly they said it, neither Jamie nor my mother nor I would hear or see anything.
“It was as if, as far as they were concerned, we were already dead,” I said.
Rebecca glanced down at her notebook, as if trying to avoid my eyes. “Did you ever get any idea of what they talked about that night?” she asked, but in a voice that was deliberately flat.
“No.”
But I suspected even then that it was something of the deepest significance to them both. My father had remained rigidly in place throughout the conversation, his eyes focused intently on my sister. For her part, Laura had remained almost as motionless as my father. From a distance, she appeared locked in a stony, reptilian stillness which went against the often frantic quality of her movements, the fidgety fingers and continually bouncing feet. It was as if this stillness had been imposed upon her by the gravity of what was transpiring between them, the sheer awesomeness of its content.
“So you never heard any part of what they said?” Rebecca asked, as if she were still in doubt about the truth of my first answer.
