This way: lying on her back, faceup, her white arms stretched over her head, splattered with blood, two fingers and half the palm of the right hand blown away, as if she’d thrust it toward him at the moment he had fired.
Her legs spread wide apart as if in a vulgar pose, her white bathrobe pulled upward from her soiled bare feet, revealing her thighs and a thin line of white cotton panties.
Her chest blown open, ribs shattered like bits of porcelain, her flesh torn and mangled as if a bomb had gone off behind her heart.
Her mouth flung open, red and gaping, giving her face an attitude of grave surprise, one corner of the white towel she’d wrapped around her wet hair hanging limply, almost clownishly, over a single, blue, wide-open eye.
Along with Jamie and my mother, Laura died at approximately four in the afternoon. It was almost two hours later that Mrs. Hamilton, a neighbor from across the street, saw my father walk out of the house, climb into the Ford station wagon, and drive away. He was wearing a black raincoat and an old floppy hat. He was not carrying anything, not so much as a small overnight bag.
During those long two hours in which he remained in the house, my father washed my mother’s body, changed her into a pair of blue pajamas, and arranged her neatly on the bed. After that, he made a ham sandwich and ate it at the small table in the kitchen. I know it was his sandwich, because in the police photographs, there was a ring of raw onion on the side of the plate. No one but my father ate raw onion. He drank a cup of coffee, leaving both the plate and the cup in the sink as he always did, as if expecting them to be washed later, as normally they would have been.
He didn’t pack anything, because he left with nothing; not so much as a pair of socks was missing from his closet.
He didn’t reenter either Laura or Jamie’s rooms. He made no attempt to clean up the frightful mess that had been made of them.
And yet, for no apparent reason, he remained in the house for a full two hours, alone, silent, surrounded by nothing but the bodies of his murdered wife and children.
What had he been waiting for?
When I became old enough to ponder that question seriously—I was probably around Laura’s age, sixteen—I came up with a great many possibilities. He was waiting for some mysterious phone call. Or he was waiting to go to the airport at just the right time to catch some flight he’d booked weeks in advance. He was waiting to be picked up by gangsters, foreign agents, Communists. My own theory changed each time I considered the question.
Then, rather suddenly, on a spring day as I sat on a rock watching the waves, I arrived at the answer that had no doubt come to the police and Aunt Edna and Uncle Quentin long before, but which they’d kept to themselves, perhaps hoping that the question would never actually occur to me, that I would never seek its answer. But I did seek it, and it did come: He was waiting for me.
Once it had occurred to me, the answer was entirely obvious. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been home from school by three-fifteen in the afternoon, just as Jamie and Laura would. But I’d gone to Bobby Fields’s house instead, a play date my mother had known about all week, but of which my father knew nothing.
And so for nearly two hours my father had waited for me.
It’s possible that he might have waited as long as necessary had not Mrs. Fields made two phone calls to the house on McDonald Drive. According to the statement she later gave police, she made the first call at around 5:30 P.M. When no one answered, she called again twenty minutes later. There was still no answer.
Five minutes or so after that last call, Mrs. Hamilton from across the street saw my father walk through the rain to the Ford station wagon, get in, and drive away.
A half hour later, Mrs. Fields decided, after a good deal of protest from Bobby and me, that she couldn’t take me to the movies without getting parental permission first. She then drove directly to my house, and while Bobby and I remained in the back seat, she got out of the car and walked to the side entrance, which was nearest to the driveway, the one that led directly into the kitchen. She knocked at the door, glancing in as she did so, and saw a plate with a curl of raw onion and an empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink. Glancing idly to the left, she also saw a shotgun laid lengthwise across the small cutting board my mother kept in the corner beside the basement door.
I remember seeing her raise her hand to knock a second time, then stop, the hand motionless in the air, and turn back toward the car.
Before Rebecca, I remembered nothing else about that day except for the other car, the one with the two policemen in it, the older one turning toward me, drawing his glasses from his face, wiping the rain from the lenses with a white handkerchief, his lips parting to make a statement which, before Rebecca, time or shock had swept away.
TWO
EVEN NOW, WHEN I return to my dead family, it’s always by way of my father. It’s as if he stands at the gate of my memory, the border guard of a dark frontier.
It was a border I rarely approached during the years that followed the murders, a frontier I almost never entered. It was the “terra incognito” of the medieval maps, the place where “there be dragons,” as the ancient cartographers declared.
And so, over the years, I had not looked back. Because of that, everything had faded—Jamie, my mother, even Laura to some degree. Only my father had remained in stark relief, grim and unfathomable, the ultimate engima.
Of all the questions Rebecca later asked about him, she never asked the easiest one, the one for which my life had provided two different answers:
Until I was nine, the answer came quickly, without that momentary twinge of dread or embarrassment that later accompanied it. I simply replied that my father owned a hardware store.
