“He got them through the mail,” Rebecca answered. “There was no indication that he ever went to a travel agency.”
I shrugged. “I don’t ever remember seeing any travel brochures around the house.”
“That’s because they weren’t mailed to McDonald Drive,” Rebecca said. “They were all mailed to the hardware store downtown.” She paused a moment, then added, “Some had been mailed as long as three months before the murders.”
I leaned back, as if unable to absorb this latest bit of information, the full-blown proof, as if any had still been necessary, of my father’s plot.
“The brochures were from all over,” Rebecca said. “Mexico, Europe, Asia, South America. That’s why they weren’t much help to the police.”
“So they never had any idea where he went?”
“Not until they found the car,” Rebecca said.
“That was in Texas, wasn’t it?” I said tentatively, only vaguely recalling something Quentin had told me. “Near the Mexican border?”
“Right on the border, actually,” Rebecca said. “In Laredo.”
I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “I remember that Quentin told me about them finding the car.”
“Swenson brought it back,” Rebecca said, “but no one ever claimed it.”
So that it still sat in the shadowy corner of the police garage in Somerset, as Rebecca went on to inform me, a dark, eerie symbol of my father’s flight. I could see it there, rusting, abandoned, the odor of my father’s cigarettes still lingering in the ragged brown upholstery, dust gathering on the black, serrated wheel where he had laid his hands.
“You could claim it if you wanted,” Rebecca added softly.
I shook my head wearily. “No, I don’t want it,” I whispered.
But I remembered it, nonetheless, as I told her.
Then I related a time when my father had driven all of us far out into the woods, to where an old cabin, not much more than a log shack, sat in a primeval forest.
It was probably four years or so before the murders, and we’d all gone out in that same old car in which he’d later made his escape—Laura and Jamie and I scrunched up together in the back seat; my mother, looking vaguely content on the passenger side; my father, his big hands on the wheel, smiling with a kind of gleeful adventurousness as we bumped along the barely passable road.
He’d stumbled upon the cabin while hunting as a boy, and I suppose there was something about it which had suddenly called him back. “I want to show you all something,” he’d said at the breakfast table that morning.
We hit the road about an hour later, drove for a long time, paved roads eventually giving way to unpaved ones, then at last on to what were little more than ancient logging trails. It was already early in the afternoon by the time we finally reached the cabin.
It was set in a deep wood, near a winding brook, and I could tell by the way my father looked at it that it represented something to him, perhaps his ideal of a forest paradise, remote, primitive, and uncomplicated. When he looked at it, his face took on the kind of expression I would later see in paintings of the saints when they saw God, that here before them was the true, abiding majesty. That day, he even seemed like them, saintly, a father out of the great book of fatherhood, a man of mythic kindness and commitment, capable of making an epic sacrifice.
He played with us in the forest, a long game of hide-and-seek, in which we skirted behind bushes and fallen trees, while my mother watched us from her place on the cabin’s small, dilapidated porch. We played tag, and he ran after us, lifting Laura into the air each time he caught up with her, their faces nearly touching as he lowered her to the ground again.
Toward evening, it began to snow, and while the rest of us gathered up our things and prepared to leave, my father walked out into the woods again and stood alone among the trees, his arms lifted slightly, hands open, catching snowflakes in his palms.
As I finished relating this episode, I realized that my eyes had grown moist.
“I’m all right,” I assured Rebecca quickly, gathering myself in again. “I just got a little nostalgic, I guess.”
It was more than that, though. I’d entered a new realm of feeling in regard to my family’s slaughter. I realized that it was no longer the explosive instant which horrified me, as it had in the restaurant days before, but the long decay of love, the slow stages of its dissolution.
I could see that Rebecca understood that, but what she could not have known was that only part of my anguish was connected to the dark reliving of my family’s death. The rest had to do with me, the volcanic discontent I had come to feel in the presence of everything that had grounded and sustained me in the past. It was as if that airy, unreal dream house I’d been working on for so long was now the only one in which I wanted to live. It was without walls. It had no foundation. It was pure fantasy. And yet it seemed right in a way that made everything else seem wrong.
After a moment, my eyes settled upon Rebecca. “They actually saw the monster, didn’t they?” I asked. “My father and the rest of them? Whatever it was that was eating them alive, they actually looked it in the eye.”
Rebecca didn’t answer me directly, but grew distant, perhaps even apprehensive. “Maybe we should end the interview for tonight, Steve.”
“Why?”
“I just think it would be best,” Rebecca said firmly, leaving no doubt that the interview was over.
She walked to the door, opened it, then followed me out into the darkness, slowly walking me to my car as a swirl of leaves played at our feet.
