“I’m sorry this is so hard for you,” she said.
“It’s a lot of things, Rebecca,” I admitted. “It’s not just my past.”
At the car, I stopped and stood very near to her. I could almost feel her breath.
“When do you want to meet again?” I asked.
She watched me hesitantly, but said nothing.
I smiled. “Don’t worry, Rebecca. I’ll go all the way through it with you.”
She nodded. “In all the other cases, there were no survivors,” she said. “I guess I should have known how hard it would be for you, but I just hadn’t had the experience before.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her.
I opened the door and started to get in, but she touched my arm and drew me back around to face her.
“You should only go as far as you want to, Steve,” she said. “No farther.”
“I know,” I told her.
I could feel her hand at my arm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it tightly for a long time. But I knew that close as it seemed to me, her hand might as well have been in another universe.
“Well, good night, then,” she said as she let it drop from my shoulder.
“Good night,” I said, then got into my car.
It was still early, so I stopped off at a small restaurant and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee before going home.
Marie was at the sink when I walked into the kitchen. Peter was at the table, chopping celery.
“You’re home early,” Marie said. “We’re making a tuna dish.”
“I’ve already eaten,” I said idly.
Marie’s eyes shot over to me. “You’ve already eaten?”
I nodded obliviously.
“You got off early and didn’t come home to have dinner with Peter and me?” she asked, in a voice that struck me even then as deeply troubled, as if in this small twist of behavior she’d already begun to detect the approach of her destruction.
“I guess I did,” I said, then added defensively, “Sorry. I just wasn’t thinking.”
Marie looked at me brokenly, but I did nothing to ease her distress.
“I’m going to lie down for a while,” I said, then headed up the stairs.
Once upstairs, I lay down on the bed, my eyes staring at the blank ceiling. Below me, I could hear Peter and Marie as they continued to make their dinner together. Below me, as I realize now, they were shrinking. I should have seen it, like a murderous vision, as I lay alone on my bed that evening. I should have seen Peter fleeing down a dark corridor, Marie cringing behind a cardboard box. I should have seen the circle tightening, felt the first bite of the noose.
But that evening I felt nothing but my own distress. I remembered Rebecca as she’d stood beside me only a short time before, and I knew that I’d wanted to draw her into my arms. Perhaps, at the time, I’d even imagined that she was all I really needed to solve the riddle of my life. But I realize now that Rebecca was only the symbol of those other things I had wanted even more.
“In the deepest and most inchoate longings of these men,”
Rebecca would later write, “there was a central yearning to be embattled, a fierce need for a fierce engagement, so that they saw themselves in that single, searing instant not as killers slaughtering women and children, but as soldiers in the midst of battle, men heroically and perilously engaged in the act of returning fire.”
It was months later, and I was alone, when I read that passage. By then, I was wifeless, childless, homeless. Everything was gone, except my one need to “return fire” as my father had, in an act of sudden and avenging violence.
ELEVEN
DURING THE LAST days of October, as fall retreated and the first wintry rains began, I felt as if some sort of countdown had begun. It wasn’t a radical change, only a shift in direction, a sense of moving into the final phase of something. There was a helplessness about it, a feeling that I no longer controlled my life, that perhaps, a creature of disastrous circumstances, I had never actually controlled it. It seemed my father had destroyed that web of connections which might have given me context, a place to stand in the world. After that, I’d drifted here and there, but always in reaction to something outside myself. I was an accidental architect, an accidental husband, an accidental father—an accidental man.
“They felt their lives were dissolving, didn’t they?” I said to Rebecca at one of our meetings toward the end of October.
Her reply went to the center of how I’d come to feel. “No,” she said. “They felt that in some way they had never lived.”
But rather than thinking of myself at that moment, my mind focused once again on my father, and I remembered how, in the days preceding the murders, he’d seemed to sink into a profound nothingness. For many hours he would sit alone in the solarium, silent, nebulous, hardly there at all. At other times, he would stand by the old wooden fence, his hands deep in his pockets, staring emptily across the lawn. At the very end, he had even
