within that murderous circle.
“He wouldn’t have killed May,” I said again. “He killed us because we’d done something to him. We weren’t like May. We weren’t … innocent.”
I stopped, stunned by the hard and unforgiving judgment I had just rendered upon my murdered family. I tried to draw my scattered thoughts into a coherent whole. “It’s just that we were unhappy,” I said finally, giving up. “Desperately unhappy.”
I stopped again, waiting for the next question, but Rebecca knew I’d supply the story anyway.
“I think my mother tried to kill herself once,” I said softly, “but I can’t be sure.” I drew in a long, weary breath, then continued. “It was toward the end of October,” I said. “I know because it was the night of the fireworks. It was sort of a village Indian summer celebration. The town had this big festival in October, and we always went together, the whole family.”
It had been a clear, unseasonably warm night, and I was dressed in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The town fireworks display went off at nine, and for a few blazing minutes we’d all watched as the dark sky exploded with brilliant shards of multicolored light. It had lasted for only a short time, certainly no more than ten minutes, and yet, during that interval we’d actually seemed like a family that might endure, taking the days in ordinary stride, weathering the usual storms.
After the fireworks, we went to a local diner, and my father ate quite heartily, which was unusual for him. So unusual, in fact, that it seemed curiously faked, as if he were acting a part, forcing himself to appear less troubled than he was. My mother sat beside him, and from time to time, while Laura and Jamie and I dined on our usual hamburgers and french fries, my mother and father talked quietly to each other.
“We got home around eleven that night, I suppose,” I went on. “My mother looked very tired. We all noticed it. Jamie actually took my mother’s arm as she got out of the car. Laura saw it, too. After my mother had sat down in the living room, she went into the kitchen and made her a glass of warm milk.”
“And your father?”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said. “He just sat across from my mother until we all went upstairs to bed.”
As always, Jamie fell asleep almost instantly. I could hear him snoozing contentedly in the upper bunk. Laura was more high-strung, and that night, like many other nights, I heard her walking about in the room next door long after everyone else had fallen asleep.
But that night, I heard something more than the familiar sounds of Jamie’s breathing and Laura’s rustling about in her own room. I heard the door of my mother’s bedroom open softly, a tiny squeak I had long ago recognized, but had rarely heard at such a late hour. I got up at once, walked to the door of my room, and opened it. In the corridor, I could see my mother as she came out of her bedroom, then, without turning on the light in the hallway, made her way slowly down the stairs. She was all the way down the stairs before I ventured out of my room. I walked down the same corridor, but stopped at the top of the stairs. From there I could see the light in the downstairs bathroom go on, and hear my mother as she opened the white wooden medicine cabinet that hung above the sink.
“What did you do?” Rebecca asked.
“I waited until she started back up the stairs,” I told her. “Then I just went back to my room.”
But I didn’t fall asleep, and about two hours later, I heard the same squeaking hinge that told me my parents’ bedroom door had opened once again. Just like before, I walked to the door of my room, opened it slightly, and looked out. From that position, I could see my mother as she staggered toward the staircase once again. But this time she was weaving unsteadily and moaning softly, her arms wrapped around her stomach.
I started to move toward her, perhaps to help her down the stairs or to wherever it was she was trying to get to that night, but then I saw my father come out of the bedroom. For a moment, he stood very still in the doorway, watching her silently, his light blue eyes glowing, cat-like, in the moonlit hallway. Then, as if in response to a sudden signal, he rushed toward her, gathered her into his arms, and walked her back into their bedroom.
I remained at my door for a long time, but I didn’t see either my mother or my father again that night. I could hear my mother coughing and gagging, and I knew that she was in the bathroom that adjoined her room, probably bent over the sink or the toilet. After a while, I returned to my own room and lay down on the lower bunk.
“At the time,” I said, “I thought it was just a bad stomach.”
Rebecca looked up from her notes. “Why did you ever come to think it might be something else?” she asked.
“Because of what happened the next morning.”
I had gotten up early, just at dawn, a little boy needing to go to the bathroom. The light was pouring through the high window to the right of Jamie’s desk, and some of it spread out into the hallway when I opened the door and headed for the downstairs bathroom.
It was located to the left of the stairs, just off the kitchen, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I saw my father working furiously inside its cramped space. He was going through all the drawers of the small cabinet that we used to store such things as toothpaste and extra rolls of toilet paper. The door of the mirrored medicine chest that hung above the small white porcelain sink, and which my mother used to store the family’s various medicines, was open. My father had assembled a large number of bottles and plastic pill containers along the rim of the sink, and he was intently reading the labels of each of them in turn, his eyes squinting fiercely as he read. After reading a label, he would either return the container to the medicine chest or drop it into the plain gray shoe box he’d placed on top of the toilet.
“So from all this, you’ve come to believe that your mother had tried to kill herself that night?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes.”
“And that the next morning your father had tried to find out what she’d used so that he could get rid of it?”
I nodded. “Because later that morning, I saw him put the shoe box in his van.”
Rebecca scribbled a few notes into her notebook, then glanced up at me. “When did you see your mother again?”
