I could not bring the image to mind very easily, my father sitting on the bare cement floor with a little girl, playing Chinese checkers, trying to help her pass the long boring hours of a winter afternoon.
“She remembered something else,” Rebecca said, the tone of her voice changing. They were playing together one afternoon. May thinks it was just a few weeks before the day your father took her and her mother to the train station.” She paused a moment, as if hesitant to go on. They were alone in the back room,” she continued finally. “May had been staring at the board, making her next move. When she finished it, she looked up and noticed your father staring at her. She said he looked different, very sad. She asked him if there was anything wrong. He didn’t answer exactly. He only said, This is all I want.’“
I felt my skin tighten, but said nothing.
Rebecca watched me cautiously, gauging my mood. “I remembered you telling me that he’d said the same thing to you.”
“In exactly the same words.” I shook my head helplessly, my father’s mystery still as dense as it had ever been. “What was going on in him?” I asked, though very softly, a question directed toward myself as much as toward Rebecca.
Rebecca, however, actually offered an answer. “At that point, when he said that to you in the basement,” she said, “he was probably very depressed.”
I could see that she was leading into something.
“Depressed about what?”
“Well, he’d finalized his plan by then, of course,” she said. “He’d canceled the two plane tickets, for example.” She looked at me significantly. “He did that on October 10.”
I knew then that the “new developments” she’d mentioned on the phone earlier had to do with those two mysterious plane tickets. She’d tracked down their enigmatic meaning and was about to lay her findings before me like a parting gift.
“Why did he cancel those tickets?” I asked. “You know, don’t you?”
Rebecca leaned forward, settling her eyes on me with a deep, probing gaze. “You remember the night before you came home from the Cape? You saw your father and mother talking together, and he had his arm around her.”
“That’s right.”
“And the next night, the night the family got back to Somerset, you saw your father and Laura beside the fence in the backyard.” I nodded.
“You said that they looked as if they were engaged in a very serious conversation,” Rebecca went on. “Then later, you saw them come up the stairs, and it was at that point that you heard a few words pass between them.”
“That’s right.”
Rebecca drew her black notebook from the briefcase. “I want to be sure I have this exactly right.” She flipped through the notebook until she found the page she wanted. This is what you heard,” she said. Then she quoted it: “Your father: ‘Tomorrow.’ Laura: ‘So soon?’ Your father: ‘Yes.’“ She looked up. The ‘tomorrow’ that your father mentioned would have been September 3.”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you again: do you remember anything about that morning?” Rebecca asked.
I tried to recall it, but it remained a blur of activity. My mother had prepared the usual breakfast of cereal and toast, and after eating, Laura, Jamie, and I had all gone back upstairs to finish getting ready for school. The only thing that seemed different was the fact that my father had still been at home when we’d all left the house about a half hour later.
“My father stayed home that morning,” I said to Rebecca. “He usually left before we did, but that morning, he didn’t.” I drifted back to that day again, but only far enough to regain one last, minuscule detail. “He was sitting at the kitchen table as I passed,” I added. “I was racing for the door, you know, excited to be going back to school, but he shot his hand out, grabbed my arm, and stopped me. ‘Kiss your mother good-bye, Stevie,’ he said. And so I did.”
Rebecca looked as if I’d just confirmed something that had only been a conjecture before.
“He’d never asked me to do that before.”
“And then you went to school just like always?” Rebecca asked.
I nodded. “Yes, we all went together. Well, at least Laura and I did. Jamie always went ahead of us.”
“Did you and Laura talk about anything in particular that morning?”
“No,” I said. “We just walked to school like always. She left me at my school, then walked on to hers, about three blocks down the road.”
“When did you see Laura again?”
“She was waiting at the corner for me right after school,” I said. “She always did that.”
For a moment, as I remembered her standing on the corner waiting for me that afternoon, her books in her arms, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, I felt her loss again, but this time with a piercing depth, as if all the conversations I might have had with her in life, all the good and comforting times we might have had together, had suddenly swept over me in a great wave of imagined days. I saw us share all that we had not been allowed to share, the keenest experiences of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, the approach of middle age, all that my father had abruptly and mysteriously canceled as surely as he’d canceled those two plane tickets to Mexico.
“I loved my sister,” I said, though barely above a whisper. “And I think she loved me.”
Rebecca’s next question came at me like a slap in the face. “And Jamie,” she asked, “did you love him?”
