father,” she went on. The kind of conversations male doctors had with men in those days.”
“What do you mean?”
Rebecca seemed surprised by the question, as if any further explanation should have been unnecessary. “Well, in certain cases a doctor and the husband of a female patient would get together to decide just how much a wife should know.”
“And so this doctor, he talked to my father about my mother’s illness, but not to her?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “According to Swenson’s case notes, the doctor told your father that your mother’s tumor was inoperable, and after that, they discussed quite a few alternatives. The doctor called several specialists in the field. He got back answers that weren’t very encouraging.”
“I see.”
“And finally, on October 10, the doctor told your father that there was nothing that could be done,” Rebecca said, “that your mother was going to die.” Her eyes drifted down to her notebook, then back up to me. “The two tickets to Mexico City were canceled that same afternoon.”
The realization swept over me like a lifting breeze. “So the second ticket was for my mother,” I said. “He’d planned to take her away at some point, a surprise vacation, something like that.”
“Rebecca nodded. There was no other woman, Steve.”
For a brief interval, I thought it all over again, everything Rebecca had just revealed. There was still something that didn’t fit, and after a moment, I realized what it was.
“But when we were unloading the car the night we got back from Cape Cod, and Laura started complaining about my mother, my father snapped at her, remember? He said, ‘You should know.’”
Rebecca looked at me without expression.
“And Laura went up to my mother’s room and sat down on the bed beside her and put her arm around her.”
Rebecca nodded.
“Well, my father couldn’t have meant that Laura should know about my mother’s illness,” I said, “because Laura couldn’t have known about it that night. She hadn’t been told yet.”
“Probably not,” Rebecca admitted.
“But she went up to my mother’s room anyway,” I added. “So she must have known something.”
Rebecca glanced down at her notes, as if expecting to find an answer there.
“And if my mother was already dying, why did my father bother to kill her?” I asked.
Rebecca sighed. “There’s still something missing, isn’t there? Swenson thought so, too. He never thought it all added up. He never found a motive.”
“A reason for my father to have done it, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s what you’re still looking for, isn’t it?”
Rebecca stared at me in earnest. “I know what it was in all these other men,” she said, “but I’m still not sure about your father.”
I said nothing, but only looked past her, out toward the lake. Night had nearly fallen by then, but beyond the water, I could still make out a dark line of thunderclouds as they rumbled in from the west.
“Motive is everything,” Rebecca said, though only to herself. “There’s no question that your father did it. His fingerprints were all over the shotgun. There were no other fingerprints.” She thought a moment longer, then glanced toward me. “The only question is why?”
I continued to watch the wall of dark gray clouds as it closed in upon us. My father’s face swam into my mind, then dissolved almost instantly, a figment, an enigma.
“It may rain tonight,” I said softly, as if to avoid any further inquiry into the foggy labyrinth of his mind.
Rebecca nodded. “It was raining that day in November,” she said thoughtfully. Her mind seemed to latch on to an unexpected possibility. “Maybe something happened that day in particular. Maybe something happened that brought it all together.”
“And sent my father over the edge, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I remembered the changing faces of my father, those features that slowly descended from the joy of his wedding day to the bleakness with which he’d stared toward my mother from the smoke-filled cab of the old brown van.
“I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “I don’t think something just happened that day, something out of the blue, that caused my father to pick up that shotgun.”
Rebecca nodded. “No, probably not,” she said. Then she pulled a single sheet of yellow paper from her briefcase. “All right,” she said, “let’s start again. Let’s start from October 10, the day your father learned that your mother was dying. We’ll go from there to the end.”
I said nothing, but merely waited for her to guide me back toward that day, as I knew she’d always planned to do.
“Your mother was dying,” Rebecca began. “How did things change in the family because of that?”
“I never knew she was dying,” I told her. “No one ever told me. And I don’t think Jamie knew, either.”
