“Why do you think that?”
“Because he was the same old Jamie up until the moment my father murdered him,” I said. “He was always up in his room, always alone. Nothing changed with Jamie.”
“So you don’t think he ever found out about your mother?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He certainly never changed in his attitude toward her.”
“What was his attitude?”
“That she was a maid,” I said, “someone who washed clothes, cooked meals, vacuumed up that gray grime that my father was always tracking up from the basement.”
“That’s the only way Jamie saw your mother?”
“More or less. I don’t think he gave her much thought.”
Rebecca wrote my observations down in her notebook, then glanced up again. “Do you think Laura ever knew just how serious your mother’s illness was?”
“Oh, yes, of course she did,” I said.
I saw my sister in the solarium once again, sitting sullenly in the wicker chair as she had that September afternoon, snapping at me to “stop it,” without adding what must have been the final, unsaid portion of that sentence: “Don’t you know your mother’s sick, don’t you know she may be dying!”
“Laura looked quite upset the afternoon before my mother came home,” I told Rebecca. “And after that, for the next few days, she looked very strange.” I shrugged. “At the time, I couldn’t have known what was bothering her, but I did notice that she seemed …” I stopped, searching for the right word. “She seemed dazed,” I said finally, “like she couldn’t quite figure out what to do, how to handle it.”
“Did she treat your mother differently after that?”
“Yes,” I said. “For a time, she treated her much more gently.”
Rebecca’s eyes narrowed questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘for a time’?”
Even though it had been my own phrase, it struck me as being almost purposely vague, just as it had clearly struck Rebecca as being so.
“Well, for the first few weeks, Laura was very gentle and helpful,” I explained.
It was easy for me to recall all the little gestures of kindness my sister had made toward my mother during that brief time. She’d helped her in the kitchen, gone shopping with her on Saturday afternoons, and had been generally more tender toward her than she’d ever been.
“But that kindness didn’t continue?” Rebecca asked.
“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It lasted for a few weeks, more or less until my mother tried to kill herself.”
“How did it change after that?”
“Laura seemed to withdraw from her,” I said. “From my father, too. At about the same time.”
“That would have been around the middle of October, then?”
I nodded.
“Jamie was the only one who stayed the same during all those weeks,” I added, then thought a bit more of it, remembering how often he’d begun to bait my mother, too, as if one target were no longer enough for his steadily building spitefulness and anger. “Actually, I think he got a little worse,” I said. “He was sharp with my mother during those last weeks, but he also began to pull away entirely. From all of us, I mean. It was as if he couldn’t stand being in the same house with us anymore.”
Growing more sullen with each day, bitter in what must have been a terrible, homebound loneliness, I remembered that Jamie had begun to absent himself almost entirely from the family during the last weeks of our time on McDonald Drive. He’d never joined us in the little den anymore, or even gone on those rare family outings to the drive-in movies. Instead, he’d sealed himself in his room, remaining there for hours at a time, coming down only to eat quickly, and after that, trudging up the stairs again.
“Toward the end,” I told Rebecca, “Jamie was just a face in the hallway or on the other side of the dinner table. My mother didn’t like to be around him. Neither did I. And, of course, Laura hated him.”
“You left out your father,” Rebecca reminded me. “What did he think of Jamie during this time?”
Once again I recalled the moment years before when all three of us, Laura and Jamie and myself, had erupted into noisy battle in the backyard. My father had stepped out onto the second-floor patio and stared down silently, bringing the conflict to an immediate end. Even from that distance, I could tell that his eyes had swept smoothly from my upturned face to Laura’s, then back to mine, leaving out the third point in what should have been the triangle of his assembled children. Even in that moment of disciplinary concern, his eyes had not once moved toward Jamie. The following years, it struck me now, had only widened the abyss which separated them.
“I think that toward the end, my father just gave up on Jamie.”
“In what way?”
“Gave up trying to love him, to be a father to him.”
“Do you think Jamie felt that ‘giving up’?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes,” I said.
And for the first time, I saw Jamie captured in the deep well of his isolation. Not really his father’s son, yet unaware of that dreadful fact, he had been kept outside the circle of our kinship, a prodigal and an outcast. To have killed him in so lonely and bereft a state, the only one among us who had never loved nor been loved by another, struck me as the single, saddest aspect of my father’s crime.
A wave of empty, helpless grief must have passed over me at that moment, because when I looked back
