toward Rebecca, she appeared almost frightened by what she saw in my face.
“We don’t have to finish everything tonight,” she said.
Finish everything. Those were the words she used. And so I knew that within hours, perhaps minutes, I would be returned to that dreadful state of “back to normal” to which Marie had seemed to look forward with such anxious anticipation. I felt a pall descend, the atmosphere thickening and congealing around me. My destiny was being sealed. I was being buried alive. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Do you want to stop for the night, Steve?” Rebecca asked.
I lifted my head. “No, let’s finish it tonight,” I told her, now anxious to finish everything, to leave Rebecca behind, to go on to whatever it was that awaited me, and to do it quickly, cleanly, without ever looking back.
She nodded, glanced down at her notes, let Jamie slip back into his long oblivion, and renewed her focus upon Laura.
“You said that Laura treated your mother very gently for a time,” she began.
“It was just a brief change,” I said quickly, already pushing toward the next question, driving forward relentlessly, almost a man in flight.
“And after that how did Laura treat her?”
“She went back to the same attitude she’d always had toward her,” I answered. “She seemed resentful of her. She avoided her most of the time, but once in a while, she would say something rather harsh.”
“Harsh? Like what?”
“I can’t remember any specific word,” I told her crisply, almost curtly, urging her on at a steadily accelerating pace.
“You don’t remember any particular episode of harsh treatment?” Rebecca asked.
“No.”
“Did Laura act this way in your father’s presence?”
“No. Never.”
“And you said that this change occurred about a month or so after you got back from Cape Cod?”
“Yes.”
“In early October then?”
I nodded.
Rebecca wrote the date down in her notebook. “But your father didn’t change, is that right?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Do you recall any particular incident between them? Some special act of kindness?”
“No.”
Rebecca continued to pursue the point. “Did anything at all strike you as different in your family during this time?”
“No.”
“So as far as you know, nothing at all changed in the family during the month before the murders?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
And yet, as I sat there, responding to Rebecca’s questions with clipped, one-word answers, I could nonetheless feel the slowly building sense of doom that had begun to invade those final days. A heaviness had descended upon us, as if the house at 417 McDonald Drive had been filled with a thick, transparent gelatin through which Laura, Jamie, my mother, and even my father moved slowly and trudgingly, like weary, exhausted creatures, struggling to draw what were their final breaths. One by one, each of them isolated from the other, I saw them all a final time: Jamie, embittered by successive waves of rejection, entombed behind the closed door of his room; Laura slouched sullenly in the wicker chair of the solarium; my mother in her bed behind the tightly drawn floral curtains, a bomb already lit inside her brain; and finally my father, alone now in the basement, bereft, solitary and morose, slowly turning forward the thin black wheel. They had all been dying during those last weeks, I realized, like flowers past their season.
It began to rain, and Rebecca rose and closed the window. “And so everything remained the same up until the last day?” she asked as she returned to her seat.
“The last day,” I repeated, remembering it now as fully as I thought I ever would.
“It was raining,” I said.
It was raining, and had been raining for days. The lawns along McDonald Drive were brown and soggy. Rain battered against the windowpanes of our rooms and thumped down loudly against the mock Tudor gables. The white cords of the basketball net hung limply in a gray, sodden web. The day before, my mother had hung our laundry beneath a bright mid-morning sun, but now, drenched and rain-beaten, it drooped heavily toward the saturated ground. Alone among all our clothes, only my sister’s bra had been set free by a sudden burst of wind. It lay in a mangled, mud-spattered pile beneath a line of bathroom towels.
“Did everything seem normal that morning?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, everything seemed ‘normal,’” I said evenly, almost choking on the word. “We were all back to
I saw Rebecca’s face stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe that’s why he killed them,” I said coldly. “Because the kind of life they represented made him
