It was still raining when the car stopped and the older one turned to me.
“Are you ready, Mr. Farris?” he asked.
I must have nodded, because he got out immediately and opened the rear door of the car.
I followed him up a cement ramp, through a pair of double doors, then down a long corridor which ended at a flight of stairs.
“Just down here,” the older one said.
We went down the stairs together, then into a small, green room where two metal stretchers rested side by side against the far wall.
By the time we reached them, the younger one had joined us. Still, it was the older one who drew back the white sheet that covered what was left of Peter’s face.
I nodded. “My son,” I said.
He covered him again, then stepped over to the other stretcher and repeated the same slow movement, drawing back the stiff white cloth.
She lay on her back, stiffly, her arms pressed neatly against her sides.
“My wife.”
The sheet drifted back over her unmoving face.
The older one turned, and I followed him out of the room and back to the car. I took my place in the back seat and rode silently through the darkness, past the winding, unexpected curve that had brought my family to its death.
It was nearly dawn by the time the car pulled into the driveway again, returning me to my empty house. For a moment I continued to sit in the back seat, motionless, unable to move, as if paralyzed. During that interval, I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything. Then, as if in response to a signal I couldn’t see, the older one turned toward me, his eyes gazing at me softly. “It’s terrible right now, I know,” he said, “but in the end, you will find your way.”
In my mind, I heard those words many times in the days that followed. I heard them as I paced the empty, voiceless rooms of my house or sat beside the covered pool, watching the late fall leaves gather on the dull black tarp. I heard them as Mr. Lowe, by then aware of exactly why my wife and son had been on the road that rainswept night, watched me disappointedly from the small square window of his office.
I heard the words again and again, but still I couldn’t find my way.
Things began to fall apart. I couldn’t sleep, and barely ate at all. I burned my “dream house” plans, and sat for long, dull hours in the family room, the dim green eye of the television watching me from its place across the room. All my former occupations fell away. I couldn’t read, couldn’t draw, couldn’t engage in conversation. At work, I sat at my desk, a silent, eerie specter, warily watched by the others as if at any moment I might pull a pistol from beneath my jacket and do to them what they all knew my father had done to my mother, brother, sister. At times, I would see the same, distant apprehension in their eyes that I’d sometimes glimpsed in the eyes of Aunt Edna so many years before, a suspicion that my father’s poisoned blood had been passed on to me.
But although my fellow workers at Simpson and Lowe couldn’t have known it, they had nothing at all to fear from me. The revenge that was steadily building in my mind was not in the least directed toward them. I’d found another figure upon whom I’d begun to concentrate all my grief and rage.
William Patrick Farris.
During the weeks immediately following what everyone continually referred to as “the tragedy,” I came to hate my father more than I’d ever hated him. I hated him for more than the ancient crime of my family’s murder, hated him for more than what he’d done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie. I hated him for what he’d done to me.
Done to me, yes.
For it seemed to me at that time that my father had brought everything to pass, that almost everything could be laid ultimately at his door. Had he not killed my family, Rebecca would never have come to me, and Peter and Marie would still be alive. Even more, however, I blamed him for the poison in my own blood, for what I’d inherited from him, the dark impulsiveness and cataclysmic discontent that had led him to kill my mother, Laura, and Jamie, and which he had bequeathed to me. I thought of Peter and Marie, and went through the steps by which I’d murdered them as surely as my father had killed his own wife and children. It was a legacy of blood, passed down from father to son, and because of it, as I reasoned at last, it was necessary for both of us to die.
Night after night, I went through the packet of papers and photographs Rebecca had sent me by then. I no longer felt them as a link to her, but only as a way to keep alive my hatred, both of my father and myself. One by one, I stared at the photographs or read over the police reports. I savored each blood-soaked image, drank in every word, my eyes heavy in the early morning light, but glaring still at each macabre reminder of the hideously destructive nature I had inherited from him.
I grew bloated on our evil. I could think of nothing else. I lost my job, sold my house, and moved into a cheap hotel, but I didn’t drink or sink into madness. That would have dulled the fierce edge I wanted more than anything to retain in what was left of my life. I didn’t want to forget what the two of us had done. I wanted to remember every harrowing detail until the time of our executions.
Slowly, the plan emerged. I would track him down by moving through the places he’d moved, looking steadily for some clue both as to how he had been formed and where he might have gone.
As the weeks passed, I journeyed back to the little house in which he’d lived out his solitary youth, then to the hard-scrabble warehouse on Great Jones Street, and finally along the dreary line of small New Jersey towns through which he’d wandered, looking for work, finding none, moving on, in a trail that struck me, even then, as terribly forlorn.
I went through all the papers my Aunt Edna had left me, searching for addresses where he’d lived, references to places he’d been. I went to rooming houses that were now libraries, cafes that were now clothing stores, rural
