moment, writing letters to my mother on soft blue paper.
“Jamie and your mother would both have been better off in another place,” my father said.
“And me?”
“You’re what made it hard, Stevie,” my father said. “I hadn’t really decided about you.”
I stared at him bitterly. “At the time you killed them, you mean?” I asked brutally.
My father did not so much as flinch. “I chose to save my daughter,” he said with a grave resignation.
A strange pride gathered in his voice, and suddenly I recognized that at that moment when he’d told Laura of his plan to take her away, at that precise moment in his life, and perhaps for the only time, his love had taken on a fabled sweep, had become a thing of knights on horseback and maidens in dire distress, a romantic mission of preservation and defense, one far different from the type undertaken by those other men with whom Rebecca had already forever linked his name.
“I never saw Laura more happy when I told her about Mexico,” my father said.
In my mind, I saw them together in the little solarium with its windows draped in vines, my father in the white wicker chair, Laura below him, her face resting peacefully, as if she were still a little girl.
“Why didn’t you go then?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just take her and go away?”
“Because toward the end of the summer I found out your mother was dying,” my father said. “I couldn’t leave her in a situation like that. So I canceled the tickets.” He shook his head helplessly. “I didn’t tell Laura right way, and when I did, she looked as if her whole world had collapsed.” He seemed to bring her back into his mind, fully, in all her furious need. “Laura wasn’t like me,” he said again, “there was something great in her.” He stopped, then added, “But there was something wrong, too, something out of control.”
“When did you tell Laura that you’d canceled the tickets?”
“Around the middle of October.”
“Did you tell her why?”
“I’d already told her that your mother was very sick,” he answered, “but I’m not sure she realized that it had made me change our plans until I actually told her that I’d canceled the tickets, that we wouldn’t be going to Mexico together.”
I stared at him evenly, remembering the sudden, wrenching illness that had gripped my mother the night of the fireworks. I remembered how Laura had prepared her a glass of milk after we’d returned.
“Laura tried to kill her, didn’t she?” I asked coolly.
He nodded. “Yes, she did,” he said. “I thought it was over, after that. She’d done something terrible, but I thought that would be the end of it.” He looked at me pointedly. “Until that day.”
That day.
“It was raining,” I said softly, “that’s almost all I remember.”
He drew in a quick breath. “Yes, it was raining,” he said. He waited a moment, as if deciding whether or not to go on. “I was at the store downtown like always,” he began finally. “I was alone. There was so much rain. No one was on the streets.” The old mournfulness swept into his eyes. Then the phone rang,” he said. “It was Laura. She said that your mother had gotten sick, and she told me to come home.”
“When was this?”
“Around a quarter after three, I guess,” my father said. “I went home right away.”
I could feel a silence gather around us as we sat facing each other in the small tavern, vast and empty, as if ours were the only voices that had survived a holocaust.
“Laura met me in the kitchen,” my father said. “She’d made me a ham sandwich, and for a minute, I thought that the long time she’d been so angry with me, that it was finally over.”
“Where was my mother?”
“Laura said that she was upstairs,” my father answered, “that she was a little better, that she was taking a nap.”
And so, suspecting nothing, my father had sat down at the kitchen table, and taken a few bites of the ham sandwich Laura had made for him. She had disappeared upstairs almost immediately, and after a time my father had wandered out to the solarium and slumped down in one of its white wicker chairs.
“I wasn’t there very long,” he said, “when I heard someone coming down the stairs. It was your mother.”
Perhaps more fully than I had ever thought possible, I now saw my mother in all her lost and loveless beauty. I saw her move softly down the carpeted stairs in her fluffy house shoes, her hand clutching the throat of her blouse, a woman perhaps less foolish than any of us had thought, her mind already wondering which of her children would try to kill her next.
“From where I was sitting, I just saw her go by,” my father said. “Then I heard the basement door open, and I knew she was going down there.”
He heard her feet move down the wooden stairs, then went back to the little book he’d found in the solarium, reading it slowly, as he always did, his eyes moving lethargically across the slender columns.
“Jamie came in after that,” he said.
Encased in a vast solitude, rudderless and without direction, my brother came through the kitchen door, trails of rainwater dripping from his hair. He glanced coldly toward my father, but didn’t speak. Instead he simply bounded up the stairs.
“I heard him close the door to his room,” my father said. “He made a point of slamming it.”
After that, but for only a few, precious moments, a silence had descended upon 417 McDonald Drive. For a
