Mortal Memory

time, as he read in the solarium, my father had heard nothing but the rain.

Then a blast of incredible magnitude rocked the house.

“I thought it was a gas explosion,” my father said, “something like that. I couldn’t imagine what else it might be.”

He jumped to his feet, the book sliding to the floor of the solarium. He stared around a moment, not knowing where to go. In a blur of speed, he saw Laura fly past the open space that divided the living room from the downstairs corridor.

“The way she was running, I thought something must have happened upstairs,” my father said, “so I ran up there, thinking that Jamie might be hurt, that things might be on fire.”

And so he rushed up the stairs, taking them in broad leaps, plummeting down the corridor where he could see a blue smoke coming through the open door of Jamie’s room.

“I ran into his room, thinking that he must be hurt, that I had to pull him out,” my father said.

What he saw was a boy without a face.

“And I still didn’t know what had happened,” my father said, breathless, already exhausted, as if he had only now made that dreadful run. “I still didn’t realize at that point that Jamie had been shot,” he said wonderingly, as if, through all the years, this was the strangest thing of all.

He ran to him, picked him up slightly, his shoes already soaking up Jamie’s rich, red blood. Still stunned, dazed, unable to think, he heard a roar from down below.

“Then I knew, I think,” he said, “but even then … even then …”

Even then, he didn’t know for sure that his family was being slaughtered.

“And so I just stood there, in the middle of Jamie’s room,” my fathet said.

Just stood there, his eyes darting about wildly until he finally bolted toward the basement.

“From out of nowhere, I thought that it must be someone else,” he said, “that some killer had broken into the house somehow.” He looked at me, the astonishment still visible in his face. “I thought that it was this killer who must have chased Laura down the stairs, that she’d been running from someone else when I’d seen her fly past me that time before.”

And so he began to run again, into the bedroom across the hall, then down the stairs, taking long, desperate strides as he searched for “someone else” in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, his bloody tracks leading everywhere until, at last, they led down the basement stairs.

He stopped on the third step, stricken by what he saw.

“Your mother was behind a big cardboard box,” my father said. “Laura was standing just a few feet away. My old shotgun was in her hands. The barrel was still smoking.” He looked at me unbelievingly. “She was barefoot, like always.”

Barefoot, yes. Like she was in the photograph that should have told me everything, her bare feet stretched toward the camera, their upturned soles covered with the dark grit she’d picked up from the basement floor as she’d stood and aimed the shotgun at my mother.

Swenson’s words came rushing back to me: “Someone else. Someone in the house. Someone helping.”

Laura.

My father shook his head slowly. “She just looked at me, and she said, ‘Now we have to go!’” He stared at me pointedly. “She meant Mexico,” he said, “that now, after what she’d done, that I had no choice but to take her there.”

After that, they’d gone back up to the kitchen together, my father shaken, lost, unable to register the events that had just swept over him.

“I knew she’d done something to your mother a month before,” he said, “but I’d never dreamed that she would do the same to Jamie or to …” He stopped and looked at me emptily.

“To me?” I said.

He leaned forward, his eyes very gentle. “She wanted me to do it, Stevie,” he said. “She said she couldn’t.”

Then she had gone upstairs to her room, walking briskly up the stairs, like someone who’d just been released from prison.

“I stayed in the kitchen,” my father told me. “I thought about it all for a while.”

For a while, but not for long. Only for that short interval which Mrs. Hamilton had noticed between the second shot and the final one.

“I knew Laura had to die,” my father said, “and I knew that if I killed her, they would blame all of it on me, that you would never know what she’d done to them.”

Or had planned to do to me.

“So I wiped her fingerprints off the gun,” my father said. “Then I walked upstairs and …” He stopped, his eyes glancing away for a moment, then returning to me. “It was instant,” he whispered.

I saw my sister turn, saw her eyes widen in disbelief, her hand lift futilely as he pulled the trigger.

“That left you,” my father said.

That left me, yes.

To live on, though alone, remembering the love of my sister.

My father watched me a moment, leaning back, as if to get a better view. He seemed infinitely relieved, though