All Things Cease to Appear (3 page)

The room was clean, innocuous, with two double beds. He set Franny down as gently as he could, but she woke, slightly alarmed. Daddy?

I’m right here.

For several minutes the room intrigued her, the paisley bedspread, the wine-colored drapes, the matching shag carpet. She stood up on the bed and started jumping. For a second, while she was suspended in midair, a smile lit her face; then she dropped to all fours like a puppy and rolled up in a ball. Come here, you big lump of sugar. He pulled her into his arms and held her.

You cry, Daddy?

He couldn’t answer her. He cried raw, lonely tears.

She turned away from him, hugging her stuffed rabbit, and shuddered a little. Her eyes were open, fixed on some spot across the room, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t asked for Catherine since they’d left the Pratts’, not once. He found it strange. Maybe somewhere inside her little head she understood her mother wasn’t coming back.

He pulled the blankets up and kissed her cheek. Mercifully, she fell asleep.

He sat down on the other bed, watching her. It was just the two of them now. He tried to think. The curtains swam, ghostlike, in some unexplained breeze. It was the heater beneath them, he realized, not without relief. He went to the window and adjusted the temperature and looked out into the night, the dim parking lot, the distant lights of the interstate. It had been a long, cruel winter. Again, it was beginning to snow. He pulled the heavy drapes across the cold glass, making the world out there disappear, and turned on the TV, muting the volume. A commercial ended and the nightly news came on. He was both surprised and not that his wife’s murder was their lead story: footage of the farm, the empty barns, an ominous shot of the unutilized milking contraptions, a dreary photograph of the house from the assessor’s office with the word
Foreclosure
stretched across it like a police banner. Then a picture of his wife that had been in the local paper, taken at the Chosen Fair, an annual tradition in which everybody came together to eat corn dogs and fried dough—one of the few levelers in a town of extreme wealth and poverty with little in between. Catherine, in overalls, a moon and a star painted on her cheek, looking angelic, almost childlike. Finally, a photo of him—his ID picture from the college, which made him look like an inmate. He could see what they were doing; it didn’t take much.

He switched it off and went into the bathroom. The light was overly bright, the fan roaring. He turned it off and peed in the dark. He washed his hands and face. Unwittingly, he looked at his new reflection—the whites of his eyes, the curve of his lips, his vague outline—and it occurred to him that he was beginning to disappear.

He removed his shoes and put them on the carpet and lay down on the bed fully clothed, pulling up the bedspread. What would they do next, arrest him? They wanted to question him again; what more could he tell them? He’d come home, found her, grabbed Franny and run out. Obviously, they were hoping for a confession. He had seen it happen often enough in movies, and the next thing he knew he’d be shipped off to some prison in chains. It could actually happen, he realized. Shockingly within the realm of possibility, it terrified the hell out of him. He didn’t think he could bear it.

Just before six the next morning, he heard someone knocking. His mother stood in the doorway in her robe, drawn, withered. His father wanted to talk. He’d been up all night and had concluded that they should ignore Sheriff Lawton’s request and return to Connecticut immediately. Since George knew nothing, his mother emphasized, another meeting with the sheriff’s office would not be productive. Once they got to Stonington, they’d arrange for a lawyer. It was still early. They had time to stop at the farm to get a few things. George could take his own car and then they could drive in tandem to Connecticut. They’d be out of the state before Lawton even got to his office.

It was cold, the sky white, the landscape drained of color. Evergreens, distant fields and barns, unmoving cows, sunless horizon. The house on Old Farm Road seemed defiant, dressed in police tape. A notice had been pinned to the door. Look, he said to his parents. I’m sorry about all this. I’m really very sorry.

George’s father nodded. We understand, son. It’s a terrible thing that’s happened. A terrible thing.

They waited in the car with Franny while George went in through the porch, just like he’d done the day before. He kept his gloves on. He knew not to touch anything. The surfaces had been dusted for prints, and a fine silt remained. This was a crime scene now, and even the most ordinary objects seemed to pulse with collusion: a plastic doll ruined with ink, candlesticks ornate with wax, one of his wife’s blue pumps sticking out from under the couch. These things he saw in flashes as he crossed the floor to the stairs, trying not to make a sound, as if someone else were already here, as if he were the intruder. He stood for a moment, just listening. He could hear the trees blowing around in the wind, Catherine’s wrangling chimes. He was sweating, his face, the back of his neck. Overcome with a sudden nausea, he wondered if he’d be sick.

Again, he looked up the staircase.

He had to go up. He had to.

Clutching the banister, he climbed to the second floor and briefly stopped in the hall. It was cold, the air practically shaking with it. His daughter’s room was a bastion of innocence, the pink walls and stuffed animals flaunting their betrayal, and he could sense an awful strangeness, some lingering malevolence. He wanted very badly to leave. It was as if this house, this strange farm, wasn’t even his. It belonged to those people, the Hales. He knew it always would.

In Franny’s closet, he found a small suitcase and filled it with whatever he could—clothes, toys, stuffed animals—and stepped back into the hall. The door to the master bedroom was ajar, an invitation that he didn’t think he could answer. Instead, he started for the stairs, hearing voices outside. On the landing, he saw they’d gotten out of the car. His mother was bouncing her granddaughter from hip to hip, singing a song. Franny had her head back, laughing. It didn’t seem right, he thought, annoyed. It wasn’t right for anyone to be happy, including his daughter, and he knew Catherine would admonish such behavior
at a time like this.

When the phone rang, it seemed incredibly loud. Who could possibly be calling? He looked at his watch: ten to seven. The phone drilled through the empty rooms. After ten rings it stopped.

The silence seemed to be listening.

Then something stirred at the end of the hallway. Wind, sunlight, a vicious shimmering—and he thought, wildly,
It’s her.
Yes,
yes,
it’s
her
! Standing there in her nightgown by the bedroom door, her delicate hand on the knob, a halo of light around her head.
Let me show you,
he almost heard. Her hand reaching out.
Come.

In that moment the world went silent. Again he looked out at his parents, his daughter, and saw them all fiercely animated, but could no longer hear them and knew they existed in separate worlds. And understood, too, what was required of him now, what she wanted, his dead wife, and he fumbled down to the room they had shared. He would end his own life, he thought, if she wanted him to. It was what he deserved. For not protecting her, for his misguided impression that she’d be happy here and for all of the other things he’d done to make sure she never would be. And then he felt something, like a cold hand on his chin, making him look. There it was, the bed. They’d taken the bloody sheets, the blanket. Now it was just the mattress, the outline of the stain, an uneven circle like a lake on a map. Again he heard the wind, the bare branches of the trees. Again that distraction of sunlight.
Cathy,
he whispered.
Is that you?

—

THEY DROVE
one car after the other. Franny lay across the back seat sleeping, breathing heavily. It was four hours through sleet. He had to concentrate, to focus. How could he go on? All that blood. Her pale, lovely arms, her delicate wrists.

They’d had dinner; she hadn’t eaten. She’d been cold, distant. Shoving the plates into the sink. Her shoulders raised. I know about you, George.

What?

I know what you did.

Ruined, he thought. A wasted life.

I can’t stay here, George. I can’t stay here with you. I have to go.

He wanted to hit her but instead said, If that’s what you want.

You don’t have a fucking clue what I want.

He had washed his hands over and over.

He had pressed his ear to the door and opened it silently. She looked up in her white nightgown, her skin already so pale, and lowered her brush.

—

THE SOUND APPEARED,
stretched long and black across the horizon. There was no sleet here at the shore. He pulled over at an overlook and stumbled out onto sand that nearly swallowed him. He got to his feet and ran across the cold beach like a man in the desert who has at last found water, vaguely aware that his parents were screaming at him. He felt almost as though it was the very end of the world, and there was nothing left, neither day nor night, heat nor cold, laughter nor joy. And he belonged here. He belonged in nothing.

He wanted to feel something, the water in his hands, the smell of it, of life, the salt, the cold sunlight. Distantly, he felt the water rising up his legs, his hips. Make me clean, he thought. Baptize me.

They had to coax him out. Blankets, then hot soup at some roadside place after he’d changed his clothes in the men’s room.

What were you thinking, his mother said, going into the water like that? She’s going to need you, George. Your own life comes second now.
You don’t matter anymore,
she might’ve said.
You don’t deserve to.

They waited in the parking lot while his father bought an ice-cream cone for Franny. His mother’s eyes were as watery and gray as the Sound. Looking shrunken in her outsized coat, she reached out to take his hand and he could feel something breaking inside of him.

They think I did it, he said.

Well, they won’t get far with that.

The wind blew hard. He wondered what she was thinking. She looked up into the suddenly bright sun and closed her eyes.

They lived in an old saltbox on a cove, overlooking the water. As a boy, he’d owned a series of sailboats. When they got out of the car, he wondered vaguely if his old Vagabond was still in the shed. He had to remind himself that this was no ordinary visit.

They left him alone. He stayed in his childhood room, lying on the twin bed, and the afternoon brought the thick gloom of a winter storm. In the kitchen downstairs, the radio repeated its grinding emergency warning: more snow predicted, travel advisories, etc. He could hear Franny’s staccato footsteps all over the house. At least she was all right, he thought. Even though he couldn’t begin to predict what she’d experienced; he doubted he could ever know.

He nodded off for a while and woke to the ringing telephone. He assumed that it was Catherine’s mother, or perhaps her sister. Later, his father knocked and leaned into the room in his cardigan sweater, tentatively, as if George had some contagious illness he didn’t want to catch.

They called here, looking for you.

Lawton?

His father nodded. They want to talk to Franny.

George shook his head. I won’t allow it.

All right. That’s your decision.

His father stood there, watching him.

She wasn’t happy, George said. With me, I mean.

His father waited.

We were having problems.

This information made no difference, and his father was suddenly all business. I’ve been in touch with that lawyer you suggested. He’s on retainer now and has already done some good. Nothing you said last night can be used against you in a criminal case. As it turns out, you didn’t have to submit to an interview. Of course, they didn’t tell you that. If the police want to talk to you again, your lawyer will have to be present. Those are the stipulations now.

I didn’t know that was possible, George said.

Anything’s possible with the right attorney. His father looked at him briefly, definitively, and closed the door.

—

THE HOURS
slowly passed. He was like a tenant in their house. He sensed their uncertainty, their judgment. He thought of this time, this schism of abeyance, as his own realized version of hell.

Your in-laws are on their way, his mother told him, a warning. They’ve agreed to have the funeral here.

She was making pancakes and had burned a few—not a new tendency. The kitchen had the same smell he remembered from childhood, the ever-present salvages of burnt toast left on the Formica like fossils, evidence of her good motherly intentions. She poured him a cup of coffee.

How soon?

A couple hours.

Okay, he said, sipping the coffee, not tasting it, his mouth tasting of rubber or some other toxic residue, fear. Seeing Catherine’s parents would be difficult, witnessing their grief. Suddenly ill, he pushed the cup away and got up.

I made these for you, his mother said, holding the plate of pancakes, standing there, her face pale, her hair as wiry and brittle as pine needles. It was nearly noon and she was still in her nightgown, and in a cluttered corner of the countertop he spotted her glass of gin. Don’t you want to know where Franny is?

He asked her with his eyes.

Your father took her to the carwash. You used to love that.

Yes, he said—but that was a lie. He had always been a little terrified of the dark cement tunnel on Liberty Street, the long arcade of equipment, the vicious yellow tubes of the vacuums, the deep-black skin of the employees.

I need some air, he said.

Of course. His mother looked ravaged, there was no other word for it. Go for a walk.

He found one of his old jackets in the closet. Bracing himself for the cold, he walked down the narrow lane to the empty, desolate beach. All the neighbors were gone for winter, and the flat sand stretched down to water that was dark, almost black. Walking along the shore, he shoved his hands into his pockets and discovered a crushed pack of Camels, the unfiltered brand he’d smoked in graduate school. He lit one, dragged deeply. The tobacco was stale, but he didn’t care. He wanted the burn in his chest; he’d smoke a whole pack if he could. He watched a low-flying gull surveying the water, the beach. It flew up into the white sky and disappeared.