All Things Cease to Appear (48 page)

In May, he gets the interview. The woman’s name is Sara Arnell. They have lunch in the student union, in an area with white tablecloths designated for faculty. She seems young to run the department, he thinks, and refreshingly unassuming. She tells him she’s an ex-nun. He can see this history in her wan, hermetic face, her muscular calves, her peasant hands. A genuine do-gooder, she’d been a missionary for years in Africa.

I went where I was needed. I did what I could. I suppose, when it comes to people in trouble, I’m too easily persuaded to help.

He only looks at her.

Charitable acts, she clarifies. They’re my weakness.

A kindred spirit, he thinks.

After lunch she looks again at his CV, as if to remind herself of his credentials. You’re clearly overqualified. Compared with Saginaw, our students are, well, let’s say, variously equipped. We get people of all ages here, all backgrounds.

Tell me, she says gently. What made you leave Saginaw?

My wife, he says. He looks off toward the busy street, the blur of afternoon traffic. She died unexpectedly. It was a tragedy. He meets her hazel eyes; she has the face of St. Thérèse.

She frowns with compassion. I’m sorry for your loss.

I appreciate that, Sara.

She watches him, considering, then seems to decide something. We have an opening for a visiting lecturer in the fall. But I’ll warn you, we don’t pay much. This is a community college. Things are a bit different around here.

As I said, I’m eager to get back to work.

Well, then, consider yourself hired.

They shake hands and she says she’ll be in touch. As he is leaving the student union, it occurs to him how good it is to be back on a campus, with its structure and energy. The bright, earnest faces of the students. Their faith in the possibility of a better world. He has truly missed it.

Heading back to his car, walking the long black path to the acre-sized parking lot, he is stirred by a bitter nostalgia and almost weeps.

—

LATER,
at dinner, he tells his parents the news. They are old now, burdened. This thing with him has taken its toll. Perhaps it is inevitable that they should feel such guilt. Now it is death they fear most. Everything has changed—even the food on the table lacks flavor. They chew for the sake of swallowing and are glad for their cigarettes at the end of the meal. The taste of death, at least, is honest.

When do you start? his father says.

Right after they’d moved in, his father had put him to work at the store. It was, George knew, a gesture of good faith, his father showing George—and the rest of the community—that he trusted him. Mornings, they rode in together. George knew it was somewhat embarrassing for him—the other employees’ awkwardness, the slight elevation of their voices, their patronizing appeals for his favor.
You can have this seat,
or
No, it’s all yours, I was just leaving!

Of course, he and his father didn’t discuss it. They tried to pretend everything was the same.

His mother looked after Franny, which was less than ideal. She had the patience of a mosquito, her reactions often startling Franny into tears.

With him it’s her suspicion, her disdain. She lurks in his presence, following him around the house. She goes through his things when he’s out. Searches his pockets when she does his wash, laying out the coins, matchbooks, toothpicks she finds like evidence, souvenirs of deception.

Working summers back in high school, overseeing the showroom floor, he’d wander through the designer rooms when it was slow. Urban Oasis was his favorite: two black leather couches, a glass coffee table, a hi-fi stereo cabinet. He would sit there dreaming up a life in that scenario, the music he’d play, the women writhing on the leather cushions in G-strings.

As it turned out, retail did not come naturally to George. His father would just look at him:
Can you possibly be this stupid?
They’d been bowled over when he got into Williams. It was the tennis, they all knew—not his intelligence. As an undergraduate, he was reclusive and unexceptional. With the deliberate finesse of a cardsharp, his art-history professor told him that he lacked a scholarly temperament and should consider another career. In defiance, perhaps, he went on to graduate school and suffered through his dissertation, attempting to disprove another devoted critic, the notorious asshole Warren Shelby. None of it had actually made a difference. He’d ended up teaching at a second-rate college.

Life is full of surprises, that’s for sure, his mother concluded one night, sitting at the kitchen table with her drink and cigarette, ruminating over her spoiled life. Who would’ve guessed we’d have come to this?

He is not to be trusted, that’s what people think. Even the checker at the market, how she avoids his eyes. The librarian. The frigging gas-station attendant. After a few months at the store, his father had to sit him down. People don’t want you showing them around, he told him. It’s just not working out, son.

He understood, of course he did.

You know how people are, his father said. Suspicion is more than enough for them. They don’t need to know for sure.

The Free Wind

NOTHING STAYED
the same in this town after they left.

The house just sat there. Year after year, the paint Eddy Hale had so carefully applied peeled away. The clapboards went wobbly, the porch floor buckled. Lilacs pressed up against the windows, gangly and fragrant as streetwalkers. The lawn sprawled with weeds. Occasionally, she’d drive over just to see the place, and would gaze up at those awful black windows, imagining that poor woman looking down at her.

The people of this town were hard on Travis. Never forgave him. But he stayed with it, waiting for George Clare to slip up and tracking his whereabouts from a telescopic distance, as though he was a calamitous weather system whose onslaught no one could survive. He was living in Branford, Connecticut, in an apartment complex near the water, and working at a community college. Travis even knew about the women he found, and there were always women. Mostly of a certain type, coaxed out of bars and into cheap motels.

As convinced as Travis was of Clare’s guilt, there was never enough hard evidence to indict him. Her husband’s certainty was frustrated by the powerful protections of the law and it flat wore him out. You can’t convince a jury without evidence, he would say, shaking his head. I got nothing but hearsay.

She watched his face shut down like the circuits were being pulled one by one by one—the bad things he saw in people, the bad things they did, the criminals he couldn’t stop, the people he hadn’t saved. He thought of Catherine Clare daily, and at night he’d lie awake thinking about her, too. Every February, on the anniversary of the murder, he’d pull out that old file and go through it all over again. There must be something here, he’d say. Something I missed.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

It does to me. I guess I’m the only one.

It’s not your fault.

Oh, but it is. I take full responsibility.

Always the same conversation. The same flat-footed defeat. His presumed failure had built a prison around him. Nobody could come in. Not even her.

Eventually, he stopped trying. Years went by and she witnessed his dedicated transformation, a self-induced oblivion of saturated fats, cigarettes and Wild Turkey. He’d come home from work and plow into bed. His cigarette would wake her in the morning. Their relationship got whittled down to perfunctory remarks in passing, things like who was going to pick up the milk. Weekends, he’d spend all his time at the firing range, practicing, then come home and start drinking and pass out on the couch, watching reruns of
All in the Family.

—

FIVE YEARS AFTER
the murder, on a warm summer evening, Mary got a call at her office. The voice on the other end sounded familiar, but at first she couldn’t place it. Hello, Mary, he said. And then it came to her. It was George Clare.

Her taking the listing had been the last straw for Travis—the thing that did them in.

I don’t see how you can do anything for that man, he said.

I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for Franny.

She probably doesn’t even remember her.

You don’t forget your own mother, I don’t care what you say.

The argument escalated into an emasculating treatise on money and the lack thereof and how much good the commission, any commission, would do them.

It’s just another house, she told him.

No, it is
not
just another house. That’s when he left the room.

Despite her considerable efforts, the house never sold. Every time she showed it she got the same feeling in her bones, a deep, rattling chill, as if someone had opened up her head and poured in a pitcher of ice water. Each year, around Thanksgiving, inspired by a bitter nostalgia, she’d advertise the place in
Antique Homes.
Shouldered by all those pretty autumn leaves, with mums and pumpkins on the front porch, the house almost looked inviting. There were the sugar-white barns, the sun glinting off the windows of the cupola, the old copper weathervane. The ad always brought in calls. At first her clients always seemed interested, taking in the land and the pond and the barns, just as the Clares had done, but once they wandered through the suffocating gloom of the darkened rooms they’d hurry back outside.

The day after they took their son to college, Travis came into the kitchen before work with a sheepish, grave smile. I have something to say to you.

She stood at the stove, making his breakfast. Just a moment, she said. He liked his eggs runny, but something about his tone made her stay at the stove a little longer. He sat down at the table with his coffee and unfolded the newspaper. He was in no hurry. I’m showing the Hale house today, she told him.

Travis grunted. You’re wasting your time.

You never know. I’ve got a feeling about this one.

He grunted again. You and your feelings.

Spurned by the comment, her eyes went prickly. She shuffled his eggs onto a plate and brought them to the table. You had something to tell me?

You cooked these too long. He ate them anyway, then pushed the plate away, finished his coffee and set the cup down.

Travis?

He looked at her dispassionately. I want a divorce.

She was angry with him, but more out of surprise than anything else. Why leave her now? They hadn’t been unhappy. She hadn’t been discontented. She was a good wife, a good mother. She had done it all—mothered, tended, protected, washed and cooked and administered medicine and read to them and nurtured their minds, bodies and souls—because she loved him. It was the kind of love only women had, an idea that had sprouted the moment they were born, when their mothers, and occasionally their fathers, held them in their arms. When they’d met, he was there to complete her; it was his duty, his assignment. He, Travis Lawton, in his RPI jacket, represented the rest of her life. A
real
man. Strong, handsome, educated, an amalgamation of all the right adjectives. The rugged, courageous, even heroic sort they used in the cigarette ads. He was a cop. Her mother, Irish, poor, a round-shouldered woman in a crocheted shawl, making soups, boiled sausage and black pudding in her row house in Troy—she’d married for her. Suddenly, she finally understood that. Her whole life a blur, and now, all at once, she was old. She had suffered—oh, yes, she certainly had. And now she was suffering the consequences.

Here was the reckoning. First at church, whispering to Jesus. Whom she adored, even though He had not been fair or faithful to her. He hadn’t. What peace had
He
returned?

She had swallowed his body, whispered Hail Marys, and
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,
a million times, and what had she done? How had she sinned?

She hadn’t sinned. She’d been good.

In actual truth, she’d been grateful to Travis for marrying her—a gratitude her mother had instilled—and for staying with her all these years, always feeling, or perhaps being reminded, that she was the weaker end of the bargain. Well, she had her good points, built durably, unafraid of using her hands, an admirable cook, a patient, nurturing mother, but she admitted she had her issues, her weight, shaped like a goblet with pretty legs, top-heavy, the first place people’s eyes always went, even the women, and then her moods, the persistent tease of depression, not that she’d ever called it that. Disoriented by menopause—yet not defeated. Somewhere down the line she’d lost sight of her old self. Her old self had deserted her. Routine was her friend, her reliable mate. There was the early walk up the hill in the half-sunlight with Ernie and Herman, then the walk back down again with the sun on her back. The black pond. The wet field. The pudding-thick earth sucking at the boots she’d kick off and leave on the stone. The old bell knocking in the wind. The silent house. Then breakfast, two eggs, dry toast, a cup of tea. Time and again she’d started Weight Watchers. The quiet of the small kitchen, the window. The pasture in early spring.

She had started out as one thing, a cop’s wife, and had turned into another, a cop’s ex-wife.

People didn’t know her. Not the real her. Just the lady who sold houses. She was like some billboard they recognized and thought about in terms of what she could do for them, but nobody really
knew
her. She wondered if she did herself.

You got comfortable the way you were. Good, bad or ugly. And the years went by.

She goes to the market in her heavy coat. Like a big walrus. Or maybe a sea lion. With a few spiky hairs under her chin. She tugs on them when she’s nervous, sometimes in church, when Father Geary cajoles the good out of her.

Lately, some festering internal confusion, like her brain’s been marinating in Vaseline. You know things are bad when a trip to the supermarket’s your day’s main outing. Meandering under the relentless yellow lights of Hack’s, wandering the aisles without really needing anything, just lured along by the music:
Ventura Highway in the sunshine…