Mortal Memory (22 page)

“These brochures,” I said. “Where did they come from?”

“He got them through the mail,” Rebecca answered. “There was no indication that he ever went to a travel agency.”

I shrugged. “I don't ever remember seeing any travel brochures around the house.”

“That's because they weren't mailed to McDonald Drive,” Rebecca said. “They were all mailed to the hardware store downtown.” She paused a moment, then added, “Some had been mailed as long as three months before the murders.”

I leaned back, as if unable to absorb this latest bit of information, the full-blown proof, as if any had still been necessary, of my father's plot.

“The brochures were from all over,” Rebecca said. “Mexico, Europe, Asia, South America. That's why they weren't much help to the police.”

“So they never had any idea where he went?”

“Not until they found the car,” Rebecca said.

“That was in Texas, wasn't it?” I said tentatively, only vaguely recalling something Quentin had told me. “Near the Mexican border?”

“Right on the border, actually,” Rebecca said. “In Laredo.”

I nodded. “That's right,” I said. “I remember that Quentin told me about them finding the car.”

“Swenson brought it back,” Rebecca said, “but no one ever claimed it.”

So that it still sat in the shadowy corner of the police garage in Somerset, as Rebecca went on to inform me, a dark, eerie symbol of my father's flight. I could see it there, rusting, abandoned, the odor of my father's cigarettes still lingering in the ragged brown upholstery, dust gathering on the black, serrated wheel where he had laid his hands.

“You could claim it if you wanted,” Rebecca added softly.

I shook my head wearily. “No, I don't want it,” I whispered.

But I remembered it, nonetheless, as I told her.

Then I related a time when my father had driven all of us far out into the woods, to where an old cabin, not much more than a log shack, sat in a primeval forest.

It was probably four years or so before the murders, and we'd all gone out in that same old car in which he'd later made his escape—Laura and Jamie and I scrunched up together in the back seat; my mother, looking vaguely content on the passenger side; my father, his big hands on the wheel, smiling with a kind of gleeful adventurousness as we bumped along the barely passable road.

He'd stumbled upon the cabin while hunting as a boy, and I suppose there was something about it which had suddenly called him back. “I want to show you all something,” he'd said at the breakfast table that morning.

We hit the road about an hour later, drove for a long time, paved roads eventually giving way to unpaved ones, then at last on to what were little more than ancient logging trails. It was already early in the afternoon by the time we finally reached the cabin.

It was set in a deep wood, near a winding brook, and I could tell by the way my father looked at it that it represented something to him, perhaps his ideal of a forest paradise, remote, primitive, and uncomplicated. When he looked at it, his face took on the kind of expression I would later see in paintings of the saints when they saw God, that here before them was the true, abiding majesty. That day, he even seemed like them, saintly, a father out of the great book of fatherhood, a man of mythic kindness and commitment, capable of making an epic sacrifice.

He played with us in the forest, a long game of hide-and-seek, in which we skirted behind bushes and fallen trees, while my mother watched us from her place on the cabin's small, dilapidated porch. We played tag, and he ran after us, lifting Laura into the air each time he caught up with her, their faces nearly touching as he lowered her to the ground again.

Toward evening, it began to snow, and while the rest of us gathered up our things and prepared to leave, my father walked out into the woods again and stood alone among the trees, his arms lifted slightly, hands open, catching snowflakes in his palms.

As I finished relating this episode, I realized that my eyes had grown moist.

“I'm all right,” I assured Rebecca quickly, gathering myself in again. “I just got a little nostalgic, I guess.”

It was more than that, though. I'd entered a new realm of feeling in regard to my family's slaughter. I realized that it was no longer the explosive instant which horrified me, as it had in the restaurant days before, but the long decay of love, the slow stages of its dissolution.

I could see that Rebecca understood that, but what she could not have known was that only part of my anguish was connected to the dark reliving of my family's death. The rest had to do with me, the volcanic discontent I had come to feel in the presence of everything that had grounded and sustained me in the past. It was as if that airy, unreal dream house I'd been working on for so long was now the only one in which I wanted to live. It was without walls. It had no foundation. It was pure fantasy. And yet it seemed right in a way that made everything else seem wrong.

After a moment, my eyes settled upon Rebecca. “They actually saw the monster, didn't they?” I asked. “My father and the rest of them? Whatever it was that was eating them alive, they actually looked it in the eye.”

Rebecca didn't answer me directly, but grew distant, perhaps even apprehensive. “Maybe we should end the interview for tonight, Steve.”

“Why?”

“I just think it would be best,” Rebecca said firmly, leaving no doubt that the interview was over.

She walked to the door, opened it, then followed me out into the darkness, slowly walking me to my car as a swirl of leaves played at our feet.

“I'm sorry this is so hard for you,” she said.

“It's a lot of things, Rebecca,” I admitted. “It's not just my past.”

At the car, I stopped and stood very near to her. I could almost feel her breath.

“When do you want to meet again?” I asked.

She watched me hesitantly, but said nothing.

I smiled. “Don't worry, Rebecca. I'll go all the way through it with you.”

She nodded. “In all the other cases, there were no survivors,” she said. “I guess I should have known how hard it would be for you, but I just hadn't had the experience before.”

“It's okay,” I assured her.

I opened the door and started to get in, but she touched my arm and drew me back around to face her.

“You should only go as far as you want to, Steve,” she said. “No farther.”

“I know,” I told her.

I could feel her hand at my arm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it tightly for a long time. But I knew that close as it seemed to me, her hand might as well have been in another universe.

“Well, good night, then,” she said as she let it drop from my shoulder.

“Good night,” I said, then got into my car.

It was still early, so I stopped off at a small restaurant and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee before going home.

Marie was at the sink when I walked into the kitchen. Peter was at the table, chopping celery.

“You're home early,” Marie said. “We're making a tuna dish.”

“I've already eaten,” I said idly.

Marie's eyes shot over to me. “You've already eaten?”

I nodded obliviously.

“You got off early and didn't come home to have dinner with Peter and me?” she asked, in a voice that struck me even then as deeply troubled, as if in this small twist of behavior she'd already begun to detect the approach of her destruction.

“I guess I did,” I said, then added defensively, “Sorry. I just wasn't thinking.”

Marie looked at me brokenly, but I did nothing to ease her distress.

“I'm going to lie down for a while,” I said, then headed up the stairs.

Once upstairs, I lay down on the bed, my eyes staring at the blank ceiling. Below me, I could hear Peter and Marie as they continued to make their dinner together. Below me, as I realize now, they were shrinking. I should have seen it, like a murderous vision, as I lay alone on my bed that evening. I should have seen Peter fleeing down a dark corridor, Marie cringing behind a cardboard box. I should have seen the circle tightening, felt the first bite of the noose.

But that evening I felt nothing but my own distress. I remembered Rebecca as she'd stood beside me only a short time before, and I knew that I'd wanted to draw her into my arms. Perhaps, at the time, I'd even imagined that she was all I really needed to solve the riddle of my life. But I realize now that Rebecca was only the symbol of those other things I had wanted even more.

“In the deepest and most inchoate longings of these men,”

Rebecca would later write, “there was a central yearning to be embattled, a fierce need for a fierce engagement, so that they saw themselves in that single, searing instant not as killers slaughtering women and children, but as soldiers in the midst of battle, men heroically and perilously engaged in the act of returning fire.”

It was months later, and I was alone, when I read that passage. By then, I was wifeless, childless, homeless. Everything was gone, except my one need to “return fire” as my father had, in an act of sudden and avenging violence.

ELEVEN

D
URING THE LAST
days of October, as fall retreated and the first wintry rains began, I felt as if some sort of countdown had begun. It wasn't a radical change, only a shift in direction, a sense of moving into the final phase of something. There was a helplessness about it, a feeling that I no longer controlled my life, that perhaps, a creature of disastrous circumstances, I had never actually controlled it. It seemed my father had destroyed that web of connections which might have given me context, a place to stand in the world. After that, I'd drifted here and there, but always in reaction to something outside myself. I was an accidental architect, an accidental husband, an accidental father—an accidental man.

“They felt their lives were dissolving, didn't they?” I said to Rebecca at one of our meetings toward the end of October.

Her reply went to the center of how I'd come to feel. “No,” she said. “They felt that in some way they had never lived.”

But rather than thinking of myself at that moment, my mind focused once again on my father, and I remembered how, in the days preceding the murders, he'd seemed to sink into a profound nothingness. For many hours he would sit alone in the solarium, silent, nebulous, hardly there at all. At other times, he would stand by the old wooden fence, his hands deep in his pockets, staring emptily across the lawn. At the very end, he had even stopped answering the phone when it rang at the house on McDonald Drive. It was as if he could no longer imagine that the call might be for him.

“He'd become a worthless shell,” I told Rebecca at one point. “He'd been stripped of everything by then.”

It was the word “stripped” that seemed to catch in Rebecca's mind. She repeated it slowly, as if it had conjured up something even darker than my father's crime.

“Stripped to the bone,” I said assuredly. “There was nothing left of him.”

I recalled the dreadful baiting which Jamie had continued to inflict on Laura, and how, in the last weeks, my father had sat by and let it go on day after day. The force that had once moved him to defend my sister had dissipated.

Rebecca didn't challenge my description of my father's disintegration, but I could see that it disturbed her. For a time, she even seemed curiously disoriented, as if she'd lost her way somehow. At the next meeting, her questions skirted away from the final days of my family's life. Instead, she concentrated on other issues, our routines and schedules, the division of chores, all the minutiae of my family's existence.

Then suddenly, during the second week of November, she regained her direction. It was as if after standing poised at the edge of something for a long time, she'd now decided to plunge over the side.

I arrived at her cottage late on a Thursday afternoon. She'd already started a small fire in the hearth, and it was blazing warmly when I arrived.

“It's cold out,” she said as I came through the door.

I nodded and began to take off my coat.

“I like November,” she added. “I think it's my favorite month.”

It struck me as an odd choice. “Why?”

She thought a moment. “I guess because it's cold enough to make it clear that winter really is coming,” she said, “and that we need shelter.”

I shook my head. “Too rainy,” I said. “Too confining.” I shook my shoulders uncomfortably. “It gets into your bones.”

I sat down in my usual seat, then waited for Rebecca to ease herself into the chair across from me.

But she didn't do that. She took a seat at the table by the window instead, her briefcase already open before her. For a few seconds, she hesitated, her eyes glancing first out the window, then back to her briefcase, then at last to me.