Mortal Memory (27 page)

“Why are you all dressed up?” he asked, as I stepped in to say good-bye.

“I have to go into the office,” I said.

“When will you be back?”

“Not until late. There's a lot to do.”

He smiled jokingly. “So I guess I shouldn't wait up for you, huh?”

I shook my head. “No, I don't think so.” I waved good-bye, then headed outside.

I'd already backed the car nearly halfway toward the street when I glanced back toward the house. I could see the gray eye of the television as it glowed dimly toward me from the shaded window of the family room. It gave me the eerie sense of being watched, and so I let my eyes retreat from it, drifting upward, along a wall of brick and mortar, until our bedroom came into view and I saw Marie standing at the window, watching me from afar. For a single, delicate moment, we stared mutely at each other, two faces peering outward, it seemed to me, from two different worlds. Then, her eyes still gazing at me with the same penetrating force, she lifted her arms very gracefully, like the wingspread of a great bird, grasped the separate edges of the bedroom curtains, and slowly drew them together. They were still weaving slightly as I let the car drift on down the driveway and out into the street.

“Hi, Steve,” Rebecca said as she opened the door. She stepped aside to let me pass.

I took a chair not far from the window. Outside, I could see the still gray surface of the lake. It looked like a sheet of slate.

Rebecca took the chair opposite me, so that we faced each other directly, as if we were about to begin some kind of intensely demanding game.

“We're close to the end, I think.”

Something in my face must have puzzled her, because for a moment she stopped and regarded me closely. “We've gone through each member of your family,” she explained, “and their relationships.”

I nodded but said nothing.

“There are things I'll never know, of course,” she added. “Your father still seems very mysterious to me.”

“My father,” I repeated softly. Curiously, I suddenly thought of him almost as a rival for her attention, a dark, majestic figure whose profound experience of life and death utterly dwarfed the humdrum banality of my own.

I felt the need to bring him down. “Are you sure he's worth knowing any more than you already do?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But you're sure he fits your criteria, aren't you?” I asked. “You're sure that Nellie Grimes, for example, had nothing to do with the murders.”

She nodded. “Yes, I'm sure of that,” she answered.

“You found her, didn't you?” I said. “You found Nellie.”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. Nellie Grimes died eight years ago. But I found her daughter, May. She lives not far from Somerset.”

“How did you find her?”

“Through Swenson.”

“I thought he hadn't known anything about Nellie.”

“He's never mentioned her to me, that's true,” Rebecca told me, “but only because he'd never thought of her as actually connected to the case.” She paused a moment, then went on. “After the murders, Swenson talked to a lot of people who'd known your father. He was trying to get some idea of where he might have gone after the murders. One of the people he talked to was Grimes.” She reached into her briefcase and handed me a picture of a woman standing on a small wooden porch. “She was living in Hoboken,” she went on. “Swenson remembered seeing May playing in the backyard despite the drizzle. He said her dress was muddy, and that her hair was wet and stringy, but that Nellie didn't seem to care.”

It was hard to imagine May in such a state, or her mother's indifference to it. In all my other memories of them, they'd been dressed as well as they could afford to be, always neat and clean, as if waiting to be put upon display.

“Nellie Grimes was not doing very well at that point,” Rebecca added.

“What did she say about my father?”

“She said that he'd always been very kind to her,” Rebecca answered, “and that he'd given her some money when she'd left Somerset.”

In my mind I saw the envelope pass from my father's hand to Nellie's.

“She also told Swenson that she didn't believe your father had killed his family,” Rebecca added.

“Then who did?”

Rebecca shrugged. “She only said that she was sure it was someone else,” she said. Then Swenson asked her directly if your father might have been involved with another woman, and she said absolutely not. She told him that she knew for a fact that your father was not that kind of man.”

I remembered the way Nellie's face had lifted toward my father that day in the train station, and I suspected that it had lifted toward him in just that same tempting way many times before. In isolated places, no doubt, where no one could have seen him answer to the intensity of such a call, but he'd drawn back on those occasions, too, resolutely, with his own unfathomable pride.

Rebecca looked at me as if she expected me to contradict her, then added. “May also had a very high opinion of your father.”

“But she was just a child,” I said. “What could she have known about him?”

“Actually, she remembered him quite well,” Rebecca said. “Very clearly, even down to the gray work clothes he always wore.”

For a moment it struck me as intimate knowledge, and I felt a strange resentment toward May Grimes, as if she'd usurped my place as the sole surviving witness.

“How would she have known anything about my father?” I asked.

“May evidently spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” Rebecca continued. There was no place for her to go after school, so she played in the back room. Sometimes your father would come back there and try to entertain her a little.” She smiled. “May remembered that he bought her a Chinese checkers set and that they used to sit on the floor and play together.”

I could not bring the image to mind very easily, my father sitting on the bare cement floor with a little girl, playing Chinese checkers, trying to help her pass the long boring hours of a winter afternoon.

“She remembered something else,” Rebecca said, the tone of her voice changing. They were playing together one afternoon. May thinks it was just a few weeks before the day your father took her and her mother to the train station.” She paused a moment, as if hesitant to go on. They were alone in the back room,” she continued finally. “May had been staring at the board, making her next move. When she finished it, she looked up and noticed your father staring at her. She said he looked different, very sad. She asked him if there was anything wrong. He didn't answer exactly. He only said, This is all I want.'“

I felt my skin tighten, but said nothing.

Rebecca watched me cautiously, gauging my mood. “I remembered you telling me that he'd said the same thing to you.”

“In exactly the same words.” I shook my head helplessly, my father's mystery still as dense as it had ever been. “What was going on in him?” I asked, though very softly, a question directed toward myself as much as toward Rebecca.

Rebecca, however, actually offered an answer. “At that point, when he said that to you in the basement,” she said, “he was probably very depressed.”

I could see that she was leading into something.

“Depressed about what?”

“Well, he'd finalized his plan by then, of course,” she said. “He'd canceled the two plane tickets, for example.” She looked at me significantly. “He did that on October 10.”

I knew then that the “new developments” she'd mentioned on the phone earlier had to do with those two mysterious plane tickets. She'd tracked down their enigmatic meaning and was about to lay her findings before me like a parting gift.

“Why did he cancel those tickets?” I asked. “You know, don't you?”

Rebecca leaned forward, settling her eyes on me with a deep, probing gaze. “You remember the night before you came home from the Cape? You saw your father and mother talking together, and he had his arm around her.”

“That's right.”

“And the next night, the night the family got back to Somerset, you saw your father and Laura beside the fence in the backyard.” I nodded.

“You said that they looked as if they were engaged in a very serious conversation,” Rebecca went on. “Then later, you saw them come up the stairs, and it was at that point that you heard a few words pass between them.”

“That's right.”

Rebecca drew her black notebook from the briefcase. “I want to be sure I have this exactly right.” She flipped through the notebook until she found the page she wanted. This is what you heard,” she said. Then she quoted it: “Your father: ‘Tomorrow.' Laura: ‘So soon?' Your father: ‘Yes.'“ She looked up. The ‘tomorrow' that your father mentioned would have been September 3.”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you again: do you remember anything about that morning?” Rebecca asked.

I tried to recall it, but it remained a blur of activity. My mother had prepared the usual breakfast of cereal and toast, and after eating, Laura, Jamie, and I had all gone back upstairs to finish getting ready for school. The only thing that seemed different was the fact that my father had still been at home when we'd all left the house about a half hour later.

“My father stayed home that morning,” I said to Rebecca. “He usually left before we did, but that morning, he didn't.” I drifted back to that day again, but only far enough to regain one last, minuscule detail. “He was sitting at the kitchen table as I passed,” I added. “I was racing for the door, you know, excited to be going back to school, but he shot his hand out, grabbed my arm, and stopped me. ‘Kiss your mother good-bye, Stevie,' he said. And so I did.”

Rebecca looked as if I'd just confirmed something that had only been a conjecture before.

“He'd never asked me to do that before.”

“And then you went to school just like always?” Rebecca asked.

I nodded. “Yes, we all went together. Well, at least Laura and I did. Jamie always went ahead of us.”

“Did you and Laura talk about anything in particular that morning?”

“No,” I said. “We just walked to school like always. She left me at my school, then walked on to hers, about three blocks down the road.”

“When did you see Laura again?”

“She was waiting at the corner for me right after school,” I said. “She always did that.”

For a moment, as I remembered her standing on the corner waiting for me that afternoon, her books in her arms, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, I felt her loss again, but this time with a piercing depth, as if all the conversations I might have had with her in life, all the good and comforting times we might have had together, had suddenly swept over me in a great wave of imagined days. I saw us share all that we had not been allowed to share, the keenest experiences of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, the approach of middle age, all that my father had abruptly and mysteriously canceled as surely as he'd canceled those two plane tickets to Mexico.

“I loved my sister,” I said, though barely above a whisper. “And I think she loved me.”

Rebecca's next question came at me like a slap in the face. “And Jamie,” she asked, “did you love him?”

I answered without hesitation. “No.”

“Did anyone in the family love him?”

“I don't think so,” I answered. “He always seemed alone.”

Alone in his bunk, alone at his desk, alone beneath the tree in the backyard, always alone.

“So Jamie never waited for you after school?” Rebecca asked.

“No, only Laura did that,” I answered. “She was always there, waiting on the corner, just like she was that first day of school.”

Despite the warmth of the weather, as I recalled then, the first leaves of autumn had already begun to drift down upon us. I saw them fall slowly, but thickly, as Laura and I made our way down Ontario Street, and I felt a great sadness settle upon me, like the leaves.

“The leaves were falling,” I said to Rebecca. “They were very red.”

But they could not have been red, I realized. I was not thinking of leaves. I was thinking of my sister's death, and Jamie's and my mother's. I was thinking of their thickly falling blood.

“Did you and your sister talk much on the way home that afternoon?” Rebecca asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“You walked silently, all the way home?”

Something came back vaguely, a tiny detail. “No, I don't think we walked all the way home together that day,” I said slowly, unsure. “I think she went into Oscar's, that little convenience store on the corner.”

Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “Why would you remember that?” she asked.

“Because it was so unusual,” I answered. “But I do remember it now.”

I saw Laura turn to me, felt her hand release mine. “Go on home, Stevie,” she said. “I'll be there in a minute.” Then she walked away, moving slowly toward the convenience store, and finally disappearing inside of it. As I headed home, I saw her standing by the window, her eyes fixed on me, as if she were waiting for me to leave.

“So you walked the rest of the way home by yourself?” Rebecca asked.

I nodded. “Laura told me to go on home without her, and so I did.”

“Was Jamie home when you got there?” Rebecca asked.

“No,” I said. I could feel it returning to me slowly, a picture of that afternoon. “No one was home,” I added, “not even my mother.”

It had never occurred to me before, but for the first and only time I could remember, my mother had not been at home when I arrived from school. I had returned to an empty house.

“I was alone in the house for a while,” I said, “then Laura arrived, and Jamie a few minutes after that.”

Jamie had gone directly to our room, but Laura had walked into the solarium instead. Later, when I'd approached her, skipping jauntily across the living room carpet, she'd looked up at me fiercely, and snapped, “Stop it, Stevie.” Then she'd turned away, letting her eyes drift out toward the empty street.