Mortal Memory

  “Harsh? Like what?”

  “I can’t remember any specific word,” I told her crisply, almost curtly, urging her on at a steadily accelerating pace.

  “You don’t remember any particular episode of harsh treatment?” Rebecca asked.

  “No.”

  “Did Laura act this way in your father’s presence?”

  “No. Never.”

  “And you said that this change occurred about a month or so after you got back from Cape Cod?”

  “Yes.”

  “In early October then?”

  I nodded.

  Rebecca wrote the date down in her notebook. “But your father didn’t change, is that right?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Do you recall any particular incident between them? Some special act of kindness?”

  “No.”

  Rebecca continued to pursue the point. “Did anything at all strike you as different in your family during this time?”

  “No.”

  “So as far as you know, nothing at all changed in the family during the month before the murders?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  And yet, as I sat there, responding to Rebecca’s questions with clipped, one-word answers, I could nonetheless feel the slowly building sense of doom that had begun to invade those final days. A heaviness had descended upon us, as if the house at 417 McDonald Drive had been filled with a thick, transparent gelatin through which Laura, Jamie, my mother, and even my father moved slowly and trudgingly, like weary, exhausted creatures, struggling to draw what were their final breaths. One by one, each of them isolated from the other, I saw them all a final time: Jamie, embittered by successive waves of rejection, entombed behind the closed door of his room; Laura slouched sullenly in the wicker chair of the solarium; my mother in her bed behind the tightly drawn floral curtains, a bomb already lit inside her brain; and finally my father, alone now in the basement, bereft, solitary and morose, slowly turning forward the thin black wheel. They had all been dying during those last weeks, I realized, like flowers past their season.

  It began to rain, and Rebecca rose and closed the window. “And so everything remained the same up until the last day?” she asked as she returned to her seat.

  “The last day,” I repeated, remembering it now as fully as I thought I ever would.

  “It was raining,” I said.

  It was raining, and had been raining for days. The lawns along McDonald Drive were brown and soggy. Rain battered against the windowpanes of our rooms and thumped down loudly against the mock Tudor gables. The white cords of the basketball net hung limply in a gray, sodden web. The day before, my mother had hung our laundry beneath a bright mid-morning sun, but now, drenched and rain-beaten, it drooped heavily toward the saturated ground. Alone among all our clothes, only my sister’s bra had been set free by a sudden burst of wind. It lay in a mangled, mud-spattered pile beneath a line of bathroom towels.

  “Did everything seem normal that morning?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes, everything seemed ‘normal,’” I said evenly, almost choking on the word. “We were all back to normal on that last day,” I said bitterly, my voice coming through nearly clenched teeth. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear.”

  I saw Rebecca’s face stiffen. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe that’s why he killed them,” I said coldly. “Because the kind of life they represented made him sick.”

  Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of life are you talking about, Steve?” she asked, but warily, as if she were closing in on a dangerous animal she’d studied and knew well.

  “A pinched, little life,” I said, brutally, the raw edge of my own vast discontent piercing through the mask behind which I’d hidden so long. “A dull, stupid life, with nothing in it that lifted him, that gave him hope, that had some possibility of escape.”

  Rebecca’s face filled with recognition. “Escape from what?” she asked.

  “From them” I blurted. “From the way they were killing him before he decided to take it by the balls … and kill them instead.”

  The words seemed to hit her like bullets. She drew away from me, her eyes glaring fiercely. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she closed her notebook with an abrupt finality.

  “I think we can end it here,” she said, in a steely voice, her tone beyond any feeble gesture I might make at either apology or explanation.

  I started to speak, but she rose instantly, walked to the door, and jerked it open. “I’ll send you all the materials I’ve collected on the case,” she said tensely.

  I remained in my chair, my own last words washing over me like a hot wave.

  “Rebecca, I …”

  She remained at the door, her body rigid. “I’ll also send you a copy of the book,” she added.

  I knew that all she might have felt for me before that moment—respect, esteem, perhaps even some affection—had been reduced to this single, brutal and explosive kernel. She’d seen the face of “these men” in my face, and there was no way for me to creep back into my former self.

  And so I nodded to her as I passed, saw her eyes dart away, then stepped out into the rain.

  FOURTEEN

  I WALKED OUT into the rain, moving resolutely toward my waiting car. I didn’t glance back toward Rebecca’s cottage to see if she lingered by the door or watched me leave from behind the short white curtains of her tiny living room.

  I could feel an immense emptiness within me, a sense of having been filled for a time, then gutted absolutely. As I drove down the curving road which led from Rebecca’s cottage, I felt that some part of me had been blasted away by the same fire that had taken my mother, my brother, and my sister to their isolated graves.

  It was still raining heavily when I pulled onto the main road, the leaden drops coming toward me like a hail of silver bullets, splattering onto the hood and windshield of the car, sending small bursts of water back into the dense, nocturnal air.

  For a while, I drove on determinedly, biting down on my aching emptiness, trying to remove all the preceding days from my mind. I wanted to forget that I’d ever met Rebecca Soltero, heard her voice, or entertained a single one of her darkly probing questions. I wanted to forget all that she’d unearthed in me, the hunger and dissatisfaction along with the gnawing, nearly frenzied, urge to burst out of the life my own choices had created, as if in one, explosive act I could erase and then reconstitute an existence which, without explosion, offered no way out.

  The lights of Old Salsbury glimmered hazily through the weaving veils of rain. I swept through its slick, deserted streets, past shop windows crowded with blank-faced mannequins and on toward its prim outer wall of white Colonial houses. I felt my head drift backward almost groggily, my mind reeling drunkenly in a fog of pain. I had never known so deep an anguish, or experienced so complete a sense of irredeemable collapse.

  The house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. For a time I didn’t go in, but remained in the car, instead, poised motionlessly behind the wheel, staring hollow-eyed at the black, unblinking windows. For a moment I closed my eyes, as if in an effort to make it all disappear, the whole intransigent structure of my life. When I opened them again, I realized that they were moist, glistening, that I had, against the force of my will, begun to cry.

  I waited for a long time after that, waited to regain a stony composure. Then I got out of the car and walked toward the short flight of cement steps that led to the side entrance of the house. I could feel the rain slapping ruthlessly against me, but I walked slowly anyway, so that by the time I entered the house, my hair hung in a wet tangle over my forehead.

  Down the corridor I could see a light burning softly, and for an instant, I thought that Marie must still be working in her office. Then I realized that the light was coming from farther down the hallway, from my office, rather than Marie’s.

  She was sitting very erectly in the black leather chair beh
ind my desk, the surreal outlines of my mythical dream house spread out before her. When she spoke to me, only her mouth seemed to move; the rest of her body, her arms, her hair, the clean, classically drawn lines of her face, everything else appeared to hold itself firmly within a marble stillness.

  “Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.

  “At the office, you know that.”

  She shook her head firmly. “You weren’t at the office.”

  “What are you talking about, Marie?”

  She looked at me as if this last, despicable lie was hardly worthy of attention. “I went to the office,” she said.

  I started to speak, but found that I had no words. I felt my lips part, but no sound came. I knew that I was helpless, literally naked, before her. She was armored in the truth, and I was a worm wriggling beneath its dark, approaching shadow.

  “Peter fell out by the pool,” she said. “He hit his head.”

  “Is he all right?” I asked quickly.

  “He’s fine,” Marie answered stiffly. “That’s not the point now.”

  I knew what the point was. I could sense it hurling toward me like the head of a spear.

  “I had to take him to the hospital,” Marie went on. “The doctor wanted him to stay there a little while, and I thought you’d want to come and be with him.”

  “Well, of course I’d want to …”

  She lifted her hand to stop me. “I drove to the office to get you, Steve, but you weren’t there. No one was there except the night watchman. He told me that no one had been in the office all night.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Not Wally or any of those other men you said were going to meet you there.”

  I struggled to save what I could see sinking in the murky gray water, my wife, my son, sinking away from me forever.

  “Marie, I was …”

  “I know where you were,” Marie said coolly, though without to amputate the diseased and frightful limb.

  “You were with her,” she said, lifting a small square of white paper toward me.

  From my place in the doorway, I could see the large block letters Peter had printed so neatly across the page: REBECCA .

  I shook my head. “Marie, it’s different, it’s …”

  She rose gracefully, like an ancient woman warrior, beleaguered, betrayed, her forces wounded all around, but still in full command. “I guess I always expected that you’d have some little fling somewhere along the way,” she said, then added, “most men do.”

  “Marie, I …”

  Again her hand rose, palm out, silencing me.

  “But I never expected you to forget us, Steve,” she said, “I never expected you to forget Peter and me.”

  I said nothing.

  “And you did that,” Marie said. “You forgot us. Maybe only for a little while, but an hour would have been enough.”

  She stepped out from behind the desk and headed for the door. The force of her character pressed me out into the corridor as she swept by me, marched down the hallway, then ascended the stairs. As she disappeared up them, I would have died to hold her, died to kiss her, died to have been the man she had always expected me to be.

  I was still standing, stunned and speechless, when she came down the stairs again, this time with Peter sleeping in her arms. I could see the white bandage with its single spot of blood wrapped around his delicate blond head. I knew that she was going to her parents’ home in the mountains. She would stay with them awhile, but only long enough to get her bearings. Then she would make her life over again, in some other place, perhaps even with some other man. Certainly, she would never come back to Old Salsbury or to me.

  “Marie,” I said softly, calling to her.

  She turned as she reached the door, glancing back toward me, her face framed by the dark window, the space between us completely silent except for the hollow patter of the rain.

  “Marie,” I said again.

  She looked at me almost mercifully, no longer as a husband, but only as another man who had lost his way. “Things weren’t perfect,” she said. “They never are.” She watched me for a moment longer, as if in grave regret that what had been so obvious to her could have been so lost to me. “Things were missing, I know that,” she added. “Things always are.” She paused, her two dark eyes upon me like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “But it was never love, Steve,” she said in her final words to me, “it was never love that was missing.”

  She turned then, and headed out into the rain. I walked down the corridor, parted the curtains, and watched as she laid Peter down in the back seat, then drew herself in behind the wheel. As she let the car drift down the driveway, I saw her eyes lift toward our bedroom window, close slowly as the car continued backward, then open again as it swung to the left and out into the slick, rainswept street.

  Within an instant, she was gone.

  For the next few hours, I wandered the house like a man who had awakened in a foreign city. Nothing looked familiar anymore. I heard ghostly, floating voices that seemed to speak to me in a language I had once understood, but which my long neglect had made incomprehensible, a language of connection, of duty, of belonging, a language which spoke of things present, rather than things missing, and as I listened to that language, I yearned for the oldest and most familiar objects in a house that was suddenly brand-new.

  I don’t remember into exactly what part of that house I had wandered when, hours later, I heard the knock at the door.

  Two men were standing on the small porch when I opened it, one younger, bareheaded, one older, with glasses and a large gray hat.

  “Steven Farris?” the older one said.

  I nodded.

  He reached into the pocket of his rain-soaked jacket and brought out a small, yellow badge. “Could you come with us, please?”

  I rode in the back of a dark, unmarked car. I don’t remember anything being said between the time I got in and the moment when the car finally pulled in behind a large brick building that I didn’t recognize. I’m sure they spoke to me, but I can’t remember what they said.

  It was still raining when the car stopped and the older one turned to me.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Farris?” he asked.

  I must have nodded, because he got out immediately and opened the rear door of the car.

  I followed him up a cement ramp, through a pair of double doors, then down a long corridor which ended at a flight of stairs.

  “Just down here,” the older one said.

  We went down the stairs together, then into a small, green room where two metal stretchers rested side by side against the far wall.

  By the time we reached them, the younger one had joined us. Still, it was the older one who drew back the white sheet that covered what was left of Peter’s face.

  I nodded. “My son,” I said.

  He covered him again, then stepped over to the other stretcher and repeated the same slow movement, drawing back the stiff white cloth.

  She lay on her back, stiffly, her arms pressed neatly against her sides.

  “My wife.”

  The sheet drifted back over her unmoving face.

  The older one turned, and I followed him out of the room and back to the car. I took my place in the back seat and rode silently through the darkness, past the winding, unexpected curve that had brought my family to its death.

  It was nearly dawn by the time the car pulled into the driveway again, returning me to my empty house. For a moment I continued to sit in the back seat, motionless, unable to move, as if paralyzed. During that interval, I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything. Then, as if in response to a signal I couldn’t see, the older one turned toward me, his eyes gazing at me softly. “It’s terrible right now, I know,” he said, “but in the end, you will find your way.”

  You will find your way.

  In my mind, I heard those words many times in the days that followed. I heard them as I paced the empty, voiceless rooms of my house or sat beside the covered po
ol, watching the late fall leaves gather on the dull black tarp. I heard them as Mr. Lowe, by then aware of exactly why my wife and son had been on the road that rainswept night, watched me disappointedly from the small square window of his office.

  You will find your way.

  I heard the words again and again, but still I couldn’t find my way.

  Things began to fall apart. I couldn’t sleep, and barely ate at all. I burned my “dream house” plans, and sat for long, dull hours in the family room, the dim green eye of the television watching me from its place across the room. All my former occupations fell away. I couldn’t read, couldn’t draw, couldn’t engage in conversation. At work, I sat at my desk, a silent, eerie specter, warily watched by the others as if at any moment I might pull a pistol from beneath my jacket and do to them what they all knew my father had done to my mother, brother, sister. At times, I would see the same, distant apprehension in their eyes that I’d sometimes glimpsed in the eyes of Aunt Edna so many years before, a suspicion that my father’s poisoned blood had been passed on to me.

  But although my fellow workers at Simpson and Lowe couldn’t have known it, they had nothing at all to fear from me. The revenge that was steadily building in my mind was not in the least directed toward them. I’d found another figure upon whom I’d begun to concentrate all my grief and rage.

  William Patrick Farris.

  During the weeks immediately following what everyone continually referred to as “the tragedy,” I came to hate my father more than I’d ever hated him. I hated him for more than the ancient crime of my family’s murder, hated him for more than what he’d done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie. I hated him for what he’d done to me.

  Done to me, yes.

  For it seemed to me at that time that my father had brought everything to pass, that almost everything could be laid ultimately at his door. Had he not killed my family, Rebecca would never have come to me, and Peter and Marie would still be alive. Even more, however, I blamed him for the poison in my own blood, for what I’d inherited from him, the dark impulsiveness and cataclysmic discontent that had led him to kill my mother, Laura, and Jamie, and which he had bequeathed to me. I thought of Peter and Marie, and went through the steps by which I’d murdered them as surely as my father had killed his own wife and children. It was a legacy of blood, passed down from father to son, and because of it, as I reasoned at last, it was necessary for both of us to die.