Summer House with Swimming Pool

  On the way from the beach club to the parking lot, I had already asked her once. I had whispered it in her ear, so Judith wouldn’t hear. Who? I whispered. Who was it? Someone you know?

  And at first Julia hadn’t answered. I started thinking that maybe she hadn’t heard me, then she said, “I don’t know, Daddy …”

  I didn’t go on asking. Shock, that was my diagnosis. Shock blocks out what we don’t want to see. What we don’t want to be reminded of.

  Now I nodded to Caroline. She was the one who had to do it; we agreed on that without speaking. This was a question a mother should ask.

  “Julia?” Caroline said quietly, leaning over close to her daughter’s face and at the same time laying the palm of her hand on Julia’s cheek. “Can you tell us what happened? Can you tell us who … who left the club with you? Or who you left with?”

  Julia shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Caroline caressed her cheek.

  “First you were with Alex,” she said. “And then? After that? What happened then?”

  Julia blinked. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes again. “Was I with Alex? Where was I with Alex?”

  Caroline and I looked at each other.

  Julia had started crying again.

  “I don’t know …” she sobbed. “I really don’t know …”

  Later that night, Stanley came home as well. He had walked the whole way, he told us. When he got to the parking lot there were no longer any cars he recognized, and he’d assumed that we’d forgotten him.

  He came in for just a moment to say hello. Emmanuelle had already explained everything to him. He and Emmanuelle had decided that we should spend the night in their apartment and that the two of them would sleep in our tent. Normally speaking, when someone makes an offer like that, you tell them a couple of times that “that’s really not necessary”—but this wasn’t normal. Nothing was normal. We didn’t discuss it, we just accepted.

  Later on I went to our tent with Stanley to take out some of our things, so they would have more room. Stanley put his arm around my shoulders. He said again how terrible he felt about all this. For us. For Julia. He swore. In his American English. Also in American English, he went on to say what should happen to men who did things like this. I could only agree with him.

  Then he clasped my hand. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one.

  “There’s something else …” he said.

  We stood and smoked in front of the tent while Stanley told me how he had walked back to the summer house. Along the same high, sandy road that we had taken on the way down. And so he had also come past the spot where we had run the man from the green campground off the road.

  “His car was still there,” Stanley said. “At exactly the same spot. It was really weird. I mean, it looked as though, after us, no one else had come past there. But it gets even weirder …” He glanced over toward the house. “I tried the door,” he went on, almost in a whisper. “And it was open. And the window was rolled down the whole way, too. That’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, who would leave a car behind like that? I took a good look, but it didn’t look like it was stuck in the sand or anything. I think he could have just driven away …”

  “Maybe he couldn’t get it started?”

  Stanley shook his head. “No, it’s not that. Listen, I did something that maybe wasn’t too smart. I leaned in through the window and I saw that the key was still in the ignition.”

  Now, for the first time, I felt a shiver run down the back of my neck. The kind of shiver you feel in the movie theater when the film takes an unexpected turn.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “So I climbed in the car and turned the key. And it started right away …”

  I said nothing. I took such a deep drag on my cigarette that I started coughing.

  “I got out again. I even did what they do in the movies. Because I didn’t have a handkerchief or anything like that, I took off my T-shirt and wiped down everything with it—the key, the steering wheel, the door. Then I walked around the car. There’s a pretty steep slope on the other side there. I climbed down a little, but then I started to slide. I had to grab hold of a bush. Besides, it was pitch-dark up there. I shouted. Once. Then I came back here on foot.”

  “But do you think he …”

  “I don’t know, Marc. I just think it’s weird that he didn’t keep on driving. And if he couldn’t, for whatever reason, then it’s also weird that he would leave his door unlocked and the window open and the key in the ignition. Something doesn’t add up.”

  I felt that shiver down the back of my neck again. I thought about the campground owner, who for some reason had walked around his car and then fallen down the hill.

  “Maybe his nerves were shot,” Stanley said, as though he could read my mind. “Maybe we scared him more than we thought. Who knows what somebody does when they’ve been run off the road … I just wanted you to know as soon as possible. Even in this situation. Especially in this situation.”

  Now I was the one who got to read Stanley’s mind. But I didn’t say anything. I let him say it.

  “Sooner or later they’re going to find that car, Marc. Who knows, maybe not tonight, but for sure tomorrow morning, once it gets light. The first thing they’ll do is go looking for the driver. Maybe he just walked home, who knows. But maybe he didn’t … They’re going to notice the damage to the back of his car. Your car has some damage, too, Marc. There’s no connection, not yet. Besides, that guy has no idea who we are. But in any case, I wouldn’t take your car to a garage here. I’d head out. Maybe not tonight. But tomorrow morning for sure.”

  Julia was asleep. Caroline and I had carried two chairs out and were sitting outside the apartment with the door ajar. We were smoking. Caroline looked at her watch.

  “We have to go to the police, Marc,” she whispered. “We have to report this as soon as possible. Maybe now, right away. Or do you think we should wait till morning?”

  “No,” I said.

  My wife looked at me. “No, what?”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t want to take Julia to a police station. All the questions they would ask … I mean, something happened. We know what happened. You and I know. And she knows, too, even though she can’t remember anything right now. Maybe that’s better, too, that she doesn’t know right now.”

  “But, Marc, we can’t do that! Who knows, that man may still be walking around somewhere. They always say that when there’s been a crime. That you have to act fast. The first twenty-four hours. They’re the most important. The sooner we report it, the less chance that bastard has of getting away. The greater the chance that they can find him.”

  “Of course. You’re right, Caroline. Completely right. But we can’t take Julia to a police station right now. You don’t want to do that to her. And I don’t, either.”

  “But the two of us could go, right? Or at least one of us. One of us goes to the police and the other stays with Julia.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay with Julia.”

  “No, I will.”

  We looked at each other. Caroline had wiped the tears from her face. Her expression was grim, that above all.

  “Marc, I don’t want to whine about who she needs most right now, her father or her mother. I think it’s her mother. You can go to the police.”

  I could have told my wife that at this point what our daughter needed most was a doctor. Maybe not so much her father as the general physician I was, too. A doctor who sat beside her when she came out of her initial shock and started remembering things. But in my heart I knew that Caroline was right. Julia had to be able to hold her mother’s hand. Her mother, who was a woman as well. A woman. Not a man, not at this point. Even if that man was her father.

  “I don’t know, Caroline,” I said. “I mean, imagine I go now, then they’re going to ask if they can question Julia later on. Tomorrow. We don’t want that, do we?”
r />   “But there’s no use in questioning her, is there? She doesn’t remember anything, anyway.”

  “Do you think they’ll be satisfied with that, with our word that our daughter can’t remember anything? Caroline, please! They’ll come in here with the whole CSI team. With psychologists and specialists. With understanding female agents who’ve seen it all before. Who supposedly know how to get rape victims with amnesia remembering and talking again.”

  “But still, that’s what we want.”

  “What?”

  “For her to remember something. That she remembers what happened. What that bastard looks like.”

  I tried to remember what I knew about amnesia. What I had learned about it in medical school once, long ago. Memory loss was often selective, I remembered that. The brain blocks out a traumatic experience. Sometimes that experience never comes back at all. On the beach Julia had recognized me right away, as well as Judith later on, her little sister, Thomas, Alex, her mother, Emmanuelle, and Ralph. With total amnesia, people often don’t even know who they are: They no longer recognize their own faces in the mirror, let alone the faces of other people.

  Under the circumstances, I hadn’t wanted to ask Julia, but it seemed as though the memory loss went before all that. Was I with Alex? She still knew who Alex was, but she couldn’t remember that they had gone to the other club together.

  And there was something else, too. That afternoon and evening, my daughter had tried to ignore me as much as possible. When I asked her a question, she barely answered. She probably hadn’t looked me straight in the eye even once.

  After she’d seen me in the kitchen. With Judith.

  But from the moment I’d found her on the beach, and as I was carrying her to the car, and after that, here, in Stanley and Emmanuelle’s apartment, while I had been examining her, she had only looked at me sweetly. Sadly, but sweetly.

  Was it possible? I asked myself now. Was it possible that Julia’s amnesia went all the way back to the early afternoon, or maybe even before that, and that she no longer knew that she had seen me with Judith in the kitchen?

  I couldn’t ask her straight out; it had to be something casual. A remark about something else, about that same Saturday. I reconstructed the day from start to finish. The fledgling. Lisa finds the little bird that fell out of the olive tree. Breakfast. After that, Lisa and I go to the zoo. And when I came back … When we came back, Caroline was gone. And Ralph and Stanley and Emmanuelle, too. I had gone upstairs. To the kitchen. Judith and her mother and I had looked out of the kitchen window … That was it! Miss Wet T-shirt … Julia and Lisa had taken turns walking the diving board as though it were a catwalk. They had let Alex hose them down … I thought about my older daughter, about the coquettish pose she’d assumed, how she’d pulled her hair up at the back of her head and then let it fall …

  That was what I needed to ask Julia about when she woke up. In my mind I tried to formulate a casual question (Remember this afternoon / yesterday, when Alex sprayed you with the hose down at the pool? You guys really had fun, didn’t you?), but it didn’t seem quite right. The word fun in particular seemed out of place.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Caroline said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should keep Julia away from too many prying eyes at this point. I hadn’t thought about it that way, that they would want to ask her all kinds of things. It would probably only make her more confused. The police and everything. But then what are we going to do? We have to do something, don’t we? I mean, we can’t just let that bastard walk away, can we?”

  “We could call. We could place an anonymous call and say that there’s a rapist on the loose.”

  Caroline sighed, and at that same moment I saw how senseless it would be to make a call like that. I thought about Alex again. About the way he’d acted on the beach. I couldn’t see him as a potential rapist. But I still had a nasty feeling that he hadn’t told us everything.

  “Marc,” Caroline said, placing her hand on my forearm. “You’re a doctor. You can tell. How bad is she? Should we take her to a hospital? Or is it better to let her calm down as much as possible? Let her rest for a few days, and then go straight home?”

  “She doesn’t have to go to a hospital. She doesn’t know what happened. I mean, she knows something happened. And she probably also knows what. She’s thirteen. I gave her something to stop the pain. But she’s … she feels …”

  I felt my voice falter; there was high wheezing in my throat and I started coughing. Caroline squeezed my arm.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll let her take it easy for a day. Tomorrow. And then we go on Monday, if you think she can handle the drive. On the backseat. We can make a bed for her on the backseat.”

  “It would be better …” I looked at my watch. It was two-thirty in the morning. “It would be better if we left today. Later on, as soon as it gets light.”

  “Isn’t that kind of rushing things? We haven’t even slept yet. And for Julia—”

  “It’s just better,” I interrupted her. “For her sake. We have to get away from here as soon as possible. We need to go home.”

  It was a couple of hours later—I was still sitting in my chair in front of the apartment, smoking; Caroline had crawled into bed with Julia—when Ralph came down the steps.

  “I figured, Maybe he could use some of this,” he said. He had a bottle of whisky under his arm and two glasses filled with ice in his hands.

  We sat beside each other for a while, not saying a word. Somewhere in the dry brush on the far side of the pool, a stubborn cricket persisted in rubbing its hind legs together. That and the ice tinkling in our glasses were the only sounds in an otherwise silent yard. The first daylight had appeared in the eastern sky. I stared at the motionless water of the pool, lit from below. Then I looked at the diving board. It was the same diving board as yesterday, but it was a different board nonetheless. The yard and the summer house were a different yard and summer house, too. And not only that. For the time being, I didn’t want to see another yard, summer house, or pool. Maybe never again. I wanted to go home.

  Ralph rubbed his right knee. “That was a good kick, Marc. Where did you learn that? In the army? At school?”

  I looked at his knee. You couldn’t see anything on the outside—it looked like a normal, hairy male knee—but on the inside all the muscles and tendons were stretched to the limit, I knew that. I hadn’t paid attention when he came down the steps and sat beside me, but he would almost certainly be limping for the next few days.

  “What did you do after that?” I asked. “Did you go home right away?”

  “I walked along the beach for a bit. Along the sea. Well, walked … it was more like hobbling along. At first I didn’t feel much, but after that it started pounding and throbbing inside there.” He tapped his knee. “I figured, What am I doing here, anyway? I’m going home.”

  I have to admit that I hadn’t taken Ralph’s knee into account in my earlier calculations. I had thought about whether he could have walked to the other beach club and back. And whether he could have been home by the time Judith called him. But I had forgotten all about the knee.

  Why would Ralph Meier have walked more than half a mile to that other club with a painful, pounding knee? And then back again? It seemed not only highly improbable, but also nearly physically impossible.

  “You have to keep moving it, that’s important,” I said. “If you sit still the whole time, it will get stiff.”

  Ralph stuck his right leg out in front of him. He wiggled his fat toes in their plastic flip-flop. He groaned. He was biting his lower lip, I saw when I glanced over. If it was all playacting, it was good acting. I wasn’t ruling out anything. I still took into account the possibility that the whole business with his knee was a performance. That he was using his knee as an alibi.

  “I talked to Stanley and Emmanuelle,” he said. “You can stay in the apartment as long as you like. We’ll come up with a solution.”


  I was about to reply that this wouldn’t be necessary, that we would be leaving in a couple of hours, but stopped myself in the nick of time. Who knows, maybe he would be relieved to hear that we were leaving. I didn’t want him to be relieved. Not yet.

  “Where’s Alex?” I asked.

  As I stared straight ahead, at the glowing blue water of the pool, I stayed alert to any physical reaction on Ralph’s part. And indeed, he shifted in his chair. He leaned forward a bit, ran a hand over his face, then sank back.

  “Upstairs,” he said. Now he crossed his right leg over his left knee, this time without groaning. “He’s asleep. Want some more?” He had picked up the whisky bottle from the tiles and held it above my glass.

  “Okay. Did he say anything to you?”

  Ralph topped up his own drink before answering. “He’s incredibly upset. He feels guilty. I told him there’s no reason for that.”

  I took a deep breath. I raised the glass to my lips. The ice had already melted; I tasted lukewarm, watered-down whisky.

  Why shouldn’t he feel guilty? Maybe he has every reason to feel guilty.

  That was what I could have said. But I didn’t. I felt my face growing warm, but that wasn’t good. I had to keep a cool head. Literally.

  “No, he doesn’t have to feel guilty,” I said for that very reason. “It’s just that I think he saw something. Something he’s afraid to tell us. Precisely because he feels guilty.”

  “And what do you think he might have seen?” Ralph shifted in his chair again and took a few quick gulps of whisky. Body language. If his body language told me anything, it was that he wasn’t telling me everything he knew, either. Or else he was simply trying to protect his son.

  Then I realized something else. Something that hadn’t occurred to me before, strangely enough. Julia couldn’t remember anything. But I had never told Ralph that. I hadn’t told Alex, either, or anyone, for that matter. No one but Caroline and I, in fact, knew about Julia’s memory loss. Or did they? I tried to run back through the last few hours, down to the smallest detail. Who had been here in the apartment at which moment, and who hadn’t.