All the Houses (47 page)

“And then she asked me, very casually, it was very much of a since-I've-got-you-on-the-line-I-might-as-well, she asked about an article that one of her colleagues was working on. It was about that Bible, I don't know whether you would remember this, but North and McFarlane took this Bible with them on a trip to Tehran, to give to the Iranians. I always thought that it was odd, but I'll never understand why people made such a fuss about that one thing. At the time it hadn't been reported yet, and from what Jodi told me her colleague had got several facts wrong, and though I suppose I should've just kept out of it, I corrected her. On background, I said that it was this way and not that way. She asked me, is it true that this was all Dick Mitchell's idea? I said I didn't know whose idea it was, probably North's. Dick could've run out and bought the thing, I told her, but it had to be on North's instructions.

“The whole business seemed so minor that I hardly gave it a lot of thought. She'd said she would try to help me, and I tried to help her a little. But I was also scared for Courtney and very tired and in retrospect I would say not careful. Not careful when it came to Dick. I shouldn't have said what I did, because it got out that he was the guy behind the Bible and whatever else they said he was behind. I wonder now what was going through my head. I shouldn't have said even that much.”

*   *   *

Dad looked down at his lap. What could I say to him? I wanted to thank him, at least, for telling me what he'd told me.

“Did you read the pages I gave you?” he asked.

I said I thought the memoir was off to a promising start, but I could hear myself, I sounded apologetic. I suggested he write out the story he'd just told me.

“I don't know about that,” he said.

“You should.”

“I'll think about it.”

I thanked him, though I don't think he knew what I was thanking him for—taking me to Wheaton and back, that's what he must've thought. He told me he planned to report the missing car to the police, and he waited for me to enter the building before driving off. Once he was gone, I stepped outside. The sky had a reddish tint, with a few stars like embers. There were lights on at Daniel and Nina's place. I went back in.

*   *   *

An envelope appeared in my mailbox the next day, containing the key to the Camry and an unsigned note explaining where the car was parked. I would've liked to call Nina, but Daniel had ordered me to keep my distance. The car was waiting just where the note said, and straightaway I started for Albemarle Street, forgetting to ask my father to update the police. I hadn't driven it a mile in the direction of his house before I was pulled over. I spent a long time stopped in the right lane of Massachusetts Avenue, trying to convince a skinny but jowly cop that I hadn't stolen Dad's car. We happened to be across the street from an embassy, where a small boy watched from an upstairs window. Finally I drove the rest of the way to the house with a police escort, and that waifish officer walked me up the half flight of concrete stairs and got my father to confirm my story before leaving me alone. I sat in the living room for a while, still rattled by the experience of having come under suspicion, and while my twenty minutes was nothing compared to what had befallen Dad, I still made that comparison, and saw something I hadn't before then.

 

 

It had been so reassuring to be ferried around by Dad that I no longer understood what it meant to feel reassured, to feel that I was in exactly the right place, not if a car and D.C. roadways and the sound of his voice sufficed. My apartment was far less comforting than the car, and the next night I balked at it all. The plate of crumbs left on top of my latest to-do list, the pile of professional clothes in the corner, the cheap Cuban coffee maker on the stove, the pans and knives from the supermarket, this shabby parcel where I'd penned myself.

I had intended to go on writing, to record my family's experience of the long investigation, the awful late eighties, when Dad was on the hook. For even after he'd found a new job and otherwise might've gone on with his life, he could hardly go on with his life. The independent counsel was a methodical, moralizing man who proceeded slowly, left everybody hanging. It was 1989, 1990 before the trials started, and by then you had crusty old ex-spooks and ex-somebodies who, worn down by years of waiting, of legal expenses, of whispers behind their backs, of dwelling in the alternate universe of a scandal nobody cared about any longer, broke down in tears on the witness stand. Which was maybe no more than they deserved, maybe less than they deserved—I myself have no clue what they deserved. I only know that during my last two years of high school, Courtney had left and the house was gloomy and quiet. Sometimes I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom. Maggie entered a rigorous training program for dancers that ate up all her afternoons and evenings, and I just found other places to be. I became more social than I'd been before, went to more parties, slept over at other girls' houses. I was the funny one, offering up sarcasm, imitations, whatever I could do for a laugh, ha!

By the time I left for college, Dad had learned that no charges would be brought against him. And still the battle continued: he was informed by the government that in fact he'd never been considered a target of investigation, which not only stripped him of his very struggle, but also put him, put the whole family, in a financial hole. For if you were a “target” against whom charges were ultimately dropped, you were entitled to some reimbursement of your legal fees, but otherwise you were stuck with the entire tab. He had to submit a petition maintaining that while he may not have been a “target,” he had qualified as a “subject” under the law. Once, when I was home on vacation, I found a copy of that document:
Mr. Atherton was clearly a ‘subject' of the investigation, as defined both by the ordinary usage of the word ‘subject' and by Section 9-11.150 of the Department of Justice Manual
. And in another paragraph:
Although the Independent Counsel may have eventually dropped Mr. Atherton to the level of a witness, he was most certainly a subject for a significant period of time.

Witness or subject? That was one of the questions I'd been trying to sort out for myself, all these years later, but I hadn't found an answer. There was no jewel in the slagheap, and no lifting my father out of that pitiful moment in which he'd had to plead with the court to recognize him as more than a mere bystander. Now, in 2005, it was too late: what good would it have done him to be recognized after so many years, by such a partial and ambivalent judge as myself? Here I had started out writing a cautionary tale about my father, the father whose mistakes I didn't want to repeat, and then somewhere along the way it had become a cautionary tale about myself, or rather about the depreciated model of myself I carried around, the feckless witness I considered myself to be.

Even so, I refused to accept Courtney's idea that this was all a dead end. I wasn't ready to renounce it. I simply came to the not so revelatory conclusion that when you write about your family, it's not for their benefit. And whatever it had done for me, was already done.

*   *   *

I was invaded by a discomfort I can only recapture in part, a furry weed pushing up through cracked ground, a weed that had become too deeply lodged, by the time I saw it was there, to pull out with my hands. Resentment was one piece of it, but I'm talking about that kind of resentment that bangs around looking for a target, or a subject, that dredged up a boss who'd underpaid me some time ago, also a night in 2001 when I'd gone to a party with my then boyfriend and he'd decided (without telling me) to give crack a try, also a comment my mom had once tossed off, starting with a skeptical
Now, if you were ever to get married …
And along with all that I felt a more general restlessness, like a person who can't sleep because she's lying in bed thinking furious thoughts, except that I wasn't in bed or trying to sleep.

I stared out the window at the dark street. I had to get out, had to go somewhere, no matter that I had nowhere to go. I thought of “nowhere to go,” oh that magic feeling, thought of the summer car trips we had taken in the late seventies and early eighties, the good years of the Pontiac Grand LeMans wagon and “You Never Give Me Your Money” trumpeting quietly from the tape deck, as we passed through Pennsylvania and Ohio, as our dog farted on our suitcases in the way back.

It was drizzling out and warmer than I'd expected it to be, everything damp but also sharp. I walked to the Metro but then saw a taxi and waved it down instead.

When I got out of the cab, the clouds had hidden the sickle of moon, and the drizzle had turned to solid rain. A handful of boisterous men with near-shaved heads huddled together in the door of a restaurant, as someone turned the volume up and down on their jazzy laughs. The street split apart, two lanes descending under an intersection while one lane hugged the storefronts, and the wet cars dove into the dark tunnel, and some part of me knew my own delusion, that is to say I knew I might not be acting in my own best interests, but when did I ever?

I called Rob from under the awning of his building. He didn't answer, but just then a middle-aged couple came out the front entrance, and I slipped inside and into an elevator that opened its doors for me. As I neared his apartment I heard, or thought I heard, his voice. I knocked and nothing. I knocked again. “Hey, open up,” I said.

He opened it maybe a third of the way. “What are you doing here?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“This is not a great time.”

“Could you let me in?” Even as I asked I was pushing my way inside. The place looked different with all the lights on, his jacket over a chair, an open bag of chips on the dining table, along with his laptop and a couple of beer cans. Rob had on a T-shirt and jeans, he was unshaven and annoyed with me, and still he was handsome, the fucker.

“So what is it?” he asked, as he walked over to the computer to read something on the screen.

In the cab I'd rehearsed the middle of the conversation I wanted to have, but not the beginning. “I just have some concerns,” I said, and then stalled. I tried to clear my throat, which devolved into spasms of coughing.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

He fetched a glass of water and set it down on the table.

“I just would like to know, what happened with you and my sister?”

Now he stared at me. “I've seen her, like, twice in the past fifteen years.”

“What happened in high school?”

“We got together a few times. She was kind of a mess.”

“She was not a mess.”

“Senior year, she was.”

“You can't just blame it all on that,” I said. “You guys were a couple.”

“Blame what? I'm not blaming.”

“But something happened.”

“Really, your sister was, like … Look, if she hasn't told you herself, then I don't know.”

I heard the sound of the toilet flushing. “Is there someone in your bathroom?”

“That's from next door.”

He was lying. I walked toward the bathroom and opened the door—and there she was. Nina was barefoot, and her hair was down and wet against her shirt, which didn't seem like
her
shirt. It was a man's striped button-down, too big for her.

“Whoa,” she said. Then she laughed. “Oops.”

I tried to say something but couldn't. Rob, who'd followed me to the bathroom, was tossing out words I didn't catch. Finally I asked, “Whose shirt is that?”

“Hers was soaking wet,” Rob said.

“Have you even been home?” I asked her.

“Sam's in jail. I had to find someone who could help. It's not like my dad's going to. You wouldn't.”

“She came here and told me about this guy who's detained,” Rob said.

I felt sick, wanting to do and say drastic things, but what were they? “This is so … I don't even know what to call it. This is insanity.”

“I've been on the phone to some people. We're trying to figure out what system he's in,” he said. “It might be the county, or it might be ICE—”

“Where are your shoes?” I asked Nina.

“I'm not leaving.”

“It's ten-thirty at night. Get your shoes on. I'm taking you home.”

“You can't make me go.”

“I will call the police and accuse you of things you don't want to be accused of,” I said to Rob.

“Nothing happened?” he said.

I thought about my little gun. It occurred to me that although my father had given it to me to ward off a different kind of threat, in my life to date it was the Robs of the world who'd done more damage than thugs or thieves, and this because I'd failed to defend myself against them. I should've kept it, should've had it with me in my purse, but instead I pulled out my phone.

“I'm calling the police right now. She's underage. You gave her beer. I can call them.”

“Yeah, okay. Go right ahead. You're as crazy as your sister,” he said.

“Maybe I am. She's not, though. Courtney's not crazy.”

“Oh, she is.”

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”

“You really want to know?”

“Lay it on me.”

“She was obsessed with my stepfather. She thought she was in love with him. It took me a while to catch on, but eventually I figured it out. She went after me to get to him.”

“Please.”

“She did.”

“Your stepfather. You expect me to believe that.”

“I don't care if you do or not. She was obsessed.”

“I think you went out with her, you sold her pain pills, you dumped her, and then you were cruel to her after that. That's what I know.”

“Man,” he said, smiling acidly. “Ask her then. You really should.”