I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (20 page)

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Still, I had to subscribe to some initial ways of looking at what had happened. To that purpose, the most incisively spiritual thing I read was a response by the poet Rita Dove to a journalist asking about Reetika Vazirani: “She couldn't find her way back to herself.” And the most ethically useful thing was offered by David Mamet, who had driven over to our farmhouse in Vermont: “If you are walking down the road and you look up ahead and see a house on fire, if you are a good person you don't wish for it to be someone else's house.” The essence of altruism in this felt meaningful, but I said to David that given the waking nightmare of a child murder, and the bewildered sobbing in my farmhouse, it was very difficult to feel much like a good person. He stayed for dinner to talk about it.

 

The summer had just been going along. Then on July 16, my family and a friend, Alexandra, had been to Montpelier, a twenty-minute drive from the farmhouse, for dinner at a restaurant. It was a balmy evening, and I remember pulling the car up to the house in dusky light and seeing a kestrel heliotroping over the slope of a dandelion-filled field, halfway between the garden along the stone wall and my writing cabin. Once inside the house, I lingered in the kitchen while Jane and Emma went upstairs to watch a movie. I'd intended to carry coffee and chocolate mints upstairs.

That's when I noticed the message light blinking on the telephone on the wall next to the pantry. It was one of those machines capable of archiving far more messages than one would normally receive during a few hours' absence from home. I pressed the button, put the receiver to my ear, and heard, “You have fifty-three messages.” I got a bad feeling. I immediately poured a shot of Scotch; this could not be good news. Then, after hearing five police messages and one from friends, I went upstairs. Telling Jane, and aware that in the telling I would cause sadness, was like gasping for air. We waited until the next day to sit down with Emma and tell her what had happened.

 

Our dear friend Stanley drove up for a visit. Emma's pal Caitlin flew up and stayed for a week. Many wonderful people called from all over. It was a shocking irony to find out that in Washington, D.C., hearing the early reports of the incident in the distracted way we all take in local television news, a few people thought it was us who'd been murdered. In the face of this, my desperate, stupid joke was, well, if that had been the case, would I have answered the phone? I supposed I wanted to hear the relief in their laughter. But of course we were confused, discombobulated, our lives thrown radically off-kilter, and for weeks and weeks we had terrible, insomniac nights.

In the days that followed, the quotidian also served as blessed distraction: errands, house projects, Emma's Shakespeare rehearsals, city friends up for a visit, walks on the dirt road, swimming in ponds, attempting to write, the ten thousand things of daily life. But on some very basic level, an air of eerie if abstract preoccupation pervaded, and much of the emotional dimensions of familiar life had become unfamiliar. We were self-consciously aware of our need day by day to calibrate, adjust, and maintain our equilibrium. We carefully set about doing this. There were friends and laughter on those days and evenings. But at the same time, we held an ongoing vigil against despair, and as resourceful as we were, we knew we were amateurs up against a monstrosity. Falling apart, gathering life together, falling apart, gathering.

 

This odd thing happened with television in Vermont. I can far better understand it now, but at the time it was working on an altogether perplexing level. Jane started to watch reruns of
Law and Order
—mornings, afternoons, nights. These dramatic procedurals provided background visuals and voices (which sometimes felt like voice-overs of our own life, because to hear what the characters were saying, our silence was required) on the second floor of the farmhouse. I'd come and go, taking in snippets of dialogue and becoming generally apprised of plots and able to recognize the principal actors so splendid at portraying sanctimonious and brilliantly analytical detectives and scolds. Years later, when discussing this, Jane said that she was working on hope, and her thinking was that if she relentlessly exposed herself to the sheer plentitude and commonality of murder, it might somehow serve to anesthetize the pain of an individual homicide and “make things a little better.” In episode after episode of
Law and Order,
the unifying reason for suspension of disbelief was that, with few exceptions, the murder was solved and the perpetrator brought to justice. Yet in messier real life outside of television, there had been the perverse miscarriage of justice in Reetika Vazirani's taking the life of her son, so as to “save him from a terrible world,” a verbatim quote of the helter-skelter logic she advocated to herself more than once in her notebooks. Jane watched episodes of
Law and Order
for some time, until she realized that she'd begun to “retraumatize” herself, and so for the most part stopped.

But Jane wasn't alone in trying to find some way to invest in the possibility of allegory helping out a little. Over the next six months, I watched at least thirty times the classic cinematic treatise on child murder,
M,
directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre. (I had not thought much about this movie since I was twenty, living in Halifax, when Isador Sarovnik regaled me with stories of his friendship with Laszlo Lowenstein.) But my successive viewings of this German expressionist film only served to transfer the real-death images—for example, those in the police photographs taken in our dining room—to the cinematic depiction of child murder. Not much help there at all, really.

 

Emma had turned fifteen in April 2003. A wonderful pleasure to be with. She was a regular teenager, though I also knew her to have a big appetite for life and to be remarkably poised. Naturally, when the murder-suicide took place in July, that poise was shattered, but she got right to dealing with it. The morning after we received the news, she asked to go rowing on East Long Pond; I'd rented a cottage there for the summer. And that's what we did. She took up the oars and rowed herself and me the mile or so circumference of the pond. And whether consciously or not, she rowed with fierce concentration and at a fast pace, her face flushed with exertion, her arm and leg muscles straining, and I mean without cease, until we returned to the dock. Once we had overturned the rowboat on land and begun to walk up the wooden steps of the cottage, she said, “I won't develop the photographs I took of Jehan. But they should be developed. That little boy's family should have them.”

I felt right then, and feel the same way now, that this seemed entirely consistent with Emma's dignified comportment, and that it showed a lot of self-knowledge, too. I'd observed Emma at work in various darkrooms and could see she loved knowing her way around them, and that she had already given herself to a kind of parallel life in photography—that is, apart from school and the vexations and challenges of being a teenager. I can't really say that it was at that age she'd started thinking of herself as a photographer, but I knew that for her photography was definitely a passion. Her photographs of Jehan had originally been a fifteen-year-old's way of trying to entertain a two-year-old boy—they'd spent less than an hour together, only once, the day he and his mother came to discuss staying in our house—and all of a sudden the photographs had become memorial portraiture.

And so, driving home from East Long Pond, as we spoke a little more about the photographs—because she wanted to—it became evident to me that Emma knew how to protect herself, in the red-tinged light of a darkroom, from having to see a child's innocent face float up in a tray of developer. “No way,” as she put it. “No way.” And I thought, My daughter's going to be okay. In the end, I delivered the negatives to Andrew, one of Emma's photographic mentors, whom she'd apprenticed to and who had encouraged her to attend a summer class at the Maine Media Workshops. I told Andrew, at Emma's insistence, that after he'd developed the negatives, he should not leave the prints around his studio where Emma might see them. Andrew sent the photographs to Reetika Vazirani's mother and stepfather, who never acknowledged receiving them.

 

It is important to say again that I scarcely knew her. I didn't at the time and don't now care to be informed about her biographical details. I've had quite enough of her life, which so violently intersected with my family's. We were friendly, but not friends. I admired some of her writing and even published three of her poems in an issue of the literary journal
Conjunctions
that I edited.

For a month or so before she took up residence in our house in Washington, Jane had spoken with her on the telephone. My understanding is that Reetika Vazirani had called to ask about teaching jobs, but also indicated that most aspects of her life remained unresolved, including where she might live during the summer. Jane and I had been used to letting writers stay in the house. So it was characteristic of her empathy that Jane suggested Reetika Vazirani and her son Jehan might consider doing just that. No big deal, really. We were going to Vermont anyway, and it would be good to have someone look after things. For us it would be a
mitzvah
—the right thing to do. Personally, I had spoken with Reetika Vazirani only once before, at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and the topic of discussion on that occasion had been restaurants in Middlebury. The second time we spoke was when she stopped by in Washington to discuss housesitting.

On that visit, I had no sense of her taking any measure of the house at all: we sat in the living room drinking tea while Jehan watched a children's video upstairs in Emma's room. After exchanging pleasantries, she said, “A lot of writers said you were away in the summer, and we met once, remember?” Perhaps skeptical, certainly a touch edgy, I said, “Oh, a lot of writers.
Who?
” She reeled off a dozen or so names, and I thought: I don't know any of them. The initial discomfort on my part may have been caused by the fact that she was so deftly able to suggest the sponsorship of a very loose-knit literary community. But the thing was, when she started in on her domestic travails, I didn't grant much leeway. I felt that asking for a roof over her head was difficult enough without her having to test out various reasons. Besides, the most important reason was upstairs watching a video in my daughter's room.

How could I know? How could I know that the simplicity of our verbal contract—while living in our house you take care of it—might obfuscate future malevolence? Hindsight, of course, is powerfully suggestive and self-indicting, but cannot change what happened. Yet it has often occurred to me that had I let this weary-looking, jittery, and singularly accomplished woman with the lovely smile, whose intelligence I was, on the surface, beginning to enjoy, indulge in an hour or so of what I later understood to be a fugue state of exhaustion, fuming anger, self-pity, emotional claustrophobia, and God knows what else, I most likely would not have, at least in so perfunctory a manner, muted my protective instincts. I would have heard something alarming. In one breath I say,
How could I know?
and in the next breath say,
I should have known.

Anyway, when she and I were done talking, I served more tea and brought out some carrot cake. We laughed over the photographs in a biography of Groucho Marx I'd been reading. Emma walked in the door, home from school, and immediately went upstairs to hang out with Jehan; she showed him her collection of key chains and took those photographs of him. I remember that, even without noticeably registering incipient concern, I felt some relief when mother and child left. I watched through the front window as they walked over to look at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament like tourists. Then I went upstairs to take a nap, or talk with Emma, or start dinner, I cannot recall. At the time, I was quite pleased, I believe especially on Jehan's behalf, but for both of them, that for a few months they'd have a cozy house where life could be lived, a playground nearby, a thousand books, a writing desk, light-filled rooms, classical music CDs in stacks, a rectory of Irish and South Asian priests next door.

From my mouth to God's ear, I wish I had said, “No, terribly sorry, but this housesitting situation isn't possible.”

 

Reetika Vazirani had left a telephone message for Jane's best friend, Jody, to the effect that she was “in trouble” and to come to the house as soon as possible. Jody had barely known Reetika Vazirani either, but Jody had a key to the house. Given the amount of time between when the message was left and the murder-suicide took place, apparently Jody's assignment was to discover the bodies—can you imagine?—which Jody eventually did, and quickly alerted neighbors. The police and paramedics soon arrived. In a matter of hours yellow crime-scene tape covered both back and front porches like a garish Halloween prank. And as the investigation got under way, the news spread, and demons began to stand on a lot of hearts.

 

At the end of August, I flew down to Washington from Vermont and stepped into the house at about five-thirty in the evening. I had asked friends in advance to take down the three early-twentieth-century Dutch portraits hanging in the living room. The grim expressions on the Dutch faces had always struck me as judgmental almost to the point of satire, and I was convinced that these anonymous personages were witnesses and we shouldn't have to run the risk of seeing horror reflected in their eyes.

On the other hand, many gifts had arrived to redeem the walls. Antonin Krathovil had sent one of his photographs. Jake Berthot had sent one of his exquisite drawings of trees. Kazumi Tanaka had sent her woodcut of Japanese cranes lifting from a pond. My friend Elizabeth had sent a photograph of the wild coast of British Columbia she had taken.