Mortal Memory (34 page)

He was right, of course, and it was easy for me to see everything that had happened that morning, the terrible hatred my brother had shown for my sister, the delight he'd taken in chipping away at her vibrant, striving character. That morning he'd been even worse than usual, his small eyes focused upon her with a deadly earnest:
You're not going anywhere.

My father turned away for a moment, drew in a deep breath, then looked back toward me. “I couldn't take it that morning,” he said quietly. “I couldn't stand to see what he was doing to your sister.” He smiled. “I knew how much she wanted out of life, you see,” he went on, “how much she wanted her life to be different.”

“Different from what?” I asked.

“Different from my life, Stevie,” he said. “Different from your mother's life, and what Jamie's life would probably have been.” He stopped, as if remembering her again in the full glory of her extravagant desire. “She talked to me about it, you know,” he added after a moment. “About all she wanted to do in her life, all the places she wanted to go.” He smiled softly. “She would come down in the basement where I was, and she would talk to me about it.” His eyes drifted away slightly. “Always barefoot, remember?” he said, almost wistfully. “I used to tell her to put on her shoes, but she never would. She was like that, untamed. She'd always go back up with her feet covered with that grit from the basement floor.” He grew silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “that morning after Jamie had acted the way he did, I went out and sat down in that little room we had, the one with the vines.” He stopped, his voice a little harder when he spoke again. “That's when I decided that it couldn't go on like it was, Stevie,” he said. “That something had to be done about it.”

“You mean, something had to be done about Jamie?”

“About what he was doing to your sister,” my father answered. “Something had to be done about that.”

I remembered the look on his face as he'd sat alone in the solarium that morning. It was a grim, determined face, all doubt removed. It was then that he'd decided that “something had to be done,” I supposed, not while he'd sat gazing at my mother as she stooped over the flower garden, but that spring morning when Jamie had launched his attack upon the daughter that my father loved.

My father's hands drew back, each of them finally drifting over the edge of the table. “I told Laura about it a week later,” he said. “She came down to the solarium one night. It must have been toward the middle of that last summer.” He drew in a deep breath. “I told her what I wanted to do.”

I looked at him, astonished. “Kill us,” I muttered.

His eyes widened, staring at me unbelievingly. “What?”

“That you were going to kill us,” I said, “you told Laura that?”

He shook his head. “No, Stevie,” he said, “not that.” He paused a moment, watching me brokenly. “Never that.”

“What then?”

“I told her that I'd decided to take her away,” my father said, “that I'd looked through a lot of travel brochures, and that I'd already decided on the place.” He looked at me solemnly. “I told her that I'd already bought two tickets to Mexico, and that I was going to take her there.”

“And leave the rest of us?” I asked.

“Jamie wouldn't have cared,” my father said. “And your mother, she'd always wanted to move back to Maine, where she'd grown up.” His face took on the look of a mournful revelation. “There was someone there, Stevie. Waiting for her, you might say. Someone from way back. Someone she'd never forgotten.”

It was the phantom lover, of course, Jamie's real father, a man in a mountain cabin, as I imagined him at that moment, writing letters to my mother on soft blue paper.

“Jamie and your mother would both have been better off in another place,” my father said.

“And me?”

“You're what made it hard, Stevie,” my father said. “I hadn't really decided about you.”

I stared at him bitterly. “At the time you killed them, you mean?” I asked brutally.

My father did not so much as flinch. “I chose to save my daughter,” he said with a grave resignation.

A strange pride gathered in his voice, and suddenly I recognized that at that moment when he'd told Laura of his plan to take her away, at that precise moment in his life, and perhaps for the only time, his love had taken on a fabled sweep, had become a thing of knights on horseback and maidens in dire distress, a romantic mission of preservation and defense, one far different from the type undertaken by those other men with whom Rebecca had already forever linked his name.

“I never saw Laura more happy when I told her about Mexico,” my father said.

In my mind, I saw them together in the little solarium with its windows draped in vines, my father in the white wicker chair, Laura below him, her face resting peacefully, as if she were still a little girl.

“Why didn't you go then?” I asked. “Why didn't you just take her and go away?”

“Because toward the end of the summer I found out your mother was dying,” my father said. “I couldn't leave her in a situation like that. So I canceled the tickets.” He shook his head helplessly. “I didn't tell Laura right way, and when I did, she looked as if her whole world had collapsed.” He seemed to bring her back into his mind, fully, in all her furious need. “Laura wasn't like me,” he said again, “there was something great in her.” He stopped, then added, “But there was something wrong, too, something out of control.”

“When did you tell Laura that you'd canceled the tickets?”

“Around the middle of October.”

“Did you tell her why?”

“I'd already told her that your mother was very sick,” he answered, “but I'm not sure she realized that it had made me change our plans until I actually told her that I'd canceled the tickets, that we wouldn't be going to Mexico together.”

I stared at him evenly, remembering the sudden, wrenching illness that had gripped my mother the night of the fireworks. I remembered how Laura had prepared her a glass of milk after we'd returned.

“Laura tried to kill her, didn't she?” I asked coolly.

He nodded. “Yes, she did,” he said. “I thought it was over, after that. She'd done something terrible, but I thought that would be the end of it.” He looked at me pointedly. “Until that day.”

That day.

“It was raining,” I said softly, “that's almost all I remember.”

He drew in a quick breath. “Yes, it was raining,” he said. He waited a moment, as if deciding whether or not to go on. “I was at the store downtown like always,” he began finally. “I was alone. There was so much rain. No one was on the streets.” The old mournfulness swept into his eyes. Then the phone rang,” he said. “It was Laura. She said that your mother had gotten sick, and she told me to come home.”

“When was this?”

“Around a quarter after three, I guess,” my father said. “I went home right away.”

I could feel a silence gather around us as we sat facing each other in the small tavern, vast and empty, as if ours were the only voices that had survived a holocaust.

“Laura met me in the kitchen,” my father said. “She'd made me a ham sandwich, and for a minute, I thought that the long time she'd been so angry with me, that it was finally over.”

“Where was my mother?”

“Laura said that she was upstairs,” my father answered, “that she was a little better, that she was taking a nap.”

And so, suspecting nothing, my father had sat down at the kitchen table, and taken a few bites of the ham sandwich Laura had made for him. She had disappeared upstairs almost immediately, and after a time my father had wandered out to the solarium and slumped down in one of its white wicker chairs.

“I wasn't there very long,” he said, “when I heard someone coming down the stairs. It was your mother.”

Perhaps more fully than I had ever thought possible, I now saw my mother in all her lost and loveless beauty. I saw her move softly down the carpeted stairs in her fluffy house shoes, her hand clutching the throat of her blouse, a woman perhaps less foolish than any of us had thought, her mind already wondering which of her children would try to kill her next.

“From where I was sitting, I just saw her go by,” my father said. “Then I heard the basement door open, and I knew she was going down there.”

He heard her feet move down the wooden stairs, then went back to the little book he'd found in the solarium, reading it slowly, as he always did, his eyes moving lethargically across the slender columns.

“Jamie came in after that,” he said.

Encased in a vast solitude, rudderless and without direction, my brother came through the kitchen door, trails of rainwater dripping from his hair. He glanced coldly toward my father, but didn't speak. Instead he simply bounded up the stairs.

“I heard him close the door to his room,” my father said. “He made a point of slamming it.”

After that, but for only a few, precious moments, a silence had descended upon 417 McDonald Drive. For a time, as he read in the solarium, my father had heard nothing but the rain.

Then a blast of incredible magnitude rocked the house.

“I thought it was a gas explosion,” my father said, “something like that. I couldn't imagine what else it might be.”

He jumped to his feet, the book sliding to the floor of the solarium. He stared around a moment, not knowing where to go. In a blur of speed, he saw Laura fly past the open space that divided the living room from the downstairs corridor.

“The way she was running, I thought something must have happened upstairs,” my father said, “so I ran up there, thinking that Jamie might be hurt, that things might be on fire.”

And so he rushed up the stairs, taking them in broad leaps, plummeting down the corridor where he could see a blue smoke coming through the open door of Jamie's room.

“I ran into his room, thinking that he must be hurt, that I had to pull him out,” my father said.

What he saw was a boy without a face.

“And I still didn't know what had happened,” my father said, breathless, already exhausted, as if he had only now made that dreadful run. “I still didn't realize at that point that Jamie had been shot,” he said wonderingly, as if, through all the years, this was the strangest thing of all.

He ran to him, picked him up slightly, his shoes already soaking up Jamie's rich, red blood. Still stunned, dazed, unable to think, he heard a roar from down below.

“Then I knew, I think,” he said, “but even then … even then …”

Even then, he didn't know for sure that his family was being slaughtered.

“And so I just stood there, in the middle of Jamie's room,” my fathet said.

Just stood there, his eyes darting about wildly until he finally bolted toward the basement.

“From out of nowhere, I thought that it must be someone else,” he said, “that some killer had broken into the house somehow.” He looked at me, the astonishment still visible in his face. “I thought that it was this killer who must have chased Laura down the stairs, that she'd been running from someone else when I'd seen her fly past me that time before.”

And so he began to run again, into the bedroom across the hall, then down the stairs, taking long, desperate strides as he searched for “someone else” in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, his bloody tracks leading everywhere until, at last, they led down the basement stairs.

He stopped on the third step, stricken by what he saw.

“Your mother was behind a big cardboard box,” my father said. “Laura was standing just a few feet away. My old shotgun was in her hands. The barrel was still smoking.” He looked at me unbelievingly. “She was barefoot, like always.”

Barefoot, yes. Like she was in the photograph that should have told me everything, her bare feet stretched toward the camera, their upturned soles covered with the dark grit she'd picked up from the basement floor as she'd stood and aimed the shotgun at my mother.

Swenson's words came rushing back to me: “Someone else. Someone in the house. Someone helping.”

Laura.

My father shook his head slowly. “She just looked at me, and she said, ‘Now we
have
to go!'” He stared at me pointedly. “She meant Mexico,” he said, “that now, after what she'd done, that I had no choice but to take her there.”

After that, they'd gone back up to the kitchen together, my father shaken, lost, unable to register the events that had just swept over him.

“I knew she'd done something to your mother a month before,” he said, “but I'd never dreamed that she would do the same to Jamie or to …” He stopped and looked at me emptily.

“To me?” I said.

He leaned forward, his eyes very gentle. “She wanted me to do it, Stevie,” he said. “She said she couldn't.”

Then she had gone upstairs to her room, walking briskly up the stairs, like someone who'd just been released from prison.

“I stayed in the kitchen,” my father told me. “I thought about it all for a while.”

For a while, but not for long. Only for that short interval which Mrs. Hamilton had noticed between the second shot and the final one.

“I knew Laura had to die,” my father said, “and I knew that if I killed her, they would blame all of it on me, that you would never know what she'd done to them.”

Or had planned to do to me.

“So I wiped her fingerprints off the gun,” my father said. “Then I walked upstairs and …” He stopped, his eyes glancing away for a moment, then returning to me. “It was instant,” he whispered.

I saw my sister turn, saw her eyes widen in disbelief, her hand lift futilely as he pulled the trigger.