The Daylight Marriage (16 page)

Chapter 29

A
few nights after Janine had returned, Lovell found his banjo at the top of the metal shelving unit in the basement. He set out a folding wooden chair, rested his feet on an old recycling bin, and ran his fingers over a few strings.

He had never been all that good. But the metal strings against his fingers and that plinky sound had always activated some part of his brain that he probably otherwise never used. His mother had bought him a Gold Tone Cripple Creek when he started college, despite his father's pressing him to stay with the piano. He took banjo lessons from a woman in Somerville for a while, but a couple of years later, when he moved into the apartment in Brighton with Paul, he sold the instrument as well as his mountain bike for rent money.

Hannah had never heard him play and had asked him about it every so often over the years. “Why not go buy a cheap one somewhere? I think it might be fun for you,” she had said.

“Maybe,” he had always said, but he never did.

A few years back, she bought him one for his birthday and insisted he play a song for her and the kids that same evening after dinner. They watched him strum and pick and fiddle with the tuning pegs, embarrassed as he tried in vain to remember those chords. Nothing came back to him. Not one chord or technique, not one position. “Come on,” she said. “It doesn't have to be perfect. Just try any song.” He finally managed a sorry version of “Skip to My Lou” before setting down the banjo. “Some other time,” he said.

The boiler moaned. The room was unbearably hot, its windows bolted shut now for years. It was a mess down here. A corner of the carpet was rotted and black, possibly moldy, and there were a couple of huge boxes of broken tools that had to be fixed or just thrown away. Garbage bags stuffed with clothes that the kids had outgrown sat nearby. In another corner of the basement sat several boxes of Hannah's belongings, one full of her antique perfume bottles packed in newspaper, another with old photo albums.

He set the banjo back on the shelf and began to scrub caked dirt from the concrete floor, stack the shovels and ice scrapers, untangle and wind hoses. He worked until he felt a stinging between his shoulder blades. He headed upstairs and, after a tall glass of water, returned downstairs to vacuum the moldy carpet. He sliced into it with a knife, cutting away the black, rotted spots and stuffing them into garbage bags. He made a pile of rusted and broken tools to be thrown away.

He took a seat in an old rocking chair in the corner of the room. He considered all the tasks that remained before him: the stack of old blankets and sheets that had lain in a heap by the washing machine for a good decade now and would have to be washed; the boxes of gardening guides and travel books about France and Greece; the plastic crate full of poetry books, which would all need to go somewhere at some point. The seat of the chair sagged beneath him. He shifted his weight forward so as not to break it further. It had been Hannah's chair, where her nanny had rocked her so long ago, the same rocking chair where Hannah herself had held and fed both Janine and Ethan when they were young. “Nanny? You actually had a nanny?” Lovell had asked Hannah when Lydia first brought the rocking chair to this house.

He brushed a clump of dust now from the arm of the chair. He gathered the grubby blankets and sheets and carried them upstairs to the washer.

THE KIDS WERE
asking to go back to school. Ethan missed his friends. Janine was tired of having to mail in homework. Lovell was torn: They needed to get back to life. They all did. But those DNA results could come in at any time. “Soon enough, you can go back,” he told them.

In the days after Janine's return, a weight had begun forming within Lovell, a gravitational force born of his finally allowing a now undeniable probability to enter his mind. There was a chance that the lab would find another woman's DNA in those bones, but there was a greater chance that they would not.

Each day, he could feel himself hunkering down a little more, his body nearly solidifying in preparation for what would likely come. He could hear himself speak in a quieter, gentler voice to the kids. He kept the radio on low most of the time to fill the stark quiet. It was good to tend to their environment in these ways, to create a protected zone of comfort and warmth for them. For the first time in months, he felt as if he were kneeling down, keeping still on a raft that seesawed and bucked over ferocious water, holding steady and firm.

He cooked them soup one night, a minestrone from an old family recipe, and as they sat behind their bowls at the kitchen table, he looked over at his kids and said, “We are a family still,” although he could not quite say just what he meant.

Ethan said, “What else would we be?”

Lovell exchanged a look with Janine, who said, “Just say, ‘You're right, Dad.'”

“‘You're right, Dad,'” Ethan echoed.

After dinner, Lovell went for the scrapbook that they had made with Dr. Valmer. “Come take a look with me?” he suggested, and with some hesitation, each took a seat beside him on the couch. Maybe it would look different to him now, less treacly. Maybe looking at it together could get them talking about some of the happier times.

He opened to the page that had Ethan's elephant-shaped card, the postcard Hannah had sent to Janine at sleepaway camp. He flipped back to the first page, “Our Mother,” with the list of words below:
Thoughtful. Nice. Loved flowers. Pretty.

“I hated making this thing,” Ethan said.

“You did?” Lovell asked.

“Well, we didn't know what was going on, and Dr. Valmer made us act like we did.”

“Plus,” Janine added, “what about all the other things that we could have said about her? What about how even though she liked to cook, it stressed her out? What about how she always complained about the crowds at Fenway, you know, those meatheads everywhere who chugged beer and the ones who fell on top of her? I wanted to put in something like how she always nagged me to stand up straight and stop chewing my hair. Where was the page for that? And how about how anal she was about us keeping our rooms clean?”

“She used to yell at me for watching too much TV,” Ethan added. “She told me I should ride a regular bike instead of my unicycle. She said it wasn't safe.”

Lovell thought about it. Ethan had hardly ridden his unicycle since she had disappeared. He used to spend hours on the thing. “She was a good mother,” Lovell said.

“Yeah,” Janine murmured.

He thought to say more, maybe about how much she had loved them, or to make denials or jokes or resolutions or apologies—anything not to have to sit here with these children and listen to this silence. But none of the choices were quite right.

“I just thought the scrapbook was really stupid,” Ethan said at last.

“A total crock of shit,” Janine added.

Chapter 30

O
n the first day of February, Lovell woke to the sound of the doorbell. He bolted out of bed, threw on a bathrobe, and hurried downstairs before the kids woke. He heard the slamming of a car door outside somewhere, and as he stepped down the front hallway toward the door, he saw a news van pull up across the street behind another. Rain was pouring down outside. The sky was a murky gray. He had to do this. Once again, he had to open this door and let in something or someone with the potential to ruin them. He had no choice but to open the door right now.

On the front steps stood a girl, probably in her late teens or early twenties. She introduced herself as Melissa Michaels. She stood clutching the padded straps of a maroon backpack, her black bangs soaked and dripping. Standing here before him, she looked young enough to be his daughter.

They huddled on the porch to avoid the wind-driven rain. He did not want to invite her in. He did not want Janine or Ethan to come downstairs and see her here.

She adjusted her backpack and looked up at him before she spoke. “I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Hall.” She kept her gaze on the hair at his forehead. “The DNA results for the arm just came in,” she said. “Detective Ronson asked me to tell you that we can wait and not tell the news people yet, if you want.”

“Shit.” He bent forward and set his hands on his knees to steady himself. “Yeah. Please, yes, let's wait, if you don't mind.”

“I'm really, really sorry,” Melissa said, wiping raindrops from her glasses.

“The tests, they're definitive?”

She nodded gently.

“Shit,” he said again. Ethan was just nine years old. Janine was only fifteen. And Hannah. Thirty-nine.

“Do you want me to stay?” Melissa gestured toward the door.

“Maybe just a minute.” He knew he should invite her in.

She edged forward as if to hug him but then stepped awkwardly back. He wondered whether he was her first case.

He could hardly ask her to remain out here in the rain much longer, neither of them saying anything. He finally said, “OK.”

“I think Detective Ronson said he would contact you. The trial date hasn't been set yet. But I'll let you know when it is. I'll call you.” She repeated, “I'm—I'm so sorry.”

The rain began to gust and trill around them. He looked down at her black rubber boots. He would remember these boots, he knew. If he passed them in a store or on someone else on the street, they would send him right back to this moment.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye, Melissa.”

He watched her walk away and step into her car. He saw her sit for a moment behind the steering wheel, her head down, before she pulled her seat belt across her chest and turned on the ignition, shifted into reverse, and slowly pulled out of the driveway. A policeman waved aside another news van pulling up in order to let her pass. Lovell watched her car drive slowly down the street, breaking to avoid a squirrel, and finally disappear.

“Good-bye,” he heard himself say again.

He wondered how long he could stand here on his front porch facing the reporters, getting drenched by the rain, before Janine or Ethan would come outside and ask him what was wrong.

Chapter 31

L
ater, he considered the not insignificant amount of will and bravery that it took to walk back inside that house, wake the kids, deliver the news to them, call Hannah's mother and father, her sister, Sophie, his own parents, everyone in the world, it seemed. He granted a few interviews with reporters, and this time he let himself say whatever came into his head: “How does this feel? It feels like fucking hell on earth, if you can't guess for yourself.” Let them bleep out what they needed to.

Of course, what option was there but to tell everyone what had happened? Go back in his house, get his keys, and drive away from his kids and his life? It certainly crossed his mind.

He had done pretty well, he thought. He had held it together while the kids sobbed against him. He had invited Hannah's family to come to the house so that they could be together. He had extended an open invitation to Sophie as well, if she wanted to come and see the kids. And later, he had taken some time to himself in the bathroom to stare into the mirror and splash water on his face and hold the bottle of her lemongrass hand cream to his chest and say, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” To sit inside the empty bathtub and fold his huge body into itself, the bottle still in his hands, and say, “I'll do better. I will love them better. I will love them so much.”

He had jumped headfirst into a massive, rocky canyon and was somehow still in one piece.

AFTER THE FUNERAL
service at the church, once the kids returned to school, the day before Lovell went back to work, he stood in line to check out at Stop and Shop. He looked over, above the gum and candy, at a small TV showing the news. There was Susan Sperck saying Trobec's name. Lovell instinctively raised his hand to cover his eyes. He went to turn his cart and move to another aisle, but for some reason he stopped himself. He turned his eyes back to the TV. Trobec was seated across from Sperck in his oversize orange coveralls. His voice sounded younger than Lovell might have expected, higher and thinner, as if its lower register had been shaved away. Susan asked some questions about his life as a husband and father and then directed the conversation toward the inevitable. Trobec admitted that he had killed Hannah Hall and the other women, of course he had, and he supposed that he did regret it. “Especially now that I'm sitting here in this shit house.”

Lovell considered grabbing the TV and hurling it to the floor. He was dizzy as the woman at the register checked out his groceries. He felt sickened as he slid his credit card through the machine.

After Melissa had left his house that day, Lovell's questions had nagged at him, despite what he now knew. In what way and to what degree and at what points had he himself contributed to her each and every move that day? It was excruciating to think about all those possible images, the words that may or may not have been spoken. He tried to imagine what she had seen and heard, what she must have thought, her memories and fears. The unthinkable fear.

Was it penance that he was after? A form of retroactive witnessing, the accompanying presence, himself there with her, if in hindsight, watching and promising to remember? Maybe it was a form of self-punishment. Maybe, but also proof that those “irrelevant unknowns” were in fact relevant. If they had not mattered to the police or Trobec or the lawyers, they certainly mattered to her—and to him. After all, these were the last moments of her life.

In the parking lot of the grocery store, something inside him began to loosen, a rock-hard knot that had pulled and twisted within him for months now. There were moments of her last day that he could or would not fathom. He understood that at some point he would have to let those parts go. He would have to leave them to her, because in the end, all of it was hers and hers alone, October 4, 2007.