Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

“No,” I said. “We just walked to school like always. She left me at my school, then walked on to hers, about three blocks down the road.”

  “When did you see Laura again?”

  “She was waiting at the corner for me right after school,” I said. “She always did that.”

  For a moment, as I remembered her standing on the corner waiting for me that afternoon, her books in her arms, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, I felt her loss again, but this time with a piercing depth, as if all the conversations I might have had with her in life, all the good and comforting times we might have had together, had suddenly swept over me in a great wave of imagined days. I saw us share all that we had not been allowed to share, the keenest experiences of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, the approach of middle age, all that my father had abruptly and mysteriously canceled as surely as he’d canceled those two plane tickets to Mexico.

  “I loved my sister,” I said, though barely above a whisper. “And I think she loved me.”

  Rebecca’s next question came at me like a slap in the face. “And Jamie,” she asked, “did you love him?”

  I answered without hesitation. “No.”

  “Did anyone in the family love him?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered. “He always seemed alone.”

  Alone in his bunk, alone at his desk, alone beneath the tree in the backyard, always alone.

  “So Jamie never waited for you after school?” Rebecca asked.

  “No, only Laura did that,” I answered. “She was always there, waiting on the corner, just like she was that first day of school.”

  Despite the warmth of the weather, as I recalled then, the first leaves of autumn had already begun to drift down upon us. I saw them fall slowly, but thickly, as Laura and I made our way down Ontario Street, and I felt a great sadness settle upon me, like the leaves.

  “The leaves were falling,” I said to Rebecca. “They were very red.”

  But they could not have been red, I realized. I was not thinking of leaves. I was thinking of my sister’s death, and Jamie’s and my mother’s. I was thinking of their thickly falling blood.

  “Did you and your sister talk much on the way home that afternoon?” Rebecca asked.

  “Not that I recall.”

  “You walked silently, all the way home?”

  Something came back vaguely, a tiny detail. “No, I don’t think we walked all the way home together that day,” I said slowly, unsure. “I think she went into Oscar’s, that little convenience store on the corner.”

  Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “Why would you remember that?” she asked.

  “Because it was so unusual,” I answered. “But I do remember it now.”

  I saw Laura turn to me, felt her hand release mine. “Go on home, Stevie,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then she walked away, moving slowly toward the convenience store, and finally disappearing inside of it. As I headed home, I saw her standing by the window, her eyes fixed on me, as if she were waiting for me to leave.

  “So you walked the rest of the way home by yourself?” Rebecca asked.

  I nodded. “Laura told me to go on home without her, and so I did.”

  “Was Jamie home when you got there?” Rebecca asked.

  “No,” I said. I could feel it returning to me slowly, a picture of that afternoon. “No one was home,” I added, “not even my mother.”

  It had never occurred to me before, but for the first and only time I could remember, my mother had not been at home when I arrived from school. I had returned to an empty house.

  “I was alone in the house for a while,” I said, “then Laura arrived, and Jamie a few minutes after that.”

  Jamie had gone directly to our room, but Laura had walked into the solarium instead. Later, when I’d approached her, skipping jauntily across the living room carpet, she’d looked up at me fiercely, and snapped, “Stop it, Stevie.” Then she’d turned away, letting her eyes drift out toward the empty street.

  “Laura was not in a very good mood that afternoon,” I told Rebecca. “I could tell that something was bothering her.”

  Rebecca glanced down at her notebook. “When did your mother get home?”

  “Soon after the rest of us, I guess,” I told her. Then I remembered something else. “My father brought her. They came home in his van.”

  Once again an odd certainty swept into Rebecca’s face. She leaned forward and began to dig through the briefcase, finally withdrawing several sheets of paper. It looked like a report of some kind, very official, with all the pages stapled together in the left-hand corner.

  “This is the autopsy report on your mother,” she said. “I had never read it because the cause of her death was so obvious.” She flipped back the first two pages. “But while I was with Swenson yesterday, he made an aside about your mother being ‘doomed anyway.’“ She lifted the report toward me. “When I asked him what he meant, he gave me this.”

  She’d already turned to the page that mattered. She’d even underlined the relevant passage. I read it, then handed the report back to her, dazed.

  “She had a brain tumor,” I said, astonished. “Is that why she tried to kill herself?”

  Rebecca nodded. “Probably.”

  I saw my mother as I’d seen her that night, trudging wearily down the stairs, shoulders bowed, head down, a single shaky hand gripping the wooden banister. How alone she must have felt at that moment, how sealed within a black solitude.

  “Your mother’s doctor told Swenson that your mother had come in for an X-ray examination on September 3, and that your father had come with her,” Rebecca said.

  “September 3,” I said, laboring to make those connections I was certain Rebecca had already made. “So when my father and Laura had that conversation by the fence the night we got back from the Cape, he was telling her that my mother was sick, and that she was going for an examination the next day?”

  “Probably,” Rebecca said. She looked back down at her notebook, read a few pages to herself, then glanced back up at me. “The doctor said that your mother arrived on schedule for her appointment. He remembered that your father brought her in, and that later, when the examination was over, he came to pick her up.”

  “Yes, he brought her home that afternoon,” I told her.

  Rebecca seemed hardly to hear me. “Over the next few weeks the doctor had several conversations with your father,” she went on. The kind of conversations male doctors had with men in those days.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rebecca seemed surprised by the question, as if any further explanation should have been unnecessary. “Well, in certain cases a doctor and the husband of a female patient would get together to decide just how much a wife should know.”

  “And so this doctor, he talked to my father about my mother’s illness, but not to her?”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. “According to Swenson’s case notes, the doctor told your father that your mother’s tumor was inoperable, and after that, they discussed quite a few alternatives. The doctor called several specialists in the field. He got back answers that weren’t very encouraging.”

  “I see.”

  “And finally, on October 10, the doctor told your father that there was nothing that could be done,” Rebecca said, “that your mother was going to die.” Her eyes drifted down to her notebook, then back up to me. “The two tickets to Mexico City were canceled that same afternoon.”

  The realization swept over me like a lifting breeze. “So the second ticket was for my mother,” I said. “He’d planned to take her away at some point, a surprise vacation, something like that.”

  “Rebecca nodded. There was no other woman, Steve.”

  For a brief interval, I thought it all over again, everything Rebecca had just revealed. There was still something that didn’t fit, and after a moment, I realized what it was.

  “But when we were unloading the car the night we got back from Cape Cod, and
Laura started complaining about my mother, my father snapped at her, remember? He said, ‘You should know.’”

  Rebecca looked at me without expression.

  “And Laura went up to my mother’s room and sat down on the bed beside her and put her arm around her.”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “Well, my father couldn’t have meant that Laura should know about my mother’s illness,” I said, “because Laura couldn’t have known about it that night. She hadn’t been told yet.”

  “Probably not,” Rebecca admitted.

  “But she went up to my mother’s room anyway,” I added. “So she must have known something.”

  Rebecca glanced down at her notes, as if expecting to find an answer there.

  “And if my mother was already dying, why did my father bother to kill her?” I asked.

  Rebecca sighed. “There’s still something missing, isn’t there? Swenson thought so, too. He never thought it all added up. He never found a motive.”

  “A reason for my father to have done it, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s what you’re still looking for, isn’t it?”

  Rebecca stared at me in earnest. “I know what it was in all these other men,” she said, “but I’m still not sure about your father.”

  I said nothing, but only looked past her, out toward the lake. Night had nearly fallen by then, but beyond the water, I could still make out a dark line of thunderclouds as they rumbled in from the west.

  “Motive is everything,” Rebecca said, though only to herself. “There’s no question that your father did it. His fingerprints were all over the shotgun. There were no other fingerprints.” She thought a moment longer, then glanced toward me. “The only question is why?”

  I continued to watch the wall of dark gray clouds as it closed in upon us. My father’s face swam into my mind, then dissolved almost instantly, a figment, an enigma.

  “It may rain tonight,” I said softly, as if to avoid any further inquiry into the foggy labyrinth of his mind.

  Rebecca nodded. “It was raining that day in November,” she said thoughtfully. Her mind seemed to latch on to an unexpected possibility. “Maybe something happened that day in particular. Maybe something happened that brought it all together.”

  “And sent my father over the edge, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I remembered the changing faces of my father, those features that slowly descended from the joy of his wedding day to the bleakness with which he’d stared toward my mother from the smoke-filled cab of the old brown van.

  “I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “I don’t think something just happened that day, something out of the blue, that caused my father to pick up that shotgun.”

  Rebecca nodded. “No, probably not,” she said. Then she pulled a single sheet of yellow paper from her briefcase. “All right,” she said, “let’s start again. Let’s start from October 10, the day your father learned that your mother was dying. We’ll go from there to the end.”

  I said nothing, but merely waited for her to guide me back toward that day, as I knew she’d always planned to do.

  “Your mother was dying,” Rebecca began. “How did things change in the family because of that?”

  “I never knew she was dying,” I told her. “No one ever told me. And I don’t think Jamie knew, either.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because he was the same old Jamie up until the moment my father murdered him,” I said. “He was always up in his room, always alone. Nothing changed with Jamie.”

  “So you don’t think he ever found out about your mother?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He certainly never changed in his attitude toward her.”

  “What was his attitude?”

  “That she was a maid,” I said, “someone who washed clothes, cooked meals, vacuumed up that gray grime that my father was always tracking up from the basement.”

  “That’s the only way Jamie saw your mother?”

  “More or less. I don’t think he gave her much thought.”

  Rebecca wrote my observations down in her notebook, then glanced up again. “Do you think Laura ever knew just how serious your mother’s illness was?”

  “Oh, yes, of course she did,” I said.

  I saw my sister in the solarium once again, sitting sullenly in the wicker chair as she had that September afternoon, snapping at me to “stop it,” without adding what must have been the final, unsaid portion of that sentence: “Don’t you know your mother’s sick, don’t you know she may be dying!”

  “Laura looked quite upset the afternoon before my mother came home,” I told Rebecca. “And after that, for the next few days, she looked very strange.” I shrugged. “At the time, I couldn’t have known what was bothering her, but I did notice that she seemed …” I stopped, searching for the right word. “She seemed dazed,” I said finally, “like she couldn’t quite figure out what to do, how to handle it.”

  “Did she treat your mother differently after that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For a time, she treated her much more gently.”

  Rebecca’s eyes narrowed questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘for a time’?”

  Even though it had been my own phrase, it struck me as being almost purposely vague, just as it had clearly struck Rebecca as being so.

  “Well, for the first few weeks, Laura was very gentle and helpful,” I explained.

  It was easy for me to recall all the little gestures of kindness my sister had made toward my mother during that brief time. She’d helped her in the kitchen, gone shopping with her on Saturday afternoons, and had been generally more tender toward her than she’d ever been.

  “But that kindness didn’t continue?” Rebecca asked.

  “No, it didn’t,” I said. “It lasted for a few weeks, more or less until my mother tried to kill herself.”

  “How did it change after that?”

  “Laura seemed to withdraw from her,” I said. “From my father, too. At about the same time.”

  “That would have been around the middle of October, then?”

  I nodded.

  “Jamie was the only one who stayed the same during all those weeks,” I added, then thought a bit more of it, remembering how often he’d begun to bait my mother, too, as if one target were no longer enough for his steadily building spitefulness and anger. “Actually, I think he got a little worse,” I said. “He was sharp with my mother during those last weeks, but he also began to pull away entirely. From all of us, I mean. It was as if he couldn’t stand being in the same house with us anymore.”

  Growing more sullen with each day, bitter in what must have been a terrible, homebound loneliness, I remembered that Jamie had begun to absent himself almost entirely from the family during the last weeks of our time on McDonald Drive. He’d never joined us in the little den anymore, or even gone on those rare family outings to the drive-in movies. Instead, he’d sealed himself in his room, remaining there for hours at a time, coming down only to eat quickly, and after that, trudging up the stairs again.

  “Toward the end,” I told Rebecca, “Jamie was just a face in the hallway or on the other side of the dinner table. My mother didn’t like to be around him. Neither did I. And, of course, Laura hated him.”

  “You left out your father,” Rebecca reminded me. “What did he think of Jamie during this time?”

  Once again I recalled the moment years before when all three of us, Laura and Jamie and myself, had erupted into noisy battle in the backyard. My father had stepped out onto the second-floor patio and stared down silently, bringing the conflict to an immediate end. Even from that distance, I could tell that his eyes had swept smoothly from my upturned face to Laura’s, then back to mine, leaving out the third point in what should have been the triangle of his assembled children. Even in that moment of disciplinary concern, his eyes had not once moved toward Jamie. The following years, it struck me n
ow, had only widened the abyss which separated them.

  “I think that toward the end, my father just gave up on Jamie.”

  “In what way?”

  “Gave up trying to love him, to be a father to him.”

  “Do you think Jamie felt that ‘giving up’?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  And for the first time, I saw Jamie captured in the deep well of his isolation. Not really his father’s son, yet unaware of that dreadful fact, he had been kept outside the circle of our kinship, a prodigal and an outcast. To have killed him in so lonely and bereft a state, the only one among us who had never loved nor been loved by another, struck me as the single, saddest aspect of my father’s crime.

  A wave of empty, helpless grief must have passed over me at that moment, because when I looked back toward Rebecca, she appeared almost frightened by what she saw in my face.

  “We don’t have to finish everything tonight,” she said.

  Finish everything. Those were the words she used. And so I knew that within hours, perhaps minutes, I would be returned to that dreadful state of “back to normal” to which Marie had seemed to look forward with such anxious anticipation. I felt a pall descend, the atmosphere thickening and congealing around me. My destiny was being sealed. I was being buried alive. It was almost more than I could bear.

  “Do you want to stop for the night, Steve?” Rebecca asked.

  I lifted my head. “No, let’s finish it tonight,” I told her, now anxious to finish everything, to leave Rebecca behind, to go on to whatever it was that awaited me, and to do it quickly, cleanly, without ever looking back.

  She nodded, glanced down at her notes, let Jamie slip back into his long oblivion, and renewed her focus upon Laura.

  “You said that Laura treated your mother very gently for a time,” she began.

  “It was just a brief change,” I said quickly, already pushing toward the next question, driving forward relentlessly, almost a man in flight.

  “And after that how did Laura treat her?”

  “She went back to the same attitude she’d always had toward her,” I answered. “She seemed resentful of her. She avoided her most of the time, but once in a while, she would say something rather harsh.”