So the story that cold, clear January night was the burning stables, the screaming horses, the wealthy family out maybe millions in Saratoga speed. I was alone in the office battering out a town board meeting when I heard the call on the police scanner. I grabbed the camera and ran out back to my car. A hook-and-ladder went screaming by as I pulled out into the street. I attached myself to its rear fender and followed it to the scene.
What a scene it was too. It was a crystal, starry winter’s night. No moon at all. A glittering sky hung over the county’s tree-lined horizon. To the south I could see it, that sky. Down from the hill where the Brett farm stood, it spread out peaceful as prayer song, like an old world country at the end of a fairy-tale road. In the north, though, it had been obliterated. In the north the red flames vaulting from the stable’s roof erased it. The red flasher lights from the dozen engines beat it into nothingness. I jumped out of my car, dragging the camera behind me. I ran, wild-eyed, into the center of chaos.
Now, there is something about a camera. Any newsman will tell you. It does something to you to look at a story through a lens. I have seen men not otherwise brave stand up in the middle of a police crossfire or a riot or a hostage showdown just to get a good picture for the front page. I once saw a woman who could not bear the sight of blood walk through the carnage of a train wreck snapping off shots, unmoved. The camera puts the world at arm’s length. Makes it distant, unreal. The lens is a cold eye to cast on death for those who haven’t got one of their own, and the bravest cameramen I’ve ever met have all been cowards under the skin.
So I got out of my car and I slapped the camera to my face and I charged into the burning stables.
Everything that happened next happened in snapshots. Shots of the mad white eyes of horses straining through the smoke. Shots of the animals rearing behind a wall of flames. I caught the face of a stable hand, stained with soot, streaked with tears, as he hauled on a rope in a desperate battle to pull a frantic stallion out into the open air. I caught a filly sleek with grace and beauty lifting up screaming out of the blaze as the roof came tumbling down around her. All of it happened, it seemed to me, in still, short bursts of motion. In silence. In pictures inside the camera.
And then, all at once, the roar of the flames broke on top of me like a wave. The smoke overwhelmed me. The stable wheeled and faded and rushed toward me. I thought I saw my father’s face. I thought I heard my mother’s voice. And, in fact, someone was screaming at me, clawing weakly at my shoulder, trying to turn me around. Dazed, I pivoted, and I saw her.
She was trying to pull me toward the door. She was screaming, “What are you doing? What are you doing here? What are you doing?”
I heard myself laughing. It was a crazy, high-pitched laugh. “I’m taking pictures, man!” I shouted madly. “I’m taking goddamned pictures!”
She got hold of my jacket and pulled. I staggered after her out the door. I fell to the ground, my lungs grabbing at the cool air. My eyes cleared and I saw the sheet of smoke that lay between me and the stars. And I saw her above me too. I saw her swipe the tears from her face with a brusque, angry motion of her arm. I heard her sobbing. The stable hand rushed by her toward the burning structure. She grabbed his arm. She screamed at him:
“William!”
He turned to her and I saw his eyes rolling white in his blackened face. “They’re all dying, Miss Brett!” He was gibbering. Spit flew from his mouth, tears sparkled flame red on his cheeks. “They’re all dying!”
He tried to pull away from her. She wouldn’t let him go.
“Don’t die!” she shouted. “Don’t die! You can’t! … It’s over! Over …”
He tried again to shake her loose. She flung her arms around his neck and wept on his shoulder. It saved his life. He held her, rocking her back and forth. He raised his face to heaven, weeping too.
I lay on the ground beneath the smoke, clutching my camera, watching. I had never seen anything like her in my life.
She herself had the long strong lines of a creature bred for speed. She was tall and slender and sleek, and when I saw her next I saw how her figure flowed inside her jeans and her tan sweater. Her features were small and exquisite and perfectly related, like those of a porcelain figurine that someone has worked on for years. She had long blond hair that fell straight to her shoulders. She had arching eyebrows over dark green eyes. She was eighteen.
She came into the office on a Saturday afternoon two weeks later. Only me and the sports guy were there. He was pounding out the high school scores, I was doing a piece about a back-country road that had frozen over. I felt the cold air from the door. I looked up over my typewriter, and she was there. She stood with her hips slanted. She looked down at me smiling. She was smoking a cigarette. She must have planned it: No one looks that good by accident.
I stood up. She turned around and went back out. I followed her. She walked across the parking lot. It was nice to watch. The winter sun was low in the sky, a pale disk. I saw its reflection on the polished hood of her car. The car was red. It was low and racy. Something Italian.
She got in behind the wheel. I got in on the passenger’s side. I watched her profile as she shot the machine out into the street.
She went easily through town, she didn’t push it. But when the buildings faded away beside us, when the road began to twist into the hills and the woods, her foot sank down on the pedal. The speedometer needle climbed steadily. The trees at the windows became a blur. But it was all so silent. The engine hummed. The tires never screeched on the hairpin turns. It was all so elegant and so dangerous. I was twenty-three. I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
I didn’t say anything. That was part of it, I guess: whether I would say anything or not. I didn’t. I lit a cigarette. She turned to me and smiled.
She took me over a dirt road, deep into the land her father owned. He owned all the land around the farm. Rolling hills for horses. We came to the brink of a sort of tor, fringed with trees. The trees were bare. We looked through their branches, down at the shambles of the stable that had burned. She turned off the engine.
I looked down at the charred black stain of the wreckage on the pale brown hill below. I smoked. I finished my cigarette. I put it out in the ashtray open on the dash.
Constance turned to me. She brushed her hair out of her face. She smiled. I felt like I was back in the burning stable again: my chest was heavy; I couldn’t breathe.
She laughed a little. She shook her head. “Taking goddamned pictures,” she said.
And then I couldn’t stop kissing her.
* * *
It was like that for a year, maybe a year and a half. Every day, all day, she would be with me in sudden flashbacks. Frozen, fragmentary memories of the night before that would take me over for seconds at a time, that would leave me, when they faded, staring at a pale, distant reality that was not as real as she was. I would be interviewing the superintendant of highways about the shortfall of the sand budget when, suddenly, in my mind, he would fade away from me and I would be tasting the surface of her belly. I would be watching the town supervisor cut the ribbon on a waste treatment plant and then, all at once, I’d be somewhere else. I would feel her fingernails raking my back; I’d feel them reaching up into my hair. Or I would be waking up some police dispatcher for the morning cop calls and I would be inside her, I would feel her breath in my mouth as she cried out, I would hear her. “Anything happen overnight?” I’d ask the cop, and laugh.
Still, still and all, we never would have gotten married if her old man had liked me. He was a crusty, gray-haired buzzard who wore smoking jackets a lot. He couldn’t tolerate “the differences in our upbringing.” I was worse than lower class, I guess. I was middle class. And he gave her hell about it. Anyway, we got married in what Constance later said was “a fit of pique,” which I guess about describes it. I remember her yanking her short-cut riding jacket off a chair and saying, “I’ve really just about had it with that bastard.” Her
father, she meant. “Let’s just get married. That should shut him up.”
I was the one who should have known better. I wasn’t angry. I didn’t give a damn what her father thought of me. I didn’t give a damn about anything except the taste and the feel and the cries of her. So if instead of “Let’s get married,” she’d said, “Let’s murder the old man,” her father wouldn’t have made it through the night. As it was, a justice of the peace had us hitched before the week was over.
Two months later she was pregnant. I don’t know if it was an accident. I don’t know if it ever is, if anything ever is. All I know is it was fine with me. I’d just gotten a job in White Plains with the top-dog paper there. The word was out on me. It was a good word and I knew it. So things were fine and I was thrilled when she told me.
I laughed and said, “Oh man, that’s great, that’s great.”
She reared up to her full height. Her mouth was slack at the corners. The pouches under her eyes were gray. She looked down her well-bred nose at me. “You don’t really think I’m going to keep it, do you?” she said.
Well, we had it out. We took it around the block and back again. It was the only fight we ever had, and it was a battle royal. I won it finally. She was slumped on the floor in tears. I was hunched forward in the easy chair with my face in my hands. “All right. All right,” she said, and I had won. I’ve often thought about that, about how I won. I would not have won if it had happened even five years later. Already by then I would have known better than to win.
But I won, and we had Olivia, and she lived for fifteen years and then she died. She was an assistant counselor at a summer camp when it happened. She got up before dawn one morning in the barracks she supervised. She had this stuffed giraffe one of the younger girls coveted. She left it on the bunk beside the child and walked off into the night. They found her late in the morning. She was hanging from the branch of a tree. She’d used the rope from a tent to do it. So I guess that’s what I won her.
For myself, I won the best two years of my life. Those first two years of Olivia. There’s been nothing like them since. Even the crying in the middle of the night made me glad. When she took her first step, I handed out cigars. I made everyone look at the pictures of her stumbling along. They slapped my back and cast sidelong glances at each other and heavenward. I didn’t notice. When I did notice, I didn’t care. I loved that kid. I loved that little kid. I didn’t notice anything but her.
I didn’t, for instance, notice Constance. I tried to, but she wouldn’t let me, and after a while I decided that was just as well. She’d hired a maid to take care of the kid when I was at work. When I was at home, she let me do it. I chose not to see her sullen, gray sinking into bitterness. I chose not to hear her sarcasms and her self-abrasions. I chose not to smell the booze, or think about the absent afternoons when I could not find her. I played with Olivia. I changed her. I tickled her. I fed her. I laughed like a loon when she said my name. And then one day my wife left me, and took the kid with her. Not as fast as that, but just about.
There wasn’t much of a court fight. In those days the mother just pretty much got the kid. I myself thought that was the way it ought to be. It wasn’t until years later that I reconsidered, and by then it was too late. Constance had gone to Europe by then, to the south of France. It was against our settlement, but I couldn’t stop her. She never denied me visitation rights. I just couldn’t afford to take advantage of them very often. I wrote as much as I could. When Olivia was old enough to answer, she always did. I think about that a lot too. She always answered me. By then her mother hated me almost insanely. She hated me for giving her Olivia. And sometimes, I think, she hated Olivia too. But Olivia kept writing me, and her letters began “Dear Daddy,” and they ended with love, and I think about that as often as I can bear.
I remember, in fact, when Constance called me, that’s what I did: I went to the letters. I listened to Constance tell me in her dull, hollow, shocked voice. I shook my head quietly to myself as she spoke. I remember I was half smiling, the way I’ve seen guys do just after they’ve been sucker punched, and just before they drop to the ground unconscious. I remember then I went to the closet, to the shoe box in the closet where I kept the letters. They were tied in a bundle. I took the bundle out. I dragged a bottle to the desk and poured myself a long drink. A night-long drink. I drank and I untied the bundle. I read the letters over, one by one.
I guess I was looking for clues. I guess I was asking myself: Should I have known? Could I have? She never wrote to me in anguish or despair—not that I could tell anyway. She never complained, she never cried out. I read those letters over and over. There was only this, at the very end. Only one letter, in which the tone of quiet, thoughtful consideration was unlike her. In which—if I had known her better—I might have recognized an argument against her own dark pressures, a last attempt to unravel the night inside her.
I sat at the table and I drank and I read that last letter.
I have been thinking about things a lot lately, Daddy. About life, I guess. I’ve been thinking about how to live. It seems to me that people think of life as a fair deal, even though they know it’s not deep down. They think if they handle things just so, just right, everything will be fine. I used to think that, I know, when I was little. I used to think if I could just be good, if I could just be good enough, you and Mommy would get back together and everything would be all right again. It took a long time before I realized that wasn’t so. Part of growing up, I guess. But the thing is, I’ve just been thinking that life isn’t really like that at all. It isn’t fair or unfair or nice or not nice. It just is: and that’s the whole beauty of it. And, if you want to live, to live well, to live life the way life can be lived, then I think you’ve got to love life for what it really is, just for the fact that it is, not for what it’s supposed to be. You have to love life with all the dying and the pain of it, with all the good-byes and the hurting inside. You have to love mourning the way you love joy, because there can’t be one without the other. You have to love death the way you love life, because in the end, they’re really all one thing. Because even if it isn’t fair or unfair, it’s sweet, I think. I think maybe it’s sweet as wine.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’ve really been pushing myself on it. I’ve really just been telling myself: love life as it is, Olivia. You have to love life as it is.
I sat and I read that letter and drank. I sat where I was sitting now. I drank as I was drinking now: to kill the pain. Now, though, the pain was different. Five years had passed and made it different. I do not think it had grown any more bearable. I simply had grown better at bearing it. That’s not quite the same thing.
So now, after a while, I stopped thinking of my little girl. I sat with my feet on the desk and the glass balanced on my belt buckle. I stared out the window at the movie marquee. Still bright, still bright. Around it full night had fallen.
The scotch filled me up. It made me warm inside. Warm and cold at the same time, sort of like wintergreen on the tongue. The warmth was all the tight places relaxing. The cold was all the hurt places cauterized. I could keep it that way for another hour, I figured, and that was fine with me.
I sat and I drank and I stared and soon I saw a face. I saw it float and fade on the darkened air before me. A girl’s face. A pretty face. Enough, I thought to myself. Enough. But it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Olivia. It was Michelle.
Michelle had also been found hanging in the woods. But her mother said it was murder. Now, with a little help from Cambridge, the Star had proclaimed pretty much the same thing. And it occurred to me, as I sat growing wise with each passing sip of whiskey … it occurred to me that maybe I had known it would happen that way. I couldn’t find any rational reason to investigate this case. So maybe I let Cambridge muck it up. Maybe I wanted it that way so I could get all riled and force him to let me investigate. Maybe, oh yeah, maybe I had it figured somewhere deep down from the minute I spoke to Mrs. Thaye
r: if Cambridge played her accusations up, as he was almost sure to, then I could investigate. I could investigate—and I could find out that it was murder.
Because Lansing was right: if it was murder, I could find the killer.
And if I found him, I could make him pay.
I thought about that. I thought about Michelle. I stared out the window. I drank.
18 My welcome to Grant County wasn’t as warm the second time. I holed up in the same hotel. Drove the same road to the same high school. I went to the same office to meet with the same principal. But the look on his face was not the same.
The firm, sincere, blue eyes of David Brandt looked sternly out of his pale handsome face. I would have quailed if I was the quailing type.
“Listen—” I said. I held up my hand.
“If you’re not off this school’s grounds in five minutes, I’m calling the police.”
I thought about Tammany Bird. I have to admit, I quailed a little then.
“Listen—” I said.
“This school—this entire community—trusted you. We trusted you with our stories. We trusted you with our grief. The way you handled that trust, the way you abused it … I can’t begin to tell you the potential for damage there.”
“Listen—” I said.
“But even if there were not that potential, simple moral grounds, I would think, would have precluded your handling these stories as you did.”
This, I could tell, was a man who had never worked with an editor.
There was no explaining either. He slammed his office door in my face. The secretaries eyed me crossly with tight lips. I thought one of them would shake a finger at me. I wondered where you showed up for detention around here.
The Trapdoor Page 9
