‘Keep the change. Won’t buy you much, but it’ll buy you even less in New York. You want to tell me what you were doing down there?’
I shouldn’t have been shocked. I’d been stopped five times by state troopers on the highway in recent months. It was someone’s way of letting me know that I hadn’t been forgotten. Now a cop at the Portland Jetport had probably recognized me when I was traveling either to or from New York, and had made a call. I’d need to be more careful in the future.
‘I was visiting friends.’
‘That’s good. A man needs friends. But I find that you’re working a case, and I’ll break you.’
He turned away, said his good-byes to his buddies, and left the bar. Gary sidled over to me as the door closed behind Hansen.
‘Everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ I handed him the twenty. ‘I think he was one of yours.’
Gary looked at the untouched beer.
‘He didn’t finish his beer.’
‘He didn’t come here to drink.’
‘Then why did he come here?’
It was a good question.
‘For the company, I guess.’
6
I took Walter, my Labrador retriever, for a walk when I got home shortly after eleven. The novelty of snow had eventually worn off for him, as it did for most creatures, man or beast, who spent longer than a week in Maine in winter, so that now he contented himself with a few desultory sniffs before doing what he had to do and indicating his preference for returning to his warm basket by turning around and heading straight back to the house. He had matured a lot in the last year. Perhaps it was because the house was quieter than it was before, and he had accommodated himself somewhat to the fact that Rachel and Sam were no longer part of its, and his, routines. I liked having him in the house for a whole lot of reasons: security, company, and maybe because he was a link to the family life that was no longer mine. Two families lost now: Rachel and Sam to Vermont, and Susan and Jennifer to a man who had torn them apart, and who had died in turn by my hand. But I also felt guilty about the amount of time I was leaving Walter alone, or with my neighbors, the Johnsons. They were happy to look after him when I wasn’t around, but Bob Johnson wasn’t so good on his feet anymore, and it was asking a lot of him to exercise a frisky dog regularly.
I locked the doors, patted Walter, then went to bed and tried to sleep, but when it came it brought with it strange dreams, dreams of Susan and Jennifer so vivid that I woke in the darkness, convinced that I had heard someone speak. It had been many months since I had dreamed of them in such a way.
What do I call them? Even now, after all these years, how do I say it? My murdered wife? My late daughter? They died, but I held something of them inside me for too long, and that in turn manifested itself as phantasms, echoes of the next life in this one, and I could not bring myself to call these remnants by the names of those whom I had loved. We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.
But I had made my peace with them, I thought. Susan, my wife. Jennifer, my daughter. Beloved of me, and I, beloved of them.
Susan once said to me that, if anything happened to Jennifer, if she were to die before her time, before her mother, then I should not tell Susan what had occurred. I should not try to explain to her that her child was gone. I must not do that to her. If Jennifer were to die, I was to kill Susan. There should be no words, no warning. She should not have time to look at me and understand why. I was to take her life, for she did not believe that she could live with the loss of her child. It would be too much to bear; she would not be able to withstand such pain. It would not kill her, not at first, but it would draw the life from her just the same, and all that would be left would be a hollow shell, a woman resonant with grief.
And she would hate me. She would hate me for putting her through such sorrow, for not loving her enough to spare her. I would be a coward in her eyes.
‘Promise me,’ she said, as I held her in my arms. ‘Promise me that you won’t let that happen. I don’t ever want to hear those words. I don’t want to have to hurt that much. I couldn’t bear it. Do you hear me? This isn’t a joke, a “what-if ?” I want you to promise me that I will never have to endure that pain.’
And I promised. I knew that I could not have done what she asked, and perhaps she knew that too, but I made the promise just the same. That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.
But what she did not explain, what she did not consider, was what would happen if they were both wrenched from me. Should I take my own life? Should I follow them into that dark place, tracing their steps through the underworld until I found them at last, a sacrifice to no purpose other than the denial of loss? Or should I continue, and if I should, then how? What form should my life take? Should I die alone, worshipping at the shrine of their memory, waiting for time to do what I could not do for myself; or would I try to find a way to live with their loss, to survive without betraying their memory? What acts do those who are left behind have to perform to honor the memory of the departed, and how far can they go before they betray that memory?
I lived. That is what I did. They were taken, but I stayed. I found the one who had killed them, and I killed him in turn, but it gave me no satisfaction. It did not assuage the burning grief. It did not make their loss any easier to endure, and it almost cost me my soul, if, indeed, I have a soul. The Collector, that repository of old secrets, once told me that I did not, and sometimes I am inclined to believe him.
I still feel their loss every day. It defines me.
I am the shadow cast by all that once was.
7
Daniel Faraday sat in the basement room and felt his grief slowly give way to anger. His son had been dead for four days, and his body still lay in the morgue. They had been assured that he would be released for burial the next day. The chief had promised them as much during his visit earlier that afternoon.
In the days since the discovery of Bobby’s remains, Daniel and his wife had become ghosts in their own home, creatures defined only by loss, and absence, and grief. Their only son was gone, and Daniel knew that his passing signaled also the death of their marriage in all but name. Bobby had kept his parents together, but his father had not realized the extent of their debt to him until he had left for college, and then returned. So much of their conversation had revolved around the activities of their beloved son: their hopes for him, their fears, their occasional disappointments, although the latter now seemed so trivial that Daniel silently berated himself for ever having raised them with the boy. He regretted every harsh word, every argument, every hour of sullen silence that had passed in the aftermath of conflict. Even as he did so, he recalled the circumstances of each disagreement, and knew that every word spoken in anger had also been spoken out of love.
This had been his son’s space. There was a TV, and a stereo, and a dock for his iPod, although Bobby was one of the only kids in town who still preferred to listen to music on vinyl when he was at home. He had inherited his father’s old record collection, most of it classic stuff from the sixties and seventies, adding to it from the racks of used record stores and the occasional yard sale. There was still an LP sitting on the turntable, an original copy of After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, its surface a network of tiny scratches yet clearly, as far as Bobby had been concerned, still listenable, the pops and hisses a part of the record’s history, its warmth and humanity enhanced by the flaws it had accumulated over the years.
Most of the basement floor was covered by a huge rug that always smelled faintly of spilled beer and old potato chips. There were bookshelves, and a gunmetal gray filing cabinet whose drawers had been used mainly for storing old photographs, college notes, textbooks, and, unbeknownst to the boy’s mother, some mild pornography. There was a battered red couch with a stained blue pillo
w at one end facing the TV. The pillow still bore the imprint of his son’s head and the couch had retained the shape of his body so that, in the dim light cast by the basement’s sole lamp, it seemed that the ghost of his son had somehow returned to this place, occupying his old familiar position, a thing invisible yet with weight and substance. Daniel wanted to curl up there, to mold his body into the ridges and hollows of the couch, to become one with his lost son, yet he did not. To do so would be to disturb the impression that remained, and with it to banish something of the boy’s essence. He would not lie there. Nobody would lie there. It would remain as a memorial to all that had been taken from him, from them.
At first, there had been only shock. Bobby could not be gone. He could not be dead. Death was for the old and the sick. Death was for the children of other men. His son was mortal, but not yet shadowed by mortality. His passing should have been a distant thing, and his father and mother should have predeceased him. He should have mourned them. It was not right, not natural, that they should now be forced to cry over his remains, to watch as his coffin was lowered into the ground. He remembered again the sight of his son’s body on the gurney in the morgue, draped with a sheet, swollen with the gases of decay, a deep red line circling his throat where the rope had cut into him.
Suicide. That had been the initial verdict. Bobby had asphyxiated himself by tying a rope to a tree, dropping the noose at the other end around his neck, and leaning forward with the full weight of his body. At some point, he had realized the awfulness of what was about to happen and had struggled to release himself, scratching and tearing at his flesh, even ripping loose one of his fingernails, but by then the rope had cinched itself tight, the knot designed so that, if his courage failed him, the instrument of his self-destruction would not.
The chief had asked them, in those first hours, if they knew why Bobby might have wanted to kill himself. Was he unhappy? Were there unusual stresses and tensions in his life? Did he owe money to anyone? The autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily before he died, and his motorcycle was found in a ditch at the edge of the field. It was a wonder, the coroner said, that the boy had managed to ride the bike so far considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed.
And all Daniel Faraday could think of was the girl, Emily, the one for whom his son had not been good enough.
But then the chief had returned that afternoon, and everything had changed. It was a question of angles and force, he had told them, although he, and the state police detectives, had already voiced their suspicions among themselves, given the nature of the wounds that the rope had left on his skin. There had been two injuries to his son’s neck, but the first had been obscured by the second, and it had taken the state’s chief medical examiner to confirm the suspicions of her deputy. Two injuries: the first inflicted by asphyxiation from behind, possibly while the boy was lying flat on the ground, judging by some bruises to his back where his attacker had perhaps knelt upon him. The initial injury was not fatal, but had resulted in a loss of consciousness. Death had occurred from the second injury. The noose had been kept around the boy’s neck as he was lifted to his knees, the other end of the rope secured around the trunk of the tree. His killer, or killers, had then put further pressure on his back, forcing him forward so that he slowly strangled.
The chief had said that it must have taken considerable strength and effort to kill big, strong Bobby Faraday in that way. The rope was being tested for traces of DNA, as was the lower part of the tree, but—
They had waited for him to continue.
The person or persons responsible for Bobby’s death had been careful, he told them. Bobby’s hair and clothing had been soaked with pond water and mud, along with his fingernails and the skin of his hands. The intention had clearly been to corrupt any trace evidence, and it had been successful. The authorities weren’t going to give up on finding Bobby’s killer, he reassured them, but their task had been made a great deal more difficult. He had asked them to keep this information to themselves for the time being, and they had agreed to do so.
After the chief left, Daniel held his wife as she wept in his arms. He was not sure why she was crying, only surprised that she had any tears left to shed. Perhaps she was weeping at the horror of it, or because this was a new grief that her son had not taken his own life, but had his life taken from him by others. She did not say, and he did not ask her. But when he felt the first of his own tears slide down his cheek, he understood that his were not tears of loss, or of horror, or even of anger. He was relieved. He realized that he had felt a kind of hatred for his son for killing himself. He had been raging at the selfishness of the act, the stupidity of it, that Bobby had not turned to those who loved him in his moment of direst need. He had hated his son for rendering his father powerless, and for leaving his parents to bear the weight of his grief in his stead. For the time that he had believed his son had died at his own hand, Daniel had contemplated the horror of the act during the long, still days and nights, the hours creeping by with relentless sloth. Grief, it seemed, was a kind of matter: it could not be created or destroyed, but merely altered its form. In dying, the sadness that might have driven Bobby to such an act had not dissipated, but had merely transferred itself to those left behind. There had been no note, no explanation, as though any explanation could have sufficed. There had only been unanswered questions, and the gnawing sense that they had failed their son.
Daniel’s first instinct had been to blame the girl. Bobby had not been the same since she had broken off their relationship. Despite his size, and his apparent ease with the world, there was a sensitivity to him, a softness. He had dated before, and there had been break-ups and teenage traumas, but he had fallen heavily for the slim young woman with the dark hair and pale green eyes. She was a few years older than Bobby, and she had something special; that was undeniable. There had been rivals for her affections, but she had chosen him. His son knew that. The power had been hers, and he had always struggled slightly with the imbalance that it created in the relationship.
Daniel believed, as most fathers did, that his son was the finest young man in town, maybe even the finest young man he had ever known. He deserved the very best in life: the most rewarding of jobs, the most beautiful of women, the most loving of children. That Bobby did not share this view was both one of his best and worst qualities: admirable in its natural humility, yet frustrating in the way in which it stifled his ambition and caused him to doubt himself. Daniel believed that the girl was clever enough to play on that disparity, but then that was true of all her sex. Daniel Faraday had always been suspicious of women. He admired them, and was attracted to them (in truth, more than his wife knew, or pretended not to know, for he had acted on that attraction with others more than once during their marriage), but he had never come close to understanding them, and by engaging in casual conquests and then casting them aside he was able to balance this lack of comprehension with a degree of contempt. He had watched as the girl manipulated his son, twisting and turning him as though he were caught on a silken thread that could draw him closer or keep him dangling at a distance, as she chose. Bobby knew what was being done, and yet he was so smitten that he could not bring himself to break the bond. His father and mother had discussed it more than once over a bottle of wine, but had differed in their interpretations of the relationship. While Daniel’s wife had acknowledged that the girl was clever, still she felt that there was nothing unusual in her behavior. She was merely doing what all young girls did, or what those who understood the nature of the balance of power between the sexes generally did. The boy wanted her, but as soon as she gave herself to him unconditionally she would cede control of the relationship. Better to force him to prove his loyalty before she surrendered herself fully.
Daniel had to concede that his wife had a point, but he disliked seeing his son being played for a fool. Bobby was comparatively naive and inexperienced, even though he was almost twenty-two. He had not yet had his heart tru
ly broken. Then the girl had ended the relationship after Bobby came back from college for the holidays, and that experience had been forced upon him. There had been no warning, and no explanation was given beyond the fact that she believed Bobby was not the man for her. His son had taken it badly, to the extent that it had caused him actual, physical pain, he said: an ache deep in his belly that would not subside.
The break-up had also plunged him into depression, a depression exacerbated by the fact that this was a small town: there were only so many places one could go to drink, to eat, to see a movie, to pass the time. The girl worked behind the bar at Dean’s Place, and Dean’s was where the young people of the town – and many of the older ones too – had for generations gone to congregate. If Bobby wanted to socialize, then Dean’s could be avoided for only so long. Daniel knew that following the break-up there had been encounters at Dean’s between the two young people. Even then, the girl had enjoyed the upper hand. His son had been drinking, while she had not. After one particularly loud exchange, old Dean himself, who ruled his bar like a benevolent dictator, had been forced to warn Bobby against bothering the staff. As a result, Bobby had stayed away from Dean’s for a week, returning home from work each evening and heading straight for his basement hideaway, barely pausing to greet his parents and emerging only to raid the refrigerator or to share an awkward meal at the kitchen table. Sometimes he slept on the couch instead of in the adjoining bedroom, not even bothering to undress. Only after some of his friends came by and cajoled him out did the clouds above his head seem to break for a time, and then only for as long as he avoided seeing the girl.
When his body was discovered, Daniel’s first thought was that he had killed himself out of some misplaced devotion to Emily. After all, there seemed to be nothing else troubling him. He was saving for college, and seemed to have every intention of returning to further study, hinting that perhaps Emily might come with him and get a job in the city; he was popular with his friends both there and at home; and his natural disposition had always tended toward the optimistic, or had until the dissolution of his relationship.
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