The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  “Will?”

  When I looked over, I saw her expression. Part irritation, part concern.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

  And I hadn’t. That was another of the things we’d argued about recently. “You don’t listen to me,” she complained. I would parrot back what she had said on an automatic pilot of recall, but of course now she was right. I hadn’t been listening. I had gone to the hollow place of non-sound. Perhaps I really was going deaf.

  “I’ve been asked to go to Washington,” she said.

  “Washington?”

  She caught me up, explaining that she had been asked to testify at Congress before a subcommittee on violence in the media and its effect on society. I saw only the futility of this, the inevitable disappointment for her, as if anything she could possibly say would make even the smallest dent in the profits generated by violence. It was always about money.

  “The committee hearing is on Tuesday. Do you want to come with me?”

  That I wouldn’t do. In the days immediately following Lucy’s disappearance, I’d allowed myself to be convinced to appear on television with Sophie. We had watched the clip of the interview later that evening when it was re-aired on the eleven o’clock news, and when the cameras returned to the anchors at the end of the segment I had been shocked to hear one of them say to the other in an offhand way, The father struck me as very calm. As if they could possibly know what the fuck I was feeling. That was the last time I’d allowed myself to be put on the stage of public opinion.

  Sophie waited for my answer. “Why don’t you ask Amy?” I said. “She’d be better company.”

  “I knew that’s what you’d say.”

  Then why ask?, I thought.

  “I’ll drive down on Sunday. So I’ll be there on Monday.”

  She put an odd emphasis on Monday and looked at me as if I should understand. Had I missed something? “Monday?” Was there another interview she had scheduled? A symposium? A panel? I waited for a clue.

  “I can’t stay here in town. I just can’t.” She stared at me. “You’ve forgotten.” Her voice was flat. Not a question. “Seven months,” she said, finally. “Monday it will be seven months to the day.” Her gaze was both accusation and indictment.

  Somewhere deep in my chest I felt as if a rib had broken.

  “I can’t believe you could forget,” she said.

  “I didn’t forget.” But of course I had. And she knew I had, which made me defensive. “I just don’t keep track of the—the anniversaries. I don’t like to make a . . . a goddamn holiday of it.” God knows it was difficult enough to get through the formal calendar days—Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Lucy’s birthday—without marking each passing month too.

  “You think that’s what I do? Make a holiday of it?”

  “I don’t know what you do. I just think keeping exact track of the weeks and months seems—” Morbid, I thought but did not say. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Well, what would you rather I do, Will? Shut down? Shut everyone out? Give up hope? Pretend nothing happened?”

  “Jesus, Sophie. How can you think it is remotely possible for me to pretend, to forget—”

  But Sophie was not listening. “Is that what you want me to do?” she continued. “Shut everyone out and retreat to the attic while the world falls apart around me?” Like you was unspoken, but the words hung in the air so present she might as well have screamed them.

  “Soph—” I began, but saw it was too late.

  She stood, her face set.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  “I can’t stay.”

  She left, not bothering to pick up whatever she had come for. I stood at the door and watched her walk to the car. Walk away from me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Evenings, I walked.

  So the day Sophie left for DC, I headed out, as I often did, with no particular destination in mind, propelled only by the need to escape the vast and haunting stillness of the house. On some nights, I would walk to the harbor, a sight as familiar to me as breakfast toast, and I’d pause to sit on a bench and smell the sea, staring at the fishing fleet as the boats bobbed at their moorings like tethered boxcars or whales. I had read somewhere, probably a chamber of commerce brochure, that our harbor was the safest on the East Coast.

  Sometimes, if there were no high school kids horsing around on the basketball court, I’d walk by the community playground. Several years back, a group of townspeople had spearheaded a drive to raise money to hire a big-name builder famous for his all-wood playgrounds, but when we learned our children had been playing on structures built of arsenic-laced timbers, it had had to be torn down. Now the swings and slides and jungle gym were all plastic and fiberglass, and parents hoped that they hadn’t been too late in discovering the danger of what they themselves had brought into town. After the playground, I’d walk over to the promenade that fronted the town beach, passing the house with a collection of owls set on glass shelves in the street-facing window, dozens of them in glass and brass, ceramic and wood, a collection that had fascinated Lucy when she was a child. I’d continue on, pass the statue honoring fishermen lost at sea and the memorial wall etched with their five thousand three hundred names—the harbor may be safe, the ocean not so much. I understood that some found comfort in these numbers, found consolation in knowing that they were not alone in grief, that they were but part of many who had walked the sorrowful path of fractured hearts and spirits, but screw that.

  At other times I’d find myself cutting through an unfamiliar neighborhood, miles from our home, with no idea of how I got there. More than once I’d hiked all the way to the Eastern Point Lighthouse, and it would be after midnight before I returned home, feet sore, sometimes blistered, my legs worn as stumps, the exhaustion a relief. Again and again Sophie had told me it was foolhardy, dangerous to walk alone so late at night. She said it made her sick with worry to wait in the late dark for my return.

  “What do you want me to do?” I’d asked her. “Get a gun?”

  “A gun?” She had looked stunned.

  “For protection. If you’re so worried.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Will. That’s the last thing I’m suggesting. I’d just feel better if you weren’t walking around out there half the night.”

  But once the idea of a gun had been seeded, it grew. For protection, I’d told myself, a small handgun. The true, darker reason I had admitted only to myself. I would need it when I found the person who killed Lucy. It would have to be unregistered. Untraceable. According to news reports, there were thousands of illegal guns floating around. How hard could it be to get just one? In the end, it had proved easier than you would have imagined. A trip to Portsmouth. A visit to a pawnshop. A number scribbled on a paper. A hurried meeting in—at another earlier time I might have laughed at the irony—the parking lot of a white-steepled church. Methodist I think, if I am remembering the sign in front correctly. Cash exchanged for a weapon. Extra for the ammo. The entire exchange took no more than five furtive minutes, no questions asked. When I took the bag, I had expected it to be heavier, the weight reflecting what it contained. Ironic doesn’t begin to cover that moment. One of the few petitions I had ever signed was one to ban assault weapons. By the time I’d driven out of the lot, I couldn’t remember what the man had even looked like, only the thin, hyped-up sound of his voice that made me suspect he was high on something. At home, I’d taken the brown bag up to the attic studio and after locking the door had practiced loading it, weighing the cold metal shells in my palm. Finally I stashed it beneath a paint-stained rag on a shelf behind my worktable, where Sophie wouldn’t ever look but where it would still be handy.

  In October, when I began these walks, I’d drop by the police station. At first, the duty officers manning the front desk were cordial, offering me coffee, their voices, if not warm, at least neutral, but gradually their tones became less sympathetic, m
ore guarded. “Go home, Mr. Light,” they’d say. They had nothing new to tell me. The case was still active and open. Let them do their jobs. They would call. I really didn’t expect them to call. I knew the odds, the dark statistics of these things. With each month that passed it became less likely that there would be any development or resolution. To find who killed our daughter and make him pay. Once I’d shown up at the station intoxicated—not just tipsy but drunk to near incapacitation—and they’d threatened to put me in protective custody, for my own safety they’d said, but in the end one of the cops on patrol had driven me home.

  On those autumn evenings and well into the winter, I would prowl, as I now knew the police did, restless and vigilant, searching faces for what lurked beneath the human masks. A teenager on a skateboard. The jogger with a blue neoprene sleeve on his knee. A man in a gray topcoat. The police recruit on bike patrol along Main Street. Or the burly young man walking a Gordon setter. It could be anyone, I would think. Anyone could have killed Lucy. I knew that if I could look into the face of the person who had murdered her, I would know it absolutely. Of course now the irony of this slays me, and I wonder if those I passed—the dog walker, the recruit on patrol, the jogger, any of them—would see, on looking at me would glimpse the rage, the need for revenge, the slumbering violence of which I was capable or even if I, on looking into the bathroom mirror as I shaved, if even I was blind to the depth of what I was capable of. And so I walked and searched the faces of the people I saw for the stain of guilt. It had to be someone, I’d think. Anyone.

  In the early spring, before she moved out, I had shared my thoughts with Sophie, believing she would understand, but instead she warned me I was growing cynical. No, I told her. Not cynical. Realistic.

  “What about you?” I’d said in defense. “You haven’t changed?” I pictured her in a fighting stance, her kickboxing class, her taut body.

  “Of course I’ve changed, Will. But what would you have me do? Isolate like you? Sit around and cry? Well, I’ve done that. It doesn’t help. It’s just that—we can’t let our hearts grow hard.”

  “And you think you haven’t done that?” I’d thought of her talking to reporters, spouting numbers about the thousands of dead children.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s possible to be an activist, you know, to believe it’s possible to change things, and to still have an open heart.”

  “The voice of our murdered children,” I’d said, unable to strip my voice of sarcasm.

  “Oh, Will,” she’d said. Her look of pity had made me shiver. “Can’t you see? We can’t afford to grow cynical. If we do that, they’ve won.”

  “That’s cheap sentiment,” I’d said. “Like what people said after 9-11.” The truth was they had won. And we had lost our daughter.

  And still that spring, I searched faces. The person who killed our child—again and again the image of her blood-soaked tote, the annihilated cell phone, her broken body, would cloud my vision—this person was walking in the world undetected. Laughing. Eating a burrito. Buying a six-pack. Or a bottle of booze. Or a pair of new shoes. Planting a lawn. Tossing a Frisbee to a retriever. Watching a ball game. Having sex. Going on. Unpunished. Undetected and not likely to be detected. Unless he made a mistake. Unless there was another child.

  Seven months.

  That evening I wandered aimlessly for a bit. I headed toward the playground, but as I approached I saw a group of boys shooting hoops in the growing shadows, serious go-for-broke, smack-talking ball, their voices breaking open the quiet of the night. Despite the chill of early evening, they had stripped to the waist and sweat glistened on the skin of their chests, their naked backs. The air seemed to shimmer around them—a force field. On a bench at the far side of the playground, a boy sat alone, his concentration focused on the electronic device he held. He was thin, and there was in his posture a vulnerability, someone others would bully, the kind who would try to will himself invisible. I had a vague recollection of the boy as someone Lucy had known, but I wasn’t sure. I turned away and continued over to Stacy Boulevard. There were more dog walkers there, out for a last stroll before heading home for the evening. A wind blew in off the water, the blue expanse broken by chevrons of white. I buttoned my jacket against the chill. It was only May. I should have worn something warmer.

  Seven months.

  I pictured Lucy back in October on the last morning of her life, her quick, banana-scented kiss and “Bye, Da,” as she flew out the door, innocent of what lay ahead, and I was burdened by every month, every week and day and hour that had passed since, the bleak horrors of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the seasons melting from fall to winter and now spring, edging into summer, the mornings when I woke and for one cruel nanosecond life seemed normal and then memory cut like a lash and with it the impossible grief, the actual physical pain of it, and the knowledge that nothing would ever again be the same.

  Seven months of this with no indication that it would ever ease.

  Does my grief tire you? Do you want me to get on with my life? Try to understand how impossible that is. Try to imagine what it is like to have your daughter, your beautiful, kind child, murdered and then tell me to get on with my life. Seven months and here is what I imagined as I walked and searched for the face of her killer. I pictured what she suffered before she died. And I imagined her fear at the end. Wondered how the end had actually come and hoped it had at least been swift, a single small mercy. Had she pled? It didn’t bear thinking. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it, ruminating on the horror of it. And truth be told, if it happened to you, I don’t think you would either, and I hope you never have to find out. So this was what I was left with. This was what had led to my new self—an angry man who drank too much and had an illegal handgun hidden in his attic studio against the day when he found his daughter’s killer.

  I reversed course, walking back past the Owl Lady’s house, past the playground, now dark and empty, the boys gone home. In the town center, a Coors Light sign flickered neon in the window of the Crow’s Nest. Forget it, I told myself. Go home. A promise was a promise. I thought of Sophie in Washington, off on her crusade.

  The Nest was crowded, and as soon as I entered I was assaulted by body heat and noise. The place stank of stale beer, of something faintly musty, of cigarette smoke although years ago the state had passed a no-smoking law. You could wash the place down with a fire hose and it wouldn’t cleanse the air. I paused, almost left, thought of the promise I had made to Sophie. Just one, I thought. One beer and I’d leave. I took a quick look around. The crowd was young—mostly fishermen and a few women, two men engaged in a game of darts—no one I recognized except for Gilly behind the bar. Each stool was occupied, and I muscled in at one end, pushing against a brawny twentysomething, jostling his draft. The man, still in his fishing garb, whipped toward me and our eyes met. I didn’t know him but watched recognition dawn on his face and then, swiftly, saw it shift from belligerence to embarrassment and then pity. A look I knew too well. Even strangers gave me that glance. I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, Something terrible has befallen this man. And if it wasn’t pity I saw in the faces of others, it was suspicion. “You’re imagining that,” Sophie told me when I confided in her, but I wasn’t. I knew the police hadn’t immediately cleared me in the beginning. I remember the cadaver dogs brought in by the state police before Lucy had been found, German shepherds sniffing the ground of our backyard, even rooting around in our basement. Our basement. The implication clear.

  “Sorry,” the fisherman said as if he were the one who had shoved in, spilled beer.

  I felt let down. Although I had not been in a fight since high school, I would have welcomed it that night. The release of it. Something solid to punch, not phantoms. Had that been my intent in coming to the Nest? To seek the physical release of a fight? Though the truth was the fisherman was younger, fitter, and in any confrontation I woul
d have gotten the worst of it. Hell, those days Sophie of the muscled arms could probably have bested me.

  Gilly made his way toward me. “Hey, boss,” he said and slapped a cardboard coaster in front of me. “So what’ll it be? Draft?”

  Seven months.

  I can still recall every detail of that October day as if it were etched in granite, a monument of loss. It had begun in an ordinary way. I’d made breakfast. We’d eaten together, and then Lucy and Sophie had left for school. I’d welcomed the time ahead—eight full hours because it was a Tuesday and my wife and daughter wouldn’t return home until nearly five. After classes Sophie had chorus, already in rehearsals for the concert that signaled the holiday break; Lucy had French club and a field hockey scrimmage.

  I put in a full day painting—probably forgetting to eat lunch without Sophie there to remind me. I was that way with work. At some time late in the afternoon I’d descended to the kitchen to start dinner preparations: chopping onions, mincing ginger, pureeing garlic, seasoning and browning the lamb. I took satisfaction in the cutting and dicing, the sound of oil sizzling in the pan. Cooking grounded me after a day in the studio. It was a segue between the two passages in the symphony of my life: painting and family. At one point I had looked out the kitchen window and noticed the last of the serrated leaves from the elm cartwheeling through the air. As I often did when I stared at the tree, I’d taken a moment to admire the graceful architecture of the arching branches. I’d poured myself a glass of Cabernet to sip while I worked. Back then, drinking hadn’t been an issue. I rarely had more than two glasses at night. Occasionally, Sophie and I might allow ourselves a short pour of something later, before bed. Asked how I felt, I’d have said, “Content.” I was pleased with the progress of my current painting. Dinner was under way. The prospect of a family evening lay ahead. Content.