Two years had passed since that night the news vans returned, if briefly, to the Mother Mary Ranch outside Omaha. Two years since they’d lined up beyond the outer fence and the yellow police tape, spectral figures in the distance, cameramen with telephoto lenses and blonde reporters with microphones, sitting on folding chairs on the roof racks, peering through the fog and smoke and ash in search of one final news clip. Two years since the night fire trucks and ambulances descended upon those three hundred acres, lights and sirens blaring, dust storms along the narrow roads of the ranch and the horses in the stables in an uproar, two of them escaping and racing off before the rest could be led, snorting and bellowing, out into the adjacent fields. The thick hoses attached to the fire trucks were strewn along the gravel and draped over the whitewashed fences; the rush of the heavy water jetting toward the flames drowned out the shouts while the EMTs, equipped with resuscitation equipment, dressed in bright orange field jackets, combed the premises. The first three survivors were found beneath the hay-loading window of the main stable, cowered by the radiating heat, two women and a three-year-old boy, his mother holding him in her arms while he fought to escape, fought for the chance to see the amazing vision of the mansion he called home burning to the ground. And yet the search had continued as the firefighters fought long into the night against the inevitable, rushing to safety when the portico on the south wall collapsed, releasing a cloud of hot wind that scorched the air and made the garage roof smolder (two hoses brought back to drench it before the fire could spread). Still the hunt for survivors continued through the dawn, when a gray sun rose beyond the black noxious atmosphere and turned the world eclipse colors; it continued even then because this little trio of survivors, this unremarkable group found in the shadow of a stable one hundred yards from what remained of the main house—which, in the revealing gloom of morning, was seen to be little more than frame and blackened post—was not at all what they’d come for, would be a fine story but not the story. For they’d arrived—all of them: the EMTs and the media still standing on the distant vans, drinking coffee and eating donuts now, even the fire fighters who crouched, exhausted, around their trucks in the breezy black morning—anticipating this to be the grand funeral pyre of one George Benjamin Hill, had expected to spend days digging through the rubble in search of, and eventually finding, the remains of the once-wealthiest man in the country—or to never find him, and what a mystery that might cause!—not knowing that instead of a dramatic conflagration to bring it all suddenly to the ground there would be grand jury indictments, instead of the quick hand of fate there would be the slow march of justice, there would be delays and appeals and jury selection and intricate details argued in five-thousand-page briefs and—at last—when all these preliminary matters had been taken care of, when the entire country had waited for the moment when he went on trial and then nearly forgotten his name, there would be a final headline eradicating it all, one headline to remind everyone that he was just another old man.
That day at the Mother Mary Ranch—as the police and the fire fighters and a team of volunteers combed the wreckage, finding the bodies of what seemed to be three separate human beings—the EMTs wrapped the survivors in blankets, gave the boy a lollypop and the women Excedrin … and it was not until then, just when they were getting ready to leave the scene, that one of them, responding to something the little boy had said—something about Grandpa—had turned toward the BMW (ignored, up until now, for reasons no one could explain) and noticed that its windshield wipers were on, sweeping away the storm of soot still settling over the ranch. It was not until that moment that one of them came over to the vehicle with its tinted glass and black exterior and opened the door. It was not until then that they found the man they’d expected to discover at the heart of this tragedy, seated in the passenger seat, a strange expression twisting his face. Crying.
No. He was laughing.
BY THE TIME WE—THE SURVIVORS—gathered on Annabelle’s back porch two years later, the story of that Saturday night into Sunday morning had become less like an ending than a beginning. We’d long since put together the details of how it had come to take place, how the plan (if it could be called such) had gone from confused conception to haphazard execution. It had been Max’s idea, initially. He had followed his older brother’s baseball career though this had meant a subscription to Baseball America that often arrived a full month late. When he’d heard, through a newspaper report he’d found, of all places, on the internet—through which he combed on a semi-annual basis in search of details about us by means of the donated desktops in the public library in Fairbanks, just a few blocks away from the hotel where he’d rented a room on a monthly basis, a dour residence where he’d stewed during the two years that had passed since the incident with the helicopter—when he’d learned through these most unlikely means about the disappearance of GB’s daughter, he’d known it was time to reach out, to offer comfort and sympathy and an airing of grievances that, with any luck, would lead to a confession of feelings not so different from his own.
It had worked, though not at first. The pieces that survive of their correspondence—notebooks in the glove box of the Buick and a handful of letters, salvaged from a knapsack discovered in the high grass behind one of the retired sheds in a lost corner of the horse ranch, guarded only by the feeble old chocolate lab who came limping out of the darkness—show two men, one middle aged and one rapidly approaching it, reluctant to make a move toward closure. They tell each other their stories, try to convey something like warmth or wisdom, something like comfort for one another. And yet the tone is inconsistent. The record is incomplete. Some letters seem to be missing, pieces of their correspondence unaccounted for, seemingly important junctions in which thresholds were reached, assessed, and—somewhere in the lonely rooms of their lives—crossed. Maybe in these missing letters they fought and argued, maybe they agreed, for a time, to disagree. There must have been periods when even they recognized—through the mounting conviction of their anger and grief—the futility of what they were planning to do, the illogic of what they hoped to accomplish. And if they had been together—if they had sat in a room talking these things out rather than nurturing with solitude the vacant allure of these written words—could they have ever done it? Would they ever have achieved the initiative of turning these words into deeds?
We attended and helped plan their funerals, of course. We flew to Alaska and rented a ride from a bush pilot. We rode high above that endless stretch of wilderness, tried to imagine all the hours he had spent in that reclusive perch at fifteen thousand feet, the only signs of humanity his own shadow on the treetops. We went to Circle and tried to find the twelve-by-twelve cabin where he’d lived in a brief state of contentment before he’d found that package with Alice Bates’s name on it. And we tried to find Alice Bates herself, but it could have taken months, and we weren’t sure we wanted to hear what she might have to say. We stopped in Fairbanks, and we drove out to the old road that led to the narrow dirt driveway that led up a hill and around a copse of trees to the place where that giant field opened up and where that old cabin had once sat, but the road had been widened and the dirt driveway was now paved, and the house that looked down at us was no longer that ramshackle place some of us remembered but a pristine A-frame with one wall made all of glass.
We flew to Florida and met Tammy Pisarczek, who wore sunglasses but did not wear black at that funeral attended mostly by old ballplayers, former teammates and managers, a few of them now famous, all of them silent and reverent at the graveside where they set GB down next to his daughter. She invited us back to the condo where she lives with her fiancé, Marc, and we sat on the balcony above the water while she showed us pictures of Emma and we witnessed the fresh bloom of her grief. She had barely seen him in the year that passed between their separation and his death, and when she had he’d been unrecognizable and haggard. He was a mess, she told us, but then so was she. And for a short time they had lived in th
at mess together, had screamed and loved and fought and hoped, and in spite of himself he had been one of the reasons that she was still here, that she was still carrying on, was still picking up the pieces.
And we were there in New York, too. At the most heavily attended of the three because almost everyone from Rogers House was there. A woman named Clementina approached us afterwards, asked us if we’d come back with her. She led us up the four flights of stairs, down the long hallway to the room at the far end, the last door on the right. We stood in the room he’d called home for two decades, stood beneath the pull cord of the dull ceiling lamp looking at the single file cabinet filled with pages of nothing we could interpret, the narrow mattress and the single window and the rest of the room just emptiness, yet filled somehow with the answerless question of his predicament. Clementina walked over to the window, looked down. “There used to be a garden down there,” she said, staring through the glass. And on her face we could see the optimism that they practiced as a way of life here.
Her eyes when they returned to us were damp and full. “He used to sit down in that garden for hours,” she said. Then she shook her head. It seemed there was more she wanted to say, something about him that she needed us to hear, some anecdote or metaphor about that garden that would help us understand. But the words or the sentiment wouldn’t come. She swallowed something heavy and significant. Shook her head again. Restored her face to that resilient smile and led us all back downstairs.
IN THE END, WE FOUND out about him the same way everyone else did. From the headlines.
DISGRACED BILLIONAIRE GEORGE BENJAMIN HILL POSTS BOND WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
Annabelle has kept them, has maintained a history of the whole ordeal, though she can’t say why. Her compulsion is inexplicable but irresistible, resulting in a drawer upstairs in a closet filled with messy folded stacks of news clippings, photos, the accumulated details of decades crammed into a small space as if in an attempt to compact it, to condense it and make it somehow easier to comprehend. From his wayward days in the aftermath of the pipeline’s completion to his arrival at the top floor of the steel-and-glass structure that housed the company that briefly played the world like a parlor game, from the first inklings of a financial disaster all the way through to his final evening, even down to the lengthy exposé published in one of the less reputable tabloids under the byline of Prince Dexter, she has kept remnants of it all. That day we sat together on her back porch not long ago, she finally told us about it, waited until the football game had begun and Jake was down in the yard with the dog and distracted—then she leaned forward and took us all in confidence, told us she wanted to show us something. A short time later, she returned with an armful of stacked shoeboxes, spilled it all out on the patio table where it rested in disorganized piles for the remainder of the day, one or another of us periodically picking up a random article and leafing through it, not really reading but unable to deny our hands this tactile perusal of the past, though we all have different perspectives: some with guilt, some with anger, some ashamed, all to some degree ready to move on. Because how are you supposed to feel in the aftermath of such an event? Are you supposed to faint or flail about and carry on like women do in books and movies, or are you supposed to do what women have actually been doing for thousands of years?
An early Saturday afternoon. The shouts of the football game across town and a high battalion of clouds marching across the sky, the four of us sitting together and talking about whatever was left to talk about now that the various particulars and obligations had been worked out, now that the three hundred acres were officially gone, now that the company had been purchased in its entirety for seven million dollars by a British bank and divided into a dozen meaningless subsidiaries, now that all the assets and inheritance had been liquidated and his name and legacy that had meant so much to him had been left empty save the shame of being associated with the company now and forever emblematic of American greed run amok, the four of us sat together trying to decide what it all meant and instead found only that we each just wanted to be left alone to come to our own conclusions.
Annabelle, of all people, expressed an interest in going to see his grave some time—we know it is somewhere near Monterey, and could possibly find out more from the lawyers—suggesting an attempt at closure regarding the man whom she remembers from a few restless seasons in San Berdoo and near a decade in Fairbanks, Alaska. A trip to see him—or to come as close to it as is possible—for the first time since she escaped him over twenty years ago.
“That’s still how I think of it,” she says, looking at the rest of us one at a time. “An escape.”
Dat stands behind her, having refilled the lemonade pitcher and brought it out to us. He places a hand on her shoulder, seems to be examining from a distance the collection of history arrayed on the table like a disassembled puzzle. She places her hand briefly upon his and pats it. Then he turns and walks back into the house.
Amelia tells Annabelle she should come visit. “After Julia and I are settled in California.” A look of anticipation and excitement shared between the two of them. “Or wherever we end up,” Julia says cryptically. Annabelle’s eyes drift toward the sky. She still cannot believe that the two of them are going through with this, that Julia has quit her job in Chicago in favor of a destination-less drive west, headed for Los Angeles, San Francisco, wherever—headed toward a mysterious future with Amelia and her son, following whatever leads and plotlines they can unearth along the way.
“Oh, don’t roll your eyes, Mother,” says Julia. She’s made very clear to her mother that this is not a spontaneous thing, that these thoughts of leaving it all behind and starting anew have been on her mind for years. They go off on a tangent, bickering the way mothers and daughters do, while the rest of us watch. Across town, we hear the football stadium rise up with a distant enthusiasm, and then seconds later we hear Dat and David reacting to the same event as it appears on their television screen, a sound that sends Jake rushing up the yard and through the clattering back screen door to see.
In some respects, we’ve come a long way in these two years. In some respects, we’ve become like a family, or maybe a new translation of that word, a new iteration more flexible and mutable. We’ve come a long way, but then how could you not when your lives together began with three funerals and then—just when the strangeness and sadness of it was beginning to dissipate—a fourth death. When joined by such circumstances, how could you not come a long way? We don’t feel the same way about it. We have different perspectives. But we try our best to understand each other. We have to.
FORMER E-STAR HEAD, GEORGE BENJAMIN HILL, 71, FOUND DEAD IN MONTEREY BEACH HOUSE
When Annabelle pulls out the lighter, we think it’s to light the candles. The day is fading, the football game long over but merely replaced by another one, minus a rooting interest but still preferable, for the boys, to this endless outdoor conversation, this relentless rehashing and contextualizing. We think she’s just lighting the citronella candles until she starts to fit everything back into the shoeboxes, the articles and the photos. When the shoeboxes are full, we each take one, carrying it in both hands like an offering. We each dump our share of the burden onto the seldom-used firepit at the rear of the yard, and then Annabelle leans forward with the lighter, while the rest of us step back and watch her do it.
MY ROOM IS AT THE back of the house, next to the room in which Julia Nguyen grew up, a small corner room with slanted eaves and one narrow window looking down on the yard and, beyond the pale wooden fence, the low suburban skyline of this college town, the rows of little houses running alongside the elms toward the brick rooflines of the academic buildings. It’s above the kitchen, and so often during the late afternoons as the daylight fades and deep shades overtake the world, I can hear them down there. My mother and her second husband, their voices the low murmurs of old married couples, asking how come they’re out of milk, have you talked to David or Julia lately?
> I’ve always dreamed of a place like this, have always imagined a view such as this one, that encompasses such a spectrum of dream and possibility, of knowledge and learning, of careers full of success and pride, of such fine places for relaxing as on quads and in libraries and lunch halls, friendships formed and strengthened over four years and teary departures full of hope and nostalgia for a little town in the Midwest from which lives spiral out toward unknown second acts. I’ve always dreamed of a place and a view that inspired such memories and worldliness yet offered in its distance some seclusion and privacy. When the sun starts to set, throwing gold brilliance upon the top layer of all I see, I turn from the window, step out into the creaking hallway, pad along the weathered runner with my hand on the railing, the sounds and smells of the dinner that Annabelle, my mother, is preparing downstairs wafting up.
Some days, she’s told me, it’s like seeing a ghost. She sees me moving from bedroom to bathroom, hears me on the stairs and watches my body appearing out of the shadows, and it makes her heart stop, the aged specter of the young girl she once knew stalking her in ghostly form. But in the end it’s just me. Her forty-three-year-old daughter who seems to have moved in. For good? Who can say? But she must understand that I seem to feel content here, something that I’ve been surprised by as well, surprised by the comfort I’ve found in this cluttered house with my mother and her second husband, surprised by my unwillingness to move back west and by the fact that I’m actually out looking for a job some days, to which Dat offers reassurance by telling me it can be tough this time of year when the students are in town. A man for whom I once wished nothing better than the loss of every cent on the gaming floors now offering me encouragement, not to mention a place to stay.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 32