The Scapegoat

by Sara Davis

  “I made chicken,” she said, frowning into the light. “We could heat it up, but it might actually be better cold…” She trailed off, because she was looking at me more closely now, under the bright kitchen light. She drew her breath in with a hiss.

  “Where have you been?”

  Somewhere close by a telephone was ringing.

  “Are you kidding?” said Gerry under his breath. “Who is calling at this time of night?”

  Ann was still looking at me with the same concerned expression, but when I gave her no encouragement she went back to the refrigerator and opened the door. I lost interest in the little scene for a time, and when I returned there was a plate of chicken and roasted potatoes on the counter in front of me, and Gerry was saying, “Yes, thank you,” and hanging up the phone.

  “Who was it?” Ann asked.

  The look on Gerry’s face was strange. He was moving slowly now, back toward the kitchen, as if he wanted to figure something out before arriving. He cut a dumpy and unappealing figure in his bathrobe, his long legs pale and spindly beneath its hem.

  “Well,” he said, hesitating. He looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he said to Ann, “Stephanie isn’t coming back until tomorrow, is she?”

  “No,” said Ann. “What? Who was that on the phone?”

  He did not respond immediately, and I waited, without much interest, for him to go on.

  “Were you?” he said nonsensically, turning abruptly to me. “Kirstie Johanssen,” he said suddenly. “Isn’t she the one … who knew your father?”

  Ann was looking at me, too, now, and when I did not respond she said, “Yes, I think so,” and then to Gerry, incredulous, “That was who was calling? Kirstie Johanssen?”

  “No,” he said. “No, no.”

  He was looking at the countertop with uncharacteristic intensity. “That was someone else. Kirstie Johanssen is missing.”

  Ann closed the refrigerator door. “Missing?” she repeated. “What does that mean, missing?”

  Gerry did not answer, or if he did I didn’t hear him—I was regarding Ann contemplatively, as if really seeing her for the first time in a long while. She has aged badly, I thought. But how exactly, it was more difficult to say. Like an old shoe that you have had for many years, after a certain point it becomes difficult to tell how it might look to other people.

  They were both looking at me now. Ann, who had just poured a glass of water, put it down slowly in front of me, like she had forgotten what it was.

  “What was that?” she said.

  I was silent, at first, and then I said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But of course you did,” said Ann. Her brow furrowed, and then she laughed as if despite herself. “You said I looked like an old shoe.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but no words came out—I could not explain it.

  They were even closer now, Gerry especially, until both their faces, curiously blank, were mere feet from mine, and I felt myself inspected. Not only that, I felt suspicion in their gaze. Was it possible? I thought. Could they know already?

  “Nothing!” I burst out, and swept my arm up to emphasize my point—but in doing so I knocked the glass Ann had just set down off the counter, and next I heard it crash into a million pieces on the floor.

  “Silly me,” I said, quietly and to myself, looking down from my perch to the shards twinkling up at me.

  Glass, I thought. Life, two fingers, and then the room went sideways, and because of the proximity of the shards to my open eye, I deduced that I was now lying on the floor.

  32

  We have one dream, and then each year we make it a little smaller, all the while saying to ourselves that it’s to be expected, after all. This little success will do. Then this smaller one. So I will not have professional success, but I will have a good home life; I will marry well. And then it is the next year, then it is several years later, I will not have professional success, if I have not found some willing applicant for love, I will seek pleasure in solitude. And so on and so forth.

  I find I am brimful of thoughts like these. Gems of wisdom, each one riding like a wave on the back of another wave. Here I am in a narrow bed, low to the floor, in an unfamiliar room, sparsely furnished, with a single high window in the corner through which the morning light falls in fat bars across the thin brown blanket. On the wall is a framed picture of blue cartoon rabbits roller-skating. Not an interior decorating scheme that inspires much confidence, but when it comes to my thoughts, I am in an orchard and the fruit is ripe, I wander through the trees in a perfect light.

  Stirring, I feel an unfamiliar warm patch against my thigh, and reaching down I am delighted to feel the soft fur and cold ears of what is unmistakably a cat. This is that black cat, the most obese of the three Van Gelder cats, I think, stroking it.

  Ann and Gerry, I remember. This is their house. This must be their spare room. Here is the glass of water Ann left on the nightstand.

  Through the walls of the house I hear the click of the front door opening, and Ann’s voice says, “Come in.” Early for a visitor, I think; judging by the light it could not be later than six or seven in the morning. Now here is Gerry’s voice, in its low register, joining in. Footsteps in the hall.

  The door opens, and the light in the room has changed. It could be that it’s actually the next day, or the next. Keeping track of time has proven more difficult than it had initially seemed. Here is an old man wearing a well-cut gray coat, who sits down in a chair which has suddenly materialized beside my bed.

  “How do you do?” I say, because it seems only polite because of where he is sitting; we are very close together.

  He’s looking at me intently but does not respond. His eyes have a hooded, turtle-like quality to them, and very softly, as if they are very far away indeed, I hear a soft tinkle of bells. You know this man, the bells say. But I can’t place him.

  “I’m handcuffed to the bed,” I say suddenly, and as I say it, I realize that it’s true. It’s my right hand, and the other side is fastened to my bedpost. For a moment I am less certain that this is Ann and Gerry’s house, but I push this thought aside.

  The old man’s eyes flick to the handcuffs, but still he doesn’t speak.

  “But that makes sense,” I say, trying my best to fill the silence. “I killed someone.”

  For a second the man’s face experiences a little stutter, and freezes. But then he recovers, recovers himself totally, and raises one eyebrow as if to say, Oh, really? Whom?

  “That’s an interesting question,” I reply, as if he had asked it out loud. “It’s sort of hard to say. Could have been one of three people.”

  But that’s not quite right. And then a new, unrelated thought pushes to the surface: Could it be, as I am in Ann and Gerry’s house, that this old man is Ann’s father?

  It is true that he looks nothing like he did at Thanksgiving. This man, the one sitting in the chair in front of me, seems more robust, but it is not outside the realm of possibility.

  “I’ve known Ann and Gerry for years, a long time,” I say ingratiatingly, hoping this will get a response.

  Nothing.

  “We were neighbors, in graduate student housing,” I say. “It’s funny how the mind works, I can barely remember that apartment now.”

  It was true. I can barely remember it now, the apartment where they’d been my neighbors. I had had the mistaken impression that my father would meet me there when I arrived. Why, I don’t know; I can see now that it was an illogical expectation. I can’t remember now who it was who handed over the keys, who walked me through those unmemorable rooms, but it was not my father.

  In fact, I saw him only once, I’m fairly certain, after my arrival at the university and before his death. It was early in the morning, the first truly cold morning of autumn, and the grass on the Oval was silvered with frost. I was walking towards the main quad, wishing I had worn a thicker jacket, when I saw my father standing beside the Bu
rghers of Calais, whose figures, I saw, had been wrapped head-to-toe in burlap and rope, a bizarre sight.

  Neither he nor I made any gesture, though I am certain he saw me. Our eyes met. Then the moment passed and he turned back to his companions, a well-dressed man and woman whom he seemed to be leading on a tour.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My most sincere thanks to Rebecca Curtis, my first, best writing teacher. Thank you to Paul LaFarge, Victor LaValle, and Ben Marcus for their guidance.

  Thank you to my editors, Eric Chinski and Julia Ringo, and my agent, Claudia Ballard, for their time and dedication to this book.

  A debt of inspiration is owed to David E. Stannard and his book American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.

  For their support and encouragement, my thanks to Zeynep Kayhan, Yvonne Woon, Medaya Ocher, Andrew Eisenman, Ezra Koenig, Marya Spence, Meghan Sutherland, Willing Davidson, Ahna O’Reilly, and Eugene Kotlyarenko.

  Thanks to the Ucross Foundation of Ucross, Wyoming, the Ragdale Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center.

  Last, thanks to Evan Small and Lev Wilder Small for their patience.

  A Note About the Author

  Sara Davis, the daughter of two Stanford immunologists, grew up in Palo Alto, California, and received her bachelor’s degree and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit. She lives in Shanghai, China. The Scapegoat is her first book. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2021 by Sara Davis

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2021

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72044-5

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