“No, no, no—I rearranged it this morning, Jayne.”
“—and those footprints and the discoloration are also from the party, and I’ve already called a cleaning service—”
“Goddamnit, Jayne—I did not hallucinate this,” I said scornfully, bewildered by her refusal to believe me. “There was a car out front, and there was someone upstairs and—”
“Where is this person now, Bret?”
“He left. He got in the car and left.”
“How?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you went upstairs and saw this person and then he ran outside and got into a car?”
“Well, yeah, but I couldn’t see him because it was too dark and—”
“He must have run past the kids and Wendy then,” Jayne said. “They must have seen him as he ran right by them to get into this car, right?”
“Well . . . no. No . . . I mean, I think he jumped from Robby’s window . . .”
Jayne’s face collapsed into disgust. She walked away from me and went into the office and put the gun back in the safe, locking it. I followed her silently, glancing around for any evidence that someone had been in the house and that this vision was not caused by too much sangria and marijuana and the general bad vibes that were now slouching toward me relentlessly. Jayne started moving up the staircase. I followed her because I didn’t know what else to do.
The sconces in the hallway were lit, bathing the corridor with its usual cold glow.
Robby’s door was closed, and when Jayne tried to open it she realized it was locked.
“Robby?” Jayne called. “Honey?”
“Mom—I’m fine. Go away” was what we heard from behind the door.
“Robby, let me in. I want to ask you something,” I said, trying to push the door open.
But he never opened the door. There was no answer. I didn’t ask again because I couldn’t bear what his reaction might be. Plus the Terby was in there, and the dead mouse, and the open window.
Jayne was sighing as she went into Sarah’s room, where Wendy had put her into bed. Beneath a lavender comforter, Sarah was holding that awful doll and her face was radiant with tears. I consoled myself with the lame fact that eventually the tears would stop, but how could I have asked her at that point how that thing had gotten from Robby’s room into her arms during this time frame?
“Mommy!” Sarah exclaimed, her voice trembling with dread and relief.
“I’m here,” Jayne answered hollowly. “I’m here, honey.”
I was about to follow Jayne into the room but she closed the door on me.
I stood there. That she didn’t believe anything I told her, and that she was moving away from me because of it, made that night even more frightening and intolerable. I tried in vain to downplay the fear, but I couldn’t. Frantic, I just stood outside Sarah’s door and tried to decipher the soothing whispers from inside and then I heard a noise from elsewhere in the house and I thought I’d be sick again, but when I walked downstairs it was only Victor scratching at the kitchen door, wanting to be let in, and then changing his mind. I kept peering out the windows, looking for the car, but the lane was quiet tonight, as it always was, and no one was out. What could I tell Jayne or Robby and Sarah that would make them believe me? Everything I wanted to tell them I witnessed would just serve as the potential catalyst for pushing me out of the house. Everything I had seen would never be believed by any of them. And suddenly, on that night, I knew that I needed to be in that house. I needed to be a participant. I needed to be grounded in the life of the family that lived there. More than anyone else in the world I needed to be there. Because on that night I came to believe that I was the only one who could save my family. I convinced myself of this hard fact on that warm night in November. What caused this realization had less to do with the phantom shadows I saw pacing the master bedroom while I sat stoned in the Allens’ yard, or the thing that rushed past me in the darkness of the hallway, or the Terby with the dead mouse, than with a detail I could never share with Jayne (with anyone) because it would be the last straw. It would be my exit ticket. The license plate numbers on the cream-colored 450 SL that had sat in front of our house only minutes earlier were the same exact ones on the cream-colored 450 SL my deceased father had driven more than twenty years ago.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3
13. parent/teacher night
I convinced myself I hadn’t seen anything. I had done this many times before (when my father struck me, when I first broke up with Jayne, when I overdosed in Seattle, every moment I thought about reaching for my son) and I was adept at erasing reality. As a writer, it was easy for me to dream up the more viable scenario than the one that had actually played itself out. And so I replaced the roughly ten minutes of footage—which began in the Allens’ backyard and ended with me holding a gun in my son’s room as a car from my past disappeared onto Bedford Street—with something else. Maybe my mind had started shifting while listening to the grating voices at the Allens’ dining table. Maybe the marijuana had created those manifestations I had supposedly witnessed. Did I believe what had happened last night? Did it make any difference if I did? Especially since no one else believed me and there was no proof? As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth. But since on the morning of November third the truth was irrelevant—since the truth had already been disqualified—I was free to envision another movie. And since I was good at making up things and detailing them meticulously, giving them the necessary spin and shine, I began realizing a new film with different scenes and a happier ending that didn’t leave me shivering in the guest room, alone and afraid. But this is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer’s physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily. The problem I encountered that morning was that I needed to compose the peaceful alternative to the terror of last night, yet the half world of the writer’s life encourages drama and pain, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity became chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daughter became a whore. I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life—an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen—into the part of me that was tactile and alive. But, admittedly, on that third day of November, I was at a point at which I believed the two had merged and I could not tell one from the other.