“What?”
“I am afraid of being alone.”
You stumble into a nightmare—you grasp for salvation.
“I’m afraid of losing you . . . and Robby . . . and Sarah . . .”
If something is written, can it be unwritten?
I tensed when I said, “Don’t go,” even though this wasn’t meant literally.
“I’ll only be gone a week.”
I thought about the week that had just passed. “That’s a long time.”
“ ‘There’s always summer,’ ” she said wistfully, a famous line from a movie she had made—the elusive love interest who strands the fiancé at the altar.
“Don’t go,” I said again.
She was unfolding a napkin. She was quietly crying.
“What?” I reached for her. I felt the corners of my mouth sag.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me.”
This would be the last dinner I ever had with Jayne.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5
19. the cat
I woke up staring at our darkened ceiling in the master bedroom.
The writer was imagining an intricate moment: Jayne saying goodbye to the children, kneeling on the cold granite of the driveway, a sedan and its driver idling behind her, and the kids were dressed for school and she’d left them so many times before that Sarah and Robby were used to this—they didn’t sulk, they barely paid attention, because this was just business: Mom going nowhere again. (If Robby was slightly more emotional that day in November, he did not reveal it to Jayne.) Why was Jayne lingering when she said goodbye to Robby? Why was she searching his eyes? Why did Jayne stroke his face until Robby pulled back and flinched, Sarah’s fingers still restlessly entwined with her mother’s? She crushed them in a hug, their foreheads touching, the front of the house looming over them with the wall that was a map sprawling across its surface. She would only be gone a week. She would call them that night from her hotel room in Toronto. (Later, at Buckley, Sarah would point at the wrong plane cruising the sky, passing in and out of clouds, and tell a teacher, “My mommy’s up there,” and by then Jayne’s pain would have faded.) Why did Jayne weep on the ride to the Midland Airport? Before Jayne left the darkness of our bedroom, why had I said the words I promise? My pillow was wet. I had cried in my sleep again. Sun was now filtering into the room and the ceiling was lighting itself indifferently in an enlarging diamond, and the umbrellas were still spinning and iridescent halos revolved around me—the remnants of a dream I couldn’t remember—and mid-yawn my immediate thought was Jayne’s gone. What the writer wanted to know was: why was Jayne so frightened the morning of November fifth? Or, more accurately, how did Jayne intuit what was going to happen to us during her absence?
Ignoring everything is very easy to do. Paying attention is much harder, but this is what was demanded of me since I was now the momentary guardian.
It was time to condense things, and because of this everything started moving faster. I now had a list that needed to be checked on the morning of November fifth. The newspaper needed to be scanned for any information about the missing boys. (Nothing.)
It also needed to be scanned for any information pertaining to a murder at the Orsic Motel. (Nothing.)
The last time I dialed Aimee Light’s number was on the morning of November fifth. Her cell phone wasn’t even on anymore.
I checked my e-mail. There were no longer any messages coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks at 2:40 a.m.
I couldn’t tell if the carpeting in the living room was darker. The writer told me it was. But he also said it didn’t matter anymore.
The furniture was still in the same formation I’d known as a child. The writer confirmed this as well, then wanted to inspect the exterior of the house.
When we walked around to the side of the house facing the Allens’, we saw that the wall was still in the process of changing. The salmon pink had darkened and the stucco was pronouncing itself more forcefully in wheeling patterns that were suddenly appearing everywhere. The writer whispered to me: the house is turning into the one you grew up in.
I moved on to the front of the house, where the peeling continued to spread its warning.
The sweet, rank smell of something dead was noticeable immediately.
There was a hedge that aisled the lower half of the northern side of the house and I scanned it until I saw the cat.
It was lying on its side, spine arched, its small yellow teeth locked in a frozen grimace, and its intestines leeched the ground, clinging to the dirt they had poured onto. Its eyes were squeezed tight with what I first thought was pain.