All Things Cease to Appear (47 page)

Meaning?

She said he held her down. They were out in this field. She showed me the marks on her wrists. I never spoke to him after that. But he came to the hospital after the accident. My wife was in a coma. He stood there over her bed and I swear—Bram looks at him, his eyes watering—I swear he was smiling.

—

THEY WERE OUTSIDERS,
I guess, June Pratt says, slicing into an angel-food cake she’d made earlier that afternoon. With her small hands she serves him cake and tea and then helps herself. It’s a funny name for a cake, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

Do you believe in angels, Travis?

No, ma’am. I don’t.

Well, if they ate cake, and I’m sure they do, this is what they’d have.

It’s very good.

It’s nice to have a little cake in the afternoon, isn’t it?

Yes, it sure is.

He asks her again about the night George Clare knocked on her door. My heart was pounding, she says. I just knew he had something to do with it. You just know, don’t you? We’re no different than animals. We have a built-in instinct for sensing danger, don’t you think?

Yes, I believe that’s true. Only we don’t always act on it. And that’s when we get in trouble.

She nods, considering. I always thought there was something odd about them. We weren’t the best of neighbors, I’ll admit that. I didn’t go out of my way. But after what happened to the Hales I had a hard time even walking down there. Plus, it rubbed me wrong that they’d gotten the place so cheap. But that’s life, isn’t it? You just never know.

Yes, ma’am. That’s the truth.

Travis gazes across the checkered tablecloth at the woman he’d been in love with when they were high-school kids. She’d been in the cheerleading circle and much more popular than he was. Anyway, he’d met Mary soon after. It had all worked out just like it was supposed to, he guessed.

They seemed friendly enough. June sips her tea and sets the cup down soundlessly on her saucer. That little girl, she was always dressed up so cute. I feel so awful for that little girl, don’t you?

Yes, I do.

More tea, Travis?

No, thanks.

She came by once, the wife. Said she was in the middle of cooking something and didn’t have enough sugar and could I loan her some, so of course I asked her in and after a little while, as I was measuring out the sugar, she said there was a stink in her house she couldn’t get rid of. I asked what it smelled like and she said it was kind of like urine and she couldn’t get it out no matter what, and so I told her to wash down her floors with vinegar and she said she’d try that and then she started crying. I asked what was wrong, but she just shook her head and said it was nothing, she was just having a bad day. I’ve had a few myself, I told her, and then she took the sugar and left. I don’t know what else you can say to someone like that, do you?

—

HE HAS
his secretary call down to the Clare household in Connecticut to request an interview with George, but the call isn’t returned. He gets through to Catherine’s mother, who cries for a good ten minutes, until her husband grabs the receiver and tells him to let them mourn their daughter in peace. He sends some men down to Connecticut in hopes of getting inside the Clares’ home, but they’re turned away and the door is closed in their faces.

Two weeks into the investigation, a criminal defense attorney named Todd Howell contacts Travis on behalf of George Clare and lays out a list of requirements that they’ll have to agree to if they want to talk to his client, one of which stipulates that Howell himself must be present at any interview with the police. Which basically means that any question asked of Clare would be met with the same reply: I don’t recall. After a little research, Travis gets the goods on Howell—a partner at some splashy New York City firm famous for high-profile cases and getting people off.

During a televised press conference, when asked if George Clare will be issued a subpoena to testify before a grand jury, Perry Roscoe, head of the district attorney’s homicide bureau, announces that they have no such plans. In New York State, he explains, a subpoena would grant Clare immunity from prosecution unless he waived that right, which would be unlikely.

We’ve decided not to do that, Roscoe says, then spells it out: We’re not prepared to give Mr. Clare immunity in this case.

11

HE SAID
he could be himself with her. He didn’t have to pretend. That was hard for him, pretending all the time. He’d lean back on the pillow and smoke with this distant, melancholy look on his face, lying there in his bigness, all length and angles, with his legs open and his penis sleeping. The last time they had sex, she cried a little and told him it was over, that they couldn’t go on like this, it was destroying her, and he just shook his head and smiled and said, I don’t know why you insist on stopping. You seem to enjoy what we do.

Well, I don’t.

That’s not the impression I get. You just won’t admit it.

I just said I don’t, and I mean it.

She turned away to grab her clothes but he pulled her back, hard.

You pulling away like this just makes me want you more.

He held her down; he was a cannibal, eating her, biting and prodding, consuming her.

He told her she’d conjured the monster inside him. This is your doing, he said. He made it all her fault.

—

HIS WIFE WORE
Chanel N
^o
5, same as her dad’s girlfriend, but Portia was racy and wore high boots and short skirts and had this curly red hair she’d tie up in scarves. Portia was a real New Yorker and Catherine Clare was a hick from upstate. My wife is from modest circumstances, was how George put it. Her getting a full scholarship to college was a big deal. She’d done better than him in school. That doesn’t mean smarter, he was quick to point out, then admitted, as if being generous, that his wife could have done much more with her life if he hadn’t gotten her pregnant.
Things sort of changed when we got married.

Weirdly, Willis admired her for sticking it out with him for the sake of their kid. Her parents hadn’t done that. You had to admire a person who could make a decision even if it was for somebody else’s benefit, unlike her own mother, who couldn’t make decisions about anything and would stew over certain choices, only to change her mind at the last minute, even if it was something dumb like taking a pottery class.

Back home, when her parents were still together, her father usually slept in his study when he was working on a case. Often, very late at night, she’d hear the sound of the cassette player, her father listening to his clients’ statements as he prepared his arguments. They were her strange little bedtime stories. The voices of the bad people, she often thought, putting her to sleep at night.

There were things she noticed about these statements, how they spoke and the stories they told. There were certain consistencies. Phrases repeated. Particular manners of speech.

Her father had told her that a true sociopath has the ability to convince himself that he’s innocent. So everything that comes out of his mouth rings true to him, and usually to everyone else. They separate themselves from the event. Like they’d never been there. Like it never even happened.

They get so good at it they can pass a lie-detector test, her father had said.

Although those results weren’t admissible in their state anyway, it still made the prosecutors uneasy—a soft spot in an otherwise muscular case.

These people—people like George—were predatory. They had skills of perception that regular people lacked. Maybe because, unlike most people, they knew what they needed and weren’t afraid to admit it. Survival skills. So they could go out and do it again.

—

THESE MORNINGS IN
San Francisco, she goes to the library to keep up with the case, to know where he is, to work on feeling safe. She reads the articles on microfiche and every day there’s something new. Not just details of the investigation, but things about George and Franny. They were living with his parents. He was working for his father in one of the furniture stores. There was a quote of him saying,
Parenting was kind of my wife’s job before and now it’s mine. It’s something I think I owe her.

She wonders bitterly what Catherine would think of his assertion that mothering had been
kind of
her job and that he
thinks
he owes her, as if he’s not really sure. And why does he owe her in the first place? What does he owe her
for
?

His tentative sentiment gives her the chills.

Sickened, she almost doesn’t finish the article, but then something at the bottom catches her eye, a surname she recognizes. Hers.

On impulse, she goes outside and finds a newsstand and gets some quarters to make the call from a phone booth on the corner. She knows her father’s office number by heart and dials it now, determined to warn him about George Clare and tell him what she knows. Taking his case was a mistake—a travesty. But when the switchboard picks up she’s promptly put on hold and kept waiting and waiting, and in these moments of concentrated anticipation she is gripped with a sense of terror as a realization takes shape in her mind.

Good afternoon, Todd Howell’s office, a woman says. Hello? Is anyone on the line?

She hangs up.

Tears fill her eyes with such force that she’s momentarily blinded as the full picture of what George has done finally sinks in.

She was just some girl, she imagines him telling her father. Some girl from the inn. For him it was a regrettable fling—but the girl became obsessed and wanted him to leave his wife, his child. A real mess. A girl with problems, serious issues. She’d flunked out of school. Once, she even tried to jump off a building. He’d tried to end it but she simply wouldn’t let go. Her father would only have to establish that this unstable, pathetic wreck of a girl might have, in a jealous rage, done this awful thing to poor innocent Catherine. Worse, once her father discovered it was
her,
should that regrettable disclosure come to pass, he’d be obligated to hand the case over to one of his partners. Even if she revealed all the sick and fucked-up things about George, they could, based on her psychiatric history, easily persuade a jury that she was making it up. They’d call in her shrink as an expert witness, who’d expose her mother’s gayness, her father’s girlfriend—it would be downright ugly. Even with no real evidence against her, their job would be done and George would seem as guileless as a choirboy.

A week later, she’s wiping down the counter when a man comes into the restaurant. He sits down and drinks a cup of coffee and orders a piece of pie with a slice of cheese on top. She’s seen his type before, hanging around her father’s office, only this guy’s even sleazier. Thank you, Willis, he says pointedly, and walks out. She’s thrown a minute until she remembers her name tag. He’s left his money on the counter, no tip but something else, a manila envelope bound with a red string. It’s slow, so she asks for a break and goes outside, lights a cigarette, sits down on the old metal chair, opens the envelope and slides out the photographs. They’re of her and George having sex, and show a lot. There’s a note attached in George’s twiggy handwriting:
Don’t make me send these to Daddy,
is all it says.

12

SHE GETS MOODY,
distracted. Burns her poetry in the kitchen sink. Works from noon to closing at the restaurant and comes home stinking of fried fish and grease, slippery with sweat. He has to do everything, play in the band, fix the meals, haul their dirty clothes down to the Laundromat. She hardly talks to him, just skulks around the apartment holding a drink and pushes him away in bed.

What’s wrong with you?

Nothing.

Then, lying in bed one night under the fluid shadows of passing trolleys, she tells him about George Clare. I got caught up in something, she says. I couldn’t get out of it. He had this power over me.

He tries to listen carefully, to be open to her, but her confession only makes him angry. He turns away from her.

She presses her naked body against his back and cries. I’m better now, she tells him. I’m over it.

You lied, he says in the darkness.

I know, I’m sorry. I was afraid. I hated myself.

That’s not why.

I don’t know why, she says. I honestly don’t.

He turns to look at her, her wet, dark eyes, her lips, and suddenly feels nothing.

I’m moving back to L.A., she tells him. I’m going back to school. They said I can come back if I do an extra semester.

That’s good. You should.

What about you?

I’m sure I’ll think of something.

When will you hear from Berklee?

Soon, he says. May, I think.

Will you go? If you get in, I mean.

He nods. I have to see.

Boston’s nice. I want to go to law school there. I want to study law, she blurts. To put people like him away.

You’ll make a good lawyer, he says, and means it.

You’re going to be famous.

I don’t care about that. I just want to play.

He sits up on the side of the bed and lights a cigarette. He doesn’t want her to see his face.

She puts her hand on his back. I’m sorry, Eddy. I never meant to hurt you.

People always say that.

But I really mean it.

You broke my heart. Just so you know.

It’s not broken, she says. It’s broken in.

He looks at her and she smiles in that crooked way of hers and suddenly being mad seems pointless. She’s just a girl trying to grow up, he thinks. He still loves her, always will. He holds her in his arms and they lie awake all night long, listening to the songs of the city, the walls alive with shadows, knowing that, come morning, she’ll be gone.

A Scholarly Temperament

AT FIRST
there’s the continual assault of cameras, the abrupt contortions on strangers’ faces when they realize who he is. He rarely leaves the house. He spends whole days up in his room, staring out at the Sound. He feels trapped inside the wrong life, where even escape offers no peace, no deliverance.