The Fall of Never (14 page)

“Fabulous piece,” the woman said, and not without sarcasm. “I hear Phil actually attended an auction in Concord to bid on the original, but inevitably lost out. He’s a freak when it comes to Maccinetti. All of them: Nina MacDonald, John Parrish—if it’s been painted by some dull, neoconservative philanthropist, it’s probably hanging on one of these walls.”

But Kelly had blocked the woman out; she could only stare at the painting—at the giant impression of a man crouching beside a river—and think of one thing.
That’s my father,
she thought, the notion materializing from nothing.
I haven’t thought about him or even seen him in so long, but I know that the man in this painting is my father. And he’s all bent over and sobbing the way he was that night on the dark winding stairs, when he thought I couldn’t see him…

In the end, that was really all she had: two images of the man whom had initiated her creation—the Proud Hunter and the Weeping Behemoth.

After showering and closing her sister’s bedroom window, Kelly came downstairs and walked along the downstairs hallway in search of either her mother or Glenda to complain about the window being opened. She could find neither of them (in such a large house, no matter how many people occupied it, the damnable thing always felt empty).

A noise from the other end of the hallway gathered her attention, and she went to the end of it, pausing outside what had once been her father’s purple room. The two oak double-doors were not completely closed and there was a light on inside, so she came up to the crack between the two doors and peered in.

She saw her father standing in the middle of the room, his back facing the doors. With only a moment’s hesitation, she pushed the doors open and took one step inside.

“Daddy,” she said.

The room was no longer purple. In fact, it was no longer
anything.
The hardwood floor was carpetless and caked with dust. The grandiose oil paintings had been removed, the only indication of their existence the darkened rectangles of wood paneling left in their stead. The purple velvet drapes were gone too, having been replaced by functional white blinds. And all those staring animal heads were gone now as well.

He turned to the sound of her voice, and she half-expected him to look just the way he did in her memories, maybe even caressing a tumbler of brandy. But when he turned and faced her, she saw that he was now only the rudimentary caricature of that man, with pieces long lost and too forgotten to be remembered.

“Kelly,” he said. His eyes had dulled over the years and he’d lost too much weight. “This is good.”

She went to him and hugged him awkwardly with one arm. He reciprocated, his movements stiff and confused. He smelled faintly of powder and sleep.

“I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you,” she said.

“Everything is all right? The trip in—it was fine?”

“Fine.”

“All right.”

She wanted to ask him what happened to his room, what happened to the crushed velvet drapes and the stupid stares of the bodiless wildlife, but didn’t.

“You look well,” he told her. “You’re healthy?”

“I’m good, Dad.”

“That’s good.” He smiled the slightest bit. “And married?”

“Divorced.”

“Did he hit you?” he asked. “Hurt you?”

It was an abrupt question, one she hadn’t anticipated. After a brief hesitation, she said, “No, of course not. It just wasn’t right.”

“But you’re happy now?”

“I’m good,” she said again.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said, his words coming slow, “that it had to be under these circumstances…”

“I’d like to stay until Becky wakes up.”

He nodded. “That’s good. The police explained things to you, then?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No one did. Not mother, not the police. Glenda started to, but…”

“You shouldn’t have to hear such things from Glenda.”

I shouldn’t have to get phone calls in the middle of the night from a stranger telling me my sister’s been beaten half to death, either,
she thought.

“Why isn’t she in a hospital where there are doctors and they can keep an eye on her?”

“Because this is where she belongs,” he said.

“That makes no sense.”

“This is her
home,
Kelly. It was yours once too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“There should be doctors watching her.”

“Doctors come here,” he said. “There’s nothing they can do in a hospital that they can’t do here.”

“Why is she still unconscious?”

“Why?” mulled her father. He turned away from her and stared at the white blinds over the windows. Outside, it was falling dark. “Why do people do things that hurt other people? Can you answer that question for me? Why did your sister almost die that night? Why did she even leave the house? I don’t know the answers, Kelly, do you? If you know, I’d like you to tell me. Tell me what you know.”

She was at a loss. “I don’t know,” she said.

“So you don’t know then too.” Then he turned back to face her, and his eyes were more alive. “You’ve hated us for a long time,” he said. It was not a question. “It was because we sent you to that hospital.”

“Hospital?” Barred windows, straps on the bedposts. “It was a goddamn
asylum.
I was fifteen years old.”

“It was a place for you to get better, to get well, and your mother and I didn’t want to see you going through any more pain.”

“Pain,” she repeated, beginning to tremble.

“We didn’t know what else to do. How could we watch you fall apart like that without doing anything about it? You were fifteen, yes, but you had some sort of nervous breakdown. You shut down, shut everyone out. You wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t move, for Christ’s sake. A parent doesn’t just watch that happen—”

But those were just excuses. “You never came to see me in three years. You could’ve at least done that.”

He just stared at her. For one reeling moment, she thought he was about to agree with her and admit his fault. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. Just stood there staring at her, as if trying to see past the woman she had become to the small and frightened child she had once been.

Finally, he said, “Did they at least help you?” His voice had taken on a hushed quality. “Did they at least get you beyond whatever you needed to pass over?”

“I…” And what was she about to say? The truth: “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know,” her father mumbled.

Yet maybe she
did
know, at least a little bit. During her time at the institution, she did not cooperate with the doctors and nurses, did not try to weed out her fears and the reason for her emotional breakdown. Instead, she focused all that anger on her parents—the parents who had locked her in such a hell hole, the parents who did not come to visit in the three years she’d remained caged up like some psychopath, like some animal. There was no
getting better
at the institution; rather, she just got
angrier.

No,
she thought,
that’s not completely true. I did get better, in a sense. I got better at forgetting.

Forgetting.

The cloudy veil.

“The police mentioned something about a diary,” she said to him. “It seems Becky mentioned something about me, about having been in some sort of contact with me.”

“The police thought you might know of someone she’d been seeing, someone that would give them a lead.”

“I want to see the diary.”

“Your mother put it away.”

“I want to see it.”

“Were
you in contact with her? Did you call her regularly? Or perhaps write letters back and forth? Maybe on the computers down at the library in town…”

Kelly shook her head. “No,” she said, “I hadn’t spoken to her. Not since I left this place.”

“But her diary—”

“I want to see it.”

He pressed his lips together until they turned white. Then he released a gust of pent-up breath. “You’ve eaten?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Have Glenda fix you something,” he said. “Then go upstairs and get some rest. The diary will be on the nightstand beside the bed.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Right.” And he examined her again, up and down, as if for the last time. He looked tired and somewhat withdrawn, like a field worker after a long day in the sun. Wordlessly, he moved past her and toward the doors. “I’m tired now.”

She watched him go. And realized he looked nothing like the melancholy figure in the Maccinetti painting after all.

The kitchen was dark and empty, Glenda having already gone off to bed. She wasn’t very hungry, not really, but opened the refrigerator and peered inside. The refrigerator light illuminated a tall figure standing stock-still against the far kitchen wall, staring at her.

She jumped back, startled. “Jesus Christ.”

It was Kildare, dressed commonplace in a pair of nondescript slacks and a freshly pressed Oxford. “Miss Kellow,” he said. His voice was like an iceberg—only the sharp point of his emotions on the surface, and everything else hidden beneath. “I startled you?”

“Goddamn you did,” she said, shutting the refrigerator. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Is there something I can get for you?”

Her eyes narrowed. “How long have you been here?”

“Ma’am?”

“How long have you been in this house? How did you meet my father?”

“You were just with him not five minutes ago,” Kildare said complacently. “Did you forget to ask him that yourself?”

She was being jumpy. She knew that, couldn’t help it. Her mind slipped back to the scene in the woods earlier that day, and the image of the injured dog limping through the underbrush…then her agonized collapse to the ground, the uncontrolled release of her bladder…

“It’s late,” Kildare said, his voice a thousand steel razors, and moved past her and into the hallway. “Goodnight, ma’am.”

She watched him walk until his form was eaten up by the shadows in the hallway.

Upstairs, she stood outside Becky’s closed door again, tried the knob. This time it was unlocked. She peeked her head in. The room was dark, the window beside the bed closed. In the silence, she could hear her sister’s labored breathing from across the room.

Sleep well, Little Baby Roundabout,
she thought, closing the door and stepping back out into the hallway.

Something moved by the stairwell—she saw it out of the corner of her eye. A person, no doubt. Kildare? Had he followed her up? She went to the stairwell, peered down over the railing and saw nothing. It was as dark as a well.

Now we’re seeing things, too?

Damn it all, she should have called Josh before it got too late. Would he be asleep now? Should she even bother? All at once she felt very alone and near the point of both physical and mental collapse. Josh was someone she could talk to—not her mother or her father. Not
Kildare.

There was a telephone in her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, considered dialing his phone number.

I should have listened to you a month ago, Josh. I should have gone to see a doctor. But now I’m trapped here and I feel so incredibly unsettled and I don’t know what to do. And I think it might be too late. It’s just something I feel, like feeling the difference between hot and cold. I think it might be too late now, Josh, and I think I’m starting to lose it, starting to slip downhill. Fast.

She hung up the receiver. It was a last-ditch effort to display (if only to herself) some form of semblance, some degree of self-control. She didn’t need Josh, didn’t need anyone. She could deal with this on her own. God knows she’d been on her own before.

There was a small, leather-bound journal resting on the nightstand beside her bed. On the book’s cover was a note:
At the request of your father, Miss Kellow—J.K.
She shuddered, imagining that creep Kildare moving around inside her room. As if his presence alone was enough to contaminate what purity remained. And what purity
had
remained, anyway?

She grabbed the book and eased back on the bed, paused, then hopped up and went to her bedroom door. Locked it.

Settled back in bed, she flipped open the diary’s front cover and saw that someone—again, probably Kildare—had placed yellow Post-It notes on many of the pages, half peeking up from the top of the book. She flipped to the first note and scanned the page. It only took her two seconds to locate her name there, halfway down the page and written in the diligent, swooping cursive of a teenage girl. Shocked, she backed up and read the passage in its entirety:

I spoke with Kelly today about keeping the journal and she said it was a good idea. She said I should write everything down in it so I remember and won’t forget the way she forgot. But I still haven’t been able to write anything down, and I don’t think I ever will. I just don’t want to think about it. Kelly said when she was little she was scared a lot and when she got older she had to go away to get better. But she didn’t get better. She said to be careful and watch out for myself. I wish we talked more. I wish she tried to reach me too, but I know she’s moved away and lives a different life now. It’s okay. We all have different lives.