It was the fall that had killed him: a hundred feet from the top of the dam, then the long slide to the pool, where his body had wedged against a drain. His legs were shattered, his chest caved in; otherwise, he looked the same. Had he jumped or was he pushed? His life was not what they had thought it to be; Sara wondered how much Kate had kept from her. But it was not a question to ask.
The matter of his debts remained. Pooling their savings with Kate’s, Sara and Hollis could assemble less than half the amount owed. Three days after the burial, Hollis took the money to the building in H-town that everyone still called Cousin’s Place, though Cousin himself had been dead for years. Hollis hoped that this token of good faith, combined with his old connections, would square the matter. He returned, shaking his head dispiritedly. The players had changed; he had no clout. “This is going to be a problem,” he said.
Kate and the girls were bedding down at Sara and Hollis’s house. Kate seemed benumbed, a woman who had accepted a fate she had long seen coming, but the girls’ grief was shattering to witness. In their young eyes, Bill was simply their father. Their love for him was uncolored by the knowledge that he had, in a sense, shunned them, choosing a path that would take him away from them forever. As they grew, the wound would morph into a different kind of injury—one not of loss but of rejection. Sara would have done anything in her power to spare them this pain. But there was nothing.
The only thing to do was hope that the situation would blow over. Two more days passed, and Sara came home to find Hollis sitting at the table in the kitchen, looking grim. Kate was on the floor playing cards with the girls, but Sara could see this was intended as a distraction; something serious had happened. Hollis showed her the note that had been slid under the door. In blocky handwriting, like a child’s, two words: “Adorable girls.”
Hollis kept a revolver in a lockbox under the bed. He loaded it and gave it to Sara.
“Anybody comes through that door,” he instructed, “shoot them.”
He didn’t tell her what he’d done, though that was the night Cousin’s Place burned to the ground. In the morning, Sara went with Kate to the post office to mail the letter that would, in all likelihood, arrive in Mystic Township many days after she did. Coming for a visit, Kate wrote to Pim. The girls can’t wait to see you.
* * *
33
Yes, I am tired. Tired of waiting, tired of thinking. I am tired of myself.
My Alicia: how good you have been to me. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris: “It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.” When I think of you, Alicia, and what we are to each other, I am reminded of my first trip to a barbershop as a boy. Indulge me—memory is my method in all things, and the story has more bearing than you think. In my boyhood town, there was only one. It was a kind of clubhouse. On a Saturday afternoon, escorted by my father, I entered this sacred masculine space. The details were intoxicating. The odors of tonic, leather, talc. The combs lounging in their disinfecting aquamarine bath. The hiss and crackle of AM radio, broadcasting manly contests upon green fields. My father beside me, I waited on a chair of cracked red vinyl. Men were being barbered, lathered, whisked. The owner of the shop had been a World War II bomber pilot of some renown. Upon the wall behind the cash register hung a photograph of his young warrior self. Beneath his snipping shears and buzzing razor, each small-town cranium emerged a perfect simulacrum of his own, on the day he’d donned his goggles, wrapped a scarf around his neck, and crossed the eaves of heaven to blast the samurai to smithereens.
My turn arrived; I was summoned forth. Many smiles and winks were exchanged among the witnesses. I took my seat—a board balanced upon the chair’s chrome arms—as the barber, like a toreador flashing his cape, shook out the curtain with which he meant to dress me, wrapped toilet paper around my neck, and draped my body in decapitating plastic. That was when I noticed the mirrors. One on the wall before me, one behind, and my likeness—a reflection of a reflection of a reflection—caroming down the corridor of cold eternity. The sight brought forth an existential nausea. Infinity: I knew the term, yes, but the world of boyhood is finite and firm. To gaze into the heart of it, and to see my likeness stamped a million-fold upon its face, disconcerted me profoundly. The barber, meanwhile, had set blithely about his task, simultaneously engaged in lighthearted conversation with my father on various adult subjects. I thought that focusing my eyes solely upon the first image might somehow banish the others, but the effect was the opposite: I was made even more aware of the innumerable shadow selves lurking behind him, ad infinitum, infinitum, infinitum.