Nothing in the room was familiar. The place must have been rented already furnished. The walls were bare, but here and there I saw picture hooks.
When he finally sat up, my father’s eyes were dark, and I couldn’t read his mood. “Well,” he said. “It’s all rather complicated, isn’t it. Where to begin?”
I opened my mouth to say, With your death?
But Mãe spoke first. “Did Malcolm tell you about taking me away?”
His mouth twisted. He stared at her, hearing her thoughts.
I heard them, too. She told him about the night I was born, about Dennis helping her into Malcolm’s car, about the house in the Catskills and all that followed.
He listened. When she stopped, he looked as if he wanted to put his head in his hands again. “It’s worse than I’d thought.” The words sounded even starker because his voice had no feeling in it.
“But it’s better to know, isn’t it?” Mãe leaned forward. The ceiling lights made her long hair glisten.
I haven’t mentioned how exciting it was to see them in the same room, even if they weren’t — how do I phrase this? They weren’t together. Of course I’d entertained a soppy fantasy of them embracing, all the years of estrangement falling away. I hadn’t believed it would actually happen, but I’d indulged myself in that fantasy many times.
Even if I couldn’t read his eyes, I sensed that my father’s feelings ran deep.
He looked from my mother to me. “I suppose,” he said, “that we’d better go to dinner.”
Chapter Seventeen
We sat outside at a restaurant called Ophelia’s, down the road from Xanadu. We ate oysters and red snapper and drank red wine by candlelight. Sarasota Bay lapped a few feet away. We must have made a pretty picture, I thought: a well-dressed, good-looking American family.
Our server said as much. “Special occasion?” he’d asked, when my father ordered the wine. “What a lovely family.”
If he’d known what we were thinking — or what we were — he would have dropped his tray. I felt happy that he didn’t know, that someone thought we were ordinary.
My father let us know that he wasn’t shocked by what he thought of as “the betrayal of my best friends,” and he thought the word friends with dark irony. (When I hear thoughts, sarcasm and irony sound deep red or purple, depending on the degree. Is it the same for you?)
“I might have deduced it, from the way Dennis behaved,” he said. “I suppose that I chose not to figure it out. It was more convenient for me not to know.”
My mother twisted a napkin between her hands. She wanted him to forgive her for leaving, for becoming other. Even if her thoughts hadn’t been loud, her feelings were plain on her face. The couple at the next table gave her a curious look as they left.
But my father instead turned to me. What about these murders? he thought.
Without saying a word, we discussed the death of Robert Reedy. I killed him, I thought. But I didn’t cut him up. And the other murders — I had nothing to do with them.
The server asked if we wanted anything else. My father looked at Mãe and me. “Bring more oysters,” he said. “And another bottle of mineral water.”
By this time we were the only party left on the veranda. “It’s safe for us to talk now,” Mãe said. “I like to hear your voices.”
“I’ve never seen you eat before,” I said to my father, feeling shy. “You’re not a vegetarian.”
“No.”
“Then why did you raise me as one?”
“I wanted to give you as much chance as possible to grow into a normal human.” He spoke the words as if part of him were listening and disapproving of his phrasing. “I feared that meat might over-stimulate your appetite.”
The candles flickered in the breeze from the bay. A crescent moon hung low in the sky. “A fine setting for a talk about blood and murder,” my father said.
“How did you know about the murder?” I knew he wasn’t likely to have read the newspapers.
“My friend Malcolm told me all about the deaths.” My father ate an oyster with astonishing elegance. By contrast, Mãe and I slurped ours down.
“How did he know?” I didn’t picture Malcolm as a newspaper reader, either.
“He knew because he was there.” My father lifted another shell to his lips and deftly ingested its contents without pursing his lips. “He’s been following you for years, Ari. You sensed his presence, remember?”
Mãe said, “Wait a minute. You knew he was stalking her, and you let it happen?”
“Hardly.” He refilled our wine glasses. “Malcolm told me about it when he turned up last week to talk business.”
“You’re doing business with him?” Mãe shook her head.
“Wait, let’s get back to the stalking,” I said.
“Thank you, Ari. Yes, let’s try to sort through this mess with a semblance of coherence.”
I didn’t like the tension between them. “When I sensed an other in the Sarasota house, that was Malcolm?”