“Aunt Lena?”
Sara’s hands on the black veneer tabletop are clammy. When she sits back to put her hands in her lap, moist prints next to the phone base evaporate. My mother-in-law’s voice comes over the speakers, thick with sleep.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Sara.” Then, though there are no other Saras in the world who would call her Aunt Lena, she adds, “Sara Rochester.”
She sits in the uncomfortable metal folding chair with her leg crossed over her knee, trying to appear relaxed, maybe for her own benefit. But her suspended foot is wiggling like bait on a hook, anticipating shark teeth. Four and a half hours north in Monterey, Lena’s deadly mouth might be open, but it’s silent.
She finally musters, “What time is it?”
“Almost four thirty.”
“What on earth?” She’s more alert now, talking at full volume. I heard Lionel passed from a heart attack three, four years ago. It’s easy to imagine her elbow propped on silk sheets in a wide bed, her hand reaching for the lamp on the bed stand.
“I don’t know if you heard that Garrett Becker was in a car accident at the end of June.”
“I’m the last person in the world to care about what happens to that man.”
“Well, I’m not actually calling about him. It’s about Marina and Dylan.”
A pause. Does she have to remember the names of her own grandchildren?
I thought I’d put away my anger toward Misty’s parents years ago. But there it is—not cast off on some faraway trash island in the Pacific, but tucked under a flap right in the center of my heart, rank and rotting.
Sara was with me the last time I spoke to Lena and her husband. It was in January after Misty disappeared, after the authorities had given up hope of finding Misty’s body, after the memorial. Though Sara and I hadn’t spoken to each other since that night, she agreed to help me take Marina and Dylan to her aunt and uncle’s house for a visit. They might cheer up Misty’s folks. I actually said that to her. Our drive to Monterey was silent and awkward.
At my in-laws’ estate, a gray storm pounded the cliffs just beyond their living room window. Lena held Dylan, swaddled and sleeping, in her lap. Sara helped Marina stack chunky foam blocks in front of the fireplace. Her own parents, Barb and Stan, stood behind her aunt and uncle. We had an affair, I found myself saying to the four adults there. Sara and me. It was short, it ended before Dylan was born. But that’s why Misty . . . I couldn’t finish, and the silence in the room was like the silence on the other end of Sara’s phone line right now.
Lena’s voice over the speaker phone loses its edge but remains guarded. “I imagine they’re nearly grown.”
“They are,” Sara says. “Twenty and sixteen. Almost seventeen. Marina’s beautiful. She looks just like—”
Sara clears her throat. It sounds loud in the cold room. “They need family. They have no one.”
“They have Garrett.”
“He’s in a coma. His prognosis isn’t good.”
“Garrett’s family.”
Sara is quiet. Lena knows I am an only child, that my parents died before Misty and I married.
“Then they have you.” Now Lena’s teeth show their jagged edge.
“I can’t . . . I haven’t earned their trust yet.”
“Let them trust in your money, your success. That’s what you’re saying they need right now, isn’t it? This is about money?”
“No. I can give them money. They need love. I mean, I love them too but—”
“Well, you’re a fine one to pontificate about that.”
Sara catches the tears that escape her eyes.
“They deserve a family. Grandparents. Dylan especially, he—”
“Garrett made his decisions.”
Sara raises her voice. “They’re Misty’s children. Aunt Lena, please.”
I didn’t forewarn Sara that I planned to tell her family about the affair on that January day. I feared she wouldn’t come, and I wanted someone to share the blame, someone besides the kids to buffer the wrath.
Sara’s father was the first to react to the news. Stan yelled at Sara. You what? His thundering voice took Marina’s attention off the foam blocks. I picked up my daughter, hoping she wouldn’t cry. You violated your cousin’s marriage? You took advantage of her condition? My defense of Sara was weak. That’s not what happened. But all Rochester eyes were on their own. Sara stood up and took what came. If she was surprised by my revelation, she was more accustomed to being the black sheep of the family. Her mother spoke next. You’ve made a career of shaming us.
You killed my only child, Lena moaned.
To me they said nothing. Sara stood there, not looking at me, and didn’t defend herself. When the accusations finally stopped, she walked out of the house and kept on walking, the last time I saw her. She wrote a letter to me the next day. I have to go . . . I didn’t respond. I never saw Misty’s family again either. They shut me out.
“Garrett shut us out,” Lena is saying to Sara. “He didn’t want us in their lives. He wouldn’t respond to our phone calls, he kept the kids locked behind that beach house gate, he returned the Christmas and birthday gifts we sent.”
I did not! What kind of story is that? Why would I keep Marina and Dylan from their grandparents?
The man sitting next to me in the theater says, This is the tale you told yourself.
I glance at him. What’s he babbling about?
Sara says, “Even if Garrett did that, is that how you want it to be forever?”
At the end of the phone line Lena falls quiet again.
“You can call them directly,” Sara says. “I have phone numbers. I have the code to the gate. Garrett and I won’t be there. Just you and your grandkids.”
“Garrett made it clear—”
“It’s their turn to decide. It isn’t Garrett’s choice anymore. But I think if he had a voice right now he’d tell you he changed his mind.”
The scene shifts before I know whether I’ve changed my mind or not.
It’s morning. Marina comes downstairs and her brother is sitting at the kitchen counter. There are two empty Pepsi cans within reach. He’s working on a third. The sliding door is open and salty air pushes into the house. Beside him, a broken orange peel sits on a napkin, and next to this, the black satin box that holds almost everything he knows about his mother. He’s staring at a picture in the little plastic album.
“Did you take that out of my room?” she demands when she sees it.
“Did you want me to wake you up? You were snoring.” The hint of a smile lifts the corner of his mouth.
“Was not.” Translation: It’s fine you came in and got it.
She shuffles through the kitchen toward the coffee carafe. Fills it with water and gets a pot going. Smoothes out her T-shirt over her drawstring shorts and glances over at Sara’s book.
“Why didn’t you let me go with you yesterday?” he asks. “To see Sara?”
“I thought you’d want to stay here with Denica.” She sees the black box, runs her fingers over the lid.
“Next time ask me what I want.”
She nods. “Where’d you get this?”
“It was Dad’s,” he says. My kids exchange a look: an assent to a truce. They can’t shut each other out anymore. She is not the mother and he is not the child. They are siblings. Equals. Marina smiles. She seems relieved.
“Okay,” Marina says.
He lets her look through the contents. She holds on to the picture of her and her mother. Dylan has put the other photograph—Sara and I at the front door, holding champagne—on the counter next to the little book. She picks that up next.
“You still think that’s Sara?” she asks.
“Yeah. No wedding ring.”
“Maybe Mom took the picture.”
Dylan shrugs.
“This would have been right after they bought the place, do you think? The front porch wasn’t in yet.”
“Come here,” Dylan says.
On this large screen in front of me, the camera angle shifts in a way that catches my attention. The broad angle of the kitchen, spanning from the fridge in the corner, across the sink and window, to the opposite counter where Dylan sits at a stool, narrows. The view jostles, like the camera’s on someone’s shoulder instead of on a stand. It rises, jiggles, shrinks, moves in for a close-up of whatever Dylan is looking at.
About ten, fifteen years ago film directors did a lot of experimenting with this kind of technique and I never liked it. It was supposed to make a viewer feel present in the action, as if their perspective wasn’t staged. All it ever did for me was serve as a distraction, as it does now. Have these scenes from my life, the parts I lived and the parts I’m not shut out of, bumped around like this before? I don’t think so, but it’s impossible to say anything except that this is the first time I’ve noticed it.
For a second the only thing I can think is this: Who’s holding the camera?
It focuses over Dylan’s shoulder on the picture of Marina in the beach house garage, trying to share her peppermint with an ant.
“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Dylan says. He straightens up, puts his hands on the counter, and locks his elbows. “On Monday Mom and Dad fought, then Dad brought us here without her. She came up later that day—then what? More fighting?”
“Dad told the sheriff they got their argument straightened out, ate dinner, then went to bed. You got up in the night and wouldn’t stop crying, so he took us both for a drive to get you to sleep without waking up Mom. When he got back Mom was gone.”
“So after that he drives us to Sara’s and then goes all the way down to Marina del Rey to look for her. But she’d gone the other direction, up north to Mortuary Beach.”
“I think she was probably trying to get home, to her mom and dad.”
“Why would she go there?”
Marina shakes her head. “Is it so hard to imagine? She wasn’t that much older than I am now. I wish I could call Dad right now to help us sort out all our problems. Also, she was sick, and I guess they were really sympathetic about that.”
“With the bipolar disorder?”
“That plus something postpartum. Depression to the nth degree. The sheriff says maybe a psychosis.”
Dylan turns his attention back to the picture. “So we’re with Sara, Dad’s in Marina del Rey, and Mom’s up north by Carmel. You and I need fresh clothes, Sara brings us back here. You feed the pests candy.”
“That’s what Sara and the report say.”
Dylan lifts up the book. “Then what’s wrong with this picture?”
I see it right away. And I can’t interpret what it means. I can’t make sense of the proof right in front of my face.
The camera lets the picture go and zooms in on Marina as Dylan turns the album toward her. Close up. She looks, she thinks. The light goes on in her eyes. She lifts her eyes to Dylan.
“Dad’s truck is in the garage,” she says.
Right there next to my kneeling daughter, the old black GMC Sierra catches the glare of the light hanging from the middle of the ceiling. The front end of Sara’s VW bug is visible behind the empty bay where Misty would have parked her car.
I’m trying to remember: How did I get to Marina del Rey?
“What does that mean?” Marina asks.
Dylan says, “That Dad never went to our other house?”
“You think he was here when Sara brought us?”
“It looks like he was here.”
“But Sara wrote that note—‘I’m so sorry.’ The one everyone thought was Mom’s suicide note. Sara says she wrote it because Dad wasn’t here, as an apology to him. And us.” She sighs. “But what’s another lie from her, right?”
“She tried to tell us the truth. The first time I met her, after this”—he points at her black box—“she said, ‘I’m not your mom.’ Maybe we forced her into the lies. Maybe we wanted her to make things better even if it wasn’t true.”
I’m racking my brain. I can’t come up with anything except the clear fact that I wasn’t home when Sara came by. I wasn’t home and I wasn’t in my truck.
Why is the most significant night of my entire life a blank slate?
“If Dad was home, wouldn’t she have left us with him after bringing us back? See, there are other pictures, after the house.” Marina points. “But he’s not with us. We’re in different clothes. Here the sun is coming up. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It would make sense if Dad and Sara had a whole plan to do something to Mom.”
“What do you mean, ‘do something’?”
My son looks out at the ocean. He can’t say it. Even now.
“You know that couldn’t have happened,” Marina says. “Dad loved Mom. The wedding ring, the loyalty. He and Sara were never together afterward—he was never with any other woman.”
“That we know of.”
“Why would they do something to Mom and then never speak to each other again?”
“We can’t really know what they did or didn’t do, don’t you think?” Dylan leans across the counter and flips the pages back to the one of the garage. “Look at this again. What else do you see?”
Marina shakes her head. “It’s dark. There’s equipment by the garage. I don’t know what that is—a generator?”
“I think it’s called a plate compactor.”
“What’s a plate compactor?”
“It’s for tamping the ground when you’re getting ready to lay a foundation for something. Like a porch.”
“So they were laying the porch. The sheriff’s report said something about that.”
“What else?”
“What else would it be used for?”
“No, what else do you see?”
“Just tell me—I don’t know. A rake? A shovel? Something’s leaning against the garage. These wood slats here look like a frame for the patio. Do you mean something else?”
Dylan slides off the stool and turns toward the dining room table. He steps out of the camera’s frame. Marina watches him, sets the photos on the counter, then follows her brother. The camera stays fixed on the empty kitchen. Where did they go, and why can’t I see?
I can hear, though. Papers rustling. A search for one in particular.
“Look here,” Dylan says. “And here.”
A long pause, and then Marina:
“Oh no.”
Oh no what?
Why can’t I see? I shout the question into the theater. Why now, after being allowed to see everything else, why won’t the blasted camera turn six feet to the left?
“Where did you find this?” Marina asks.
“In Dad’s office.”
“There’s got to be an explanation.”
I’m at the mercy of this black box of a theater, this sunken chair I’m no longer strong enough to rise from, this blasted screen.
“It’s like this,” says the man farther down the row of plush seats. “You choose the boundaries of your life, the limits of the truth you’re willing to tell.”
I don’t understand. Alternating scenes flicker in front of me: Sara, pacing in her cell. And that empty kitchen. Back and forth. Sara waiting for news, me waiting for the kids to return. What does either have to do with something I’ve chosen?
“I want to see what my kids are looking at. I want to see what Sara really did the night my wife died.”
“This is the view you’ve chosen.”
“No, it’s not. Show me more.”
“You don’t really want to see. You said so yourself.”
How can any man want the truth more badly than I do? I don’t even want it for myself, but for Marina and Dylan. They need to know who they can trust when I’m gone, and until now I’d thought that person might be Sara.
“Garrett.”
My name, spoken the way I say “Marina” or “Dylan” when I’m telling a buddy about her maturity or his brains. The name formed by paternal pride and a smile.
“What?” Now I’m the child. Petulant.
“Think: when you go to the movies, you agree to the deception.”
“I don’t like the word deception.”
“Limits, then. You don’t think too hard about what’s outside the edges of the screen—all the equipment and techs and props and costumes. All the details that remind you the framed world isn’t wholly honest might ruin your experience of the story. Because the Truth-with-a-capital-T is, you want a certain experience.”
I fling my hand out over the empty seats. “This is my family, not some screenplay.”
“It’s the screenplay you wrote. You wanted your life to be a certain kind of experience, Garrett. You wanted your children to live a certain story. What you see is the bedtime story you told Marina and Dylan as they grew up. This is the tale that leaves stuff out.”
“I’m an honest man.”
“That’s part of the truth you’ve tried to create.”
“I’d know if I was a liar.”
“From where I sit, most people don’t have a clue about their true selves.”
I’m back at the infernal kitchen, still empty. A room with no life in it.
“Would you stop it?” I shout. “Would you stop shutting me out?”
You stop it . . ., a voice echoes. Is it mine? You stop shutting . . .
“Tell me what’s going on here!” I demand. “Show me what this is all about!”
I don’t even know who I’m yelling at. The theater is my prison, and I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be with the people I love, starting with my kids. But even they are out of the frame of my life now.
“Get me out of here!”
The lights go out. The screen vanishes. I can’t even see my own hands. The towering theater walls block light but allow sounds whispering on the other side to come through: the bumping of wind against the concrete, the sweeping of tree branches, and the rhythm of rain. I couldn’t hear these things over what was playing on the screen. Now I know that I was protected, and I’m asking to be exposed.
Are you ready? The voice cuts through darkness.
A tremble vibrates my bones. I’m not sure.
“Yes,” I whisper.
I can’t hear you.
A light pops on, not a projector but a spotlight, not in my face but from behind, over the top of my head. Someone is standing in front of me in the next row of seats.
I can’t hear you, the someone says. A woman with the voice of the man who has sat with me through this bizarre showing of my life. A woman with a terrible blunt wound right at her temple. Misty, smiling at me so kindly, so openly. My wife, taken from me by a powerful undertow and a terrible blow to the head by an underwater rock at Mortuary Beach.
I stand from my seat without any effort at all. I lift my hand to touch her beautiful face. The fresh wound hurts me as if it’s my own pain, but it doesn’t mar her loveliness at all. There is a trickle of blood on her cheek. I can feel the warmth of her skin before we even connect.
But we don’t connect, not then. It’s the hair that stops me, the silky sheen that catches the light, the curl right under her jaw. Her hair is as dry as the sun.
“What happened?” I ask. I am holding my breath. I realize she’s holding her chin up at an odd angle. She has to look at me sidelong.
Are you ready?
“Yes.” This time I am firm.
And then she’s gone.