Over the phone, Bill Carnegie made no bones about his professional obligations. “I can’t talk about Mark,” he warned. “Only your sister.”
“Diana is all I want to talk about,” I assured him.
We met outside the courthouse early in the afternoon, standing together as a troubled stream of litigants flowed up and down the long cement steps.
“You look a little tense, Dave,” Bill said. “I do?”
“Troubled, maybe that’s a better word,” Bill said. He lit a cigarette with a silver lighter, flipped the top into place, and returned it to the jacket pocket of his suit. “Nasty habit, I know,” he said. “You should see the looks I get. You’d think I was a child molester.” He took a long draw and blew out a thin column of smoke. “So, Diana.”
“Like I said on the phone, I was surprised to hear that she came to see you.”
“Me, too.”
“I’d just like to know why she did that.”
Rather than answer, Bill took his customarily cautious approach. “If you don’t mind, what exactly is your reason for asking, Dave?”
“I’m worried about her.”
“Why?”
I realized that until that moment, the actual posing of the question, I hadn’t clearly known the reason myself. Then, in an instant, it was all too clear.
“My father,” I answered. “He had a problem.”
Bill took another draw on the cigarette and waited.
“A mental problem,” I added. “He was paranoid. A paranoid schizophrenic.” All the terrors of my boyhood flashed through my mind for a moment, the Old
Man storming from room to room, throwing books, yelling for Diana while I cowered in some dark corner of my own vast upheaval.
Bill dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. “Just a few quick puffs, that’s all I allow myself,” he explained. “So, you think Diana may have this problem, too?”
“I’m just trying to figure out what’s on her mind,” I said. “What she’s thinking.”
“She’s thinking about Jason.”
“What about him?”
Carnegie glanced to the right, nodded to a passing attorney. “I don’t have a lot to tell you. It was a short meeting.”
“Anything might help.”
“She wanted to know what Mark had said about that morning,” Bill told me.
That morning.
I went back over its few events, Mark home from work, Diana out shopping, Jason in the family room, listening to a CD, then rising, walking to the door, then through it and across the lawn to where a storm fence stopped him for a time, then didn’t.
“She seemed to be after facts,” Bill added. “What kind of facts?”
“Where he was at any point.”
“Who?”
“Mark.”
“You mean, like a timeline?”
“That sort of thing, yes,” Bill said. “She asked if I’d recorded any of our conversations. I told her no, but it wouldn’t matter anyway, because they were private. Attorney-client privilege. She argued with me about it a little, but I didn’t get the idea that she meant it. It was more like a show, like she knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t tell her anything Mark had said to me.”
“So why did she ask you about it?”
Bill shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe she wanted to know if there was some kind of record of our conversation. Notes. Tapes. Whatever. Other people have tried that one on me.”
“Why would that matter to Diana?”
“It wouldn’t unless she planned to break into my office.” He laughed at so absurd a prospect, a woman with a burglar’s tool kit, jimmying the lock to his office door then taking a crowbar to the cabinet in which he stored his most secret information. “But even if there was a full record of my conversations with Mark, it wouldn’t help her.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mark never mentioned Jason, or anything about what happened to him.”
“Not at all?”
“Not once in all our conversations,” Bill said. “We talked about the divorce, the settlement. That was it.”
“Did you tell Diana that?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“How did she react?”
Something in Bill’s eyes shrank inward. “That was the weird thing,” he said. “She didn’t seem surprised. As a matter of fact, I got the idea this was what she’d come to find out, maybe even confirm what she already suspected—not something Mark might have said about Jason, but the fact that he hadn’t said anything at all.”
“Patty won’t be home for dinner,” Abby told me when I arrived home later that evening. “She’s working on some sort of project.”
“How’s she getting home?”
“Nina’s driving her,” Abby answered.
“I didn’t know she was friends with Nina.”
“I don’t think she is,” Abby said. “They just happened to be working on this project together, and Nina has a license.”
I didn’t like the idea of Nina driving Patty home, but kept it to myself since I knew it was based not on any sense that Nina was a bad driver, for which I had no evidence, but that she was an unstable person, immature for someone on the verge of womanhood, not at all a healthy influence. Charlie, himself, often referred to her as “the freak,” and seemed anxious for her to graduate from high school and go to college. “Believe me, Dave,” he’d said. “I won’t feel a twinge of empty-nest syndrome.”
“When did Patty say she’d be in?” I asked. “Later,” Abby answered casually.
“Where is she, exactly?”
“The library.”
“The school library?”
“I don’t know, Dave,” Abby answered. She looked at me quizzically. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, and changed the subject. “Diana went to see Bill Carnegie a couple of days ago. She wanted to know if Mark had said anything about Jason.”
I saw that this did not strike Abby as news.
“She’s been acting a little weird,” she said. She gazed at me indulgently, as if to say, I’m sorry to tell you this. “People talk, Dave,” she said. “I met Leonora Gault in the grocery store. She lives just across from that little apartment complex where Diana moved. She’s seen her walking around at night. Really early. Two, three in the morning.”
I recalled the Old Man’s late-night wandering, the sound of the door as he left, then later, that same sound, more quiet, and which alerted me that Diana had set off in search of him. But because we survive as much by denying a thing as by confronting it, I said, “I wouldn’t call that ‘weird.’ She has a lot on her mind. Her whole future. Not long ago she had a family. Husband. Son. Now all she has is me.”
None of this changed Abby’s opinion, or more than briefly interrupted her narrative.
“Leonora went over, knocked on the door,” she continued. “Diana came to the door but she didn’t invite Leonora in. She came out instead. Closed the door behind her.”
“So?”
“It just seemed strange, that’s all,” Abby said. “Like Diana didn’t want Leonora to get a peek inside her apartment. Leonora thought it was spooky.”
“Spooky?”
I thought of Diana’s visit to Bill Carnegie. “If you were Mark, would you be spooked by Diana?” I asked.
I saw one of Abby’s thousand little lights go out. “Yes,” she said, as if acknowledging it for the first time, “I would.”
After dinner I went to my small study to review a few of the cases that were approaching the calendar. I was still at work when Patty came home. She peeped in, smiling.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hi.”
She said nothing else, but only drew back out of the doorway and headed down the corridor to her room.
Normally I would have continued with my work, and later gone to bed, with no need to see Patty again before morning. But after a few moments, I found myself returning to my childhood, the long hours I’d spent in my room, fearing to go out, listening to the Old Man’s movements, knowing that when they became frantic, Diana’s voice would accompany them, soft, soothing, reciting the verses and passages that slowed him down and finally settled him into sleep. It was that long-ago fear I felt now, deep and pure, and which seemed to return to me like a chronic ache whose severity time had masked, but which was now emerging again.
And so I rose from my desk, walked down the hallway, and knocked on Patty’s door.
After a brief flurry of activity, the door opened and she looked at me with an uncharacteristically wary expression.
“I just thought I’d check in,” I said.
She peered at me like a creature whose shape had slightly altered. “Check in?” She squinted. “What’s going on, Dad?”
I nodded toward the inside of the room. “May I come in?” She was clearly surprised by my request.
“My room?” she asked. “If you don’t mind.”
She shrugged, then stepped back into a room that struck me as vaguely more disordered than it had been in the past, with her iPod balanced at the corner of her desk, its thin cords dangling like small white vines toward a short stack of books that leaned unsteadily to the right.
“Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” Patty asked.
“I’m not looking for anything,” I told her. My tone struck me as strangely defensive. “I mean, what would I be looking for?”
“Drugs, maybe,” Patty answered crisply. “Nina’s dad is always searching her room for drugs.”
“You’re not Nina,” I said. “And besides, I’m sure if Nina had drugs, they’d be well hidden from her dad.” I glanced to the right where, to my surprise, Patty had placed an old photograph of Diana.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“I found it in some stuff I was going through,” Patty answered.
I walked over to the desk for a closer look. In the photograph, Diana sat in the park near the old house on Victor Hugo Street, her legs drawn under her, Indian style. With the long hair and flowery skirt, she might have been a sixties hippie, one of those girls at Woodstock, sliding in the mud or swimming naked in the nearby river. Films of all that—the dancing in circles, the peasant dresses, even the wildly idealistic slogans, All You Need Is Love, Give Peace a Chance—had always struck me as sad, almost heartrending, not a snapshot of some moment in our social history, but of that instant within each life when making something happen seems within our grasp.
Suddenly I remembered Diana the year she’d left for college. She’d been only seventeen, on full scholarship at Yale, and, as always, relentlessly inquisitive.
She’d never had a boyfriend before then, but on visits home she sometimes mentioned this or that boy from Yale, or some equally Ivy League fellow blown in from Boston or New York. None had ever made much of an impression, which made it all the more remarkable that she’d later been taken with Mark so suddenly and with such force. I guessed that it was his brilliance that had attracted her. On the night of our first meeting, he’d talked about the cleansing of the gene pool, the possibility that one day there might be almost wholly engineered human beings, genetically bred for maximum physical, intellectual, and even emotional strength. “At some point we may actually be able to take the bad stuff out,” he’d said emphatically, “like debris from a stream.”
It had all sounded very Jules Verne to me, along with a hint of something more sinister, people designed to be perfect in every conceivable way, each man an Übermensch. As far as I was concerned, the shadow of Frankenstein always hung over such grandiose schemes. And yet no one had ever spoken with more conviction than Mark about such a miraculous possibility, and I’d left our first meeting quite impressed with him, even hopeful that Diana had found her match.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Patty was clearly surprised by the question. “Why would you ask me that?”
“I guess I just want you to have a normal life,” I said. “Husband. Kids.”
Her answer was not at all what I expected.
“That’s only normal for you, Dad,” she said. “It might not be normal for someone else.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I should have said that I want you to be happy.” Rather than respond directly, Patty drew the picture of Diana from my hand. “What was she like?” she asked. “I mean, when she was my age. You’ve never really told me about that. Just that she read all the time. Could recite all this stuff. But what was she like … as a person?”
“She was always standing off somewhere by herself,” I answered, remembering just how isolated she’d been even as a little girl, how often she’d stood apart from the other children. Time and again I’d urged her back into some kind of group play, my impulse always to make her less—the word hit me without warning—freakish. But it had rarely worked. She’d always retreated back to her solitude.
Patty appeared to see all this. “So, she didn’t have any friends?”
“No, she didn’t,” I answered.
“She e-mailed me,” Patty said. “About Kinsetta Tabu. Which songs I like.
What I think they mean.” She shrugged. “And other things.”
“Other things?” I asked.
Patty’s gaze suddenly turned wary. “I shouldn’t have told you about them,” she said. Her tone was unmistakably guarded. “It’s between Aunt Diana and me, anyway.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s just that …” I stopped, unable to put my finger on what I found vaguely alarming about the correspondence.
“You don’t like it,” Patty said. “That we’re talking.”
I started to respond, but Patty abruptly stepped over to her desk. “It’s nothing to worry about, Dad,” she said. “I guess I can show you.” She reached into one of its drawers and pulled out a short stack of e-mails she’d printed. “She gives me things to think about, that’s all,” she said. “Questions for me to think about. It’s nothing terrible, so you don’t have to get all weird about it.” She drew the first e-mail from the stack and handed it to me. “Here, see for yourself.”
I read the note, and as I read, heard Diana’s voice pronounce the words, What if the world were itself alive?