APRIL IN THE MUDROOM, staring at the high-top trainers caked with melting snow…
She wanted desperately to return to the red maple and see the proclamation of love that Eddie had carved into it. But the maple was in Vermont, almost sixteen years in the past.
The hemlock, then. She needed to see the hemlock that stood little more than a hundred feet from the house, needed to see it with an urgency like none she had ever known before, as though her very life depended on putting her fingers to the trunk and tracing the letters that he had carved into the wood.
She found herself in the kitchen instead, standing at the sink, looking at the tray on the drainboard: Havarti, almonds, wine.
An unpleasant rhythmic electronic tone drew her attention to the wall-mounted telephone. The handset was lying on the counter.
How long had it been lying on the counter?
Had she called someone? Had she received a call?
She put down the trimming knife. She hung up the phone.
Take it to him, take it to him, take it to him….
April picked up the tray and carried it to the back stairs.
Halfway to the second floor, she made the strangest discovery. She wasn’t carrying the tray. In her right hand she gripped a chef’s French knife, much larger than the trimming knife. And sharper.
38
* * *
IN THE DISTANCE, blood pooled in the lower sky, red light as lustrous as the stuff of life, while here on the earth, darkness already pressed at the kitchen windows.
The eighth decedent, a thirty-five-year-old woman serving in the Florida State Senate, mother of four, in an apparent struggle with herself, had missed with the first two shots and had blown apart her neck with the third. Jane read, “?‘Pick up the gun pick up the gun pick up the gun there is joy waiting in it.’?”
Moshe was on his feet and pacing. “She’s not writing the note to her family.”
“No,” Jane agreed.
“She’s writing it to herself, arguing herself into doing this terrible thing.”
“Or maybe…”
Moshe turned to her. “Maybe what?”
“Maybe she’s writing down what she’s hearing. The voice in her head. The spider in her brain that talks to her.”
39
* * *
APRIL IN THE UPSTAIRS HALL, at the threshold of the open door, her husband’s study in the room beyond.
She entered quietly, bearing the tray.
He sat at his computer, his back to her. He was deep into the scene, backspacing to erase a phrase that didn’t satisfy, rapidly typing a new line, scrolling backward to the previous page to review what he had written there….
How deeply he fell away into his fiction when he was writing, much the way that the world around April faded when she was at the piano, working on a melody, seeking just the right third group of eight bars in a thirty-two-bar chorus.
His work was as lyrical as he was lovely, and as she watched him work, listening to him muttering critically to himself, she found herself weeping silently, moved by all that they had been through together, all they had experienced, the triumphs and the tragedies, their only child stillborn, their love enduring every loss and setback, as it would endure what came next.
Take it to him, take it to him, take it to him….
Beyond the windows lay the mountains dark, fairies of snow dancing against the glass.
She put the tray on a worktable that was mostly covered with reference books. She picked up the bottle of sauvignon blanc and took it to him and swung it left to right, as if christening a ship, his head the bow. She swung it with such terrific force that the bottle burst, and he tipped over with his office chair, falling to the floor in a shower of fragrant wine.
April pushed the chair out of the way and looked down at Eddie and saw he was conscious but stunned, confused, uncomprehending. He spoke her name, but as if he wasn’t sure that she was in fact April.
She had required both the bottle and the chef’s French knife to do what needed to be done. To ensure it was done right. She took the blade from the tray and turned to Eddie.
“I love you so much,” she said, “so much, so much,” each word a sob, and she fell upon him with the knife.
40
* * *
THE NINTH HAD BEEN a thirty-seven-year-old university professor and acclaimed poet who had thrown himself into the path of a subway train.
Jane read, “?‘The release from action and suffering, release from the inner and the outer compulsion.’?”
Gazing at the night through the window above the sink, Moshe Steinitz said, “It sounds like poetry.”
“It is, but not his own. I tracked it down. It’s from ‘Burnt Norton’ by T. S. Eliot.”
She had one more. The tenth decedent was by far the youngest, a twenty-year-old graduate student, so gifted that she entered college at fourteen, received her bachelor’s degree at sixteen, her master’s degree in astrophysics at eighteen, and was working on a doctorate in cosmology. She had set herself on fire.
Jane read, “?‘I need to go. I need to go. I’m not afraid. Am I not afraid? Someone help me.’?”
41
* * *
WHEN EDDIE WAS WHERE he needed to be, when he was with the dead, April would have carved a proclamation of her love into her flesh if she could have tolerated living long enough to finish the task, but with Eddie gone, she wanted no more of this dark world. She knelt beside him and held the French knife in both hands and pierced her abdomen with it, nearly to the hilt. Pain struck her like a lightning bolt and cast her into black silence. Not much later, she woke too weak to feel pain any longer and found herself lying on the floor beside him and fumbled for his hand and found it and held it and remembered long-ago Vermont and the red maples in bright autumn dress and young love, and in the last quick moment she thought, What have I done?
42
* * *
NOW THAT HE’D HEARD the ten statements read aloud, Moshe sat at the kitchen table, reading them from the Xerox that Jane provided.
He had put on music that flooded the house through speakers in every room: Mozart’s K. 488, an extraordinary concerto that, scored for clarinets, opened with a robust movement beyond the reach of any other composer, bringing even to this solemn moment in Jane’s life a mood of soaring optimism that she wished she could catch and hold.
Sitting at the table, she listened with her eyes closed, one hand encircling the cordial glass of Dindarello.
In time, Moshe spoke as quietly as ever, but his voice carried through the music. “I am inclined to say that these people—or at least most of them—might have been in some altered state when they killed themselves. I get no sense of suicidal depression, nothing that convinces me the voices they heard indicated schizophrenia, nothing that suggests any classic forms of mental illness. There is something here unique—and damn strange.”
The concerto contained a sequence of a different character from the music before and after it, an extraordinary slow movement of profound melancholy, which now came upon them. Jane did not respond to Moshe, but kept her eyes closed and traveled with Mozart where he conveyed her, into the heart of deepest sorrow, and she thought of Nick and of her long-lost mother. When that section concluded with a return to thrilling strains of dauntless optimism, she found that she had been moved to the depths of her soul and yet remained dry-eyed. The lack of tears, the control her dry eyes confirmed, led her to believe that she was ready for what might come next, no matter how hard the way ahead might prove to be.
43
* * *
THE PRIMARY RESIDENCE of Dr. Bertold Shenneck and his wife, Inga, is in Palo Alto, an easy drive from his labs in Menlo Park.