This is how Kate imagines it: Ray, shirtless and barefoot, hobbles to the cabin door on his bad ankles, both of which he shattered falling off the ice cream shop roof while repairing the rain gutters three years before. They ache in the mornings and he has to do exercises to keep them from stiffening up. Because of his ankles, Ray has had to give up his one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve stints in San Antonio. He has a ragged look. Needs a haircut, his beard trimmed, which Kate has done for him for years. Before he opens the door, the urge to talk to Kate seizes him. He wants her there to explain, in her controlled, adult way, to the detectives—one of whom clearly thinks Ray’s hiding something by the way he says “discrepancies”—that Ray loved the girls as his own, that he couldn’t have ever harmed them, that he wants to kill the men who did, even though he isn’t capable of violence, except for the one instance after a friend’s wedding reception when he’d drunkenly struck one of the groomsmen after an insult, bloodying his lip.
They take him to the station, put him in a little room with a table and cold plastic chairs. Can you tell us what happened that night? the detectives ask again. When you went by to get the deposit? There are forty-seven minutes he can’t explain. The money was never picked up, the deposit never made. He feels his blood quicken as if he’d risen up out of bed too fast. He’s dizzy. His ankles throb. He can still feel the houseboat rocking unsteadily on the water beneath him. He grabs the table leg for ballast. Oh my sweet Lord, he says, and puts his hands to his face as if they hold water. There are two things he eventually confesses: first, months before, without Kate’s knowledge, he’d raised the value of the fire insurance policies on the ice cream shop. A terrible coincidence, he admits. Terrible. But the building had old wiring, he says; he needed to protect them all from ruin. And two: from time to time—including that night—he’d been fucking Sarah Haven, the insurance agent who sold him the policy.
The Ray in Kate’s head will not stop talking. All his words the shapes of things he would have done.
I will go away, Kate thinks. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too.
11
MICHAEL SOMETIMES REIMAGINES his brother Andrew’s last conscious minutes. He conjures up a single, wavering moment among many now inevitable ones that gives Andrew pause. Saves him from bad luck. Instead of coming through the house’s side door, where he’ll be surprised by the owner, Andrew works his way through the gate and around to the back of the house and hears, through an open window, the murmuring of a baseball game on the radio. The veteran announcer’s soothing voice is one Andrew has heard for years. Never impatient or hurried. Even on bad days—a blown save or key dropped ball—there is always some possibility of redemption in it. Andrew, standing there in front of the den window with his duffel bag of tools that says SIMPATICO APPLIANCE REPAIR, can see a fish tank in the corner of the den, its bluish light undulating on the ceiling above. Though there aren’t any other lights on in the house and the radio announcer seems to be talking to himself, Andrew thinks: Not today. This one doesn’t feel quite right. And he makes his way back to his car parked down the street, drives on home, his face intact.
But sometimes it seemed to Michael that it wasn’t chance or luck. That there were no decisive moments that could have tipped things one way or another. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible cord threaded through them all, pulling them along. When he was eleven, his dad showed him a glossy magazine photo of a group of Hindu men on a religious pilgrimage. A dozen hooks pierced the skin of their chests and attached to the hooks were taut colorful ropes being pulled by someone outside the photo. “Whenever you think someone has you by the short hairs, remember this,” his dad had said, tapping the photo and laughing. But as a kid, the photo had fascinated and terrified Michael. The men’s faces knotted in pain that was also a kind of ecstasy. Their bodies leaning forward, as if into a strong wind.
“But where are they going?” he’d asked his dad.
“Up the mountain,” his dad said, leaving it at that.
Later, he’d taken the photo from his dad’s dresser and tried to duplicate the hooks and ropes in the bathroom with some safety pins and kite string. But when his chest started bleeding he’d passed out and hit his head on the toilet seat.
Michael was living in an apartment on the east side when the detectives found him, five years after the murders. First, there were the bad portents: the series of odd phone calls with nothing but buzzing on the line, two strange men asking about him at his daughter’s preschool, then the carefully handwritten note in green ink under his car wiper blade: Are you the do-right man?