The children come home from school. They run to the backyard. They climb onto the swings. They talk about their days; they laugh. Alyssa puts her feet to the ground, pushes the swing back as far as she can, lifts her feet, and glides forward. Tommy swings more gently, holds little Davy securely on his lap.
The sound of breaking glass, all movement stops, feet flat on the ground. Alyssa says, Who’s that man over there? And Tommy tells her, Run inside and get Dad.
He staggered back to the fire ring, clutched the top of the old kitchen chair to keep himself from falling. Stared into the ashes. Felt the pulse of bruising sobs building in his chest again, wanting out, banging inside him, choking off his air until he could resist them no longer. He went down on his knees then, toppled the chair, and fell onto it. And sobbed, wanting to die, Please let me die. His fists squeezing ashes. Please, God, let me die.
Thirty-Two
DeMarco made three wrong turns before finding the place. “You go about ten miles, maybe a little less, north on 58,” he had been instructed by one of the troopers. “After you pass the country club on your right, it’s only another mile or so. There’ll be the Vita-Style beauty shop on your left—fancy name for a beauty shop in a converted garage, isn’t it? Then a couple of houses. Then start watching for a dirt road on the same side. It’s about a mile and a half down that road. It’s called Whispers.”
But there was no sign along the highway, no billboard advising him where to turn, and in the moonless dark of early night, intersections with unmarked, unpaved roads were not easy to distinguish until he was upon or past them. His first dirt road led him to a Baptist church in a yellow, steel building. The parking lot was empty and the building empty. A lighted sign in the small strip of lawn advised: In the dark? Follow the Son.
The second wrong turn dead-ended at a farmhouse, from whose driveway DeMarco could see into the dining room. The room was well lighted and clearly illuminated four individuals seated around the table. Nearest the window sat a man who appeared to be in his seventies, then, clockwise around the table, another man maybe thirty years younger, then a middle-aged woman with short, brown hair, and finally a boy wearing a red baseball cap. When the headlights from DeMarco’s car swept across the dining room window, all four individuals looked his way. “Sorry,” he said aloud and quickly swung the car to the left so that he could back up. But none of the faces watching him showed any surprise or concern, and he knew he was not the first driver to take this lane by mistake. It probably happened several times every weekend night, half-drunken men in search of nude women, their attention, their touch, the illusion of desire.
The family watched DeMarco’s car for five seconds or so, then the white-haired man turned his gaze back toward the table and raised his hand, and DeMarco saw that they were playing cards at the table. He smiled to himself but also felt a twinge of jealousy. He was the end of a generation himself and unless a miracle of God or chance intervened, he would never play cards or any other game with one of his grandchildren.
He put the car into reverse, then pulled away quickly. Out of nowhere, four dogs suddenly appeared at his bumper, yapping mongrels of varying breeds and sizes but all uniformly loud, all apparently hungry for the taste of metal or rubber. When he reached the highway, the dogs turned as if by signal and trotted home again. In the end, he was as inconsequential to the dogs as he had been to the family in the farmhouse, a fleeting distraction.
The third dirt road, narrow and potholed, rounded a sharp turn after a mile and seven-tenths, and there, behind a row of tulip poplars denuded by the winds of autumn, was a two-acre parking lot of packed dirt in front of a long, low wooden building. The boards were weathered and unpainted except for a white door on which someone had brushed Whispers in sloppy, red letters. The tin roof nearly blended into the blackness of the sky, and the whole building looked as if it had once been an equipment shed of some kind, or maybe an old sawmill. Maybe the white-haired man in the dining room had once owned this land and farmed it, had built his house from timber harvested off his property. Now the family grew a few acres of soybeans and lived off government subsidies while the owner of Whispers harvested a steady crop of dollars from the fertile soil of fantasy.
From inside the building came the muted screech of guitars, the kind of screaming rock music that always set DeMarco’s teeth on edge. He preferred the more soothing tones of Norah Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, and even, when the mood seized him and the back of his throat had been warmed and numbed by ample Jack, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, the amazing Etta James. But he had not come here for the music.