CHAPTER SIX
I TOOK WALTER, MY Labrador retriever, for a walk when I eventually got home shortly after eleven. The novelty of snow had eventually worn off for him, as it did for most creatures, man or beast, who spent longer than a week in Maine in winter, so that now he contented himself with a few desultory sniffs before doing what he had to do and indicating his preference for returning to his warm basket by turning around and heading straight back to the house. He had matured a lot in the last year. Perhaps it was because the house was quieter than it was before, and he had accommodated himself somewhat to the fact that Rachel and Sam were no longer part of its, and his, routines. I liked having him in the house, for a whole lot of reasons: security, company, and maybe because he was a link to the family life that was no longer mine. Two families lost now: Rachel and Sam to Vermont, and Susan and Jennifer to a man who had torn them apart, and who had died in turn by my hand. But I also felt guilty about the amount of time I was leaving Walter alone, or with my neighbors, the Johnsons. They were happy to look after him when I wasn’t around, but Bob wasn’t so good on his feet anymore, and it was asking a lot of him to exercise a frisky dog regularly.
I locked the doors, patted Walter a final time, then went to bed and tried to sleep, but when it came it brought with it strange dreams, dreams of Susan and Jennifer so vivid that I woke in the darkness, convinced that I had heard someone speak. It had been many months since I had dreamed of them in such a way.
What do I call them? Even now, after all these years, how do I say it? My murdered wife? My late daughter? They died, but I held something of them inside me for too long, and that in turn manifested itself as phantasms, echoes of the next life in this one, and I could not bring myse hooing it?lf to call these remnants by the names of those whom I had loved. We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.
But I had made my peace with them, I thought. Susan, my wife. Jennifer, my daughter. Beloved of me, and I, beloved of them.
Susan once said to me that, if anything happened to Jennifer, if she were to die before her time, before her mother, then I should not tell Susan what had occurred. I should not try to explain to her that her child was gone. I must not do that to her. If Jennifer were to die, I was to kill Susan. There should be no words, no warning. She should not have time to look at me and understand why. I was to take her life, for she did not believe that she could live with the loss of her child. It would be too much to bear, and she would not be able to withstand such pain. It would not kill her, not at first, but it would draw the life from her just the same, and all that would be left would be a hollow shell, a woman resonant with grief.
And she would hate me. She would hate me for putting her through such sorrow, for not loving her enough to spare her. I would be a coward in her eyes.
“Promise me,” she said as I held her in my arms. “Promise me that you won’t let that happen. I don’t ever want to hear those words. I don’t want to have to hurt that much. I couldn’t bear it. Do you hear me? This isn’t a joke, a ‘what-if.’ I want you to promise me. Promise me that I will never have to endure that pain.”
And I promised. I knew that I could not have done what she asked, and perhaps she knew that too, but I made the promise just the same. That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.
But what she did not explain, what she did not consider, was what would happen if they were both wrenched from me. Should I take my own life? Should I follow them into that dark place, tracing their steps through the underworld until I found them at last, a sacrifice to no purpose other than the denial of loss? Or should I continue, and if I should, then how? What form should my life take? Should I die alone, worshipping at the shrine of their memory, waiting for life to do what I could not do for myself; or would I try to find a way to live with their loss, to survive without betraying their memory? What acts do those who are left behind have to perform to honor the memory of the departed, and how far can they go before they betray that memory?
I lived. That is what I did. They were taken, but I stayed. I found the one who had killed them, and I killed him in turn, but it gave me no satisfaction. It did not assuage the burning grief. It did not make their loss any easier to endure, and it almost cost me my soul, if, indeed, I have a soul. The Collector, that repository of old secrets, once told me that I did not, and sometimes I am inclined to believe him.
I still feel their loss every day. It never goes away. It defines me.
I am the shadow cast by all that once was.