The apartment was dark, darker than the one I had just been in. On my right was the kitchen. I felt for the switch on the wall and flicked it, but of course it didn’t do anything. In the light that came through the small square window at the end I could see things still laid out in the kitchen. Pots by the sink; three plates by the stove. Cutlery on the counter and on the floor. Still life with silence. I turned away before I could see any more.
I stood in the bathroom for a moment, looking at my reflection in the mirror. It was darker in there, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see just how much, or how little, I had changed.
The living room. Bookcases along one side, cookery and gardening books jumbled up with my cheap paperbacks and forensic texts. Another wall, almost entirely window, a source of great pride to us. We could have afforded to live a few floors up, but we chose to stay on 72 because we had enough to rent an apartment on the edge here. I’d liked the idea that Angela would be able to see something beyond New Richmond, and on a good day you could see clear to the mountains. Tonight you could barely see the clouds outside, because the window, along with most of the walls and the carpet, was covered in a dried brown smear that was the blood of my wife and daughter.
I didn’t go into the bedroom. I let my back slide down the wall and sat, arms tight round my knees.
I’d come back at nine, late for dinner as always. But also as always, even in those last, bad days, Henna had held it for me, and the kitchen had smelled of something good. I’d been so Rapt as I blundered into the apartment that for a moment I’d seen the smell as a color, a kind of deep warm red. I was also drunk, and I was only going to be staying ten minutes, though Henna didn’t know that yet. The Vinaldi gig was breaking at long last, and I was going back out just as soon as I’d fulfilled my duty as husband and father in the thoughtless and perfunctory way I had.
The apartment was quiet as I entered, which surprised me. Angela’s favorite program was on at nine, some toon featuring a dyslexic cat. Even in my wired and whirling stupor the silence gave me pause, and I walked into the living room with a frown on my aching face.
I thought at first that more of the Rapt had just kicked in, and that the red smell from the kitchen had seeped into the room, blotting out everything else. Then I realized it hadn’t, and screamed so loudly that no sound came out at all.
Angela and half of Henna were in the living room. Angela had been dismantled, each limb removed from her body, then broken into smaller parts. Her face had been peeled off in one piece, and was stuck to the television screen in her drying blood. I couldn’t see her head at first. My wife’s torso was sitting upright in the chair she always sat in, her insides spilling out of the torn lower end. Her lower half was on the bed in the bedroom, legs spread wide. Her head was in the wastebasket, with the rest of Angela’s. I couldn’t find Angela’s eyes.
I saw these things, and then came to just under two weeks later. Someone found me in a disused warehouse area on 12. I was wearing the same clothes and didn’t immediately recognize the person who found me, though I knew her very well. In that period I had developed from a medium-strength Rapt junkie into someone whose body could not survive without it I wasn’t a suspect in the murders, but my job was long gone. It didn’t matter. I barely remembered I’d had one. Five years later I still have no idea what happened during that time, and I don’t want to know; just like I don’t want to think about the fact that I must have turned and walked out of my apartment that night, abandoning the bodies of the two people I loved most in the world.
Somewhere in New Richmond there would be photographs, I knew, Polaroids taken by the killer to prove the job was done so he could collect his fee. I believed I had just spoken to the man who’d paid for those photographs to be taken, a man whom no one in the police department was interested in taking down. The real bodies were long gone and destroyed, leaving only stains on the floor and the chair, and presumably the bed.
But everything else was still there, including the blood on the windows and the dried smear I could still see on the screen of the television. I sat absolutely still for a while, looking at these things and listening for echoes: Angela’s laugh, Henna’s sighs. I could hear neither, and so instead I reached into my jacket and took the burning sensation from my pocket and injected it into my arm.
The day is still hot but beginning to cloud over at the edges, a white sheet of haze thickening into invisibility. Couples and small families walk the beach with red shoulders and faces, some fractious and bickering, others soothed into stillness by the sight of the sea and the squawking of wheeling seagulls. Down on the waterline a man drinks soda from a frosted bottle, the glass glittering in the sunlight as he tilts to get the last mouthful, and clumps of women and children bend, their eyes fixed and far away, to pick shells and smooth stones up out of the sand.
I was left sitting on a rock, alone and furious after a shouting match with my mom. I wanted an ice cream, she said I couldn’t have one, and when you’re seven you won’t accept any truth as good enough reason for that denial. When the disagreement started, the ice cream hadn’t even been that much on my mind, but as it went on I began to taste the coolness in my mouth, the crunch of a sugar cone, and I dug my heels right in and began to cry, though even I knew that I was too old for that particular kind of blackmail.
My mother explained that it would be dinnertime soon, and that I would spoil my meal. I know now she was trying to protect both of us from the fact that we simply didn’t have the money. My father would have told the truth and slapped me one to drive the point home, but he wasn’t around because he never came when we went to the sea. Partly because he hated it, partly because he hated us. Mainly so he could sink himself into a weekend of dark futility without real people around to bother him.
It was three o’clock, and hours from dinner, and I raved and she walked away. As I sat there, watching my mother’s back as she walked farther and farther down the shore, an old man came and sat near me on the rocks. He wore khaki shorts and a faded denim shirt, and the skin on his arms and legs was pale and spotted with freckles and liver spots. He had gray hair, cut short and neat, and his face was the texture of handmade paper that had been screwed up and then flattened out again. He sat and looked at me.
I stared back sullenly. I wasn’t afraid of him. I thought I knew how bad things could get, that the world had little else to show me. If I was learning how to dodge my father, then a wrinkly like this old guy would be no trouble at all. In fact, I wanted him to start on me, to say something I could wallop right back at him. Already at that age the reservoir was filling up. Sometimes it yearned for a channel to course through, a town to flood.
The old man turned away and looked out to sea, and for a while I thought that was it. My mother was at the far end of the little bay by then, sitting against the rock wall which climbed away from the water. The argument would not end easily, I knew. My mother did her best with me, always, but we shared a piece of metal in our hearts which made backing down nearly impossible. I realized gloomily that the day was spoiled and that in the evening we were going home. Away from Florida, and the sea, and back to Virginia.