Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell

The summer before she sold the house, she visited Berkshire Security Associates and met with Brian Delacroix, a private investigator. He was only a few years older than she was and carried himself with the rangy ease of a jogger. They met in his second-story office suite in an industrial park in Chicopee. It was a shoebox of an office, just Brian and a desk, two computers, and a row of file cabinets. When she asked where the “associates” in the firm name were, Brian explained that he was that associate. The main offices were in Worcester. His Chicopee satellite was a franchise opportunity and he was just starting out. He offered to refer her to a more seasoned operative, but she really didn’t feel like climbing back in her car and schlepping all the way to Worcester, so she rolled the dice and told him why she’d come. Brian asked a few questions and wrote on a yellow legal pad and met her eyes often enough for her to feel a simple tenderness in his that seemed older than his years. He struck her as earnest and new enough at the business to still be honest, an opinion he validated two days later when he advised her not to hire him or anyone else for that matter. Brian told her he could take her case and probably bill her for at least forty hours of work before he came back with the same opinion he was offering now.

“You don’t have enough information to find this guy.”

“That’s why I’m hiring you.”

He shifted in his chair. “I did a little digging since our first meeting. Nothing big, nothing I’ll charge you for—”

“I’ll pay.”

“—but enough. If he was named Trevor or even, heck, Zachary, we might have a chance of tracking down a guy who taught at one of over two dozen institutions of higher learning in Massachusetts or Connecticut twenty years ago. But, Miss Childs, I ran a quick computer analysis for you and in the last twenty years, at the twenty-seven schools I identified as possibles, there have been seventy-three” — he nodded at her shocked reaction — “adjunct, fill-in, assistant, associate, and full professors named James. Some have lasted a semester, some less, and some have gone the other way and attained tenure.”

“Can you get employment records, pictures in the files?”

“I’m sure for some, maybe half. But if he’s not in that half — and how would you even identify him? — then we’d have to track down the other thirty-five Jameses who, if demographic trends in this country are an indicator, are flung across all fifty states, and find a way to get their pictures from twenty years ago. Then I wouldn’t be charging you for forty hours’ work. I’d be charging for four hundred. And still no guarantee we’d find this guy.”

She worked through her reactions — anxiety, rage, helplessness, which produced more rage, and finally stubborn anger at this prick for not wanting to do his job. Fine, she’d find someone who would.

He read that in her eyes and the way she gathered her purse to herself.

“If you go to someone else and they see you, a young woman who recently came into some money, they will milk you for that money and still come up empty. And that larceny, which is what it will be in my opinion, will be perfectly legal. Then you’ll be poor and fatherless.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Where were you born?”

She tilted her head toward the south-facing window. “Springfield.”

“Is there a hospital record?”

She nodded. “Father is listed as UNK.”

“But they were together then, Elizabeth and James.”

Another nod. “Once when she’d had a few drinks, she told me that the night she went into labor they were fighting and he was out of town. She had me and, because he wasn’t there, she refused to list him on the record out of spite.”

They sat in silence until she said, “So you won’t take my case?”

Brian Delacroix shook his head. “Let him go.”

She stood, her forearms quaking, and thanked him for his time.

She found photographs stashed all around the house — the nightstand in her mother’s bedroom, a box in the attic, filling a drawer in her mother’s office. A good eighty-five percent of them were of the two of them. Rachel was struck by how clearly love for her shone in her mother’s pale eyes, though, true to form, even in pictures, her mother’s love looked complicated, as if she were in the process of reconsidering it. The other fifteen percent of the pictures were of friends and colleagues in academia and publishing, most taken at holiday cocktail parties and early summer cookouts, two at a bar with people Rachel didn’t recognize but who were clearly academics.

None contained a man with dark wavy hair and an uncertain smile.

She found her mother’s journals when she sold the house. She’d graduated from Emerson by that point and was leaving Massachusetts for graduate school in New York City. The old Victorian in South Hadley where she and her mother had lived since Rachel was in third grade contained few good memories and had always felt haunted. (“But they’re faculty ghosts,” her mother would say when the unexplained creak snaked out from the far end of a hallway or something thumped in the attic. “Probably up there reading Chaucer and sipping herbal tea.”)

The journals weren’t in the attic. They were in a trunk in the basement underneath carelessly packed foreign editions of The Staircase . They filled lined composition notebooks, the entries as haphazard as her mother had been ordered in her daily life. Half were undated, and her mother could go months, once even a year, without writing. She wrote most often about fear. Prior to The Staircase, the fear was financial — she’d never make enough as a professor of psychology to pay back her student loans, let alone send her daughter to a decent private high school and on to a decent college. After her book landed on the national bestseller lists, she feared she’d never write a worthwhile follow-up. She feared too that she would be called out for wearing the emperor’s new clothes, for perpetrating a con job that would be discerned when she published again. It turned out to be a prophetic fear.

But mostly she feared for Rachel. Rachel watched herself grow in the pages from a rambunctious, joyful, occasionally irritating source of pride (“She has his appetite for play... Her heart’s so lovely and generous that I’m terrified what the world will do to it...”) to a despairing and self-destructive malcontent (“The cutting troubles me a bit less than the promiscuity; she’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake... She leaps into dark waters and then complains about the depth but blames me for the leaping”).

Fifteen pages later, she came upon “I have to face the shame of it — I’ve been a subpar mother. I never had any patience for the underdeveloped frontal lobe. I snap too much, cut to the chase when I should model patience. She grew up with a brusque reductionist, I’m afraid. And no father. And it put a hole at the center of her.”

A few pages later, her mother returned to the theme. “I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things, soul-baubles, new age therapies, self-medication. She thinks she’s rebellious and resilient, but she’s only one of those things. She needs so much .”

A few pages later, in an undated entry, Elizabeth Childs wrote, “She is laid up right now, sick in a strange bed, and even needier than usual. The persistent question returns: Who is he, Mother? She looks so frail — brittle and mawkish and frail. She is a lot of wonderful things, my dearest Rachel, but she is not strong. If I tell her who James is, she’ll search him out. He’ll shatter her heart. And why should I give him that power? After all this time, why should he be allowed to hurt her again? To fuck with that beautiful, battered heart of hers? I saw him today.”