Russell Banks - The Reserve

“Daddy kept them up here at the Reserve,” she went on. “Hidden in the library, of all places. Can you imagine? Hidden right there in plain sight in the old Beinecke, in the one place he knew she would never look. And neither would I. Until yesterday, when I took you into the library, which had been the nursery when I was little, and I thought, of course, ‘Everything is in the library.’ That’s what Daddy used to say whenever I asked a question he didn’t have the answer for. ‘Everything is in the library.’”

“What the hell are you talking about? Am I supposed to think you’re crazy, Vanessa?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“What’s in the folder, then.”

“What’s in the folder? Why, photographs.”

“Photographs. Of what? Of whom?”

“Photographs of me, Jordan! Me with no clothes on, me when I was a teeny-weeny girl, taken by my daddy, with my mommy acting as his studio assistant. Drunk or doped at the time, no doubt, but my daddy’s faithful assistant all the same. Then and now. Even dead. Do you want to see them?” she said and picked up the folder.

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t.” She hugged the folder to her chest. “They’re mine. They’re me.”

“Okay, fine. You want me to bury them?”

“Yes. I…I can’t do it myself. I don’t know why. I want to, but I don’t want to let them go. It’s too…hard, somehow. I feel like it’s destroying evidence.”

“I’ll do it,” Jordan said.

“But don’t look at them!”

“I won’t.” He picked up the shovel and proceeded to dig a hole in the soft wet ground that was the width and length of the folder. “Okay, let me have it.”

She handed him the folder very carefully, as if it contained sacred scripture, a gnostic revelation. “You can’t look.”

“I won’t,” he said, and he didn’t. He was absolutely sure that there were no photographs inside the folder. Papers — he could tell that much from the weight and shape of it — but probably nothing more than receipts for materials and work done at the camp, or letters, newspaper clippings, possibly a half-dozen old magazines or a pack of Dr. Cole’s personal Rangeview letterhead stationery. But photographs? No. Jordan lay the folder flat in the hole and filled it in and tamped down the dirt and kicked a layer of pine needles over it. “There, it’s done. Do you want me to place a rock on top, some kind of ceremonial marker?”

“Don’t condescend to me.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “In case you ever change your mind and want to come back and dig them up.”

“‘Them.’ The photographs.”

“Yes. The photographs.”

“No. No need to mark it.” She stood with shoulders slumped, hands lost in the sleeves of the heavy fireman’s coat, strands of soaked hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks — a bedraggled, lost child, Jordan thought.

“Come on, Vanessa. I’ll take you over to my place, get you some dry clothes, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“You can do that? Fly me away from here?”

He was silent for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly, as if a quandary had at last been resolved. “Yes. I can do pretty much whatever I want now.”

“What’s going to happen to me, Jordan?”

“Nothing,” he said. Then added, “But only if you agree to do what your mother originally wanted you to do.”

“Oh! Go into that hospital? That’s what she originally wanted. So they could perform the operation on my brain. The operation they learned from Daddy. The operation that will make me nice.”

Jordan put his arm around her shoulders and gently moved her away from the grave and toward the woods below. “Vanessa, no one’s going to operate on you. Trust me. There’ll be no brain surgery. All that business about your father and lobotomies, it’s not true, Vanessa. You know that. No more than your belief that he took obscene pictures of you when you were a child. You’ll be fine, I promise. If you go into the hospital, nothing bad will happen to you.”

“You don’t know as much as you think you do.”

“I do know that if you don’t go into the hospital, there’s going to be a thorough investigation into the fire, and you’ll likely go to jail for setting it. They already know you set it. That you set it ‘not really’ by accident. And who knows what else will come out in an investigation and trial? Your mother’s death, for example. Which might also be seen as ‘not really’ an accident. And that you kidnapped her. And buried her body here on the Reserve. You’ve still got plenty to hide, you know.”

“Is it like I’m pleading insanity?”

“Yes.”

“Am I insane, Jordan?”

“I don’t know.” Then added, “No, not to me.”

They walked a few more feet, and she stopped and stuck out her lower lip and pouted. “I don’t want to go.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said again. “Trust me.”

“What if they find out about what happened to Mother?”

“They won’t. Not if you go quietly into the hospital. I told the sheriff and Russell Kendall that I flew her out last night and she went back to New York by train from Westport. Your original plan. They believed me. Or at least the sheriff did. Kendall went along for his own reasons, I guess. And Hubert will, too. No one will ever know what happened here. It will be just as you planned. Your mother will have simply disappeared. But now, because of the fire, you have to disappear, too. Only for a while, though. A hospital in Europe is perfect. A nervous breakdown is perfect. In a year, you’ll be able to come back to New York and start your life over again.”

“Start my life over. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? What about you, Jordan?”

“Yeah, well, like I said, I can do pretty much whatever I want to now.”

“So you’re free?”

“Yes. I’m free. In a sense, you are, too. We’re both free as birds.”

AT THE TAMARACK CLUBHOUSE, THE OVERHEATED KITCHEN WAS crowded with local women and girls cleaning the pots and dishes and utensils. The firefighters and the Reservists who had gone out to the Second Lake with them had been rewarded with a large dinner prepared by the staff of the Club and the wives and daughters of the volunteers from the surrounding villages. Local women and girls had cooked the meal, and the wives and female guests of members had served it and cleared the dining room tables afterward. Then, a little before nine o’clock, Alicia Groves left the kitchen and walked slowly, wearily from the building, past the tennis courts and toward the staff parking lot where she had parked her car. Her mind was on her sons, Bear and Wolf, whom she had left at the house in the care of the girl Frances. Alicia needed to get back to them. They were trying not to show it, but she knew they were frightened and confused and did not believe her steady assurances that everything was going to be fine, Papa will come home soon, but then he might have to go away on a long trip to Spain.

The rain had stopped falling. As she neared the car she glanced up at the rising meadow beyond and saw flickering chartreuse lights dotting the darkness — fireflies. She stopped for a moment to watch. They were beautiful, the first thing of beauty that she had noticed in days, it seemed. The first thing that had given her pause and taken her thoughts away from the sudden dismemberment of her life. Fireflies. Their tiny lights flared against the darkness, then went out, like sparks from an invisible fire.

For a long time Alicia stood beside the car watching the fireflies dance through the darkness, until it came to her that she would survive this day and the next and the next, for in the midst of a life of loneliness and unacknowledged abandonment she had finally come to know true love, and because she had known love she had for the first time been able to see the darkness that for so many years had surrounded her. She had deceived her husband, yes, but in the end she had not lied to him about her love for Hubert, and now she was glad that she had not lied to him, glad that she had not told her husband what he wanted to hear, which would have partially healed the breach in their marriage and allowed it to continue more or less as before, in darkness, with no brilliant lights illuminating for a few brief seconds the wildflowers strewn across the alpine meadow before her. She did not realize it, so caught up was she in the glow of her thoughts, but as she got into the car and drove it from the parking lot down the road toward her home and her children and her unknown future, Alicia Groves was smiling.