The Golden Hour Read online

  And I wasn’t afraid anymore. There was no one following me. Not Robby, not Rick, not even Michael Ash. And so I entered the woods. I concentrated on my breath and followed the short path through the cold foliage to the clearing where Seamus and Fiona’s house sat quietly, almost expectantly.

  Emboldened, I marched across the expansive yard and up the stone steps, the cold air burning my face, my elbow throbbing.

  I rang the doorbell and then knocked with my good hand. Loudly.

  Nothing. Where the hell was he? How could he just leave? How could he just take off and leave her here, leave them here?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and saw him standing in the background of the photo, little Rachel playing hide-and-go-seek. Shhh, he seemed to say to the camera. “Don’t tell her where I’m hiding.”

  When the door opened, I caught my breath. I was crying.

  “Please tell me what happened to her,” I said. Imploring.

  He hung his head and reached for my good hand, ushering me inside.

  “There was another roll of film,” he said. “I have it.”

  The Magic Hour

  On a bright Sunday morning in November near Thanksgiving in 1981, Sybil got up, made the bed, fed her three-year-old daughter breakfast, and started a load of laundry. She cleaned the refrigerator, the stove, the floors. She sliced apples, coated them in cinnamon and sugar, maybe let Rachel eat the sweet, curly peels. And she photographed all of this:

  Breakfast dishes, dirty clothes, linoleum, apples.

  Later, she made her daughter a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, gave her a glass of grape juice, and sat at the kitchen table with her, where they colored in a Snoopy coloring book. They took a walk that afternoon, along the beach, gathering sea glass for the collection Rachel kept in an old jelly jar on her windowsill.

  Jelly jar, broken crayons, mermaid tears.

  Later, when Rachel grew sleepy, Sibyl took her upstairs to her room and tucked her in bed for a nap. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she might have said, and tickled Rachel’s toes through the heavy blankets.

  Downstairs, she pulled the hot pie from the oven, set it on the counter to cool, and took her camera outside.

  A child’s closed eyes, steam blown through the beak of a ceramic pie bird.

  To Seamus’s surprise (and dismay), Fiona had suggested they spend Thanksgiving here. Seamus had told Sybil he’d be arriving before Fiona, to get the house ready for guests. That he would come see her. Come see Rachel. She wouldn’t be alone for long. He missed her, he said. He had made a mistake. They would figure out what to do.

  She slung the camera around her neck, so grateful for the weight of it. Sometimes it felt like the only thing keeping her from floating away. She took photos of the house where Rachel was sleeping. She took photos of Seamus’s house, quiet and dark as a catacomb.

  She walked to the edge of the bluff and studied the sky. The days were so short now, they seemed to be tumbling, cartwheeling like a child across a vast expanse of grass.

  The light would be perfect in just a few more minutes. That golden hour, that magical hour that comes before dusk. She was only moments away from beauty. But she didn’t take any photos, not this time, and when she lifted the camera from her neck, she felt untethered. Capable, even, of flight.

  When Rachel came running outside, having woken from her nap, she shook her head . . . no, no, go back inside. But it was too late.

  “Mama?” Rachel must have said, running to her. And Sybil picked her up in her arms, dizzy, already tumbling in her mind.

  This was the coveted moment, the golden hour. The sky was gilded when she stepped off the edge of the cliff, Rachel clinging to her, face buried in her neck. But there would be no photo to capture this moment, she thought. And it filled her with sorrow.

  But the universe was awash in gold as they fell.

  * * *

  Seamus arrived, as promised, just as the sun set. The door was open, and the pie was still hot on the counter, the laundry still spinning in the dryer. He searched the tiny house and then headed toward the bluffs to see if they had gone on a walk on the beach. Instead he found the camera sitting at the edge of the rocky cliff and knew before he looked what he would find below. And on the roll of film captured inside.

  Epitaphs

  In art history, I memorized the suicides.

  American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was wracked by “depressive episodes” her whole life, purportedly exasperated by symptoms associated with hepatitis. On July 26, 1971, she swallowed a lethal dose of barbiturates and slashed her wrists with a razor. She wasn’t discovered until two days later. She was forty-eight years old.

  Dora de Houghton Carrington (1893–1932) was a British painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group. During her lifetime, her work was never exhibited at the urging of her lover, the gay writer Lytton Strachey. When Lytton died of stomach cancer, Carrington borrowed a gun from a friend and shot herself. She was thirty-nine years old.

  Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), the Mexican painter, was crippled in a bus accident as a teenager, and suffered ill health as a result for most of her life, including the inability to carry a child. Her marriage to her mentor, Diego Rivera, was plagued by mutual infidelities. At forty-seven years old she died of a pulmonary embolism (officially), though the rumored cause of death was an overdose.

  Constance Mayer (1775–1821), a French portraitist, carried on a long affair with her mentor, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. When his wife finally died, she expected he would marry her, but he did not. And so she took the artist’s knife and slit her throat. She was forty-six years old.

  Jeanne Hébuterne (1898–1920) was also a French painter. The lover and muse of Modigliani, she bore him a child. However, soon after she became pregnant with a second child, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis complicated by substance abuse. The day after his death, she flung herself, carrying their unborn child, out of a fifth floor window. She was twenty-two years old. Her epitaph read, “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.”

  The Bluffs

  “What did he say?” Pilar asked as I came back into the house.

  I shook my head. He’d pieced the story together the same way I’d pieced together her life, from the artifacts she’d left behind. He’d developed that last roll and had hidden those images for thirty-five years. He hadn’t known about the box of photos in the basement.

  I went to the living room and gathered the prints, the negatives, everything she’d left behind. I tore down the prints I’d hung. The idea of these images, these photos, hanging on some cold gallery wall seemed ridiculous to me. The beauty of them was that they were not exposed but rather protected, coddled. She couldn’t protect her own daughter, apparently, but she could protect this.

  “What are you doing?” Pilar asked.

  I was crying now, my heart slivering. I was so angry at Sybil. How could she have done this? To herself? And to her little girl?

  I clumsily made my way to the door, my arm a bundle of pain as I went outside to the rocky edge of the bluffs. Pilar was behind me, but she didn’t say a word.

  I looked down at the dizzying sight of the rocks and sand below. I wanted to scream at her, How could you do this? God, you selfish, selfish bitch.

  But as the sun dipped into the trees behind me, the air took on that quality of light she must have seen that afternoon, and for a moment, I understood.

  She’d already died once when she left her life behind and came here. She’d written her own epitaphs.

  But she didn’t have to die again. This had been her choice.

  The tide was high, the wind violent. I thought about tossing the negatives, the prints. Releasing them, letting her name be writ on water. But each of these frames was the truth of this woman’s life. Of what happened to her. Hiding them hadn’t done anyone any good. I owed it to her to preserve them, not to destroy them. I wouldn’t be complicit in another lie.

  I walked slowly back to the house, c
lutching the prints, the negatives. Trembling.

  Inside, Pilar was waiting for me. Her face was pale, and her eyes were wide.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. Everything’s okay.”

  She shook her head, reached for me.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling sick, my heart plummeting. Something was wrong.

  “Your dad just called.”

  “My dad?”

  “Yeah. There’s been some sort of accident,” she said, her mouth twitching nervously. “A fire.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody’s okay,” she said. “But you need to call your dad.”

  Ash and Ember

  The fire started in the cellar.

  My father said Husky smelled the smoke moments before the alarm went off and went and woke him and my mother; the little dog saved their lives.

  My brother was on duty, and when the dispatcher announced the address, Mark said, his heart stopped. But then muscle memory kicked in. In a small town like Haven, this was bound to happen one day: somebody he knew. A fire engulfing a place he loved.

  My father and mother got out just as the flames were climbing the cellar stairs. I picture them standing in their nightclothes on the front lawn, pale as my mother’s chicken wire ghosts in the firelight. Ash falling like snow on their shoulders and hair.

  My brother said when the fire truck roared down the street where we grew up, it felt like every moment of the last few years had been in preparation for this. “Do you believe in destiny?” he asked.

  The firefighters were able to keep the fire from destroying the house, but the kitchen was gutted. The basement flooded.

  “How did it happen?” I asked when my brother put my mother on the phone.

  “It must have been something electrical. That goddamned furnace? Oh my God, all your artwork, Wynnie. From high school. College. It was all down there.” My mother sobbed.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I don’t care. I’m just so glad you and Daddy are okay. Can you put Mark on again?”

  “What happened?” I asked my brother.

  “It doesn’t look like an accident,” Mark said softly. “It looks intentional.”

  “Intentional?”

  “Arson.”

  * * *

  Trembling after the phone call, I opened my laptop, logged onto my business e-mail account.

  Lissen. Maybe I need to git your attention some other way. You got a responsibility. If you think you can just start blabbing your mouth off you got another thing comin.

  I clicked PRINT, opened the earlier e-mail and clicked PRINT as well.

  “What are those?” Pilar asked.

  I felt my stomach bottom out.

  The only person in the world who could help now was Pilar. If only to keep me from combusting. From turning to ash.

  I sat down at the kitchen table. My legs were shaking too hard to support me. It made me think of the charred walls of my parents’ house. The foundation ravaged.

  “Talk to me, Wynnie.” She reached out and took my good hand.

  “It’s not the way I said it,” I told her, my voice and throat aching.

  “What’s that?”

  I shook my head. “I was scared. I was just a little girl.”

  Pilar sat down across from me and took the e-mails from my hand, read them. Tears ran down my face in hot streams.

  “Who the fuck wrote these?” she asked.

  “His brother,” I said, feeling like a valve inside my heart had been released. “His brother was there too. He made him do it.”

  Unspun

  This is the thing about a lie: over time, it not only obscures the truth but consumes it. Those who pursue veracity (those do-gooders, those seekers) see truth not as an abstract thing but something concrete. Strong, vivid, with an unassailable right to prevail. But those who fight for it, who fight in the name of it, do not understand that truth is anemic, weak. Especially in the hands of an accomplished liar. Especially over years. A lie, in collusion with time, can overpower the truth. A good lie has the power to subsume reality. A good lie can become the truth.

  However, lies are also precarious things. I picture my own like the shimmery filaments of a web. The truth is that fat insect ensnared in the delicate strands, imprisoned, struggling to break free. Each twist and turn, each flutter of wing, each protest threatening to tear the intricate construction apart.

  It had been twenty years since I’d cast out that first lie, that fine thread. And foolishly, I’d believed my design was infallible. That the winged beast, the one wrapped in the silken fibers of my own making, had succumbed. That I was safe.

  But what was the truth?

  Robby and Rick Rousseau followed me into the woods intent on hurting me. When Robby couldn’t follow through, Rick took over. His rage and violence, his sickness, both calculated and spontaneous. Whatever had happened to them both as boys twisted them, turned their concepts of right and wrong upside down. Upset down. The sky became the ground, the earth became the heavens. But Robby was not innocent. He pressed the blade to my throat; he wanted my silence as much as Rick had.

  I thought of Seamus, of Fiona. The secrets, the lies. Seamus had used his money to purchase the silence of law enforcement, of the newspapers, to quietly hide Sybil’s suicide (with her baby, God, with that poor little girl). And Rick and Robby had used their knife to purchase mine.

  But the funny thing about the truth is, it always seems to have a way of getting free. For two decades, I could practically hear the beating of wings against those invisible threads, gossamer snapping, coming undone. I had a feeling Seamus had simply been waiting for his own lie to come unraveled too.

  I would need to tell my parents. Gus. And I would need to talk to Larry. The police. There would be accusations. Cruel and awful things said about me. That wound I thought had healed would be opened again and again and again.

  But I couldn’t keep his secret anymore. I couldn’t keep my own.

  Testimony

  “So the DNA tests probably showed there was no match between the samples taken and Robby’s DNA,” Larry said. I’d returned to Haven, shared everything with my parents. And now I sat in his dim office as he paced.

  He looked flustered, his white hair long and unruly. “Which casts doubt on whether or not he was the perpetrator of the rape.”

  “He tried to rape me,” I said, my throat tight, the old wounds made fresh.

  “But he didn’t rape you,” Larry said. “And he’s been sitting in prison for twenty years on a rape conviction.”

  “And attempted murder,” I said. Whose side was he on?

  Larry continued shuffling back and forth across his office floor. There was a faded path in the Oriental rug, likely from years of such fevered pacing.

  He continued, “The knife was never found, but Robby was covered in your blood. There was a confession, which the defense is going to try to show was coerced. Your new testimony is going to call all of this into question. They’re going to try to get the original verdict overturned.”

  I nodded. I knew this. I also knew if it was, if Robby was freed, he might come after me. I took small comfort in his having found God.

  “The defense is going to use you as their key witness. To defer the blame from Robby to Rick.”

  I nodded. I knew this as well. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  I had forwarded Larry the e-mails, the letter. I had told him about the phone call on our landline.

  “He set the fire,” I’d told him. “Rick. He thought I was at my parents’ house. He was trying to kill me again.”

  “But you said he used a condom? Then there might not be any of Rick’s DNA in the kit either. No physical evidence to link Robby or him to you?”

  I closed my eyes, forced myself back into the woods again. Recalling every awful moment in excruciating detail. I recollected waning sunlight, the green of leaves. Felt the pounding of the bass in my heart. This same heart beating inside my ches
t now. I heard birdsong, the crush of leaves, wind, his voice. Come on, you pussy. I squeezed my eyes tight, until that blue sky of my imagination turned to stars. I smelled mud. Cinnamon.

  “The gum,” I said to Larry, my heart thudding. “It was in the rape kit. Rick was chewing it, and it fell in my hair. They clipped it out at the hospital. It’s got to have his DNA on it. Maybe that’s what they found? Maybe that’s their new evidence?”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding. “That’s good, Wyn. That’s an important detail. Enough to establish he was there. That he was involved somehow.”

  I nodded. I was still there, in those woods, scrambling to my knees after they were gone. Rick probably didn’t remember the gum. Because he had used the condom, gotten rid of the knife, he must have thought he left no trace behind. He must have figured this, coupled with my silence, had been the key to his freedom.

  Larry sat down behind his desk and steepled his fingers together. “What we’re going to need to work on is proving Robby was equally culpable. That he was an active participant in both the rape and attempted murder.”

  I nodded. I had no idea how he would do this. I couldn’t worry about it though. I needed to trust the truth, that sluggish, winged thing, would prevail.

  “Wyn, this time you have to take the stand,” he said. “Will you testify?”

  No, no, no.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  Prophecies

  “You sure you’re going to be okay for a couple of days?”

  Pilar asked.

  I nodded. I’d returned to the island after meeting with Larry. My parents had wanted me to stay in Haven, to wait for the retrial, which had been granted in light of the “new” evidence. But I still wasn’t ready to go home. Life on the island didn’t feel finished yet.

  Pilar had gotten a call from her manager that a big collector from Sweden wanted to meet her, see her work. I thought of Ikea. About what almost was, but, perhaps thankfully, wasn’t.