All Things Cease to Appear Read Free Page A

think he had the courage to raise her alone.
    As they drove to the hotel, Franny fell asleep. No one spoke. He put her on his shoulder when they walked into the silent lobby and rode up in the elevator. His mother had arranged for two rooms. Why don’t you let Franny stay with us? she said. We’ll be right next door. I’m sure you need the rest.
    No, he said. She’ll be with me.
    His voice was cold, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. Their faces bleached and cautious. Wanting to know. Wanting a reason this had happened in their family. The potential embarrassment. They wanted the facts. Intimate details that were nobody’s business. They couldn’t help being suspicious—he guessed it was only natural. Maybe he should even forgive them.

    No. He hated them for it.
    Suddenly his parents looked like strangers, refugees who’d been thrown together with him until whatever end awaited them all. They turned into their room and closed the door. Through the wall he could hear their muted conversation, though he couldn’t imagine what they were saying to each other. When he was a boy, his bedroom had been next to theirs, and they often talked late into the night. George would fall asleep trying to decipher the conversation. His father would sit on the bench at the end of the bed, pulling off his shoes and socks, while his mother sat up in her nightgown, her face greasy with wrinkle cream, the newspaper open on her lap. As parents they’d been strict, rigorous. His father, the disciplinarian, occasionally used his belt. George could remember the shame of it.
    The room was clean, innocuous, with two double beds. He set Franny down as gently as he could, but she woke, slightly alarmed. Daddy?
    I’m right here.
    For several minutes the room intrigued her, the paisley bedspread, the wine-colored drapes, the matching shag carpet. She stood up on the bed and started jumping. For a second, while she was suspended in midair, a smile lit her face; then she dropped to all fours like a puppy and rolled up in a ball. Come here, you big lump of sugar. He pulled her into his arms and held her.
    You cry, Daddy?
    He couldn’t answer her. He cried raw, lonely tears.
    She turned away from him, hugging her stuffed rabbit, and shuddered a little. Her eyes were open, fixed on some spot across the room, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t asked for Catherine since they’d left the Pratts’, not once. He found it strange. Maybe somewhere inside her little head she understood her mother wasn’t coming back.
    He pulled the blankets up and kissed her cheek. Mercifully, she fell asleep.
    He sat down on the other bed, watching her. It was just the two of them now. He tried to think. The curtains swam, ghostlike, in some unexplained breeze. It was the heater beneath them, he realized, not without relief. He went to the window and adjusted the temperature and looked out into the night, the dim parking lot, the distant lights of the interstate. It had been a long, cruel winter. Again, it was beginning to snow. He pulled the heavy drapes across the cold glass, making the world out there disappear, and turned on the TV, muting the volume. A commercial ended and the nightly news came on. He was both surprised and not that his wife’s murder was their lead story: footage of the farm, the empty barns, an ominous shot of the unutilized milking contraptions, a dreary photograph of the house from the assessor’s office with the word Foreclosure stretched across it like a police banner. Then a picture of his wife that had been in the local paper, taken at the Chosen Fair, an annual tradition in which everybody came together to eat corn dogs and fried dough—one of the few levelers in a town of extreme wealth and poverty with little in between. Catherine, in overalls, a moon and a star painted on her cheek, looking angelic, almost childlike. Finally, a photo of him—his ID picture from the college, which made him look like an inmate. He could see what