Snake Eyes Read online

  Her thin fingers grope about the doorway, grip the doorknob of the screen door as she steadies herself there, peering toward him. He is only about thirty feet away, can’t she see him?

  It is early August. In the Poconos. Where, at Swarts Lake, one of the smaller, more isolated, more private of the mountain lakes, Michael O’Meara has rented a spacious A-frame cottage for his family, for the month. He can’t be there all the time, since he has a new, and challenging, job with a law firm in Newark, but he is there much of the time, and always on weekends. The Swarts Lake rental is not exactly a secret, but neither has Michael advertised it much, in conversations with Mount Orion friends. So far as most of them know, the O’Mearas are on Cape Cod, where, until this summer, they’ve always gone.

  For it isn’t just Gina who must heal, and convalesce: it is the entire family.

  And how restful, how peaceful, how convalescent here at Swarts Lake amid tall stands of pines, sharply etched clumps of white birch, a welter of deciduous trees!—simply to breathe in the mountain air, to feel it fill, and expand, one’s lungs, is deeply satisfying. Scattered about the angular lake are perhaps a dozen handsome, custom-built cottages—cottages is perhaps too modest a word, but it is the word of choice—like the O’Mearas’, but they are discreetly hidden from one another by foliage, and by the steep hills and wedgelike rocky crevices of the terrain. There is boating on the lake, but, by implicit common consent, no intrusively loud outboard-motoring; and no boating at all after dark. Joel and Kenny were lonely at first, and resentful of being sequestered in so remote a place, but, these past few days, have become more adventurous about exploring the lake, and are gone for long hours at a time. If any of the O’Mearas’ neighbors on the lake are aware of their identity, Michael has detected no sign, no hint. When he drives in to the village of Swarts Lake for provisions, he’s careful to keep conversations at a minimum. Indeed, Michael judiciously arranged for the cottage rental by way of his father-in-law, so that the name “O’Meara” might not be officially associated with it.

  Her voice lifting in concern, not quite in fear, Gina calls again, “Michael?—where are you?”

  Michael replies quickly, “Right here, Gina. On the beach.”

  Gina turns, startled and blinking, in the direction of his voice, and now she sees him, or gives that impression. She may be attempting a smile—Michael isn’t sure. This is a delicate moment, for it is the first time in the nine days she has been at Swarts Lake that Gina has ventured out onto the redwood deck before dusk.

  “Is anyone else there, Michael?”

  “No, darling. I’m alone. Raking.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Michael glances about, as if to confirm the fact. Of course, he is alone: the twins seem disinclined to spend much time with Daddy and have gone off exploring on their own.

  “Reasonably sure,” Michael says, cheerfully.

  “But—along the lakeshore? Can you be certain?”

  Michael resists the impulse to answer too abruptly, thus to make light of Gina’s dread. He squints out at the lake, where, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, someone is sailboating. On a farther stretch of the shore, where rock gives way to pebbly sand, thus to an appealingly rough, undomesticated beach, there are sunbathers, swimmers.

  Gina continues, nervously, “If there’s anyone there, they could look through binoculars, couldn’t they, and see me? The deck is so exposed.” The deck is not much exposed, but shaded by evergreens on either side. Still Gina lingers in the doorway, fussing with her scarf, her dark glasses, her shapeless pink sweater drooping to mid-thigh.

  Michael’s heart leaps at the prospect of Gina actually venturing outside, by daylight; sitting on one of the deck chairs, or lying on the canvas lounge chair, as he’d hoped she would. He says, “There’s no one in sight, darling, there’s no one watching, I promise.” Like a flamboyant young suitor he lets the rake fall, bounds up the steps to the deck, takes Gina’s thin hands in his, before she can shrink back inside, and urges her out into the sunshine.

  “Come, sit down. I’ll bring us something to drink,” he says.

  He’d bounded up the steps so effortlessly, he seemed to have forgotten his stiff knee.

  Gina doesn’t withdraw her hands from his immediately, though, since that terrible evening in March, she often shies away from being touched, even, so gently, by her husband. (Her physicians’ examinations are nightmares for her—she has to take a tranquilizer before submitting.) She frowns doubtfully, squinting toward the lake. Is the elegant white sailboat with its billowing sails defined for her, or is it a mere blur?—is the farther shore, vibrantly defined to Michael’s eye, entirely lost to her? The vision in her left eye has so severely deteriorated, she is legally blind in that eye; the vision in the right eye is marginally stronger, but unreliable. Behind the thick lenses of her glasses, which weigh cruelly on the delicate bridge of her nose, and give her a bizarre insectlike look, Gina’s eyes are hidden from Michael’s close scrutiny.

  Gina says, “But, if anyone knows we’re out here—”

  Michael says, “But who would know, darling? Really!”

  “—they could even take photographs, couldn’t they?—with a telescopic lens?”

  “But why, Gina, would they? We’re not that important.”

  “People are cruel,” Gina says vaguely. Now she does withdraw her hands from Michael’s, politely. As if she has only now thought of them, she asks, concerned, “Where are Joel and Kenny?”

  “Out in the woods, or down by the lake, playing.”

  “By themselves?”

  “They may have found some other kids to play with, but I don’t think so. The last I saw of them, they were going ‘exploring.’”

  “Not swimming?”

  “The shore’s too rocky at this end.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure—?”

  “That they’re not here.”

  “Do you want me to call them?”

  “No, they don’t want to see me, outside like this. They don’t want me to be seen, I terrify them.”

  “Gina, that isn’t so,” Michael says adamantly. “Joel and Kenny are not ‘terrified’ of you. They love you, and naturally—”

  Gina nods slowly, distractedly. She isn’t really listening: she is more concerned with the possibility of strangers spying on her from the direction of the lake, which is so open, and flooded with light.

  “They just want you to be well, Gina. And happy. As I do.”

  Gina allows herself to be urged gently down, to sit in one of the gaily striped red-and-white canvas chairs. Since the assault, she moves her body with excessive care, as if needing to calculate each minute shifting of position and balance; as if her limbs, and not just her face and head, had been injured. Her surgeon at the Kessler-Macon Clinic told Michael that such caution was normal in cases of severe psychophysiological trauma, where the victim’s position-sense, or proprioception, had been threatened.

  The surgeon went on to say that each individual views the world through the perspective of his or her own physical self, and where that physical self had been injured, the perspective was naturally altered. Michael asked, dreading the answer, if Gina’s “perspective” would ever revert to normalcy, or near-normalcy, and was told, yes, perhaps, there was the distinct possibility, with time.

  And assuming no further trauma.

  Gina sits; stiffly, and anxiously; arms folded tight beneath her breasts, as if she’s cold; her disfigured face lifted bravely to the sun. Michael squeezes her shoulders as one might squeeze a child, signaling pleasure and approval. “I’ll get us some fruit juice, all right? Stay here!”

  He hurries inside, into the kitchen. How ravenous he is, with thirst!—he’d been raking debris on the beach for an hour, quite enjoying the physical exertion, the satisfaction of sweating in a useful cause.

  Always at Swarts Lake he wakes early, and rises early, at dawn.

  His sleep here, and back home in Mount Orion
, is less disturbed than one might expect: the old guilt nightmares are gone, perhaps forever.

  Now that his enemy is dead, and he knows himself morally blameless, out of what reasonable source might guilt spring?

  His tragic involvement with Lee Roy Sears belongs to the past. Why then should he not be a reasonable man for the remainder of his life?

  Whistling under his breath, in the kitchen. Must be happy.

  He pours himself and Gina tall cold glasses of grapefruit juice and brings them back outside.

  (Now that Gina is on more or less continuous medication, she isn’t allowed to drink alcohol, nor, out of sympathy with her, does Michael. And he has stopped taking drugs of any kind, except, sometimes, aspirin—all that is safely behind him.)

  When he returns to the deck he sees, to his disappointment, that Gina has shifted her chair so that her back is to Swarts Lake.

  Michael pretends he hasn’t noticed. It isn’t for him to pass judgment. “Here you are, honey,” he says, smiling, handing her her glass. But not watching her lift it to her lips—she’s self-conscious, about being watched.

  Thinking, It is a considerable accomplishment. For Gina to have ventured outdoors at all, in her condition, exposed to pitiless daylight.

  Since March, there have been numerous changes in Michael O’Meara’s life. Some of them easily measurable, others not.

  He has had a new job, for instance, since mid-May. With a private law firm in Newark, specializing in civil cases.

  No more defending Pearce, Inc., against grieving plaintiffs. No more “wonder” drugs for him.

  He’d turned the massive Peverol documents over to his successor, with heartfelt good wishes.

  (Had Pearce, Inc., eased Michael O’Meara out, embarrassed by local publicity, or had Michael O’Meara simply eased himself out, with enormous relief?—even Michael’s long-standing Mount Orion friends didn’t really know.)

  Another recent development (if it is a development of the Sears episode, and not something wholly unrelated) is the unexpected behavior of Michael’s sister, Janet, with whom he believed himself close; and of whom he was very fond. For, abruptly, with no warning at all, Janet telephoned Michael one day in April to tell him, somewhat evasively, that she was accepting a position in Portland, Oregon, as program director of a public television station; and would be moving away so quickly, she wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to him and his family in person!

  And Mrs. O’Meara, true to form, had abruptly returned to Palm Beach, without having come out to Mount Orion to see the O’Mearas at all.

  Michael tried not to show his surprise at such peculiar, yes such rude, and cruel, behavior. His own sister!—his only sibling! Hadn’t they felt genuine affection for each other, not just as sister and brother, but as friends? Michael had certainly thought so, the last time Janet had come to visit. What had she said to him, in the drive: “You did what you had to do … You’re a hero.”

  Gina, who referred all things to herself, was less surprised. Saying, with a resigned sort of bitterness, “Your sister and your mother never liked me, before.” She paused. “Now, they’re frightened of having to see me, and having to say I look ‘good.’”

  Adding, sadly, “In their places, I would probably behave the same way.”

  Michael, with his lawyerly sagacity, wasn’t so sure that this was the explanation. Or the entire explanation. He seemed to know, and to be baffled by the knowledge, that Janet was frightened of him.

  “Well. So be it.”

  His only sister. His only sibling.

  Michael recalled that, in medieval England, a jury could bring in not one of only two verdicts, but one of four: in addition to guilty and not guilty there were ignoramus (“we do not know”) and ignorabimus (“we shall not know”).

  The latter two verdicts, especially the last, seemed to him supreme, in this matter of living with other, so very inscrutable, human beings.

  And there was Joel, and there was Kenny.

  Whom Michael O’Meara persisted in not calling “the twins.”

  (Though everyone else did, of course. It was maddening!—“the twins,” or, at the very least, “the boys.” Why did this so infuriate Daddy?)

  Only eight years old now, Joel and Kenny were husky, energetic, restless boys, who looked older than their age—they might have been ten, even eleven! In a single year they’d grown considerably; wearing out shoes, clothes, toys, at a rate to astonish and amaze. As the O’Mearas’ pediatrician said wryly, They were healthy. Michael was mystified rather than alarmed. It disappointed him that their pale blond hair, so like Gina’s, was steadily darkening, by identical degrees; soon, it would be dark as his own had been, before it had grayed. Their eyes, formerly a beautiful blue-green, of the exact hue of Gina’s, seemed to have darkened too, to a very ordinary brown. How was this possible, and so rapidly?—within a year, or eighteen months?

  Michael knew that Joel and Kenny had been profoundly affected by the hateful presence of Lee Roy Sears in the O’Mearas’ lives: but how, in fact, had they been affected? Since his death, they had never spoken a word of him; before his death, during those terrible weeks when the O’Meara household had been under siege, they had not spoken of him to their father directly, nor to their mother, but Michael had overheard them (he was certain he’d overheard them) whispering and giggling together about “Mr. Sears.”

  No doubt, Sears had enticed them into leaving the school grounds with him and going to a nearby park: Joel had denied it vehemently, and Kenny had denied it vehemently, but Daddy suspected otherwise.

  Yet he knew better than to interrogate them, frighten them.

  Daddy was not one of those hysterical-paranoid parents, of whom one hears so much recently, who suspect “child abuse” on the slightest provocation, and terrify their children.

  So, he’d let it go. But he knew what he believed.

  He knew what he knew.

  True, Joel and Kenny had been terrified of the bloody dog carcass dragged onto the iced-over pond. They’d even dreamt of it afterward, or of something mangled and bloody—nightmares from which Daddy had to wake them, to give comfort. Yet, inexplicably, maddeningly, they’d also transposed the ugly incident into one of their “codes,” to be spoken of in secret, to be thrilled by, reduced to spasms of giggles.

  And the harsh sibilant whisper, never quite audible, which Daddy could nonetheless hear: Mr. Sears. Mr. Sears. Mr. Sears.

  Michael had discovered, in the boys’ room, hidden away at the back of a closet, their comic-book epic, which they’d been drawing, and giggling over, for years. He had leafed quickly through the loose sheets of paper, some of it construction paper, most merely tablet paper, to get to the more recent pages: these, covered in crudely yet cleverly drawn figures, human, animal, human-animal, involved in various action-antics, of a kind common to television and children’s movies. There were children (Joel, Kenny?) who towered over adults (Daddy? Mommy?); there was a mysterious black-haired man (Lee Roy Sears?) who had a snake wrapped about his arm, and sometimes around his neck, and sometimes even protruding from his mouth, who caused destruction of a cheery comic book nature.

  The drawings both impressed and worried Michael, for he believed that they did show talent; at the same time, there was something malicious and cruel about them, granting even, as one must, the instinctive need of the child to unleash his imagination, free of adult restraints and inhibitions.

  Of course, it was fantasy, wholly. And Daddy had no business intruding.

  More worrisome, because more public, were complaints by teachers of Joel’s and Kenny’s behavior at the Riverside School: they were “hyperactive,” they were “bullying, threatening, physically rough” with other, smaller children, they were “unsocial.”

  Not all the time, of course, but some of the time.

  Their grades, including grades for deportment, had steadily declined.

  With this, Michael O’Meara would concern himself in September, if the problem persisted i
nto third grade.

  Gina, convalescing, could not be told of such family problems, for they would only upset her, and to what purpose?—there were days when the poor woman had but the vaguest consciousness of the fact that she was a mother, at all.

  And when she did, it was with a wincing, shrinking gesture, her fingers over her face. “Oh!—don’t let them look at me, oh please!”

  For it was true, though Michael would not acknowledge it, that Joel and Kenny, though they loved their mother very much, and missed her household presence enormously, were frightened of her, and did not want to see her; just as, for the time being at least, she did not want to see them.

  Of course, this would change, in time. Gina was scheduled for further surgery, in the fall. And that would make a difference.

  Shortly before he’d brought his family to Swarts Lake, Michael had happened to poke his head in Joel’s and Kenny’s room, to discover that Joel was lost in childish concentration drawing something, in ballpoint ink, on Kenny’s left forearm; even as Kenny was lost in childish concentration drawing something, in ballpoint ink, on Joel’s left forearm. So rapt were the boys, so engrossed in their artwork, in blue, green, black, and fluorescent-red ink, they were unaware of Daddy’s presence until he stood above them, and spoke, louder than he meant to speak.

  “My God!—what are you doing?”

  Wide-eyed, scared, guilty, they gaped up at him, each dropping his pen, cringing as if fearful of being struck.

  “I said, what are you doing? Giving each other tattoos?”

  Michael seized the boys’ arms and examined them: the drawings were childish in conception, but fastidiously executed: on each boy’s forearm was a snake, of numerous cross-hatchings in blue, green, and black, coiled, about four inches long, with red eyes and a red forked tongue. Already some of the ink had begun to smear, and the “tattoos” looked unintentionally comical, silly.