The Event Reconstructed (Part I)

It happened sometime in summer. Well, it might have been late spring or early fall, but the weather was warm, there was grass, and it was green. It couldn't have been in winter, certainly not anytime around Christmas. Unless there had been some kind of crazily intense chinook. But we didn't get chinooks in Iron Springs, at least I don't think we did. Did we? Maybe. No, it must have been summer, late spring or early fall.

It's amazing now that I'm trying to remember this how hazy it's all become. The one thing that's totally beyond uncertainty is the creeping grasping spider hand. I can still see it clearly when I close my eyes. Although I don't know anymore if it belonged to her or to him.

I said before that Dick's fall was largely a matter of the layout of the house. (I speak of Dick's fall and not Anika's because her proper place always had been and I guess always would be at rock bottom, where all falls end.) More specifically, Dick's fall was largely a matter of the contiguity of his room to Anika's. You entered the Scholten house and immediately to your left were the family and dining rooms. In front of you was a hall. Just down the hall to the right was the master bedroom. At the far end of the hall was a bathroom. You turned left and there was the kitchen. You turned right and there were two bedrooms. These were Dick and Anika's. The remaining sisters all had their rooms downstairs.

The paterfamilias and his dam daily rose at five, so they both tended to retire no later than ten. Moreover, neither ever had problems falling asleep, and undoubtedly neither ever suffered the sort of unquiet dreams that would scare you awake in the middle of the night to the sensation of your flesh crawling for no visible reason. The kids usually were allowed to sleep until six and sometimes seven. While they tended to be herded off to bed at the same time as their parents, they--being kids, and therefore less susceptible to the siren of weariness--would usually find things to do in their bedrooms. I know all this of course not because I'm some omniscient narrator, but because I had the run of the house, and the only room from which I was barred--the master--was the only room I never wanted to enter. Usually I slept in Dick's room. (My second favorite place was Willy's.) Dick had an old brown button-back swivel chair that I had basically claimed as my own, and usually whenever he was in his room, doing homework at his desk, reading, listening to the radio, or sleeping, I was blissed out in my chair. I seem to remember it being located at the back of the room, near the dresser and the closet, a few feet from the foot of Dick's bed.

Anyway, quite often it seemed to me, Anika would sneak into Dick's room at night, quiet as a rat, and the two would hang out on his bed, read magazines or books, listen to a barely audible radio, talk. Well, Anika took care of most of the talking. Dick was a reticent boy, and, with a martyr's patience, seemed to prefer listening. By the time I entered the picture, the two had been doing this forever. That things could utterly change in one single summer night, one single night in late spring or early fall, one brown Christmas--it hardly seems possible. But I wouldn't be here talking about it if it didn't actually happen now would I?