Tunnel of Night

HER HAIR WAS LIGHTER THAN I REMEMBERED
, and looked as if she hadn’t combed it.

I watched, absorbed every detail, as she came through the kitchen door, walked to the table, put on her glasses to read the morning paper. She was heavy, dressed in baggy black Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. The once regal lines of her profile and her slender neck were gone, buried beneath puffy flesh.

“Hello,” I said.

The coffee cup clattered to the floor as her head spun around. Her mouth opened, and she made a noise—perhaps she said my name.

She turned in her chair and stared at me as I stepped between her and the kitchen door. Then she stood, leaned against the table, and forced it backward.

“Oh, my God. Why did you come here? What do you want?”

Her body shook. Her eyes were wide, filled with terror.

“All those years,” I began, thinking for a moment
that I might answer her, that I might tell her what I had become and why.

“You betrayed me,” I said, slipping my hands behind my back and removing the knife from my pocket.

She gripped the shaky table. “No,” she said, but it sounded more like a question.

She never had time to lift her arms. As I stepped toward her, her head snapped up and her throat accommodated my blade.

For the first time in our lives, she was totally compliant.

She never made a sound.

I OPENED THE REFRIGERATOR. THE LIGHT DIDN’T
work, so I jiggled it and tightened the bulb in its socket. It went on. People don’t take care of things, not even the simplest adjustments requiring the least amount of effort.

I found some lettuce, cold cuts, a jar of mustard, and a loaf of whole wheat bread. Then I opened the cupboard above the sink to get a glass and a plate. I noticed the impressionistic figurine of a bird, and remembered the beautiful young woman I had sent it to so many years ago—the woman who now rested on the kitchen floor. I placed the figurine on the table, a centerpiece.

The sunlight from the window refracted as it passed through the glass bird, cascading bands of primary color across the table. I sat with the chair facing the window so that I didn’t block the light, and so that I could enjoy my own private display of all the colors of the sun.

Mine was a private celebration. I was completing
old projects, and beginning new ones. No one who had touched my life was safe.

I grabbed my knife—a heavy, folding Buck with a single four-inch blade. It was sticky with blood, so I wiped it with a paper towel. I sliced the bread, then placed the knife on the table to my right. In many ways the preparation of a meal is more important than the eating of it.

I glanced to my left. If it were not for the blood, she would have looked as if she were sleeping.

I took a bite from my sandwich, then pushed the food away and moved the short distance to her side. This complete possession, this ownership of another, carried with it certain responsibilities. With both hands, as if I were cradling something fragile, I adjusted one of her arms so that it was parallel to her side, like the other one.

Symmetry
.

THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG
.

You can always find your way back home—so long as you know how much garlic to put in the marinara. That is the secret. Garlic. And, of course, the olive oil— Filippo Berio extra virgin. But even when you get the recipe right, people want to give you directions. They want to barge into your home and take over your kitchen. Miscreants. Philistines.

If Thomas Wolfe had studied marinara, if he had labored over a hot stove more than he did over a typewriter, he would have changed the title of his book— and probably his life. For one thing, he would have gotten drunk more often. Oh, yes, one cup of ale for the pot, and one for the maw. You seldom have trouble finding your way home because you hardly ever leave.

I was getting buzzed. A morning on the lake in the warm sun trying to outwit an elusive bass, followed by a stint in the kitchen starting the sauce (it has to simmer all afternoon), and I was ready for the shower. Life is grand.

I was expecting company—a rare visit from my
daughter, Lane, a detective with the New York City Police Department. She had sent a fax four days earlier. Lane was concerned that she hadn’t heard from me, and sounded as if she were having a crisis of conscience. Her note said, in part:

I answered the fax, assured my daughter that I was fine, and told her that I would love to see her.

Intuition had been nudging Lane with the truth— that I had murdered the killer, John Wolf. It didn’t seem that long ago, but my daughter was right. It was nearly a year ago. Lane had been the lead investigator in her partner’s ex-wife’s murder. What began as a straightforward homicide case became a hunt for a serial killer. I had provided armchair advice to Lane and her lieutenant until it was clear that Wolf’s next intended victim was my daughter. So I went after the bastard, tracked him to his lair in Vermont, and used his own bomb to blow him to pieces. Enormously rewarding justice, that.

The six-week bout with demons in the night that erupted when I returned home had nothing to do with my having dispatched a predator to the netherworld. The problem had been that even though he was dead, Wolf continued to live inside my head. In order to track him, to anticipate his moves, I had to invite him into my
mind, to learn to see the world as he saw it, to think as he thought. When it was over, the task of evicting Wolf from my dreams took more time than bringing down the beast.

Killing him had caused me no confusion. I had not hesitated, and I had not lost a wink of sleep over it. But it was different for my daughter.

When she was young, Lane was always sticking bars of flowery-smelling soap in the shower. She would dump my Ivory in the wastebasket, and I would have to haul ass out of the shower, dripping wet, to retrieve it.

Soap is not the only thing that she and I see differently. I used to lure her into the kitchen when she was a child, determined to turn her into a cook. “That’s men’s work,” she would say—and she was right, at least in our house. When it was my turn to cook, my wife, Savvy, seldom passed through the kitchen; I was not a kind cook.

As Lane grew older, she became more specific in her distaste for cooking. “Think of the time we consume driving to the grocery, picking out the food, preparing it, eating it, clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying them, putting them away. You could solve half a dozen murders in that time.”

I wanted her to appreciate cooking the way I did, to appreciate cooking the way it
deserved
to be appreciated, but it was hopeless. She was too caught up in that other part of my life—my work as a practicing psychiatrist, profiling and tracking human predators. Although she always ate whatever I set before her, she remained steadfast in her indifference to the process.

“It’s just food, Pop.”

A heartbreaking sacrilege.

When she was transferred from her street beat to Homicide, Lane wanted to fill my head with her cases.
She expected me to offer some profound insight, some new angle on a murder that was fracturing the best minds in law enforcement. “When I quit,” I always told her, “I really quit.”

She insisted that she had special rights—a “biological exception” to my rule. True. I have never mastered the art of saying no to my daughter.

My daughter or my cat. I guess they are the only two creatures on earth who have me exactly where they want me.

I looked at my massive Maine coon cat and said, “Max, do you think you’ll ever retire?”

I was sure that he would do a better job of it than I had.

Max flipped his tail. He was sound asleep on
his
kitchen chair, deep in a dream state—with his paws curled back and his lower jaw in a cataclysm of murder. Max is the perfect predator. The field mice, chipmunks, and squirrels that populate my ten acres have learned the hard way. When he comes inside, Max purrs, rubs against my leg, curls into my lap, sniffs my beard to determine what I have eaten in his absence. When he sleeps, he is back in the field—the cold, calculating killer that nature designed him to be.