Page 16 of Our Last Resort

That was four days ago. In another life.

The soles of my sandals catch on the Ara’s pathway. My ankle twists.

“Shit.”

I right myself just before my palm hits the ground and I turn around.

There it is, the spot that made me trip. A thin crack, almost invisible, but enough to make me lose my balance. Like those memories that resurface at the most unexpected moments, that embarrassing thing you said six months ago grabbing you by the throat in the supermarket checkout line. Gabriel, almost nine years ago, sitting at the kitchen table in his empty house.

Annie was missing. In the period that followed herdisappearance—and, eventually, the discovery of her body—I came by every day. In my memories, the lights are on only in whatever room Gabriel and I happen to be in. The rest of the world is in shadow.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that they’re doing this to you.”

He sighed.

By then, “they” didn’t just mean the police. Neighbors had started crossing the street to avoid sharing a sidewalk with him. When we’d gone to get cash at the ATM, two women had exchanged knowing looks behind his back.

Gabriel didn’t rebel against the police’s efforts until after the third interview. Before that, he was open, cooperative.

“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re right to be doing this.”

He took a small sip of the chamomile tea I’d made, the only time he lifted the mug to his lips.

“They should be looking at me,” he said, and put down his tea. “They always look at the husband.”

His hand fluttered like he was searching the air around him for the right words. “I just hope…”

I waited for the rest.

Hope for what?

But that was it. My brother’s wife was missing, and he found it in himself tojust hope.

It seemed too passive, like Gabriel had become too familiar with tragedy. Like what had happened to Annie fell within the category of things he’d come to expect.

I hated that we spoke it so fluently, the language of violence, of crime. But it was what we’d been given to work with from birth.

7The Only Town We Knew, Hudson Valley

Twenty-three Years Ago

Gabriel burst into my life with the wrong words.

It was almost two years after the test.

Émile was a busy man. He had books to write, seminars to teach. But every morning, he took time to address us.

This was called Assembly. Everyone had to attend, except for the mothers who were in charge of the current crop of babies. Assembly took place after breakfast, in what looked like a Gothic lecture hall but turned out to be, when I conjured up its image in my adult mind, an old, repurposed Catholic chapel.

Émile’s world, which he insisted he had created for us, had, in fact, once been a boarding school. A small establishment, two hundred students at most. After the stock market crash of 1987, when enrollment and alumni donations dropped irreparably, the school’s lender seized the buildings and the land. Émile, who had been in the U.S. for five years by then, lived nearby in Poughkeepsie. He ran what he called a start-up and what the government called a multilevel marketing company, selling computer equipment. He took over the school’s lease and—well, I suppose one thing led to another.

By the time I was born in 1990, Émile had renounced computers and modernity as a concept, but kept the buildings. Hehad also, as it turned out, stopped paying rent, but he’d taken care to register his organization as a church—and after Waco happened, that made the optics of kicking us out almost trickier than the logistics.

And so, there it was. The paradise in which I was born. A heaven in which every morning began with a lecture.

One morning, before Émile started speaking, this boy settled one seat away from me, to my right. We’d barely ever spoken—nothing of significance, just the necessities of life in a commune. I didn’t know him. We weren’t friends. I’d only noticed him because of his eyes, one brown, one blue.

The brown one was on my side that day. Aside from that, all I could see of the boy was his silhouette, a blur of blond hair, and one of those patchy, hand-knit sweaters we all wore.

---