Paul’s but not exactly the same. Had Paul found the tape after his father died? Was that what had first sparked his interest? Julia disappeared almost a year before his parents’ car accident. Five years later, Paul was wooing Claire at Auburn. They were married less than two months after her father had killed himself. Claire could no longer cling to the idea of coincidences, which begged the question: Had Paul designed all of this from the moment he recognized Julia in his father’s videotape collection? Was that what had set him on the path toward Claire?
Absent a written explanation, Claire knew that she would never know the truth. Julia’s death had haunted her for the last twenty-four years. Now the mystery of what had really gone wrong with her husband would haunt her for the remaining decades.
She slid the tape back into the cardboard sleeve. She wrapped the rubber band around the stack of cassettes.
She smelled Paul’s aftershave.
The scent was faint. She put her nose to the tapes. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
“Claire,” Paul said.
She turned around.
Paul stood in the middle of the room. He was wearing a red UGA sweatshirt and black jeans. His head was shaved. His beard had grown in. He had on thick plastic glasses like the ones he’d worn back in college.
He said, “It’s me.”
Claire dropped the tapes. They clattered at her feet. Was this real? Was this happening?
“I’m sorry,” Paul said.
Then he drew back his fist and punched her in the face.
V
I must confess, sweetheart, that I have been neglecting my wall of clues. My “useless gallimaufry,” your mother called it on the one and only occasion she deigned to look at my work. I sagely agreed with her observation but of course I went running to the dictionary as soon as she was gone.
Gallimaufry: a hodgepodge; a confused jumble of various people or things; any absurd medley.
Oh, how I adore your mother.
These last ten months that I have been visiting Ben Carver at the prison, I have gone to bed many times without giving my gallimaufry a second glance. The collection has become so mundane that my mind has turned it into a piece of art, more a reminder that you are gone than a roadmap to getting you back.
It wasn’t until I read Ben’s inscription inside the Dr. Seuss book that I remembered a note from Huckleberry’s files. It’s been there from the beginning, or at least since I started my annual reading ritual on the anniversary of your birthday. Why is it that we always neglect the things that matter most? This is a universal question, because through the days and weeks and months and years after your disappearance, I understood that I did not cherish you enough. I never told you that I loved you enough. I never held you enough. I never listened to you enough.
You would likely tell me (as your mother has) that I could rectify this deficit with your sisters, but it is human nature to yearn for the things we cannot have.
Have I told you about Claire’s new young man, Paul? He certainly yearns for Claire, though she has made it clear that he can have her. The match is an uneven one. Claire is a vibrant, beautiful young woman. Paul is neither vibrant nor particularly attractive.
After meeting him, your mother and I had some fun at the boy’s expense. She called him Bartleby, after the well-known scrivener: “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.” I likened him more to some form of rat terrier: arrogant. Easily bored. Too smart for his own good. Partial to ugly sweaters. I opined that he is the kind of man who, absent the right kind of attention, can do great harm.
Is this last sentence revisionist thinking? Because I can clearly remember sharing your mother’s Bartleby appraisal the first time we met Paul: annoying and harmless and likely to soon be shown the door.
It is only now that I see the meeting in a more sinister light.
Claire brought him home during the Georgia–Auburn game. In the past, I have always felt slightly sorry for any man Claire brings home. You can see it in their eager eyes that they think this is something—meeting the girl’s parents, touring the town where she grew up, just around the corner is love, marriage, the baby carriage, etc. Sadly for these young men, the opposite tends to be true. For Claire, a trip to Athens typically heralds the end of a relationship.