Empire of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

different man than I had been.
    The plane touched down with a jolt. I shook myself, trying to throw that feeling off, that odd, heavy intimation of danger.
    It wouldn't go away.

The Television Room
    Night had long fallen by the time I left the airport to drive out to the island. There were spots of rain on the windshield of my rental car. It was a sleek, jolly little red Mustang, low to the ground. It dodged and wove sweetly through the expressway traffic.
    I talked to Cathy most of the way out. Her voice was thin and tinny and faraway in my cell-phone earpiece. She told me about the kids, their day at school: a good grade on a spelling test, a part in a school play. It was still daylight where they were, she said. The sky, she said, was clear.
    Man oh man, I wished I hadn't lied to her about Lauren. I wished I had told her I was going to see her while I was here. She wouldn't have minded. She would've trusted me. I wasn't sure why I had kept it to myself. Just an impulse really, a momentary whim. It wasn't that I was planning to sleep with Lauren again, or anything. I wasn't an idiot, after all. I think it's just that sometimes—sometimes when you live a good life, a stable life—you want to leave room for the possibility of something else, for the excitement of the possibility. It was like letting Tanya touch my arm ... just for a moment sometimes, you feel compelled to leave life open to the thrill of disaster.
    Anyway, I hadn't told Cathy the truth, and I found I couldn't tell her now. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, I asked her to put the children on. They said hi to me one by one. I asked them how
they were. Fine, they said. When they were done, I switched off the phone and kept driving.
    I slid from the highway into my hometown. I came along the broad road past the car dealerships and gas stations at the town limits. Then it was up the hill into the residential areas, where streetlights shone down on the canopies of maples and elms above me. Yellow and red and green leaves glistened, slick with the light rain. Behind the trees, entry lights gleamed white by the doorways of tranquil clapboard-and-shingle houses. Inside, behind the curtains, room lights burned yellow and warm.
    It was just another Long Island suburban town, but it was my town. I'd been back here often over the years, of course, to visit Mom and my brother. Every time, it struck me with an almost-mystical familiarity. I felt I could walk its streets blindfolded, and if its streets were gone, I could walk blindfolded on the paths where they had been. I felt as if the map of the place were branded on the longest-living part of me, as if I could die and trace its outline on the after-darkness.
    The house where I grew up and where my mother went mad and died was on the corner at the bottom of a hill. It was a substantial two-story colonial with white clapboards and dark green shutters. It was set back on a broad, flat lawn and shaded by oaks and a tall cherry tree. I'd been paying a caretaker to keep the grounds neat and a housekeeper to dust and air out the rooms, but when I pulled into the driveway, I thought the place had a forlorn, abandoned look to it all the same.
    Inside, when the door had shut behind me, it seemed very still. I don't suppose that houses get any quieter when people die in them. I don't suppose it was any quieter than if my mother had gone out for a while on one of the rambling walks she sometimes took before her heart got too bad. But she hadn't gone out for a
walk, and when I turned on the foyer light, the rest of the house spread dark around me and, as I say, it seemed almost preternaturally still.
    I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase in my hand. I looked up into the shadows of the second-floor landing. Her bedroom was up there, haunted by my imagination of her last hour. I imagined her lying in bed alone, feverishly explaining the signs, the omens and connections that were so obvious to her, but that no one