Excerpt

ONE

Here is what we know, those of us who can speak to tell a story: On
the afternoon of October 24, my wife, Lexy Ransome, climbed to the
top of the apple tree in our backyard and fell to her death. There
were no witnesses, save our dog, Lorelei; it was a weekday
afternoon, and none of our neighbors were at home, sitting in their
kitchens with their windows open, to hear whether, in that brief
midair moment, my wife cried out or gasped or made no sound at all.
None of them were working in their yards, enjoying the last of the
warm weather, to see whether her body crumpled before she hit the
ground, or whether she tried to right herself in the air, or
whether she simply spread her arms open to the sky.

I was in the university library when it happened, doing research
for a paper I was working on for an upcoming symposium. I had an
evening seminar to teach that night, and if I hadn't called home to
tell Lexy something interesting I'd read about a movie she'd been
wanting to see, then I might have taught my class, gone out for my
weekly beer with my graduate students, and spent a few last hours
of normalcy, happily unaware that my yard was full of policemen
kneeling in the dirt.

As it was, though, I dialed my home number and a man answered the
phone. "Ransome residence," he said.

I paused for a moment, confused. I scanned my mental catalog of
male voices, friends and relatives who might possibly be at the
house for one reason or another, but I couldn't match any of them
to the voice on the other end of the line. I was a bit thrown by
the phrase "Ransome residence," as well; my last name is Iverson,
and to hear a strange man refer to my house as if only Lexy lived
there gave me the strange feeling that I'd somehow, in the course
of a day, been written out of my own life's script.

"May I speak to Lexy?" I said finally.

"May I ask who's calling?" the man said.

"This is her husband, Paul. Iverson."

"Mr. Iverson, this is Detective Anthony Stack. I'm going to need
you to come home now. There's been an accident."

Apparently Lorelei was the one responsible for summoning the
police. As our neighbors returned home from work, one by one, they
heard her endless, keening howl coming from our yard. They knew
Lorelei, most of them, and were used to hearing her bark,
barrel-chested and deep, when she chased birds and squirrels around
the yard. But they'd never heard her make a sound like this. Our
neighbor to the left, Jim Perasso, was the first to peer over the
top of our fence and make the discovery. It was already dark out
--- the days were getting shorter, and dusk was coming earlier and
earlier each day --- but as Lorelei ran frantically between the
apple tree and the back door of the house, her movements activated
our backyard motion-sensor lights. With every circle Lorelei made,
she'd pause to nudge Lexy's body with her nose, stopping long
enough to allow the lights to go out; then, as she resumed her wild
race to each corner of the yard, the lights would go on again. It
was through this surreal, strobelike flickering that Jim saw Lexy
lying beneath the tree and called 911.

When I arrived, there was police tape marking off the backyard
gate, and the man I had spoken to on the phone met me as I walked
across the lawn. He introduced himself again and took me to sit in
the living room. I followed him dumbly, all my half-questions
stalled by the dread that seemed to have stopped the passage of air
through my lungs. I guess I knew what was coming. Already, the
house felt still and bare, as if it had been emptied of all the
living complexity that had been there when I left. Even Lorelei was
gone, having been sedated and taken away by animal control for the
night.

Detective Stack told me what had happened as I sat there,
numb.

"Do you have any idea what your wife might have been doing in the
tree?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. She had never, in the time I had known her,
shown any interest in climbing trees, and this one couldn't have
been an easy one to start with. The apple tree in our yard is
unusually tall, a monster compared to the dwarf varieties you see
in orchards and autumn pick-your-own farms. We had neglected it,
not pruning it even once in the time we'd lived there, and it had
grown to an unruly height of twenty-five or thirty feet. I couldn't
begin to guess what she might have been doing up there. Detective
Stack was watching me closely. "Maybe she wanted to pick some
apples," I said weakly.

"Well, that seems to be the logical answer." He looked at me and at
the floor. "It seems pretty clear to us that your wife's death was
an accident, but in cases like this when there are no witnesses, we
need to do a brief investigation to rule out suicide. I have to ask
--- did your wife seem at all depressed lately? Did she ever
mention suicide, even in a casual way?"

I shook my head.

"I didn't think so," he said. "I just had to ask."

When the men in the yard finished taking their pictures and
collecting their evidence, Detective Stack talked to them and
reported back to me that everyone was satisfied. It had been an
accident, no question. Apparently there are two ways of falling,
and each one tells a story. A person who jumps from a great height,
even as high as seven or eight floors up, can control the way she
falls; if she lands on her feet, she may sustain great injuries to
her legs and spine, but she may survive. And if she does not
survive, then the particular way her bones break, the way her
ankles and knee shatter from the stress of the impact, lets us know
that her jump was intentional. But a person who reaches the top
branches of an apple tree, twenty-five feet off the ground, and
simply loses her footing has no control over how she falls. She may
tumble in the air and land on her stomach or her back or her head.
She may land with her skin intact and still break every bone and
crush every organ inside her. This is how we decide what is an
accident and what is not. When they found Lexy, she was lying
faceup, and her neck was broken. This is how we know that Lexy
didn't jump.

Later, after the police had left and Lexy's body had been taken
away, I went out into the yard. Underneath the tree, there was a
scattering of apples that had fallen to the ground. Had Lexy
climbed the tree to pick the last of the apples before they grew
rotten on the branches? Perhaps she was going to bake something;
perhaps she was going to put them in a pretty bowl and set them
someplace sunny for us to snack on. I gathered them up carefully
and brought them inside. I kept them on the kitchen table until the
smell of their sweet rot began to draw flies.

It wasn't until a few days after the funeral that I began to find
certain clues --- well, I hesitate to use the word "clues," which
excludes the possibility of sheer coincidence or overanalyzing on
my part. To say I found clues would suggest that someone had laid
out a careful trail of bits of information with the aim of leading
me to a conclusion so well hidden and yet so obvious that its
accuracy could not be disputed. I don't expect I'll be that lucky.
I'll say instead that I began to discover certain anomalies,
certain incongruities, that suggested that the day of Lexy's death
had not been a usual day.

The first of these anomalies had to do with our bookshelves. Lexy
and I were both big readers, and our bookshelves, like anyone's, I
imagine, were halfheartedly organized according to a number of
different systems. On some shelves, books were grouped by size, big
coffee-table books all together on the bottommost shelf, and
mass-market paperbacks crammed in where nothing else would fit.
There were enclaves of books grouped by subject --- our cookbooks
were all on the same shelf, for example --- but this type of
classification was too painstaking to carry very far. Finally,
there were her books and my books --- books whose subject matter
reflected our own individual interests, and books each of us had
owned before we were married that just ended up in their own
sections. Beyond that, it was a hodge-podge. Even so, I came to
have a sense of which books belonged where. A mental impression
that I had seen the novel I had loved when I was twenty sitting
snugly between a book of poems we'd received as a wedding gift and
a sci-fi thriller I had read on the beach one summer. If you asked
me where you might find a particular textbook I coauthored, I could
point you right to its place between a Beatles biography and a book
about how to brew your own beer. This is how I know that Lexy
rearranged the books before she died.

The second anomaly has to do with Lorelei. As far as I can piece
together, it seems that Lexy took a steak from the refrigerator,
one we'd been planning to barbecue that night on the grill, cooked
it, and gave it to the dog. At first I thought she must have eaten
it herself and merely given Lorelei the bone to chew on --- I found
the bone several days later, hidden in a corner of the bedroom ---
but the thing is, there were no dirty plates or cutlery, only the
frying pan sitting on the stove where she left it. The dishwasher
was locked, having been run that morning after breakfast, and when
I opened it up, I could still recognize my own handiwork in the way
the dishes had been negotiated into place. The dishwasher hadn't
been touched, the dish rack next to the sink was empty, and the
dish towels weren't even moist. I have to conclude that one of two
things happened: either Lexy surprised Lorelei with an
unprecedented wealth of meat or she stood in our kitchen on the
last day of her life and ate an entire twenty-ounce steak with her
fingers. As I think about it now, it occurs to me that there might
be a third scenario, and it might be the best one of all: perhaps
the two of them shared it.

Maybe these events mean nothing. After all, I am a grieving man,
and I am trying very hard to find some sense in my wife's death.
But the evidence I have discovered is sufficiently strange to make
me wonder what really happened that day, whether it was really a
desire for apples that led my sweet wife to climb to the top of
that tree. Lorelei is my witness, not just to Lexy's death itself
but to all the events leading up to it. She watched Lexy move
through her days and her nights. She was there for the unfolding of
our marriage from its first day to its last. Simply put, she knows
things I don't. I feel I must do whatever I can to unlock that
knowledge.

Chapter Two

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The Dogs of Babel
by by Carolyn Parkhurst [5]

Genres: Fiction [10]
paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN-10: 0316778508
ISBN-13: 9780316778503