The World of a Few Minutes Ago

After Everyone Else Has Left

[ After Everyone Else Has Left ] Doyle Laidlaw has never attended an execution, has never, one way or another, asserted a conviction—pro or con—concerning capital punishment. He is an ex-husband and the father, still, of one daughter . That daughter, Ellie Laidlaw, is the reason, thirteen years after her disappearance, that he is, at this moment, sitting here behind the closed screen. It seems another lifetime since he has accepted an invitation anywhere , and he has requested to be seated hours early, though he is not sure why. He is all alone, front row center, dressed casually, wearing sensible shoes and khaki slacks, no coat or tie, attired, perhaps, as he might be to view a Sunday matinee. He is travel-weary and uncharacteristically unshaven, and, within seconds of closing his eyes, images begin to unreel slow-motion behind his eyelids: a receding tide, a tidal cove gone to mud, and a girl in a bright pink bathing suit and clamming boots crossing that hundred 01 Driscoll text.indd 39 11/16/11 7:24 AM [ 40 ] The World of Few Minutes Ago or so yards to the island where, as she’s been told repeatedly, she must not go by herself. “Nuh-uh,” she says. “It’s not dangerous.” But Doyle and his wife Francine are adamant worriers, a condition, they concur, that is symptomatic of middle-aged, single-child parents whose absolution has come in what they refer to as their late-stage miracle of conception, this blond girl they worship and love. She is their consciousness, and they will escort her, they promise, across on tomorrow morning’s outgoing tide, in search of starfish and horseshoe crabs and those translucent blue mussel shells she sometimes holds up to the sunlight and smiles at. “Okay. Cross your hearts,” she says, and in unison they do. Ellie has, earlier this month, July, turned ten, the evening air warm and still, and Doyle Laidlaw has, with a dull orange pruning saw he found hanging in the unlocked tool shed, just finished butchering two two-by-fours into stubby blocks of kindling. He is yawning, coming, by degrees, fully awake. Francine has driven inland to the Burnt Cove grocery store for the hot dogs and buns and dill pickles he was supposed to have picked up earlier but forgot, and his counterargument of silence, his only defense, he knows now, here in the stark, whitewashed world of this observation room, is nothing less than an admission of guilt. The rustic cottage he has rented on the coast for the week seems suddenly to tilt and spin again as he stands alone by the unlit fire pit, staring out at the shimmering horizon of panoramic ocean, those thousands and thousands of brightly colored buoys nearly blinding him, and he listens, as always, to that distant, low-guttural echo of what he believes to be a single lobster boat motoring toward the Stonington harbor. It’s all there in the police report, his brief nap in the hammock, twenty-five minutes truant is all, tops, a dreamless sleep, a mere doze, though he dreams nightly the opposite of every sworn statement he has ever made in his life, every whispered, guilt-ridden prayer of the non-believer, every angry, self-incriminating arrogation. Sometimes half a day will go by, an elongated evening maybe, when Doyle Laidlaw quiets his thoughts and forgets that drive from 01 Driscoll text.indd 40 11/16/11 7:24 AM After Everyone Else Has Left [ 41 ] northern Michigan to Maine. Maps and the Rand McNally Road Atlas and guide books, those spontaneous family sing-alongs, and how, after arriving, the weather stayed indisputably perfect. Early afternoon breezes, and cadmium-blue sky, and stargazing nights so spectacular that Francine is, right now, holding her daughter’s thin index finger and pointing into that immensity while enunciating clearly the syllables of stars, the mythic names of constellations. “Cassiopeia. Venus. Orion,” she says, his bow full drawn into an arc of silver light. And, in Doyle’s mind, the lead detective jotting down every detail, his scratchpad filling in shorthand, laser-like, though he is alarmingly nonchalant, careful not to insinuate anything with his questions or his momentary descents into wordlessness, his casual, faraway stares. He is young, late thirties, concentrated more than cold, and Doyle can see out the newly installed bay window behind him how the...