The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [126]
“How long have you been planning it?” Buster asked.
“Years,” Camille answered. “Many, many years.”
“We started this once the two of you made it clear that you wanted nothing more to do with our work,” Caleb continued. “Annie, you left us, and then Buster was gone a few years later. We had worked so hard to make you an integral part of these performances, to turn you into essential elements of our process, and then you left us. So we had to start from scratch, we had to start over.”
“You’re blaming this on us?” Annie said.
“We’re not blaming you, Annie,” Camille said emphatically, though Caleb’s face seemed to suggest otherwise, his eyebrows raised and eyes wide. “If it wasn’t for the two of you, forcing us to rethink how we made art, we never would have come up with this piece.”
“We started with the essential steps,” Caleb said. “We got new identities, social security numbers, passports, tax history, everything. Jim Baltz and Patricia Howlett.”
“When was this?” Buster asked.
“Soon after you left for college,” Camille responded. “Ten, eleven years ago.”
“You’ve had these identities for eleven years? And you only just disappeared last year?” Annie said.
“It was part of the process,” Caleb explained. “We had to create new characters for when Camille and Caleb died, identities we could easily slip into.”
“There was a woman, Bonnie; you might remember her, actually; she had been an ardent supporter of our work. So we reached out to her. We told her how we wanted to disappear, and she helped us. Her husband, who had no appreciation for art at all, had only recently left her and she had these twins, not even two years old yet, and so your father married her. Jim married her, perfectly legal.”
“I bought a truck and that was my cover, a long-distance trucker. I would spend most of the time with your mother in Tennessee, but every few months, I would drive back here and live with Bonnie and Lucas and Linus for a week or two, before I went back on the road. It worked well enough.”
“What about you?” Annie asked her mother.
“There was a small cabin on a few acres that had been in Bonnie’s family for years. I would stay there in the summers, getting to know people in the town, establishing my backstory, so that when I came here for good, people wouldn’t be suspicious of this stranger in their midst.”
“You did this for ten years?” Buster asked.
“It wasn’t so bad. I like it here. It’s quiet; the people are nice. I got used to it.”
“Little by little, we cashed out funds from our bank in Tennessee and then deposited it in the accounts here in North Dakota, building up enough money to live on. So the plan was in place, not quite fully formed but enough of an outline that we knew what would happen when we finally disappeared.”
“And then you two showed up, back in our lives,” Camille said, smiling.
“And we knew we had to take action,” Caleb continued, his voice growing more and more excited. “We hadn’t planned on you two coming back, but we realized it was a sign that we needed to put this thing into motion. If we disappeared, you two would be there to discover us missing. And then our disappearance would have even more meaning. And, if we had done things correctly, we thought you would look for us, and that would add depth to the piece, how our deaths would resonate beyond us.”
“What about all that blood?” Buster asked. “The police really thought you were dead.”
Camille rolled her eyes. “That was your father’s idea, at the last minute.”
“Bonnie had driven from North Dakota to meet us, and just as we were going to leave, I had the idea of violence, of some signs of struggle. So I took a knife and slashed myself with it. I didn’t realize how much blood there would be.”
“Oh god,” Camille said, smiling, remembering the event. “It was horrible. Your father looked