Marlon Bain’s letters (pp. 1047–1048)

Bain passes along, at several removes and hedged in scare-quotes, the one hard detail he has about the marriage's end: in the days before Himself's suicide, a "word" appeared on a "fogged" "window" of Avril's pale yellow Volvo, and "the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions." He offers nothing more — not the word, not who wrote it. But the datum sits at the exact seam of the family's secrets: the same Volvo whose windshield carries the smeared nude footprints of 170, a fogged window with a word on it appearing just before the king dies. The marriage's fatal information travels the way everything does in this family — obliquely, through a fogged pane, as a word no one will quite speak aloud.