The Guilty One (14 page)

“Shit,” Karl mumbled again. He too seemed to have lost the anger that had gripped them both only moments earlier. “It's just that it's, you know, the appeal process could take so long, and I could be out in five years anyway. So just to gain, like, two years or whatever, if it even worked, and to have to go through all of that again.” He glanced up at his father, almost shyly.

“Karl,” Ron said. He didn't know what else to say. What he needed now was time—time to think about this, to examine it from every angle. Forget his own volatility—he couldn't keep up with the shifts in his son's mood. Because his son was talking like an adult; the boyishness Ron thought he'd perceived in Karl's face was deceptive. His puffiness looked dissipated, not youthful. His words came out sounding weary.

“I know Mom sent you here to convince me,” Karl continued. “But it isn't going to work. I'm sorry, Dad, I don't mean to be uncooperative, but I just can't do it. I can't go through with it.”

“But if it could be overturned—” Now Ron was on the verge of doing the one thing he had forbidden himself from doing, ever: imagining what might have been—being tempted by the fiction that it still could be. To get the felony off Karl's record—Ron didn't even voice the idea out loud. It was too big. The simple things he'd given up hoping for his son, like voting and finding a job and richly unlikely things like going to college, even business school. Even having another girlfriend someday.

Sitting at their table for a holiday meal.

“Dad.” Karl had regained himself, released the tight-coiled posture. He was shaking his head, rubbing a hand through his hair, mindless of the gel or whatever it was that he'd applied. His words sounded smooth if slightly rehearsed. “I know I don't have the right to ask you for anything. And I'm . . . I'm glad you came to see me. That's big, I know that. But please, can you just convince Mom? I don't
want
this. I just want to, you know, pass the time and maybe take some classes or something, figure out how to do something useful while I'm here.”

Ron saw how it was going to be: he would return home without having accomplished what Deb had asked. He would disappoint her. But was he also disappointed? Had he changed his mind somehow in this confusing exchange?

“Look, I just, I mean, think about it, okay? Mom'll be here Sunday. I'll talk to her too. We'll just—”

He stopped; he'd been on the verge of saying that they'd
get through this together,
but how was that possible? They weren't a family anymore, not really. When Karl got out in seven years—or even five, in five years he would be twenty-four years old—he would be a man, an adult; he would be a branch that grew far out from the tree.

The visit was soon over, the ache of watching his son walk from the room felt not just in his heart but in his arms that he could not put around his son, his boy. Still, despite everything, his
boy
. Ron made it barely ten miles from the prison entrance before he burst into great, heaving sobs. He couldn't stop, even after he pulled over to the side of the road and dug in the glove box for napkins with which to blow his nose. He cried until he had a headache, and then he sat for another ten minutes, simply staring through the windshield at the dried and dead fields.

What if?
he thought, the idea inside him painfully taking shape. What if Deb was right? What if Karl really was innocent?

But how could that be? The witnesses—one after another, kids he recognized, others he didn't—called up to tell their damning stories. “He, like, pulled hard? On her arm?” Tentative, most of them, giving their statements in the form of questions, unwilling to look at Karl except for brief, fleeting glances. “She said she was, you know, afraid? Not of who he was, but of who he turned into? After the breakup?” Circumstantial, Arthur Mehta kept assuring them.

But later, when the mud from the SUV was identified and the expert witness from Stanford estimated the probability of the car having been at Byron Ranch as “so close to a hundred percent as to be statistically certain,” even Arthur seemed less engaged. Less . . . committed, though Ron was certainly reading into his comments, his gestures and throat clearings. That was when he'd brought up the subject of manslaughter convictions and the best-scenario sentences each might carry, and Ron knew without a doubt that they were sunk.

Of course there were those whose belief in Karl's innocence never wavered—and not just Deb. The Fowlers, who had lived next door to the Isherwoods when their boys were in elementary school—Mindy Fowler called every few days. Karl's civics teacher, a coach he'd had before making the varsity team. Kami, once the Innocence Project took an interest. And all those strangers, with their website and their letters and their prayers, their teddy bears and balloons left at the curb.

Ron's head throbbed and his eyes felt swollen and itchy from crying. He stared at the key dangling from the ignition, willing himself to turn it, to pull the car into traffic and get on with it, get home to where Deb was surely waiting to hear how he had fared with Karl. The car's interior had quickly grown stifling, and sweat dampened his neck. At least he should roll down a window.

Instead he thought about Calla's band trip down to Orange County in the early spring before she died. Calla played flute, and the band had qualified for a state competition. Karl had been at odds that weekend, moping around the house, declining to join his friends for pizza after practice, deciding at the last minute to skip a party he'd planned to attend. Deb thought it was cute: “lovesick,” she'd whispered as Karl made another sullen trip to the refrigerator to stare at its contents before making do with another 7-Up.

Deb also teased Ron about being sorry to be left out, a reference to the prior fall when she had convinced him to serve as a parent chaperone on a senior class trip to Sacramento. In fact, it had been the trip on which the kids' romance had begun, which made it a sentimental milestone for Deb, who hadn't even been there. For Ron, memories of that trip were far more complicated, and Deb's teasing made him feel both irritable and guilty.

Maybe that was why he hadn't gone up to bed with Deb after the news. Instead, he'd stayed up, drinking beer and watching television, pointedly distracting himself. Around midnight he heard something thump on the floor overhead, where Karl's bedroom was located. Mildly concerned, he went up the stairs and down the hall and was surprised to hear Karl's voice raised in anger—then immediately lowered, quiet enough that Ron couldn't make out the words. Then nothing at all. Ron stood, indecisive, in the hallway; he knew he shouldn't be eavesdropping on his son, but Karl had become such a mystery to him, especially in recent months when he slipped quicksilver from their household every chance he got, to be with Calla.

Another barrage of words, indistinct but urgent. Then a single sharp exclamation followed by silence.

Ron waited, but there was nothing more. He was getting cold, his feet chilly on the hardwood floor. Just as he decided that Karl had gone to bed, however, there was an anguished sob and then a wall-echoing slam.

He rushed to Karl's room and tried the knob, but his son had locked the door. “Karl,” he said, keeping his voice low, mindful of Deb sleeping on the other side of the house. “What's going on?”

After a long moment, the knob turned and Karl opened the door. He blocked the opening, not inviting his father in. Only the reading light clipped above his bed was turned on, but even so, Ron could see that his son's face was streaked with tears, his eyes red.

“It's nothing,” he said woodenly.

“Come on—I heard—it's obviously not
nothing
.” Ron scanned the room for evidence of what had happened.

His gaze fell on the wall between the nightstand and the desk. There was a reproduction poster from the Warriors' triumphant '75 season, when Karl hadn't even been born, affixed to the wall with some gummy stuff Deb had found that wouldn't mar the paint. The bottom of the poster was torn and crumpled. Behind it, the wallboard was dented, its painted skin broken.

“You hit the
wall
?” A stirring of dread moved inside him.

“I, look, only . . . Calla broke up with me.”

Ron absorbed the news, trying to make sense of it through the cottony haze of five beers. He was caught off-guard—he'd assumed that Karl would be the one to end the romance. Even Deb agreed, though she'd refused to voice the reasons Ron assumed they both knew: Karl was athletic, good-looking, well liked by all kinds of kids and respected by teachers. Calla was . . . well, a little ordinary. A
band
girl, sweet, but without the edge that bound the most popular girls into cliques.

“Do you . . . do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” The syllable bit off sharply. Karl moved the door slightly, narrowing the opening, cutting off his father's view of the damaged wall.

“But look, Karl, you can't—we have to—this isn't any way to handle things, right?”

Unable to come up with any more convincing platitudes, Ron withdrew from Karl's doorway after awkwardly assuring his son that Deb and he were there for him, to listen, to talk, to help in whatever way they could. He thought about adding a whole thing about how the end of a first love was always painful, that it would get easier soon, and every relationship had something to learn from, and Karl would look back on this and . . . but no, Karl didn't need that. Karl, with his brooding gaze and his quick intellect—it was astonishing sometimes, the speed at which he made connections—would see through such cheap solace.

As Ron padded to his bedroom and listened to the house settling back into silence, he reflected on how much smarter Karl was at eighteen than he had been.

And as he got back into bed, Deb murmuring softly in her sleep when he drew back the covers, he took a moment to be grateful that, unlike himself in adolescence, Karl had not done anything stupid.

A LITTLE AFTER
seven that evening, light leached from the sky, thin merciful clouds gathering low and ushering in a breeze. Maris peeled off the gloves and dropped them in the trash, crossed her arms, and looked around the apartment. It was a different space from the one she'd walked into yesterday: The surfaces were scrubbed, everything that had belonged to the prior tenant had been thrown away, and it smelled of Method cucumber cleaner.

Had she done enough?

The question was too big to consider, so Maris dug her phone from her purse. Talking to Alana was another kind of challenge, but at least it would interrupt her trajectory of self-criticism. Choosing your anxiety: that was a tool she should tell Nina about, so she could pass it on to her other pathetic clients, these women in midlife with their disappointments and miseries. When you find yourself worrying about something you can't change, focus on something even worse.

Alana picked up midway through the first ring. “Oh my God! I thought you were never going to call!”

“I'm sorry, I know I should have called sooner. This was all just—I needed . . . I'm sorry.”

“But where are you?”

Maris, leaning against the counter, squeezed the tiled edge with her free hand. She had practiced this lie while she washed the windows. “I'm staying at a house that belongs to a woman from yoga, someone I've known for years. She and her husband are out east for a few weeks. She needed a house sitter. So, you know, the timing worked.”

There was a silence, just long enough for Maris to read Alana's hurt. “But we talked about it. How you shouldn't be alone.”

Actually, Alana was the one who said she shouldn't be alone; Maris had merely agreed. Because it sounded reasonable, like something Nina, whom Maris had stopped seeing after the holidays, would say. But now, in her scoured burrow,
alone
felt like what she needed. Or not alone, exactly, but with people who didn't know her, who didn't know what had happened.

“I'm not alone,” she said, surprising herself. “There's this girl—she's an art student, she's here too. In fact, I'm having dinner with her tonight.”

“But I thought you said there wasn't anyone in the house.”

“She rents the guest house.” Maris shook her head, surprised at how easily the lies came; this was getting complicated, exactly what she wanted to avoid. “Anyway, it's just for a couple of weeks. I'm going to go for walks, journal, think about things.”

“You were going to do all of that here.” Maris could hear Alana's sigh. “Mar, look, I have the guest room all set up. I'm gone during the day, you'd have the place to yourself. I looked into getting you a guest pass at my gym. And in the evenings, you'd have company. I just—I just don't want you to have a setback.”

Maris knew what she meant, the bad place she'd been before Jeff and Alana practically staged an intervention, finding Nina for her and forcing her out of the house to walk in the mornings, to eat a couple of meals a day. To be fair, if their roles were reversed (but how could they be? Imagining Alana as a mother, a wife, was like imagining the pope as a talk-show host) she would probably be saying all the same things.

But Maris wasn't going back to those semicomatose days, the lethargy and the light-headedness from not eating, the thinning skin and the hair falling out. And it wasn't that she was moving on, as she'd claimed to Nina and Jeff, passing through the stages of grief. At least, not the official ones that you were supposed to, the one that more cooperative clients apparently did. (And what kind of therapist specializes in grief, anyway? She must have her own issues, though Nina had been scrupulous in never speaking about her own life.) Maris was moving through her own stages, and while she doubted she would ever feel better, she knew the last year had changed her like lightning changes a tree or a landslide changes a hill, and she would never go backward, either.