The Guilty One (17 page)

“You can. I swear it.” He was glad she wasn't there to look into his eyes; it was a promise he wasn't sure he would be able to keep. If it was just him, yes—but there was Deb to consider; Deb and her hell-bent determination to open it all up again. “And about the other. I would like to help. Please, if there's a way I can help. I'm . . . I don't know how to say this so it comes out right. But money, that's not . . . it's maybe the one thing we don't have to worry about. Deb and me. And I know she'd feel the same way.” A lie, a necessary one. “It's, there's more than enough.”

“Thank you.” Not quite as hard, now. “I appreciate it. I don't expect she'd ever want that. But if it ever comes up . . . but no, she wouldn't.”

“I would like to talk to her—to tell her I'm sorry for the other day. Not now, I know that, but if, you know, if later there seems like a time when it would be okay.”

“I'll pass that along. Like you said, if ever it seems like a good time. Right now she's just, I don't think she's all that stable.”

“You said you talked to her.” His mind cycled through the worst. Some of the parents from the grief group . . . they'd looked like ghosts, their words in a time-lapse mismatch from their faces. Clothes hanging off slumped bodies, eyes purpled with sunken skin. Sometimes they hadn't washed. And others were the opposite—so carefully groomed, so tightly wound, as though the slightest upset would shatter them. “Do you feel like she's, I don't know . . . Headed in the right direction, at least?”

“I don't feel like you deserve to know. I want to hate you,” Alana said. “But I don't have the energy. She's all right, Ron. I think.”

He could tell she wanted to say more, and he braced himself for it, for whatever hurled epithet she had stored up, whatever emotions she might try to shift onto him. But when she spoke again, her voice was soft and sad.

“She went to the bridge, you know. After you called her. She said she was afraid she'd get pulled over because she was cutting in and out of traffic and driving on the shoulder. By the time she got there you were gone, though. The bridge was backed up, but she drove it both ways and there wasn't anyone there. It
was
the Golden Gate, wasn't it?”

“Yeah—it's the only one you can walk out onto.”

“Right. Well, I told her maybe you were faking. Like, just trying to get her sympathy or something. And she told me she knew you wouldn't do that. That if you said you were on the bridge, you meant it. And I asked her how she knew.”

That memory again, of Maris in that bar, her upturned face, her expressive eyes. Listening while he poured out his secrets . . . listening while he told her things he had never told another soul and would never tell again. He'd die first. And all the while, her face never changed; it wasn't judgment and it wasn't forgiveness and it wasn't even curiosity. It was just . . . it had felt like acceptance. She had allowed him to confess his sins and not reacted at all.

“She said she just
knew
,” Alana said softly. “I wanted to tell her she was being stupid, that no one can know what's in your mind. But, I don't know. Maybe you two understand each other.”

Maybe they did.

Alana hung up and Ron texted Deb, promising to be home soon. Then he watched a rabbit lope across the lot to disappear into a shrub. He could hear horns from the freeway. Someone cutting someone else off, everyone in a hurry.

Maris
. He'd thought she was exceptional, that heady, wine-fueled night. He'd watched her across the little bar table, over that tiny flickering oil candle and the untouched dish of pistachios, and wondered why everyone didn't see what he saw.

“ALL RIGHT,” RON
said, ambushed in his own foyer. His shirt, damp with perspiration from sitting on the bench, had grown clammy in the car's air-conditioning. “All right,” he said again, nodding, a pathetic attempt to buy time.

“I'll get you a drink,” Deb said brightly. The new attorney watched him sagely, a faint smirk on his bearded, square jaw. He was wearing a sport coat over a cotton shirt unbuttoned just far enough to show a bit of silver chest hair—a look Ron found especially repugnant.

“I'm just going to change,” Ron said, his eyes still locked on the lawyer's. His name was Honeycutt, and in an introduction that took less than thirty seconds, his wife had managed to convey that he was very well regarded and they were very lucky to hire him.

Honeycutt nodded coolly and shook the ice in his glass. Ron took the stairs two at a time, fueled by irritation. Deb had blindsided him, but he could see that she'd only been acting on her powerful protective instinct. She wasn't really to blame, any more than you could blame a raccoon from knocking over garbage cans, an eagle for building a nest in the highest aerie it could find.

And besides, he'd done worse to her first. He wouldn't blame her for feeling he owed her.

Back downstairs, in a clean shirt and with a gin and tonic in hand, he discovered that the loathsome Kami was there too. His only consolation was seeing how Honeycutt's mouth twitched when Kami spoke. He too was put off by her murky, nameless motivations. Honeycutt's own goals were crystal clear: publicity, payout. He would look good in the courtroom and he would look good on the evening news, and watching his wife's wide, hopeful eyes, Ron could tell that she thought she'd hit the jackpot.

When he left half an hour later, Honeycutt shook Ron's hand with a bit more force than necessary, and held on to Deb's a little too long. Kami lingered for a few more moments, chatting about nothing, before taking off. Ron rolled his eyes and shut the door, and when he turned to face his wife, Deb was watching him carefully.

“Before you say anything—”

“Deb,” he said warningly.

“I haven't signed anything and I haven't given anyone any money.”

“Well, that's a relief,” Ron said sarcastically, before reconsidering the conversation ahead. “Look, let me just use the john.”

He took the time to settle his irritation. He had to do this carefully, or Deb might fly off the handle and decide to do this with or without him. For now, he hoped he still had her natural deference on his side—the old Deb never made a decision, not even something as small as what microwave to buy or which cable service to use, without consulting him.

But she was changing, just as everything was changing. He was not the old Ron, and she was not the old Deb. She was steelier, somehow, and less . . . dependent? Was that the word? She no longer signaled her need for him with the countless gestures he'd taken for granted for so long. She didn't refill his coffee, adjust his tie, ask him if he wanted another pillow when he was reading in bed at night—all the officious little acts that had once annoyed him and that he now missed. Once he'd have laughed at the thought of his wife undertaking some life-changing agenda without his full support.

But so much had happened since then. Now he had to be cautious.

In the kitchen he mixed them each a fresh drink, even though Deb had been drinking bright pink Crystal Light. He took the drinks to the den and sat down in his favorite chair and set her drink on the end table. Curled on the couch, Deb looked relaxed, almost vulnerable.

Ron needed to press every advantage.

“Look,” he said carefully, leaning forward. “I'm not going along with this. Karl will never agree.”

Deb blinked, and Ron could see a stiffening in her posture. “But—” she said.

“I was just there today. I talked to him. He has no interest—he is absolutely dead set against it, Deb. And he made a good point. The appeal could take, what, two or three years? Longer, if we're unlucky—”

“Mark is
good
,” Deb said emphatically. “He's the best there is. He wouldn't take the case if he didn't think—if he didn't expect—”

“This isn't about him, sweetheart.” Ron reconsidered; maybe he should have sat next to her on the couch. Been there to provide comfort, put his arm around her and offered his shoulder to cry on. “This isn't even about whether or not our son did it. It's not about guilt or innocence. Honey, you've got to stop looking at it that way.”

“I'll
never
stop,” she said, untucking her legs from underneath herself and sitting up straight. She clutched wadded tissues in her hand like she was trying to strangle them. “I made a promise to him, to myself, that I would never stop believing in him, stop trying to help him, until the day he walked out of that place.”

Ron shut his eyes for a moment, looking for the right words. He opened them and gently tugged at Deb's hands. After a moment she loosened her grip; he uncurled her fingers and the tissues fell to the floor, and he tried to envelop her cold hands in his, but she pulled them back. “I'm going to say something to you, Deb, and it's important. Well, it's important to me, anyway. Do you understand?”

Deb nodded, suspicion clouding her red-rimmed blue eyes.

“All right.” Ron made a show of taking a deep breath, girding himself. “I . . . don't know if our son is guilty or innocent. I'm confused. Things I thought I knew . . . I'm not sure about them anymore, at least not like I was before.”

He forced himself not to look away. Was this true? The words had come from him, from a place deep inside him where he'd reached for the tools to change his wife's mind, but were they also real? Or only a fabrication meant to serve his needs in the moment?

“When I talked to him today,” he continued, and now he was up there without a net, extemporizing, going with his gut. “He was different. He said I'd never believed him, never given him a chance.”

“
I
told you that.” Deb followed her sharp retort by picking up the drink he'd made and taking a gulp. “I've always said that.”

“Yeah, no, but he was saying . . . always. Before all this happened. Like when he was growing up.” Suddenly Ron felt his control of the situation slipping away, the loss of what was known and the suffocating presence of what was not. “That I didn't make him feel like I had faith in him, that I believed in him.”

That catch in his voice, the thickening in his throat—where had they come from? He hadn't meant to dwell on this point, only to use it as context for what he meant to say next. To lead Deb gently to the conclusion he needed her to reach. Instead, an image of Karl at eleven came to mind, out of breath and red-faced from running, his thin arm in Ron's grip, the feeling of power as he curled his fingers tighter around his son's bicep. Karl and his friends had been throwing rocks over a creek at the baseball fields on the other side. The other dads could discipline their sons as they saw fit—Ron remembered having this thought, how reasonable it had seemed—but he, Ron, wasn't going to raise some hellion of a kid who couldn't connect actions and consequences. But he wasn't his old man. He wasn't a monster. He made Karl walk out on that field and pick up every last rock, the ones he'd thrown and the ones the others had, and bring them back to the landscaped ridge where they'd found them. Ron waited, stony faced and cold, as the other boys and their parents all went home, as the coach gave him a sidelong glance, hauling the bags to his trunk.
This is a sacrifice for me too
, Ron had reminded himself, watching his son try not to cry, the wind whipping his jacket, as night fell.

“I never hit him,” Ron heard himself say, but his voice was so plaintive. “Never. But I might have been too tough on him, in other ways.”

“Ron,” Deb said impatiently, “I never said that you were a bad dad.
Are
a bad dad.”

“Heh.” The little laugh that slipped out of him sounded manic, unhinged. He
was
a bad dad. There wasn't a person in the country who would argue in his favor, given the facts.

But he could still try. He thought of Karl, the anguish in those blue eyes that strangers used to remark on—
got his looks from his mom
, that was always Ron's refrain—now set into that puffy, oily face. Wished he could go back to that day on the baseball field. Wished he could go back all the way to the start. To before the start, before Karl was even conceived. Back, back, back—but how does one do that? How do you go back up the family tree, scrambling up the doomed bloodline, and make things right?

He was sweating again, the fresh shirt wilting against his skin. Deb was regarding him with frosty confusion. “Look,” he tried again. “All I'm trying to say—Karl was very, very clear with me. If we do this, he's just going to refuse. You know Honeycutt can't do a damn thing for him without permission, don't you?”

Deb scowled, but she didn't say anything.

Ron sighed. “Look, I can, we can try to talk to him again, I guess—”

“I'm going on Sunday.”

“I know. So, you can try to talk to him then, maybe you'll have a better shot at him.”

“I already tried.” She was petulant, like a little girl. That wasn't new, exactly, but in the past such moods could easily be smoothed away by a compliment, some trifling indulgence. Ron doubted that would work now.

“But we can try again, right? There's no deadline on, I mean, I know you said you wanted to capitalize on the news, on Mehta's thing, I get that, but . . .”

He reached for her hands again, rubbed his thumbs over her knuckles. She didn't resist. He was torn between fighting her and pleading with her. He was willing to get on his knees for her, if it would have made a difference. Only, what was he trying to achieve, again?

“Come with me, if you care so much,” Deb said abruptly. “On Sunday. I'll get on the system and see if I can add you.”

“That's . . . I mean, I guess, maybe.”

“We don't have that much time. Honeycutt wants to get started right away.”