The Guilty One (32 page)

The investigators had found several of Calla's long blond hairs in the passenger seat, but that had been easily explained. As recently as a few weeks before her death, Calla had been in the car with Karl.

“I told Karl he had to get some sleep. I gave him one of your Ambiens. I knew you wouldn't notice one missing, and he always slept so late on Sundays anyway, I knew you wouldn't think anything of it. I put him to bed just like he was a little boy—” Her voice cracked, just a little, and she put her hand to her throat until she could continue. “And I told him he had to forget it, he had to tell himself that he hadn't been there. That it would never work unless we both decided together to just—to change the past. That we could do it, together.”

Ron thought about that Monday, when he'd picked Karl up at school. How his son, his six-foot-one grown son, had sagged against him in the car, and how he'd held him. That would have been a time to tell him he loved him. That would have been a good time.

“I was so angry when he told me today.”

“You should be angry. At me.” When he didn't look at her, she took his chin in her hand and forced him to look at her. “At
me
, Ron, do you hear? Not at Karl.”

After a long moment, he nodded. “But you'll drop the appeal thing,” he said quietly, just to be sure.

She let her hand fall to her lap. “Yes.”

He gathered her into his arms, and she lay there motionless for a moment, before her shoulders started shaking. He held her tighter. “Deb,” he murmured against her neck. “I need to tell you something. Something that happened to me, a long time ago.”

RON HAD NEVER
told anyone the greatest failing of his life—it was his alone. Between him and God.

God, whose judgment he'd carried with him for so long; whose opprobrium was a weight on his shoulders that was sometimes unbearable. It had been almost two decades. Wasn't that long enough? Hadn't his good behavior entitled him to some release, some relief?

“One night, when Karl was only eighteen months old,” he started, and then he faltered. Was it really possible? To unhitch the stone he'd been dragging for so long? Deb squeezed his hand, and he closed his eyes for a moment before going on.

“You'd been sick, you had the flu. Do you remember that? You'd taken some nighttime cold medicine and I said I'd get up with Karl. It was back when he hardly ever slept all the way through, and I had a feeling this wasn't going to be one of those nights. I'd been working on a presentation and I hadn't had much sleep the night before. So yeah, I was wound tight. He was up screaming at eleven, then again at two, and he wouldn't take a bottle and he wouldn't go back to sleep. He just wouldn't sleep.”

Ron closed his eyes, remembering. The sensations came back to him. The thrumming of his nerve endings, the tightness of his breath, the near-manic skittering of his heartbeat. Muttering
please, please, come on buddy, you know you're tired, just fucking please please go to sleep . . .

“I did everything I knew to do. Remember how it used to calm him down if I held him on his stomach like an airplane, and walked him . . . I walked up and down the stairs to the basement a dozen times. I was halfway up the stairs when he twisted around in my arms, screaming his head off—I almost dropped him. I was so scared, you know?” There were no rails on those stairs, and the basement floor was concrete. And Karl didn't care, he just kept fighting and
screaming
. “I went down the stairs to where we had that old couch in the basement, and suddenly
I
was yelling at
him
. I put him down on the couch, but I still had his arms in my hands, and I was telling him to shut up to please just shut the fuck up, shaking him, and it . . .”

He swallowed, remembering: how good it had felt to finally let the fury out, to shake those tiny, treacherous arms, to yell into that screwed-up face with its squinting eyes and its wide-open mouth, how as Karl kept screaming, he'd squeezed harder and harder and—

“And there was this sound, this horrible sound, and I could feel his arm snap. I mean, not in half, like a bone, but like a pop, and I knew I'd done something. Dislocated the shoulder, at the very least, and just like that all the anger was gone and I was myself again, I was kneeling on our basement floor with our baby, and his screaming was different now and I knew he was hurt.”

“Oh my God,” Deb said, her hand to her mouth. “You did that?
You
broke his arm?”

Ron nodded miserably, afraid to look at her.

“You told me it was an accident.” She pulled her other hand free from his. “Why didn't you tell me what really happened?”

“It didn't really sink in at first, what I'd done, I went right into problem-solving mode. I wrapped that old quilt we used to keep down there around him, I guess I thought maybe it would keep the arm still. I got my keys and put him on the front seat. I didn't even put him in the car seat, which shows you that I wasn't thinking clearly. I kept one hand on him so he wouldn't roll off the seat and I drove to Mercy General. And the crazy thing was, by the time we got there he was asleep. And I started to wonder if I was crazy, if I'd
imagined
hurting him, but I took him in and we got seen right away, it was a slow night. I told the admitting nurse that Karl wiggled out of my arms. I kept mostly to the truth, I said he'd fallen onto the couch but that his arm twisted at a bad angle.

“Once they took him in the back I started to think more clearly again. I called the house, but you didn't pick up—those nighttime cold meds had knocked you out. By now it was around four thirty, and this doctor, or intern or whatever, came to talk to me. I told you about that, remember?”

“How they were trying to see if you hurt him . . .” Her voice was faint, her posture stiff.

“Deb, this isn't easy,” Ron said, but it sounded defensive to his ears and he tried again. “I'm not trying to hurt you. I'll stop if you want. You have every right to be angry with me. But I just—if we're going to be honest with each other now—”

“No, tell me. All of it.”

He tried to gauge her reaction, how repugnant she found him, how much damage he was doing to her trust, but she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself, pressing into the far corner of the couch. “It's just . . . I mean, you know they have to do it, right? Make sure you didn't hurt your kid on purpose? And I was thinking, how the fuck am I going to get through this, should I just admit it straight up? I mean, I can't be the first person who ever did something like this, but then again they were cracking down back then, remember all those shaken-baby cases in the news? And what if I'm the guy they decide to make an example of? And you—I know how this is going to sound, but it's the truth. I swear to you, Deb, I couldn't bear that you would think—that you would know that I'd
hurt
our baby.”

He was shaking now, sweat under his arms. He glanced up at Deb: now he just wanted this over; the telling exhausted him.

“Anyway, he did ask a few things, but it was like a checklist, like something they'd made him memorize, you know? I could tell right away he didn't think I did anything to hurt Karl. So I answered his questions and then all I had to do was wait and they brought him out with his arm in that tiny cast, and I signed all the papers and headed back to the house. Drove about twenty miles an hour the whole way; Karl was asleep in his baby seat. By the time you got up I had a pot of coffee made and the whole story, you know, I'd practiced it, like what a dumb-ass I was and how clumsy, and like that, and—well, you remember, right?”

“Yes. I . . . I remember how sweet you were about it. You kept telling me how sorry you were. You didn't let me help at all that morning, you stayed home from work and took care of both of us that day.”

He had been afraid of more than just her censure: he'd been afraid she'd leave him, if she knew. Never let him see their son, around whom he couldn't be trusted. Never forgive him for letting his temper get the better of him.

“I was just so . . . I couldn't believe I'd done it,” he said, his voice finally breaking. “That I'd lost control.”

“Like your dad. You were afraid you were becoming your dad.”

Her voice was gentle, but the words felt like a slap. They were the truth, the dread that he had been carrying around with him since that day. Before that, it was possible for Ron to believe that the incidents of violence that littered his past were isolated, that they were part of an unhappy and frustrated youth that was now behind him. When he became a father, he had looked into his infant son's face and vowed to never do anything to hurt a single hair on his tiny, perfect head.

And then he'd done this unconscionable thing and it was like Magnus had reached through time and forced his hand. Thinking of his father, it wasn't the old man's slack and drooling face that came to mind, but a younger, meaner, craftier version, the one who'd terrorized Ron for so long.

“I never wanted to be him,” he gasped. “You have to believe that.”

“I know,” Deb said quietly. “It makes sense now, the way you were that day. That you were beating yourself up. Do you remember, after it happened, how careful you were around him? I didn't understand it then, how overnight you seemed to turn into such a worrywart. You treated him like he was made of glass.”

“I don't remember that,” Ron said. What he did remember was that when both Karl and Deb were finally both asleep that morning, he'd lain awake, despite his exhaustion, wondering how he could ever make it up to either of them. But he had also had a rogue impulse, quickly squashed, to simply abandon them. If there had been a way he could have left, and kept going . . . maybe not forever, but just to get away from what he had done. From the evidence of his guilt.

Instead he had stayed. He had looked at that cast every day until it finally came off, and every day he castigated himself all over again. “I was . . .” Ron said, but his voice cracked with emotion and he had to collect himself before he could continue. Deb slipped her hand lightly into his. “I was so afraid of what I'd do to him the next time.”

“But there never was a next time,” Deb said.

He looked into her eyes, longing to believe he could deserve the comfort she was offering. “How can you be sure? For all you know . . . my father never did anything to us when my mom was around. What if I only hurt him when you weren't there to see?”

But she was already shaking her head. “I know you want to take the blame for this,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “And I won't lie, there were times I tried to make it your fault. You weren't a perfect father. I wasn't a perfect mother. But we were
good
. Sweetheart, we did our best. You didn't abuse our son. Whatever he did, that's his responsibility. You have to believe that.”

“I want to. God, I want to. I mean . . . sometimes I feel like I could bear it all—like I could be there for him the way you always are, maybe even forgive him. If I could just believe I didn't make him that way.”

“You didn't. I swear it to you.”

Age had mellowed Ron. He'd be forty-nine this year, and the passing decades had diluted the rage. He still felt it sometimes, swimming eel-like deep inside him, looking for an opportunity to escape. But most of the time Ron was able to push it back down. He hadn't had an outburst—no yelling, kicked door, even a moment of road rage—in years.

But it was Deb's belief in him that gave him real hope.

“I'm so tired,” she said now, scooting back next to him on the couch. He opened his arm to her and she curled against him, her hand on his chest and her breath warm against his neck. It had been a long time since they'd sat together like this, a long time since he'd let his mind empty and just held his wife. Her breathing grew even and deep, and in a while she was asleep in his arms. Ron would get up and they would go up to bed, together—soon. For now, he was content to simply hold her.

“You're safe with me,” he whispered.

NORRIS STOPPED BY
with an update after the ambulance left. By then, Maris and Pet had snuck back to her apartment, going around the block to avoid the scene out front.

“All clear,” he said.

“I'm just so sorry this is happening,” Maris said yet again.

Pet just shrugged. “That's her third 5150,” she said. “I know the drill.”

Norris looked around the room before he left. “You know . . . maybe you should think about staying, Mary,” he said. “Maybe we could work something out with the rent.”

When he was gone, Pet and Maris both burst out laughing.

“Oh my God, you're one of his charity cases now,” Pet said.

“Only because I'm good with a bottle of Windex,” Maris said, but she was secretly pleased.

Pet got up and stretched, popping her shoulders one at a time. “I guess I better go get ready for work before fate has a chance to send any more drama my way. You want me to say hi to George for you? Or maybe send him home early if it's slow?”

Maris could feel her face flaming, but she attempted to sound nonchalant. “I'm going to bed early myself. I'm beat.”

“Yeah, doing the sunrise walk of shame can really take it out of you.”

“Oh, God . . . did you see me come home yesterday?”

“Ha! Lucky guess. I mean, I knew something was up, because I was getting ready to go for a run and I looked out and saw George pulling out of the driveway. When I saw you were still wearing what you had on the night before, it wasn't that much of a stretch.”

Maris covered her face with her hands. “Ugh, I wish I knew what I was doing.”

“Have you told him? You know . . .”