Virginia Lovers (21 page)

“They’re not sick.”

“What?”

“You said you did sick things. They’re not sick. If you feel them, and you find someone to do them with who feels the same way, well, that’s not sickness. I have not raised you to think that, so don’t say it. And look, Danny, you don’t know what that jury is going to think. You saw that boy beat Brandon Pierce. Yes, you should have come forward and so should have Pete. But just because you’re …”

“Gay?”

“I know the word for it. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean that you’re a liar.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Yes I am, Danny.”

“No, you’re not, Dad. You know how people think. I hear you complain about the letters they write to you about your editorials, I hear you tell Mom how they cancel their subscription if you say anything that goes against the preachers they listen to on the radio, I know how depressed you get when some idiot on the city council makes some racist remark around you, as if you’re one of them. You know what I’m talking about, Dad. You know how they think.”

Thomas wanted to say,
Okay, you’re right, I do know, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t hope that they might do the right thing this time.
But how could he say that and not insult his son? He’d rather have his respect than give him false hope about human nature. Still, he had to say something.

“Let’s go home.” This is what he said, and it felt like a failure. Like everything else he did these days, it felt as though he’d given up.

At home, Caroline, standing at the stove browning chicken, said, “You’re early, what happened? Why aren’t you two still at work?”

Thomas looked at Danny, who looked back at him as if he wasn’t about to explain, then slipped down the dark hallway to his room.
Come back,
Thomas wanted to call to him,
Don’t leave me alone with her, help me out here.

He knew Caroline would think he should have allowed Danny to stay no matter what. He knew that she would think that Thomas brought him home because he was ashamed.

“I just didn’t think it was a good idea, him starting back to work right yet,” he said. “It’s hard enough on him already, he doesn’t need those other boys staring at him.”

“He can’t just stay in his room until all this is over.”

“It will be over soon enough,” said Thomas.

Caroline laid her spatula on the counter with such measured calm that Thomas grew fretful.

“It will never be over,” she said. “You know that. The only thing we can hope for now is that Danny will come out of this without hating himself for the rest of his life.”

“I don’t know how to fix that,” said Thomas. It was true, he didn’t. He had no idea how to make
himself feel
human again, how to quell that niggling feeling that Pete was just away on one of his AWOL trips, that any minute he would come slinking in the front door, stoned out of his mind, in some kind of trouble, maybe even escorted by the police, but at least alive. It stayed with him always, despite his attempt to reconcile himself to time, the intolerable crawl of it. He’d thought, earlier that day, hauling the news back to town, of how time was so absurdly important to his existence. His life was calibrated to a tight production schedule, and to the meetings he had to cover, and to accommodate the occasional tragedies that struck in the middle of the night that he was required to document. These were the only surprises, and he’d grown so accustomed over the years to the notion that his sleep might be interrupted to snap a picture of some triple-fatality car crash that he could scarcely think of them as surprises anymore.

It seemed crippling now, this schedule. His hours were not his at all. The rising sun that demarcated one day from the next for the rest of humanity was arbitrary to him. What separated his days was his need to escape the things he might have to confront should he find some other way to live.

“Well, I don’t know how to fix it either,” Caroline was saying as she bullied the chicken around the smoky skillet, “but I’m going to try to find a way. I’m not about to lose the only son I have.”

“You think I want him to hate himself? You think I want him to be miserable?”

“I don’t know what you think. Sometimes I’m convinced you think he’ll sort it out on his own, and so you stand out of his light. Other times I think you—”

She stopped talking, stopped stirring the chicken, and her silence, her stillness, made his breath come quick and shallow.

“What?”

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but sometimes I think you blame him for what happened to Pete. As if he had anything to do with Pete’s death. I know Pete wouldn’t have been there if Danny hadn’t decided to go to Washington, and he wouldn’t have been hanging around that bar at four in the morning if Danny would not have left him alone, in that hotel room. Danny made some terrible decisions. He let his brother down. But that does not mean it’s his fault that Pete’s dead.”

“Did I say it was his fault?”

“No. You didn’t say it.”

Thomas crossed the kitchen to the cabinet above the oven where he kept the liquor. He mixed his drink without looking at her.

He drained half his glass on the first pull, then set it down and placed his hands on the counter as if he was being searched by a policeman and said, “Do I think it’s his fault?”

She was watching when he finally faced her. “You’re asking me?”

“No.” He reached for his drink again, rattled the cubes, put it down without drinking. “I’m asking me.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The chicken sizzled in the skillet. A timer buzzed for the rice. Thomas could hear music drifting up the hallway, and for a second he thought Pete was home, and this thought made him want her to put her arms around his waist, rest her cheek against his shoulderblade, and he wanted to tell her yes, maybe he did blame Danny, and he was ashamed, not so much of what happened and who was at fault, not of who Danny was, whom he preferred to sleep with, but of that part of him that had liked his younger son—despite all his problems and the pain he’d caused all of them—better than his older one.

“Thomas,” she said to him, and when he saw her arms crossed so tightly across her chest, as if protecting her heart from the things he was thinking, the things he could not say, he picked up his drink and moved without a glance or word her way to the cabinet, where he poured more whiskey to take into the den and drink alone.

He woke the next day disoriented, to the sound of the alarm, which Caroline mercifully turned off—she was already up and dressed, though it was only six-thirty. She’s off to work, he thought, and he pressed a pillow over his head and tried to smother the whiskey fumes lingering from a late night of watching television alone in the den. Once, late, past midnight maybe, Danny had come to stand on the threshhold of the den, and he’d asked Thomas what he was watching and Thomas said without turning to him, “Mindless crap,” and Danny had asked if he was going to bed, and the idea that the child had already become father to the man had so shamed Thomas that he snapped, “When I’m ready.” The memory floated back now, and made him not want to face his son today.

Maybe he would not have to. He remembered it was Thursday, he could sleep late. He always slept late on Thursdays, went into the office around nine to putter around before his standard Thursday-afternoon golf game with Strickland and two other friends. It took a few minutes to place himself in this new life, this new schedule, where there were no more Thursday-afternoon golf games, no more sleeping late on Thursdays. He and Danny were due this morning in Croom’s office for questioning.

“I’ll take the Vega and meet you there,” he told Caroline at the breakfast table.

“Can’t we all ride together?”

“Need to drop the Vega off at the office,” he said, too stiffly he knew. He did not trust Caroline’s mood this morning, did not feel comfortable with her lack of reaction to his stumbling into bed well past two. She treated him as if he were excused for such indulgence, which increased his guilt, though Thomas felt he was allowed this overindulgence. He wasn’t sloshed every night—only, say, twice a week. Which meant that he deserved those two nights, for being so good the rest of the week—for stopping while he was ahead.

When he went into the bedroom to find a tie to wear, she followed.

“Danny’s nervous about today. When I got up he was sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark. I’ve been trying to get him to eat something. Maybe you could talk to him?”

“If he won’t eat for you, he damn sure won’t eat for me.”

She sighed, then sat down on the bed. She smoothed the bedspread with her hand as tears dripped onto her blouse.

He knew he should go to her, hold her, but he was suspicious, felt this was some kind of trap: he’d hold her, tell her it would be okay, that he loved her, and she would pull him close and then attack.

“I want you with me today, Thomas,” she said.

He found the tie he was looking for, draped it over his shoulder, and as he left the room told her he’d meet them downtown.

Down at Dawson’s, men he would have normally stopped to visit nodded as he walked in, left him alone at the counter. He drank three cups of coffee while staring at a calendar of the Trent High football team the athletic boosters sold each year. Danny, broad-shouldered in his pads, cradling his helmet, kneeled a few players to the left of Lee Tysinger. Tysinger’s grimace was obviously fake, but it made him look like a killer, especially compared to Danny’s face, which was blank, as if he was pretending he was not there. Thomas wondered if the other boys teased him in the locker room, if they called him names. He wondered if Danny showered with the other boys, or waited until they were through and showered alone, lest the sight of all these naked boys …

He couldn’t finish the thought, or the coffee. He tossed some bills on the counter and drove to the police station.

Sean Merritt, the district attorney, was already seated in Croom’s office. Sean was in high school when Thomas moved to Trent; he’d known the boy for years, still thought of him as a boy even though he had gone away to college and law school and spent a few years clerking for a judge up in Raleigh before he’d come home to marry a local girl, hang out his own shingle, run for D.A. Thomas had always gotten along well with Sean and often relied on him as a source for stories. Still, he was surprised to see him there.

“Danny’s on his way,” Thomas said to Croom. “His mother’s bringing him.”

“You don’t mind if Sean sits in while we question Danny, do you?” asked Croom.

“Not sure I see the point,” said Thomas.

“I’m investigating this thing, Tom,” said Sean. “If he’s got some information about the Tysinger boy, I want to hear it.”

“I understand that,” said Thomas. “But I figured Croom would let you know if there’s anything you need to be aware of. After the interview. In other words, isn’t it unusual, your sitting in at this stage?”

“I’m just here to listen in, Tom,” said Sean. “Nothing to worry about.”

When Caroline and Danny were ushered into the room by a desk sergeant, Croom shot Thomas a look. He shrugged slightly to show that he didn’t understand, at which point Croom asked to speak to him out in the hall, and where he questioned Thomas whether Caroline should stay.

“It’s liable to get, well, pretty personal.”

“She’s his mother. I reckon she can handle personal.”

“Well, of course. But there might be questions asked she doesn’t want to hear the answers to.”

“If I were to go back in there and ask her to leave, Croom, you’d have another crime on your hands.”

As soon as he finished speaking he felt the shame coloring his face. She’d be angrier at him for alluding to their troubles in public than she would if he asked her to leave.

Croom tried to put Danny at ease before he began his questioning, but Danny was as stiff as Thomas had ever seen him. Not a frightened stiff—more a surly composure, as if he wanted everyone to know how uncomfortable he was.

“I was invited,” Danny replied when Croom asked him what he was doing at the party.

“So you and Brandon Pierce were friends?”

“I knew him.”

“How long had you known him?”

“Since seventh grade, I guess.”

“Did you notice anything about Brandon the night of the party?”

“Well, he was pretty wasted.”

“Drunk, you mean?”

“Yes, drunk. He was really drunk. He threw up all over himself. I had to help him get cleaned up. I took him into his parents’ bedroom and ran the shower for him.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, Brandon was really upset. He was crying.”

“What was he upset about?”

Danny glanced at his mother, then out the window. “He was mad about the way people treated him in this town.”

“And how did they treat him?”

“According to him, terribly.”

“You say according to him. Didn’t you believe him?”

“Well, yeah. Like I said, he was drunk, he may have been exaggerating a little, but he was right, people gave him a hard time.”

“And why was that?”

“Why?” said Danny.

“Why did they treat him badly?”

Danny went blank again. Thomas tried to send him the strength to tell the truth, but his son would not look at him. He had not looked at him, in fact, since the questioning had started.

“Because he was gay.”

“A homosexual?”

Danny smiled. “Yes, a homosexual.”

Danny’s smile and his crisp enunciation of the term made Thomas sweat. He could see the way this thing was going. Now that Danny had no reason to hide the truth—now that his chance at a scholarship was shot, now that his little brother was gone as a result of his negligence—he did not care enough to hide his disdain for people like Croom who would help him if they could. Thomas wanted to ask for a time-out, yank Danny out in the hall and lecture him, but he knew that he was not in charge here, and—a far worse thought—knew that Danny would pay no attention to him now. From now on, no doubt.

“And how did you know he was a homosexual?”

“Because he told me. I knew it anyway.”

“How?