Dark Rooms (36 page)

“Not a word.” She turns the mug over in her hand. “I felt just terrible.”

“For telling him?”

Her eyes fill with tears again. “For how I told him. I'm his mother. I should have protected him. Instead I ambushed him. I was angry at his father, and I took it out on him. No self-control.” She looks up at me guiltily. “I didn't always, you know, like to”—rapping her knuckles against the bottom of the upside down mug—“so much.”

“Do you know where he went when he left the house?”

She shakes her head.

So much for Jamie having an alibi.

Mrs. Amory goes on: “And you can imagine the kinds of thoughts that were running through my mind when I found out that he'd taken one of his father's guns. I assumed he'd gone upstairs to get his cell. Then I called it and I could hear it ringing in his racket bag. That's when I checked the rifle cabinet. Saw that the .22 was missing.”

And there, I think, is means. I feel a little like I did that day in Mom's studio when I realized that the photograph was of Nica's dead body. As if I'm in danger of turning into vapor, of disappearing. “Mr. Amory has a .22?”

“For big-game hunting. His once-a-year trip to Montana to blow Bambi's brains out.”

A little desperately, I say, “But a .22 is a small handgun, a street gun. Not a hunting gun. You couldn't use it to kill a large animal. I looked it up on the Internet.”

“Not to take the animal down, no. You use something higher-caliber for that. You use a .22 to finish the animal off. One right behind the ear.” Mrs. Amory makes a finger gun. Pulls the trigger. “Pow,” she says.

“Pow,” I say back, a toneless echo.

“I can't tell you how relieved I was when I heard Jamie walk
through the door the next morning. I was so frightened he'd use the gun on himself. I went right back to being frightened, though, when I found out that your sister had been shot that night, and with a .22. Immediately I took the gun out of my husband's cabinet, drove to the Charter Oak Bridge, threw it over the side. I know it sounds awful but I was never so happy in my life as when I heard that Mexican boy killed himself and left a confession.”

So that's it, I think. Jamie did it. He's the one.

I continue to sit with Mrs. Amory, let her keep talking. She's repeating herself now. And I'm just waiting for her to pause so I can make my exit. Try not to think of it as abandonment, me leaving her alone with her drunken grief. At last, she begins to wind down. When she's silent for five consecutive seconds—I actually count them in my head, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . . —I say, “Well,” and get to my feet.

She gets to her feet, too, and walks me to the front door. Instead of opening it, though, she just stands next to it. I keep hoping she'll reach for the knob—a way of letting me know it's okay to leave. But after a while, it becomes clear she's not going to, so I reach for it. She watches me, looks away.

I touch her shoulder. “I'm sorry you had to go through all this. You don't deserve it.” I mean it—I am sorry for her and don't think she does deserve it—but as soon as I say the words, I realize they sound exactly the same as if I don't.

The door moans softly as I close it behind me.

I'm driving east on 44, back the way I came, back to Chandler. My mind is calm, empty. I've already got my answer. I know who killed Nica. I even know why. Now it's just a matter of getting Jamie to say the words, of seeing this thing through to the bitter end so I can be done with it once and for all.

My cell vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out. Dad. He must've come home for that sandwich after all. I see his name flashing on my screen and suddenly it hits me: the grave injustice I've done him. I should pick up immediately, apologize for not leaving a note, since I can't apologize for believing him capable of committing the most heinous crime imaginable. It's the least I can do. Quite literally the least. And yet, I can't do it. My thumb, poised above the Answer button, will not press down.

It's strange. I feel so guilty toward him and at the same time so totally unrepentant. This huge chasm opened up between the two of us when Nica died. Understandably, I suppose, since—unconsciously, subconsciously, whatever—I believed he murdered her. I did to him
exactly what I did to Damon: misdiagnosed his guilt. I thought he felt guilty for killing Nica when what he felt guilty for was failing to protect Nica. I'd taken signs that could have been interpreted in any number of ways and interpreted them in one way. I was wrong about him, unequivocally and undeniably. So why then am I unable to bring myself to say those two simple little words,
I'm sorry
?

I think it's because, in my mind, Dad
is
guilty. Not of murder, maybe, but of cowardice, which, in this instance, amounts to the same thing. Yes, it's possible he didn't know for sure that Nica was Mr. Amory's daughter. He did know for sure, though, that Mom was in love with Mr. Amory when she married him. He also knew for sure that Nica had a father and he wasn't it. Was he really so naive and unsuspecting that he didn't put the pieces together? My guess is he did and then tricked himself into believing he didn't in order to keep from having to confront the ugly truth about our family. It would explain why he lashed out at Jamie after Nica's body was found, this before there was a single shred of evidence, as if distrust and loathing had been bubbling below the surface the whole time. And for that—for turning a blind eye, for sparing himself rather than her, for behaving, basically, in the same craven, chickenshit manner as I behaved—I'm unable to forgive him. I don't like that I'm unable to, but that's just how it is, and I don't think it will ever change.

My cell vibrates for the fourth time. Checking my impulse to duck his call, pass off my dirty work to my voice mail, do to him, in short, what I just accused him of doing to Nica, I press Answer. “Dad,” I say, “hi.” I wait for his hello—vague, limply pleasant—to come back to me. Instead of his voice, though, I get the whir and hum of a car engine. He must be on his way to the Holiday Inn. This happens every so often. Dad carries his cell in his back pocket, sits on it when he drives. He shifts in his seat a little, puts pressure on a certain button, and the phone of whomever he last called starts to ring. An ass dial, in Nica's words.

I can't hear him, just the rumble of his motor, the thudding of the baseline of whatever song's playing on the sad old-guy rock station he's listening to. I yell, “Dad!,” a couple times but it doesn't do any good. Eyes on the road, I feel around the keyboard to end the call. As I do, though, I hear, very faintly, Dad's dry cough, the crinkle of a wrapper—a lemon drop, a Sucrets?—and my heart opens with a quick, wrenching movement. In an instant I can barely see the car in front of me my tears are so out of control. I try to fathom my extreme emotional reaction to what's, essentially, the accidental push of a button, but I can't.

And then I can. In a surge of understanding, I can. Listening to the sounds Dad makes in his car puts me in his car. And not only am I traveling alongside him, I'm also traveling backward with him, back to the past, back to those weekend afternoons when Mom would be working or on one of her tears, and he'd toss me and Nica in the old Datsun with the waffled seats, cart us around while he did errands—taking us to the dump or the hardware store or Sears or, that spring he was trying to grow an herb garden on the kitchen windowsill, to the nursery with the pond and the windmill and the little wooden train for kids to play on where he'd buy potting mix and terra-cotta planters and basil and dill and oregano seeds. (The garden was a failure. The kitchen didn't get enough sunlight.) The three of us would talk, listen to
Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!,
Dad calling out answers, delighting me and Nica, especially Nica, who'd scream with glee when he got one that had stumped the egghead panelists. Afterward, we'd go for pizza or for spare ribs and lo mein, then to the bookstore or the movies. By the time we pulled into the driveway, Mom would be standing in the door, calm now, even happy to see us.

I hear him clear his throat and all at once this excruciating sadness mixed with this equally excruciating sweetness funnels into my ear; and I can feel, can actually physically feel, what's broken between us
trying to mend itself. Holding my cell open so as not to sever the connection, I move it to the center console, lay it down gently. Continue driving toward Chandler.

Ten minutes later I'm turning off Fiske into the student parking lot, closer to Jamie's dorm than the employee. My eyes are sore and slitty, but I'm not crying anymore. I reach for my cell. I'd driven through that dead zone around Hungerford Street, so I'm no longer connected to Dad. I must've missed a couple calls while I had him on the line, though, since the phone didn't ring and I have two new messages. Both from Damon.

I fast-forward through the old new messages—a dozen or so—without listening. At last I get to the new new.

“To hear your messages press one,” the automated female voice tells me, short, blinky beeps interrupting her throughout. Great. The battery's about to die. No surprise. I haven't been so good about charging my phone in the last few days, and the extended call with Dad must've drained what little juice it had left.

The first message begins: “I forgot to tell you earlier, I looked into that Mellors thing for you. A couple with that name did stay at the Red Lion Inn the night Nica died.” A pause. “Okay, that's it.”

As the automated voice runs me through the familiar list of message disposal options, I think about Damon checking out that detail, following up on it with all the other things he has going on.

The next message begins: “It's me again. That wasn't it, actually. There's something else I wanted to say to you, a question I wanted to ask.” He sighs. “This isn't really how I pictured doing this but you won't see me and you won't take my calls, so . . .” He trails off. “Anyway, the question is, Will you marry me and have our baby? I know what you're thinking and it's not true. I'm not asking because I
feel guilty, though I do. I'm asking because I want to. I'm at the hospital and I'll be here all night if you want to talk. Okay, that really is it.” And then, a second later, “Also, I love you.”

I'm staring at the phone in shock when it makes another low-battery beep and I realize that I don't have time to be shocked. I need to tell Damon where I am and what I'm doing. As I get out of the car, I call him back. Voice mail. Shit, no cell phones in the hospital. I should be calling Max's room directly only I don't have the room number anymore. It's on the back of Mr. Wallace's note to Nica, which I stupidly left with Mr. Wallace.

At the sound of the beep I start talking: “I just spoke to Mrs. Amory. Jamie did it. I'm at Chandler now, am on my way to Endicott to tie up loose ends.” I pause, trying to decide whether or not I should say something about his last message. Like what? Thanks but I don't believe for a second that you love me and that you're not asking me to marry you out of guilt and/or residual feeling for my sister? Thanks but I have zero interest in becoming a teen wife and mom? Thanks but are you out of your fucking mind? Better to just leave it, deal with it later. I reach with my thumb to press End Call. See that the screen's already dead. I wonder how much of what I said actually got through.

I'm looking around for the nearest pay phone to leave the message again when I notice that the car at the opposite end of the lot, the only one in it besides mine, isn't empty. There's a bent-necked figure in the driver's seat. I strain my eyes to see more, but it's too dark and I'm too far away. And then, the flare of a lighter. Jamie's face comes to sudden, lustrous life. A moment later, the lighter flickers out.

I stand there for what feels like an eternity but is probably no more than a minute. Since holing myself up in my bedroom three days ago, Indian summer's come to an end. The air is crisp, the night breeze chilly, and when it blows, the exposed parts of my flesh break out in spiky little goose bumps. This is exactly what I want, I think: Jamie alone, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I walk fast, afraid he's going
to drive away before I can reach him. But the car—Ruben's, I recognize it as I get closer, sporty with a backward-sloping roof, built low to the ground—stays put, motor off, lights out.

I tap a fingernail against the passenger-side window.

Jamie's head turns sharply. At first he looks scared, but then he sees it's only me. A smile unfurls slowly across his face and he lowers the window, releasing a puff of sweet-smelling air.

“Gracie, hey.”

“Hey, Jamie. You headed somewhere?”

“I'm supposed to be making a Doritos run for Ruben. We're watching TV in my room and the SyFy Channel gives him the munchies.”

“That's nice of you.”

“Not really. It was the only way I could get him to hand over his keys.”

“Why did you want his keys?”

“He keeps a bong in his glove compartment,” Jamie says. His responses to my questions are a beat too late, several beats.

“But you're smoking a joint,” I point out.

One beat. Two beats. Three beats. “Yeah. The joint's for now, though. The bong's for later.”

“Oh.”

“Only Ruben's bong's not in his glove compartment. Just this.” Jamie holds up a baggie filled with little white pills, shakes it so it makes a sound like maracas.

I let out a low whistle. “There must be a thousand dollars' worth in there.”

“More like a dollar.”

“You too stoned to count?”

“I wish. No, Ruben's pretty sure his new supplier's scamming him, selling him aspirin. Not all the time but some of it. He's been getting an earful from pissed-off customers, I guess.”