Harmless (17 page)

“What I mean is, Detective Caputo kind of took this case away from me. He's busy getting things ready for the DA and I have some new assignments and I have tons of work to do on those cases and yet I can't stop thinking about this case, about you and Emma and Mariah.”

“We're fine. We're all fine now. Don't worry about us.”

He looked at me. “I'm not even on duty.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that. My stomach growled.

“There are some things that just bother me. They nag at me constantly, even when I'm working on my other cases.”

This was my chance to say something like “What bothers you, Detective Stevens?” but I remained silent. An agitated cricket was chirping from under something in the darkness.

“Like, for example,” he continued, “did he bleed?”

“What?”

“You hit him in the head with a rock, right? Hard enough to stun him?” I couldn't just keep looking into the night. His eyes were on me. I turned to him. I nodded. “The thing about the head is, it's a messy bleeder. Lots of blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. But there was no blood anywhere at the scene. Not on any rock. Or the ground.”

I shrugged.

“You know what's even harder to understand?” Pause. “Why David Allen doesn't have even the slightest sign of a cut or a bruise or any kind of trauma whatsoever to his head.”

“That is strange, kind of,” I said. I untied and then retied my shoelace just to keep my eyes engaged in something other than staring blankly at him. “But hasn't it been, like, two months? I guess maybe the head heals quickly.”

“Not in my experience.” He bent his head over and gestured to the back of it. “I was a reckless kid. Accident-prone. Always getting stitches. You can still see my scars.”

I could see one through his crew cut, an inch or two in length.

“That's just from when my brother lost his grip on his ten-nis racket.” He sat up again. “And there's something else.”

I was grateful for the cricket now. It was drowning out the pounding of my heart.

“Everyone seems to recognize David Allen. They don't know his name or anything, but they've all seen him before. He was some kind of fixture down at the river. Most kids I talked to said he was always there.”

Was it only one cricket? It was starting to sound like thou-sands.

“If that's so, then why didn't you recognize him that night? How did you not know someone you've seen before?”

“We told you. It was dark. We couldn't see. We were scared. We panicked. And anyway, why are you doing this? Why are you questioning me? What about Emma and Mariah?”

“Oh, I was planning on talking to them too. But I thought
I'd start with you because you just seem so together to me. And also, I know you're a good kid. I can tell these things.”

“But I told you—”

“I know, I know, it was dark. You were scared. You pan-icked.” He stood up. He cast a long shadow that stretched down the steps and disappeared into the backyard. “Good night, Anna.”

Emma

I had tests to study for.
I had a paper to write. School would be over in two weeks and I would watch Silas walk down the aisle in his black robe and his stupid square hat with the tassel and I was already imagining my future without him. There was too much going on for me to take a day off and spend it with Dad, but he insisted. He demanded. When Dad gets that way you can't say no.

He wanted to go to the racetrack. I just loved that as an excuse for why I missed a whole day of classes. Sorry I ditched school, Principal Glasser, but I was busy betting on the ponies.

This was something Dad and I had done together every summer for the first few years we'd lived up here. We would drive the hour and a half north and he would spot me twenty dollars to bet on the horses with names I liked: Proud Princess,
Jellybean, Flower Power. The odds meant nothing to me; I placed my bets solely on what sounded closest to the name I might have given my own horse at the age of eight, nine or ten. I usually lost, but a few times I won big—well, as big as you can win on a two-dollar bet. I used to love these days with Dad. We'd listen to the sound track of West Side Story and sing at the top of our lungs with the windows rolled down and we'd buy root beer floats at the Frosty Freeze off the highway on the way back home. But Dad's new car only had a CD player and we'd thrown away our cassette of West Side Story after we found it under the seat, strangled in its own tape ribbon, when Dad sold his old car. This day seemed like a terrible idea.

I insisted on bringing my books even though reading in a moving car makes me want to hurl. Dad knows this about me. That's probably why he didn't fight me on it. He knew I'd end up zipping them back into my bag.

We were listening to Bach's cello concertos. Not exactly something to roll the windows down and sing along to, but the mellow music and the green trees speeding by outside my window had a hypnotic effect on me. Just as I was settling into this rare moment of peace and nothingness, Dad pounced.

“We need to talk, Emma.”

We. Need. To. Talk
. Four words you never want to hear your parents say.

“Is this about you and Mom?”

This seemed to catch him off guard. He adjusted his sun visor. He fiddled with the volume knob on the stereo until it wound up exactly where it had been before he started to fiddle with it.

“Well, in a sense, yes, a bit indirectly, I suppose it is.” He
cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you about what hap-pened the night of that march and about the article in the college paper I'm pretty sure you managed to get your hands on. All this business about the sexual harassment charges. It's time we clear this up.”

Signs were approaching and then disappearing behind me. I couldn't see them. Couldn't make any sense of them. What does it mean when there's a Soft Shoulder Ahead?

“You don't have to do this, Dad.”

“I know I don't have to, I want to.”

“But I'm not sure I want you to. Sometimes maybe it's better not to know certain things.” That sounded smarter than anything I'd ever said in all my life.

He took a deep breath, considered me for a minute and then pressed on. “Do you know what sexual harassment is?”

“I have a feeling you're going to tell me.” I was glad we were driving, glad for the excuse to look straight ahead and avoid his eyes.

“I'm not really all that sure myself. The exact definition is malleable. What I do know is that one of my former students, a graduate student, made such an accusation against me and I haven't been able to shake it even after all these years.”

“Was it true?”

“No.”

I looked at him. He stared hard at the road. His cheeks were red. His hair was a bit of a mess from running his fingers through it. I felt like I was looking at him, really looking at him, for the first time in a long while, and what I saw made me want to grab hold of the wheel and turn the car around.

He wasn't telling the truth.

“You're lying,” I said before I could stop myself. I should have let him lie. I didn't want to know the truth. I'd just told him I didn't want to know the truth. And yet here I was, putting him on the spot.

He looked over at me and his eyes were soft. His body loosened. He slunk down into his seat. He let something go.

“I'm not lying, Emma. But the truth is too complicated to explain to you. You're still too young to understand.”

I turned the music off. Those cello concertos were getting to me. They were sad and hollow and they made me want to cry.

“What you need to know, Emma, is that I made a mistake and I paid for it dearly. When it became clear to me that all I cared about in this world was your mother and our family, I tried to get myself out of a situation I never should have been in in the first place. And when I tried to do that, this student of mine wanted to hurt me, and she did it in the only way she knew how, by accusing me of things that weren't true, or really, I guess what she did was put some true things into an untruthful context.”

Maybe a Soft Shoulder is what happens to you when you are beaten down and defeated and you give up on keeping up appearances and you let go of whatever you were using to hold yourself together and, starting at your shoulders, everything inside you just starts going soft.

“So are you and Mom getting a divorce?”

“No. Why would you think that?”

“Because you argue. You get angry at each other. And you didn't go with her to Oxford.”

“Em, I didn't go with her to Oxford because we were wor-ried about you.” He grabbed my hand. “Mom and I decided that someone needed to be here for you, and since I'm not the genius with the fancy grant, I got to stay home. And there's no place I'd rather be.”

Something was breaking in me. Slowly. Piece by tiny piece. Grain by grain. I tried thinking of the Arctic, of white-ness, of the frozen Earth, but nothing could stop it. Things were coming apart.

“I love your mother and she loves me and she was able to forgive me my stupidity and selfishness. Sure, we argue, but that's just who we are. We're both strong-willed and stubborn. Maybe she makes me pay from time to time for what hap-pened in the past, but that's only fair. Marriage is a long and treacherous road, but it's also full of beauty and surprises. The one thing that's always been easy for us is loving you and your brother. That's the easy part.” He looked over at me and stroked my hair. “We've been worried about you, Em, very worried. You seem troubled, like you're carrying a load too big for your fifteen-year-old shoulders. But you're also wise and thoughtful and empathetic and mature. And I guess, as hard as this is for me, you're ready for the truth.”

I started to cry. Big, deep, howling sobs that came from a part of me I didn't even know was there. I let my father hold my hand. I watched the world go by. I let the truth begin to sink into me.

Mariah

I was starting to like the Greek Corner
with its faux wood-paneled walls and its stained maroon carpet. I liked the sticky menus and the thick black sludge they called coffee. Silas and I were driving to Greenfield almost every day after school, and con-sidering that graduation was right around the corner, complete with the obligatory senior-class bowling day and senior-class swim in the lake and senior-class bonfire and barbecue, I was flattered that Silas was choosing to spend his final afternoons as an Odious student in my company.

We talked. Our knees grazed each other under the table. He would take hold of my arm when he was trying to make a point and he'd leave his hand there for a few beats, and after he would take it away, I could still feel where it had been.

Much as I tried to avoid the subject, we talked a lot about Emma. His whole family was worried about her. He told me Detective Stevens wanted to come speak with her, to ask her some more questions, and he heard his father tell him no. Emma had been through enough, he said. It was time to put this all behind her.

I wondered if Detective Stevens had tried calling Mom and Carl. Did he want to talk to me? Ask me any questions? What did he want? Why was he still asking questions when this terrible episode already had an answer?

The answer was:

(a) An unshaven ghost in a red flannel jacket.

I thought, more than once, more than twice, during those beats when Silas's hand held on to my arm, when his knees were touching mine, of telling him the truth. The truth about our lie. The truth about our lie? Or was it a lie about the truth? Truth and lies. Lies and truths.

Lielielielielie. Truthtruthtruthtruthtruth.

I didn't. I couldn't. He would hate me. He would hate me for sitting across from him day after day, coffee cup after coffee cup, letting him talk about Emma and what could be bothering her when all along I knew.

Lies destroy you.

I wanted only one thing. I wanted Silas. I wanted to be alone somewhere in a room with him and have his strong arms around me and I wanted to hear him tell me that he loved me, and once I heard him say that to me, I could come clean because when you love somebody you can forgive them for the terrible things they do.

Silas said it was too nice a day to spend breathing the recycled air of the Greek Corner. Did I want to go somewhere we could sit outside?

I wanted to go anywhere he was. Anywhere we could be together. It didn't have to be alone somewhere in a room. Outside was good. Outside was open and free and there was no way of telling what might happen if we were alone outside.

We drove north. The river gets wider up north and the other side of it becomes harder to see. We sat under a tree behind a historic home where a former vice president or someone who signed the Declaration of Independence once lived. The truth is I wasn't sure who he was, except that he was someone important enough that the place where he used to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom was now somewhere you had to pay five dollars to enter.

I wondered if David Allen had gone by here on his way to Kapachuck. At night the people in dark green vests and gold nameplates who take your five dollars would have been home in their own houses with their own families, sleeping in their own beds. This house would have been empty, but it would have been locked. Alarmed against people exactly like David Allen. Maybe he came here anyway. Maybe he slept on the porch. Or maybe he slept right here, under this tree where we were sitting, with its view of the widening river.

We hadn't said a word to each other since we got out of the car. We just sat there, alone by the river, breathing the air and watching the water. I thought about how rivers play tricks on you. You think you're looking at something you've looked at countless times, but really, you're seeing something entirely
new. Rivers are always moving, always changing from one second to the next. What you remember seeing the last time you stared at the river, even what you saw just before you blinked your eyes, isn't there anymore. Something new has come to replace it, and what you saw before is gone forever.

Silas was sitting with his back against the tree trunk. Some pine needles had fallen in his hair and I leaned over to brush them off. He jerked away from me and his hands flew up to his head.