The Dart League King (26 page)

She does not want there to be anything wrong with him. It is frightening. She wants him to be the same Tristan she has always thought he was. She looks over at him, guarding herself under the blanket.

The look in his eyes is painful, as if, even in the face of the evidence, he is surprised to see the question in her eyes, the question they both know is there. “I didn’t kill her,” he says. He is quiet for some time and then says it again. “I didn’t.” He looks out at the lake. “But I let her drown,” he says, and she starts to cry again, softly, to herself. Maybe he is a coward, he says, maybe there is something missing in him that other people have. He doesn’t know what it is.

And she begins to feel sorry. Sorry for the girl, sorry about whatever it is that has happened, sorry that the whole world has changed in some way now, sorry, even, for him. He is staring down at the water and she has never seen him weakened like this, she cannot help her heart from going out to him. This is the Tristan she has always wondered about, the real Tristan down beneath the cool exterior, but he has come to her too late.
“I still don’t understand,” she says. She pulls her hands from under the blanket and places them in her lap. She is no longer shivering. She shakes her head slowly back and forth. “This is crazy,” she says. “
Why
is she up there on the hill? If it was an accident, what is she doing there?”

He moves his feet back and forth in the water. He says he doesn’t know. He says that he remembers standing right here on the dock after it happened. He looks out into the cove, his eyes seeming to focus on a certain spot, and she imagines the girl going under there, a corpselike girl, a dead body sinking, not the live person she actually would have been. He was alone, he says. Instead of calling the police, he went to bed. He couldn’t understand what was happening. The next morning there was no body. There was no
body
, he says. He stands up suddenly, starts pacing on the dock. He stops with his back turned toward her, framed in the lighted windows of the house. If there had been a body, he says, it would have seemed real. He didn’t want it to have happened, so he acted like it hadn’t. It was easy when there was nothing but the memory in his head. He stands there with his arms across his chest, his head down. “Thank you for coming here with me,” he says. “Thank you. I feel like myself now.” He lifts his head back, his face pointed at the sky, so that she can just make out the shape of his jaw against the lights, his mouth moving, as if he were speaking up into the stars. “It’s been a species of hell. Really. I didn’t even know it, but I’ve had an awful time. I’ve felt terrible. But now I feel like myself again.”

And she thinks that he’ll cry now, having opened up this far, but when he sits down next to her he isn’t crying. She wants to comfort him the way she would comfort her own child, but
there’s still something in him that won’t let her. “That doesn’t explain everything,” she says, though she can’t think what else needs explaining.

“I’m very tired,” he says. He closes his eyes and sways his head from side to side and puts his hand to the back of his neck. It is like he is almost a dead person himself, a person who has been drained of everything, falling limp. But he goes on speaking. Her body didn’t come up for a long time, he can’t remember how many days. Weeks. He had hoped it would go away, that
she
would just go away, but then one day there she was. He buried her because he couldn’t tell anyone. He thought about it, he tried to make himself, but he couldn’t. The police wouldn’t have believed him by then. He lies back, on the boards of the dock, and puts his arm over his eyes. She can see his Adam’s apple move up and down. He doesn’t know what else there is to tell her. He doesn’t think that there is really anything more to say. She keeps looking at him. “I’m glad you know,” he says. “You’re the only person I could tell.”

Maybe there is still some hope for him. Maybe this is not the end. What has he done, actually? She cannot quite get it through her head. He has failed. He has failed to save a girl from drowning, a girl who could have been Kelly Ashton, because he was scared. He has failed—because he was scared, because there is something wrong with him, because he has never had to grow up the way she has, to learn that the world makes you take responsibility—to tell anyone, to report the girl’s death. He has failed to see that she was a person, that she would not just go away. He has failed to report her body. He has buried her on a hill. In the grand scheme of things, she can just see how he would get away with it. Think how he would
appear to the police, to a judge, to a jury. A young man with a bright future, a college degree, a stack of awards and a bunch of admiring professors. He had behaved in a cowardly, disgusting fashion, but look at how handsome, how smart, how charming—it is just such people who get the second chances. She is not afraid of him anymore. She is simply sad. She wants to go home and take Hayley out of the crib and hold her. She wishes she had stayed with Russell. She thinks if it had been Russell instead of Tristan at the lake that night—Russell, clumsy silly Russell, she knows he would have saved the girl.

She looks at Tristan and sees someone who is defenseless. All the barriers are down. “Will you sit up for a second and look at me?” she says. He does—the shaggy hair, the slumped shoulders, the downcast expression. He will tell her the truth now. He has been telling her the truth all along. The question she wants to ask is not important anymore, and she feels guilty for even wanting to know. “Did I ever mean anything to you?” she asks him. “Really—did I ever mean anything?”

His eyes are on hers. His gaze is open. He isn’t hiding anything. “Yes,” he says.

It could have been her out here with him that night, if he’d thought enough to call her. “Would you have saved me?” she says.

He looks at her and nods his head up and down slightly, not to say yes, but to acknowledge her right to ask the question. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he says.

She looks around at the stars, the bright moon, the water, the trees on the cliffs, the house with its glistening windows. It is one of the most beautiful summer nights she has ever seen. But she just wants it to be over. She lowers her eyes and
looks at her hands. They are not shaking anymore. “Tristan,” she says, “we have to go up to the house and call the police.” Everything is quiet. He doesn’t answer. She glances up at him and sees that his eyes have narrowed, that he is resisting. “You don’t have any choice,” she says.

But that is a mistaken view, to his way of thinking. Up until now she has made perfect sense, and he has told her everything. He has been in love with her for the past fifteen minutes. “Maybe we could just leave her there,” he says. He doesn’t hear a sound from Kelly Ashton and he is afraid to look at her face. But feeling so much like himself, feeling so much like the self he used to be, way back before any of this, he does not want to call the police. It does not seem fair to turn himself in. “I don’t have any reason to be sure they’ll find me—I could just leave town,” he says. “You could come with me.” And he wants her to. He means it.

But it is the wrong thing. He can tell that by the way she doesn’t answer. She isn’t saying anything, and he won’t look at her. He looks down at his feet. When he puts his toe down just on top of the water, tiny green waves spread out. The water appears almost opaque, more solid than liquid, an interesting effect. She is right, he knows. She is being logical. Of course she won’t go with him now, not anywhere. Of course there is only one thing to do, call the police. In her presence he is, for the first time, truly ashamed. But shame is not a good motivation for calling the police. If he calls the police, more people will know, and he is beginning to see that it is better for people not to know. Only one person knows right now, and he is beginning to wish that she didn’t, that he hadn’t brought her here.

“Tristan,” Kelly Ashton says, “you can’t think like that. I
don’t believe you really mean it. I don’t believe you’d just leave her here like that and run away.” She is standing over him, looming there, her shadow cast out over the water by the lantern. “I don’t think of you like that, and I’ve known you for a long, long time.” That’s all she says, as if that’s proof enough, as if the length of time she’s known him is an indication of anything. And it
should
be, he knows that. The past should count for something.

Now he looks up at her. She nods her head up the hill at the house, the light framing her so that he can’t see her face clearly. She is just a silhouette, a voice talking in the dark. “We’re going up there to call the police,” she says. “I promise I’ll stay with you till they’re through. And I’ll tell them everything you said to me, and I’ll tell them I know you’re telling the truth. It’ll be OK. It’s the only thing you can do.”

His toe makes tiny waves. In the lantern light, the water looks viscous and green. Here is the strangest thing—she is right, but she is also entirely wrong. He has operated up till now on the mistaken assumption that he has had a choice in the matter. He doesn’t. She is right. But she is wrong that the only choice is to call the police. That, he realizes, is not a choice at all. That is not even one of the options open to him. It would be open to someone else, but not to Tristan. He should have seen this coming, he realizes now, from the moment he decided to tell Kelly Ashton. She is who she is and he is who he is and the outcome should have been clear.

He looks at his feet in the water for a moment and considers his situation. It is a practical matter, really. Yes, they know someone was with Liza Hatter in the library, and maybe, by now, they even know it was him. And yes, Kelly Ashton was
seen leaving the bar with him by at least one other person. But he still has money, and he still has precious time. A bank withdrawal, a plane ticket, and he is in Buenos Aires. He has a passport. He speaks the language. He can blend in.
Un apartamento
,
un trabajo
,
un nombre nuevo
. It could happen. It could work. He could get started right now if not for Kelly Ashton.

He is only slightly surprised to be taking the knife from his belt loop. He recognizes the moment, of course—like everyone else he knows the story, he’s seen the popular films, he has read novels and newspaper accounts. This is the moment when the formerly mild-mannered husband, the formerly mild-mannered father, the formerly mild-mannered classmate or coworker or neighbor or childhood friend crosses the line definitively from sanity to insanity, from innocence to guilt. From now on, he can make no excuses. But he finds this line easy enough to cross—he has crossed so many already. He looks at his feet there in the water one last time, at how strange and alien they appear.

He stands and moves closer to her. Is she sure about her decision, he asks. He wants to know if she is sure. There is still time for her to change her mind, he tells her. And she backs away a little. He is close enough now to see the answer in her eyes. He has seen that look before. He breathes in deep and lets his head fall back, taking in the wide open space beneath the stars.

She
does
mean something to him. One part of him loves her, and it is that part right now that could almost break into tears. At one time, Kelly Ashton was the truest measure of his heart’s longing—even to this moment he can remember the day she spoke to him in art class, the day she formed in him the desires
that made him who he was then—the desire to be recognized, to be admired, to be loved. He left those desires behind. But there is another part of him, and it is still there, and it has been there his whole life. That part is made of baseless pride and boundless selfishness. That part cares nothing about anything but itself. He knows it, he hates it, he hates what it will make him do, but it is the stronger part of him in the end. There is no point in denying what it finally desires—the absence and the silence it has come to know, the only music and language it hears.

As she sees him come toward her, sees the knife he holds out in his hand, it might be that all she feels is fear, that it is all reduced to that, but there are other things beneath the surface of the fear, things that make her who she is, Kelly Ashton. She feels stupid. She has been fooled again. She is the mother of a two-year-old girl, and she has failed in her responsibilities to her daughter, Hayley, and those responsibilities—to protect, to provide for, to love, to
stay
—are more important to her than anything in the world. There is how her father disappeared, and how that changed her life, and how that disappearance might have led her to this place in which she herself might disappear, to be buried on the hillside. There is her mother and how Hayley will be left to her. And then a thought does rise to the surface from under the fear, a thought of Russell Harmon, and she is so glad she told him. He is a good person, and he will do the right things. These are her thoughts as she sees Tristan come closer and she raises her hands against him. She wants to tell Russell: there is a certain way to warm a bottle, there is a way she likes a scrambled egg, there is a way to potty train, there is a way to take her out of the bathtub and dry her
off, there is a way to adjust the car seat, there is a way to hold her when she cries, there is a way to put her in your arms at night and help her fall asleep, there is a way to smell her hair, there is a way to receive her smile and a way to smile back at her, there is a way to love her and make her feel loved and make her grow and keep her safe and you, her father, you will find it, Russell, please.

She is the mother of a two-year-old girl and if this man who wants to steal that from her thinks she will not fight him with every scrap of energy and strength she has, he is about to find out different, but the words she says are spoken as if from some other time, on some day long ago, to someone she thought she knew—
Take me home now, Tristan
.
I need to go home
.

 

In a few more hours, there is the sunrise. Everything has changed. The town itself looks different to Matt, rumbling along in his logging truck through the mist weaving up from the asphalt, the sky an unusually bright red. The buildings and the traffic signs look altered in this light, and he is the only one to see them, barreling through town on his way to Russell’s.