The Dismantling (32 page)

As he waited for the train on the elevated platform, he took his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He'd charged it overnight, but he was only looking at his messages for the first time now. He found a text from DaSilva, from the night he and Maria had driven to Montauk. He read it with the sensation of plunging down a well, the bottom falling out from under him: “Where the fuck did you go? Call me.” He deleted the text, his fingers shaking.

The only new voice mail was from Howard Crewes. Simon pressed the phone against his ear and, hunching against the wind and the clatter of the tracks, listened to Howard's message.

“Shit, Simon.” Crewes spoke in a voice almost comically fatigued, like that of a healthy man calling in sick to work. “How could you go see Cheryl like that? I'm sure she was pretty damn clear, but in case you didn't understand: do not contact her again. Get it? You and Cheryl, you've never met, never spoken, nothing. Same thing with you and me now. I just want to forget this ever happened.” There was a pause before Crewes finished: “Maybe I'm being naive, but I'm praying it all ends here. I just hope you weren't lying about that girl. I hope she really is someplace where they never find her.”

Simon erased the message. He didn't know what DaSilva's death would mean for Crewes and Cheryl. Probably it would help them. Without Simon and DaSilva, the hospital was never going to find Maria; any worries about the money Crewes had paid her could probably end there. Simon felt sorry for Howard, all the man's best intentions in ruins, but he couldn't do any more for him now. Crewes was right: from this point forward, they'd never known each other.

He peered down the tracks: still no sign of his train.

He wondered what Katherine Peel would do when she found out DaSilva had been killed. She might assume the murder was somehow connected to Simon, but what would she do about it then? He knew how important medical school was to her, how ambitious and stubborn she was. Was she really going to risk derailing all that by going to the police with what she knew about DaSilva's scam? Wouldn't she rather just leave it alone? Her car though—the kid at the Montauk motel had seen it, maybe somebody at the Best Western as well. If she were reunited with the RAV4, she might be dragged into things whether she wanted to be or not.

Simon ran down the platform stairs and around the corner to the block where he'd parked the thing. It was right there, of course, exactly as he'd left it. He still had the keys in his pocket, and he unlocked it, rummaging through the glove box until he found Katherine's registration and insurance. He shoved the papers into his bag—he'd shred them later, at his father's house—along with her cell phone, and then he hunted around the cluttered trunk until he found a small screwdriver. He looked around the block: there was nobody to see him. Quickly, he removed the license plates and stuffed them into his bag too. He locked the car again and forced himself to walk slowly and calmly back to the train station. They'd eventually be able to link Katherine to the RAV4's VIN, but he figured she would be smart enough to say the car had been stolen. He tossed the car keys and her cell phone into one garbage can and his own phone into another, and then he trotted up the stairs, a Rockaway-bound A train pulling into the station just as he reached the platform.

 • • • 

W
IND
cutting across Jamaica Bay. Whitecaps slapping against the base of the tracks. White line of sky pressed thin between black clouds and black water. On Beach 116th, snowbanks worn down to icy gray nubs. An upended trash bin spilling Styrofoam cups and soda cans onto the sidewalk. The pizza parlor, the shuttered surf shop, the fogged windows of Derry Hills. At his house on Beach 113th, a single yellow lamp glowing in his father's bedroom.

As he climbed the stairs to the porch, a shadow moved behind the glass. The kitchen light switched on, and Simon saw his father backlit—a cutout, an absence. Then Michael turned toward the light, and he looked exactly like what he was: a middle-aged man who lived alone, tidying his kitchen.

Simon didn't wait any longer. He crossed the porch and knocked on the door.

 • • • 

M
ichael didn't ask Simon where he'd been, why he'd skipped their dinner earlier in the week without explanation, why he hadn't returned any of his messages. Instead, he pulled his son inside the house, sat him down at the kitchen table, and made him breakfast: fried eggs and sweet Italian sausage and white toast. He poured the last of the carafe's coffee—weak and slightly burnt, just like always—into a mug, set it on the table, and leaned against the counter to watch Simon eat. Simon knew it must be obvious he was in some kind of trouble, and for once he was immensely grateful for his father's circumspection. After Simon finished his breakfast—devouring every last scrap of food, his body abruptly realizing it hadn't been fed in almost twenty-four hours—Michael retrieved the bottle of Jameson from the sideboard and poured them each a tumbler, two fingers, no ice. It wasn't yet ten in the morning, but neither of them much cared.

Where do you start? How do you begin to be honest when there are still so many truths you cannot afford to reveal? Simon wanted to tell his father how Amelia drowned—the real story, leaving out nothing, not their argument, not his spying, not his shameful moment of paralysis before he jumped in after her—but he thought his actions would seem so alien, so inexplicable, that he wanted first to build a bridge, to give that night context and meaning, to show where both he and Amelia were coming from when they arrived together on that beach. He first needed his father to understand how it felt when Simon realized that Amelia was going to grow up to hate him. If Michael could understand this, maybe he would be able to one day understand what had eventually followed from it, how those few seconds of hesitation on the groyne had colored the balance of Simon's life, insinuating themselves into every calibration of self, all those countless subconscious adjustments to his own understanding of who he was; how those few seconds had made him out into a coward, a failure; how a sense of inadequacy had become the imperative force in his psyche, a kind of perverse lodestar guiding him into the embrace of its darker cousins, shame and guilt.

There was no direct causative line from any one point in Simon's life to the horrible scene on the beach in Montauk, to the fact that he was now, in all but the most literal reading of events, a murderer. But there was a course to be mapped nonetheless, a chain, no matter how tangled, that bound the Simon who had pointed a gun at DaSilva's head to his younger and more innocent self. If he couldn't ever explain where the course had ultimately led—and he couldn't; he would forever protect Maria with his silence—at least he might help his father understand who he had become and how he might now change, if it was still possible, into someone better.

“Want more?” Michael nodded at Simon's plate.

“I'm all right now,” Simon said. “It's just like high school, remember? How if I was stressed out over a test or something, you had to force-feed me spaghetti before I realized I was hungry?”

Michael swirled his whiskey. “You want to tell me why you're stressed?”

“Not really. Not yet anyway.” Simon paused. “Right now I want to talk about Amelia.”

Michael shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair, like an antenna recalibrating to better receive some distant, obscure signal. “I'm listening.”

“Remember when you asked me to watch over her, right after we moved out here?” Simon said. “I took what you said very seriously.”

“I know you did.”

“Yeah, and that was mostly because you were telling me to do something I already thought I should be doing. I thought she needed my help and that I wasn't giving her enough of it. But I was wrong,” Simon said. “What she needed was for me to start letting go, not to hold on any tighter.”

“You're being too hard on yourself.”

“You don't know that,” Simon said sharply. He took a breath. “I'm sorry. I just . . . I never really listened to her. That was the problem. Taking care of her—even when she didn't want me to—it gave me a purpose. I did it for me more than I did it for her.” He finished his whiskey. “Even back then, I realized I was always going to disappoint her. Over and over and over again. The harder I tried not to, the worse it would be. I knew this, and yet still I refused to accept it.”

“You were doing the best you could.” Michael looked steadily at his son. “I could see that.”

“It wasn't right. It wasn't good enough.”

“Sometimes it's not going to be, and that's just the way it is.” His father stubbed out his cigarette. “I obviously know all about that.”

Silence then, interrupted only by the rasp of Michael striking a match, the crackle of the new cigarette catching.

“Dad, listen to me,” Simon suddenly blurted out. “I dropped out of med school, okay? I've been lying to you. It's been almost a year already.”

His father focused on the lit end of his cigarette, puffing until the cherry glowed a healthy orange. He inhaled and then let a long, thin stream of smoke out the corner of his mouth, prolonging the moment, Simon thought, maybe even relishing it. Simon braced himself for anger or disbelief, even pity. Instead, his father said, “I thought you had.”

“What? You did?”

“Give me some credit, Simon. I'm not an idiot.”

“But then . . . why didn't you say anything? Why did you let me lie to you like that?”

“Because I wasn't going to shame you into telling the truth. You'd tell me when you needed to.” He paused. “And isn't that what happened?”

“Jesus, Dad.” Simon had to laugh. Of course his father would sit silently by and watch Simon dig himself into such an absurd and unnecessary hole, the behavior fitting Michael in its passive-aggressive combination of tact and cruelty by omission.

“I don't know why you dropped out though,” Michael said. “I was hoping you'd tell me that sometime.”

“I had some difficulties with anatomy lab.” His father tapped his cigarette expectantly against the ashtray's edge. “I, uh, well . . . I guess I kind of had a breakdown.”
Why not call it what it was?
“I saw Amelia everywhere. The way she was in the morgue, I mean, that Amelia. I still see her like that sometimes, in dreams mostly, sometimes just when I close my eyes.”

“But it was worse then?”

“Yeah. Much worse. The girl we were dissecting . . . I guess, for me, she
became
Amelia, and I couldn't stand what we were doing to her.”

Michael stared down at the kitchen table. He rubbed his thumb across the wood, smearing spilled ash into the grain. “What have you been doing since you left school?”

“I don't want to talk about that. But it's over. I hope it is, anyway.”

Michael nodded as though he'd expected this answer. “Could you go back if you wanted to?”

“Not to that school, no.”

“A different one?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe.”

“Then do it.” Michael lifted his eyes from the table. “You look at my life and you see a waste, don't you?”

Simon flushed. “No, I—”

“Stop.” Michael raised his hand. “I know you do. You think I've given up, and it's true, in some ways I have. But I also hoped I might put my ruin to some use. I thought I could take on most of the grief and pain over what happened to Amelia so you wouldn't have to. You'd be free to live.”

“Wait,” Simon said. “It's not like there's a fixed amount of suffering, and if you take on more, there's less left for me. It doesn't work like that.”

“It can if you let it. My life is done changing or improving, Simon. This”—he gestured as though to take in the house, Rockaway, the available world—“this is what's left for me.” The words bordered on hyperbole, but the way his father spoke was restrained and shorn of self-pity. “I'm not telling you to forget her. But, you want to make your sister's death mean anything? Go out and do something good with your life.”

Michael fell silent then. Simon felt the warmth of the whiskey spread through his body. The kitchen smelled of burned coffee and sausage, a cocooning thickness to the warm air. Frost edged the windowpanes, and the sky outside was heavy and gray as poured concrete.

“Dad,” Simon said.

“Yeah?”

“Is it all right if I stay here for a while? Just until . . . I don't know exactly. Until I don't have to anymore.”

“You don't have to ask.” Michael stood and brought Simon's dirty plate to the sink. “Stay as long as you need.”

 • • • 

S
imon left his father in the kitchen and carried his bag up the stairs, to his old bedroom. He turned on the lamp and sat on the mattress. He wondered where Maria was at that exact moment. It was difficult to imagine her progress when he didn't know where she was going, what her plan was. What they had done together—what she had forced him into doing—was unforgivable, and their complicity would bind them forever, no matter how far the physical distance between them. An invisible, unbreakable string. She was strong—he knew that—stronger than he could have imagined, but still he feared that her suffering wasn't finished. He hoped, despite everything, he was wrong about that. He hoped that her wounds, all of them, of body and psyche and spirit, would heal with a perfection he knew wasn't often granted. He hoped she might one day discover a peace that didn't rely upon the promise of violence, that she might one day be happy. But he also knew that what he hoped for her—what he wanted for her—didn't matter anymore. This was her own life. It wasn't about what he wanted, and it never had been.

Simon pulled Amelia's lockbox out of his duffel and held it for a few minutes in his lap. He spun the combination and removed her diary. He ran his thumb over the red cover, the edges of the pages wavy and brittle. Then he removed the elastic strap and opened the book, and he began to read.