The Long Way Home (13 page)

He was on the short side but trim and fit as if he went to the gym a lot. He was black, with a round face and a thin mustache. He had short hair and a receding hairline. His features looked like someone had pushed them flat. But the features that really caught your attention were his eyes. His eyes were cold and smart. They watched you and took in everything. Detective Rose always gave you the feeling that he knew everything you’d done and everything you were thinking.

Even then, even at the very start, I could see there were a lot of reasons for Detective Rose to be suspicious of me. I could see that he might even think I had killed Alex. Alex and I had argued—there were witnesses who had seen us and heard us. And Alex had obviously known the person who approached him in the park. Then there was the fact that Alex had died gasping out my name: “Charlie . . . Charlie . . .”

So, sure, all of that put together made me nervous. Nervous—but not scared. I wasn’t scared because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.

I told Rose what happened, the whole story about Alex and me. He asked me questions and I answered them. When he was done, he asked me to give him the clothes I was wearing the night before. I said sure. He asked for a sample of my DN A. I said sure again. Some guy came in and took some spit out of my mouth with a cotton swab. Finally Detective Rose asked if I’d take a lie detector test and I said another sure and I did.

A couple of days later, Rose came by my house. He acted differently this time. His eyes stayed cool and watchful, but he smiled more. He talked to my father in a friendly voice.

He told my dad that there was nothing to worry about. It would be weeks before all the tests came back, the DN A and everything. But I had passed the lie detector test with flying colors and, he said, he was willing to “stake his reputation as a detective” on the fact that I hadn’t killed Alex.

Well, again (this is what Beth told me that I told her), I wasn’t scared, but it was a relief to be off the list of suspects.

All the same, I was still pretty down about Alex. Everyone was. We had an assembly at school to talk about him. Mr. Woodman, the principal, who usually couldn’t put two sentences together without stumbling over his own tongue, suddenly became almost eloquent, talking about Alex’s life and how we would never know what he could have made of it. There was no clowning around in the auditorium while he spoke, the way there usually was. Everyone just sat there, looking grim. A lot of the girls were crying.

Sometime later that week, I phoned Beth. She had given me her number and I’d said I was going to call, so I did. Originally, I’d been going to ask her out. But we talked about it and, after the murder and everything, it didn’t seem right somehow to just go out to a movie or something. So we decided we would take a walk together instead and talk about things.

That Saturday, I met Beth down by the Spring River. There’s a really nice path there that goes along the river and through a birch tree forest. There’s a lane for bikes, but most of it is just for walking. We went in the morning before the path got crowded. In early autumn the birch leaves turn this really beautiful orange-yellow and the sun was shining through them so that they looked almost like fire against the blue of the sky. We walked under them side by side.

“It’s messed up about Alex,” I said.

“It’s really messed up,” said Beth. “It must be kind of weird for you to be one of the last people who saw him.”

“Yeah, it kind of is. I feel bad because we ended up arguing. Now I’ll never get to make it good.”

I told her all about what happened. I told her about the police questioning me and so on.

“I still can’t believe it.”

“I went by his house yesterday to visit his mother,” Beth said. “I never saw anyone look like she did. She looked like she was the one who died. I mean, first her husband leaves and now . . .”

“It was nice of you to go over there.”

“Alex and I got to be friends last summer. I knew he’d been having a lot of troubles since his dad left and . . . Well, the way he was acting, I couldn’t go on seeing him, you know. But deep down, he was a good person. I wish we could’ve helped him somehow.”

“Me too. I always figured he’d straighten himself out, you know. You never figure someone that young is just going to run out of time.”

“Do you think they’ll catch the person who did it?”

“Oh yeah. Sure they will. I mean, it’s probably not that big a mystery. Alex was getting in with some bad kids at his school, getting into some bad stuff. Drinking, hanging out. I’m sure there were drugs too.”

“I know there were,” said Beth.

“The police probably know about all those people already. They just have to find the right one.”

I sounded very sure of it, Beth told me. But, in fact, the police investigation went on for weeks and there were no suspects. And life went on too. And, after a while, people didn’t talk about the murder all the time and they didn’t feel sad all the time. Alex and his death sort of faded into the background.

Beth and I started walking home together after school. It still didn’t feel right to date somehow, but we went to lunch a couple of times and bowling once. Then one Saturday afternoon, we went to a movie together. There were a lot of movies at the malls in town, but we didn’t go to one of those. We went to a little theater on a small street near the airport. The theater was kind of run-down and the pictures that played there were months old, but it was a nice place to be sometimes because it was out of the way and you were less likely to see any of the people you knew. I guess there was something about me and Beth being together that had begun to feel kind of private at that point.

Anyway, we were sitting in the theater before the lights went down, passing a popcorn bag back and forth and just kind of staring at the advertising slide show on the screen and talking about stuff.

And Beth said, “I feel a little strange about this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “About going to the movies?”

“I don’t know. I still think about Alex and everything. I mean, I know life goes on, but . . . do you feel like it might be wrong for us to be here?”

There was a silence. Then I said, “I feel . . .”

But before I could finish, the lights went down and the movie trailers started.

When we came outside after the movie, it was dark. We decided we would go back into town and have dinner at a place called Marie’s where a lot of the kids hung out. As we were walking to our cars, I took hold of Beth’s hand. It was the first time I had done that.

When we reached her car, we stopped and stood facing each other. I was looking into her eyes. Her eyes were blue, but they were a sort of pale blue with flecks of gold in them. The color reminded me of flowers.

“What were you going to say?” she asked me. “Before the movie started. I said it felt a little wrong for us to be there and you said, ‘I feel . . .’ and then you didn’t finish. What were you going to say? Do you remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. I was going to say: I feel like nothing about you and me being together is wrong. I feel like when we’re together, it’s just right, like it’s supposed to happen. It’s weird, too, because it’s not like in the movies with music playing or fireworks or—or anything that I expected. It’s just like . . . I don’t know, like a little click, like— You ever do jigsaw puzzles? And you find the right piece and it clicks in? It feels like that.”

Beth said, “It feels like that to me too,” and I kissed her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Worst Thing Ever

The wind outside had fallen off, but, all the same, a chill drifted in through the broken window of the Ghost Mansion’s parlor. Beth paused in her story. She shivered and I shivered and we both looked away.

It was kind of embarrassing, that’s all—sitting there, listening to Beth describe what I said to her and how I kissed her. It was embarrassing—and it was molto weird, too, because I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t remember saying that stuff about the jigsaw pieces fitting together and everything—although, I have to admit, when she told it to me, I thought it was a pretty cool thing to have said. Because, the thing was, I could feel it, even now. I could feel it was true right that second, sitting there with her.

“I bet that was nice,” I said. “Kissing you for the first time. I wish I could remember what that was like.”

“It was like this,” she told me.

And then we didn’t say anything for a while.

And for a while, Beth told me, Alex and the murder fell into the background of our lives. Just about everything did, except for us being together. Walking home together, going out together, being around each other. It was as if we had made some kind of discovery—as if we had discovered something that had been right there in front of us and yet hidden away at the same time. I guess we’d fallen in love. Which, I guess, happens a lot in the world. But it felt to us like it had never happened to anyone before. It felt like nothing that special and yet so incredibly
right
could happen any more than once in a million years.

We were together every minute we could be. We did homework together and watched TV together. We talked and talked to each other, telling each other the stories of our lives, everything we hoped to do after we got out of school and all the secret stuff we thought about that we never told anyone.

“It’s like we’re two different computers downloading our programs into each other,” I said to her. “It’s like we’re becoming a two-machine network running the same software.”

She laughed at me. “Only a guy would say something like that.”

“Why?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s, like, the least romantic thing I think I’ve ever heard. In fact, it may be the least romantic thing anybody’s ever said.”

I laughed too. “Come on! You think it’s the least romantic thing anybody’s ever said? Ever? What about, like, cabbage. Or mud. Or, Hey, Al, I dropped my cabbage in the mud.”

“Even that is more romantic than comparing us to two machines with the same software.”

“It’s a very romantic concept.”

“To a guy!”

“It’s like a love song or something.” I sang it to her: “You’re the software that makes my computer full—and that’s why I think you’re so beauter-full . . .”

That made her laugh even more. Or maybe it was just my singing voice, which, I’ve noticed, makes a lot of people laugh.

Anyway, it seems we spent a lot of time together talking about stupid stuff like that and then laughing about it. And we would wonder to each other sometimes why anyone would ever do anything else, why everyone didn’t spend all of their time just saying stupid things and laughing. It seemed like the best thing two people could possibly do.

But then we stopped. Suddenly. We stopped laughing. We stopped saying stupid things. All our happiness came crashing down around us.

It happened on a Tuesday, early morning, before school. I called Beth and told her we had to meet at our place. I told her it was important.

Our place was the path by the river, the path where we’d walked that first time together. We met there sometimes in the early morning when there were no crowds, no one except the occasional young professional getting in some biking exercise before the day began.

The autumn had gone on now and the leaves were falling. The branches of the birches were almost bare and the yellow leaves lay in the grass beside the path and blew rattling across the pavement. The weather was turning too. The sky that morning was steel gray, and there was a damp chill in the air that told you winter was coming.

Beth got to the path before me and waited. When she saw me coming, when she saw my face, she knew right away that something was really wrong.

“Charlie? Are you okay? What’s the matter?” she said.

She reached out with both her hands to take my hands. But I wouldn’t give them to her. I stood at a little distance with my thumbs in my pockets. I looked at her and my face was hard, she said, as if I was trying to look angry or mean. But she saw something else in my eyes.

“Look,” I told her. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but we have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop seeing each other. We can’t see each other anymore.”

“Charlie, what’re you talking about? Why?”

“Well, because . . . We just should. That’s the way I want it, all right? It’s—I don’t know—it’s just getting too serious for me. After a while, we’ll go to college or whatever and . . . what’s the point, you know? Look, I just think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t feel the same way about you anymore and I—I just want to end it, that’s all.”

Beth stared at me a long time. She had a sick feeling in her stomach, but it wasn’t what she expected. She wasn’t sad, as if we were breaking up. Instead, she was afraid and she wasn’t sure why.

She shook her head. She stepped closer to me, studying my face, studying my eyes.

Then she said, “You’re lying to me, Charlie. I never saw you lie before, but I know it when I see it. Why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not . . .”