“It’s wonderful to be here.” He moved back stiffly.
She wanted him to change into something of Dennis’s. He patted himself off with a dish towel and insisted he was fine. Dennis wasn’t home yet, she said. Gordon felt panicky. He had never talked to her alone before. Pale ale, Harrington’s newest, she said, taking a beer from the refrigerator. Her family owned the Harrington Brewery in Collerton. Before becoming Dennis’s father-in-law, Mr. Harrington had been his patient, then his golf partner. The friendship had cooled, however, with Dennis’s growing attention to Lisa, ten years younger and just out of college. Socializing with the brother of a notorious killer had been a bit of a hoot for the boozy, handsome Harringtons, but mixing bloodlines was the last thing they had ever imagined for their only child.
“How is it?” she asked with his first sip.
“Good,” he lied.
“It’s even lighter than the one last time,” she said.
He sat on a stool at the long green-granite counter separating the kitchen from what Dennis had called the great room. At Fortley they called the day lounge the big room, though he had never known why, since it could hold only ten or fifteen men at a time. He had to be careful; the half bottle of beer he’d had his first night here had gone right to his head. He didn’t even really like the taste. Lisa was making room in the refrigerator for the watermelon. He wished she’d open the cake box. He had remembered her saying once that chocolate cake with raspberry filling was her favorite dessert. Dennis found it strange that he could recall such random facts. It came from having so little contact with people, so naturally he would remember exactly who had said what to him.
Lisa sat next to him and guillotined the wire cutter down through the block of cheese on the marble tray. She was tall, olive-skinned, with thick chestnut hair that shone in the light. Her long legs looped around the stool. She was attractive in a rangy, boyish way, certainly not the prettiest of the girlfriends his brother had brought to Fortley. Gordon had hated those visits. Self-conscious with women, especially women he didn’t even know, he could never think of anything to say. Not only did Dennis do most of the talking, but he would be so unusually loquacious, so focused on Gordon’s reticence, that he found it necessary to explain in painful detail exactly what his brother was thinking, feeling, or trying so dismally to express. Lisa had been the only one to cut Dennis short. Leaning toward the small microphone in the glass, she had said in a robotic monotone, “Earth to Gordon. Earth to Gordon. Your brother thinks you’ve disappeared. Please inform him you are sitting right here in front of him.”
As she passed him a slice of cheese, her hair fell across her face. He was glad she was growing it long again. Around her neck was a diamond-studded cross on a thin gold chain. Lisa taught a religious-education class one night a week and sang in St. Margaret’s choir every Sunday. Gordon had felt guilty when Dennis said he’d never been to hear her sing.
Until his arrest, they had always gone to church as a family. When he first got to Fortley, the familiar ritual of Mass seemed his last link to a life he could no longer have. But it was also there in the blue block walls of the austere little chapel that his anguish and remorse were the worst. He would bury his face in his hands to muffle the sobs. Evil had invaded his aimless, blundering life, and he didn’t know how he could live with the consequences of what he had done. He stopped going to church. Back home, so had his family.
“Is Delores coming?” Lisa asked. “Dennis said you were going to ask her.”
“No. She’s not. She’s not coming.”
“Oh no! Why?”
He felt guilty that he’d disappointed her. He’d been thinking only of himself.
“Does she have to work? Is that it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her,” he added quickly.
“Well, that’s probably it.” She patted his wrist with consoling cheerfulness. “I’m sure that’s the only reason. She probably thinks she’d be too late. Why don’t you give her a call? Tell her to come when the store closes. Jimmy and Annie are still at swimming, and Lord knows when Dennis will get here.”
“No. What I meant was I didn’t ask her to come.”
“Why?” She blinked and shook her head. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t want to, I guess.” He found it amazing how in their assumptions people tried to control others. Lisa and Dennis thought Delores would be good for him, so therefore it had to happen.
She looked at him a moment. “She’s awfully nice.”
“I know.”
“She’s so easy to talk to.” She slid off the stool and threw the cheese wrapping into the trash. When she picked up the pastry box, he grinned. “And she really cares about you, Gordon. She really, really does.” She put it into the refrigerator, and he was disappointed. He wanted her to know that he’d remembered. “Ooo!” She leaned over the counter. “I know that look. It’s the old Loomis ‘Get outta my face, lady.’ Okay!” She waved her hand. “I said what I had to say, and now not another word about Delores Dufault.”
“No! No.” He had offended her. “It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about her. I guess I just don’t have a lot to say about her, that’s all. Or at least not now, anyway. I mean, I’ve just got so much else I’m trying to do right now.”
“You sound like your brother,” she said as she slid open the glass door. He followed her out onto the glistening white deck. She was telling him that Dennis’s dream was to have his own medical complex. He seemed to spend every free moment looking at real estate parcels.
“That sounds interesting.” Gordon eased carefully into a canvas chair that creaked and sagged under his weight. Afraid it might break, he was afraid to move.
“I think Dennis is tired of root canals and pulling wisdom teeth. What he really wants is to be some kind of mogul. Like that. That’s what he wants.” She pointed to the label on the beer bottle. “To have his name on something. Loomis.” She scrolled her finger in the air. “The Loomis Dental-Surgical-Big Deal Medical Park.”
Her laugh made him squirm. “It’s beautiful out here,” he said, looking toward the gently rolling green hills. Four golfers with pull carts moved through the rose-tinted twilight.
“Maybe you and Dennis can play this weekend.”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know how. I never played before,” he added, seeing her frown.
“Dennis’ll teach you.”
“No. It’s too late. I’m too old.”
“Not for golf!” she scoffed.
“But that’s something you learn when you’re young.”
Dennis hadn’t played golf as a kid, she said. But Dennis was a born athlete, he reminded her. Sports had always come naturally. “Like everything else. Dennis just had the touch. No matter what he did.”
“That must’ve been a little hard to swallow, huh? I mean, you being the older brother.”
“Actually, I was always very proud of Dennis. He was very, very gifted.” He smiled. “And in a way, it diverted attention away from me. Which I wanted!” he added. “I was always so big. All I ever wanted was to fade into the background, and that’s not easy when you’re bigger than everyone else.” He laughed.
“Oh! Poor Gordon.” She patted his arm.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said stiffly. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself or making excuses. That’s just the way it was. Actually, it wasn’t until Fortley that I finally appreciated being so big.”
“But . . .” She sighed. “But in a way that’s part of it, when you think of it. I mean, being so big and always holding back. It all just seems so unfair. I mean, if you hadn’t felt that way, you probably wouldn’t have even gone with Jerry Cox that night, and none of this would have happened.”
“But it did.”
“But you didn’t mean to . . .” She gestured for the unspeakable.
“No. I don’t think that way. I can’t,” he said uneasily. If Dennis were here, he would have cut her off by now.
“You have to! You can’t keep being so hard on yourself, Gordon.”
At the trial his lawyer had portrayed him as a loner, a loser, a big, goofy kid so desperate for friendship that he had unquestioningly followed the sly, handsome, popular Jerry Cox into the house that night.
So what?
the prosecutor had roared during his closing argument.
So what if he was the most unhappy boy in Collerton? Or in the universe? What justification could that possibly be for taking the lives of two innocent people?
“I have to be realistic, that’s all. I did what I did. And nothing can change that. Nothing.” If it were anyone else but Lisa, he would have gotten up and left.
“That’s what you say, but that’s not really what you mean, is it?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean,” he said coldly.
“I look at you and I see this . . . this tightness. Like a coil. Like it’s all inside and you can’t get rid of it.”
That she might think him still capable of violence left him speechless for a moment. “It’s hard. I—”
“Of course it’s hard, because you’re too hard on
yourself,
Gordon. God’s forgiven you. I know He has. Now why can’t you do the same?” She rubbed her arm, frowning. “You didn’t mean to . . . It’s not like you wanted to . . . to do that. You were just a kid. You were scared.”
What else was there to say? That Janine Walters had been so scared she wet the bed? That she wasn’t supposed to have been there? Jerry Cox had said the house would be empty, that she and her husband were in New York for the weekend. But Jerry Cox had said a lot of things that night, that she was hot for him and always left the key in the garage for him to let himself in any time he wanted. He said the booze was in the back pantry, so the plan was to just help themselves and then be on their way. But then Jerry started opening drawers in the dark kitchen and feeling around inside cupboards for the money he said they owed him for yardwork. Probably upstairs, he said. She did that sometimes, left it in her underwear drawer for him, wrapped up in the silk panties she’d worn that day.
It had all been said, all written down somewhere, delivered in testimony no one believed. Why should they? And even if they did, which word, fact, or detail would change a thing? No matter what he knew and remembered, the truth was ultimately meaningless. Like her grave marker, there remained only this rock-solid, irrefutable pyramid of facts: Suffocated or strangled, Janine Walters had died and would always be dead, no matter how awkward, scared, misled, lonely, or gullible the boy Gordon Loomis had been.
It was murder!
the prosecutor had cried.
Murder! Nothing else.
It was what it was.
The front door flew open and the damp-haired children raced through the kitchen, calling for their mother. Gordon stood up as they burst onto the deck. “Come here, Jimmy, Annie,” Lisa said, gathering them close as if suddenly for comfort.
With all three facing him, Gordon’s self-consciousness boiled to a rising panic as Lisa told them how lucky they were to have their wonderful uncle Gordon back home again and with them forever and ever.
“Now you both go give him a great big hug and a kiss,” she said, nudging them along. Jimmy forced a smile. His younger sister glanced back at her mother. “You’ll have to bend down, Gordon,” Lisa said. “Otherwise they can’t reach you.”
He bent forward, but sharing his discomfort, the children tilted their heads away from his clumsy embrace. He felt bad. He had positioned their pictures so that their beautiful faces were his first vision with the morning light into his cell and his last with sleep. Yet he was as much a stranger to them as they were to him.
“Now you go sit in the corner and tell Uncle Gordon all about yourselves,” Lisa said on her way into the kitchen.
Gordon and the children had the same pleading expressions as they watched her go. Though he already knew the answers from Lisa’s letters and visits, he asked Jimmy what grade he was in: Fourth. His teacher’s name: Mr. Kelly. Did he like school? Well, sometimes.
“Sometimes he hates it,” Annie confided, careful to look at her brother and not her uncle.
“No, I don’t!” Jimmy fixed her in his indignant stare. “I never hate school. I just don’t always like it the same, that’s all.”
“Yes, you did! You said you hated it, and Mommy got really mad because we’re not supposed to say ‘hate.’ We’re not supposed to hate anything.”
“You’re not?” Gordon said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” The little girl wet her lips and brushed the long dark hair from her face, conviction growing as she explained that hating was ugly and if you hated something, then you’d be ugly, too, like a creature or some kind of monster everybody was afraid of.
Like your uncle,
Gordon thought. His first night here, Dennis had leaped out of his chair when Jimmy pushed his sister out of his way.
“She’s only six, that’s why she still believes in monsters,” Jimmy said, laughing.
“Mom!” Annie called, running inside, leaving Gordon alone with the boy. He couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“What was the jail like?” Jimmy asked.
“Uh, big. It was big. There were a lot of . . . different parts to it.”
“Did you ever try and break out? Like, saw through the bars or something?”
“No. No, I never did anything like that.”
“How come? Didn’t you want to get out?”
“Well, I knew I had to wait. Until it was time. Until—”
“I woulda climbed right over the wall, at night, with black stuff all over my face and these special things on my shoes, like suction cups that’re so strong they—”
“Jimmy,” Lisa said from the doorway. She sent him downstairs to apologize to his sister.
Gordon went inside and watched Lisa cover the zucchini and summer squash with foil wrap. “It’s getting so late. Seven-twenty.” She put the casserole back in the oven. “Maybe we should just start without him.”
“I don’t mind waiting,” he said.
“I do. He’s missed dinner just about every night this week.”