Reunion at Red Paint Bay (20 page)

Simon spun the dial to twenty minutes and pulled out the knob. The old dryer rattled on. “Well, I was drinking soda coming home and had to stop fast. The drink spilled all over me.” The lie came easily to him, no thought needed. He just opened his mouth and there it was.

“It must have been a really huge soda.”

“It was, from Burger World.”

Davey reached out and poked his arm. “You shouldn’t drink and drive, Dad. You could be arrested for that.”

“I think I’d get off easy since it was Sprite. But you’re right, I shouldn’t be drinking anything. Both hands on the wheel.” Simon saw his son’s eyes drift downward toward his wet, clinging boxers. He grabbed a towel from the pile on the washer and began drying himself. “Let’s not tell Mom about this, okay kiddo? I don’t want her to worry about my getting in an accident.”

“You mean you don’t want her yelling at you?”

“She doesn’t yell, she lectures.”

“Okay, I won’t tell.” Davey leaned back on the washer, as if getting comfortable in a familiar chair. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Then you wouldn’t have to tell her about me and Kenny, would you?”

“
Kenny and me
. What’d you two do this time?’

“His mom caught us playing mumblety-peg.”

“Mumblety-peg?”

“We weren’t throwing at ourselves, we were just tossing his jackknife at his sister’s teddy bear. If you hit him you lose.”

“What is it with you and knives all of a sudden?”

“You played mumblety-peg when you were a kid, didn’t you?”

Simon debated his answer. “A couple times, I guess.”

“So you know, knives are cool.”

“They aren’t so cool when they cut you. If you don’t stop playing with them I’m going to ground you for a month or however long it takes to get your attention.” The boy struck the washer with his heels in a rhythm, one two, one two. Simon grabbed the legs to silence them. “Are you listening to me?”

“So we have a deal?”

It was the wrong thing to do, bargain with your kid over playing with knives. No parent in his right mind would do it. Perhaps he wasn’t in his right mind, temporary insanity taking over, or more precisely, situational insanity. But how many times could he claim
that? “Okay,” he said, “this once, so as not to upset Mom, we’ll keep our secrets.”

The boy spit on his hand and held it out. “Seal it.”

“I’m not spitting on my hand, Davey.”

“Then the deal can be broken.”

Simon lifted his hand in front of his mouth and made a spitting sound. The boy clenched their palms together, then turned them, grinding them together. Simon had forgotten this intimate adolescent ritual, how binding it really felt.

“Now we can never tell,” Davey said. “Ever.”

He heard her calling
his name from the front door, then the pounding of her shoes as she ran up the stairs. He always found the heaviness of her step too insistent, unable to be ignored. He had hoped to be ready for her, to know what he was going to say, but here he was coming out of the bathroom with just shorts on, toweling off his head, no clue whether to tell the truth or lie. Either one had its dangers.

“Simon, are you okay?”

“Sure,” he said brightly, leaning forward for their usual kiss. “Why?”

She looked at him with a disconcerted expression, thrown off by his nonchalance, or something else. “Did you just take a shower?”

“I did.”

“You always take your shower in the morning before work.”

He tossed the towel into the clothes hamper in the hallway. “You’ll have to amend your assumptions about me,” he said, with a little teasing in his voice, “because as you can see, today I showered after work.”

She reached into the hamper, pulled out the towel, and took it to the bathroom. He could see her draping it over the shower rod. That was a good sign, her caring about a wet towel. She ran water and splashed it on her face, then stared at herself in the mirror. He turned away, into their bedroom.

She came in moments later and sat on the edge of the bed. “You scared me with your call,” she said. “I thought something happened to you or Davey or … I don’t know.” She pulled off her shoes. “Where is he?”

“Out back,” Simon said. “I saw him when I came in. He’s fine. We’re both fine.”

“You hung up so fast, and when I called back I got your message.”

“Yeah, like I told you, it was bad reception.” He opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a black T-shirt.

“I had a scare today at the office,” she said.

He pulled the shirt over his head, and it shrouded his eyes and ears, the world disappeared from his perception just for a moment. Then he picked up his hairbrush. In the dresser mirror he could see her behind him, watching as if there was some deep significance
to his every move. He wondered how a man brushing his hair would look an hour after killing someone. What would give him away? “What kind of scare?” he said and set the brush on his bureau.

“The new patient I told you about, he wouldn’t let me leave my office.”

Simon felt a shiver of fear sweep over him, the same as he’d felt on the dock. Amy, trapped in her office by an insane man. She could have been assaulted or killed, and he would have been powerless to stop it. In fact he would have been the cause, bringing this lunatic upon them. He went to her, bent over her on the bed, surrounded her in his arms. She seemed smaller to him, some of the life let out of her, not the Amy he was used to. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could have done something.”

She made a slight wriggling motion, and he let her break free. “What could you have done?”

“I don’t know. I just always think I should protect you.” He looked out of the window and saw the tree house, wedged in the branching arms of the white pine, with the rope ladder dangling to the ground. The place where Davey took refuge when the stranger lingered at the front door.

“He never actually touched me,” Amy said, “he just wouldn’t get out of my way.”

This was a usable fact—Paul holding her against her will, with who knows what intent? He could incorporate this into his story line, if one were ever
needed … 
He said he had just been with my wife in her office and implied he had done something to her
 … 
No, he didn’t say exactly what. I imagined the worst
.

“So,” Amy said, “I called the police.”

Simon turned around faster than he should have. He would have to control his reactions better, not betray what was going through his mind. “Did you have to get them involved?”

“He said you wouldn’t want me to.”

“What?”

“My patient, Paul, he said you wouldn’t like it if I called the police and he told his story to them.”

His story
—what would that be exactly? “I didn’t say I didn’t like you calling the police. I just asked if it was necessary.”

“He didn’t talk to them,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. He just turned around all of a sudden and left.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

She looked at him curiously, still sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, doing nothing but observing him. He realized now that it was a suspicious question. It was more difficult than he supposed to know beforehand whether a question sounded suspicious or not.

“No, he just strolled out the door like any other patient. I called back to 911 and told them there was no need to send someone, but they still had to.”

Simon got down on his knees and pulled sandals from under the bed, reaching far under to retrieve the pair. When he stood up again he said, “You’re not going to see him again, right?” He felt dishonest asking this, knowing what he knew. Of course she wouldn’t be seeing him again. He realized at this moment that he wasn’t going to tell her about meeting Paul, punching him, and watching him sink into the murky bay. She didn’t need to know.

“Of course I won’t see him again. He said he was leaving Red Paint anyway.” Amy stared at Simon for a moment, an uncomfortable silence, as he strapped on his sandals. “He did say something very disturbing. Maybe he was just trying to shock me, I don’t know, but we have to talk about it.”

Simon moved toward the window again to slow down the momentum of this conversation. He saw Davey in the yard now, at the base of the tree house, gouging at the trunk with something in his hand. It had to be a knife. Even under threat of perpetual grounding, there he was in plain view carving into a tree.

“Davey’s waving me to come out,” Simon said. “Can we finish this later?”

“Later as in never?”

He laughed a little. “I just mean a little later. It’s been a rough day.”

———

After the pasta
and bread sticks, after the green salad and organic mini carrots stewed in brown sugar, after watching two hours of a
Twilight Zone
marathon (Davey’s choice) on television together sitting on the couch, the boy lying alternately against one and the other as if they were pillows, they sent him off to bed, and Amy said, “Is this later enough?”

Simon looked at his watch—10:05, the time they usually went up to bed themselves to read for a while. That wouldn’t happen tonight. “Sure, let’s talk.”

“I started to tell you, I had trouble with a patient today.”

“You should get some kind of security device in there,” he said, “connect to the police station. I think they can do that.”

“This man made an accusation, Simon. About you.”

“What accusation?”

“About your graduation night on the dock by the inn. He said you forced a girl to have sex.”

She was being uncommonly delicate, Simon thought. Paul would have said
rape
over and over again.

“Do you know what he’s talking about?”

Simon wondered how much to say, what to include, what to leave out. There were so many ways to tell a story. “The guy you’ve been seeing,” he began, “your patient, Paul Walker, he—”

“Paul
Walker
? He said his name was Paul Chambers.”

“I think Chambers is his middle name. I guess he was using it to hide who he was. He married the girl I took to graduation, Jean Crane. I didn’t really know her that well. She sat next to me in Spanish. She was pretty and smart, and since I’d just broken up with Ginnie, my steady girlfriend, I asked her to graduation. The party was at the Bayswater Inn. We ducked out a few times during the night to take a drink, me more than her, I guess. Then we went down to the bay, and things got carried away.” He remembered stumbling across the sand and looking up at the moon hanging in the black sky. He remembered the hip flask concealed under his tuxedo jacket and the Chopin vodka—the finest Polish mash—that burned down his throat, like swallowing fire. He remembered twirling around, his brain spinning, the world spinning all around him.

“You had sex?” She said this in a somewhat surprised voice, as if even that was disappointing to her.

“Yes, we had sex. I could tell she was upset,” he said, “after, I mean. She got her cousin, Holly Green, to drive her home. I called her the next couple of days, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Finally I went to her house and she told me that I had forced myself on her.”

“Oh, Simon.” He had never heard her say his name like this, with such a depth of disappointment. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”

“I’d prefer not to, trust me.”

“You’re saying you didn’t force her?”

“Of course I didn’t.” He heard himself answer quickly and matter-of-factly. He could have let the statement stand on its own, no elaboration. What compelled him to add, “At least I don’t think so”?

“You don’t
think
so?”

“I had a lot to drink, and I wasn’t used to it. I’d never had more than a few beers before, and this was vodka. We drank and were rolling around on the dock, and like I said, things got carried away.”

“Did she say no to you?”

“She said yes, no, yes, no … and she was laughing. At least I thought it was laughing. I guess she was actually crying.”

“There’s a big difference between laughing and crying, Simon.”

“No, there really isn’t, not when you’re drunk.”

Amy leaned back on the sofa as if she was going to sink into it, then bounced forward again, on the edge of the seat. “Wait a minute, the rapist from prison.”

“David? What about him?”

“Is that why you hired him, he’s like a kindred spirit?”

The suggestion seemed bizarre to Simon. “That had nothing to do with hiring him. I haven’t thought about Jean for years.”

Amy looked at him in amazement. “I imagine she thought of you quite a lot.”

“What are you trying to do, deliberately make me feel bad?”

“I’m trying to make you feel something. You tell this story like it happened to your old roommate Ray or somebody else you knew long ago.”

“It did happen to someone else long ago, me as a high school senior.”

“That’s still you, Simon. You don’t erase yourself at every stage of life. Human personalities develop in layers, one on top of the other. Scratch one layer, you can see what’s below.”

“Like a palimpsest.”

“What?”

“A palimpsest. It’s a parchment that’s been overwritten through the centuries, and you can still see parts of the underlying documents. If you’re going to use the image, you should know the word for it.”

“I don’t need the word. My patients get what I mean.”

“Well despite your palimpsest theory of human personality, I am different today, and I wouldn’t get myself in the same situation I did twenty-five years ago.”

Amy shook her head dismissively.

“What?”

“ ‘Get myself in that same situation.’ You make it sound like the circumstances happened to you.”

“What do you want me to say, that I got drunk and raped my graduation date?”

“If that’s what you did.”

“I told you, I don’t know exactly what happened. I only know what I thought I was doing at the time, which wasn’t rape.”

“Did you ask her if she wanted to have sex?”

“Of course. It’s not like I just suddenly jumped on her.”

“You asked her if she wanted to have sex with you that night?”

Simon nodded.

“Graduation night, on the dock, right before you had sex with her, you asked her if she wanted to and she said yes?”