Reunion at Red Paint Bay (24 page)

“Why wouldn’t Mom understand?” Simon said.

“She’s a girl. Girls don’t play with knives.”

Girls don’t play with knives, girls don’t shoot off guns in the street, girls don’t rape, girls don’t murder. It seemed like a simple life to Simon, being female. He almost wished he could try it for a while. “You still shouldn’t lie to her.”

Davey leaned back on the bed again, his hands behind his head. “
You
lied to her.”

It took a moment for Simon to process the full meaning of the words—
You, my father, the one who is supposed to teach me to be honest, lied to her
. “What do you mean?”

“When you came home all wet. You didn’t really spill a soda on yourself because you’d never get
that
wet. You don’t know how to lie, Dad. You try to sound like you’re really really telling the truth. If you want people to believe you, you got to act like you don’t care if they do.”

“Seems like you’ve thought this out.”

Davey nodded. “Yeah, lying takes some thinking ahead of time. Then you just do it.”

“You sure you want to be telling me this? I am your father.”

“That’s okay because you lie, too. You didn’t want Mom to know how you really got wet, right?”

“I didn’t want her to know because—”

“It doesn’t matter why, Dad,” Davey said. “You lied, just like me.”

It was true. He was a liar, the same as his son, and worse because his own lies were about life and death.
“Listen to me, Davey, lying doesn’t solve things. It just makes them worse.”

“Not if they don’t catch you.”

“It’s not about being caught. It’s what people believe. Mom doesn’t believe me. She knows I lied to her.”

“You lied to me, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“How come, Dad? I don’t care if you did something wrong.”

Simon sat on the bed, his hand inches from his son’s. He felt like picking it up, stroking the palm as he had done when Davey was a baby, loving the way the small fist closed over his index finger as if it would never let go.
I don’t care if you did something wrong
. Not forgiveness for whatever was done, just unquestioned acceptance no matter what. One liar to another.

“You’re right,” Simon said, “I shouldn’t have lied to you or Mom. I’m going to change that starting right now, no more lying.”

Davey shifted on his side and propped his head up with one arm. “So how’d you get wet?”

“There’s a man, his name is Paul, he’s been sending me postcards for the last month.”

“The ones on the refrigerator?”

“You know about them?”

“Yeah, since we’re telling the truth, I kind of knocked the fish magnet off when I shut the door too hard and it broke on the floor. You can take it out of my
allowance, if you want to.” He batted his eyelashes, a feminine trait, but apparently natural in his son.

“What did you do with the postcards?”

“They’re probably still on the floor next to the refrigerator.”

Such a simple explanation for the disappearance of the first two cards. Nothing mysterious, nothing sinister. “The reason I lied to you about getting wet is that I was out on the dock at Bayswater Inn that afternoon with the man sending the postcards and I got into an argument with him. I thought he’d hurt Mom, and I was very upset, so I hit him and he fell into the water.”

Davey rose up on the bed. “Wow, you mean that guy who’s missing, you knocked him into the water?”

“That’s the one. I jumped in to look for him, but I couldn’t find him.”

“So like he drowned?”

“I don’t know for sure what happened. They haven’t found him.”

“Wow, Dad,” Davey said again with what sounded more like excitement than worry. “They’re not going to arrest you or anything, are they, because you just hit him, you didn’t drown him. You even jumped in to save him, right?”

He had jumped in, dove to the bottom several times, the water so thick that he had to feel around in search of a body. Would that make a difference, his attempt at saving his victim, even if it came late?

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, kiddo. It’ll be up to the police when I tell them what I did. But people will know about it, I’m sure, and some kids might say things to you.”

“Like what?”

“Things about me.”

Davey balled up his small fists. “They better not or I’ll punch them.”

“No!” Simon said more loudly than he intended. “Aren’t you listening to me? That’s how I got into this trouble, punching someone. You have to be smarter than me.”

“You want me to turn the other cheek?” Davey said with disdain in his voice.

That was what Simon had meant, but he realized it was useless to phrase his advice that way. “I want you to be strong enough to walk away if kids hassle you, that’s what I’m telling you. Can you do that?”

“What if they keep walking after me and saying stuff about you, then can I punch them?”

“Under no circumstances are you to get into a fight over this, understand?”

“It’s awful hard not punching someone who deserves it.”

“I know,” Simon said, “believe me.”

Confessing once, Simon thought
, would make the second time easier. But he didn’t find it so when the second person he had to confess to was Amy. He took her hands across the small round table in the back corner of the Surf Club, Red Paint’s finest fish restaurant, and most expensive. That’s why there were only a few couples sprinkled throughout the dining room overlooking the Common. You could count on a secluded table at the Surf Club on a weekday.

“You proposed to me like this,” she said.

Her comment confused him. “No, it was at that place on the harbor in Portland with the huge wreath made out of corks. Real classy.”

“The restaurant was different, but it was candlelight like this, a seafood place, the waiter had just cleared away our plates, and you reached across the table to take my hands. I knew you had something important to say.”

He remembered bringing out the engagement ring, the best $195 could buy, and trying to slip it on her. It was way too small. He couldn’t believe how much he had underestimated the size of her finger. “You said yes right away, no hesitation.”

“I was ready for the question. You were dropping hints for weeks.”

Would she be ready tonight? Could she possibly know what he would say? “I lied to you,” he said. She nodded, that was all, no other encouragement to keep him going. “I lied about Paul Walker.”

She pulled her hands back from him. “Oh God, Simon, you
did
kill him?”

He wished he could say no and wipe away the fears flooding her mind, but the answer was more complicated. “I got another postcard at the office telling me to come to the dock on Thursday. Paul Walker showed up, and he started saying crazy things about Jean Crane and me. Then he said he’d just come from seeing you. He made it sound like he’d done something to you. When I couldn’t get you on the phone, I figured he had.”

“So …”

Simon took a deep breath, wondering how much truth he could bring himself to share. “So I hit him, not hard really, and he fell in the water. He was kind of flailing a little, but he was only a few feet from the dock. I figured he was all right.”

“If he was that close, couldn’t you have just leaned over and pulled him out?”

That had been Simon’s instinct, to offer his hand. But something told him to wait a moment, to watch, to see how things went. “I wasn’t sure at first what to do, so I guess I hesitated.”

“You weren’t sure whether to save him or not?”

“I was scared about you, so I called your cell. Then he went under again. I jumped in to find him, but he was gone. I don’t know how that could be. It’s not even that deep there.”

Her expression changed, and he wondered if there was always this moment when her clients would notice her face seize up with the gravity of the matter. That was when they would see confirmed what they vaguely knew—there was something seriously wrong in their lives.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “First I find out a woman killed herself because she felt you raped her, and now you say you knocked a man into the bay and let him drown.”

“I didn’t know he was going to drown. I’m not even sure he did.”

“Were you hoping he would? Are you sure you didn’t wish your problem would disappear into Red Paint Bay—just like Jean Crane disappeared from town?”

“God, are we back to Jean again?”

“I’m just trying to get you to understand—”

“Why is that your job? I’m not your patient. You’re not the arbiter of my life. I was a goddamn horny teenager on graduation night, and you’re judging me like I was fully responsible for what this woman ended up doing to herself. She had all of those years to find a way to cope with what she thought I did, and she let herself be a nonfunctioning human being and a non-functioning wife.”

“She didn’t
let herself
any more than a person with PTSD lets herself be traumatized all of her life.”

“She didn’t choose to get help either, did she? She took her own life twenty-five years later, Amy—twenty-five years of making herself miserable and her husband miserable and now me.”

Amy cradled her wineglass in both hands. For once she was silent. For once he had the floor to himself.

“Paul Walker came here to ruin me,” he said. “He didn’t have to kidnap Davey or shoot me, like you thought might happen, he just had to make you think I raped her. Then he could leave town and let the story play out. He seemed like a passive guy, but he knew what he was doing.”

“This isn’t about him.”

“You’re right,” he agreed quickly, “but it isn’t just about me, either. It’s about you, too. You’re so used to sitting on your throne of morality that everything is clear-cut in your mind, all black-and-white. You took a crazy guy’s account of what happened decades ago without even considering that maybe he was using me as a scapegoat, that maybe Jean was unstable for reasons that had nothing to do with me. You were sure from the beginning that I was guilty,” he said, and then an unsettling thought came to him. “It’s like you wanted to believe I was.”

A waiter in black-and-white pushed through the kitchen door carrying a tray of desserts and walked past them without a glance.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it.”

“But you can’t help yourself. For some reason you’re ready to think the worst about one stupid thing I did a long time ago and make it stand for my whole life.”

She sipped her wine, taking her time. “Letting Paul Walker drown,” she said, “that wasn’t a long time ago. It was last Thursday.”

She said this with a calmness that infuriated him, but she was right. It had been only a few days since he had soberly punched a man and watched him sink into Red Paint Bay. It seemed reasonable at the time, so reasonable that he couldn’t say he wouldn’t do it again, if Paul Walker reappeared. “He was stalking us, Amy—you, Davey, and me. Can’t you understand how I felt?”

She stood up and slung her pocketbook over her shoulder. “No, I don’t understand how you could let a man drown and maybe rape a girl. I don’t know what to do with that information, Simon. It’s just incredibly disturbing.”

“So …?”

“I need some time to sort things out.”

Take as much time as you need
occurred to him as a sensitive response, or
I’m sorry this is so hard on you
. But he didn’t feel like being sensitive. He didn’t care if it was hard on her. “You expect me to just sit back and give you
time to sort things out
?”

Her hand fished around in her pocketbook. He couldn’t imagine what she was looking for. “That’s exactly what I expect.”

“Am I exiled to my office, or can I come home?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said quickly.

Not a good idea
right now
or
for a while
, but open-ended, for as long as she deemed it so. Her choice. She took out two twenty-dollar bills and tossed them on the table.

He stared at the money, taking a moment to comprehend. “You’re paying your half like we’re on a date?” She took a step and he grabbed for her. “Amy—”

She looked down at his hand circling her forearm. “Let go of me, Simon.”

“I will, but listen for a minute.”

“I said let go!”

Conversations stopped at the other tables. The waiter coming out the swinging door pivoted on his heels and went back in. An elderly couple leaned into the aisle, not to miss a word.

Simon’s fingers loosened their grip. “Don’t do this,” he whispered.

Amy shook off his hand and it swung over the edge of the table, knocking over her wineglass. Red ran across the white linen cloth. They both watched it for a moment. Then she walked away, a few quick steps to the door, and was gone. Through the front windows he saw the shadow of her get into the Volvo. He had no chance to tell her to drive carefully, as he always did.

It was the first time
he had ever slept overnight at the
Register
. The old sofa in the conference room was comfortable enough, just a few inches short for him to stretch out all the way, but wide enough that he could curl on his side, his legs pulled up, the way he slept anyway. A day passed, then two. He found small reasons to call home, things that he normally took care of and she wouldn’t think about. The mortgage payment was due. The painter might stop by to give an estimate on the house. She should double-check the back door at night because the lock often popped open on
its own. He didn’t ask to come back during these quick calls, and she didn’t invite him.