The Guilty One (16 page)

“Oh,” Maris said, taken aback. Despite her gratitude for this unexpected opportunity, dinner with her landlord and a garbage hauler seemed . . . inadvisable.

“It's at the bar,” Norris added hastily, seeing her hesitation. “Where Pet works? George owns it. Nice place. I mean . . .”

“The trash guy? Owns the bar?”

“Yeah, well, he only does the hauling on the side now. He and I, we go way back, it's a long story. Anyway, we can get some wings—”

“$8.99 for wings and fries?” Maris interrupted.

“How'd you know?”

“I have my ways,” Maris said, feeling better than she had in days. “I'll just grab my purse.”

RON WAS SITTING
on the bench behind the Whole Foods. He'd never seen anyone else sit on this bench in the eight years since they'd built the little upscale strip mall, but it had become his habit to walk down the landscaped path behind the shops to the bench occasionally when he wanted to think, to be alone. His phone rang, and he stared at the unfamiliar number for a moment before shoving it back into his pocket.

After the jail visit, he'd found himself driving to work, without really making a decision about it. He'd left word for his assistant that he had a doctor's appointment, leaving it open-ended; no one would have minded if he took the rest of the day off. But he wasn't ready to see Deb yet, wasn't ready for questions about how the visit had gone, what had been said and not said. Decided and not decided. And he definitely wasn't in the mood to discuss the appeal, or the psychiatrist she still thought he should see, or her obvious if stifled resentment of the thing he'd almost done. So he'd scrolled through email and looked over notes for an hour and a half before finally admitting to himself that he wasn't really absorbing anything he read, that he would have to repeat all of the work tomorrow. Stopping at Whole Foods—he told himself he could pick up the green olives that Deb liked, maybe some gelato—was just another way to put off the inevitable, to buy a little time once he got home before she started in on him.

But once he parked, he bypassed the entrance to walk around to the back. As serenity practices went, this bench probably wasn't ideal. The strip mall had been built just before the real estate crash, and originally a multiuse luxury apartment building had been slated for the parcel next door: restaurants, a garden center, upscale units. That had all been scrapped, but not before the builders had landscaped the back of the strip mall with trails and retaining walls and plantings meant to overlook the apartment building, the centerpiece of which was to have been a massive water feature. Now the bench overlooked a cleared acre, unnaturally flat and scraped of vegetation, so that only scrub and weeds poked up around the broken concrete and vestigial drainage pipes that had been left behind.

Depressing as hell, which was, maybe, why Ron was drawn to it. Best was at twilight, when the foothills beyond were nearly invisible in the sinking sky. But afternoons like this one were good too. In truth, no one would notice him there except the Mexican gardeners who dutifully mowed the abandoned patch. He stared at the empty lot, at the freeway in the distance with its rushing cars, at the nothing in between. He tried to empty his mind. Sometimes he tried the exercises the therapist had recommended, the ones Deb had begged him to do with her. Mostly, though, he just stared.

The phone rang again. Impatiently, he pulled it from his pocket a second time. Same number. Someone really wanted to get in touch with him. Ron was accustomed to things coming in the mail—no one could stop the freaks from finding out their address, even after he moved. But they usually didn't find his phone number. He supposed he was going to have to get used to this all over again if the appeal really did happen.

Besides, maybe this was just work, since he'd left without tying up a few loose ends. One of the analysts, maybe someone from Glenda's team, needing a last round of approvals before they sent off to production. For a lot of people, July was a slow month—half the support staff seemed to be on vacation—so this could probably wait until he got in.

Whomever it was was leaving a long message. Ron stared at the screen until the ding of the voice mail came through. Then he watched the cars on the freeway and tried to muster the energy to get moving.

It rang again. Same number.

“Aw,
fuck
.” Ron's voice was quiet, competing only with a handful of crickets. This was stupid.

He answered. “Yeah?”

“Don't hang up.”

A woman's voice, but not one he recognized. “Who is this?”

“Just please don't hang up. All right? Please.”

He didn't answer, poised to do exactly that. His finger hovering near the End Call button.

“This is Alana Parker. Maris Vacanti's sister.”

“I—I know.” Of course he knew who Alana Parker was. When she'd come to court, which admittedly wasn't all that often, she made quite an impression and ended up being photographed a lot, especially when she leaned in to talk to her sister. She had that Caroline Kennedy quality about her, the elegant bearing and the dark glasses and the sense of unapproachability. The photo of the two of them hurrying down the steps, clutching each other, with Jeff trailing in their wake—that was the photo that had been picked up everywhere on the day of sentencing.

Ron and Alana Parker had never spoken before, though.

He could hear her take a deep breath. “You called her. On Monday.”

He didn't answer. What was there to say? Already, he could look back on that moment from many angles of regret. He could claim that it hadn't really been him, at least not him in his right mind, and that would be true, in a way.

“I wish you hadn't,” Alana said. “She . . . you know she doesn't need that, right?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered.

“No, no, wait, that's not what . . . let me just.”

The silence between them felt familiar. Ron watched cars, tracking their speeding arcs as they made their way south. The evening was starting to cool, and the air smelled like thyme, the scent of some sort of wild scrub plant. This was far better than air-conditioning, as far as Ron was concerned. Why everyone didn't just sit outside—hell, sleep outside at night in the fresh air, it didn't make sense. Maybe he should go camping again. Maybe he should become a hermit, live in some fishing shack in the Sierra and grow a beard down to his chest.

“I'm calling because I want to ask you to leave her alone.”

“Don't worry,” Ron said. He rested his forehead on his hand. “I'm not—I won't do anything like that again.”

“It's just . . . I don't think she can take it. I know she seems like she's holding it all together. She can do that, she's tough that way.”

A memory of Maris, in the bar of that hotel in Sacramento almost two years ago when they'd both chaperoned the school trip, the moment before she'd spotted him. She had a book tucked under her arm, some sort of pastel-covered novel with a picture of a lake on the cover. When her eyes lit on him, finally, she looked amused.

“I always . . .” His voice came out rough, and he cleared his throat before trying again. “I always thought highly of her. Before everything.”

“Yes. Well. Jeff left her.”

“Aw,
hell
.” The news hit him in the pit of his stomach: one more casualty, one more disaster that was, if you followed the long chain of culpability back to the source, his fault. Of course it wasn't a surprise—the statistics were stark. Couples who endured the loss of a child usually lost each other as well, finding no place for another person in their grief—he and Deb had known that practically from the start. After their first counseling session she had held him in the car, so tightly he actually felt the breath leave his lungs, and made him swear that they wouldn't ever leave each other.

“You know, I don't know if it's the worst thing . . . I mean, it's not my place to say. But she was supposed to come down and stay with me at my place. Just while she got back on her feet. And instead she's gone completely off the rails. I talked to her earlier today, Ron. I'm scared for her.”

“She's not with you? She's by herself?”

“She told me she was staying at a friend's house in Linden Creek. I don't know what she's trying to do, if she's punishing herself or . . . I really don't know. But I do know that she doesn't need anything else to tip the balance right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Ron tried to remember what he'd read about Alana. It had been his worst penance, during the long months awaiting trial, to comb the media for any news of the Vacantis. And not just them, of course; he had Google alerts set up, and he'd bookmarked Facebook pages and set up Twitter lists, schooled himself in all the social media Karl once scoffed at him for being ignorant of. He allowed himself half an hour in the morning—he adjusted his schedule to get to work even earlier, so there was no one there to see him hunched over his computer—and every morning he forced himself to learn the latest about Karl's grassroots defenders, the protestors, the nuts and the freaks, the accusers and the haters. And most of all, the Vacantis themselves, the ones crushed under the wheels.

Alana worked for a biomed startup, and she had risen pretty high. The article in the
Examiner,
the big one that had been picked up all over the place, called her “her sister's strength,” and made much of the fact that there were no other siblings, no parents. It made good press, no doubt, with the moody photos they'd caught of the sisters standing outside the courthouse during the pretrial hearings. Alana was a couple of inches taller, and she favored high-heeled platform sandals with her flowing colorless clothes. She sometimes hid her face behind her hair, which hung around her face in shiny, silvery sheets, so that usually it was Maris that the camera caught, Maris with that eternally stricken expression.

More often than not, Jeff had been relegated to their distant orbit, caught at the edges of photographs. But it was no wonder. Jeff's resting state was a blank expression—had been even before. He was a good-looking man in the blandest possible way, the sort of man who could model a suit for a Macy's ad but fade into a crowd with no effort at all. Ron supposed that Jeff experienced a full gamut of human emotions, but over the course of the months awaiting trial, the days in the courtroom, his expression had barely pressed the parameters that contained it.

“I understand,” Ron said, because he knew Alana was waiting for him to say something. And he did, he knew—maybe even better than Alana—what might have made Maris bolt. Some hairline crack had shattered and she'd gone rogue. “She has a lot of friends in Linden Creek, doesn't she? I mean, maybe that's why, maybe she needs—”

“No.” Clipped, annoyed. “At least, not right now. She's been a virtual hermit, she's been turning everyone away.”

“Well, are you worried that—are you afraid she's thinking of—” He couldn't say it, didn't feel entitled to say it, not after what he'd done.

“No, that's not what this is about. She's not the type to make this about her.” Ron flinched: such an obvious jab, but one that he deserved. “She just doesn't need any more on her mind. And there's another thing. She doesn't have any money. Jeff apparently emptied out the accounts, and he's not making enough to swing the mortgage.”

“Oh,
God
,” Ron muttered, squeezing the skin of his forehead and closing his eyes. Their lawyers had warned him and Deb of the possibility of a civil suit. Maybe now it would come to pass. Ron didn't care—he'd be happy living out his days right here on this bench—but what it would do to Deb . . . “Alana. Listen. If it's money, there's got to be a way for us to help.”

“Fuck you, Ron.” It was shocking, coming from her, even if they'd never spoken before this day. She seemed like the last person on earth who would swear. “If that was the issue,
I
have money. Plenty.”

“But all I was saying was—”

“If you want to buy off your guilt, you'll have to look somewhere else. That's not what this is about.” Her fury made her voice harder, stronger. “I called to tell you to leave her alone, that's all.”

“Look, I understand I screwed up,” Ron said, and he really did know it, inside. He felt hot at the core, shame and remorse. “And just so you know, I wasn't . . . I wasn't asking her for forgiveness. When I called from the . . . when I called her on Monday.”

“
You're
not the one who ought to be asking.”

Oh, God, of course he knew that. How many times had he wished he could march across the courtroom and smack his son across the face, jar the words free, pry them out. Anything, just to get Karl to show that he
felt
something.

“Alana.” His voice broke, and for a long time, he didn't trust himself to try again. What he wanted to ask her: Was there ever a moment when she'd wondered if Karl might be innocent? Could she now? She hadn't mentioned Mehta; maybe she hadn't made the connection, maybe she never dreamed that the Isherwoods would push for an appeal.

The phone chimed; without looking he knew a text had come from Deb. He'd forgotten to tell her he wasn't coming straight home from the prison. He was predictable enough that she'd probably already guessed he'd been hiding out at work, but now she expected him home.

“Look.” Alana sounded calmer. “I shouldn't have said that. I just want my sister to . . . to have a chance, you know? I can take care of her. I can help her. But she has to work through everything she's dealing with right now. And she needs peace for that. She needs to know you're not going to do anything to, you know, revisit what she's been through. Can I promise her that? Can I
really
make that promise to her?”