The Guilty One (25 page)

She gasped, the word
loved
tripping something inside her, some delicate thread broken. But she
had
loved them, fiercely, even the sullen ones, the unfocused, the mean girls and the resentful boys. And then, in Oakland, the shy ones and the incorrigible ones and the obstreperous ones.

“I came from an ordinary family,” Maris tried again. “I have a sister in Santa Luisa. I never knew my biological father and my mom wasn't exactly warm, but she took good care of us. We had everything we needed. We were . . . close.” The word was painful to say, but it was true—the distance between them all now was her fault, all hers. A single word from Maris and Alana would drop everything and come, she had made that clear. “We were ordinary. My only rebellion was that I wanted to be a wife and a mother, which kind of drove my mother crazy, because she was really into her career. But then . . . once I got married and we moved to Linden Creek I kept feeling like something was missing.” She grimaced. “I know how this sounds: but I wanted to make a difference. To
someone
.”

Because Jeff certainly didn't care, she didn't add. How would things have been different, if only he'd wanted her? If he'd cherished the home she made, the family she tried to create, as much as she had? Would she still have felt that pressing need to see more, do more . . . or would she have been content?

“So,” Pet said. “One look at the mean streets of Oakland and you were, like, this is the place for me? Nah, I'm just kidding, I think I kind of get it. I mean,
I'm
here.”

“Yes,” Maris said, ready to move the conversation away from her. “What
about
that? How did you end up here?”

“You mean instead of staying in the middle of fucking nowhere?” Pet smiled, and Maris blushed. “Aw, you know, the rent's cheap.” She was silent for a minute, and her expression darkened again. “Okay, for real. So I dropped out of college the first time, right, and my mom, like, when it happened she told me that if I ever wanted to go back I'd have to pay for it myself. It was, like, her way of controlling me, and when I quit anyway, it was kind of . . . we didn't talk for a while. And now I think she feels bad about it and I feel kind of stupid because, you know, she was right, I shouldn't have quit. But I keep telling her I have everything I want, I
like
what I do. The bar, and classes. The . . . you know, art. But then, when she and dipshit try to give me money, I have to say no, see? Because if I took it it would be like saying that what I have
isn't
enough. So. Until I figure all that shit out, I'm here.”

Maris nodded. “Independence can be . . . well, I guess I'm about to find out what it is. I met my husband while I was getting my teaching certificate. I never really lived on my own, without roommates.”

Pet nodded. She finished the soda and crushed the can with her hand. “You know, I have a sister too. Elena, she's a year younger than me. She's working on a senate campaign and taking her LSATs.” She scowled. “Dipshit fucking
loves
her.”

“Listen,” Maris said conspiratorially. She knew this conversation was getting away from her, that lines were blurring that she wasn't ready for. But this was her last night in Oakland, in this borrowed little burrow. Why not share it with Pet, who had been a friend to her? “You're welcome to stay as long as you want. We can order takeout from that Indian place down by the Walgreens. I'll run out and get it and you can stay here, I'll pick up a bottle of wine. Even if your mom and her boyfriend do come by, they'll never know.”

Pet laughed. “My partner in crime,” she said. “Okay.” She held up her hand for a fist bump, something Maris used to do with the kids at Morgandale.

MARIS WAS RETURNING
from the restaurant, her car fragrant from the bags of takeout, when she saw George's truck parked in the driveway. Her heart thudded, but she parked under the tree and got out just as he was walking back down the driveway. When he saw her, he gave her an awkward wave.

“Well, hey,” he said. “I hear you girls are having Indian food.”

“George—about last night. I'm so sorry.”

“No, look, don't, I'm the one who should be sorry. Or something. I mean, I'm sure I was wrong. About, whatever. It's just, I was thinking . . . well, can we try that again? No pressure. Just have coffee with me. Or dinner. I mean not now, obviously not now, you've got company and I'm on my way to work. But what about Tuesday night? Are you free?”

Two nights from now, Maris could be at Alana's house, and this might all be in the past. “I don't know,” she said, then berated herself.
No
—the answer really should be no. It wasn't right to start something with a man as kind as George under false pretenses. But he hadn't shaved this morning and he looked kind of sexy with his hair wet from the shower, the soft hairs on his arms glinting gold in the sun. And, more important than all of that, he had come for her. She had been kind of awful to him yesterday and still he was here, still he was looking at her hopefully, that sweet half smile on his face.

“Don't say no yet. Okay? Just, have a nice dinner with Pet, relax, do whatever you need to do. I mean, you can let me down the hard way just as easy on Tuesday as today, right?”

He smiled so hopefully that Maris couldn't help laughing. “It's still going to be no,” she said.

“I don't hear you,” George said. As he passed, he squeezed her arm, letting his fingers trail down to her hand gripping the handles of the plastic take-out sack. His fingertips glanced lightly off her knuckles and even that small, innocent touch sent dizzying sensations through Maris's body.

She hurried to the door, then paused on the stoop, listening to his truck revving and pulling away from the curb, and had to wipe the dopey smile off her face before she let herself in.

THEY DRANK THE
wine and then, as night fell, Pet went to her apartment for a bottle of tequila and a couple of candle stubs and they drank shots by candlelight.

“The thing I don't get,” Pet said after a while, rather slurringly, “is how it happened. I mean . . . on TV anyway, everyone always kept saying he was so ordinary. Just an ordinary kid. You know, coaches liked him, teachers liked him, blah blah blah. And that whole breakup violence thing. Oh. Fuck. I'm sorry. I'm doing it again.”

“Pet. You've apologized a hundred times. And I've told you I don't mind talking about it.” The tequila had left Maris with a pleasant numbness. It wasn't that she didn't mind, but that she didn't mind any more than any other conversation on any other day, and much less than most. She liked having Pet here. She wasn't ready for her to leave. It felt a little like a crutch, but then again, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing.

“Okay. I get it, anyone can lose their shit in the moment. And, I mean. Strangling. It's not like he—um.”

Maris knew what Pet was clumsily trying to say. There hadn't been any blood. No broken limbs or savage beatings. Just Karl's hands around Calla's throat, until she stopped breathing. The prosecutor had even outlined exactly how it might have happened, in an effort to spur Karl to talk, citing other cases where killers talked about a momentary loss of control of their own actions, a sense that they were out of their own bodies, watching rather than participating.
Maybe she just wouldn't listen to what you were saying,
the prosecutor had suggested, in his oily, persuasive voice.
Maybe you were just trying to get her attention
.

But later, when he was making his closing remarks, he wasn't so understanding:
Karl Isherwood drove to Byron Ranch with the victim's dead body in the car next to him
, he'd said.
He had twenty minutes at least to think about what he'd done. He put her body in the lake, lifted it with his own hands
 . . .

“I'm trying to say, I mean, when I was eighteen, I couldn't have—like, to maintain a lie that long? Without cracking? I mean, fuck, I can't even keep a story straight for two days.” She frowned ruefully. “Which is what ended my last relationship, actually.”

“I don't know, either,” Maris said.

But that wasn't entirely true. And as the evening wound down to its inebriated end, as Pet fell asleep on the sofa and Maris slipped her folded towel under Pet's head for a pillow and lay down with the room spinning a little, she allowed herself to remember another inebriated night, another wandering conversation that might have served as a warning—and for the thousandth time consoled herself that there was no way either of them could ever have known that the tiny seed of rage could explode into an act that could never be undone.

DEB LEFT FOR
the prison at noon on Sunday. She hadn't been able to add Ron to the visitor list after all, and he didn't want to go anyway. She had a three o'clock visiting slot, but she always left extra time for the trip. Ron didn't know what she did with that time—if she sat in her car the way he had, or if she had found a coffee shop somewhere nearby. He could picture her checking her watch, standing up from a café table, throwing away her paper cup, straightening her skirt, reapplying her lipstick. All to prepare to see Karl, to prepare herself for the ways in which he had changed or not changed since the prior week.

He kissed her good-bye and he didn't tell her that Karl had called him that morning. Or rather: that the robo-dial system had called and asked if he would take the call, and that he had hung up. Every call, even as brief as a few minutes, docked his credit card another fifteen or twenty dollars in the ridiculously overpriced prison phone system, but it wasn't the money. He just didn't want to have to admit to his son that he hadn't been able to convince Deb to drop the idea of the appeal.

Ron watched TV for a while but he couldn't pay attention. He got a beer from the fridge and drank it; then he got another one and went outside and stared at the wilting flowers in the flower beds while he drank that one. He drank a third standing in the kitchen and then he went up to Karl's room.

It was Deb who had started calling the guest room “Karl's room” after they moved, though Karl had never set foot in this house, this refuge to which his parents had fled. She'd directed the movers to put all the boxes of Karl's things in the closet—not just his clothes but every book, CD, memento, gaming device; the folded posters from his walls and the lava lamp he'd wanted so badly for his eleventh birthday. Now the room held only his bare furniture. The bed, the desk, the chair, the dresser—all were there, and if by the cruel weight of fate he and Deb were still trapped in this pallid life when Karl was released, he supposed his son would come home and find his room waiting for him. Ron sat in the desk chair and laid his forearms on the cool surface of the desk and pictured how it had looked, before: the huge monitor set up on a stack of old textbooks, the
South Park
bobbleheads and the beer stein from Ron's own fraternity days that Karl used as a pencil jar.

After a while he opened the empty drawers one by one. It wasn't the first time he had done this. He inhaled the air trapped in them, touched his fingertips to their surfaces. Looking for proof that Karl had once inhabited this space. He slid his hands along the seams and, jammed toward the back, stuck into the narrow gap of the seam, he found a photograph. What was left of a photograph, anyway: most of it was sliced into narrow ribbons, so that only by carefully laying it out flat could Ron see that it was a picture of the two of them from a school dance back in January, Karl's arm slung around Calla's shoulders. Karl had made a dozen cuts, slicing through their clothes, their arms.

Only the heads had been cut all the way off. There was no sign of the missing part of the photograph.

He sat there, heart thudding, for a few moments, thinking. “Nobody could have seen this coming,” the refrain had gone. It was what he and Deb told each other, what their pastor had said—even the prosecutor had suggested that breakup violence could strike anyone, even “nice” kids, kids like Karl.

But what of that night when Karl put his fist through the wall? The fury that Ron had seen—had
recognized
—in his son's eyes?

Of course Karl had done it. The sharp edges of the cut-up photograph poked into the soft flesh of Ron's palm as he crumpled the thing. How could he have been lulled into doubt? He got up from the chair and stalked down the hall to Deb's office. She had never wavered in her stated faith in Karl, but she had shown her cracks too, the way she wouldn't look at him when she left for the prison. And what of the box? The carved wooden box that she obsessed over, that had become her touchstone after Karl was taken from them. How many nights had Ron come upon her in her office, hastily closing the lid and locking it with that key, that key that was nowhere to be found, not in her jewelry box or desk drawers, because he had looked, oh yes, he had looked. Ron was not above doing his own investigation. He deserved answers too.

Standing in the door of the little office he saw the box in its place on the shelf. Tacked to the fabric bulletin board were cards and pages torn from magazines, stickers and pressed flowers.
God Alone Knows His Plan
, read a postcard that he hadn't noticed before, rendered in watercolor with a lavender ribbon pinned to it.

He got the box from the shelf. It wasn't heavy. Felt around the clasp, the lock, the hinges. The metal parts were old, purely decorative. Ron took a letter opener from the ceramic jar on Deb's desk and jimmied it into the crack along the back. The old brass hinges bent under the pressure and then one of them popped. Ron was beyond caring about the evidence he left: he shoved the letter opener's blade along the split and attacked the other hinge until the burnished metal fell away and then he pried the box open, the clasp bending until he could shake the contents loose.