by Julia Glass
Anthony was bent on changing the way Robert saw Turo, the way that maybe he had to see Turo to get through this. (He could hear Turo warning him about lawyers, the way they could “poison your virtue.”) What was it Turo had said, that sooner or later someone would be caught and that’s when the DOGS would go big-time? Why shouldn’t the someone be Robert? So that morning, Robert had finally asked Anthony, straight out, if he would go to prison.
“I’m doing everything I can to avoid that. Some of it depends on what proof there is that you were involved in other … incidents. If that kind of evidence emerges, I’ll have to get you a bona fide criminal lawyer.” Anthony did nothing to hide his scorn for the DOGS and what he called their infantile approach to changing the world. “And some of it, maybe a lot of it, will depend on Laurel Connaughton, the woman whose house you helped burn to the ground.”
“I didn’t know—”
Anthony gave him a sharp look. “What you chose not to know, Robert, that’s what got you here. And I mean chose.” Anthony had made it clear to Robert that one thing he was good at, in his pro bono work, was winning mercy, or a second chance, for people who’d totally screwed up. If they got the right judge, and if Robert were contrite enough—made not a single excuse—Anthony was hopeful.
If not for Celestino, Anthony might have had nothing but contempt for Robert. Within an hour of meeting Anthony, Robert told him that he was worried about Celestino—that he knew Celestino had nothing to do with the DOGS but might, by association, be in trouble. Ira had already thought of the connection, but Robert saw Anthony’s face soften as he nodded, reassuring Robert that no one, so far, had fingered Celestino.
His parents’ phone had not rung; he’d still heard no voices from beneath the kitchen floor. The clock over the stove ticked loudly, as it always had. Robert had been sitting on the bench for twenty minutes.
Upstairs, he urged himself, forcing his legs to comply.
He opened the door to his room. Here, where he’d least expected it, this was where the accusations lurked.
Stacks of clean, folded clothing covered the surface of his twin bed. Four pairs of his shoes stood side by side where the bedspread met the floor, facing out. Like a firing squad, thought Robert. Cardboard cartons—five—were stacked by the window, four labeled BOOKS, one PAPERS. His father’s handwriting.
Robert’s desk, normally bare except for an old-fashioned blotter and an electric pencil sharpener, was crowded with a seemingly random assembly of objects. Only Robert would recognize them, right away, as things that had come from his bedroom in Cambridge. A this-is-your-life exhibition in a museum: a stapler, a gooseneck lamp, a can of tennis balls, a squash racquet, a Swiss army knife, a box of ink cartridges for his printer, a box of unused checks, a packet of envelopes, a roll of stamps … a carved soapstone box that Clara had given him for no particular reason and that contained—he looked and it still did—a box of matches and a sheaf of rolling papers. (Had Turo left weed in the apartment? Anthony would have known that, wouldn’t he? Anthony had shown him a list of the incriminating evidence, so far. Did the police deliberately withhold unpleasant surprises? He didn’t like the sound of that “so far.”)
Front and center, dominating all these trite possessions, stood the microscope that Robert’s parents had given him as a high-school graduation present. Mom had chosen a card with a black-and-white photograph taken in a lush, fertile forest, every leaf, every ridge of bark and clump of moss in riveting focus. In the card’s blank interior (Robert’s mother declared herself allergic to Hallmark sentiment, perhaps because so much of it came her way from patients), she had written, Dear Robert, We love the way you look at the world (which we know you’ll go out and conquer, however you choose). Now you can look at it even more closely. With so much pride and all our love, Mom and Dad.
The sight of the microscope, deported to the realm of his suburban childhood, struck Robert physically, in the core of his gut, as almost nothing else had in six horrific days. All the plans he’d had, whether vague or specific—the casual ambitions of a privileged boy, which his parents had kindled and nurtured and, along with him, taken for granted—were moot, obsolete, kaput. He thought of the recent dinner he’d shared with his mother, where they’d argued the merits and the attractions of curing ills of the body versus those of the mind. Such choices were both trivial and lofty. Just like that, they were a thing of the past, not the future.
He felt as if he were reliving the moment, two days before, when Anthony told him that Turo hadn’t been enrolled at Harvard since their sophomore year. He’d failed most of his courses that second semester. He’d flunked out. Had Turo known this before he asked Robert to move off-campus and share an apartment? Had Turo’s mother known, or did he have money all his own, to live as he pleased?
Did it make any difference? The deception was so enormous that to accept it in any version was to step off a cliff.
Sitting in Anthony’s luxurious office with its sky-high view of the islands in Boston Harbor, the planes angling away from Logan, Robert had been unable to respond. He’d felt his memory, like a bird that flies through a window and finds itself trapped in a closed room, darting helplessly and senselessly back and forth over the past year—a whole year’s worth of lying. But had Turo actually lied to Robert, literally lied, ever? Or had Robert refused to see the obvious? Had Turo ever talked about the courses he wasn’t taking? Made a pretense of reading any textbooks or walking into classrooms?
Precisely what Robert had failed to do was to look at the world around him, really look, never mind look closely. So much for that microscope.
He sank into the desk chair and swiveled it outward, to face the rest of whatever the room had to say about his life. How fitting that the walls were dark and, for the most part, blank. After Robert had moved to Cambridge, his mother (with his permission) had removed all his posters and painted the walls a stormy slate blue. The only picture she’d hung, over the bed, was an oil painting of a rocky coastline, a relic of her mother’s childhood by the ocean.
Would he live here now, again? Would his parents even let him live here—that is, if he didn’t go to prison?
He noticed a small red box on his otherwise barren dresser. He hadn’t a clue what it was until he crossed the room and opened it. Aunt Clover’s friendship ring.
“What the fuck else?” he shouted, as if the house itself had laid these boobytraps, turned his own belongings into something malevolent, each one a messenger of shame.
“Robert?” His father stood in the doorway. “Can I come in?”
Robert laughed bitterly. “It’s your house.” Instantly, he was sorry. His father was not the parent who’d denied him refuge for days on end.
Dad sat on the edge of the bed, toppling a stack of T-shirts onto the floor. “Oh dear,” he said. He leaned over to pick them up.
“Leave it, Dad.” Robert was relieved, yet sad, that his father hadn’t tried to embrace him.
“I’m so sorry, Robert. I’m sorry if it seems like we haven’t been there for you, but we are, you know. Your mother meant to be home before you arrived, but she—”
“You don’t need to explain for her. It’s okay,” said Robert.
His father sighed. He looked as if he had perched deliberately, absurdly, in a nest of shirts and trousers. Robert’s undershorts and socks spilled into Dad’s lap and onto the floor. “I keep on wondering what we missed. You’re such a damn good student that we always assumed …”
Robert waited to hear what they assumed, even though he knew.
“That you were a damn good kid, through and through. That you wouldn’t do anything dangerous. I mean, anything that could …”
“I fucked up.”
His father didn’t try to contradict him. “We’re glad you’re home now. I know you doubt that, but really, son, we are. For as long as you need it to be, this is your home.”
Robert slipped the box containing the ring into his pocket. He retained the childish i
nstinct to hide it—though now, knowing how everything had gone down, how Clover had denounced him, the instinct made sense. However angry his mother was at him, he could only imagine the fury she felt toward her sister. He hoped that, for now, they could avoid the subject of Clover.
His father said, as if reading his mind, “One thing at a time, I guess.”
Robert nodded. He saw that Dad was every bit as weary, as sleep-deprived as he was.
“Are you happy with Anthony? The Python?” Weakly, Dad smiled. “Small world. I never cease … to be amazed.”
In that moment’s hesitation, both of them raised their heads at the sound of the kitchen door closing.
Robert’s father looked at him and saw his despair. “She won’t yell at you. I promise. You might not realize this, but it’s just that she’s so heartbroken. She blames herself, really.”
“Great,” said Robert. “I didn’t break any of her limbs, what a relief! Just her heart, that’s all.”
“Robert. Sarcasm won’t help. Please try to remember that.” Robert knew this was something his father told his clients. They turned together at the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
“Are you up here?” she called tentatively. “Douglas? Robert?”
There she was in the doorway, and then there she was crossing the room, holding Robert far too tightly, her face pressed into his left shoulder. Of course he held her in return. He felt rather than heard that she was crying.
“I’m going to start dinner. I thought I’d make something simple. A pasta,” said Robert’s father. When no one said anything, he added, “Arugula, bacon, and pine nuts. Sound good?”
Over his mother’s graying hair, Robert said, “Anything, Dad.” How much thought, he wondered, had his father devoted to supper for the prodigal son?
When Dad had left the room, he told his mother how sorry he was. She told him she was sorry, too.
“But if I’d seen you these past few days, I’d have said things I might regret,” she said. “Not just about you. About all of us.”
Robert was tempted to tell her that maybe all those things ought to be said—that there was nothing he didn’t deserve to hear—but then he thought of the secret he’d already bullied from his mother. He waited to hear what she wanted to say instead.
She sat on the desk chair. Robert shoved the once-folded clothing to the foot of the bed and sat in the space he’d cleared.
His mother rolled the chair toward him and reached out. He thought she wanted to take his hand, but she pulled a T-shirt off the bed and held it to her face, wiping her tears, blowing her nose. “Robert, I always hoped you’d be daring in some way—but not destructive.”
The words I didn’t know filled his brain again, but he thought of the reprimand he’d received from Anthony that morning.
“I was so gullible,” he said, though wasn’t this an excuse, too? “I was naïve and … rash.” The word surprised him.
“You know about Mrs. Connaughton’s house.”
“Mom, I’ve spent hours with a lawyer. And with Granddad. There’s nothing you can tell me I don’t know.”
She regarded him mournfully. “Except about my conversation with your dean.”
Robert said nothing.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
They stared bleakly at each other for a moment. Robert nodded. “Mom, school’s not important right now.”
“But Robert, it will be!”
“Can we not talk about that now?”
“Everything you want for yourself—”
“Mom!” He tried to sound urgent and gentle at once. “I fucked up, Mom, and if I’m lucky—lucky—I get to do community work and, I don’t know, stuff to make amends somehow. I need to do that. First. Before whatever comes next.”
“Next.” She wiped her face with the T-shirt again. She held it in her lap and stared at it for a moment. Then she stood. “Okay. I’m going downstairs to help your father and make a couple of calls to patients. I’ll be quick. Why don’t you take a shower?” She motioned at the clothes on the bed. “Maybe put some of this away. Or just throw it in the closet. I washed everything that was dirty. I put your kitchen things in the garage.”
“Thanks.”
She left the room carrying his T-shirt. Robert went to the window. It was still light outside, though the sun had fallen beneath the tree-line. Across the street, a woman was changing sheets in an upstairs room. On the sidewalk, one by one, three dogs passed by with their owners. By habit—still, after several days—he reached into his pocket for his phone.
He thought for a moment. He took off his shoes. He walked quietly down the hall, past the bathroom, past his parents’ bedroom, to the small den at the back of the second floor. Neither of his parents worked here, but on a corner desk they kept an extra computer, for checking their e-mail late at night or first thing in the morning. Robert opened Safari and went to his server, typed in his address, his password.
The password was denied. Of course it was. He stared at the screen for a few minutes, until it went dark. So. Time for another low-tech detox, this one enforced. This one without the romance of the jungle.
He sat quietly and took in the features of the room, its homely sofa and shelves of forsaken books. This unloved room, it occurred to Robert, would have belonged to his little sister. Thirteen: that’s how old she’d be now. What a consolation she might have been to his parents at a moment like this.
Downstairs, radio jazz kept Dad company as he cooked. Something sizzled loudly in a skillet. Robert went to the top of the stairs. He stood there until he smelled garlic, then bacon. He hoped his father would serve bread.
In the bathroom, he turned on the shower. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the tub. He made the water as hot as he could stand. Inhaling the steam, he wished he could wash away so many months—or, more than time, whatever insolence or impunity had led him to do such fatally stupid things. He remembered the day he had first wondered, almost smugly, if Turo was little more than a groupie, a Moonie, a galley slave for the DOGS, but in the end Robert was the blind disciple: not even a disciple; more like a yes-guy, a patsy, a cog. A moth to the flame of groupthink.
Whatever he did after this, if he could just make it across to the after, like the opposite bank of a rushing river, it would be something independent. No labs, no lectures, no group anything. Not if he could help it. He would do more than ask questions; he would insist on pinning down the answers. He would look at them as closely as he could.
22
Small house. Big tree. Both a good deal older than I.” Those were the first words I spoke in person to the young real estate agent I met at her office in Vigil Harbor on a gray day in early June. We’d traded telephone messages and e-mails.
“How old is that, exactly? As a point of reference.” Though she appeared hardly old enough to drive a car, let alone help me find a place to live, Daphne did not treat me with the cloying respect so often leveled at me and my peers.
“Seventy-one.”
“Well, that won’t be a challenge. Piece of cake in a town like this.”
I was reminded, with predictable sorrow, of the day I’d walked into TGO in need of bathing trunks. Daphne was half Sarah’s age, but she had that forthright nature I’ve always loved in women who know themselves well. She had a head of boyishly short dandelion hair, a rose tattoo above her right ankle, and, on her left hand, an emerald the size of a peach pit.
She showed me five houses that day—two without the tree, for which I scolded her. “Just testing your resolve,” she said.
The fifth was desperately in need of paint, its wide-plank floors scuffed and gouged, its kitchen and single bathroom—again to quote young Daphne—“a blank canvas if you’re into renovation.” I liked its back porch, the ratio of four fireplaces to three bedrooms, and, most of all, the katsura, a braggart of a tree rising like a glossy green phoenix from the lawn, roots breaching the ground for yards in every direction. Not much dared gro
w in its thirsty shade.
“There’s some local legend about this tree that has to do with a shipping merchant, his daughter’s dowry, and a fateful voyage to Japan,” said Daphne, “but frankly, the minute I hear ‘shipping merchant’ in any story around here, I have a hard time not rolling my eyes. Historically—if that interests you—this was a town of hardscrabble fishermen, not colonial Onassis types.”
The house, dwarfed by the tree, was built for a blacksmith in 1813. A parched wooden plaque by the front door made this claim. That door opened directly onto the street; as we stood in the small parlor, a FedEx truck passed within two feet of the window. “Good Lord!” I exclaimed.
“Not to worry,” said Daphne. “Those guys drive by the inch.”
What privacy this house possessed was all in back. At the nether end of the long yard stood a swaybacked shed (reminding me, on a smaller scale, of that dear old barn before Poppy and I gave it new life). Beyond a splintering fence, stacks of yellow mesh lobster traps stood higher than my head. They reeked a bit, but absent a view of the shore, they were a plainspoken reminder that the ocean was just around the corner.
Daphne led me into a rugged crawl space to show me the furnace and the knob-and-tube wiring. “Are you prepared to see an inspection report for a house this old? It’s not for the faint of heart,” she said when we emerged into the kitchen, standing upright again.
“My dear, I could write that inspection report. This house is a youngster compared with the one I’ve lived in for most of my life.”
She gave me a sly smile. “I’d say that’s more than long enough to become an expert on just about anything.”
“Young lady, anyone else would call you impertinent.”