All he could hear was the sound of his father breathing.
“Listen,” his father said, bending to Jesse’s level and taking him by the shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot and wild with something that looked like anger but might have been sorrow. He scanned the lake—as if the woman might reappear somehow, as if by magic—then looked back into Jesse’s eyes. “You have your whole life ahead of you. Do you understand this?”
His father’s voice was unlike any other voice he knew. Jesse struggled not to be affected by it. The very air around his father seemed to shimmer as though it were charged. In the distance, he could see the woman’s dog by the edge of the lake, but the dog was silent, unmoving, not even panting. Hidden by the birch trees, out of sight.
“None of this happened,” his father was saying. “This did not happen, do you hear me? Do you understand this now?”
“I understand,” said Jesse. “I understand.”
“You did not meet this woman. You have never seen her. This did not happen.”
For a moment, Jesse wondered whether he had misremembered his childhood—had he imagined his father was an out-of-control, angry monster? No. He could remember his father’s face turning purple if the phone rang at the wrong time. What had happened to that man? Who was this person, tears in his eyes, clothes soaking wet, looking at his aging hands?
They were in the parking lot now, though Jesse could not remember walking there. Had his father carried him up the trail? Had he closed his eyes, let his head slump against his father’s shoulder as he was carried to the car?
“No one will ever know.”
His father held the car door open for him. He waited for Jesse to get in, then leaned over gently and fastened the seat belt, tugging it a little afterwards to make sure it was secure.
His brother was in the front seat, waiting. The snow was falling around the car in heavy clumps. His father was digging in the snow outside the car, looking for something, and it took him some time before he climbed into the driver’s seat.
Even from the back seat, Jesse could smell the tequila on his father’s breath. He could hear his father breathing in ragged, choking gasps. He leaned closer to his father because he thought his father might be speaking—and as he leaned closer he heard that, yes, his father was saying something. Over and over his father was telling them, in a voice not much louder than a whisper, that this day had never happened, that this day had never been.
* * *
—
When they pulled up to his mother’s house, Jesse could see his mother watching from the window. She was holding the phone receiver in her hand.
They walked toward the house, and he listened to his father tell his mother that Dmitri had fallen on the ice. Jesse nodded as his father told her the story, his mother’s eyes on him as he did so.
His mother took Dmitri into the house, and for a moment Jesse was alone with his father.
His father’s clothes were wet, and he was looking past Jesse into the house. Jesse could hear his mother asking Dmitri whether his face hurt, and then the sound of her searching the freezer for an ice pack, telling Dmitri to hold it to his face.
The snow had stopped and the sky cleared above their heads, the stars finally visible after weeks above the clouds. His father’s car was idling, a plume of exhaust rising from the tailpipe into the night air.
“Dad,” Jesse said. But he couldn’t make himself ask the question.
He waited for his father to hold him. To take him in his arms and tell him that he loved him. That they would recover from this. That everything had an end, even the bad times.
“So long,” his father said to him, and Jesse felt something move within him, some familiar old ache of disappointment.
JANUARY 1987
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lewis
Lewis parked his patrol car and let himself into Denny’s house and stood in the living room. Scout bolted in and out of the rooms, searching for Denny. The dog nudged at Lewis’s legs, poked the backs of his knees with his muzzle.
It was the one-year anniversary of Vera’s disappearance. He felt he had to stop by. He felt he had to say something, to commemorate it. He didn’t see as much of Denny these days. What he had done—letting Denny talk to Jesse, no matter that it had led to the truth—had fractured the friendship for both of them.
He had told Denny what had happened to Vera. The whole truth, not a half-truth, or nothing at all, as he could have done. He went through the entire story, start to finish.
Denny, he’s a little boy.
A little boy who was terrified of his father.
He has his whole life ahead of him.
The lights were off in the living room and it was so quiet Lewis could hear the hum of the refrigerator. Scout circled toward the bedroom then back to Lewis, his tail low and moving back and forth. Lewis flicked on the lights. He saw vacuum tracks across the carpet and a once-overflowing wastepaper basket that was now empty. In the kitchen, the floor sparkled and the counters shone. Lewis opened the fridge but it had been emptied of its contents and wiped clean. No dishes in the sink; all were drying on the rack, the sponge back in its holder. Gone were the piles of newspapers and junk mail and crusty glasses of orange juice. Gone was the smell of rot and mildew. He opened the cupboards and saw that all the food had been thrown out. Only the dishes remained, gleaming.
“Looks great in here!” Lewis called out. The windows washed; the sills free of dust. Scout’s water dish, often empty, was full of clean, cold water, as if Denny had been expecting them.
At first, Denny had wanted to prosecute Leo. And it was still a possibility. But was it worth it? Wouldn’t it do more damage to the boy in the long run—more damage than had already been done? One long night, they had argued until four in the morning. Denny had even raised his fist to Lewis.
They left her there.
“Hey, man! You home?”
Maybe Denny had hired a cleaning service. Or maybe he had cleaned the place himself. He was on new medication for his arthritis, and it seemed to be working. Perhaps he was coming around. Finally! Maybe he was going on a diet. Maybe he’d thrown out all his stale food so he could start over. Maybe he’d finally donated Vera’s things to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, or driven them to the dump.
Whatever the case, Lewis surveyed the clean house with a feeling of pleasure. Denny was finally moving on, and here was the first sign of it.
Denny! It’s over! Move on with your life! Get up from off the floor and let us live again! Let us drink and dance! It is over, my friend! Not your grief, not your grief, but the doubt! You are free! We could even be friends again—true friends, nothing between us! It is over! It is finished! It is the first day of the year! Hooray! Callooh! Callay!
“Where are you, man?”
He stood in Denny’s immaculate kitchen, opened the back door and let Scout into the yard but the dog was crouched low and didn’t want to go outside. His police radio crackling was the only sound.
He put his hand on the door frame and called out again. He scanned the yard but there was no sign of him. The mower had been returned to its place beside the garage, the electrical cord coiled into a perfect figure eight. Denny had raked, too, and gathered the leaves in a black garbage bag, which he had leaned against the house. The yard cleared of its leaves, Lewis saw that there were flowerbeds, neglected but for a few hostas that would bloom in the spring, and some blue ornamental grass that was doing quite well. “You back here?” he called.
Maybe he was in his studio. Lewis had never been in Denny’s studio, although he had always wanted to see it. What went on back there? He walked to the little outbuilding—it looked like a shed—and opened the door. The lights were off and he imagined when he flicked them on he would finally see all the equipment Denny had told him about—the kiln, the centrifuge, the thing Denny called a quench
tank, where a ring finally broke free of its plaster cast and exploded into being. But when he flicked on the lights, the studio was empty. A long rectangular-shaped room lined with workbenches, a couple of stools on wheels. He knelt and ran his hands over the rough cork floor, in search of something left behind. A little diamond? He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Nothing but a sliver of some kind of metal. The place swept clean. The way Denny described his studio, it must have taken days, weeks maybe. What had he done with all the equipment?
Scout crawled over to Lewis and lay by his feet, panting heavily. “Okay, boy.” He patted Scout’s head, then scooted his feet out from under the dog. He walked outside again and scanned the lawn. A pair of pruning shears had been left out to rust—Denny must not have noticed them—and Lewis picked them up and walked toward the garage.
He put one hand on the door, his other hand on his gun.
“Denny, you in here?” he called out.
He imagined Denny hanging from a rope. He imagined him in his fancy car, the engine on, his head rolled to one side.
Lewis was rarely nostalgic for his difficult childhood, but he wanted to tell Denny about it now. He wanted to explain why his hands were shaking and his body had gone numb.
He wanted to tell Denny about the last conversation he’d had with his father. That long goodbye, a month after he’d moved to Whale Bay.
He wanted to explain to Denny that his father’s craziness had fractured him, so that he felt his own personality was a glass that had been dropped from a great height onto a hard floor. He wanted to explain that the child of a crazy parent spends his whole life trying to fix the world. But that, faced with Denny, who did need fixing, Lewis had felt a kind of calm, a remove, a move toward sanity. He felt how he was supposed to feel. A lightness.
He didn’t need to fix Denny. And so he had performed only the manageable duties of friendship: walked Scout, occasionally tidied the house. He hadn’t, as he had done for his father when he was a child, teenager, and young man, sat up with him all night, or called in sick so he could spend the day with him when he knew he was particularly sad. For the first time in his life, Lewis had put himself and his own needs before Denny’s.
But maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe Denny had driven to the ocean and waded in, wanting to drown like Vera. Perhaps he had leapt in front of a train. Perhaps he was in a motel room somewhere, washing his pain medication down with a bottle of cheap vodka. Cutting his wrists. Affixing a rope to the ceiling fan, taking a step off the back of a chair.
It was one of his father’s neighbours who found his father’s birding binoculars on a clifftop, a few miles from the house. The neighbour looked down. He called out but got no response.
His father must have fallen about a hundred feet.
It was a lie—it didn’t get easier. There was no help when you lost someone you loved. And there was no help for someone like his father, nothing that could have made it better, nothing Lewis or anyone could have done or said to prevent his father from killing himself.
It was important to be honest about this. It was important to see the world as it really was, and to understand its limitations and his own.
These were not conclusions he had reached on his own. They were the words of his uncle, whom Lewis had called one night at Evelina’s urging. It’s good to know the truth, she said. But there wasn’t much truth to be known. His uncle told him his father had always been odd, even when they were children. He didn’t wish to mine the past any further. He wasn’t unkind, but he was gruff, and Lewis knew he wouldn’t call again.
Now, his hand on his gun, he opened the garage door and flicked on the light.
Nothing, not even the car. The floor had been swept clean.
“Okay,” he said to the empty garage. “Good. Okay, then.”
He walked back into the empty house.
Nothing but the clean rooms and the name of Scout’s vet pinned to the fridge with a magnet and Vera’s red bathing suit hanging from the dresser.
The carpet had been vacuumed in the bedroom as well, the sheets washed and the bed made. The closets were empty save for their hangers. He took Vera’s bathing suit in his hand.
He had a sudden, overwhelming desire to see an orca breach in the bay, an eagle soaring, a heron at the shoreline. He wanted birds, lots of birds. He wanted to lie in the water and have the salt of the sea clean his body. He thought of Denny’s face after he had told him that Vera was dead: an expression of wonder, like a child’s, as if he were seeing something no one had ever seen before.
Lewis sat on the bed, where Scout was waiting for him. He took the dog in his arms and buried his head in his fur. He didn’t say much of anything. This wasn’t how he had pictured it. In his mind, he and Denny were clinking glasses. In his mind, they were toasting Vera. In his mind, he was a great police officer, on his way to becoming a great detective. He had solved the mystery, after all. He had done it.
He sat on the bedroom floor, his legs out in front of him, and breathed in the clean scent of the house. He stayed that way for over an hour, thinking at any moment he might hear Denny’s car in the driveway. Or the phone ringing. Something. Someone. Anything. Nothing but the distant sound of the foghorn, the ever-present sound of Whale Bay.
He wanted to tell Denny how profoundly meaningful he had found their friendship to be. That Denny had taught him how to be a friend. That Denny had taught him to be a normal person. A normal man. And that, armed with his new knowledge, he knew he could be a good husband to Evelina.
“A husband.” He said it out loud. That’s what he would do: he would marry Evelina. He would be a father to her boys, and one day to a child of his own. He would never let anything bad happen to any of them.
He hoped Denny was on an airplane, bus, or train, heading off to start a new life, and would soon send Lewis a letter or postcard, letting him know where he was. Or maybe Denny had fled because the truth about Vera’s death was too much to bear. Maybe he would never hear from him again.
Maybe his disappearance was some kind of terrible gift. Some way of letting Lewis carry on with Evelina and the boys.
He lay on the bed and put his head on Denny’s pillow.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He felt that it was the right decision not to have arrested Leo. He felt it was the right thing not to have sought legal justice, in whatever form it would have taken, for what had happened to Vera Gusev. A terrible thing had happened to her, but he understood why it had happened. He understood that a little boy’s pain could blossom into rage. Although his own relationship with his father was different from Jesse’s relationship with Leo, he understood Jesse with a deepness and intensity that surprised him.
And he understood that now he, too, had to keep the secret. For so long, he had been the only one who didn’t know what had happened. Jesse, Evelina, and Leo. They’d all known. Only he and Dmitri, too young to comprehend it anyway, didn’t know the truth. But now that he knew, it was better to keep quiet. Not to act. Not to disturb the universe. He would carry the secret forever. He would do it for the boy.
He opened the bedroom window and let the cold wind into the room, to clear out the ghosts. He understood something else, too: he did not feel young anymore.
* * *
—
He hoisted himself from the bed, left the house, and stood in the front yard, regarding the big picture window. He had grown so used to seeing Denny through the window, slightly warped from the glass, that he could see him now, clear as anything, sitting on his fancy velvet couch, a glass of bourbon in his hand. Denny raised the glass to Lewis, and Lewis nodded back.
Well, wherever you are, Lewis thought, goodbye. Goodbye, Denny. Goodbye, my friend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Leo
A quick trip to Whale Bay to get some things out of storage, including the Remington. He had
n’t meant to see anyone. Meant to dip into Whale Bay, then dip out again. But instead he found himself on the block where Evelina and the boys lived, staring at the little white beach house, imagining himself walking up the steps and letting himself inside. He hadn’t seen Dmitri in eight months. Even longer since he’d seen Jesse. He’d sent them a few postcards. Talked to them a few times on the phone. He’d talked to Evelina, too. About what had happened with Jesse. And he had talked to Lewis. And they had made a deal. This was not part of the deal. He was not supposed to be anywhere near the boys.
It was late on a Sunday morning. Leo figured the boys and Evelina would never know he’d been there. But just as he began to turn away, Lewis emerged from the front door in uniform. The two men looked at each other.
“Thought you were staying down south,” said Lewis, walking toward him, rubbing his hands together, his breath fogging the air.
Leo braced himself for something. A fist? A bullet? What did this police officer feel toward him? The Remington was useless, unloaded, locked inside his suitcase.
He felt ashamed of his sweater, which he’d retrieved from the storage locker last night. It was the one he’d got in Scotland, a white cable-knit sweater, like the kind fishermen wore. He thought it made him look worldly. But now, standing in front of Lewis in that perfectly pressed uniform, Leo thought he looked shabby, like a person who couldn’t afford a nice winter coat. This is why he hated being around people—all they did was remind him of what he didn’t have. He didn’t even want it—money, things, a house with a lawn to mow. He didn’t want any of that stuff at all. He’d given whatever he could—his car—to the Swami. The Remington would be next. Only worth a few hundred dollars, probably, but every penny counted for something.
“Just up for a few days,” said Leo. He gestured to the suitcase at his feet. “Had to get some things.”
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