by R.J. Ellory
I remember starting to apologize for what I'd said on the phone.
Dr. Backermann cut me short, told me it was nothing, that he was sorry too, that he'd been out of line, that we'd both been upset, stressed by recent events…
His words faded into nothing.
I just stood there. I couldn't think of anything to say, anything to feel. I was sort of numb. Displaced.
Later - an hour, a day, a week, I don't know really - I recall sitting talking with Backermann. He told me the house was mine, that it would take some time to pass through the legalities, but it was my inheritance, and that he was happy to see me home. He told me he knew why I'd gone, that he'd been interested to see if I ever did receive a Draft Notice. I hadn't. He was sure of that. He'd checked with my ma every week until she'd died. They'd sent for Nathan, but not for me. An irony.
During those moments, I didn't take time to wonder what would have happened had I stayed. I didn't punish myself with thoughts about how my mother might still have been alive had I stayed. I didn't allow myself to consider anything about anything had I stayed.
It was safer that way.
I was home. My mother was dead, but I was home.
After eighteen months of running it was just that simple.
Dr. Backermann left after some time. He left feeling that I'd be okay. I walked out to a callbox and called Nathan. He was at the bus station. He asked me if I was okay, I told him I was, and I suggested he wait until nightfall and then walk into town. I said he should come the back way, cut across Nine Mile Road near the 1-88 intersection, and come down through the bank of trees that separated the Interstate from the main freeway.
He did come that way. He was certain no-one had seen him.
It felt good to have him there, have him in my house again, and for a little while I imagined we were back ten years, that we were kids again, that any moment now my ma would call us in for potatoes and greens and homemade corned beef, and she would sit Nathan down and present him with a plate loaded with more food than he could ever possibly eat…
But she didn't. She was dead.
We ate in the same kitchen. We ate from the same plates. What we ate didn't taste the same. Never would. We had changed along with the world, and back here in Greenleaf it was so much more evident than when we were away. We really had grown up. We were men, no longer boys, and I think some part of me wished we could go backwards and change it all. I wondered for a moment what would have happened had a different decision been made, what would have occurred had we not run. Nathan Verney would have gone to Vietnam, I would have stayed here, perhaps my mother and I would be sitting here, right where Nathan and I were sitting, and we would have been talking about Nathan, what a friend he was, how much a part of both our lives that little black kid with jug-handle ears, traffic-light eyes and a mouth that ran from ear to ear with no rest in between had been…
That first day back he asked me a question.
'You think we did the right thing?' he said.
I was surprised. I had never doubted his commitment and resolve.
'Yes,' I said - as much for myself as for Nathan. 'We did the right thing.'
He nodded, he smiled, he looked away towards the window.
I looked out there too, towards the rear of the house. I half-expected to hear our own voices from the yard. Kids' voices. Laughter. Someone shouting at us as we ran from some trouble we'd caused. Something such as that. I imagined we could even go out walking and see ourselves playing, ghosts of who we once were, still haunting the back yards, the open grass fields near Nine Mile Road, Benny's Soda Shop, Karl Winterson's Radio Store…
But we were gone. The children we once were had disappeared forever. I think perhaps I grieved for that more than anything else.
We decided then that we would stay for a little while, that this was my home, that no-one was going to come looking for me. Nathan would stay too, I would go see his parents, let them know he was fine, that he'd stayed up north and would be back before the spring. In reality he would stay right in the house, he wouldn't leave, and if people came visiting, as they were bound to do, he would hide down in the basement. Meanwhile he could help me sort the place out, fix it up from all the months of neglect, and we even spoke of selling up, taking the money and going somewhere else entirely, perhaps L.A., New York, even overseas.
They were dreams, nothing-dreams really, but we shared them, and it made us laugh, and after all this time it felt good to be somewhere where we didn't need to be afraid of who might come looking. That's what we believed. There was no reason to believe otherwise.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-One
Rousseau came again the following day. I asked him if he had no place better to go. He smiled, and though he smiled there was something in his expression that spoke of his own sadness. He would spend this handful of weeks with me, and once I was dead there would be another, and yet another. How long could someone stay doing this without losing their mind completely?
That's why I asked him the question, and though I knew it was unfair, though I knew I had no right to put him in such a position, I was aware of my own lack of concern. Hell, I was going to die. I could afford to upset some people before I went.
'The death penalty?' he said, repeating what I'd asked him.
He sat down, and as was his routine he produced two packs of Lucky Strikes from his jacket pocket.
We'd get through a pack each in every sitting. I figured he got a nicotine expense account.
'It depends entirely on whether or not someone is guilty,' he said.
I was surprised at his answer, and then I figured it as the eye for an eye philosophy that many of the Southern-state Christians possessed.
'If a man kills someone, and he did kill them, and he says he killed them and there is no doubt that he did, then I think perhaps those who were closest to the victim should decide whether he dies or not.'
'Hell, that would be a good deal for me,' I said, thinking of Reverend and Mrs. Verney.
'Wouldn't be applicable to you,' Rousseau said.
I looked up, frowned.
'You say you didn't kill Nathan, and as far as I can tell there really isn't anything but circumstantial evidence to support that you did.'
I smiled. 'How would you know?'
'From the trial records.'
I was puzzled. 'You read the trial records?'
Rousseau nodded. 'Yes.'
'All of them?'
He nodded again. 'All of them.'
'And your opinion?' I asked, genuinely curious.
'That there was someone who should have been there to give evidence and they weren't… perhaps the most significant person in the whole case.'
'I know that,' I said. 'That's old history. What I meant was whether or not you thought I was guilty.'
Rousseau shook his head. 'I don't think you were guilty of murder, but I do think you were guilty of something else.'
I looked at him.
He smiled, tried to look sympathetic, understanding perhaps, but it came out like he was hiding something, that there was something he really didn't want to say.
'I think you were guilty of compromising, of cowardice, but most of all of being untruthful with yourself.'
I laughed, a hollow and slightly irritated sound. 'What gives you the right to say that?'
Rousseau shook his head. 'You asked me.'
'And that's what you think?'
'The only thing I can think is what I can gather from the trial records. I wasn't there, Danny, not when they found you, not when they arrested you or interrogated you. I wasn't there in your house listening to what was going on before or after. The only opinion I have is based on hearsay, second and third-hand reports, and the answers you gave to so many leading questions during the trial. That's the sum total of what I know.'
'But that's not all that happened, and certainly not the way it happened.'
'So tell me.'
I sighed. 'Christ,
so many times I've been through this… seems I've spent the last ten years doing nothing but explaining myself over and over again.'
Rousseau smiled. 'I know, Danny, but I think I need to know. I have some explaining to do as well, you know?'
I frowned. 'Explaining? Who do you have to explain to?'
Rousseau smiled, looked up towards the ceiling.
'God?' I asked. 'You have to explain yourself to God?'
Rousseau shook his head. 'No, Danny, I have to explain you to God.'
I laughed. 'Me? What the fuck has that got to do with anything? I don't know that I even believe in God.'
'Because you're here… because of what's happened to you?'
'No,' I said. 'Not because of what happened to me.'
'Then why?'
I looked away towards the vague, gray reflection of my face in the one-way window.
'Because, if there is a God, he let Nathan die, Father John… because he let Nathan die.'
The room was quiet for some time.
I could hear the sound of my own breathing.
All these years you take your own life for granted, and it is symbolized by something so simple as the sound of breathing. You pay no mind to it, it's always there, never even give it a second thought.
I wondered, in that moment of quiet, what it would be like to hear nothing, to hear absolutely nothing at all.
I think - for the first moment in all the time I'd been waiting - I felt afraid.
Truly afraid.
People did come over. Benny came the day after I'd arrived back in Greenleaf. He seemed so much older than I remembered him, and the day we'd run from the soda shop, the other kids chasing us, seemed a thousand years ago. He spoke of that moment, and there was something in the way he spoke that sounded like he wished to be forgiven for failing to defend us. I felt no resentment towards him, I was happy to see him, but all the while my attention was on the fact that Nathan was down in the basement.
Benny stayed for nigh on two hours, and when he'd left I went down to get Nathan and found he'd pissed in a bucket in the corner.
'Christ, Nathan, you pissed in the bucket.'
'Hell, you didn't get rid of him. What the hell did you expect me to do?'
'I couldn't just send him away.'
'Sure, but you didn't have to keep him here two hours.'
I stood looking at him, his unshaven face, his hair twisted upside his head, and he reminded me of the Nathan I'd wheeled from a hospital in a stolen chair. His clothes were dirty, dishevelled and sweat-stained, and when he moved he moved like a beaten man. He took a step forward and slumped in a chair.
'Two fucking hours, Danny… you know what it's like to sit down there in the fucking dark for two hours wondering what the hell is going on up there?'
He thumped the arm of the chair with his clenched fist and cursed again. He was on edge. He wanted to see his folks. He felt he couldn't, not yet, not until the Draft situation had been resolved completely. Either that or the war ended.
I believed I understood what he felt; I'd felt the same way until I'd arrived back and found there'd been no call for me.
This reality created a tension between us, but the moments of tension were brief and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
The abiding feeling was one of relief. We were no longer running, no longer living hand-to-mouth or wondering who might ask questions about who we were and why we were there. That sense of ever-present anxiety had disappeared. I had not realized how great an effect that had had on me.
Nathan, though, was a different story. He became increasingly agitated, understandably so, and though he spent much of his time listening to the radio and reading, he appeared always restless. We had no TV, my ma had never wished for one, and though Karl Winterson's Radio Store now stocked such things I never considered buying one. For some reason I believed my stay in the house would be short, perhaps through Christmas, the early part of the New Year, but no longer. Why I felt that I didn't know, but the feeling was there and establishing roots was the last thing on my mind.
As Christmas approached Nathan's invisibility became more and more difficult to maintain. People came to visit, people called and asked me to go visit them, and try as I could to maintain some distance it became ever more real to me that to avoid everyone, to ignore every invitation, was merely to feed any sense of suspicion that might already exist. The human mind - concerned, afraid perhaps - always errs towards thinking the worst when there is no real reason to think such things. Nevertheless, I felt that way, careful, tentative, alert to what I said, always conscious of never allowing myself to refer inadvertently to Nathan Verney. So I would go out, and was out most evenings during the last week before Christmas, and though I would return as quickly as I could I found that Nathan would be drunk more often than not. Drinking had become his solution to the interminable boredom. We had spent eighteen months working, travelling, doing something different almost every day, and now he was housebound. I could appreciate how he felt to some degree, but we started arguing, and one evening I returned and found he'd broken plates and cups across the kitchen floor.
I was incensed. These had been my mother's possessions. He had no right.
'Right?' he shouted. 'Don't talk to me about rights. I have rights. I'm stuck in this fucking place because someone who doesn't even know me thinks I have the right to die for something I don't even believe in. That's my fucking right, Danny, a right that was never granted you -'
'Sit the fuck down, Nathan, and stop shouting.'
Nathan paced back and forth across the room for a while. His fists were clenched, he seemed all wound up inside, tightened like a clock spring. He'd worn the same jeans and tee-shirt for days, and for the life of me I could not remember when he'd last bathed.
I opened my mouth to say something.
The sound of someone knocking on the front door stopped me dead.
'Oh hell,' I remember saying.
I looked at Nathan.
He looked at me.
I looked towards the basement door there behind me in the hallway.
Nathan shook his head.
'Nathan -'
'Fuck it,' he said. 'Fuck it, I'm here… I can't bear to stay locked up in this fucking house any more. Let whatever comes come, I'm ready.'
'Nathan,' I said again.
Nathan shook his head again.
'Fuck it, Danny… might as well face the music as go crazy in here.'
I sighed inwardly. There was nothing audible. It was like some internal collapse. The walls of the soul were giving way.
I turned and walked to the door.
I raised my hand.
I could see a silhouette through the frosted glass.
The latch snapped back.
I could sense Nathan behind me, right there in direct line of sight.
I slowly opened the door, and I recall trying to fill the ever-widening gap with my body, knowing at once that such an action was futile. If Nathan had given up hiding then he would be seen whether I tried to hide him or not.
I gave up my resistance.
I pulled the door wide.
'Danny!'
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Two
'You were surprised to see Linny Goldbourne?'
I looked across at Father John. 'Surprised? I was stunned. Christ, I never thought I'd see the girl again.'
'What made her come, d'you think?'
I shrugged my shoulders. 'I don't know. There was something about her, something distant, like you could never really nail down exactly what she was feeling or thinking. Apparently she was like that with everyone, had been all her life, and that was part of the reason people found it so easy to accept that she'd gone crazy. They were comfortable with the idea of Linny Goldbourne being crazy because it explained their own difficulty in relating to her.'
'You thought she was crazy?' Father John asked.
I smiled, shook my head. 'No, I never thought she was
crazy, no more crazy than me or Nathan or anyone else.'
I leaned forward and looked at Father John. 'The truth? The truth was that I loved the girl… loved her as much as I'd loved anyone, and the way she left, everything that happened at that time -'
I stopped mid-flight. I didn't know what I was saying.