“I hate that boat,” he said. “I’m never going on any more boats.”
“It’s okay now,” I said. “I’m just going to hold you for a while.” Now that I’d seen him, and he was alive, the particulars of what had happened didn’t seem that important, though later they would be.
Oliver couldn’t stop shivering. I looked over at Swift now, speaking with the police officer. His expression, unlike Ollie’s, remained remarkably unchanged from any other day—calm, reasonable, sober—though his trademark grin was absent. He appeared to listen intently to what the officer was saying, though Swift was doing most of the talking, with occasional interjections from Cooper.
What was Cooper doing at Lake Tahoe? (What were any of them doing at Lake Tahoe?) The last I knew, Cooper was supposed to be flying into SFO from New York. (Renting a car. Showing up at the party to meet up with his fiancée and deliver the big birthday toast to his father.) Now he was leaning back just a little on the molded plastic chair, legs spread wide apart in that way a certain kind of man is likely to sit, that always seemed, to me, to announce the presence of their manliness. Here is my cock. Here are my balls. Any questions?
He had a Coke in one hand, cell phone in the other. He was wearing a pink polo shirt, with the little alligator appliqué on his left chest, his Ray-Bans suspended from his neck on a rubber cord, a two-day growth of beard in no way diminishing his handsomeness. The way he looked reminded me of one of the photographs of Swift I’d included in the Man and His Dogs book, taken when Cooper was sixteen or seventeen and had been named Prom King, class of 2000.
I would have expected to have spoken with Swift when I reached the waiting room—or he to me—but strangely, given our many months of apparently close friendship, he seemed not to acknowledge my arrival, or, stranger still, the presence of my son. We remained on separate sides of the room—he with his son, I with mine. The unspoken message was clear: This was how things were going to stay. If I could have picked Ollie up right then and run away with him, I would have. Through the blanket, I could still feel his whole body trembling, though after those first syllables when I’d taken him in my arms, he had not spoken another word.
I looked back to Swift. Though he was not smiling, for once, his face seemed strangely placid. I thought fleetingly of Elliot, and how when he was anxious or upset he ran his hands through his hair and how crazy it looked. Elliot, who was normally so calm, acted agitated when he was upset. Swift, who was usually so outrageous and loud, seemed chillingly composed, at a moment when you might have supposed he’d be unsettled.
I missed Elliot. I wished he were here.
With my arms wrapped tightly around my son, I watched Swift talking with the policeman. He was gesturing with his hands, but without any hint of distress, as if he were telling the gardener where to plant the tulip bulbs, or recreating for a friend the workings of a particular play enacted by the 49ers at last Sunday’s game. Beside him at the table, Cooper looked earnest, thoughtful, concerned. Now and then, as his father spoke, he nodded, and other times he shook his head—not as a person would who takes exception to what the other is saying, but simply by way of conveying how regrettable things were.
“He’s just a little kid,” Cooper was saying, his voice level, reasonable. All evidence of the frat boy absent now. “It’s not his fault.”
Cooper and Swift exchanged glances then. I had never recognized before how much they resembled each other. It came to me, they were speaking about my son.
“You have any kids, Norman?” Swift was saying now. Somewhere along the line he’d picked up the officer’s first name. “You know how they are at that age.”
The police officer looked over at Ollie. Whatever else Swift was saying then, I didn’t hear it. All my focus went to Ollie.
Just then, Ava came into the room in her wheelchair. She went immediately to Swift, seeming not to notice me and Ollie. “Finally!” she said. “Nobody could tell me what floor you were on.” She reached her long, thin arm—still in the silver beaded gown—to stroke his chest and smooth his hair. The way she touched him reminded me of how she would pet one of their dogs.
“You’re okay,” she kept saying to Swift. “The only thing that matters is you’re okay.”
A second officer came into the room. “Please, ma’am,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but we need your husband’s attention. We’re trying to get a statement.”
A doctor entered, wearing surgical scrubs.
“She made it through the surgery,” he said. “But there was a lot of pressure on her brain. The impact was pretty severe. We won’t know the extent of the damage for some time.”
“Who is he talking about?” I asked the second police officer, the new one.
“Ms. Hernandez,” he said. “I understand she was employed by the family. Or her mother is? She was thrown off the back of the Jet Ski. That young woman is lucky to be alive.”
Carmen.
Later now. I had lost track of the time, but it was early morning and we were at the police station now—my son asleep, at last, on a cot they’d provided, with a blanket over him, and a second blanket because he was shivering so badly, which had nothing to do with the temperature. One of the officers had offered me a cot, too, but I couldn’t sleep, so I just sat on the floor next to Ollie, with my arms still locked around him.
Sometime around dawn, the officer came in to say he’d finished his report—“just the initial findings”—and that he was ready to tell me what appeared to have happened, based on his interviews with Swift and Cooper, neither of whom had spoken to me directly.
“We’ll want to have a talk with your son, too, naturally,” he said. “But he’s in no shape for that now. We might want to have a child welfare officer present, just to assess how much of this he can handle.”
I didn’t want to leave Ollie, but he finally appeared to be sleeping soundly, so I followed the officer into the other room and sat down across from him at his desk.
Reynolds was the name on his badge. “So,” I said. “What can you tell me?”
“I understand that Mr. Havilland had brought your son Oliver up to the lake to give him a ride in his power boat,” Officer Reynolds offered.
“This wasn’t the plan,” I said. “They were supposed to be spending the day in Monterey.”
“According to Mr. Havilland,” Officer Reynolds said, “he’d wanted to surprise your boy. I gather this was something the two of them had talked about for a long time.”
“They were supposed to be going to the aquarium,” I said. For whatever that was worth. Nothing, evidently.
“Unbeknownst to Mr. Havilland, his son Cooper had chosen to pay a visit to the house sometime earlier—the day before—and brought along a friend of his, Ms. Hernandez,” the officer continued.
Described this way—based on his interview with Cooper, I gathered—the whole thing sounded wonderfully uncomplicated. A cookout on the grill. A dip in the lake. A little card game. (A little fooling around, too, no doubt. But that was not a police matter.) Then, on Saturday afternoon they took out the Jet Ski. The younger Mr. Havilland thought he’d show this young woman around the lake.
Sometime in the late afternoon Mr. Havilland, senior, had shown up with Ollie.
Late afternoon? The two of them had set out at six that morning. What took them so long to make what should have been a four-hour trip? What was Swift thinking, arriving at Lake Tahoe late in the afternoon, with full knowledge that he needed to be home in time for dinner that night?
No answer for any of that. All the police officer had to say was that Mr. Havilland arrived, by his own account, sometime around 4:00 or 5:00 P.M. He had not been concerned to see another car in the driveway already, because he recognized the vehicle as the yellow Dodge Viper his son Cooper liked to rent whenever he flew home to San Francisco. He figured Cooper had come west to surprise him on his birthday and was taking an extra couple of days to enjoy the lake house. He had his own key, and it was not uncommon,
he had said, that he’d use it this way, as a getaway.
“Since there was no sign of the younger Mr. Havilland on the premises, Mr. Havilland, senior, deduced that his son must be out enjoying the lake, as he and your son intended to do,” Officer Reynolds continued.
“This was confirmed when he recognized that one of the two Jet Skis was missing from the boathouse. So he drove down to the landing for the purpose of lowering his speedboat”—he consulted his notes here—“the Donzi . . . into the lake.”
I was listening, but only partly. It was hard to focus, knowing Ollie was in the other room. I didn’t want to leave him by himself. If he woke up afraid, or had a bad dream, I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. But I was having trouble making sense of the officer’s account of the events of that afternoon. Or what Cooper and Swift could possibly have been thinking, heading out onto the lake for a boat ride, and a Jet Ski ride, on the afternoon of the day when they knew they were due back on Folger Lane by seven thirty. At least one of those two—Cooper—knew a big party would be under way at which his presence, not to mention his father’s, was expected. Even Swift had to have realized something was up for his wife to have been so insistent that they make it home no later than eight. We had both known, as he set off on the trip, that he was humoring her when he acted as if there were nothing unusual in Ava’s insistence that he go away for the day with Ollie.
“Apparently your son and Mr. Havilland rode around on the boat for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before the trouble occurred,” the officer continued. “Mr. Havilland explained that this particular model of speedboat is capable of getting up to speeds as high as eighty miles per hour. But he had made it plain to Oliver that they would not be doing that kind of racing. This was meant to be strictly a child’s pleasure trip.”
I nodded. More numb than in agreement. The Swift I knew would not be averse to taking a boy on a thrill ride.
“Mr. Havilland has made it plain to us that he is adamant about water safety,” the officer went on. “At first his plan had been only to take Oliver out on the smaller dinghy with the outboard motor, or the kayak, but your son was so insistent about going on this bigger boat that he finally acquiesced.”
They’d driven up there to ride the Donzi. That was the whole point of the trip. Those two didn’t travel over four hours for a ride in a dinghy. I didn’t say this. I just thought it.
“Unfortunately, your son evidently displayed a strong resistance to wearing his life jacket,” Officer Reynolds continued. “I gather he had been somewhat argumentative and oppositional for much of the day, but Mr. Havilland attributed this to the boy being overtired.”
“He may have been tired,” I said. But none of the rest made any sense. If Ollie hadn’t wanted to put on his life jacket, it was hard to picture Swift making an issue of it. It was even harder to imagine Ollie ever being argumentative—or “oppositional”—with Swift. Every time I’d seen those two together, Ollie behaved like the most obedient and loyal puppy.
“As you would expect, Mr. Havilland took a firm position. He explained to your son that there would be no ride in the boat unless he agreed to wear the life jacket. At this point, Ollie reluctantly complied.”
The crash, I thought. Tell me about the crash.
“But evidently your son kept giving Mr. Havilland a hard time about the life jacket,” the officer said. “You know how mouthy kids can get.”
Maybe I did. But not Ollie, not to Swift.
According to this police officer, Ollie continued to “mouth off” to Swift about the life jacket. He had used an epithet describing the kind of person who wears life jackets.
“I don’t want to repeat this epithet, Ms. McCabe,” he said to me. “Let’s leave it that the word begins with ‘P.’ Then Ollie starts asking if he could drive the boat. Mr. Havilland says no. Under no circumstances. They were rounding the point just south of Rubicon Bay, if you’re familiar with that area.”
I shook my head. “I’ve only been to Lake Tahoe once before,” I told him.
“This was when Mr. Havilland noted a Jet Ski on the starboard side. Coming at a reasonable speed but close enough that it was important to keep a close watch. The Jet Ski gets closer, and to Mr. Havilland’s surprise, the Jet Ski is being driven by his son, Cooper. Naturally, then, the two wish to pull their two crafts up, one alongside the other. They’d almost reached each other,” the officer continued. “Close enough that they could speak to each other. Mr. Havilland, senior, calls out to his son, does he have sunscreen?”
Here the officer interrupted his story with a detail from Swift’s account of the events. “Mr. Havilland, senior, wanted number fifty,” he said. “He explained to his son that he had twenty-five, but out on the water, it wasn’t enough.”
At this of all moments, Swift had been talking about sunscreen. What was that about? A memory came to me of Ollie playing cards by the pool, and Swift instructing him on the secret of winning at poker.
You want to make a lie sound like the truth? Swift had said to Ollie. Surround it with smaller details that are real.
I knew this, too, from the stories I made up. It had been true that Audrey Hepburn worked for UNICEF. It was true, she made a movie with Gregory Peck. She just wasn’t my grandmother.
“They were evidently close enough that Mr. Havilland, senior, reached to grab the tube of sunscreen from his son. It was in this moment, when he looked away, that your son Ollie wrested the helm from Mr. Havilland and proceeded to gun the engine.”
I drew in my breath. I looked at the officer hard. I didn’t know this man, but I knew my son. He wouldn’t do something like that. I thought I knew Swift, too, but I’d been wrong. He was lying.
Swift never wore sunscreen. He had told Ollie that sunscreen was for pussies.
“When Ollie gave it gas,” Officer Reynolds continued, “the boat shot forward, full throttle. That’s when the boat rammed into the Jet Ski. Mr. Havilland’s son was knocked off his seat, sustaining only the minor injury of a sprained wrist.
“Unfortunately, the injuries incurred by Ms. Hernandez were much more severe. When she was thrown from the Jet Ski it appears that she sustained a head injury. She lost consciousness. It was no doubt due to the efforts of Mr. Havilland—the senior Mr. Havilland—who dove into the water to rescue her, that this young woman is alive at all.
“Given what he was facing,” the officer concluded, “I’d call that man a hero.”
I asked if there was any more information about how Carmen was doing. “Has anyone contacted her mother?” I asked.
“The doctors are saying it’s too early to tell much,” he said. “Her mother’s on her way up now.
“Of course we understand that Oliver is too young to be held responsible for this,” the officer went on. “He couldn’t have anticipated the consequences.”
“My son wouldn’t have done anything like that,” I said. “My son worships the ground Swift walks on. I can’t picture him grabbing the helm of a boat and trying to drive it himself. He doesn’t have that kind of confidence. That’s more the kind of thing Swift would do. Or Cooper.”
“With all due respect, Ms. McCabe,” Officer Reynolds said, “mothers never seem able to view their sons with a totally unbiased eye. My wife would be the same where our son was concerned.”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“Of course we’ll be speaking with your son about all of this, when he’s ready,” the officer said. “Meanwhile, given his age, no charges will be filed against him. What he did, according to Mr. Havilland, was a prank. A stupid prank, with terrible repercussions for the young woman involved, though we can thank God nobody else was seriously injured. And nobody’s suggesting that Oliver injured Ms. Hernandez intentionally.”
“He didn’t do it at all,” I said.
“In Oliver’s case, we understand your son has had a lot of traumatic experiences,” Officer Reynolds went on. “We managed to reach his father by telephone earlier this evening
. He was deeply troubled, of course, but confirmed that Oliver has displayed a lot of anger lately, particularly to authority figures.”
They’d spoken with Dwight. The walls seemed to be closing in on me now. Not unlike that courtroom, three years earlier. But worse.
“Kids from divorced families can often act out,” the police officer said. “Your DUI arrest was probably confusing to your son. Seeing an authority figure placed under arrest.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr. Havilland explained to us that your drinking is no longer an issue. I understand you’re in AA.”
This wasn’t happening. No, this was.
Maybe I would have said something, but I heard Ollie calling out for me and I went back in the other room.
They wanted to talk with Ollie, of course. He wasn’t in good shape for that, but it seemed important. Particularly after the account I’d heard—Swift’s account—of what had happened out on the lake.
First they got him a Coke. The officers sat him down in a comfortable chair. This time there was a female police officer, and someone I figured must be some kind of child protection officer. I was not allowed in the room.
“I’m sorry about this,” Officer Reynolds told me. “It’s just policy.”
He was gone only briefly—five minutes at most. When Ollie emerged from the room—his face pale, his eyes hollow in their sockets—the female officer took me aside while Ollie was in the bathroom.
“He isn’t responding to our questions,” she said. “All he could do when we ran over Mr. Havilland’s account of what happened was to stare out the window and nod his head. Mostly he just kept saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again.”
“Ollie’s eight years old,” I told her.
“Of course he’s feeling guilty and responsible. He asked if he was going to go to jail. I made a point of reassuring him that we understand he didn’t realize the consequence of his actions. It’s not like we’re going to be charging someone his age with a crime.”
“Ollie agreed he gunned the engine?” I asked her. “He said he was the one who crashed the boat into the Jet Ski?”
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