The pool they had been in was slightly uphill from where Max stood now, and he began to walk slowly along the side of the rocky stream back toward it. As he rose up with the land, he saw David Hammer, stuck near the mouth of the pool, his body lodged against a rock ledge, his legs moving obscenely back and forth in the current. It was a miracle that Max had made it out and down to where he could breathe.
Max needed to get David out. The water, the current, the current that had almost killed Max, scared him and he moved gingerly around the rocks, stepping over the small stream to the other side, where David Hammer lay facedown.
Max bent down and took David’s hands in his and began to pull on David’s arms. Max pulled David until he could lean down and put his hands under David’s armpits, then he tugged hard to get him out of the water.
Max fell backward onto the bank and David Hammer fell down on top of him.
Max slid out from under him and stood up. Max was out of gas, breathing hard again. But David’s eyes were open and Max didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t to see those vacant blue eyes. David’s glasses were gone, somewhere in the pool probably. On his neck were the scratches from Max’s fingernails. This didn’t surprise Max, and he knew they would raise questions, but the answer was easy, wasn’t it? He had tried to save him. That was what happened. He fell in, and Max tried to save him and almost killed himself.
Max left David Hammer on the rocks. He followed the route they had run only an hour ago back up the hill, through the woods, climbing the ridge to where on the other side, in the lee of the trees, sat David’s car.
Max moved slowly, his body broken and his head soupy, one foot in front of the other. When he touched his head, his fingers came down still covered in fresh blood. It was hot now and he wondered if he had a fever.
While Max didn’t want to know what he looked like, he knew this was a gift. When help arrived it would appear he had been through the wringer, too, which could only add gravitas to his story. It was a tragedy on a spring day, so terrible, but nobody’s fault.
Somehow he made it to the car. He opened the door and took his phone out of the bag on the passenger-side floor. The words he was about to say were going to be the most important words he had said in a lifetime of saying words. They would be recorded and they would be assessed. Nothing mattered more than how he sounded.
Max forced himself to cry. He imagined that it was Susannah’s body on that rocky riverbank and that she was gone forever. The tears came and stuffed up his nose.
He leaned against the hood of that small car and dialed 911.
“There’s been an accident,” Max said, when the operator came on. “My friend drowned. I’m really hurt. Hurt bad.”
“Sir, where are you?”
“A dirt road. I don’t know the name. We were at Huntington Gorge. Oh, God…”
“Stay on the line, okay? Stay with me. We are sending help now.”
Max stayed on the line. “Okay,” he said through tears.
The blackflies consumed him. He knew it would be a while. But he stood and listened for the wail of sirens and the scramble of tires coming up the hill.
THAT MORNING, BEFORE THE PHONE call came, Susannah felt oddly calm. She watched Max bound out the door to David Hammer’s waiting car, and after they left, it was almost as if she could feel Max running through those woods, as if she were doing it herself in a dream, the strain of his quad muscles, then the feel of the icy river water when he plunged in after David. Sometimes they were symbiotic like this—two minds connected by an invisible thread. Maybe that’s why she was calm. She was calm because Max was. He knew what he was doing.
It was a beautiful morning. She dragged Freddy to the farmers’ market downtown. He didn’t want to be there, or at least with her, for he was of the age now when everything Susannah did embarrassed him.
“You need sunlight,” she said to him.
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“You’re going.”
A Saturday morning Vermont farmers’ market is a thing of beauty. Susannah could not go there without being reminded of her mother, and the wistful stories she told when Susannah was a child about the markets in Madrid, which her mother had missed about Spain more than anything else, teeming with fresh vegetables and fish that had been trucked in from the sea. While there were no fish at the market in Burlington, it had newly plucked vegetables and meat and eggs from local farms and gorgeous breads. Susannah had made a commitment to herself to try to shop here every week, to bring home a bounty and then fashion meals all week for Freddy and Max. It would be her challenge, her labor of love: cook fresh and healthy out of the breadbasket that was Vermont.
The market was bustling. Sometimes crowds bothered Susannah, but not this kind, with the wide-open air and families with children and dogs and street performers everywhere. Freddy vanished on her almost immediately. At the north end of the market, some kids from school were break-dancing on a piece of cardboard, and he skateboarded over there as if he didn’t know her at all.
It was early in the season. Too early for the sweet ripe summer tomatoes, but not for pencil-thin local asparagus and greens, and Susannah bought some of both. From a vendor, an elderly dark-skinned woman, who had a sign that said FREE HUGS, Susannah bought some lamb-leg steaks and some ground beef.
Her final stop was at the local bread company, where the young guy with the long goatee flirted with her, as he had at the end of last summer. Susannah didn’t know if he remembered her or if he flirted with everyone, but the way he looked at her brought a smile to her face.
Susannah’s phone started to vibrate in her back pocket. She didn’t get it in time, but it was a local number and she thought, Oh, well, but then they called right back.
“Hello?”
“Susannah Garcia?”
“Yes?”
“This is Officer Brisbane from the Burlington Police Department. There has been an accident.”
THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN TIME stops. Moments when all around you things move in slow motion and the fog you fear is not fog at all, but profound clarifying numbness, and thank God for the body that continues to move when all you want to do is shut down.
Susannah ran through the crowd with her bags flapping against her legs toward where Freddy did skateboard tricks off the curb next to white kids popping and locking to hip-hop on a former refrigerator box they had opened flat and laid out on the cobblestones. She grabbed him frantically by the shoulders and, when he tried to brush her off, said, “Max was hurt, we have to go. He’s in the hospital.”
She didn’t even remember driving. Somehow they ran to the car, got in, and sped up the hill to the university hospital.
Susannah felt as if she were swimming through soup after she parked the car and they went in through the emergency entrance. She never liked hospitals. The glare of the lights, the click of shoes on linoleum, the antiseptic smells, and most of all the sense that no one, outside of the staff, chose to be there.
They hadn’t told her much on the phone. Just that Max was here and that he was stable. She had tried to say that over and over in her head. Stable. It was a good word and she didn’t know the whole range of words but she knew enough to know that it didn’t mean “critical.”
The nurse looked him up on the computer. “He’s not ready to see you yet, but it shouldn’t be long. They’re just finishing up.”
“Finishing up? What do you mean?”
“He’s going to be fine. He took a pretty good blow to the head, some loss of blood. He has a concussion. They’re just stitching him up now. But if you want to take a seat, I will let you know.”
Susannah was grateful to her. She was an older woman with streaked-gray hair and a kind face. She didn’t talk to Susannah in jargon—The doctors are reassured or some such thing. The nurse said simply that he was going to be fine. Thank you.
Susannah and Freddy sat down on the hard plastic seats that were joined together. It was like waiting for a bus. Freddy lo
oked bored and Susannah realized that she hadn’t spoken to him since they got in the car, and he must have seen the tightness in her face and didn’t want to pierce the bubble she was in.
She reached over and put her hand on his knee. “You okay, honey?”
“Can I walk home? It’s not far.”
“No, Max is going to want to see you. It won’t be long.”
Freddy slumped in his chair, his hair falling over his eyes.
It was almost forty-five minutes before they were brought upstairs in the elevator to the fourth floor, where Max lay in a bed in a small room. He was hooked to an IV and on his head a bandage protruded out as large as a softball and came right to the edge of his blue eyes. On the left side of his bed, a young nurse with a high ponytail and blue scrubs looked up from where she was scribbling on a clipboard.
“Oh, Max,” Susannah said, going over to the right side of the bed next to him, Freddy trailing behind her.
“I’m fine.”
“Did he hit you?”
Max looked at her sharply and then over toward the nurse. “What? No, of course not. Why would he hit me? It was an accident. David fell in. I tried to save him.”
“What do you mean ‘tried to save him’?”
“They didn’t tell you? David Hammer drowned.”
MAX CAME HOME THAT NIGHT with instructions to take it easy for a few days. No bright lights and lots of rest, he was told. The state police didn’t believe this precluded them from visiting, which two did, both in uniform, a man and a woman. On the street outside the house, all three local television stations had stationed their satellite trucks, two of them sad small vans with a dish on top, and the other one looking new and like a small RV.
Susannah drew the blinds down and Freddy disappeared into his room to play video games. Susannah had wanted to stay and listen to what the cops had to ask Max, but they asked if they could be alone, and that they might have questions for her afterward.
Before they came, and after Max was settled in upstairs, he told her what had happened. He was groggy and his eyes were slightly glassy but his words were pure Max, clear and forceful and she almost believed them. She wanted to believe him, even, but she knew differently. Though for the moment she felt that she had no choice but to play the dutiful wife.
“He just slipped,” Max told her slowly. “It was crazy. He got there first, to the gorge, and I was maybe two minutes behind him running down the hill. David was standing with his back to me, looking over at the falls. I remember he turned toward me, like he was about to say something. Next thing I know he’s falling backward into the water. At first I laughed. But then I realized he was in trouble. I sprinted over and went in after him. The current was insane. I was trying to pull him out but he kept getting sucked under. He was clawing at me for help. Then I hit my head. I have no idea how long I was out. When I came to, I was so lucky. Somehow I had gone downstream. David was floating on his face in the pool.”
“Oh, Max. Max.”
“It’s going to be a zoo, Susannah. For a few weeks. For all of us. The press will be knocking at the door. It’s important we don’t say anything yet. When I am able, I will talk to them. But I don’t want you and Freddy to have to, okay? This happened to me.”
“It sounds like it happened to David.”
“Of course, yes, it did. I feel terrible for Joanie. I mean, we made fun of them. But they were perfect for each other.”
Susannah sighed. “It’s going to be huge at the university.”
“Yes, it is. Listen to me. I know you won’t like this. But until I am well enough to make a statement, hopefully tomorrow, I need you to stay inside, okay? Backyard should be fine. But don’t go out front. There will be a lot of interest.”
She nodded. She looked into his blue eyes, which though hazier than usual were still that icy blue, both warm and unknowing at the same time.
“I got it, Max.”
“Thank you.” He looked at Susannah as if she were a student he had just taken a conference with, and now she was dismissed.
“ANGER SEPARATE FROM HUMAN EXPERIENCE, from human feeling and empathy,” Joseph once told her in therapy, “can grow like a weed until it consumes you. But few of us truly hate, Susannah, when you get right down to it. Sociopathic behavior, put simply, is the absence of empathy. I want you to try something for me.”
“Okay.”
“This is a game.”
“I don’t like games, Joseph.”
He sat back in his leather chair, stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Indulge me.”
“I don’t like indulging you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
She glared at him but didn’t say anything.
“I want you to imagine a dungeon.”
“No.”
“Yes, Susannah, a dungeon. Picture it. It’s dark and damp and subterranean. Metal bars. Stone walls. No windows. Close your eyes for me. Can you see it?”
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“I see dark rock walls. They are uneven. Slick with water. It looks very old.”
“Yes. What else do you see?”
“Nothing, Joseph. I see nothing.”
“Good. Now here is what we do. I want you to imagine someone you hate. Someone who has done you wrong. And here’s the thing, Susannah, the big thing about this. You get to torture them.”
“Torture them?”
“Yes, however you want. Pick your weapons. In fact, I want you to imagine them. What is in that cell? Are there razors? A hammer? A knife? You get to choose.” Joseph paused. “But there is one important caveat to this whole fantasy. Well, actually two. First, you have to look them in the eyes when you hurt them. You have to see the hurt in their eyes. And you are not allowed to look away, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And the second caveat is equally important.”
“Okay.”
“There is a reset button for them. They get to press it. And when they do, the pain goes away, whatever harm you have inflicted is reversed, but they remember that you did it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“So who do you want to hurt, Susannah?”
“Nobody, Joseph. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“What about your father? He gives you up just because you fall in love?”
She shook her head. “I love my father.”
“Your mother? She didn’t defend you. She shrank away and let you go. The very woman who birthed you?”
“No, no, no.”
“Your sister?”
“Stop it. I don’t like this at all.”
“Do you want to hurt me, Susannah?”
“Of course not, Joseph. I’m not playing this anymore.”
Joseph sat back in his chair, stroked his chin again. He looked at her, then past her shoulder to the bookcases behind her. “Time’s up.”
MAX’S HEAD HURT AND EVEN the wan late-afternoon light coming through the window was way too bright and his eyes did not want to be open. After Susannah left, he closed them to conserve his energy—he knew the crucible to come—and he fell into a deep sleep.
He dreamed that he was running through the forest, as he had been earlier in the day. Those sunlight-dappled woods were lush and green and he moved effortlessly, his body a machine, legs and arms pumping up the steep hill. In front of him, he saw the figure running in the distance, coming into view for a moment before disappearing around a bend in the trees. Max picked up the pace—he needed to catch him. It suddenly occurred to Max where he was going. He was going to the car, and he intended to leave Max behind, out in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road. He would drive to the police station up near the lake and tell them what Max had tried to do.
Max ran faster. He was so fast. He burst up the hillside and he felt no burn in his lungs—he was a child again and he could run forever.
He was gaining on him. He popped into sight at the top of the hill, the
white of his shirt, and he was no more than fifty yards away now. Max crested the rise and then the slight downhill in front of him, and there he was, moving toward the trailhead. Max picked up the pace yet again, practically sprinting, and when he got within twenty yards, he yelled, “Stop.”
And he did. He stopped. He stopped and turned around to face Max.
It was no longer David Hammer. Instead, Max’s mother stood there, and she had aged, her face heavily lined, her hair streaked with gray, but still wearing that baby-blue eye shadow she loved. She was smoking one of those generic cigarettes, holding the crumpled pack in the claw of her other hand.
“Phil, is that you? You look so grown-up.”
“No. No. No. No.”
“Phil, come home.” A pleading was in her voice. “It’s been forever.”
TWO STATE TROOPERS STOOD AT the entrance to his bedroom, a man and a woman. Max saw them instantly, assessing him, and he thought, These must be the two who wanted to see me at the hospital, with the nurse running interference and saying unless it was an absolute emergency, it should wait until later.
He must have still looked jacked up, because before they introduced themselves, the female trooper said, “Are you sure you can talk? We could come back.”
“I’m okay.” Max mostly was, though the dream lingered, just beyond his grasp, as if the concussion had knocked something from the past loose in his head. It had been years since he had thought of his mother.
He was tall and out of central casting for a state trooper, broad shouldered and with the clichéd superhero cleft chin. His name was Loftus. She was stout and wide hipped, but she had a pretty face, with dark eyes and full lips. Her name was Scott, though she looked Hispanic, and while they were both in uniform, she said they were detectives with the state police. She did all the talking, and by the way Loftus looked at her, his body language, Max could tell she was the senior officer.
She moved over to the side of his bed, while Loftus stayed unmoving at the foot of it, as if he were ready in case Max made some kind of run for it.
The Perfect Liar Page 11