Later that morning, Lois called, just as she might have called any morning when Jack was working, just as she’d called that Thursday morning when he was working on this same critique and they talked about Danny and barbecues and the future. She did not talk about any of those things today.
She said, “Summer vacations are starting in a few days and we all want to see you before we go away.”
“We?”
“Your friends, Jack. We want to be with you.”
“You mean go out somewhere?”
“If you like. But we thought we’d just stop by.” When Jack didn’t answer, Lois said, “Only for a little while, to say good-bye. No one’s seen you since Danny died.” When he still didn’t answer she said, “I think it’s important that we do this, Jack. We won’t see each other again until the end of summer. I think we should be together…”
He tried to prepare for his friends, make a fresh pot of coffee, put out a plate of cookies. But he knew it didn’t matter. There was no way to prepare. They would look at him with pitying faces and talk soft talk, cautious talk. They would not speak what they surely would be thinking: “How could you let this happen to your son?” They would look at him and be reminded of what can go wrong and what can be lost.
They came dressed in jackets and ties and summer dresses, bearing food—they said the last thing Jack needed to think about was cooking for himself—and sympathy.
They sat in the living room, in the deep couch and the comfortable chairs where the sunlight was the sparest, where the trees and the porch hung shadows on the walls. Their voices had competed at countless cocktail parties in this room and after dinners when the talk was loud and hard and there was never a lull. Now they could only talk soft talk.
Arthur and Celeste Harrison, Rick’s parents, said, “It’s as if we lost our own son.”
Sally Richards told Jack, “We’ve been through so much together, and now it—I don’t know…”
“We know this,” Stan Miller said, “nothing is the same for you and that means nothing is the same for us, either.” Stan was thin, not very tall, his gray hair was brushed straight back over a long skull that made Jack think of an eagle. When he spoke, his voice had a firm timbre, it was a reliable voice.
Lois sat next to Jack and held his hand. “All we’re trying to say is, you’re our Jack. You’ll always be our Jack.”
Jack said he found comfort in that.
In another few days his friends would be gone for their vacations. The migration from academe, the summer ritual they’d performed most of their professional lives. The ritual Jack was now no longer part of. They each wanted him to come visit them, stay as long as he liked. Jack wanted to say yes, he would. He wanted to tell them how much he’d miss them and that he didn’t want to spend the summer alone. He wanted to tell them how lonely and miserable he was. He wanted to say that he’d never felt so empty in all his life. But he only knew how to tell them not to worry about him, he was sure he’d be all right.
Mandy Ainsley, C.J.’s mother, arrived with cake and cookies from the White Brick Bakery. She said, “Danny was C.J.’s closest friend. We’re all going to miss him.” She moved closer and whispered, “Carl is very upset with himself for what happened the other day. He was too ashamed to come over and tell you himself.”
Hal and Vicki Clarke, Brian’s parents, arrived with more food.
“We all loved Danny so much,” Vicki said.
Hal sat facing Jack. “So very much,” and leaned forward—it seemed everyone was sitting forward, or was Jack imagining it? Were they waiting for him to do something, waiting for him to say something? Waiting for Jack to decode the suicide? Waiting for an explanation—if Danny had died in an accident, if he’d died of a disease, there would be no need to explain—or were they waiting for another kind of explanation? Waiting for Jack to tell them where he went wrong. “How could you let his mother leave him, Jack?” “Did you really think you could undo the damage?” “A boy doesn’t commit suicide just like that.” “We would have seen it in our children, how could you have missed it? He was your son, after all.”
But no one asked for explanations. There was only soft talk. Then there wasn’t any talk at all. Only their presence, silent and sorry.
Jack thought about the other boy who’d killed himself. Who were his parents? Where did they work? Did their friends bring food and gather in the living room and lean forward expectantly? Were those parents able to provide an explanation?
When Arthur got up to smoke his pipe on the back porch, everyone followed him outside. They seemed relieved to be out of the house, away from the oppressive sorrow. They needed to breathe.
Jack sat on the steps. Arthur and Stan sat in the chairs beside him.
Arthur said, “I know it’s too soon to think about now, but if you ever want counseling, I know a good man in Bloomington.”
Across the yard, Celeste, Sally and Hal stood along the back fence, in the corner where the new flower beds were showing their colors. They were talking about their children. Jack imagined Danny sitting here with him, leaning back, watching the day grow another minute older. That’s what he wanted, to watch the day grow a minute older with Danny.
A shadow shifted along the corner of the porch, Jack’s eyes tried to grab it, his heart twitched. He thought: Danny. Because that’s what it had always meant before, what he’d always seen when he looked up, when he looked over his shoulder, when there was the change in the air that had its very own feel, the footsteps on the floor that had their own sound.
He thought, This is what it will be like from now on, a shadow would shift and he’d think he was seeing Danny because he used to see him all the time. It’s like the phantom limb, which your eye says is gone but your brain still feels. Your hand can’t touch it, so it must not be there, but tell that to the rest of the body that loves it—the slightest change in light and he’d expect to see Danny, so he’s there. And then he’s not.
Over by the creek the crows were caw-cawing. Out in the field, Mutt was barking and making dark parabolas across the ground. The wind rustled the trees.
A small circle of people grew around Jack. Lois, Celeste and Arthur, Hal and Vicki, Stan, Mandy and Sally.
They stayed with him for a few minutes longer, making reassuring promises, speaking their regrets, saying their good-byes for the summer. If there was anything they could do, anything at all…
Jack couldn’t let them leave, not without asking. He said yes, there was, in fact, something they could do.
“Did your kids say anything about Danny—about his state of mind?”
“No,” they said, “nothing.” And looked at Jack with such sadness and pity that his insides curdled and he wanted to disappear.
Only Lois stayed behind. She put her arm through Jack’s and hugged it close to her body. “I know…I know…” was all she said.
Jack sat alone on the back steps trying to absorb this day, astonished that it had ever come, astonished by the new calibration: Time-without-Danny.
He did not get the chance to consider this. A car pulled up to the house. Someone was knocking on the front door.
The man said his name was Marty Foulk. He said he was a detective with the Gilbert police department.
“I told Hopewell everything I know,” Jack said.
“That’s not why I’m here.” Foulk held out the torn piece of paper. “It’s the poem your son wrote.” Jack didn’t move. “It’s yours, Dr. Owens. The investigation’s over.”
Part Two
X
Jack stepped outside, took the paper from Foulk and looked slowly at Danny’s handwriting.
Foulk said, “I know you’re going through a bad time. I put off coming out here for the past couple of weeks, the last thing you need is another detective showing up on your front porch.” He said this more sympathetically than Jack expected and made it sound more like an observation than a fact. “I wouldn’t be here now, except I work in the Juvenile Division. I’m
supposed to investigate juvenile crime, but since there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of that around here, I spend most of my time counseling kids, single parents.”
“I don’t need your counseling.” Jack did not raise his eyes from Danny’s poem.
“I know you don’t,” Foulk answered. He spoke, not in a midwestern accent, but in a southern accent, or traces of a southern accent, with rounded vowels and a smooth and easy tone, and when he offered his hand, saying, “Call me Marty,” he made it seem like he just happened to be passing by and this was nothing more than a friendly visit. “I’d really appreciate it if you gave me a few minutes of your time. You see, Danny was the second boy to commit suicide in the past month. Less than that, really.”
“The reporter who Hopewell gave my name to told me. But he wouldn’t tell me who the other boy is.” Jack looked up from Danny’s poem. “Or if Danny might have known him.”
“And you’ve been carrying that around with you all this time.” Marty shook his head slowly. “I’m really sorry about that.”
Jack folded the paper along the original creases, just as Danny had made them. “The son of a bitch sent the reporter to the woman who found Danny and he wouldn’t tell me her name, either.”
“Hopewell was out of line. He thinks getting his name in the news will get him to a big-city department.”
Jack put the poem carefully in his shirt pocket.
Marty said, “The boy’s name is Lamar Coggin. Did Danny know him?”
Jack said he’d never heard the name before. “Were he and Danny the same age?”
“He was ten.”
“Christ. Was it the same—did he do it the way—”
“No. He hanged himself. Out by Otter Creek. About a week before Danny.” When Marty said this, Jack heard something in the voice that was more than just down-home friendliness, something that had been missing from everyone else who had spoken to him since Danny died. It was as though Marty were speaking not from outside of Jack’s experience but from within it, not as a stranger but as someone who himself had lost a son.
It took Jack by surprise and it made him feel uncomfortable, that what Marty was doing, what he was saying, was a practiced act of manipulation. And when he told Jack, “I need to know a few things that only you can tell me,” Jack answered impatiently, “I already told Hopewell everything I know. Ask him.”
Marty quickly said, “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.” Then he said, “I saw the two of you together once. Back in March. At the recital at Danny’s high school.”
“You heard him play?” Jack said, feeling both sorrow and pride. “You heard Danny play?”
“I’m a big brother to one of the boys in the school band. Danny was very talented.”
“He was studying classical piano with Ben D’Amico at the college. Ben thought Danny had great potential.”
“I saw how you and Danny talked to each other. Even in that short time, I got a pretty good idea how the two of you got along. It was pretty amazing, as a matter of fact, to see that in a father and son. That you could express that kind of love just by the way you looked at each other.” He nodded his head. “When I read Hopewell’s report and realized that you were the same Jack Owens…” He had a tight, athletic face, and what he did with it, and with his eyes, was more than an act of sympathy, it was more than empathetic, and it was a remarkable thing to see in a cop’s face, in anyone’s face; remarkable in the way any act of courage is remarkable. For a moment Jack thought he might have been mistaken, that there was nothing remarkable at all, that it had been something calculated, some trick of eye and mouth that the detective had picked up over the years like a salesman or con artist, nothing but more manipulation, and Jack didn’t trust it any more than he trusted Marty’s voice. But when a stranger comes to your house and speaks to you the way Marty spoke, and looks at you like that, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if you’re thinking that he shows the same expression to all the other parents he talks to, and makes the same conversation in that easy, down-home voice.
Jack tipped his chin toward the porch swing. “Have a seat.”
Marty thanked him and sat down. He said, “What I’m trying to say is, if it would help to talk about Danny, maybe figure some things out, I’m interested to hear what you’ve got to say.”
“You don’t have that kind of time.”
“I don’t doubt that. But maybe I could just ask you a few things. Okay?” Marty lowered his eyes for a moment and stared at the floor, then slowly looked up at Jack. “Kids who commit suicide tend to fit certain patterns of behavior and I’m gonna assume that if Danny was acting out in any way, any real obvious way, you’d’ve noticed. If he’d been depressed you’d’ve been aware of it, right? If he was displaying mood swings or showed symptoms of being bipolar. So, thinking small, was he having any problems at all? Problems in school?”
“He was comfortable in a learning environment.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me think of that. He was a good student. Not great. B’s. Some C’s. A few A’s when he was interested enough.” Jack shook his head. “He didn’t have any problems in school.”
“I don’t mean only his grades. Were there any kids he was hanging out with who might have been fooling around with drugs or into violent or antisocial behavior?”
Jack turned his head away and looked down the road where Danny had learned to ride a bike, as though Danny would be riding his bike right now, coasting the last few feet to the house. That’s what he wanted to see. It must have been all over his face and Marty must have seen it, because he let the silence hold, the way some people do when they’re not quite comfortable with what they’re thinking or what they’re being shown and they don’t know if it was something they’d said or how to shift the conversation back to where they’d like to take it.
Jack waited another moment before he said, “Danny’s friends weren’t like that.”
Marty gave the swing a soft push. “Did he have a lot of friends?”
“A lot?”
“I mean, he didn’t spend a lot of time alone?”
“You’re not thinking he was one of those lunatic kids who heard the devil—”
Marty raised his hand. “We both know those families have a mess of problems, with a kid who’s been giving off warning signs six to the dozen. I’m only asking.” He smiled weakly.
“He wasn’t the loner type, if that’s what you want to know. He wasn’t drawn to anyone who was. Look, his friends were all decent kids. That’s who Danny was drawn to. That’s the kind of kid he himself was.”
“Then I’m safe in assuming his teachers never alerted you to any red flags?”
“Of course not. Haven’t you talked to them? Haven’t you talked to his friends?”
“I wanted to talk to you first. Did Danny have a girlfriend? You know, some boys get started before they’re ready and it kind of mixes them all up inside.”
“Danny didn’t get some girl pregnant, if that’s what—”
“I was speaking strictly on an emotional, developmental level.”
“Danny was a normal kid who had a pretty clear picture about sex. He was starting to think about dating, just like the rest of his friends, but it was mostly hanging out at the mall and Saturday night parties at someone’s house. I’m pretty sure he was a virgin.”
“I know you’re divorced. I was wondering how often Danny saw his mother?”
Jack explained things in the barest-bones version. Marty leaned back in the swing and said, “That’s a real shame. Did Danny ever have any counseling for it?”
“We both did, but I don’t think he ever really understood what made his mother want to leave. I don’t know if that’s something a child can understand.”
“I imagine he was angry about it.”
“He said he was. But when he was eight, he said he’d forgiven her but he didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Would that make him sui
cidal? I never thought so at the time. I don’t know what to think now.”
“Was there a woman in your life?”
“I don’t think that’s germane to this conversation.”
“I mean, someone you brought around to sort of fill the gap for Danny?”
“Is this about me or about Danny?”
Marty apologized. He said, “Most of what I know about these sorts of things I come by in keeping up with my reading, so you might say I’m doing this by the book, and if I don’t make it come out smooth as silk, well, now you know why.” He gave the swing another soft push before he said, “Now don’t get riled about this, but what kind of shows did Danny watch on TV? I’m just asking is all.”
“The usual junk.”
“Movies? Did he like a particular kind?”
“I kept him away from Disney as much as possible. He went through a Spielberg phase. Harpo was his favorite Marx brother. Groucho scared him, until he was about six or seven. He liked Blade Runner. It made him cry.”
“Blade Runner?”
“Do you know the movie?”
“I saw it a bunch of years ago. About homicidal robots and Harrison Ford hunts them down? Am I close?”
“Close enough. It was one of Danny’s favorite movies. He must have watched it a dozen times. He thought it was sad when the replicants die.”
“Weren’t they the bad guys?”
“You want to chew on that for a while or move on to the bonus round?”
Light of Day Page 9