Jack watched her knock on the screen door, shade her eyes and peek inside. She knocked on the door a second time, pushed it open and called “Dr. Owens?” a couple of times in her high, sweet voice. Jack was undecided whether to let her know he was out here until Mutt raised his ears, lifted his muzzle and barked, and Mary-Sue turned and looked in his direction and Jack called to her.
She waved to him and ran over, all in the same motion, sat on the large square rock next to Jack and said, “I came by the other day, but you were out. Mom wanted to come by today, but I told her I’d do it for her. She and Dad wanted to know how you’re doing. They said to say hi.”
“You can tell your folks that I’m hanging in there.”
Mary-Sue had grown since Jack last saw her—he remembered how Danny ripened every summer, as though he were plugged directly into the sun, and how far removed twelve was from eleven, fifteen from fourteen. Four weeks ago, Mary-Sue had stood in the kitchen shifting ungracefully, all shoulders and knees, not yet grown into her body. Now she had come to terms with her arms and legs, no longer held in awkward disregard but carried comfortably at her side. Her hair was cut to the middle of her ears and great care had been given to styling it. She wore her shorts and T-shirt with more consideration of their shape and hers. She was conspicuously aware of herself. Jack looked at her and saw Danny grown taller, broader at the shoulders and chest, his voice a little deeper, closer to a man than a boy.
Mary-Sue looked at Jack’s notebook, groaned, “School. Please don’t remind me,” and asked, “What are you teaching this semester?”
“Films of the sixties.”
“Anything good?”
“That’s the question we’ll try to answer in class.”
“I guess there’s nothing with Brad Pitt.”
“Would you settle for Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda?”
“You really should have Brad Pitt.”
“Sorry. But there’ll be a cartoon between features.”
She didn’t seem to know that he was joking. “You really should show Brad Pitt,” she said with a certainty that was enviable. She crossed her legs, rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “Did you hear what happened to C.J.? He was in a car accident, at the Ainsleys’ place in Kentucky. He broke both arms, busted his right shoulder, his face was cut to shreds. He’ll need an awesome amount of plastic surgery. They weren’t even sure that he’d live.”
“Live?”
She nodded her head. “He’s doing better now, but he’s really hurt.”
“What about his parents?”
“That’s just it. They weren’t with him.” Mary-Sue dug her toe into the soil, making a deep, narrow burrow. “If he’d gone along with them it wouldn’t have happened. I’m beginning to think the kids around here are jinxed.” Her tone of voice was earnest and heartbreaking.
“Gone along?”
“They were going to a cookout and C.J. didn’t want to go. My dad says, that is, Dr. Ainsley told my dad, that C.J. was moping around the entire summer. Of course his parents couldn’t understand why. I mean, duh, considering how he felt about Danny, if they’d bothered to notice, which they didn’t. I mean, well, all of us have been bummed by what happened, but C.J.—he called me a few times just to talk to someone who knew—it isn’t like we’re that close, but his sisters were like telling him to get a life and Brian’s doing Out ward Bound in Maine and Rick’s up at his uncle’s farm in Wisconsin somewhere. Poor C.J. had no one who understood. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about Danny. It was haunting him. He was so intense it was scary. I was like, ‘C.J., maybe you should get some help,’ but he said he just wished he could disappear somewhere. And then the dummy gets the bright idea that he could drive his dad’s old Dodge. And he totaled it. My dad says he lost control going around a curve. He must’ve been doing at least a hundred. He’s in some hospital down there. Intensive care. They don’t know when they can bring him home. If he’d taken the new car he might not have been banged up so bad be cause of the air bags, or even if he’d worn his seat belt.”
“When did this happen?”
“About two weeks ago. I wanted to come over then, but my mom and dad didn’t want me to bother you, but I thought—I just wanted to—I mean I know I’m interrupting your work, but I thought if I could sit here awhile with you—I don’t know.” She began flicking the soil with the tip of her big toe; there was still a lot of little girl left in her. “You don’t like Dr. Ainsley, do you?”
“I feel sorry for Carl.” Which wasn’t completely untrue.
“Do you like C.J.?”
“I feel sorry for him, too.” Which was the truth.
“Everyone treats him like he’s such a screwup. It’s all wrong.”
“Yes. It makes C.J. very unsure of himself.”
“Mrs. Ainsley and the twins aren’t much better.”
“No, they’re not. You treat someone like that long enough and he begins to believe it.”
“I don’t like Dr. Ainsley. Not the way he puts C.J. down in front of his friends.”
“Carl can be very thoughtless at times.”
“We all did it. Even Danny. I shouldn’t call him a chucklehead all the time, but—it wasn’t like C.J. didn’t do stupid things, but what Dr. Ainsley does to him is really cruel. Anyway, I just hope everyone’ll be nicer to him now.”
“They will be.”
“That’s why we all wished you were our dad.” She said this cautiously. Her face was flushed.
“What?”
“The way you took care of Danny. Watched out for him.”
“Your parents aren’t exactly neglecting you.”
“It’s other things. The way you talked to him, to all of us. Like we’re, I don’t know. Like we’re not kids. And it was way cool that Danny got to see all those movies with you. I mean, well, when your dad teaches linguistics and your mom teaches English lit, there’s a definite lack of entertainment value.”
“He didn’t always like my choices.” Jack smiled. “He hated subtitles.”
“I wish my parents were more like you,” she answered adamantly. “We all did. I mean, it’s like I can tell you about C.J. and—I don’t know.” She hunched her shoulders and looked up at the treetops.
“Everyone wishes their parents were like someone else’s parents.”
“Well, if you ever get lonely for Danny, I mean I know you are, but, like watching those movies by yourself, I’ll go with you. I mean, if it’ll make it less lonely.”
It was unsolicited honesty, like Danny’s honesty, and it was more than Jack could bear. It made him want to hold his son the way he used to until their chests were pressed so close together and tight they could feel each other’s heartbeat. Jack wanted to hold Mary-Sue like that, just so he could hold what he was feeling, just so he could hold a child, the way he held his child. But he couldn’t go around hugging fifteen-year-old girls anytime they made him think of Danny. He couldn’t tell her what he was thinking, as he watched her stare at the ground, work her toe into the soil, unaware of what she’d been able to do with what she’d said—she was still more child than not, he thought. She didn’t know not to speak what she felt. Jack slipped a little further inside himself, inside the self that had been Dr. Owens, who never got ruffled by the things teenagers told him. Who always knew what to say. Who thought he might still know: “I can’t offer you a movie right now, but I can give you a cold soda.”
Mary-Sue looked up and smiled.
Jack didn’t feel less lonely drinking a soda with Danny’s friend, but he liked that she sat with him while he did his work, lying quietly in the sun, as Danny would have done. He could hear some of Danny when she talked about C.J., about Brian, and Rick. She’d shared time with Danny, and Jack could hear that in her voice, too; and he could feel her needing to sit here. Maybe she thought Jack was the only one she could be with who would understand what it was like to have one friend dead and another near death. She didn’t have to explain her sadness, or any
thing else for that matter, and Jack wouldn’t ask her any questions or try to cheer her up or do any of the obtuse things parents and adults do when children are sad and silent. Or maybe it wasn’t any of those things at all. Maybe she had come here thinking that Danny’s suicide had revealed to Jack the incomprehensible workings of, if not the universe, at least the slice of it located on the banks of the Wabash and he could explain to Mary-Sue what was happening inside her because she certainly didn’t know and her parents were no help. Maybe Jack could explain what it was that had wrenched her and Danny, C.J., Brian and Rick away from the rest of the crowd and into a sadness children were not supposed to know. Or maybe it was the sadness itself that brought her here and all she wanted was to rest where she wouldn’t be an anomaly. Maybe she needed to feel all of this and Jack needed her to feel this, needed her to be there inside the absence Danny had left behind.
Jack could not help feeling disloyal to Danny—the same disloyalty he felt making plans with Marty—for wanting Mary-Sue to stay with him, for wanting her to fill the absence, if only for an afternoon, if only for being barely more than the nothing he already had. Jack could not help feeling disloyal to Danny. Because grieving is never enough.
Mary-Sue stayed while Jack worked on his lecture notes. She took Mutt for a walk along the edge of the creek, sat in the shade of a tree as the light of the afternoon deepened and warmed. Later, after she thanked Jack for the cold soda and went home, her small body absorbed into the harvested field, Jack walked back to the house. He wondered what Marty would have to say about C.J.’s accident. Would it trouble him as Danny’s suicide had? He thought this without cynicism, which is what he told Marty that night, when they met for dinner at Marlowe’s.
They were sitting at a round table near the center of the room working slowly on their whiskeys. Marlowe’s was a jacket-and-tie place, and Marty was dressed smartly in summer beige, blue and coral. He didn’t say he was troubled by C.J.’s accident. He did say it was upsetting, and that he felt sorry that Mary-Sue thought that her friends were jinxed. “That’s a terrible way for a kid to feel.” He asked, “What sort of kid is C.J.?”
“A brilliant student with about enough self-esteem to fill a shot glass. He was always doing stupid kid stuff.”
“So there were other occasions when he behaved irresponsibly?” Marty smiled and said, “I just turned cop on you, didn’t I?”
“Just a little.” Jack took a sip of whiskey. “A student in one of his father’s classes paid C.J. fifty dollars to steal a copy of a final exam for her.”
“That’s pretty serious, don’t you think. Did it bother you that he and Danny were friends?”
“No. C.J. isn’t bad or malicious. It had more to do with how he feels about his father. He’s pretty guileless actually, the only one he ever hurts is himself. The really sad thing is, if his father had known how desperate that student was for a good grade, he would have cut a deal of his own.”
“You don’t like him,” Marty said flatly, and lifted his glass to his mouth. “Let’s just say I don’t approve of him, which, I know, stinks of self-righteousness. But he’s just so goddamned irresponsible. And he always, I don’t know—”
“Gets away with it?”
“Gets away with it.”
“I bet he’s also one of those guys who doesn’t do more than just enough to get by on the job.”
“He’s managed to get tenured. But he hardly distinguishes himself in his department. For him, work is an extension of the country club.”
“Unlike you.”
“That’s not what—I’m not drawing any comparisons.”
“But if you did. You’ve distinguished yourself wherever you taught.”
“There’s no professional rivalry,” Jack answered, not defensively. “We’re not in the same department, and he certainly isn’t the only one on the faculty phoning it in. But he’s the only one who goes out of his way to flaunt it. At me.” He took another sip of his drink, and then another.
“So you resent this guy for getting away with it and also rubbing your nose in it. That sounds fair enough.”
“And I’m sure Ainsley thinks I can be the most judgmental, pompous asshole that ever lived. And maybe he’s right. But I resent that he thinks I am.”
“Maybe you wish you could get away with something once in a while.”
“I don’t know what I wish.”
“I’m sure as far as he’s concerned, you are getting away with something. Your son never sold you out, not for any amount of money.”
“Ainsley used to make bad jokes about my coming to Gilbert. How I was slumming. He never missed a chance to jab at me because I took my job seriously, as if there wasn’t a downside to what—I gave up a lot when I moved here.”
“Don’t you think he knows that? Why do you think he made the jokes? He resents you just as much as you resent him, for the way you conduct yourself. I suspect what he really resents you for is for being the man that you are.”
“What I really resent has nothing to do with Ainsley.” Jack emptied his glass. “Maybe all I’ve done is make up my own rules and they were about making Danny’s life whole, teaching him to have self-respect and a sense of self-worth. Ainsley, if he has any rules, breaks them all, and C.J. knows all about it. Danny killed himself. C.J. winds up in the hospital all banged up and barely alive. That’s what I resent, Marty. That Ainsley and I get tossed into the same mix regardless of how we behave. Maybe what I resent is that there aren’t any rules.”
“I don’t think that’s what you resent at all,” Marty said. “Everything you believed in and trusted, including your low opinion of Ainsley, has been called into question. That’s what you resent.”
They were about to begin the formality of ordering supper, but they didn’t get the chance. Detective Hopewell stopped by the table. He was with a woman only slightly old enough not to be mistaken for his daughter and dressed more for a seaside clam bar than Marlowe’s. Hopewell gave Jack a perfunctory nod as though he wasn’t quite sure where they’d met before and asked Marty if they could talk for a minute.
Marty answered, “Sure,” and excused himself.
The two detectives walked to the far corner, over by the pay phones and restrooms, leaving the date looking bored and unhappy. She shrugged her shoulders at Jack and said, “Tell Earl I’ll be at the bar.”
Marty and Hopewell talked for a few minutes, more accurately, Marty listened while Hopewell did the talking, slowly, describing something with his hands which made Marty shake his head, listen awhile longer, turn and look at Jack.
Hopewell started to walk toward the table but Marty put his hand on his shoulder and pulled him back, said something and walked away. Hopewell stared sourly at the floor, then walked to the bar.
Marty sat down, reached for his glass and finished what was left in it.
“Hopewell says the other boy didn’t kill himself. He says he was murdered.”
XV
Jack felt as though he were wreathed in numbness, as though his legs had vanished under him, as though he were helpless.
“Does it have anything to do with Danny?” he wanted to know.
“Hopewell needs to ask you a few questions. That’s all he’d tell me.”
“Then Danny—”
“They’re just questions, Jack. It doesn’t mean—”
“He thinks Danny was murdered.” The words stuck dry inside Jack’s throat.
“He didn’t say that.”
Jack didn’t give the waiter time to come over to take their order, he dropped his napkin, put down enough money to take care of the drinks and walked out of the dining room and into the street, as though Hopewell and the murder of young boys existed only inside the restaurant, that outside, the night owned its own existence.
Marty didn’t try to stop him but followed along, across Main Street, through the parking lot, past their cars and behind the post office where the alley led to the campus, where the boughs of the trees hung heavy and
low and the moonlight was all but lost.
They walked through the old campus, where the sidewalks were made of red brick laid down by the WPA workers who’d come to Gilbert College to build the Fine Arts building and paint murals, to plant bushes and trees and grass for the quadrangle, where gaslights glowed along the paths and the windows throughout the campus hung empty and dark.
Marty looked at the darkness and said nothing.
“All summer,” Jack told him, “I’ve been trying to live with the idea that something went terribly wrong for Danny. Something I did, something I didn’t do. That he was a troubled kid with a troubled life. Now I’ve got to change all that and try to believe that Danny was the victim of some piece of shit who arbitrarily killed him? Christ almighty. I almost feel like that should be a relief, in a fucked-up sort of way. Only Danny is still dead.”
“Hopewell’s always looking for something big. I told you that the first day. He wants to get out of Gilbert and be a bigger fish in a bigger pond. Unfortunately, now you and the Coggins are caught in the crosshairs of his big-city dreams.” They walked a little further. “Not that he’s completely out of line, but he should leave you out of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Coggins mentioned something that Hopewell doesn’t think fits the profile of a suicide. He wouldn’t give me many of the details. He didn’t want to compromise the integrity of his investigation,” Marty said derisively. “But my guess is it has nothing to do—”
“Guesses aren’t good enough, Marty.”
“I know.” Marty waited a moment before he told Jack, “Lamar got into a fight with a boy in his class the morning of the day he died. The medical examiner found marks on Lamar’s arm and assumed that’s how they got there. Hopewell isn’t convinced. He thinks they could have happened out by Otter Creek. That Lamar could have struggled with his killer. That’s not at all like Danny’s death. That’s all he would tell me, that and he thinks there’s enough to merit taking another look at the case. There must be something to it. He wouldn’t have been able to do this if our captain didn’t agree with him. But none of this means Danny was murdered.”
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