Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

“Not innocent. He didn’t commit this crime, that’s all. He was using the Internet to meet young boys and possibly engage in sex with some of them, which is the leverage Hopewell used for the confession and which won’t be too far removed from what the prosecutor will use to build his case. When this thing goes to trial, they’ll either settle for a guilty plea on second degree murder or try him on first degree murder. And with that confession, and a few other things I’m not allowed to discuss, the guy’s finished.”

  “Can’t you do something?”

  “Not unless the actual killer turns up between now and when this thing comes to trial, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. Don’t forget, the guy’s a pederast, I just don’t think he’s a murderer. But there’s nothing I can do.” He told Jack, “Everyone’s got their ducks lined up and they’ll go down one by one.” His voice sounded neither unhappy nor angry, just empty. It was a sad thing to hear and Jack felt sorry for him.

  “I’m not naïve enough to think this sort of thing doesn’t happen,” Marty said, “but I never expected to see it happen in Gilbert. It’s not even that. This is redneck bullshit. That’s all it is, bullshit.” A minute later he said, “It’s a very isolating feeling.” A minute after that: “Sometimes all it is is a job and you do it because it’s what’s expected of you.”

  “I wish there were something I could do to help you, for a change.”

  “You are helping. Just talking about it helps.”

  “Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Not a hell of a lot is a lot more than nothing.”

  They drove on, not saying anything else about Hopewell or Lamar. Not saying anything else at all; just another lunch hour spent in each other’s company, and how extraordinary it would have seemed this time last year, when he would have been at Paul’s with Lois and Stan and his other friends, eating and gossiping, as they always did when everyone was back from summer vacation—more had changed than Jack’s being the-father-of-the-boy-who-killed-himself or being part of the Community of Parents of Dead Children. More had changed than his awareness of things that made some detectives sad and others merely ambitious. Or maybe it was just that something else had changed along with that, because, Jack realized, he had more in common with Marty than he did with any of the faculty he saw at lunch yesterday, or with Lois and Stan and the rest of his friends, and he would have found this disturbing if it were Hopewell or any other detective. But it was Marty, and that made it acceptable. That made it all right.

  When he got back to his office, Jack did little more than watch the sky grow dark a minute earlier than it had the day before and autumn move a day closer. He made a pass or two at the work on his desk, which wasn’t work at all but an excuse not to leave the office, not to go home to the empty house. He could always go over to the screening room, there were always more films to watch and he could set it up for himself. But he didn’t want to go to the screening room, he didn’t want to be alone in or out of the dark. Instead, he’d take himself over to Chase’s—it was still too early in the year for the faculty to show up, and it was a good place to sit and have a cocktail.

  Chase’s was a dimly lighted, tweedy place, with ambience and prices forbidding to students, which made it all the more inviting to faculty, and that was Ned Chase’s intention. There were two small dining rooms, separated by the bar, with big oak tables, starched cloth napkins and tablecloths, a bartender who stocked excellent scotches and whiskies, shook painfully cold martinis and did not get too carried away with the wine list. But for all its attempts not to be, the place was nothing more than an old-fashioned joint. Jack named it the “faculty dive” and for the past ten years he was Chair-without-Portfolio of the “First Friday Club”: a dozen of his friends met here for cocktails and dinner on the first Friday of every month. Tonight, Jack sat by himself at a small table near the rear window, drank his whiskey and barely picked at the complementary plate of fried crayfish.

  There was always some CD playing, always standards. Tonight it was the King Cole Trio, Jumpin’ at Capitol. It seemed any minute Hoagy Carmichael would appear at the piano, if there’d been a piano. Hoagy didn’t show up, but Celeste and Arthur Harrison did.

  Celeste had a deep suntan, her black hair was scooped below her ears. She wore a bright summer dress, black high-heeled sandals; the style of her hair and clothes gave her the look of an actress from the thirties, Gail Patrick or Bebe Daniels. Her lipstick was dark red and there was a perfect print where she’d kissed Arthur’s right cheek. They must have been there before Jack came in, Arthur’s sport coat was off and their drinks were just about finished. Celeste turned to signal the waiter, which is when she saw Jack. She waved to him and then she and Arthur came over to the table. “We’ve been leaving you voice mail right and left all summer,” Celeste said. “I must have stopped by the office six or seven times since we got back. And your house.”

  Arthur laid a thick hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  “You were on our minds all the time,” Celeste went on. “We were worried about you.” She invited Jack to sit with them, please. Jack was not quick to accept the invitation. “We won’t bug you with questions,” Celeste promised. “We have a pretty good idea how you’re doing. And if we get on your nerves, just tell us to shut up.”

  Jack pushed his chair out and stood up. Arthur took the plate and glass and walked them across the room. “We missed the hell out of you.”

  They sat for a moment, saying nothing, sipping their cocktails. Then they talked the general talk that drinks in late August require. The new semester, department politics, summer vacations.

  “You were in New Hampshire,” Jack said.

  “Vermont,” Arthur told him. “I was revising the third edition of my book while my lovely wife loafed about the lake and garden like Our Lady of the Flowers.”

  Celeste arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Correcting endless pages of his text.”

  Arthur nibbled on the crayfish. “Don’t you think it’s time you revised your books?” he said to Jack. “It’s quite the little racket, if you don’t overplay it.” He grinned. “A few additions here, update chapter twelve, delete a few pages there, throw together a new introduction, assign it for the new semester, and you have the goose whose golden eggs your students are required to purchase.”

  “I don’t think Jack wants to hear this right now,” Celeste said.

  Arthur looked embarrassed. “I was only—”

  Jack came to Arthur’s aid. “Don’t pick on him.” He took a sip of whiskey. “First of all, I can’t stand reading my own stuff, so revisions are out, and if I assigned my own books it would only remind the class that they don’t need me. I’d finesse myself right into obsolescence.”

  “Let’s order another round,” Celeste suggested. “Okay?”

  Somewhere during the second round, Celeste told Jack she was teaching an advanced film studies course.

  “I thought Pruitt was teaching it this semester.”

  “He’s on sabbatical.”

  “That’s right.” But Jack had no memory of either Pruitt’s sabbatical or Celeste being assigned the course. “That’s right.”

  “I’ve never taught it before and I’m on very unfamiliar turf.” Celeste said she was assigning Jack’s second book, Notes After Midnight. He thanked her in advance for the royalty and bowed toward Arthur.

  Celeste said, “You can really show your thanks by doing me a big favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “Lend me your lecture notes? If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. I’ll dig them out of the basement first thing.”

  This got Arthur talking about book revisions again and the money to be made from them, until Celeste told him, “Enough already,” and asked Jack, “How are you holding up? Are you okay?” His answer was perfunctory and Celeste probably knew it, but before she said anything more, Jack wanted to know how Rick was doing, and had they heard what happened to C.J. and had Rick spoken to him?
>
  Arthur and Celeste exchanged looks. “We heard, but Rick hasn’t been up to calling C.J. He’s had a very rough time of it,” Arthur said. “Danny’s—He was very upset about Danny.”

  Celeste said, “He can’t sleep. He’s lost a lot of weight. He’s withdrawn into him—”

  “And now,” Arthur broke in, “he refuses to go back to school. He says he can’t stand being here. He came home for two days and made us take him right back to my brother’s farm.”

  Celeste took a slow sip of her martini. “Arthur managed to pull a few strings and Rick’s going to spend his sophomore year in St. Louis, at Andrews Academy. We’re also going to find a good therapist for him.”

  Jack said, “I imagine Brian’s had a tough time, too.”

  “He’s had a few bad moments.”

  Arthur grunted, “A few bad moments? They ran him out of Outward Bound.”

  Celeste frowned at Arthur. “According to Sally Richards, the Outward Bound leader thought Brian was behaving a little too aggressively.”

  “Too aggressive for Outward Bound.” Arthur looked at Jack. “Isn’t that redundant?” It wasn’t clear if he was trying to be funny.

  “It sounded pretty bad to me,” Celeste said. “Brian was belligerent and threatening. Disruptive. It was very troubling to everyone up there.”

  “Brian’s got that in him,” Arthur said, and Jack remembered that Arthur didn’t like the way Rick always followed Brian’s lead. “I overheard some of the things he said to Rick when he told him he was going to Andrews. He was less than sympathetic. He can be a narcissistic little bastard when he wants to.”

  “It all starts with Hal and Vicki,” Celeste said. “They’ve managed to coddle and neglect him at the same time. They treat him like he’s precious cargo while putting the worst kind of pressure on him. He can’t step into a room without having to be the smartest or the handsomest or the best athlete. Brian has some issues.”

  “Sometimes I’d like to give him a good kick in the issues,” Arthur said.

  Celeste glared at her husband. She asked Jack, “Is this more than you want to know?”

  Jack said, “They’re sensitive kids. Danny’s death couldn’t have been easy for them to deal with. Apparently he wasn’t the only victim of his suicide.” He took a sip of his drink. “I hate to think that you and Hal and Vicki blame him—”

  “Nothing of the sort. Nothing like that. Not for a second,” and Celeste changed the subject.

  It was after ten when they said their good-byes outside the restaurant.

  Arthur assured Jack, “The important thing is, you got through the summer and you’re staying on to teach.”

  “We’re around whenever you need us,” Celeste reminded him.

  In his dreams, Jack cried, head thrown back, mouth wide open, like the faces in Guernica.

  He cried for Anne, who said she was being pulled in two directions and followed the direction that took her back to England.

  He cried for his mother, who died a slow death.

  He cried for Danny.

  When the crying woke him and he couldn’t go back to sleep, Jack sat with Mutt on the back porch and looked out at the urban glow that interrupted the night sky.

  He thought about Danny, who would have been a sophomore in high school, and how they’d always gone shopping for clothes and shoes before the start of a new term and that Danny would have wanted to do all of that with his friends this year.

  He thought about Danny’s friends who couldn’t sleep and eat, who acted out and acted up.

  He looked out at the horizon, where September would begin four days hence and the semester a day after that and where autumn progressed toward the equinox. He had dreaded the coming of summer and felt no great sadness seeing it leave. He did not look forward to the fall. He did not look forward to anything. He could only look back. He was nothing but the past, which appeared richer than anything the present possessed or the future might promise. Where Danny was still the living Danny getting ready for school, or learning to talk, or standing covered in paint in the big room in the house in Loubressac. Where Anne lived in the loft on Crosby Street.

  It was something Jack could only admit to himself at three o’clock in the morning on a sleepless night and never have confessed to anyone, not to Lois or Marty. Not to his father while he listened for telltale signs in the old voice, while he said, “You’re sounding good today, Dad.” Even when Jack was talking to his father about the new semester, when he promised not to wait until Christmas to come out and visit, he was merely talking from within the past, where Danny was alive and where Anne loved him. That was all he had, all he was.

  XX

  The office door was open and there was movement inside. Robbie Stein, Jack’s new student assistant, sat at the desk, phone tucked under his chin, sleeves rolled up, dutifully taking down a message with one hand and holding a container of coffee with the other. At his elbow was the list of instructions Eileen had left for him. He was hanging up the phone when he saw Jack and quickly put down the coffee, stood up, grinned meekly and gave quick, nervous tugs at his shirt collar and sleeves.

  The expression on Jack’s face must have shown more than simple surprise, although that’s all it was, but Robbie rushed to explain, “I’m your student assistant this year, Dr. Owens. Remember?” He stepped away from the desk.

  “Of course I remember,” Jack answered, in no way remonstratively, “but you’re a day early.”

  “No way.”

  “Page two of Eileen’s notes. Right before she says that if she managed to graduate, there’s hope for you, too.”

  Robbie tugged on his collar again. “Well, so much for impressing you with my quick and agile mind.”

  “You’ll have plenty of chances to do that. In the meantime, I can always use your help and you can get a jump start on how to run things around here. How’s that?” Jack picked the messages off his desk and stuffed them in his pocket without looking at them.

  Robbie smiled and nodded his head. He started to say something, stopped and called out, “Oh dammit,” at the same time looking past Jack to the open door. “Lauren Bellmore. Third time this morning.”

  “I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Lauren shoved Robbie aside and placed herself directly in front of Jack. She was tall, buxom, with curly red hair that looked absolutely Medusan at the moment and a voice pitched several decibels louder than Jack thought physically possible. “Some idiot in the registrar’s office screwed up and I’m not registered for your ‘sixties’ class. I spent two entire hours begging and pleading and I’m still not—and classes start Monday.” As if Jack needed to be reminded. “How can this be happening to me? I hate this school.”

  Not quite kicking and screaming, but less than willingly, Jack was pulled into the first crisis of the new semester, and into the “Kafkaesque-world-of-Gilbert-College’s-preregistration-torture. And he”—Lauren glared at Robbie—“can’t find your student list. I’m just so freaked.”

  Jack had to smile. It was Danny when his world was nearing collapse because he tore his costume on Halloween morning. Or he needed sheet music that day and Steiner’s wouldn’t have it for two weeks. Or Mutt had vanished. “He’s gone, Daddy. I looked everywhere and he’s gone.” The tears welling up and Danny looking scared and queasy, his legs shaking, his eyes wide. “I let him out real early this morning and I went back to sleep and when I woke up he never came home. I’m scared something bad happened to him.”

  Even when there seemed to be no solution, a solution was found. Lois had one of her theater students fashion a costume for Danny. Jack asked Nelson Fried to give him the sheet music. Mutt wasn’t lost after all, he had simply done what dogs do when front doors are locked and no one lets you in: he crawled through a basement window and, being home, fell asleep in the warm corner next to one of Jack’s filing cabinets. Ever since, Danny would go down to the basement on damp and dreary afternoons, curl up in that same corner, with or without Mutt, read
a book or play or daydream.

  Lauren wasn’t Danny and Jack wasn’t her father, but this certainly had the feel of a parental moment and it wasn’t at all awful playing the surrogate, even if it called for nothing more than applying an administrative Band-Aid, which was the yellow Additional Student card in the top desk drawer, which Jack signed and which he told Lauren to fill out and take to the registrar’s office.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re the best, Dr. Owens.” She took a step toward the door, said, “Oh. I’m really sorry about…” Her eyes turned briefly toward Danny’s picture and then back to Jack. Jack nodded his head once but said nothing. Lauren rushed out, leaving the door open behind her.

  Robbie hissed, “I don’t believe her.”

  “That’s pretty tame stuff, wait until class starts.”

  “Not that. How she said that to you. I mean it was really cold.”

  “That’s the way I prefer it these days,” and speaking to the look on Robbie’s face, Jack said, “and if you don’t learn to relax around me, it’s going to be a long year for both of us. Okay?”

  “Okay, but Dr. Owens, I’m really sorry about, well, about everything, and especially for screwing up.”

  “I’m not sure I know how you screwed up.” Jack sat down and leaned back in the chair.

  “Not finding the list.”

  “First of all, the list isn’t here, so you couldn’t have found it. Second, whenever you get ambushed like that, and it’s going to happen again, remember you’re not responsible for fixing their world. Just tell them to come back during my office hours and I’ll see what I can do. And third, my student assistant calls me Jack. Any questions?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Feeling better?”

  Robbie nodded his head. “A lot better.”

  Jack was feeling better, too. He could still fill out the forms, he could still solve student problems. He still knew all the words; and even if it wasn’t the smoothest beginning and breaking in a new student assistant was a more formidable proposition than it seemed back in May, he had managed to reassure Robbie that it was still Dr. Owens at work here and he was glad to see Robbie’s face relax and, while he sat on the sofa, papers spread across the table, talk to Jack about the courses he was taking, his roommates and his new girlfriend. Jack said nothing, he only listened, pleased that he’d reassured Robbie, pleased that he’d done a little reassuring of himself.