The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  Pete leans toward the kitchen, where Christopher, I’m sure, has been hanging on every word of this exchange. “Chris? Hey bud, can you give us some privacy for a few minutes while we talk with your dad?” Chris scurries off down the hall, and I hear his bedroom door click shut.

  Rick Coombs clears his throat. “There are some photos going around,” he says, “allegedly of—”

  “Denise Masterson,” I say. “I know her family. My wife and the mom were close. The kid was a student of mine.”

  “Have you seen them?” Coombs asks.

  “No. My son told me someone offered to show them to one of his friends, but the friend declined.” As Coombs scratches out a note I quickly add: “I reported that to Peggy Mackie, by the way.”

  He nods as he stares down at the pad. “When did you first learn about them?”

  “The pictures? It was the beginning of the week.” I tell them about my history with the family, and how Peggy had suggested I help as a liaison with them if necessary. “That was all on Monday.”

  “Not last week?” Pete asks.

  “No. It was Monday of this week. I’m pretty sure.” I almost add: “If I can be sure about anything,” but I decide that it’s probably not a very smart thing to say.

  Pete cocks his head, looking like he’s searching for just the right words. “Mr. K., would you say you’re pretty worked up about these photos?”

  “I haven’t even seen them, so I couldn’t really form any opinion other than feeling pretty bad for her parents. And for her. More like disbelief when I first learned about it, because I know Denise well and it didn’t really seem like something she would do. Then when Chris gave me a hint about what they were of, I felt awful. But that was only yesterday.”

  “Okay,” Pete says. “That should do it for now. Rick, you got anything more you need to ask?” Rick Coombs shakes his head. “We’ll be in touch if we need to speak to you again.”

  “Again? You mean…you’re done? Nothing else? Right now, I mean.”

  “No, we’re all set,” Pete says. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Do you have any questions for us?” Rick Coombs asks, flipping his notepad closed.

  “I do, actually,” I say. “Does that video seem real to you guys?”

  The two of them glance at each other, and Pete Tran hands me his card. “We need to talk to a few more people,” he says. “If you think of anything else you may have forgotten to tell us, give me a call, okay?”

  I follow them to the door, and watch them through the screen as they return to their cars and drive away through the rain. Chris slinks back to the living room, and I when I join him we both collapse next to each other on the couch.

  “You look a little pale, Dad.”

  I let out a small laugh. Our boiling pot still clatters in the kitchen. “To be honest,” I say weakly, “so do you.”

  While Christopher gets started on making pasta, I force myself to go to the spare room and check my email. Sure enough, in my personal account, there’s an email from a Barton Garvey, Esquire; the subject reads: VIDEO. Kathleen brought him up to speed, he writes, he works out of Grand Rapids and would be happy to help me out. When I see at the bottom of the message how much he would charge by the hour—even with a discount for being Kathleen’s brother—to help me out, I close the message without responding. A quick mental calculation tells me that roughly two days of my work equal one hour of his.

  Maybe I’ll write him back later.

  More messages are in my school account, and I’m filled with the unpleasant feeling that maybe this flood of electronic abuse is something directed at me specifically rather than the district as a whole. I delete the obviously bad messages, the unknown and random senders, and am left with only a few legitimate-looking ones. One subject says: PHYSICS QUESTION, and I open it. The body of the message says DOES IT SINK, DO YOU THINK NEIL? And when I scroll down….

  There’s a photograph of a log floating in a swimming pool.

  I stare at the picture for a long time. This cannot be meaningful. It cannot represent what I think it represents. It cannot.

  I will not allow myself to believe this has any sort of meaning.

  A little shaken, I delete the message, close the laptop, and tell Chris I’m going to see Alan and I’ll be back in a bit. There’s an assortment of jackets in our front hall closet and I pull one out at random, realizing, when I’m a few steps out the door in the rain, that it must belong to my son because the sleeves hang past my hands. It will be fine. I flip the hood over my head and my ears fill with the sound of raindrops slapping on nylon.

  No one answers when I knock at Alan’s door. I let myself in and call his name, and he greets me with a shout from his study:

  “Come on in, Neil! I’m back here!”

  The room is dark when I enter except for the glow of computer monitors; Alan is flying his make-believe plane in some perfectly rendered make-believe world. He’s wearing headphones too, and he holds up his hand to me when I try to talk.

  “Less than two minutes, Neil. I’m on final into Heathrow.” He turns the steering yoke with small motions and punches buttons on his keyboard, muttering pilot jargon the entire time.

  “Flaps at thirty…gear down and locked…little hot, little hot coming in here…there we go.” The imaginary plane touches down with a very real-sounding squeal of tires, and a smile spreads across Al’s face.

  “How about that? Greased her right in.”

  “Hey, something’s up, Al. I have something going on.”

  “Hang on, I need to taxi to the gate.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I groan, throwing up my hands. “I’ll come back later.”

  “No, come on, here, I paused it. You talking about your video? Your fifteen minutes of fame? God, you look like shit. You haven’t been sleeping, I can tell.”

  “No, I haven’t. Not really. And how did you find out about it already?”

  Alan shrugs.

  “I’m getting weird emails,” I say.

  “Sure you are. Hate mail. Your contact info is on the school’s website. And some people are awfully worked up about this video.”

  “Do you think it’s real?”

  “I think….” He taps his chin with his fingertips. “It is of questionable reliability.” He minimizes the flying program and brings up a browser. The YouTube page with my video is already loaded, and he starts the thing playing full-screen. “Okay. Let’s see. There’s something about the kid that seems odd to me. And there’s something about you. I’ve watched this over and over, and it doesn’t smell right to me. I’m a fellow who notices things, as you probably know. Would you agree with me on that?”

  “You do notice things,” I say. “Your powers of observation may in fact border on the supernatural.”

  “I appreciate you saying that.” Alan pauses the video just at the point where I’m grabbing Cody Tate. “Now look here. What is it about this boy that strikes me as peculiar? I honestly can’t put my finger on it. Yet. But your face. Look at it. It’s the face of a psychopath.”

  “Uh….”

  “No, what I’m saying here is that you are most certainly not a psychopath in the real world. I’ve seen you at your worst, and it was certainly nothing like this. In addition to never once seeing a tendency toward this sort of aggression in you, I have never seen this look of calm, detached determination on your face.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “What I’m getting at is that I believe, in these frames, some pixels have been rearranged. There’s been some digital manipulation of your image. To make you look crazy. As I think about this, it’s not the action of you throwing the boy that makes this video unsettling, it’s the expression on your face. It’s beyond unsetting, Neil. It’s sinister. It’s troubling.”

  “It is!” I say. “Seriously, I think you just put your finger on why I’m so bothered by it.”

  “But the level of sophistication, that should bother you too. The level of w
ork.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve seen the kids in Steiner’s digital media class do some pretty incredible stuff.”

  “This Steiner, he’s a teacher?”

  “She’s a teacher. A very good one.”

  “Maybe you should talk to her. About any of her students who might—”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to anyone there,” I say. “And they’re not supposed to talk to me. But Chris and his friends want to go all Hardy Boys on this, so maybe they could talk to her.”

  “Find out who she thinks could pull something like this off. In the meantime, I’m going to download a copy of this thing and take a peek at it in some video editing software. Where I can blow it up and see it frame by frame. Oh, and a question for you.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t really do that to that kid, did you?”

  “God, no.”

  “Good. I didn’t think so.”

  “I mean, what the hell? Here’s this thing that I’m fairly certain did not happen, but pretty much everyone thinks it did, and now I have to prove it didn’t happen.”

  “What the hell,” Alan says, nodding sagely. “Welcome to my life, Neil.”

  “Jesus,” I say, and let out a long sigh.

  “You haven’t told Chris about Lauren yet, have you?”

  I shake my head, and Alan rises to his feet and grabs me by the shoulders. “You need to do this. Not telling isn’t fair to Chris, or Lauren.”

  “But this video thing—”

  “This video thing is going to blow over. Your family doesn’t go away, though. Here’s what you are going to do. Get some sleep tonight, some good sleep, and tell Chris tomorrow after school. He can stew about it over the weekend, maybe he’ll be a little pissed, and he’ll be over it by Monday. You got it?” I nod. “He’ll do his basketball thing, and we’ll all still have dinner Saturday night. Now, I told you I can get something from Kris to help you sleep—”

  “I don’t know,” I say, rising from the chair. Alan claps his hand on my shoulder and gives me one more brotherly shake.

  “It’s there if you need it. So, tomorrow, right? I’m letting you off the hook for one more day.”

  “Okay.”

  Alan pats me on the back, and I leave his study to run into Kristin at the front door just as she’s getting home. She drops the bag she’s carrying to the floor and gives me a hug.

  “Al told me about the video,” she says. “Why did they do this? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I say, then I laugh. “I’m not really okay.” I pause, thinking maybe I should ask her for something to help me sleep, but I don’t.

  “Let us know what we can do,” she says. “Anything you need, okay?” She gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I trot back out into the rain.

  My phone chirps with a call from Peggy Mackie when I’m almost home, and I run up and duck under Carol’s garage roof to answer it.

  “Any news?” I ask. “The police came here this afternoon.”

  “They’ve been getting statements from everyone,” Peggy says. “You know, I had Pete Tran back when I was teaching English. Good kid. What did you tell him?”

  “I had him too. Great kid. Maybe not so much when he’s in your house with a pistol and cuffs. But I told him everything, just like with you.”

  “The Tate family is going nuts. Like, out for blood on the district.”

  “Shit,” I sigh.

  “Do you have a lawyer lined out?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “Stu thinks there’s no way this will go to trial, but I really think he just wants to reach a quick settlement to get us out of the way of negative publicity. And he wants our discussions with the family and their legal team to exclude you, at least as much as they can. Gracie Adams agrees, and will push the board that way. What she lacks in support she makes up with intimidation. It’s pretty obvious she’s taking the side of the family. Stu I think is pretty eager, which might mean throwing you under the bus.”

  “What about the pictures, Peggy? Isn’t this kid going to get in some kind of trouble for the pictures?”

  “I can’t talk to you about the pictures right now, or what might happen with them. So don’t ask me about it. I’ll tell you something when I can.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Something else. I’ve been getting…some emails. Bad ones. Harrassing.”

  “Everyone is,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.” My shoulders drop with relief. “But how are you seeing them? You aren’t even supposed to have access to your account right now. I’ll say something to Cory.”

  “Great. Is anyone questioning whether or not the video is real?”

  “The kids are all sticking to their stories so far. At least the ones we’ve been able to prove are in the background of the video. The YouTube accounts were made with fake names, and they used a proxy server to hide the internet address, so we don’t have any idea who uploaded them.”

  “That sounds kind of advanced. Technically, I mean.”

  “Maybe more sophisticated than you’d expect from a fourteen year-old, but not really. People are looking into it. The Tate kid is the only one we’re absolutely sure about, and he’s sticking to his story most of all. He says you threw him down. The parents have pulled him out of school, and they won’t let us talk to him without their lawyers present.”

  “Lawyers, plural?”

  “They’ve got some money.”

  “Great,” I say. “That’s just great. Oh, you know what else is great? Kent Hughes—”

  “Yeah, he called me too. I told him no comment, I need to talk to our lawyer before I can tell you anything on that, blah, blah, blah. Who knows what Gracie had to say to him, though. Hell, she probably got lit up on bourbon and sent Hughes an email before he even needed to call her. She’s not exactly disciplined about messaging. But, whatever the article ends up saying, don’t get too bent about it. It’s just the Bungle, right?”

  I try to laugh at this. “Just the Bungle.” I try to laugh again, but it’s not really working. “Keep me posted, Peggy.”

  Chris and I eat dinner quietly together when I’m back home. It’s pretty dull fare: penne pasta, marinara from a jar, salad from a bag and a loaf of store-bought French bread. In spite of his gourmet proclivities my son downs two large bowls of the pasta; we’re all about carbohydrates in the Kazenzakis household.

  Later, as I’m getting ready for bed, Chris appears at my bedroom door, staring at a phone in his palm.

  “No luck,” he says without looking up. “Sparks says they made a new account just to post the video.”

  “I heard the same. Don’t worry about it too much, okay? I think Mrs. Mackie has a good handle on everything.”

  “We need to figure this out,” he says. “It’s like, now I’m kind of mad about the whole thing. Oh, there are like twenty new messages on the machine—”

  “Just leave them,” I say. “Try not to worry about all this, Chris. Deal with your own stuff. Focus on your schoolwork. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He nods. “Night, Dad.”

  Lauren has not called back or sent any texts. I know she’s busy, and possibly called out or covering for another nurse, so I’m not too worried about it. It happens. In my bed, I leave Lauren one last message.

  “Hey, I need to talk to you. Call me when you can. I’ll be up for a little bit.” I pause. “And I love you.”

  There. I said it. I lie across my bed with my phone on my chest, but Lauren does not call back.

  Nearly an hour passes and my bedroom is getting too oppressive, so I search through my closet for my thick pullover so I can go out to the fire pit. Maybe staring at a conflagration will calm my head. As I’m looking, though, the shoebox on the upper closet shelf where I keep my old prescriptions catches my eye; I take it down and rummage through. Alan did offer me something similar, and I really could use some sleep. I find one of my old Xanax bottles and give it a shake, and it rattles in reply. I shouldn’
t. I know I shouldn’t. Wasn’t my best friend okay with it, though? I need rest, badly, so I press off the top and tap one of the pink pills out into my hand while I work up some spit in my mouth.

  The tablet is swallowed. Tonight, maybe I will finally sleep.

  Outside in the dusk I pull the tarp from the woodpile and wrestle out some suitable logs. I toss them over the wet, dead ashes in the stone ring, prime them with crumpled newspaper, and before long I have myself a glorious bonfire. I should give Alan a call to let him know, I’m thinking, because he’s always up for a fire, but my phone buzzes in my hand with a call from Peggy Mackie just as I’m taking it out of my pocket.

  “What have you got for me?” I ask her, poking a stick into the fire.

  “I didn’t think you’d pick up. I was just going to leave you a message. Not much new. I’m getting the impression the family is stonewalling Pete Tran. Pete let something slip to that effect when I spoke with him after I talked to you, but he backpedalled when I pressed him on it. He’s also been talking to someone about the technical side of how the video might have been made and posted.”

  “Tracy Steiner?”

  “No. Some cop computer expert. Also, there’s going to be a special board meeting Tuesday night about all this.”

  “A board meeting that I should attend? With legal counsel?”

  “I think your presence will be expected, yes. And all I can say is, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably want a lawyer there. How are you hanging in?”

  “I keep moving, Peggy. I just keep myself moving.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  After we hang up I check my phone for any messages or emails from Lauren—there’s nothing—and I dial Alan’s number only to get his voicemail.

  “Built a fire,” I say after the beep. “Come on over if you want.”

  Alan calls back in seconds. “Should I bring supplies?” he asks. “I have a pretty nice bottle of tempranillo downstairs.”

  “You can bring supplies.” Should I mention the Xanax? I only took the smallest dose. I can’t even feel it, really. A little wine on top will not hurt.