Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  Stefan and I sat at the granite-topped island, drinking and munching companionably. It’s not just strangers who can be knit together by sharing a meal; even spouses can deepen their connection, heal a rift, arm themselves against adversity, can do almost anything through the quiet magic of food and drink. Sitting there, I remembered the times the electricity had gone out in our neighborhood because of a thunderstorm and how we’d huddled around LED emergency lanterns, feasted on bottled water, peanut butter and crackers as if they were the offerings of a fine chef, relieved that we were together, that our house was unscathed, that we hadn’t lost any trees, that life would go on, order would soon be restored.

  I couldn’t tell you why, but that’s how I felt right then, grateful and even mildly hopeful.

  Then the mood changed when I said, “Father Ryan told me we should look for somebody who’s suffering the way we are—”

  “You talked to Ryan? Why? When?” Stefan looked almost angry.

  “We had coffee just now.”

  “Why?” He set his scotch glass down as if he wanted to smash it but was forcing himself not to.

  “Why not? I didn’t know who else to talk to and I thought he could help. He did. I can see why you like him. I mean, we didn’t talk about religion or anything like that, but he’s pretty calm and centered.” None of that seemed to be getting through to Stefan, whose face was still beclouded. “Are you pissed I didn’t tell you first?”

  He flushed. “Yes. Sort of.”

  I took his arm. “Stefan, I was a wreck yesterday and I was relieved you weren’t home. And this morning, you were sound asleep. Did you really think I’d wake you up for something like that? I needed to calm down first, and talking to him really helped.” Stefan didn’t pull away, which I considered a good sign. “I know you tell Ryan things you don’t tell me, and that’s okay. He’s your priest, you go to confession, I get all that.”

  “It’s called reconciliation now, not confession.” Stefan knocked back his scotch and poured another two fingers of it.

  “Oh, sorry. I guess he called it confession so I’d know what he meant.”

  Stefan wasn’t really listening. He said, “There’s something I haven’t even told Ryan, not all of it, anyway. I haven’t told anyone.”

  “It’s about that student’s suicide, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, his face as twisted with guilt and shame as if he were a gargoyle carved by a medieval stonemason to represent those cruel and terrible feelings.

  19

  Since the night last week our lives had been torn apart, my sense of time had been completely disrupted, and while I waited for Stefan to tell me what he’d been hiding, I realized once again how I had been cut adrift from the very ordinary markers I took for granted: regular meals; watching our favorite TV shows; walking and feeding Marco the same time every day, day after day. It’s as if I was living in some kind of perpetual, fogged-in present which became murkier no matter what I did or said or thought. Was it any wonder that I was so tired? Deep down, I felt lost.

  And things were even worse, because despite brief moments of calm or at least quiet at home, there was still a gulf between me and Stefan, one we had not even looked into, let alone talked about. I would never truly understand the horror he had experienced being dragged off by the cops, those endless poisonous moments that I doubted any amount of therapy or prayer could vanquish. I had lived those moments vicariously in movies and TV shows, but when they were over, the catharsis I felt was secondhand, an artifact of someone else’s imagination. Now, there was no relief. His experience was an abyss I couldn’t plumb.

  And my helplessness and panic, those would be alien to him. We had experienced the police assault together, but it wasn’t like being in a tornado shelter with the winds howling outside and tearing at the doors, and then finally emerging after the devastation was over. No, he had been swept away and I’d been left behind, and though we were reunited, we would always be separated by the difference of those hours. I would always be the one who had suffered less than he had, the one who had not been so utterly humiliated.

  And how much longer would our relationship last with a minefield like that between us? It was as deadly as the death of a child, which many couples never survive. Tragedy didn’t always unite couples—often it sundered them forever even if they went through the motions and pretended they could go on together.

  “It’s my fault that student, Casey, committed suicide,” Stefan brought out.

  “What? What are you talking about? Because you caught him plagiarizing and confronted him? Stefan, you did what was right. And you gave him a second chance, didn’t you? To do another paper? That was pretty generous. Most professors would have flunked him for plagiarism.”

  Stefan waved that away. “Casey didn’t hear any of that, not really. He was crying, Nick. He told me that he wanted to kill himself.”

  I was about to say Casey was just being dramatic, but I didn’t even start the sentence. It hadn’t been teenage angst, it was real. The boy had hanged himself, after all. But why?

  Stefan went on as if he’d read my mind. “Casey said his parents were very strict about his grades, they’d home schooled him for years until SUM, and still looked at all of his assignments. He said there was no way he could hide what happened. They’d get it out of him somehow. He didn’t know how to keep secrets. They wouldn’t let him. They were relentless.”

  “Sounds like he grew up in a prison. But what were you supposed to do about it? I know therapists have—what’s it called?—a duty to warn, if they think a patient is going to hurt someone or hurt themselves, right? But you weren’t his shrink. Anyway, how could you have known he was serious?”

  “I did know,” Stefan said blankly.

  “What?”

  Stefan hugged himself and looked down. “It was in his eyes. He was terrified. I’ve had students try to snow me before. This wasn’t fake, this wasn’t bullshit. It was real.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and I now found myself wishing he would stop.

  “And—” Stefan hesitated, then finished his sentence in a rush: “And I just didn’t want to get involved.” Now he sat back and frowned. “I even lied to the campus police when they spoke to his professors and asked if he could have some reason to kill himself. I said ‘Yeah, well, lots of students have problems, who has time to listen to them all?’ They probably thought I was an asshole, but I couldn’t risk saying anything.”

  “Risk how?”

  “Come on, he hanged himself in Parker Hall and I was the only one of his profs who had an office there. The cops asked me if he was trying to send me a message. I told you that last year when it happened.” Now he looked mildly aggrieved that I wasn’t following every twist and turn of his recital.

  I didn’t remember that part about lying to the cops, but the whole episode had been so freaky I had probably blocked things out to make walking into Parker Hall afterwards more bearable. It was where I had to work. It was where I’d probably be working for the rest of my career. I had no tolerance for ghosts.

  “But there wasn’t a suicide note, right? I remember there wasn’t. That’s what I don’t understand.”

  Stefan shrugged. “Maybe there was, and his parents destroyed it.”

  I shook my head. It didn’t add up. It had never added up.

  And then I got a text on my phone. It was from Vanessa and read “Car’s owner Pat Silver. 4022 Tuberose. I’m in court now. Don’t do anything. Let’s talk later.”

  “I have to go,” I said, not explaining.

  Stefan sighed and said, “Whatever.” He didn’t ask where I was going or why, proof of how the SWAT team’s raid had sundered us and killed his spirit. He hadn’t been in jail long, but he had the defeated, shrunken air right then of someone whose spirit has been broken by prolonged incarceration, someone rendered unfit for a world without bars.

  Stefan said he might as well go to campus for the afternoon to try to do some work. I didn’t need to ask wh
y he couldn’t work at home. Our home had become toxic. What were we supposed to do about that? I couldn’t even imagine moving.

  I headed off to Pat Silver’s address in what was called Roseville, a small 1930s-era enclave in Michiganapolis where all the streets had names like Bellerose, Wildrose, and Rosebush. Its small brick or stone houses were like English country cottages more than mid-Michigan homes. You know, diamond-paned windows, curving brick paths, urns filled with annuals or twisted topiaries, the works. Streets in Roseville were lined with oaks, and the gardens were some of the prettiest and best-tended in the city, thanks to an overbearing neighborhood association—or so I’d heard.

  I’d never been a thrill seeker, had no interest in rock climbing, bungee jumping, parasailing, or any even partly extreme sports. Hell, I’d never even tried a roller coaster or a helicopter ride, but that past was in shreds. Flushed and breathing hard, I was aware that going to confront this Pat Silver guy was probably nuts, maybe even dangerous, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see the man who was stalking me and Stefan and trying to ruin our lives, look him in the eye and demand to know what we had done to make him torment us. I wanted the craziness to end. That was all I could think about, all I could see ahead of me. Resolution. Escape.

  The postcard prettiness of Rosedale as I drove along might have soothed me at any other time, but now I imagined throwing bricks through decorative bow windows, smashing wildly ornamental mailboxes, ripping shake shingles off roofs. And I had the strange sense of dispassionately watching myself at the wheel: enraged, exhausted, and unpredictable.

  I picked out the large street numbers 4022 and the name “Silver” on a wrought iron mailbox smothered in purple clematis. I parked halfway down the shady street from it. Pat Silver’s lair couldn’t have been cuter, with white roses climbing up the ochre stucco’d walls and tubs of pink hydrangeas flanking the arched red door. Grandma’s house, I guess. What would the Wolf be like?

  The street was quiet except for the birds: plaintive mourning doves and chickadees, and arrogant crows.

  But before I got out of my car I saw a woman with a blue mesh shopping bag come limping down the far end of the block. She turned in at the same address I had been texted. She must have been Silver’s wife. Her middle-aged face under a helmet of white hair was grim, but the rest of her fit in with the neighborhood as if she were an extra hired for a film scene: puffy white peasant blouse, calf-length cream and pink flowered skirt, pink sandals. I waited till she had let herself in, then headed down the block for her door, still feeling I was separated from myself, a spectator, not an actor. I’d been sitting in an air-conditioned car and hitting the street made my forehead damp. I tried wiping it with the back of my hand.

  I walked up the red brick path and as I stood before the red door with its door knocker shaped like an angel’s wings, I felt insanely reckless and free. I had no way to defend myself from whatever was on the other side of that door, but I was facing it nonetheless. I rang the brass doorbell and the chimes played some song I didn’t recognize.

  The door opened slowly, and the woman I’d seen entering a few moments before stood there surveying me.

  “I want to talk to Pat Silver.”

  She glared at me. “Took you long enough. Come in, then.” She stepped back.

  Completely nonplussed, I entered a low-ceilinged living room as picturesque as the whole street: everything was unbearably cute chintz and china figurines of shepherds and shepherdesses. The only decoration on the walls covered in a shiny pink-and-white-striped paper was framed photos of men in U.S. Army uniforms, and enough Celtic crosses to stock a small gift shop.

  “I’m making tea. Sit down.”

  I had entered the Twilight Zone.

  I picked an armchair near the door in case I had to make a quick exit. She hadn’t locked the door behind me. The chair was stiff and unyielding. From the kitchen I could hear the local classical radio station; at least that’s what I assumed it was, since the hosts played Brandenburg concertos several times a day and one of them was playing now. I never could remember its number, only that I intensely disliked the implacable cheerfulness.

  If I’d been sweaty before coming in, now I felt my skin as dry as if I’d been walking into a fierce wind. Well, hadn’t I?

  As the woman limped back into the room with a tea tray, I wondered where to start. And what the hell had she meant by saying it took me long enough?

  She eased into a chair near mine with an elaborately carved tea table between us and proceeded to fuss with cups and sugar. Her bad leg jutted out at an ungainly angle, but she seemed used to that. The blue and white tea set with Chinese scenes on it was very pretty and I’d never seen one like it before. She must have caught my inquiring glance.

  “Churchill,” she explained. “It was my grandmother’s.”

  I thought to myself that Stefan would tell me it was crazy to have tea in our persecutor’s house, but though this woman lacked any emotion, I did not feel I was sitting in a nut house, which puzzled me.

  She handed me a cup after asking how I liked it, and then before I could take a sip, she said, “Why so long? Somebody should have come long ago to apologize, somebody should have come last year.”

  “Apologize? For what?”

  She clanked her cup down in its saucer and some tea spilled over the side. “Are you kidding me? You people at the college are all the same.” She was one of those townies who insisted on calling SUM “the college” as if to reduce its size and diminish its importance. “You’re so high and mighty. If you’re not here to apologize, what are you here for?”

  I gulped down some tea, confused and wondering if I was even in the right house. “Where’s Pat Silver?” I asked. “That’s who I want to talk to.”

  “I’m Pat Silver. My parents wanted a boy and they got me instead,” she added, with the weary note of having explained her name not being short for “Patricia” thousands of times.

  We glared at each other and I felt idiotic holding my tea cup when the atmosphere was electric with tension. I set it down carefully. “Do you own a black Chrysler 300? License plate DXM 838?”

  “Yes.”

  A woman was behind all our distress? How was that even possible? Hadn’t it been a man threatening me on our street? Unless she was conspiring with someone …

  “So why have you been persecuting me and my partner Stefan?”

  She flushed and said, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I haven’t been doing anything to you or to anyone else. I don’t even know you. I mean, I know your face from the newspapers, and that you teach English. That’s why I thought you were here, to apologize for your colleagues, for the school.” She sniffed. “I expected somebody higher up, but I guess I’m not important enough for any of those muckety-mucks.”

  “Wait a minute. Apologize for what? Someone’s been after us, stalking us—”

  “Is that why you’re here? Because you think I’ve done you wrong? That’s crazy! You’re the one in the wrong, you and all those creeps at the college who turned my poor boy’s head. You’re all commies and queers! You killed my son, or as good as did it. Casey was going to be like his brothers and his uncles and both his grandfathers and go into the Army until he started taking those godforsaken English classes and got his head all screwed up. Who cares about books? They’re dead, they’ve always been dead. Why did you all encourage him like that? You poisoned his mind and you turned him against his family, against his tradition. He could have had a real life in the Army, a good life, and now he’s dead all because of you.”

  Casey. This woman was Casey Silver’s mother! The boy who had hanged himself in Parker Hall last year. And she thought I had come to say I was sorry for his suicide? So that’s why she had invited me in, that’s why she was going through this bizarre act of serving me tea. Why hadn’t I put their two names together as soon as I got the text?

  Her face darkened. “You say someone’s been, what, following you? Tell me what else.”

  I
told her about the SWAT team, and the two threatening phone calls, being threatened and followed, about when our house was broken into, and the raid on my office (but not about the planted drugs we had disposed). It was an edited version of what Stefan and I had been through over the last week, but it was chilling enough, and with each detail, she shrank back into her chair, ending up looking as appalled as Scrooge seeing Marley’s grim chains.

  I asked, “Does anyone else have access to your car?”

  She nodded warily. “My husband,” she murmured. “Even though we’re separated and he has his own car, he still keeps a set of keys to mine.” The way she said it, I could tell this was not something that made her happy. “He uses the car whenever he wants to, and I don’t drive much myself. He also comes and goes here, even if I change the locks.” She rubbed her bad leg unconsciously, it seemed.

  Watching her hand, I had to ask, “Did your husband do that to you?” And I wondered who the hell he was, and where.

  She snapped at me. “No. I fell.” But it sounded fake, and maybe even she thought so. She slumped in her chair like a marionette whose strings had been cut, and shook her head helplessly. I was starting to feel bizarrely guilty. I had come here for a confrontation, to somehow clear the air, not to make anyone else miserable, even someone who seemed to hate me.

  “Yes, he did it,” she said, smiling in a twisted way, as if the memory were somehow ironic. “He’s done other things over the years. To me and to Casey. Though he stopped when Casey got big enough to fight back.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially even though we were alone, “Lord forgive me, but at first I thought my husband killed Casey because he announced he wanted to be a teacher, for the love of God, and wanted to educate people, not kill them.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Like there’s anything better than serving your country?”