Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  She glanced away, settled her gaze briefly on the woods outside the window, two small birds in a hanging feeder. "I just feel this terrible sinking," she said softly.

  I came over to her and drew her into my arms. Her body was stiff and brittle, a bundle of sticks. "Nothing is sinking," I assured her.

  She shook her head. "I'm just afraid, that's all. Afraid that it's all going to ... explode."

  With that, she stepped out of my embrace and made her way up the stairs. I made no effort to follow her. It wouldn't have done any good anyway. Under stress, Meredith preferred being alone, at least in brief intervals. There was something about solitude that calmed her, and so I left her to herself, walked out into the yard, sat beside the brick grill, and tried to reason through my impulsive decision to say nothing to the police or even to Keith about my oddly building suspicion that he'd lied to them. Even then, I wasn't sure why I'd done it, save that I'd found no way to address the matter without either drawing Keith deeper into suspicion or grilling him myself, an action I wanted to delay as long as possible in the hope that Amy would suddenly turn up safe and sound, and so there would be no need for me to confront Keith at all. It was an illusion that couldn't be justified, or even maintained for very long, and I should have known that at the time. Since then I've learned that half of life is denial, that even in those we love, it's not what we see but what we choose to be blind to that sustains us.

  I was still sitting in the same place when Warren's car made the lazy turn around the driveway and came to a halt in front of the house.

  He got out and headed toward me, his gait far more determined than I'd ever seen it, an awkwardly charging bull.

  "I just heard it on the radio," he said breathlessly when he reached me. "They're organizing a search. Volunteers. The whole town is gearing up for it." His face was red and appeared a bit puffy, the way it looked after he'd been drinking.

  "So," he asked. "Are you okay?"

  "I just hope Amy turns up," I said. "Because if she doesn't—"

  "Don't think about that," Warren blurted.

  This piece of advice did not surprise me. It was precisely the advice Warren had spent his life following. I recalled how he'd put my father's bankruptcy out of his mind, pretending that our precipitous fall into poverty had simply never happened. And so he'd obliviously urged me to hold to my plan to go to college, though there was no money for that. Years later, with my father now in a low-rent retirement home, he'd broached the subject of our starting a landscaping business. When I'd asked how he intended to come up with sufficient seed money, he'd replied, "Well, you know, when Pop goes," even though our father had long ago lost everything he had, everything he might have given us. Warren had reacted to Jenny's illness the same way, by simply refusing to face it. During the months of her dying, as she grew steadily weaker, losing one faculty after another to the growing tumor in her brain, Warren had talked on and on about a future she could not possibly have. "When Jenny gets a boyfriend," he'd say, or "When Jenny gets to high school." Only once, the afternoon of Jenny's death, when she lay mute and helpless, but nonetheless frantically trying to communicate, had he actually looked stricken by her circumstances. In my mind I could still see the way he'd stood at the door as she squirmed and sputtered, unable to speak, but seized with a raw determination to make some final statement. I'd leaned down and put my ear to her lips, heard nothing but her feverish breathing until even that had ended and she sank into a coma from which she never awakened.

  Now Warren was with me once again in a time of trial, and once again he was refusing to admit the nature of the problem or how grave it might be or yet become.

  "So," Warren said, "I just wanted to tell you that it's going to be okay, Bro."

  There was no point in arguing with him, so I said simply, "The police have already been here. Keith told them that he never left Amy's house and that he walked home alone."

  Warren plopped into a lawn chair opposite the grill and folded his hands over his belly. "The police had to talk to him," he said. "But they wouldn't think he had anything to do with something bad."

  There it was again, mindless optimism, my brother's particular form of adaptation. He'd found a way to survive by taking in only the information that kept him afloat. In high school, he'd played the happy fat boy. In adulthood, the role of jovial alcoholic had fit like a glove. Now he was playing the steady family adviser, a role that clearly pleased him until I said, "They'll probably talk to you, too."

  Warren smiled, but with a hint of nervousness. "Me? Why would they talk to me? I'm not involved."

  "Of course you are, Warren."

  The faint smile now drooped. "How?"

  "You drove Keith to Amy's house," I explained.

  "So?"

  "I'm just telling you that they know about it," I said. "They asked for your address. They have to talk to everybody, Warren. Anyone who had any contact with Amy in the hours before she disappeared."

  Warren said nothing, but his mind was clearly working hard.

  "Did you have any contact with her?" I asked evenly.

  "I wouldn't call it ... contact."

  "Did you see her?"

  Warren didn't answer, but I knew from the look in his eyes that he had.

  "Where was she?" I asked.

  Warren's face grew very still. "She was in the yard when I let Keith out in front of the house. Playing. She came up to the car."

  I leaned forward. "Listen to me," I said. "This is serious business. So I'll tell you what I told Keith. When the cops come to you, when they ask you questions, think before you answer. And tell the truth."

  Warren nodded gently, obediently, like a child receiving grave instructions.

  "Did you talk to Amy?" I asked.

  Warren shook his head.

  "Not even a quick hi?"

  "I don't know," Warren said.

  "Think, Warren."

  He shrugged. "Maybe something like that, like what you said. You know, a quick hi."

  "Nothing else?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes," Warren answered.

  I could see that he was worried now, but I also knew that this worry wouldn't last, his momentary fretfulness precisely that—momentary. Or so I thought. But to my surprise the veil of trouble didn't lift from my brother's face.

  "Do you think they suspect me?" he asked.

  "Why would they suspect you?"

  Warren shrugged. "I don't know," he said weakly. "Maybe they just do."

  I shook my head. "They have no reason to suspect you, Warren," I assured him.

  But the pained expression remained on his face, an expression that reminded me of the look on Meredith's face, and on Keith's, so that it seemed to me that trouble had fallen upon my family like a net, leaving all our faces webbed in gray. "Everybody's a little worried at the moment"—I placed my hand on his shoulder and gave it a brotherly squeeze—"but it's nothing," I said, "compared to what Vince and Karen must be going through. A missing daughter, can you imagine?"

  Warren nodded. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Such an adorable little girl."

  SEVEN

  Here is the illusion—a normal day predicts a normal tomorrow and each day is not a brand-new spin of the wheel, our lives not lived at the whim of Lady Luck. And yet, now, when I recall the morning in question, a bright sunny morning, before that first ring of the phone, I see myself as living in a world that was almost entirely illusion. Then the phone rang and I heard Vince Giordano's voice, and suddenly the wheel stopped. Instead of falling on the number upon which I'd bet the full wealth and value of my life and which it had always landed on before, the red ball skirted past, made another circle around the wheel, and dropped into a very different slot. And like a gambler who'd won every spin before that moment, I stared, dazed, at the grim result of this latest turn of the wheel, and in my mind I set the wheel going backward, lifted the ball from the fateful slot, and sent it whirling back as if by sheer force of w
ill it could be made to fall again where it had fallen so many times before. It was the afternoon of the day that Amy Giordano disappeared, but I refused to accept the fact that anything had changed.

  And so, when I returned to the shop, I tried to appear normal, as if nothing were bothering me.

  But Neil knew better. He attempted to hide it, but I often caught him glancing at me surreptitiously, as if I'd begun to manifest some curious symptom, a slight tremor in the hand, for example, or a peculiar tendency to stare into space.

  "Something wrong, boss?" he asked finally.

  By then the local radio stations had been reporting Amy's disappearance for several hours. People were searching her neighborhood, as well as more remote areas, particularly the woods that surrounded the subdivision where she lived. It was a big story, and so I knew that it was only a matter of time before the whole community would find out that Keith had been babysitting Amy the night of her disappearance.

  "It's about Amy Giordano," I said. "Keith was at her house last night. Babysitting. The police spoke to him this morning."

  The layer of jovial self mockery with which Neil presented himself dropped away. "I'm sure Keith didn't do anything wrong," he said. "Keith's very responsible."

  Keith was no such thing, and I knew it. Although he was supposed to come to the shop immediately after school each afternoon, he often showed up an hour late, usually with a grudging look on his face, wanting only to go directly home, then just as directly up the stairs to his room. If there were deliveries to be made, he would make them, but always sullenly. He was not responsible in his schoolwork or in his chores at home. "When he raked leaves, he usually did little more than scatter them. "When he took out the garbage, a few pieces always failed to make it into the can. There was something desultory in everything he did, and for the first time, this very desultoriness took on an oddly sinister character, an outward carelessness and indifference to order that struck me as perhaps emblematic of an inner, and far more serious, disarray.

  Neil touched my arm. "You don't have to worry about Keith," he said. "He's a good kid."

  It was typical of Neil to say whatever had to be said to ease my distress, and the only response I could think of was a quick, false "Yes, he is."

  Neil smiled warmly, then returned to his work, though I noticed that each time the phone rang he tensed and glanced over at me worriedly.

  Until just before two that afternoon, all the calls were routine, and during those few hours I felt the sweetness of the ordinary, of needs easily met, promises easily kept, a world of choices and decisions that demanded no great store of wisdom.

  At 1:54 the phone rang.

  It was Detective Peak. "Mr. Moore, I wanted to let you know that—"

  "You found her," I blurted.

  "What?" Peak asked.

  "You found Amy," I repeated.

  "No," he said. "I wish we had. I'm just calling because I need your assurance that Keith will be around if we need to talk to him again."

  "Of course, he will."

  "This is an official request, Mr. Moore," Peak said. "Keith is now in your custody."

  Custody. The word was abruptly laden with grave responsibility.

  "He won't go anywhere," I told him.

  "Good," Peak said. "Thank you for your cooperation."

  He hung up, but for a brief instant, I continued to press the receiver to my ear, hoping for another voice to come on the line, to tell me that Amy had been found, that she was alive and well, just a little girl who'd wandered out of her house, crawled into a storm drain, and gone to sleep.

  "Boss?"

  It was Neil. He was staring at me from behind a counter piled with small boxes of film.

  "It was the police," I told him. "They want to make sure Keith doesn't go anywhere."

  Neil's lips parted, but he didn't speak.

  I put down the phone. "I think I should probably go home, Neil."

  "Sure," Neil said. "I'll lock up if you..."

  "Thanks."

  I walked to my car and got in, but didn't start the engine. Instead I sat, nearly motionless behind the wheel, watching people on the sidewalk, some alone, a few couples, a scattering of families with children. They strolled past the little shops with an air of complete casualness, like swimmers in the sea, untroubled, caught in that carefree instant before the dark fin breaks the surface and sends them thrashing toward shore.

  Before I started home I snapped up my cell phone and called Meredith.

  "Peak called me," I told her. "We have to keep an eye on Keith."

  She could tell by the tone of my voice that I was feeling shaky. "That means they suspect him," she said.

  "I'm not sure you can draw that conclusion."

  "Oh please, Eric," Meredith said, her tone faintly irritated. "You can't live with your head in the sand forever. We have to face things."

  "I'm facing them, it's just that—"

  "Where are you now?" she interrupted.

  "I'm just leaving the shop."

  "Good. We need to talk."

  She was waiting in the living room when I arrived.

  "It's all that's on the radio," she said. "A big story for this shitty little town."

  I had never heard her speak of Wesley in such a hateful way, as if she felt trapped by its smallness, ensnared and suffocating. Had she felt this way for a long time? I wondered. Had she sometimes awakened in the night and wanted to rush to the family car and drive away, out of Wesley, toward some bright horizon she'd never spoken of? In movies, people always had secret dreams, and I'd assumed that at least a few real people actually had. them, but I'd never thought Meredith afflicted by such dreaminess. Now I wondered if she harbored some thwarted fantasy, dreamed of yellow-brick roads and princely palaces, of being king of some hill she'd never had a chance to climb.

  She walked over to the sofa and sat down hard, as if she were trying to squash the world beneath her. "They mentioned that Vince and Karen had gone out for the evening but not that there was a babysitter"—she shook her head—"but that'll come," she said crisply. "There had to have been a babysitter. Amy was eight years old."

  "Was?" I asked darkly.

  "You know what I mean." She looked at me determinedly. "I think we should call Leo."

  I don't know why I resisted, except that some part of me was determined to keep the gravest consequences at bay, a hope, foolishly held, that if I simply refused to take the next step then no one else would take it, either.

  "Not yet," I said.

  "Why?" Meredith demanded.

  "Because it'll make Keith look guilty," I answered. "You've seen how they do it on television. They say, 'So-and-so has retained counsel.' And people think, Okay the guy knows he did it and so now he's trying to protect himself."

  Meredith stood up, walked to the back window, and peered out into the woods. "I hope you're right, Eric," she said.

  I let her cool a moment, then said, "Do you think we should call the Giordanos?"

  She shrugged.

  "I think it would be a good idea," I said. "You know, to show our concern."

  I walked into the kitchen, took the phone, and dialed the number.

  A strange voice answered, but one I recognized. It was Detective Kraus. I told him who I was and that I wanted to express my hope that Amy would be returned safely home and offer my help, my family's help, in finding her. I asked to speak to Vince. Kraus said he'd get him. I heard him put the phone down, then his footsteps as he walked across the room. I could hear voices, but they were low and distant. Then the footsteps returned.

  "Mr. Giordano doesn't want to talk," Kraus said. "He's a little ... well ... upset."

  "Of course," I said.

  "Keith's around, right?" Kraus asked.

  "Yes."

  "Because we have a few more questions for him."

  I told him that Keith would be more than willing to help in any way he could, then put down the phone. Meredith was watching me worriedly.

&nbs
p; "Maybe you're right," I told her. "Maybe we should call Leo."

  Leo agreed to come over immediately, and so I went upstairs to talk to Keith.

  The door to his room was closed and locked, as he'd insisted upon from the time he was thirteen. I'd never thought anything unusual about this. Teenagers were like that. They shut their parents out. It was a matter of asserting their independence, I supposed, part of the ritual of growing up and growing away. But now the fact that my son spent so much time in his room, at his computer, alone, behind a locked door, gave off an air of something hidden. What, I wondered, did he do in there? And in his solitude, what thoughts came to him?

  I knocked at the door. "Keith."

  I heard a strange scrambling, as if he were taken unawares and was now readying the room before opening the door, turning off the computer, closing drawers, perhaps quickly secreting things in his closet or beneath his bed.

  I tapped again, this time more urgently. "Keith?"

  The bolt snapped back, then the door opened to its customary two inches, and the single blue eye appeared.

  "We've called a lawyer," I said.

  The blue eye gave nothing away.

  "Leo Brock," I added. "He's coming over in a few minutes."

  The blue eye stared at me without sparkle, a tiny pool of unmoving water.

  "I need to talk to you before he gets here."

  Keith's voice was emotionless. "What about?"

  I looked at the slowly blinking eye and wondered if Keith had taken something, inhaled something, if this, too, was a part of him he had hidden from me.

  "Open the door," I said.

  The door remained in place.

  "What do we need to talk about?" Keith asked.

  "Keith, open the door," I insisted.

  He hesitated briefly, then drew back the door, but instead of ushering me into his room, he came out into the corridor and quickly closed the door behind him.

  "Okay," he said. "Talk."

  I looked at him closely. "Are you okay?"

  He laughed softly, almost mockingly. "Yeah, great," he said.

  "I mean are you ... able to talk?"