70
John Rice, 2019
I know what happened,” Rice had said. It felt like minutes had passed since he’d spoken, but it had probably been a matter of seconds. “I’ve always wondered if you knew, too.” Well, no longer, he thought. The sheer shock on her face told him everything: for all these years, she’d never known that he’d figured it out. She had no idea that she’d made him an accomplice to her crime. She was responsible for the most colossal sin he’d committed in his days on earth, and she hadn’t even known it. At least, not until this moment.
Julia sat beside him, bottom lip dropped open, revealing a trembling row of teeth.
What must she have been feeling? A small part of him wanted to punish her—to let her wither under his words. Compared to his years of burdensome knowledge, years of praying for forgiveness for a sin that was perpetual, Rice thought a moment of suffering was a short sentence indeed.
“Enough.” The word was harsh, and she started. “I want to hear it.”
“What?” she whispered.
“I want to hear it from you. Tell me what I already know. Tell me what happened on the day he went missing.”
IV.
LUCKY
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
71
Tony Hall, 2016
At 4:00 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker would go missing, Tony Hall arrived at Goodspring. The pretty woman at the front desk perked up as he came through the door. She looked like she was in her forties, with stiff blond hair she’d had back in a clip each time he’d come in. There was always an air about her, as if she knew everything going on with Nick and she wanted Tony to know it.
“Mr. Hall, right?”
“Yeah,” Tony said as he pounded his boots on the mat.
“Your brother’s primary worker said to expect you. She’s here today.”
“Is she not normally?”
“Oh, no, she is. I just mean she’s here for your meeting with Nick.”
The woman’s face begged him to ask why. Instead, he said, “Oh, okay,” and he slid his car keys across the counter toward her.
She scooped up the keys and pushed the sign-in sheet toward him. It probably made her feel important, working there, getting to dip her toes into the drama of other people’s lives.
She pulled the sheet back and said, “I’ll let Anne Marie know you’re here.”
A couple had come in behind him, and Tony stepped away from the desk. He stood to the side, fixated on the double doors the woman had motioned toward a couple of times as they spoke.
After a minute, a woman appeared at those doors. She looked just about Nick’s age; too young to be his therapist, or whatever she was.
“Mr. Hall?”
Tony went to her quickly.
“I’m Anne Marie.” They shook hands, and the woman turned to start walking down the hallway. “I’m Nick’s primary mental health worker here. Nick is looking forward to seeing you.”
“Is something going on?” Tony still didn’t know why Nick had asked him to come visit.
“Well, since you were coming up, Nick asked if we could do a little group session. He wants to talk to you about something.” She pointed to a door they were fast approaching. “I’m really just here for support. We won’t be too long, and then you two can move to the visiting area.”
She opened the door without pause. Nick was sitting in a small chair on the opposite side of the room, his curly hair glowing in the low sun of late afternoon.
He stood to hug Tony. Tony had grown used to Nick’s new, tense embrace, and he began to release his arms after a single squeeze. Nick held fast, though, and Tony looked to the side of his face, brought his arms back around his little brother, closed his eyes, and hugged him deeply for the first time in as long as he could remember. It was the kind of hug that sank into his chest.
When they released each other, Anne Marie was sitting behind a small desk near the door, and she motioned for Tony to sit beside Nick.
“What’s going on?” Tony said to Nick.
Nick looked at Anne Marie.
“Nick?” she said.
“I guess I wanted to talk to you about some stuff.”
“About that night?”
“No. About us.”
“Oh.” The knot in Tony’s stomach loosened. He looked over at Anne Marie. “Oh, are we doing therapy?”
Anne Marie laughed, and Nick smiled nervously. “If that’s okay?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Sure.”
“I just wanted to talk to you about something, and I feel like whenever I try to, I get all jumbled in my head. But when I’m with Anne Marie, or when I was with Jeff, I could talk about it better.”
“It’s really fine. What do you want to talk to me about?”
“I’m so scared to sound like I’m blaming you.”
The knot returned. “For what?”
“I’m not, though. Please try to listen, please try to hear me, because I don’t blame you for a single thing. You have done more for me than Dad or my mom ever has. More than I think they could—I don’t think they’re capable of love in a normal way. But this isn’t about them or what’s wrong with them. I’m so lucky I have you—I’d be fucked without you.”
“Okay,” Tony said.
Nick looked at Anne Marie, and she nodded at him.
“Sometimes, I feel like you baby me.”
Oh. This was not news. Tony felt his hackles going up.
“I know you were young when you started taking care of me. You were younger than I am now. And I was a baby. I was helpless. All a baby can do is rely on the people around it. But I’m not a baby anymore.”
“I know you aren’t.”
“Tony,” Anne Marie said. “If you could let Nick finish what he needs to say, that would be really helpful.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Nick’s eyes welled. “Please don’t apologize for anything you’ve ever done for me. I just need you to know that I need to feel like I’m taking care of myself now. When Ray raped me, that was the most powerless moment of my entire life. I felt like every fear I’ve ever had was confirmed. I was weak. I wasn’t a man. I couldn’t stop whatever bad things people wanted to do to me—I could be used. I could even be killed, if he’d wanted to do that, and for part of that night, I thought he did. You remember how Dad was about me being gay. I felt like everything he’d ever said I was, Ray made me in that moment.
“And I’m never gonna get better if I can’t start believing what Jeff and Anne Marie and all of you keep telling me. That it wasn’t my fault. That it had nothing to do with who I am.
“And the more you say stuff to me like you wish you’d been there, you would have stopped him, you’ll take care of me—the more you say that stuff, the more I feel like I’m still a victim. Like I can’t save myself.”
“Nick,” Tony said quietly, and Nick nodded. Tony could speak now.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for how I’ve treated you. I swear, I know it doesn’t change what I did, but I swear it doesn’t match how I see you myself.”
While Nick was talking, Anne Marie had gotten up to hand Tony a tissue. It was soaked through now, but he kept wiping his nose with it anyway.
“You are the best man I know. I am in awe of you.” Tony hung his head. “I’m so stupid.”
“No,” Anne Marie said.
Tony looked at her in surprise. How could she not hate him after what she’d just heard?
“Nick and I have had a lot of time together,” she said. “You want to know what I think?”
Tony looked at
Nick. Nick nodded.
“I think you grew up in an unsafe home with a dad who was withholding, cruel, and unpredictably violent, until your mom took you away. And then, when you were a teenager, and you were figuring out who you were, you saw that same dad have another kid, and that kid didn’t have a mom like yours. And you decided to be his hero.”
Nick cleared his throat. “Jeff was talking about that one day with me. I asked him about, like, what would happen to me later. Like, would I become violent, because of what Ray did. And Jeff was saying that people who are hurt by other people, like abused, sometimes they have a hard time not getting hurt over and over after that. And sometimes they start hurting other people. But sometimes they get kind of obsessed with helping other people. And Jeff was talking about me and him, but I think that’s what you did.”
“I did think I was helping,” Tony said to Nick. “I’ve only ever wanted to keep you safe.”
“I love you for that. But you can’t protect me from everything.”
That was obvious. Look at what had happened.
“I want us to figure out a new way to be without me feeling . . . fragile every time I talk to you.”
Tony blew his nose into the tissue. “Okay.”
Nick reached for Tony’s hand and squeezed it three times.
Tony squeezed back four.
72
Nick Hall, 2016
At 5:30 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker would go missing, Tony and Nick entered the visiting room together. They went straight for the corner cabinet and selected a pile of games. Then they sat at a table and played checkers, then cribbage, then war, then Connect 4, then checkers again. Games had always been their favorite way to suspend reality when Ron and Jeannie were drunk or fighting, or when school felt like too much for one of them. Since that fall, everything had seemed too much, too heavy, too hard to do together. Nick hoped it would get easier.
“I’ve decided to go forward with it.” Nick hopped Tony’s checker piece and plucked it from the board. “At least for now.”
“The case?”
Nick nodded.
“You’re sure you want to do that?”
Nick eyed him.
Tony held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Your choice, and I trust you.”
“If it gets too hard again, I can always tell them I’m done.”
“But everyone will know.”
That was true. Nick was sure his absence from the school had not erased everyone’s memory that he was the one in the story. And the new story—the real story—would be in the news again. He would have to contend with what people thought of him. What they thought it said about him, as a man, to have failed to stop Ray. What they thought it said about him as a person to have hidden the truth. Whether they believed him at all.
“I know,” Nick said. “But it’s my fight to have, if I want it. And I do.”
Tony rubbed a finger on a checker for a moment before he spoke. “You really want to go through it all? A whole year of this? A trial?”
“Yes,” Nick said.
Tony moved the piece forward. “It’s not what I would have chosen for you.”
Nick laughed. “You’re such a dad.”
Tony’s face lightened with surprise, and he laughed, too.
“It could settle,” Tony said.
“I mean, it didn’t, but it could later.”
“I thought the court date got moved to next week.”
“No, it was a few days ago. Julia didn’t tell you?”
Across the board, Tony looked at Nick like this was news to him.
“Wow. You must have been being insufferable about my case.”
Tony sighed. “You don’t even know.”
His brother didn’t look angry, so Nick smiled. “I really meant for her to tell you.” He’d called her the same day . . . wait a minute. The same day she told him that Tony wanted to come see him at Goodspring. “Why did you come visit today?”
“You wanted me to,” Tony said.
Nick laughed. “Your wife is sneaky. I didn’t ask you to come here. The second I told her the case didn’t settle, she said you wanted to come see me.”
“Really?”
“Guess she thought it would be good for me to tell you myself. That or she just didn’t want to have to do it.”
Tony sat back from the board and crossed his arms. “I don’t blame either of you. I haven’t exactly been . . . levelheaded about all of this. Did she say anything about me, or what we talked about today?”
“No,” Nick said honestly. “I wanted to do this. We needed to talk.”
Tony held Nick’s eye for a minute then moved a piece forward on the board. “So there’s no deal, and you really want to do this your own way, with court.”
“Yep. Will you come with me the next time there’s a hearing?”
“Of course. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“You sure you can take it? Is your head leveling out?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “You’ve set me straight.”
“Thank God,” Nick said as he jumped another piece of Tony’s. “I was starting to worry you’d do something stupid.”
73
Julia Hall, 2016
At 6:00 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker would go missing, Julia Hall was standing in the kitchen of a man she didn’t know, a single sweaty palm gripping his counter, when she heard him descending the stairs.
He stepped from the stairwell, and a lamp went on in the corner of the living room.
She only saw him for a second, probably, before he saw her, but that second stretched like a warm taffy pull. There he was: Raymond Walker. Just like his mug shot, but alive and real. Wearing a robe like Tony wore. Regret crashed over her, and if she could have blinked and made herself disappear, she would have. Raymond Walker’s eyes stuttered as he took her in, and he stepped back, knocking his heels against the bottom step of the staircase he had just come down. He wavered, then sat with a thud.
His voice was pure bewilderment. “Who are you?”
She hadn’t disappeared. He could see her and she needed to speak. She could do this.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Julia said, holding her empty hands up at shoulder height. She’d thought about bringing a gun to scare him into listening to her, but she’d been worried she’d have shot him before either of them said a word. Given the tremor in her hands now, she was glad there wasn’t a trigger under her finger.
“Who the fuck are you,” he said. “Are you—” He tilted his head, like he was trying to see her face better. If her clothing was doing its job, he might have even thought she was a man. Her hair was slicked back tight under her hat, and she wore an oversize men’s parka.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” she said again. “My name is Julia.” She took an incremental step toward him. “Hall.”
He shook his head. “Nick Hall’s sister?”
“Sister-in-law,” she said.
“Shit,” he hissed as he turned. Before Julia could react, Walker had crawled himself to standing and was pounding up the stairs.
“Wait, wait, wait!” Julia called as she rushed across the kitchen.
She took the stairs two at a time; her baggy pants would have tripped her if she hadn’t thought to wear a belt. She pictured Walker waiting at the top of the steps, ready to kick her back down, but when she rounded the bend in the narrow staircase he was gone.
She burst out onto the landing. Walker was across the room, next to the bed, his back to her.
Julia ran at him, and he started to move toward the bathroom door, but the phone he was clutching was plugged in next to the bed. She slammed into him arms first, driving him into the doorframe with a yelp. The phone released from its cord and clattered to the bathroom floor.
Walker stooped toward the phone, and Julia gr
abbed for his arms, but he wrenched them free. She clambered onto his back, a strange cry emerging from her throat.
“Get off!” he bellowed in confusion, jerking his body to the right.
She clamped her limbs around him. “I just want to talk!”
He moved toward the phone again, and she released a leg to drag her foot along the floor in front of him. She felt the phone underfoot, and with a miraculous yank she sent it skittering under the claw-foot tub.
Walker bucked her off and she fell to the floor.
“Stop,” she groaned. Her ribs thrummed where she’d landed on the lump of papers folded in her coat pocket.
She picked herself up and saw him scrambling for the phone on his hands and knees.
She rushed toward him and shoved her hands against his shoulders, driving him squarely into the side of the tub. His head drove up into the lip of the tub and snapped back against his neck. A metallic thong rang out and he slumped to the floor.
Julia Hall stood in Raymond Walker’s bathroom, swaying, her heart pounding in her ears.
And Raymond Walker did not move.
74
Tony Hall, 2016
At 8:10 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker went missing, Tony called Julia as he crossed the parking lot outside of Goodspring. She’d been all over him about his calling her whenever he finished meeting with Nick. For some reason she’d gotten herself worked up about this visit. She didn’t answer. It was a shame—she’d be happy to hear the news.
Nick, and the therapist to some extent, had convinced Tony. Tony had taken control of the hand Ron Hall dealt him by making himself a hero: Nick’s hero first, then anyone who’d have him. That was fine when the person actually needed saving, but Nick didn’t need or want to be saved. And Tony had been stifling him for a long, long time. It was a fine line, it seemed, between helping someone you love and hurting them. A line Tony hadn’t even been looking for.
The Damage Page 28