“I want you to do something for me,” said Julian. He glanced at Paul again but didn’t let his gaze linger. “I want you to let me be nice to you today. I don’t care if you don’t think you deserve it.”
He knew what he deserved, and it wasn’t kindness—it was the dread that Julian’s affection would vanish with the last of his patience. But Paul didn’t protest, because part of letting Julian be kind to him was pretending to believe it would last forever. He answered instead by taking off his glasses and resting his head on Julian’s shoulder. The world beyond the windshield faded away to formless undulations of gray. When Julian turned to kiss his forehead, Paul caught a sharp unfamiliar smell at his throat—perhaps a new shaving cream he barely needed, or a different brand of soap. The change unnerved him far out of proportion to its actual importance. Even Julian’s smallest details threatened to slip through his grasp.
“We’ll be all right,” Julian said, and Paul wondered which of them he thought needed the reassurance. “I’ll show you. We’re nearly there.”
Around noon they reached a town where the water tower was painted with a name Paul nearly recognized. The town looked like a painting from one of his mother’s jigsaw puzzles—well-loved clapboard houses with bright paint and white trim, tall healthy trees along the edges of the streets. Even in the snow, with tire-troughs in the slush and flags taken inside for the winter, it was picturesque in a way he wouldn’t have thought Julian liked.
“I know,” said Julian, as if Paul’s apprehension was too obvious to ignore. “When we came here to visit the campus, I almost balked, but there’s a bigger town up the road, and it would only be for a few years.”
The college was one of the tony handful where neighbors on wealthier streets liked to send their children—the kind of place where long-haired students staged sit-ins and rallies, but not the kind where they might be shot for it. When he and Julian stepped out into the empty parking lot, Paul involuntarily imagined Julian’s parents accompanying them. Mr. Fromme would collect arbitrary details to find distasteful, some of which he would jeer at in the moment and others he would hold in reserve to hurt Julian with later. The picture of Julian’s mother was more impressionistic—she would be quieter and far crueler, able to convey the depth of her skepticism by the delicate way she removed her gloves by their fingertips.
“You’ve got to imagine it in the fall,” said Julian.
The campus was empty for winter break. It was as archetypal in its way as the town that surrounded it, like something out of a brochure for the faraway expensive colleges Paul had never considered attending. Frozen walkways wandered beneath a vaulted ceiling of bare branches, and the façades—stone and red brick, Harvard in miniature—were half hidden by veins of ivy. They didn’t see another soul. Every window was black.
Julian led him by the hand and explained the plan. It crackled with downsides and imperfections, which Julian might have included on purpose so it would seem more likely to come true. They would have to share a dorm room for at least the first year, and Julian knew they would both go crazy from being unable to escape each other. The student body was nebulously Episcopalian and lily-white—“About ten Jews total,” Julian joked, “and it sounds like you know all of them.” The town would be unbearably boring, and of course no sane man aspired to live in any of “these awful flat states that start with a vowel.”
But Paul really had to imagine it in the fall. (He pretended he could.) He would have no trouble getting in; there was a biology program, and even a decent art division, just in case he decided to double-major. He would be able to enjoy the preserve nearby, with a thick forest full of butterflies; the town up the road had a Chinese restaurant and an art-house theater, and even what Julian’s parents had humorously failed to recognize as a head shop. Not perfect—it wasn’t Vermont-or-Maine, not yet. But it was a start.
Julian had it all planned, their future of petty frustrations and collegiate joys. Paul suspected he’d even built a road map of their inevitable quarrels, tiny curlicue detours from which they would easily return.
It was cold, but not bitterly so, and they didn’t return to the car right away. When Julian tired of walking, they sat on a bench alongside the duck pond. Yellow-stalked cattails leaned and folded at the shoreline, and the ice was still carved with skate marks from the students who had since gone home for the holidays. Julian turned up his coat collar. Paul zipped his parka up to the chin.
“Do you actually like it, or are you just humoring me?” Julian’s tone was light and teasing, but when he went on, Paul could sense the unease underneath. “I’ve been to a million other colleges if you don’t like this one. This one’s just, you know, it’s closer to Pittsburgh than the others. And since you have a family that’s actually worth visiting, I thought . . .”
A shiver moved through Paul like a chill in the wind. When he tried to imagine the two of them here, he could only see them at a distance. He watched them wander the long path around the campus green, walking in step as they always had, alone together under a shining September sky. Not as they were now, nor even as they had been at the beginning. They were the people they should have been for each other’s sake, so far out of reach now that Paul barely recognized them. The better Paul grieved as much as he did, skin so thin around his father’s absence that the pain left him breathless—but in the parts of him that Julian held in place, he believed somehow that his shape would hold. The other Julian might be opaque to the world outside, but with Paul he held nothing back, because somehow that Paul forgave him for being capable of fear. Paul couldn’t stand to imagine them for long. These were the only versions of themselves that had ever stood a chance of surviving.
“I like it—I do.” Paul spoke as soon as he could summon the words because he couldn’t bear to hear the uncertainty in Julian’s voice. It didn’t matter if it was a lie.
Julian exhaled hard. Then he smiled, with such wary and blazing relief that it hurt to keep meeting his eyes.
“I wanted to show you it was real,” he said, and Paul almost shied away when Julian touched his face. “It’s always been real for me, every second—anything else I’ve ever loved is so wrapped up in you now, you’re all that’s left. Promise you believe me, I’m so goddamn exhausted trying to convince you, I don’t know what else I can do to make you see it.”
He had promised to let Julian speak without arguing; the promise was the only thing that kept him steady. There was no revering him anymore. Only love remained, and it was a fragile thing that Paul had been desperate not to see. He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.
Of course he said yes. Of course he made every promise Julian asked of him, because they’d hurt each other enough, and it was the only mercy he could offer. It didn’t matter. He knew what waited for them back in the city, and he knew nothing they said to each other today would hold.
The sun sank behind them as they left. Julian drove with the window rolled down. Now and then he would shake his cigarette ashes out into the wind, that careless movement he must have borrowed from his mother. His fingertips were red from the cold, and he was euphoric and radiant with hope, and Paul imagined the inevitable moment the dream would fall down around them.
They drove past an abandoned barn that a tornado had ripped in two. Julian watched it as they passed, turning in his seat to get a better look, as if he couldn’t parse it. Then he lowered his sunglasses and turned back to the road.
“You shouldn’t look so sad,” he said. It was less of an accusation than he pretended. “Are you sure this is really what you want?”
Paul shut his eyes and tried to find a plausible lie. “It is,” he said. “I just didn’t know we would have to go so far away.”
Julian chewed on the inside of his lip, just long enough for Paul to see the grim shape of what they carried between them.
“I think ‘far away’ is what we
’re going to need for a while.”
7.
They came back for him the day after Christmas.
The garage was open, but business was slow. The pair of them appeared at the far end of the building, framed from behind by bright light and snow. Paul looked reflexively toward them, putting on his glasses as he raised his head, because their arrival was the first unexpected movement in hours. He nearly looked away again, but he recognized Benton, first by his profile and then by his boots.
Paul wasn’t surprised to see them. He couldn’t tell if he was afraid, because the first and most overwhelming thing he felt was the absence where his boredom had been moments before.
His grandfather approached them, wiping grease from his hands. Then he stopped short.
Carl wheeled himself out from under the car he was working on, out of sight of the others, pretending not to listen in. Paul’s grandfather loomed over the two detectives with his hands on his hips, but Benton’s partner said something that made him glance involuntarily toward the office. Benton followed his gaze and turned to march through the garage. When Paul’s grandfather tried to follow, the partner stepped into his way to intercept him.
The pencil had fallen from Paul’s hand. When he looked down at the ledger, the numbers churned like the surface of a river during a storm.
Detective Benton’s face appeared on the other side of the reinforced glass. When he caught Paul’s eye, he waved, as if they were friends, and let himself in through the office door.
“Hi, Paul.” He spoke with the sort of sterile amiability that Paul used himself, not infrequently, in conversations with his classmates. “Got a minute?”
Paul told his face to smile. The muscles moved, but he couldn’t feel them.
Benton didn’t say how he’d known Paul was here. He had a vision of Benton stopping by the house to ask his mother—and then a far worse one of an unmarked car following him, unseen, for days or even weeks. He watched without blinking as Benton glanced around the office with placid disinterest. He didn’t sit down; he leaned on the file cabinet with his hands in his pockets.
“You handle this all by yourself?” Benton asked. He was pretending to be impressed.
Paul’s tongue felt too dry and thick to move, even after he spoke. “Just helping my grandfather keep things under control. The last manager left a real mess.”
“Doesn’t look like a mess anymore,” said Benton, and he flashed Paul one of his inscrutable smiles. “So listen, Paul, this shouldn’t take long . . .”
His grandfather had freed himself from Benton’s partner. He appeared in the doorway, his face grim, though he gave Paul a reassuring nod and rounded the desk to stand behind him.
“I’d like to know what this is about,” said his grandfather quietly. His hands came to rest on Paul’s shoulders. Paul didn’t dare look at him; he didn’t want to see how much the question might have been directed at him.
“We’re tying up some loose ends in an investigation. There was a drug theft at your grandson’s college.” Benton dispensed the half-truth with an easy confidence that rivaled Julian’s. “Paul isn’t a suspect, we’ve only talked to him as a witness—we’re just trying to narrow our focus and make sure we build a good case. I’m surprised he didn’t mention it,” he added, as if his surprise were both genuine and trivial.
Paul felt his grandfather’s gaze; he had to steel himself to turn and meet his eyes. “I didn’t want Ma to freak out,” he said quickly. “It didn’t seem like a big deal, and she’s been doing so well lately that I—”
“You’re not in trouble, Paulie.” His grandfather squeezed his shoulders. Paul bit his tongue and looked away.
Benton’s partner was in no rush to catch up with them. Paul could see him through the open door, strolling around with his hands in the pockets of his peacoat. He was younger than Benton, with a lean face and untrimmed black hair. He leaned down to chat with Carl as he worked (or feigned working) beneath the squeaky-braked Chevelle. Paul stared until he couldn’t bear it any longer, trying to imagine the kind of answers Carl might give. (All right, I guess. Funny kid, though—quiet. He’s the boss’s grandson, so . . . Yeah, now that you mention it, I guess he might know how to sabotage an engine.)
“I was hoping you could firm up a few things for us,” said Benton. Paul snapped his gaze forward and tried, once more, to smile. “Just for the record, where were you around Thanksgiving?”
“What is this?”
Paul’s grandfather still had a U-shaped scar on his scalp where a police baton had struck him decades ago, when he was a young man trying to save the world. He sounded increasingly as if he was remembering how it felt.
“Paul’s never been in trouble in his life,” he went on, “and you—”
“Well that’s not strictly true,” said Benton, in a conspiratorial tone that didn’t match the polite distance of his smile. “There’s the matter of his, ah . . . abrupt exit from high school.”
“Self-defense,” said his grandfather coldly. “Do you look up school records on all your witnesses, Detective? Did you happen to notice he was a goddamn model student while you were digging around in there?”
“It would be very helpful,” said Benton as if he hadn’t heard, “to hear your whereabouts on your Thanksgiving break. I’m sure we can wrap this up painlessly.”
“He was with his family all day,” his grandfather said. “As you might expect. There are over a dozen witnesses who would be happy to confirm it, if you insist on wasting their time.”
“No need, Mr. Krakovsky. I’ll take you at your word.”
Benton opened his leather-bound notebook and clicked open a pen. He turned his gaze to Paul—keen but impassive, offering no hint of what he thought an innocent person would do.
“The holiday break starts on Wednesday, doesn’t it?” he said. “Maybe you could tell me about that day.”
For a single, interminable second, Paul lost the ability to speak.
Of course they’d discussed the possibility that the police might pull apart the false time line they had tried to create. They’d kept the receipts from the day, just in case, paper-clipped into Julian’s little green balance book. But they hadn’t rehearsed a script, because Paul would never be able to speak it convincingly, and it would look suspicious if they remembered too many details of an unremarkable Wednesday from weeks before. In the absence of a concrete road map, Paul was briefly but sickeningly certain that they had made a terrible mistake—that he was even less capable of improvising than reciting a lie from memory.
“Let me think,” he heard himself say. He could have wept from relief at finding his voice at all. “It was a while ago.”
His grandfather gave his shoulders another gentle shake before letting go. Of course his grandfather was another unwanted variable. Suspicious of Julian, deliberately kept in the dark about how often they still saw each other—Paul didn’t trust him to keep his face steady if he heard the truth. But there was no avoiding it. His grandfather had appointed himself as Paul’s protector; he would hardly be swayed by any efforts to get rid of him.
“I think . . .” He paused, pretending to search for the memory of a dull day in November. “. . . yeah, I was with a friend.” He felt his grandfather tense, but he forced himself to keep speaking. “I stayed over the night before Thanksgiving. I can’t really remember what we did, I think we went to the movies, that kind of art-housey place down the street from the Hillman Library.”
“Does this friend have a name?” Benton adopted a gentler tone after a few words, clearly for his grandfather’s benefit. “We’ll just have to chat with him to confirm. We should be able to clear all this up.”
“Um—Julian.” Paul wrung his hands and tried to think of an inconspicuous way to warn him. “Julian Fromme. I can call him if you like.”
“Nah, I’ve got to drop by the station in a bit, you could just give me his contact information.” Benton flipped to a back page of his notebook and held it out to Paul, b
racing the book against his palm rather than letting Paul take it. “We’ll try to get it squared away this afternoon—speed things along,” he added with a glance at Paul’s grandfather, “so we can get out of your hair.”
Paul carefully wrote Julian’s phone number and address, in a tight too-neat hand that barely looked like his own. One or the other of the detectives might stay behind and follow him; he couldn’t dare run to a pay phone and call Julian before they arrived. With wild and senseless spite, he decided not to care if Julian was angry. If Paul had to improvise, so should he.
The other detective was waiting in the doorway. Paul realized with a start that he didn’t know how long he’d been there.
“There were ‘a few’ in for minor repairs over the holiday weekend,” he said to Benton. “The kid’s in charge of the records, apparently.”
“This is Detective Marinetti,” Benton said, as if he were reminding his partner of his manners. Marinetti looked at Paul with a nod and a smile, but he didn’t say another word.
“So the cars that come in for repairs,” Benton added, turning back to Paul. “Where do you record their plate numbers and mileage and everything? We just need to know about the cars that were here over the holiday. Do you know where we could find that information?”
Under any other circumstances, Paul might have laughed. It seemed like a deliberately ludicrous question, calling attention to the careful order Paul had imposed on the office over the last several months. The offending record binder was in plain sight on the shelf behind him, labeled REPAIRS 1973 OCT–DEC in crisp block lettering. But his grandfather’s patience finally snapped.
“You said this was about a theft.” His voice was so cold with fury that Paul wouldn’t have recognized him. “What would my business records have to do with it? My private business records,” he said, “which I think, if you check the Bill of Rights, you’ll find you still need a warrant for.”
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