by James Smythe
‘When your son died, you were there. But it seemed awful coincidental that you didn’t hear him. Maybe we should have looked into what happened to your son more?’ Robards says, and Laurence lunges, throwing his body on top of him, and then both fall to the floor. Templeton is ready and grabs at Laurence before he can do any damage. He yanks back Laurence’s arm and pulls him backwards, snapping handcuffs onto his wrists. Robards pushes himself to standing and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Please don’t do this,’ Deanna says to Robards.
‘This is all for your own sake, Mrs Walker. He’s dangerous.’
‘No,’ she says.
‘We’re going to let him cool off in a cell. Won’t do him any harm.’ Robards grabs the bar between the cuffs and wrenches Laurence to his feet. He’s crying, Deanna sees.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asks.
‘Laurence Walker,’ Robards says, walking Laurence forward, through the living room and kitchen and into the hall, ‘you have the right to remain silent when questioned.’ He carries on the speech through semi-gritted teeth and opens the front door. Most of the camera crews are ready, and the ones that aren’t jump to attention. He holds Laurence in the doorway while they prepare themselves, and they start shouting questions, but some of them are too slack-jawed to bother; and then Robards marches Laurence forward, Templeton following behind, and the camera crews and reporters swallow them entirely, engulfing them. It takes them five minutes to get Laurence into the squad car. Every single one of the reporters gets their shot, and their question ignored.
Deanna watches from the front door, and then, as the car pulls away, the reporters turn their attention to her, asking her what happened.
‘Did he threaten you? Was he violent?’ one of them asks. She slams the door and stands against it. At the top of the stairs, her daughters stare.
Emails come all afternoon, and notes are pushed through the door when knocks are ignored. People from the town, desperate to offer their commiserations and help. It’s like when Sean died: offers of help; food being made to help Deanna through this time; words of understanding and congenial affection, and of pushing her away from Laurence, as if she has finally seen what they have all recently realized.
We’ve always liked you, Deanna. Words written by people who barely know her or her family. Anything you need, we’ll be there. Just say the word. This is a hard time, but it’s for the best. Deanna puts a ban on televisions. Deanna tells Alyx she can’t watch it at all, not even the Spanish-language soaps. She doesn’t want to run the risk of the channel being changed.
The three of them try to put the house back to something resembling normality. They clear away the trash and sort anything that they can into drawers. Lane sews up holes in the sofa cushions, just a patch job, but something to hold them together for as long as possible. They make it into a game for Alyx; cleaning up, something fun to do. They sing songs, but Deanna’s heart isn’t in it. She telephones her parents. They ask how she is. They beg her to go and stay with them. Her father takes the phone and asks her what happened.
He says, ‘I’m not going to do anything about it, because it’s your business; but so help me God, Laurence better not have lain a hand on you or the girls.’
‘Of course he didn’t,’ Deanna says. She thinks about that moment where she tried to comfort him, then, but it’s fleeting. It’s a glance at the past, and wrong to judge him on that. Instead, with the telephone cradled between her shoulder and chin, she sits on the bed and turns the gun around and around in her hands. She balances the weight of it on her palm while her mother tells her that they will make up the bedrooms, just in case. They only live in Canada, her father reminds her; she could leave now and be there by midnight. ‘I have to be here for Laurence,’ Deanna replies. Besides, she thinks, you can’t have another of your children running home with their tails between their legs. She talks to her sister, neutered and rehabbed so much that she barely sounds even real, and when she asks her to come home in this passive, small voice that doesn’t emote the same way it used to, Deanna lets her hand hang down, the gun in it; and then she pulls it up, trying to get a feel for the weight of it. Everybody says that the kick is more than you expect; that it hurts if you aren’t expecting it. She opens the barrel, to see if it’s loaded; and she cocks the hammer at the back, and feels it click.
‘I have to stay here for Laurence,’ she says to her sister. ‘When we’ve got this sorted out we’ll all come to stay.’
‘I don’t know that he’ll be welcome,’ her sister says. ‘Not after what he did.’
‘He hasn’t done anything,’ Deanna tells her. ‘That was a prediction.’ She stops at that word. That’s exactly what it was, she thinks. But of when? And does it have to come true? She holds the gun in her hand, and wonders what this is evidence of.
She says goodbye, promising them all that she’ll be safe, that she knows how to handle herself, and that Laurence would never do anything to hurt her; and she dials Amit as soon as she’s done. She lets it ring, but he doesn’t answer. She leaves a message, begging him to call her back.
Amit emails the news channel that broke the story about Laurence, asking them who intercepted the story. He writes that he works for the Walker campaign, and he dangles the vague lure of an interview. They give him Jessie Ng’s address within seconds.
I worked with Laurence Walker. We should probably talk, his email to her reads. He puts his phone number at the bottom and then waits, holding the handset. Everything feels like waiting to him.
He sifts through Hershel’s notes. One is a list of details from the video. Gun. Water (?). Gray suit, lemon tie, white shirt; all details cross-referenced. Laurence had a gun license, and there’s a photo of the make and model – the same as in the video. This is what the data miner did: picked up on this and made it a part of the prediction. The last subject has photographs of Laurence in the suit, taken the day that Sean died. Coincidence?, Hershel has written next to it. Hershel has manually attempted the equations that the algorithm made, knocking off approximate numbers; looking for causes and reasons to bring the percentile down. Repeatedly underlined are matters of public record: the fact that Laurence was tortured when he was in the war; the public’s perception of him as a man not unlikely to have a breakdown; the death of Sean. All are mitigating factors. But he can’t drive it as low as the algorithm did. There’s something missing still.
Amit’s phone rings, a number that he doesn’t know. He lets it go to messages, even though it could be Jessie Ng – he’s been fielding calls from the delegates all day, pulling support and attempting their own forms of damage control. He switches on the television and eats his sandwich, cold meatballs in cold tomato sauce, and he sees a news report about Laurence being led out of his house in cuffs. The narrative has changed. It’s no longer about the prediction of what he could do, or how terribly he has lost this race; now it’s about what he might have done that got him arrested. It’s about how far he has fallen.
Deanna leaves a message on his machine, saying that she needs his help. She asks him to call her back. In the background of the television footage, she’s standing in the doorway, watching her husband being taken off in the squad car.
Ten minutes later he’s driving to Staunton. He stops at a Wal-Mart and buys her a new computer, putting it on the Walker Campaign credit card – he know this will be cancelled soon enough, so he takes advantage, and he buys some food as well, bags of sweets and fresh pizzas. When he arrives at the Walkers’ house he parks where he can and fights through the journalists. Deanna only answers the door when he shouts through the letterbox. In the hallway, he holds her for a second.
‘It’s okay,’ he says.
Laurence sits in his cell and doesn’t move. He hangs his head, staring at a spot on the floor, a scuff on the concrete that’s so shiny as to almost look silver. He feels sick and hungry, and he shivers because he doesn’t have a jacket; his shirt sticks to his skin with now-col
d sweat. He’s alone in here, the only occasional company being when one of the officers comes down to look at him. There are six working here, and two assistants, and they all come for a look at him, acting as if they have another interest downstairs – going into the evidence locker – but they all stare. Robards comes and stands in the corner by the stairs and doesn’t take his eyes off Laurence. Night comes and they bring him a meal. It’s a tray that’s been heated in a microwave, sodden omelet with warm salad and a juice box. Robards passes it through the hatch and watches while Laurence doesn’t touch it.
‘You should eat that,’ he says. ‘You’re looking thin.’
Later, they switch the lights off and leave Laurence in the dark, and he curls up on the bed and tries to sleep. He shuts his eyes but sees Sean there, in the cell with him, sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to his chin. He doesn’t say anything to his father. Instead, he keeps his eyes down as well, as if he is looking at the same mark on the floor as Laurence was. Laurence doesn’t speak to him, because there are cameras here filming him, and he knows that Sean isn’t really here. He is dead, which means he cannot be here. But still, it looks so much like him.
12
Robards is the one who signs Laurence out. He stands at the front desk and fills out the forms and Laurence signs them. Amit pays bail – again, using that credit card that now won’t be needed for plane tickets and campaign banners, and that, miraculously, is still working. He takes Laurence out to the car and puts his hand on Laurence’s back to keep pushing him forward, to nudge him into moving as quickly as possible. The press is here, having split their forces. They swarm. Laurence doesn’t say a word, but Amit can feel the muscles and bones in his back draw tight, feels the shoulder blades pull close. The journalists take photos and video as Amit starts the car; carrying on, he drives towards them slowly, forcing them to scatter. He only speaks when they are on the main road, back towards the house.
‘They treat you all right?’ Amit asks.
‘Yes,’ Laurence says. As they pass the garage, Henderson’s, Peaforks, the townsfolk glance at the car. They know who’s in it. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Dee called me. She thought you might need my help.’ Laurence stares straight ahead. As soon as they stop he opens the door and walks out. No protection, no attempt to guard himself. He pushes through the journalists to get to his front door, Amit running in behind him, and beats on the door. He doesn’t have his keys.
‘Let me in,’ he shouts. ‘Deanna, please.’ Amit brings out the keys and opens the door himself. Laurence’s face falls. ‘She isn’t here.’
‘Come in,’ Amit says, ‘and I’ll explain.’ Laurence pushes past and stands at the foot of the stairs. He breathes, clinging to the downstairs bannister. ‘She’s at a hotel, with the kids. I told them they should go.’ Laurence looks at him with dead eyes. ‘I told them it was better to get away from this circus. We can try and fix this, or deflect it. Turn this down. That’s what you need, Laurence; not to turn this into more of a show.’
‘This can’t be fixed,’ Laurence says.
‘Some things can be. You can’t run again, that’s done; but you don’t need to be a villain. I’ve emailed some TV stations to try and get an interview. There’s a path, Laurence. We do damage control, and we get this to die down. We do a news show, and then we try for one of the chat shows. Ellen, maybe. Give her an exclusive. You tell your side of the story; how ClearVista did this to you, how they ruined your life. They took advantage of you when you were at your weakest. We sue them. Doesn’t matter if we have any chance of winning. They’ll settle. We get you and your family back together as part of a photo-op. We show you as a man who is back in control. Ruined, but coming back.’
‘I’m not ruined,’ Laurence says.
‘Sure, not yet,’ Amit tells him. ‘But they’re trying. So we can’t let them.’ They walk to the living room and Laurence pours himself a drink. There’s a solitary bottle of Scotch in there, the only thing that wasn’t smashed when the house was raided. He pours some into a glass and tops it off with water. There’s so much Scotch the water is barely worth anything. ‘You know who did this?’ Amit asks, indicating the remnants of the mess in the room.
‘They did,’ Laurence says. ‘They all did.’
‘Who?’
‘The people who are trying to destroy my fucking life,’ Laurence tells him.
Laurence explains his theory; that one of the other candidates – Homme, most likely, because he’s been number two for a while, and it’s always safest to look to your most direct competition – has somehow enacted this. He focuses on the man with the jacket from their flight. He says, ‘This all started that day. We were flying to Texas and everything began to fall apart.’
‘He was a nobody,’ Amit says.
‘Maybe he wasn’t. I’ve seen him over and over.’
‘But he didn’t know that the report would say what it did.’
‘What if he did know?’ Laurence asks. He talks Amit through his worries: that somebody was going through his trash; that he was being watched, spied on, and there was blue thread, the only evidence of their intruder; that the ClearVista results might somehow have been tampered with. He sounds paranoid, Amit thinks, but perhaps he has reason to be. There’s something there, a nugget of logic in what Laurence is saying. This cannot all be a series of accidents and coincidences.
‘But we can’t prove it,’ Amit says.
‘No,’ Laurence says. ‘We can’t.’ He finishes his drink, swallowing half the contents of the glass in one go. He grimaces away from the glass for a second; and briefly it’s the old Laurence back again. It’s almost a comic gesture, how harsh he finds the alcohol. ‘But maybe it just ends, now that I’m out of this. They want me out of the race; they don’t want me destroyed.’
‘So that’s why we do damage control,’ Amit says. ‘That’s why we try and fix this.’ He holds out his hand to shake Laurence’s. This is how they first began working together. There was no contract, no documents of employment. There was just a handshake that signified intent and trust.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Laurence asks. ‘Why did you come back?’
‘We’re in this together,’ Amit tells him. There are other reasons that he doesn’t say: that turning this around saves some of Amit’s face, if he’s known to be behind rescuing the PR nightmare; that he wants to know what happened, because he thought that he backed the right horse; that he wants to keep an eye on Laurence, because he’s worried about what could happen if he doesn’t.
Laurence’s handshake is so weak. It’s not the handshake of a man who wants to win over the country, not any more. But, Amit thinks, now it doesn’t need to be.
Amit spends the night on the inflatable mattress in the living room. He can’t sleep, so he tidies; cleaning the floor where he can, moving things back to how they should be. He attempts to put the family’s photo albums back into order. He doesn’t know how this works, but he can gauge it to some extent: how old they are, and then also how many of them are in each picture. It’s strange, to see the actual photographs. He only has a single printed-out picture in his apartment: one of his mother and father, from when they were young. Everything else is on his various devices or stored in the cloud. There’s nothing tangible. He wonders if they’ve always had these pictures printed out, or if this is something that they did after Sean died. He looks at who Laurence used to be. Realistically, he realizes, he probably should have thought, when Sean died, that this was all too much too soon. He should have told Laurence to wait another four years. Get over this. Be with his family.
His phone pings with an email. It’s from Jessie Ng.
I’ve been advised to pass your email onto my superiors and the legal department. It goes on, covering herself and the station. They’re assuming the worst.
Don’t freak out, he emails back. It’s not that sort of thing. I’m trying to find out who sent you the video. He sends it and waits. She replies straight away:
I don’t know, she writes. No name or anything.
They didn’t charge for it? Amit asks.
Not a cent. Sorry I can’t help, she writes. He thinks that she would never reveal her sources, anyway. That was a long shot at best.
Maybe you can do me a favor, he writes. Laurence Walker is looking at doing an interview somewhere to address what’s happened. An appearance.
To clear his name? she writes.
Nothing to clear, Amit replies. This is to just get his point across. To try and get rid of some of the wolves. He imagines her furiously getting this okayed. She’s not big enough to control this by herself. He holds the phone and watches it for the reply.
When can you come in? she asks. Can you come tomorrow?
Today? he clarifies.
Sure, sorry, she says. Night shift. You know how it is.
I know how it is, he replies. He Googles her: the work she’s done, her picture, her CV. On the TV, everybody is still talking about Laurence’s arrest. There’s nothing else for the cycle to move onto. He feels guilty as he prays for earthquakes and hurricanes; anything that will help to shift the cycle on.
Deanna doesn’t sleep because of the noise from down the hall. There is sobbing coming from another room, and she wouldn’t ordinarily notice it were it not so familiar. It’s faint, almost blending in with the machinery of the motel. This is the area’s least likely hotel for her to be staying in, a roadside place outside the town’s main stretch that only tends to serve truckers and dirty weekenders. They don’t know her, at least not by name: the woman behind the counter didn’t coo or offer sympathies when Deanna and her daughters came in, which was a relief. She gave them a room with a double and a single and a minibar and a television, each extra nudging the cost up by a dollar or two. They ate takeaway McDonalds, and Deanna put dimes into the box at the side of the bed to make it shake and vibrate as Alyx and Lane lay on top of it and giggled. Deanna tried to laugh with them, and Alyx asked why they weren’t at home, and Deanna said that their father needed a little space. She said that he was tired, that he couldn’t sleep with them all there, running around, making the noise that they were making. They replaced the bed’s sheets with ones that Deanna brought with her, and they sprayed air freshener and talked all night, telling each other stories.
