by Garth Stein
“I should have handled the situation entirely differently,” Denny said. “I haven’t had the chance to say this to you because we’ve been kept apart, but I made all the mistakes. It’s all my fault; you did nothing wrong. You’re an attractive woman, and I understand my noting that attractiveness—even to myself—may have signaled to you that I was available. But, you know, I wasn’t available. I was married to Eve. And you were far too young.”
Annika dipped her head at the mention of Eve.
“Maybe I even thought of you as Eve for a minute,” Denny said. “And maybe I looked at you like I used to look at Eve. But, Annika, while I understand how angry you must be, I wonder if you understand what’s going on, what the fallout is. They won’t let me have my daughter. Do you realize that?”
Annika looked up at him and shrugged.
“They want me to be registered as a sex offender, and that will mean that I will always have to register with the police, wherever I live. And I will never be able to see my daughter again without supervision. Did they tell you about that?”
“They said…” she said softly, but didn’t finish.
“Annika, when I saw Eve for the first time, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t walk. I felt if she were out of my sight for a moment, I might wake up from a dream and find her gone. My entire world revolved around her.”
He paused, and none of us said anything for a moment. A crowd of people emerged from a restaurant across the street and said their good-byes loudly and with much laughter, kissing and hugging before they went their separate ways.
“It never could have worked between you and me. There are a million reasons. My daughter, my age, your age, Eve. In a different time, in a different place? Maybe. But not now. Not three years ago. You’re a wonderful woman, and I know that you will find the right partner and you will be very happy for the rest of your life.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes were so big.
“I’m very sorry that it won’t be me, Annika,” he said. “But one day you will find someone who stops the world for you as Eve stopped the world for me. I promise you.”
She looked deeply into her latte.
“Zoë’s my daughter,” he said. “I love her like your father loves you. Please, Annika, don’t take her away from me.”
Annika didn’t look up from her coffee, but I glanced at her friend. Tears hung on her lower lids.
We paused a moment, and then we turned and walked away briskly, and Denny’s gait seemed lighter than it had been for years.
“I think she heard me,” he said.
I thought so, too, but how could I respond? I barked twice.
He looked at me and laughed.
“Faster?” he asked.
I barked twice again.
“Faster, then,” he said. “Let’s go!” And we trotted the rest of the way home.
52
The couple who stood in the doorway were entirely foreign to me. They were old and frail. They wore threadbare clothing. They toted old fabric suitcases that bulged awkwardly. They smelled of mothballs and coffee.
Denny embraced the woman and kissed her cheek. He picked up her bag with one hand and shook the man’s hand with the other. They shuffled into the apartment and Denny took their coats.
“Your room is in here,” he said to them, carrying their bags into the bedroom. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
Neither of them said a word. He was bald except for a crescent of stringy black hair. His skull was long and narrow. His eyes were sunken like his cheeks; his face was covered with a gray bristle that looked painful. The woman had white hair that was quite thin and left most of her scalp visible. She wore sunglasses, even in the apartment, and she often stood completely still and waited until the man was next to her before she moved.
She whispered into the man’s ear.
“Your mother would like to use the washroom,” the man said.
“I’ll show her,” Denny said. He stood next to the woman and held out his arm.
“I’ll show her,” the man said.
The woman took the man’s arm, and he led her toward the hall where the bathroom was.
“The light switch is hidden behind the hand towel,” Denny said.
“She doesn’t need a light switch,” the man said.
As they went into the bathroom, Denny turned away and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands.
“Good to see you,” he said into his hands. “It’s been so long.”
53
Had I known I was meeting Denny’s parents, I might have acted more receptive to these strangers. I had been given no advance notice, no warning, and so my surprise was completely justified. Still, I would have preferred to greet them like family.
They stayed with us for three days, and they hardly left the apartment. For the afternoon on one of those days, Denny retrieved Zoë, who was so pretty with her hair in ribbons and a nice dress, and who had obviously been coached by Denny, as she willingly sat for quite a long time on the couch and allowed Denny’s mother to explore the terrain of her face with her hands. Tears ran down Denny’s mother’s cheeks during the entire encounter, raindrops spotting Zoë’s flower-print dress.
Our meals were prepared by Denny, and were simple in nature: broiled steaks, steamed string beans, boiled potatoes. They were eaten in silence. The fact that three people could occupy such a small apartment and speak so few words was quite strange to me.
Denny’s father lost some of his gruff edge while he was with us, and he even smiled at Denny a few times. Once, in the silence of the apartment, while I sat in my corner watching the Space Needle elevators, he came and stood behind me.
“What do you see, boy?” he asked quietly, and he touched the crown of my head and his fingers scratched at my ears just the way Denny does. How the touch of a son is so like the touch of his father.
I looked back at him.
“You take good care of him,” he said.
And I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to Denny. And if he was talking to me, did he mean it as a command or as an acknowledgment? The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.
On the last night of their visit, Denny’s father handed Denny an envelope.
“Open it,” he said.
Denny did as instructed, and looked at the contents.
“Where the hell did this come from?” he asked.
“It came from us,” his father replied.
“You don’t have any money.”
“We have a house. We have a farm.”
“You can’t sell your house!” Denny exclaimed.
“We didn’t,” his father said. “They call it a reverse mortgage. The bank will get our house when we die, but we thought you needed the money now more than you would later, so.”
Denny looked up at his father, who was quite tall and very thin; his clothes draped on him like clothes on a scarecrow.
“Dad—” Denny started, but his eyes filled with tears and he could only shake his head. His father reached for him and embraced him, held him close and stroked his hair with long fingers and fingernails that had large, pale half-moons near the quick.
“We never did right by you,” his father said. “We never did right. This makes it right.”
They left the next morning. Like the last strong autumn wind that rattles the trees until the remaining leaves fall, brief but powerful was their visit, signaling that the season had changed, and soon, life would begin again.
54
A driver must have faith. In his talent, his judgment, the judgment of those around him, physics. A driver must have faith in his crew, his car, his tires, his brakes, himself.
The apex sets up wrong. He is forced off his usual line. He carries too much speed. His tires have lost grip. The track has gotten greasy. And he suddenly finds himself at turn exit with no more track and too much speed.
As the gravel trap rushes at him, the driver mu
st make decisions that will impact his race, his future. To tuck in would be devastating: wrenching the front wheels against their nature will only spin the car. To lift is equally bad, taking grip away from the rear of the car. What is to be done?
The driver must accept his fate. He must accept the fact that mistakes have been made. Misjudgments. Poor decisions. A confluence of circumstance has landed him in this position. A driver must accept it all and be willing to pay the price for it. He must go off-track.
To dump two wheels. Even four. It’s an awful feeling, both as a driver and as a competitor. The gravel that kicks up against the undercarriage. The feeling of swimming in muck. While his wheels are off the track, other drivers are passing him. They are taking his spot, continuing at speed. Only he is slowing down.
At this moment, a driver feels a tremendous crisis. He must get back on the gas. He must get back on the track.
Oh! The folly!
Consider the drivers who have been taken out of races by snapping their steering wheels, by overcorrecting to extremes and spinning their cars in front of their competitors. A terrible position to find oneself in—
A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive.
The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind the others than it is to drive too hard and crash.
55
So much information came out in the following days, thanks to Mike, who plagued Denny with questions until he answered. About his mother’s blindness, which came on when Denny was a boy; he cared for her until he left home after high school. About how his father told Denny that if he didn’t stay to help with the farm and his mother, he shouldn’t bother keeping in touch at all. About how Denny called every Christmas for years until his mother finally answered the phone and listened without speaking. For years, until she finally asked how he was doing and if he was happy.
I learned that his parents had not paid for the testing program in France, as Denny had claimed; he paid for that with a home equity loan. I learned that his parents had not contributed to the sponsorship of the touring car season, as Denny had said; he paid for that with a second mortgage, which Eve had encouraged.
Always pushing the extremes. Finding himself broke. And finding himself on the telephone with his blind mother, asking her for some kind of help, any kind of help, so that he could keep his daughter; and her response that she would give him everything if only she could meet her grandchild. Her hands on Zoë’s hopeful face; her tears on Zoë’s dress.
“Such a sad story,” Mike said, pouring himself another shot of tequila.
“Actually,” Denny said, examining his can of Diet Coke, “I believe it has a happy ending.”
56
“All rise,” the bailiff called out, such old-fashioned formality in such a contemporary setting. The new Seattle courthouse: glass walls and metal beams jutting out at all angles, concrete floors and stairs with rubber treads, and all of it lit by a strange, bluish light.
“The Honorable Judge Van Tighem.”
An elderly man, clad in a black robe, strode into the room. He was short and wide, and he had a wave of gray hair swept to one side of his head. His dark, bushy eyebrows hung over his small eyes like hairy caterpillars; he spoke with an Irish lilt.
“Sit,” he commanded. “Let us begin.”
Thus, the trial commenced. At least in my mind. I won’t give you all the details because I don’t know them. I wasn’t there because I am a dog, and dogs are not allowed in court. The only impressions I have of the trial are the fantastic images and scenes I invented in my dreams. The only facts I know are the ones I gathered from Denny’s retelling of events; my only idea of a courtroom, as I have said before, is what I learned from watching my favorite movies and television shows. I pieced together those days as one conjures a partially completed jigsaw puzzle—the frame is finished, the corners filled in, but handfuls of the heart and belly are missing.
The first day of the trial was devoted to pretrial motions, the second to jury selection. Denny and Mike didn’t talk much about those events, so I assume everything went as expected. Both days, Tony and Mike arrived at our apartment early in the morning; Mike escorted Denny to court while Tony stayed behind to look after me.
Tony and I didn’t do much with our time together. We sat and read the paper, or went for short walks, or ventured to Bauhaus so he could check his e-mail on their free wi-fi network. I liked Tony, despite the fact that he had washed my dog years earlier. Or maybe because he had. That dog, poor thing, finally went the way of all flesh and fell to threads and was tossed into the trash bin without ceremony, without eulogy. “My dog,” was all I could think to say. My dog. And I watched Denny drop it into the bin and close the drawer, and that was that.
On the third morning, there was a definite change in the air when Tony and Mike arrived. There was much more tension, fewer banal pleasantries, no one-liners. It was the day the case was to begin in earnest, and we were all filled with trepidation. Denny’s future was at stake, and it was no laughing matter.
Apparently, I later learned, Mr. Lawrence delivered an impassioned opening statement. He agreed with the prosecution’s assertion that sexual molestation is about power, but he pointed out that baseless allegation is an equally destructive weapon, and is just as much about power. And he pledged to prove Denny innocent of the charges against him.
The prosecution led off their case with a parade of witnesses, all of whom had stayed with us that week in Winthrop, each of them testifying to Denny’s inappropriate flirtatious manner and his predator-like stalking of Annika. Yes, they agreed, she was playing the game with him, but she was a child! (“As was Lolita!” Spencer Tracy might have shouted.) Denny was an intelligent, strong, good-looking man, the witnesses said, and should have known better. One by one, they depicted a world in which Denny maneuvered sneakily in order to be with Annika, to brush against her, to hold her hand illicitly. Each convincing witness was followed by another even more convincing, and another after that. Until, finally, the alleged victim herself was called to take the stand.
Wearing a subdued skirt and high-collared blouse, her hair pinned back and eyes downcast, Annika proceeded to catalog every look, glance, and breath, every incidental touch and near miss. She admitted that she was a willing—even eager—accomplice, but insisted that, as a child, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. Visibly upset, she spoke about how the entire episode had tormented her ever since.
Tormented her in what way, I would have asked, by her innocence, or by her guilt? But I wasn’t there to pose the question. By the time Annika’s direct examination was finished, not a person in the courtroom, save Denny himself, was absolutely certain that he had not taken liberties with her that week. And even Denny’s confidence in himself was shaken.
Early that afternoon—it was Wednesday—the weather was oppressive. The clouds were heavy, but the sky refused to rain. Tony and I walked down to Bauhaus so he could get his coffee. We sat outside and stared at the traffic on Pine Street until my mind shut down and I lost track of time.
“Enzo—”
I raised my head. Tony pocketed his cell phone.
“That was Mike. The prosecutor asked for a special recess. Something’s going on.”
He paused, waiting for my response. I said nothing.
“What should we do?” he asked.
I barked twice. We should go.
Tony closed up his computer and got his bag together. We hurried down Pine and across the freeway overpass. He was moving very quickly, and I had a hard time keeping up. When he felt the leash go taut, he looked back at me and slowed. “We have to hurry if we want to catch them,” he said. I wanted to catch them, too. But my hips ached so. We hustl
ed past the Paramount Theater to Fifth Avenue. We rushed south, zigzagging from Walk to Don’t Walk signals until we reached the plaza before the courthouse on Third Avenue.
Mike and Denny were not there. Only a small cluster of people in one corner of the plaza, speaking urgently, gesturing with agitation. We started toward them. Perhaps they knew what was going on. But at that moment, the rain began to fall. The group immediately disbanded, and I saw Annika among them. Her face was drawn and pale; she was crying. When she saw me, she winced, turned away quickly, and vanished into the building.
Why was she so upset? I didn’t know, but it made me very nervous. What could be going on inside that building, in the dark chambers of justice? What might she have said to further incriminate Denny and destroy his life? How I prayed for some kind of intervention, for the spirit of Gregory Peck or Jimmy Stewart or Raul Julia to descend on the plaza and lead us to the truth. For Paul Newman or Denzel Washington to step out of a passing bus and deliver a rousing speech that would set everything right.
Tony and I took refuge underneath an awning; we stood tensely. Something was going on, and I didn’t know what it was. I wished that I could have injected myself into the process, snuck into the courtroom, leapt on a table, and made my voice heard. But my participation was not part of the plan.
“It’s done now,” Tony said. “We can’t change what’s already been decided.”
Can’t we? I wondered. Even just a little? Can we not will ourselves to achieve the impossible? Can we not use the power of our life force to change something: one small thing, one insignificant moment, one breath, one gesture? Is there nothing we can do to change what is around us?
My legs were so heavy I could no longer stand; I lay on the wet concrete, and I fell into an unsteady sleep filled with very strange dreams.
