The Final Judgment

by Richard North Patterson

  Caroline faced him again. After a moment, she said, “All right.”

  Her father put down his brandy, as if gathering his thoughts. “There’s something wrong with him, Caroline.” His tone was still soft, reluctant. “A real person is integrated—they’re simply the sum of who they are and what they’ve done. They don’t have to think about it.” He looked up at her. “Haven’t you noticed this boy thinking? Not so much about his ideas—the passion is real enough. But about who he is. Or pretends to be.”

  “Just what are you trying to say, Father?”

  “I don’t know yet.” His eyes narrowed. “It’s the sense you’ll have, perhaps a decade from now, after you’ve cross-examined a hundred witnesses. You watch their eyes and see that split second of calculation. And you know that they’re thinking just a little too hard. Just as this boy spent the first hour of our dinner pretending to be less clever than he is.” He paused again. “I don’t know where you and Jackson stand. I’m not sure I want to know. But Jackson is a real person, and a fine one.”

  “Who never disagrees with you.” Caroline’s voice rose. “Isn’t that your trouble with Scott? That he stood up to you?”

  “How can you think that? This is about character, not ideas.” Her father’s gaze grew distant. “I don’t want to be intrusive, Caroline. I like to think I haven’t been—at least no more than any only parent with basically good intentions. But bad character is a rot, and there is no cure. The only thing you can do is resolve to avoid the taint yourself.”

  With sudden intuition, Caroline sensed that this conversation, too, was not simply about Scott Johnson, but about her own mother.

  “There is no taint,” she snapped. “Except in your mind.”

  Before he could answer, she turned and left the room.

  Nine

  But the confrontation with her father ran like a fault line between Caroline and Scott.

  With him, she felt joy and passion, yet the undertow of doubt: all her instincts told her that, in some sense she could not identify, Channing Masters was right. Alone in her room, she would add up the discrepancies—between Scott’s air of carelessness and his deeply ingrained caution; his supposed unsophistication and his evident worldliness; his studied unsociability and his ease with the few people they had met; his persona of cynical purposelessness and the incisiveness of his mind. Their time was running short, and Caroline might never know him.

  Some part of her felt that to penetrate Scott’s veneer was dangerous—if there were certain things he did not wish to share, there must be a reason for it. But as each day passed, and Caroline knew only that she wanted to be with him every moment she could, the sense of something between them that they could never say, never reach, ate through her until she feared his silence even more than the reason for it.

  “There are things you haven’t told me,” she said. “Things about you. I want to know why.”

  They were sitting on the deck after a long day on the water, enjoying wine and cheese and a sunset that stained the wispy clouds orange red. Caroline had broken a pleasant silence; her question, sharp and sudden, so at odds with the mood of their day, startled her.

  Yet Scott did not look surprised. With a veiled, wary look, he asked, “Where’s this coming from, Caroline? Your father?”

  “Quit sparring with me, all right? You’re playing at being someone you’re not, and I’m supposed to sit on everything I think or feel.” She stood, feeling the depth of her anger. “I spend every minute I can with you, like it’s life and death, and all I’ve really been doing is fucking you for the summer. Because I can’t reach you.”

  He put down his wineglass and faced her. “It’s you who’s going away, Caroline. I don’t expect you to drop out of law school. So don’t expect me to open up a vein.”

  Beneath the chill words was an undertone of emotion. Caroline placed both hands on his shoulders, looking up at him. “All the time I’m planning to go on with my life, I feel like you’ve turned me inside out. Please, doesn’t this summer mean anything to you?”

  She saw him blanch at her intensity. Suddenly, Caroline felt naked and exposed, without any defense between Scott and her emotions.

  “Look at me,” Scott said softly.

  Slowly, she did that. The tears ran down her face.

  Seeing this, his own eyes shut. Caroline saw him swallow. And then his eyes opened; as he touched her face, tracing her tears with his fingertips, he looked at her with a tenderness so open that it was hurtful.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Don’t you know by now how much I love you?”

  Caroline felt stunned. Mute, she shook her head.

  He seemed to slump. “Why do you think I stayed here, Caroline? I should have left weeks ago.”

  Caroline clasped his shoulders. “Why?”

  Shaking his head, Scott put his arms around her. He seemed to hold her with a desperate longing.

  “Make love with me,” he murmured. “Please.”

  His voice was hoarse; Caroline felt her body tremble. They went to the bed like children drawn to a flame.

  Now they were fumbling, desperate, tearing the clothes from each other, hands and mouths seeking each other’s bodies, like two lovers meeting after weeks apart. Yet they had never been like this—lost, heedless, their bodies from the moment he entered her moving with a frenzy so deep that Caroline no longer knew herself.

  They cried out together.

  Afterward they lay in the dark. Stunned, defenseless, Caroline pretended to sleep. She felt ripped open.

  Beside her, Scott stirred, restless, rose from bed. Caroline said nothing.

  She lay in the dark, alone. Scott did not return.

  Naked, Caroline stood.

  The air was cool. She felt her skin rise, her nipples. Picking through the clothes on the floor, she found his T-shirt and slid it over her head.

  He was on the deck, wearing only his jeans, staring out at the water.

  She walked behind him. From his stillness, she knew he was aware of her. But he did not move.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He turned to her. In the moonlight, she saw him pause.

  “My name,” he said quietly, “is David Stern.”

  It was almost as if, Caroline felt, he were talking of someone he had lost. She took both his hands in hers. He gazed down at their fingers, laced together. “The funny thing,” he said, “is that I chose Johnson as a joke, because of Lyndon. But Scott was because I always liked Fitzgerald. I guess you and I will never agree on everything.”

  Caroline stared at him. “But why pretend like this?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out?” His voice was low and bitter. “I gave myself my own exemption, Caroline. I’m a draft dodger.”

  It made Caroline quiet; she felt both shaken and relieved. She looked at him, waiting.

  “I’m from California, not Ohio,” he said at last. “I went to Berkeley and was going to Stanford law.” He gazed at the deck. “I was also 1-A.

  “I absolutely opposed the war. My father screamed at me about World War II; my mother begged me to go to Canada; my draft counselor told me to work on becoming a conscientious objector.

  “Nothing was right.

  “I hated the war, and I didn’t want to die there. Canada’s not my home. And I would have fought in my father’s war.

  “For two years, I tried for a medical deferment. Until my appeals ran out.

  “The only principled thing, I told myself, was to go to jail.” He paused and then looked directly at her. “Your father had me pegged. At the last minute, I couldn’t face it. The day before I was supposed to report, I just took off.”

  His tone was laced with self-contempt. As if to encourage him, Caroline squeezed his hands. “My mother gave me some money,” he finally said. “My father never knew. One morning, I just lit out with my guitar, a suitcase full of stuff, and a plane ticket to Miami under the name Scott Johnson.

  “I picked Miami be
cause I’d never been there.” He shook his head. “All I had was two thousand dollars and a California license that said I was David Stern.

  “I got myself a crummy room in a hotel that didn’t care who I was, and made contact with a draft resisters group I knew about from law school. Some of them had a side business—turning birth certificates for dead people into a new identity. So I gave them some money and waited in my room, working on my interim story.”

  His voice softened again. “Day by day, what I’d done sank in….

  “I was no one anymore. I had no friends. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth. I couldn’t call my folks or write them—the FBI could tap their phone or read the mail, which happened to that friend of mine who did end up in jail. And I wasn’t sure that my dad wouldn’t do something stupid, like come look for me, or that my brother or sister wouldn’t blow it somehow.”

  Caroline watched his face. “So they’re real. Your family.”

  “Oh, they’re real.” He looked at her sharply. “That letter you were looking at, the first time you came over, was to my aunt in Denver. She burns the envelopes and reads them to my mother on the telephone. I can never say where I am.”

  Caroline tried to imagine herself adrift, cut off from her own family. But David was lost in his memories now. “Before I could get my new ID,” he continued, “the FBI busted the people who were working on it.

  “I took off before anyone could find me.

  “I couldn’t rent a car, which would put my name in a computer. So I bought a bus ticket to Boston, the only place I could think of where there are so many students that one more would just blend in. But there were too many people to lie to, and too many people who wanted ID—for jobs, to buy a car, even for drinks. And now I was short of cash and afraid to buy another identity.

  “I’d come face-to-face with what a luxury it was to have been David Stern.” His voice was soft again. “So I came here—the end of the world, or at least of the United States.

  “Vineyarders are used to transients. And they leave you alone.” He paused. “I scrounged a job, bought a car without registration, and hoped no one would find me until I figured out what to do.”

  Caroline watched him. “So the night we went to town…”

  “I’d let myself go out with you, and now you might see my license. How could I know who you might talk to?” David shook his head. “But that was nothing compared to how stupid I was, forgetting myself like that. All your cop friend needed was to put me through a computer or check my registration or even just get curious.” His tone turned wondering. “If it weren’t for you, I might have ended up in the local can, waiting for some FBI guy from Boston to come around whenever things got slow.

  “That was when I knew I had to leave.”

  In the silence, she touched his face. “Where?”

  “Canada.” His voice was quiet and sad. “I meant to leave here weeks ago. But every week I made another excuse to stay. Until I knew I’d only leave when you did.”

  Caroline stepped back from him, trying to absorb it, fingers touching his now. “All those things you told me…”

  “Were lies, pretty much. Except the part about Bobby Kennedy. Only that it was California, not Indiana. I was there the night they shot him.” His voice slowed. “We were going to win, Caroline. We were that close…”

  He did not finish the sentence. In the silence, his fingertips curled beneath hers.

  It was the smallest of gestures, and it brought his world down on her. The depth of his loss. The fear in which he lived. The weight of her responsibility, suddenly clear, to protect him from whoever, out of carelessness or malice, might choose to turn him in.

  “Can’t you fix this somehow?” she asked.

  His smile seemed knowing but not unkind; it was as if he saw that, in the numbness of first comprehension, she could get no farther than the desire that things be different.

  “Short of jail? This is not a forgiving government, or a forgiving time—too many kids far younger than me have gone there and died for most people to feel sorry for a draft dodger. I’m afraid that job’s been left to me.” He paused for a moment. “And after jail, what would I do? I couldn’t practice law here. I don’t think I’d even get to vote. I just made a bad decision. And every night I go over it, and over it, and over it….

  “I’m tired of it, and sick of myself. At least in Canada there are law schools, and I can be David Stern again. Maybe after a few years I can even figure out who he is now.”

  It came to her then: his loneliness; his fear of others; his knowledge that—in a moment of fear and indecision—he had damaged himself in some way that would always be part of him. And then, quite softly, he said, “It isn’t much to offer you, is it?”

  Caroline sat down in a deck chair. “I want a life,” David said softly. “I want a life with you. But I can never have one here.”

  Caroline felt sick. “You’re asking me to come with you.”

  “Yes.”

  It was as if, Caroline thought, she’d been transported to someone else’s life. She had never felt so lost.

  He touched her hair. “If I leave here now, not knowing what you’d say, it would be the one thing I could never live with.”

  Caroline shook her head. “There’s just so much…”

  He withdrew his hand. “I know. You have your father. You have this life….”

  “I have the life you used to have.” Caroline’s voice rose. “It’s not fair to lay this on my father. Until two years ago, you had my life. Now I find out that most of what you’ve told me is a lie, that your life as an American is over, and that maybe I can turn mine in and go somewhere I’ve never been and never cared about. All right, and leave my family behind.”

  He turned away. “That’s why I tried not to fall in love with you. Because loving you isn’t fair to either one of us. Certainly not to you…”

  “Just let me be here, okay? Alone.”

  He turned to her for a moment. And then, without a word, he stood and left.

  It was too much to absorb. For a time, she could only see the places that were part of her and, she had believed, would always be—Masters Hill; the town of Resolve; Harvard Yard; Boston; Heron Lake; the streams and mountains of New Hampshire. And then the faces of her college friends; of Jackson; of Betty and Larry; of Channing Masters, the parent who had been with her, and guided her, since the first dawn of her consciousness.

  And in none of them, with none of them, had she ever felt as she felt with David Stern.

  David.

  He was a real person. Beneath the harm he had done himself, he was the person she had sensed he was. For an odd, almost giddy moment, Caroline felt elated. It was possible; they were possible.

  Because Caroline Masters was in love with David Stern.

  Happy and sad, filled with love, terrified by her confusion, Caroline went to him.

  He was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Quietly, she said, “You have to be David to me, okay? That’s at least a start.”

  He gazed up at her, eyes filled with hope and doubt. “I really do understand,” he said. “If you can’t go, it’s for a good reason.”

  Caroline stood by the head of the bed, watched him in the moonlight. And then she slowly pulled his T-shirt over her head.

  She stood in front of him, not shy. As David looked up from the bed in silence, wanting her, Caroline wished that she could freeze this moment forever.

  “I love you, David.”

  Silent, he reached out to her.

  She went to him. Slowly and sweetly, David Stern made love to her.

  Afterward, they lay together in the dark.

  There were minutes without speaking. And then, still quiet, David ran his fingers down her spine.

  Perhaps he wanted her again, Caroline thought. She touched his face.

  “Tell me about your mother,” he said softly. “Everything.”

  Ten

  It was insane.


  They would lie there, looking into each other’s faces, bodies damp with lovemaking. Caroline could not imagine life without him.

  But her life before had been perfectly fine, the steady accretion of steps, one upon the other, down the only path she had ever imagined. The Caroline Masters she had always known was not a woman who lived in a vacuum—she was a New Englander; her father’s daughter; a graduate of Radcliffe; a person with a career ahead; even Jackson Watts’s girlfriend. Without these things, there was no Caroline Masters—there was this passionate creature, defined solely by her love for a man she barely knew, and whose real name felt strange on her lips. Who could not imagine her life with him.

  It was insane.

  She could not sleep, lost her desire for food, felt nauseous in spite of that. There were circles beneath her eyes.

  And yet each night she went to David.

  She could not decide, and there was no one who could help her.

  More deeply than in the months following her death, Caroline missed her mother.

  Her father would call, and Jackson. At the times that she was there to answer, Caroline sounded to herself like a chattering stranger. She hardly noticed their reaction.

  The only person to whom she could truly speak was David.

  In the middle of the night, he listened to her doubts and fears. “Caroline,” he told her finally, “if I’d known I’d put you through such hell, I’d never have asked you. I should have just gone away.”

  He looked so sad that when she left, Caroline was suddenly afraid she would never see him again. So that when she looked out the window the next morning and spotted his curly head as he sat on the corner of his deck, her eyes filled with tears.

  There was one week to go, and she was headed for law school like an automaton, spiritless and irresolute.

  The morning after Caroline canceled her college friends’ visit on the feeblest of excuses, she walked alone on the beach. She felt like a prisoner in her own skin.

  Caroline sat on the beach, fighting tears.

  Gazing along the edge of the water, she saw the distant figure of her sister, searching for shells.