by Anita Shreve
Gary and Owen brought Silas into the house and put him on the dining room table, and Anna tried to breathe the life back into her boy. Owen knew she believed she could do that, but all the men standing around, you could see on their faces that they knew Silas had been dead for some time and that no amount of breathing, even from a mother, was ever going to bring him back.
Owen thought when Anna finally gave up, she would collapse onto the floor and probably stay there forever, but she did something he would never forget. She kissed Silas’s face and then she unzipped his parka, as if he might be uncomfortable in it in the overheated dining room. Owen was standing there, wailing inside, for her and for Silas and for himself, and when she unzipped the jacket, that was when she found the sheaf of papers Silas had been writing while he was up the path. At first, Owen thought they might be Silas’s letters to his mother, and he wished so much for that, even though he had every reason in the world to hate Anna. But he knew the letters would help her afterward. But those were letters to Noelle. They weren’t so much letters as ramblings. Later, Owen read a page, but then he had to put them aside. They weren’t for him, and Silas would not have wanted Owen to see them.
Someone came and took Silas to the funeral home. There had to be an autopsy, they said, because he had died under unnatural circumstances, even though everyone knew he had frozen to death up there on the path. Owen believed that Silas could have gotten down that path, even in the dark, he knew his son well and knew that he could do that. So Owen thought that there had to be some part of Silas that wouldn’t walk down that path, that didn’t want to come back to his life. And this was the thing that hurt Owen the worst, and he knew the hurt would probably never go away, because Anna and Owen would have forgiven Silas, they would have embraced him, they would have loved him no matter what happened to him after that. And Owen thought that maybe this was something you learned only after the thing you loved most in the world had been taken away from you. What Silas did was nothing compared to the love Anna and Owen would have given him. Owen knew that Silas had hurt a girl, and Silas would have paid dearly for that, but Anna and Owen would always have loved him and held him and breathed life into him until he could stand on his own. They would have done that for their son.
Anna, though, Anna was ruined. She wouldn’t leave the house now because she was afraid she would see teenage boys. She had wanted to go to Canada, but Owen couldn’t do that. The TV was never on. Anna wouldn’t answer the telephone. Owen had had to tell the newspaper boy not to come around anymore. Owen didn’t know exactly what his wife did all day. Sometimes she cried.
Silas died hating his mother. And Anna, she knew that. And there was nothing she could ever do about that.
Anna
Freeze the soil. Kill all the pigs. Let the rafters collapse in the barn.
Slaughter the birthing sheep. Why did we take their lambs?
Where is Silas? Where is my beautiful boy?
Is he in the wind ripping at the corner of the house? In the panes of glass making a soft, bumping sound? Is he trying to come back to me?
How can mail come to the door? How can the telephone ring? Why have the walls not tumbled down?
Why have you stayed with me? Do you owe it to Silas to keep me alive?
How long has it been since one of us said his name aloud?
Sienna
That was really sad about Silas, and I didn’t go to the funeral, but I know practically the whole school did, and the town, too, but my parents said it would be a horror show, and you know there were people from town who didn’t think I was the victim, especially after Silas, and my mom was worried I might get harassed, so it was no way. But I kind of felt like I should’ve been there. I did feel it that morning, the morning of the funeral, and I know there were pictures in the paper of the coffin and of people coming out of the church and all. He was Catholic, right? Yeah, he was, and so I felt like I should have been there. To pray or something. I’m not religious, but I could have gone to pay my respects and think about Silas in silence, about how he was a victim, too, even though, like I said, he was there.
I really have to go now, I’ve kind of missed my class already, but that’s OK because I can get my notes from my roommate, and the teacher is pretty lame anyway. So if you need anything else, you could call me, and instead of flying all the way down here, they could maybe use some of the money to pay for the interviews because I feel that I’m giving you good material here, and you’ve pretty much got an exclusive. But, you know, it’s not a big deal or anything. I’m just saying.
Noelle
Ms. Gorzynski comes to get me while I am in my dorm room. She says that I am needed in the administration building. When I walk out into the corridor, fear twists my stomach. I know that Silas has been missing, that there has been a search party. All day, I walked around the campus, visiting all the places we’d ever been together. Ms. Gorzynski says that Mr. Bordwin wants to see me. Get my jacket and boots, she says, and she will walk me across the quad.
I ask her what this is about, and she says that I am not in trouble but that he just wants to talk to me about what has been happening the last several days. I know that she is lying. We walk together, and she keeps up a steady chatter, asking me how I like my classes this semester, what my plans are for next year, have I had any recent concerts, the one she went to was like a dream, and by then we are in the administration building, which I have hardly ever been inside, and we are standing in the doorway of the headmaster’s office. Mr. Bordwin stands up. He tries to smile at me, to put me at ease, even knowing that after what he is going to tell me, ease might not be possible for a long, long time. Ms. Gorzynski squeezes my hand as she leaves, and that alone, I think, tells me all I need to know.
“Please sit down,” Mr. Bordwin says. And I do.
“You’re aware that Silas has been missing,” he says.
Tears flood my eyes. “Oh God,” I say quietly to myself.
“I’m sorry to say that he was found an hour ago. He was . . .” Mr. Bordwin takes a breath. “Silas has passed away.”
“Nooooo,” I cry.
Not possible, I am thinking. Not possible. Not possible.
“He walked up a path near the back of his house. He may have lost his way in the dark. He spent the night in the woods and froze to death,” Mr. Bordwin says.
A series of violent spasms seizes my stomach and chest. I turn and vomit onto the floor. Mr. Bordwin calls for Ms. Gorzynski, who comes running back in with tissues in one hand and a paper towel in the other. She slams the door behind her so that no one else can see.
I can’t get my breath. I think that maybe I will die, too.
It is not possible. This is not possible.
Mr. Bordwin holds my shoulders tightly. I bend my head and sob. My body shakes, and Mr. Bordwin tries to hold me upright. “I am so sorry,” he says.
He hands me a wad of tissues. I wipe my mouth and blow my nose.
“I wanted to tell you before the news became public,” he says, making a tentative move away from me and back to his seat. “I didn’t want you finding out from someone else in your dorm tonight. Or seeing it on TV.”
I wrap my arms around my head. I want the world to stop, back up. Give me time to enter it yesterday when Silas was walking up the path. Let me go find him and bring him down. Let me go with him and fall asleep, nestled in his arms.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Mr. Bordwin names the funeral home. He says that there will have to be an autopsy.
I open my mouth wide. The image of Silas being cut open is a horror.
“You don’t need to know any of this,” he says quickly.
“Why will there be an autopsy?” I ask.
“To determine cause of death.”
“I thought you said . . .” But I can’t say the words aloud. Frozen and death.
“That’s what they think. But because he died in unusual circumstances . . . Do you want me to call your parents? To come ge
t you?”
“I need to see Silas’s mother,” I say.
“Silas’s mother?” Mr. Bordwin asks.
I nod.
“I don’t think that’s going to be possible . . . at least not tonight. As you can imagine, she is not doing well.”
I imagine. I don’t want to imagine.
A picture slips in sideways. Of Silas running away from me up the stairs and out the door. It was the last time I ever saw him. “Oh God,” I cry again.
“I’m going to call your parents. You can remain here until they come. I think it would be best for you if you left the campus for the time being. You will need a rest.”
“No,” I say quite firmly. “I need to be here, near Silas. You don’t have to call my parents. I’m fine.”
Mr. Bordwin looks skeptical.
“Why did Silas go up the path?” I ask.
“We don’t know,” Mr. Bordwin says, though it is the only time he looks away from me. “We can only imagine. The last several days would have been extremely difficult for him.”
“Silas was in trouble?” I ask.
“Yes, Silas was in trouble,” he says.
“What did he do?”
“Now is not the time or the place to go into that,” Mr. Bordwin says, and I can see determination on his face, and something else. Bafflement. Fear, maybe. He is surprised that I don’t know about Silas and the tape. Which I don’t. Not then. Not yet. That will come later, when I am back in the dorm, when my roommate locks our door and comes over to my bed and gets into bed with me and holds me and tells me in what is almost a whisper about Silas and the girl and the tape, and she holds me for hours, during which I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known. It is possible to wonder how it is that Silas, who loved you, could have done this to you, could have left you and not said good-bye. It is possible to know, even though you are only seventeen, that your life will never be the same again. Never. No matter what anyone tells you.
I don’t want my mother and my father to come to the school. I don’t want them to know the terrible thing that Silas did, because they will never understand how good he was and how much I loved him.
Because of the press, there is no wake. But the Quinneys are Catholics, and there must be a funeral. If you have an Avery student ID card, you are allowed into the service. My roommate goes with me, holding tightly on to my hand as we climb the steps to the Catholic church, which I have never been in. All around us are people from the newspapers and the television stations, taking our pictures and calling out to us. When we enter the church, I see the casket at the front. It is closed. I cannot see, but I can hear, Silas’s mother crying in the front. My roommate and I sit in the middle of the church, though I insist on being at the aisle end of the pew. I want to be near Silas when they take him out.
I don’t remember the service. I don’t remember what the priest says. It seems irrelevant. Later I will read bits and pieces in the newspaper. The priest does not mention the scandal in any way. Silas is remembered the way a parent would want to remember him.
At the end of the service, the pallbearers lift the casket, and I know that this is the last time I will ever be close to Silas. They begin their journey down the worn carpet. When they come past my pew, I reach out and touch the wooden casket.
I leave my pew right then and follow him. I see Silas’s father behind me. We walk together out the door of the church, Silas leading us.
At the bottom of the steps, Mr. Quinney gives me a sheaf of papers he had tucked inside his overcoat. He gives them to me at the funeral because he says he doesn’t imagine that our paths will ever cross again. The papers are folded into quarters and have ruffled edges on them, as if they had been ripped from a notebook. Mr. Quinney is not the sort of man you hug, and so I don’t.
I think a lot about whether it is possible to keep a person alive in your thoughts and imaginings. All I have is what I can remember. What I remember is all the doors that Silas and I went through together. This door and that door and this door. The only way I can have them now is to flip through the pages of this diary, and in that way, I suppose, Silas and I can go through doors forever.
Colm
In the days following the death of Silas Quinney due to exposure, the focus of the story made a subtle shift from the guilt of the individual boys to the mismanagement of the case right from the get-go by Avery Academy. A great deal of pressure was brought to bear on the administration of Avery and particularly on Michael Bordwin, who had extracted confessions from two of the boys without benefit of legal counsel.
As for the boys, Robert Leicht and James Robles were charged in Avery District Court with one count each of sexual assault. If convicted, the boys would have been required to register as sex offenders and could have faced up to three years in prison. The parents and their legal counsel wisely chose to have the boys plead guilty to lewd behavior instead. They were ordered by Judge Wycliff to seek counseling and to perform two hundred hours of community service in addition to serving two years’ probation. They were not required to register as sex offenders.
I think Robles, as much as I came to dislike him as a human being, has a strong case against Avery regarding the forcing of the confession and his legal rights. The school would be wise to settle before it goes to court. An interesting argument, which was not part of the criminal case but is an integral part of the civil case, is that Robles believes he ought not to have been charged in the first place since he never actually touched the girl. Though he was present in the room, he says he was simply “minding his own business.” It’s clear from the tape that a part of James Robles touched the girl. Depending upon your point of view, either the footage exonerates James Robles or it doesn’t. Frankly, I think this particular part of his case is hooey. Though I must say, I would love to be in the courtroom when the Robleses’ lawyer presents his case.
Ellen
It is 5:30 in the morning, and you survey the kitchen. It is considerably smaller than the one you used to have and therefore looks more cluttered, or maybe there is actually more clutter than there used to be. You have lost the habit of washing the dishes at night because it seems that after a long day of commuting and working, tidying the sink is more than you can handle. Sometimes Rob, who always goes to bed later than you do, will clean up, and that is a nice surprise in the morning. You can usually tell what your son did the night before by his leavings on the counter and on the kitchen table. There might be an empty Coke can next to a crumpled package of Smartfood Popcorn, or the previous day’s newspaper might be folded in such a way as to reveal the TV schedule. Or possibly he will have left the light on in the living room, where his current reading book is splayed open on the hassock. Rob has a part-time job in the library across the street, and three or four times a week he will come home with an armful of books he reads in his generous spare time.
You think that you and he might as well live in different time zones for all the hours that you see each other. When you leave the house to go to work, he is still in bed and will stay there until noon. His job begins at one, on the days he does work, and he is home by eight. You will have left supper for him in the fridge or in the oven, and occasionally he will eat it with you in front of the television or at the kitchen table. You ask him questions, and he answers as best he can, but always you are aware of his impatience with the questions. Sometimes, however, curiosity or simply your own frustration gets the better of you, and you ask if he has met anyone at the library or if he has thought about going back to school or what he plans to do over the weekend.
He doesn’t seem ever to meet anyone at the library, he has no concrete plans to go back to school, and he doesn’t th
ink far enough ahead to say what he will or won’t do on the weekend. It is not that he is impolite or disrespectful. He is over that now, and older, aware that if you and he are to live together, a truce of sorts must be respected. You will go to bed at nine or nine thirty and will read for half an hour before falling asleep. For Rob, his day, his true day, is just beginning. Once in a while, you will hear him leave, taking the car you share out of the driveway, and you will wonder, Where exactly is he going? You are not aware of any particular friends he has. Rob comes home, he says, about 4:30 in the morning, an hour before you wake up to begin your day.
There are coffee cups and cereal bowls and plates in the sink. The yellow sponge has something black on it that will have to be investigated. There is a vase of flowers, bought in a flower shop near a place where you work. Several days ago, over the weekend, you carefully cut these flowers and placed them in a short square vase with a flower frog at the bottom. You were happy with the arrangement. It seemed unpretentious and cheerful. Now, however, the water is brown and the flowers need to be thrown out, which you will do in a minute when you have had your second cup of coffee. On the kitchen table is a pile of mail from yesterday and the day before, several magazines that have already shed their ad cards, two discarded wrappers from Weight Watchers Fudge Bars. Three days’ worth of newspapers have taken up residence on chairs and at the end of the table. One has been left on a burner on the stove. When you get up, you will remove it.
