He meant the house we'd lost, the one Dad had mortgaged to the hilt in his failed effort to regain financial ground, the one the bank had finally taken from us.
"I loved that house," Warren added. "Remember how we used to sail on the pond?"
"Yeah," I said.
"We'd already lost it when this guy came," Warren said. "I was packing boxes and he..."
"What guy are you talking about?"
"Some insurance guy."
"I don't remember any insurance guy coming to the house," I said.
"That's because you were with Aunt Emma."
I had been twelve years old the summer of my mother's death, and I recalled how my father had driven me across town to stay with his sister until, as he put it, "things calmed down."
"I stayed with Dad, remember?" Warren said. "Helping him pack."
My father had often enlisted Warren to do such heavy work, so it didn't surprise me that he'd used him as a kind of packhorse when he'd had to clean the house out before its repossession.
"Where was Dad when this guy came to the house?"
Warren shrugged. "You know Dad. He could have been anywhere." He looked at the empty bottle, then raised his hand and ordered another. "Anyway," he said. "With Dad not around, I didn't know what to do. But I figured, okay, this is just some guy from the insurance company, so, if he wants to talk to me, so what? I didn't see any harm in it."
"So you talked to him."
"Yeah. I was just a kid. He was a grown man. Big guy. You know, an adult. You don't say no, right?"
Peg arrived, plopped down Warren's beer then glared at me. "You?"
"I'm fine," I said.
She turned heavily and lumbered back up toward the front of the bar. "Besides, he was just asking about general stuff," Warren added. "Like how things were." He rolled the bottle between his hands, getting jumpy again, as if he suspected that I was laying some kind of trap for him. "You know, was Mom okay. Stuff like that. Family stuff. I didn't think much about it then, but it sort of gives me the creeps now."
"Why?'
"Because he seemed, you know, suspicious."
"Suspicious of what?"
"Us. I guess. Things in the family. Between Mom and Dad. Like, were things okay between them."
"He asked you that?"
"No, it was more a feeling I got, you know, like he was wondering if things were okay with them."
"What did you tell him?"
"That everything was fine," Warren said. "Which is why I couldn't understand why Dad got so pissed when I told him about this guy. Told me to keep my mouth shut, not let this guy in if he showed up again." He took a sip from the beer and wiped away a residue of white froth from his mouth with the back of his hand. "I guess he told the guy the same thing, because he never came back after that one time." He shrugged. "So whatever it was, it got settled, right?"
"Sounds like it," I answered. I glanced at my watch again. "I have to get home, Warren."
"Yeah, sure," Warren said. "I'll just hang around, finish my beer."
I got to my feet. "Just remember, if the cops talk to you again, be careful what you say."
Warren smiled. "You can count on me," he said.
TEN
Keith was in his room when I arrived at home.
"How'd he take it?" I asked Meredith. "My not wanting him to make deliveries for a while."
"I cant tell," Meredith answered. She was in the kitchen, standing at the cutting board, running a knife across the fleshy surface of a late-summer tomato. Its juices ran out onto the board and added a tang to the air. "He's just wears that same, flat face. No emotions. 'Flat affect'—that's what they call it."
"Who calls it that?"
"Psychologists."
"He's a teenager," I said. "All teenagers have 'flat affect.'"
She stopped slicing. "Did you?"
It was an unexpected question, but one I thought I could answer with a swift, decisive no. Then I recalled the moment when I'd been told of my mother's death, the way her car had plunged off a thirty-foot bridge. She'd been impaled on the steering wheel, a fact my father had not been reluctant to divulge, and yet, for all the gruesome nature of her death, I had simply nodded and walked upstairs to my room, turned on the phonograph, and listened to the album I'd just borrowed from a friend. Before now, I'd considered such behavior merely my way of choking off my grief, but now, thinking through it again, I couldn't be sure that I'd actually felt my mother's death as viscerally as I might have expected. At the funeral, for example, I'd sat silently beside my equally silent father, toying with my sleeve, while Warren sobbed uncontrollably, his fleshy shoulders shaking, huge tears running down his fat cheeks.
"Maybe I did," I admitted. "When my mother died, I didn't exactly fall apart."
"But I thought you loved your mother," Meredith said.
"I think I did," I said. "I mean, she was the one who wanted me to go to college, scrimped and saved."
I remembered how, even in the midst of our worsening financial situation, she'd hoarded a few pennies from each month's budget. She'd called it my college fund and had sworn me to secrecy, made me promise not to tell Warren and especially not to tell my father. It couldn't have been very much money, of course, and after her death I'd always assumed that my father had found it buried deep inside a closet or on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, then spent it in his usual way, probably on a final bottle of expensive brandy.
"I should have been really hurt by her death," I said. "But I don't remember being all that upset about it." I recalled the slow, deliberate tone my father had taken when he broke the news, his voice even, emotionless. He might as easily have been informing me of a sudden change in the weather. "My father didn't seem all that upset, either," I added.
Meredith looked as if I'd just revealed a formerly hidden aspect of my character. "Maybe that's where Keith gets it then." She began slicing the tomato again. "Anyway, it's not supposed to suggest anything, this flat affect behavior."
"What would it suggest?"
"You know, that he's a monster."
"Jesus, Meredith, Keith's not a monster."
She continued to slice the tomato. "That's what I just said."
I sat down at the kitchen table. "The cops talked to Warren. He told them Keith was in a mood that night."
Meredith spun around, the knife frozen in her hand. "What a fucking idiot," she snapped.
"Yeah."
"Goddamn it!"
"I know. I told him the next time to think before he spoke."
"As if he could," Meredith said hotly. "In a mood, Jesus Christ!" She seemed to smolder as she stood, knife in hand, glaring at me. "What's wrong with him, anyway? Is he just stupid, or is it something worse?"
"Something worse?"
"I mean, is he trying to get Keith in trouble?"
"Why would he do that?"
"Oh, come on, Eric." She put down the knife. "He's jealous of you. He always has been. You've always been the favorite. To your mother, but not just her. I mean, to this day, your father doesn't care if Warren comes by to see him. He never thinks about Warren. And then there's the fact that you have a wife, a son, a real family. What does Warren have? Absolutely nothing."
All of this was true, but I had never considered its corrosive effects before, the terrible possibility that all the years of feeling small and unsuccessful, of living in a tiny rented house alone, might have corrupted some aspect of my brother's heart, poisoned him against me so that he secretly reveled in my current troubles, perhaps even sought to deepen them.
"Do you really think Warren would deliberately try to implicate Keith in this thing with Amy?"
"Yes," Meredith answered bluntly.
The sheer force of her reply, the world of bitter envy it unearthed, was more than I could accept. "I just can't believe he'd do something like that, Meredith," I said.
Her gaze was withering, and beneath it I felt like a hopelessly clueless child. "You don't have any idea how
malicious people really are, Eric," she said. "And I don't think you ever will."
There was no way to answer such a charge, and so I merely shook my head, walked into the living room, and turned on the television. The local news was just beginning. The lead story, once again, was about Amy's disappearance.
There'd been no developments in the case, the reporter said, but the police were busy following a few "promising leads."
Promising leads.
I glanced back to where Meredith stood at the entrance of the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the television screen.
"Promising leads," she repeated sarcastically. "I wonder how many of them came from dear old Warren."
I turned back to the television. By then, the report had gone live, with Peak and Kraus before a bristling array of microphones, Peak out front, Kraus standing stiffly behind him. For the next few seconds, Peak brought reporters up to date. The police, he said, were following a number of leads. A hotline had been established, and some of the information gained from callers appeared "credible."
"Credible," Meredith scoffed as she sat down on the sofa beside me. "Not if it came from Warren."
"Please, Meredith," I said quietly.
Peak ended his update by saying that the Giordanos were being fully cooperative, that they absolutely were not suspects in Amy disappearance, and that they'd recently turned over the family computer so police could see if Amy might have been contacted by "suspicious individuals" on the Internet.
With that, Peak turned, and started to go back into police headquarters.
"Do you have a suspect?"
The question had come from the crowd of reporters gathered on the steps of the building, but when he turned, Peak appeared to recognize the reporter who'd asked it.
"We're looking at several people," Peak said.
"But do you have one suspect in particular?" the reporter asked.
Peak glanced at Kraus, then faced the camera. "Were building a case," he said. "That's all I can tell you."
Then, almost like an apparition, he was gone.
"Building a case," Meredith said. She looked at me worriedly. "Against Keith."
"We don't know that," I told her.
She looked at me again in the way she'd looked at me when I'd denied my brother's ill intent. "Yes, we do," she said.
We had dinner an hour later, Keith slumped mutely in his chair, toying with his food, barely eating it. Watching him, I could not imagine Peak and Kraus building a case against him. In some sense, he appeared too pale and skinny to be considered a threat to anyone. But more than his physical weakness argued against his having done anything bad to Amy Giordano. Brooding silently at the table, aimlessly picking at his food, he gave off a sense of being innocuous, far too listless and desultory to have summoned the sheer malicious impetus required to harm a child. My son could not have hurt Amy Giordano, I decided, because he lacked the galvanizing energy necessary for such an act. He was too drab and ineffectual to be a child killer.
And so I forced myself to believe that the phantom suspect against whom the police were building their case had to be thick and burly, with a muscular body and short powerful legs. I wanted him to be a drifter or some visitor from another town. But barring that, I would have settled for anyone, as long as it wasn't Keith.
"How's school?" I asked, then regretted it since it was exactly the kind of inane parental question all teenagers dread.
"It's okay," he answered dully.
"Just okay?"
He plucked a single green bean from the rest of them as if he were playing a solitary game of pick-up-sticks. "It's okay," he repeated, his tone now somewhat sharp, like a felon impatient with interrogation.
"Is there anything we need to know about?" Meredith asked in her usual no-nonsense tone.
"Like what?" Keith asked.
"Like about Amy," Meredith answered. "Are you having any trouble over Amy?"
He drew another green bean from the stack, peered at it as if he thought it might suddenly begin to squirm, then let it drop back onto his plate. "Nobody says anything about it."
"At some point they might," Meredith said.
Keith picked lazily at a red pimple, but said nothing.
"Keith?" Meredith said insistently. "Did you hear me?"
His hand dropped abruptly into his lap. "Yeah, okay, Mom."
He remained silent for the rest of the meal, then excused himself with an exaggerated show of formality and returned to his room.
Meredith and I cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and finally returned to the living room where we watched television for a time. Neither of us had much to say, nor did either appear uncomfortable in the silence. There was, after all, nothing to talk about but Keith, and that was a subject that could not be raised without heightening the general level of anxiety, and so we simply avoided it.
A few hours later we went to bed. Meredith read for a while. I knew she was trying to lose herself in a book. That had always been one of her ways of coping. During her mother's illness, she'd read continually, but never more than at her mother's hospital bedside, where she'd devoured book after book in a frantic effort to keep her mother's approaching death at bay. Now she was using the same tactic to keep from dwelling on the grim possibility that our son might be in very deep trouble.
Before she finally turned out the light, it was clear that this time the tactic had failed.
"Do you think Keith should see a counselor?" she asked. She turned toward me and propped her head up in an open palm. "There's one at the college. Stuart Rodenberry. Kids come to him with their troubles. People say he's very good."
"Keith wouldn't talk to a counselor," I said.
"How do you know?"
"He doesn't talk to anybody."
"But everyone wants to reach out, don't you think, to someone?"
"You sound like a counselor, yourself."
"I'm serious, Eric," Meredith said. "Maybe we should think about setting up something with Stuart."
I didn't know what to say, whether counseling was a good or bad idea at this point, and so I simply said nothing.
"Look," Meredith continued, "Stuart's going to be at Dr. Mays's party on Friday. I'll introduce you. If you think Keith might respond to him, we can go from there."
"Fair enough," I said.
With that, Meredith turned out the light.
I lay in the darkness, laboring to fall asleep. But sleep eluded me, and as time crawled forward, my mind drifted back to my first family, which, for all its tragedies, seemed less besieged by trouble. A sister dead at seven, a mother impaled upon a steering wheel, a destitute father living out his days in a modest retirement home, an alcoholic brother—these were, for all their misfortune, not problems unknown to other families. Other families had yet different problems, but those, too, now struck me as common, ordinary. In comparison, Keith's situation was much darker and more sinister. I couldn't shake the image of him slouching out of the shadows and into the house that night, then stealthily trudging up the stairs to face the door when I spoke to him, as if he were afraid to look me in the eye. There was something familiar in the scene, a sense that I'd lived through it before. But try as I did, I couldn't bring the earlier moment back until I suddenly remembered how, on the morning before Jenny's death, Warren had returned from Jenny's room where he'd been more or less stationed by my father to see her through the night. It wasn't a job he'd wanted, and he'd tried to get out of it, but my father had insisted. "You just have to sit by the goddamn bed, Warren," he'd barked, a clear suggestion that any more complex task would have been beyond my brother's limited capacity. Warren had gone to Jennys room at midnight, then returned to his own room when my mother relieved him at six in the morning. He'd looked lost and bedraggled as he trudged down the corridor in the dawning light, his heavy footsteps awakening me so that I'd walked out into the hallway, where I saw him standing, facing the door, just as Keith had, his eyes fixed and unmoving, unable to look at me w
hen I'd asked about Jenny, muttering only, "I'm going to bed," before he opened the door to his room and disappeared inside.
It was the similarity in those two scenes that struck me now, one that went beyond the stark choreography of two teenage boys tired and bedraggled, walking down a hallway, standing rigidly before the closed doors of their rooms. There was a similarity of mood, tone, a sense that these two boys were laboring under similar pressures, both of which had to do, I realized suddenly, with the fate of a little girl.
My anxiety spiked abruptly. I drew myself from the bed, walked out into the corridor, then down the stairs to the unlit kitchen, where I sat in the darkness and thought each scene through again and again, trying to locate some reason beyond the obvious one as to why they so insistently bore down upon me.
It came to me slowly, like the building light of dawn, darkness giving way to gray, then to steadily brightening light. The real similarity was not between the two scenes, but between my brother and my son, the fact, hard though it was for me to admit, that in some sense I thought of both of them as losers in life's cruel lottery, locked in failure and disappointment, members of that despised legion of middle-aged drunks and teenage geeks whose one true power, I thought, must be their unheralded capacity to control their own consuming rage.
He took her hand and led her inside.
Warrens words suddenly called another scene into my mind, Keith summoned by the Giordanos to babysit this daughter they so completely loved. Amy Giordano. Raven-haired, with flawless skin, smart, inquisitive, her future impossibly bright and radiant, destined to be one of life's winners.
Keith's words tore through my brain in a sudden, chilling snarl—Princess Perfect.
In my mind I saw Keith take Amy's hand and lead her inside the house. Could it be, I wondered, that her beauty and giftedness worked on him like an incitement, everything about her an affront, her shining qualities always in his face, goading him from the general sluggishness that would have otherwise stayed his hand.
My own stark whisper broke the air. "Could he have hated her?"
I felt another anxious spike, walked out into the yard, and peered up into the nightbound sky where, in the past, I'd sometimes found comfort in the sheer beauty of the stars. But now each glint of light only reminded me of the mysterious headlights of the car I'd seen that night. Now I imagined a mysterious figure behind the wheel, Keith on the passenger side, then I added a frightful third image, a little girl crouched naked on the floorboard, tied and gagged, whimpering softly if still alive, and, if not, stiff and silent, my son's unlaced tennis shoes pressed against her pale, unmoving face.
Red Leaves Page 8
