Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  But now I wondered if, in fact, I was any better at fatherhood than my own father had been. When was the last time I'd actually talked with my son? Sure, we chatted over dinner, exchanged hasty asides as we passed each other in the hallway. But that was not real talk. Real talk bore the weight of hopes and dreams, tore away facades, and let each face shine in revealing light. Real talk was about life, the way we try to get through it, make the best of it, what we learn along the way. This kind of talk Keith had saved for Delmot Price, the man he'd gone to because he could not come to me, and who, if I were to begin to get a handle on my son before it was too late, I knew I would have to seek out, too.

  Delmot Price wasn't hard to find, and the moment he saw me come through the door of his flower shop, he looked like a man who'd suddenly found himself in the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

  He'd been wrapping a dozen long-stem red roses as I came into the shop. I stood off to the side and waited while he completed the task, took payment, and with a quick smile, thanked the woman whose roses they were.

  During that time, I noted how gracefully he moved, his white hair gleaming in the overhead light, his long fingers folding the silver foil just so, tying the gold ribbon with a perfect knot. His fingers moved like dancers in a flowing and oddly beautiful choreography. There was no room for the slightest misstep, they had that kind of precision. And so it was obvious that in Keith, Price had not found a boy who was like himself, the way an English teacher might find a student with the same literary aspirations the teacher had once known as a youth. But instead, Delmot Price had found his opposite in Keith, a graceless, slovenly boy with tangled hair and a sullen smirk, a boy he'd befriended not out of admiration but because he pitied my son, felt sorry for how awkward and isolated and utterly directionless he was, how in need, as Price must have supposed, of a father.

  He came toward me like a man wending his way out of a perfumed garden, weaving through swollen buds and broad-petaled flowers.

  "Mr. Moore," he said. He started to offer his hand, then stopped, unsure if I'd take it.

  And so I offered mine.

  "I don't mean to intrude," I said.

  He nodded, stepped to the door, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and ushered me to the rear of the shop where we stood discreedy hidden behind a wall of ferns.

  "The police talked to me," he said. "I suppose you know that."

  "Yes."

  "Just so you know, I don't believe Keith had anything to do with the disappearance of that little girl."

  "I don't, either," I said, then realized that in part this was a lie, and so, I added, "but he's done troubling things. He stole from you."

  Price nodded softly.

  "Why does he want to run away?" I asked.

  Price hesitated, like a doctor just asked how long a precious relative actually has to live. "He's not happy, Mr. Moore."

  "Can you be more specific?"

  I could see him working toward an answer, searching through a lifetime of words, images, experiences, looking for just the right one.

  "Let me put it this way," Price said at last. "I have a greenhouse at my home, and most of the time, when I order a particular seed, it comes just the way it's supposed to. If I order a rose, I get a rose. But once in a while, I get something I didn't order, maybe don't even like. Geranium, something like that. I plant the seed, hoping for a rose, and up comes a geranium. At that point, I have to change the plan. I can't feed it and water it like I would if it were the rose I'd hoped for. I have to say, Okay, it's a geranium. It'll never be a rose. But at least I can raise it to be a healthy geranium. See what I mean? I have to adjust, because I didn't get what I ordered."

  "Keith thinks I want a different son?" I asked.

  "No," Price said. "He knows you do."

  "Okay, but what good would running away do?" I asked.

  "None, probably," Price said. "Which is what I told him. 'No matter where you go,' I said, 'it goes with you.'"

  "What goes with him?"

  "Your low opinion of him."

  He saw that he'd delivered a stomach-emptying blow.

  "I had the same problem with my son," he said quickly.

  "Did he run away?" I asked.

  Price's eyes glistened suddenly. "No," he said. "He killed himself."

  A vision of Keith doing the same shot through my mind. I saw him in his room, opening the Swiss Army knife I'd given him for his thirteenth birthday, sliding its now-rusty blade across his pale wrists, watching as the crimson stream flowed down his arms and puddled between his bare feet, watching it dully, merely waiting for the final sleep to come upon him, his face expressionless, indifferent to the worthless life he was ending, doing all of this with an utterly flat affect.

  "I'm sorry," I whispered.

  "I was like a lot of fathers, I had great plans for my son," Price told me. "The trouble is, they weren't his plans."

  "What are Keith's plans, did he tell you?"

  Price shrugged. "I'm not sure he has any. Except this idea of getting away."

  "He can't do that now," I said. "Not after Amy. He has to know that."

  "I'm sure you've made it clear."

  I realized that I'd done no such thing, and that the reason I'd not done it was no more complicated than the fact that I simply didn't like talking to Keith, seeing his dead, dull eye peering at me through the slit of his open door. The weight of the truth hit me like a hammer—the fact was, my son simply and undeniably repulsed me. I hated the way he slumped around, the tangle of his hair, the listlessness that overwhelmed him, the sheer dull thud of him. I hated all that, but had tirelessly labored to give no sign of it. Instead I had cheered his every modest achievement, praised and photographed his ridiculously infantile science project, patted him on the back so often and with such false force that my hand had grown numb with the practice. I had worked hard to conceal what I really thought, and I had failed utterly. For all his seeming obliviousness, Keith had seen through me, divined and suffered silently the full depth of my contempt.

  Price touched my arm. "It's not your fault, the way Keith feels," he assured me. "I can see how much you love him."

  "Yes, of course," I said, then shook hands, said good-bye, turned, and walked through the scented air with my wife's words echoing in my head—Everybody lies.

  Meredith was on the phone when I arrived at the house a few minutes later. I heard her voice as I opened the door, no doubt surprising her, since it was still early in the day and I wasn't expected back until the end of it.

  "Gotta go" I heard her say, then the snap of her cell phone closing shut. She'd sunk it into the pocket of her housecoat by the time she greeted me.

  "Oh, hi," she said as she walked out of the kitchen. She smiled. "I was just making another pot of coffee."

  On the counter behind her, I noted the coffee machine sitting idly, the first morning pot still half full.

  "You're getting to be a purist, I guess," I told her.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  "A coffee purist," I explained. "Never drink coffee that was brewed more than two hours before."

  She laughed, but tensely. "Oh," she said, "is that the rule for coffee snobs?" She tossed her hair. "Where do you hear things like that, Eric?"

  "Television, I guess."

  For a moment, we faced each other silently. Then Meredith said, "So, what are you doing home so early?"

  "Peak was waiting for me when I got to work," I told her.

  Suddenly she paled. "The hotline," she blurted. "Someone's spreading—"

  I shook my head. "No. This is not about the hotline. They found out a few things about Keith. Things we have to talk about"

  I turned, walked into the living room, and sat down on the sofa.

  Meredith trailed behind and took the chair opposite me.

  "Peak told me two things," I began. "That Keith has been talking to someone. Delmot Price. He owns the Village Flower Shop. Anyway, Price caught Keith stealing from him. They started
talking about it. Keith told him that he was stealing because he needed money."

  "Needed money?" Meredith asked.

  "To run away," I added grimly. "That's why he was stealing."

  She was silent for a long time, like someone hit between the eyes, dazed, groping to regain her balance.

  "Peak talked to his teachers, too," I added. "They say he has a problem with low self-esteem." The last piece of information was the hardest, but I had no choice but to deliver it. "That's part of the profile, he says ... of a child molester."

  Her eyes began to dart around, as if the air was filled with tiny explosions. "The car," she said tensely. "Do you think it was Price?"

  "No," I said. "I talked to him right after Peak left. He's a good man, Meredith. He had a son like Keith."

  "What do you mean, like Keith?"

  "A kid with this problem, you know, esteem," I said. "Only worse. He killed himself."

  Meredith's lips parted wordlessly.

  "Price was just trying to help Keith," I said. "A shoulder to cry on, that's all."

  Meredith shook her head slowly.

  "It gets worse, Meredith. They found some pictures on Keiths computer. Little girls. Naked."

  Meredith's right hand lifted to her closed lips.

  "Not pornography exactly," I added. "But bad enough."

  She stood up. "This is terrible," she whispered.

  "Keith can't run away," I told her. "We have to make sure of that. No matter what he was planning before, he can't do it now. The police would think he was running away from this thing with Amy. They would never believe that—" I stopped because for a moment the words were too painful to bear. Then, because there was no choice, I said them. "That he was running away from us."

  She nodded heavily. "So you have to talk to him, Eric."

  "We both do."

  "No," Meredith said firmly. "It would look like we were ganging up on him."

  "All right," I said. "But I'm going to tell him everything Peak told me. Everything Price told me. And I'm going to ask him who brought him home that night. I want an answer to that."

  Meredith released a weary breath.

  "I won't take some bullshit story, either," I said. "This is getting worse and worse, and he has to know that."

  "Yes," Meredith said. She seemed far away, and getting farther, like a boat unmoored and drifting out into the open sea. "All right," she said. Then she turned and made her way down the corridor to her small office, where I imagined she remained, waiting anxiously for her son to come home.

  TWENTY

  It was nearly four in the afternoon when Keith appeared.

  During the hours before I finally saw Keith peddle down the unpaved driveway, I tried to find the best way to approach him. I remember how clumsy my mother had always been at such interrogations. She would ask Warren about some misdeed. He would deny it. She would accept his denial, and that would be the end of it. My father, on the other hand, had relentlessly pursued him, puncturing each alibi, watching sternly, his eyes gleaming with superiority as my brother steadily sank deeper into the mire of his own inept little falsehoods. If Warren claimed to have been watching television when some small misdeed had been committed, my father would whip out the TV Guide and demand to know exactly what Warren had been watching. If Warren were clever enough actually to have named a program, my father would rifle through the pages until he found the show and then demand that Warren tell him precisely what, exactly, the show had been about. He'd always managed to be two or three steps ahead of Warren, waiting for him like a mugger in a dark alleyway, poised to strike.

  But Warren had been easy to frighten and confuse. After only a few minutes under my father's inquisition he would invariably surrender, confess what slight crime he'd committed, then accept whatever punishment my father decreed. Warren had always been pliant, straining to please, contrite, eager to say or do whatever my father commanded.

  I knew I could not expect the same of Keith. His mood was volatile, resentful, sullen. At the slightest provocation, he might bolt out of the room, storm into the night, make his run for it. More than anything, what I feared as I watched him slip off the seat of his bike and trudge up the walkway toward the house was that in the end it would turn physical, that in order to prevent him from running away, I would have to use force.

  He didn't see me when he came through the door. He tossed his book bag on the stairs, whirled to the right, and strode into the kitchen. I heard him open the refrigerator. There was a clink of bottles, the sound of one being opened. I assumed he'd taken a bottled water or a soda, but when he slouched back into the foyer, I saw that he held a beer.

  When he saw me sitting in the living room, he stared at me evenly, waiting for a challenge, then tilted back his head, took a long swig, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  "You're not of drinking age, Keith," I reminded him.

  "That right?" he asked with a smirk. "Well, by the time I'm old enough to drink, I'll be in jail, so, like they say, what the fuck." He grinned at me defiantly, took another swig, then pressed the bottle toward me. "Care for a drink, Dad?"

  I stood up, walked over to him, and yanked the bottle from his hand. "We need to talk," I said. "In your room."

  "My room?" He laughed dismissively. "No way, Dad."

  I placed the bottle on the table beside the door. "Your room," I said evenly. "Now."

  He shook his head with exaggerated weariness, turned, and made his way up the stairs with a slow exhausted gait, like a boy who'd worked in the fields all day, rather than one who'd spent the last seven hours sitting in a classroom.

  At the door of his room, he turned to me. "You're not going to like it," he said. "It's not like all neat and orderly."

  "I don't care what it looks like," I told him.

  With that, Keith opened the door to his room and stepped inside.

  I followed behind, stepping into a level of clutter and disarray that I'd fully expected. The only surprise was that between the window and the small desk that had once held his computer, he'd hung a thick black cloth, which was clearly meant to block the monitor from view. The walls of the room were covered with torn-out magazine pictures of people dressed in Goth attire, black jeans and black T-shirts, stringy hair dyed black, blackened eyes and lips and fingernails.

  "Like the décor, Dad?" Keith asked with a brutal laugh. "Glad you came to visit?"

  I whirled around to face him. "Delmot Price and I had a little talk this morning," I said.

  Keith slumped down on the unmade bed and idly picked up a magazine. "So?"

  "The police have talked to him, too," I added. "They know you called him the night Amy disappeared."

  Keith flipped a page of the magazine, licked his finger, and flipped another. "I just wanted to talk," he said.

  "About your plan to run away?"

  Keith gave no sign that the fact that I knew about his plan in the least bothered him. He continued to stare at the magazine.

  "Look at me, Keith," I said sharply.

  He lifted his eyes languidly.

  "Put the magazine away."

  He flipped the cover, tossed it across the room, and made a great show of staring me directly in the eye.

  "First off, don't even think about leaving town," I said. "That's all the cops would need right now."

  Keith kicked off his shoes, pressed his back against the wall, and folded his arms over his chest.

  I pulled the chair away from his desk, planted it in the center of the room, and sat down so that we were now eye to eye.

  "I need some answers, Keith," I said.

  Keith said nothing but continued to stare at me sullenly.

  "They found pictures on your computer," I said.

  I looked for some sign that the shock of having the pictures discovered had shaken him but saw nothing but his cold metallic stare.

  "Why did you have those pictures, Keith?"

  His silence was like a cocked gun.

  "Little g
irls," I said. "Naked."

  He closed his eyes.

  "Why did you have pictures of little girls on your computer?"

  He shook his head.

  "They found them, Keith," I said firmly. "They found them on your computer."

  He continued to shake his head, eyes still closed.

  "You know what that looks like, don't you? How bad it looks. With Amy missing."

  He began to breathe with exaggerated force, rhythmically, like a pant.

  "Keith, are you listening to me? They found pictures!"

  He was breathing in short gasps, loud and furiously, like a diver gearing up for a frightening plunge.

  "They showed them to me, Keith," I said. "Little girls. Seven, eight years old."

  Suddenly the gasping breaths ceased, and his eyes shot open. "What else?" he hissed. "What else, Dad? I know there's more."

  "Yes, there is," I said hotly, as if he'd challenged me to make a stronger case against him. "I want to know who brought you home the night Amy disappeared."

  He stared at me silently for a moment, and I expected him to yell back some ridiculous reply, but instead something appeared to unravel deep within him, as if he were suddenly in the motions of a final letting go. "Nobody brought me home."

  I leaned forward threateningly. "I saw a car pull into the driveway, Keith. Up on the road. It pulled in. I saw the lights. Then it backed up and drove away. That's when I saw you coming down the drive." I lifted my head and looked him dead in the eye. "Who brought you home in that car, Keith?"

  "Nobody," Keith answered softly.

  "Keith, I have to know the truth," I said. "I have to know about those pictures. And I have to know about that car."