Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  He looked at me softly. "You believed I hurt Amy Giordano, too."

  I nodded. "Yes, Keith, I did."

  "Do you still think that?"

  I looked at him again and saw nothing but a shy, tender boy, reserved and oddly solitary, fighting his own inner battles as we all must, coming to terms with his limits, which we all must do, struggling to free himself from the bonds that seem unnatural, find himself within the incomprehensible tangle of hopes and fears that is the roiling substance of every human being. I saw all of that, and in seeing that, saw that my son was not the killer of a child.

  "No, I don't, Keith," I said. Then I pulled the car over and drew him into my arms and felt his body grow soft and pliant in my embrace and my body do the same in his, and in that surrender, we both suddenly released the sweetest imaginable tears.

  Then we released each other and wiped those same tears away and laughed at the sheer strangeness of the moment.

  "Okay, pizza," I said as I started the car again.

  Keith smiled. "Pepperoni and onion," he said.

  Nico's wasn't crowded that night, and so Keith and I sat alone on a small bench and waited for our order. He took out a handheld video game and played silently, while I perused the local paper. There was a story about Amy Giordano, but it was short and on page four, relating only that police were still in the process of "eliminating suspects."

  I showed the last two words to Keith. "That means you," I said. "You're being eliminated as a suspect."

  He smiled and nodded, then went back to his game.

  I glanced outside, toward the pizza delivery van that rested beside the curb. A deliveryman waited beside the truck. He was tall and very thin, with dark hair and small slightly bulging eyes. He leaned languidly against the front of the truck, smoking casually, and watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot. Then suddenly he straightened, tossed the cigarette on the ground, hustled into his van, and drove away.

  "Pepperoni and onion," someone called from behind the counter.

  Keith and I stepped up to get it. I paid for the pizza, handed it to Keith, and the two of us headed for the car. On the way, I glanced down to where the deliveryman had tossed his cigarette. There were several butts floating in a pool of oily water. All of them were Marlboros.

  ***

  I kept that fact to myself until we reached the exit of the parking lot. Then I stopped the car and looked at Keith. "The night you ordered pizza for you and Amy, did you order it from Nico's?"

  Keith nodded. "Where else?"

  "What did the guy who delivered it look like?"

  "Tall," Keith said. "Skinny."

  "Did you happen to see the guy who was standing outside the delivery van a few minutes ago?"

  "No."

  "He was tall and skinny," I said. "Smoked one cigarette after another."

  "So?"

  "He smokes Marlboros."

  Keith's face seemed to age before my eyes, grow dark and knowing, as if the full weight of life, the web of accident and circumstance in which we all are ensnared, had suddenly appeared to him.

  "We should call the cops." he said.

  I shook my head. "They've probably already checked him out. Besides, we don't even know if its the same guy who came to Amy's house that night."

  "But if it is," Keith said. "He might still have her."

  "No," I said. "If he took her, she's long dead by now."

  Keith was not convinced. "But what if she's not. Shouldn't we at least try?"

  "We have nothing to go on," I told him. "Just that a guy who delivers pizzas from Nico's also happens to smoke the kind of cigarette you smoke, along with millions of other people. Besides, like I said before, the police have already questioned him, I'm sure."

  I couldn't be certain that Keith accepted my argument, but he said nothing more, and we went the rest of the way home in silence.

  Meredith was in the kitchen when we arrived. We set the table together, then sat talking quietly, and during those few minutes I came to believe that for all the terrible disruptions our family had suffered during the past two weeks, we might yet reclaim the normal balance we had once possessed. I wanted to believe that Meredith's anger toward me might dissipate as Keith's resentment had seemed to dissipate, that we might regain our common footing as a family, if for no other reason than that we were all simply too exhausted by events to hold each other at knifepoint any longer. Anger takes energy, I told myself, and unless its devouring fire is steadily and continually stoked, it will cool to embers soon enough. It was for that reason perhaps more than any other that I decided simply to let things go, to say nothing more about Amy Giordano or Warren or Rodenberry, to hold back and wait and hope that after Amy Giordano had finally been found and the shock of Warren's death and the accusing finger I'd so recklessly pointed at Meredith had grown less painful, we might come together again as a family.

  After dinner, Keith went to his room. From below, I could hear him pacing about, as if worrying a point, trying to come to a conclusion. Meredith heard him, too, but said nothing about it, and so the source of Keiths anxiety never came up that evening.

  We went to bed at just before ten, Merediths back to me like a fortress.

  "I love you, Meredith," I told her.

  She didn't answer or turn toward me, but I hoped that in the end she would—that in the end we would survive.

  She went to sleep a few minutes later, but I remained awake for a long time before finally drifting off.

  By morning, Meredith seemed slightly less brittle, which gave me yet more hope. Still, I didn't press the issue, but instead remained quiet and kept my distance.

  Keith left for school at his usual time, and a few minutes later I went to work. The day passed like most days, and I reveled in the simple uneventfulness of it. Keith got home at just after four and found a message on the phone, telling him that I'd decided it was time for him to start making deliveries again. He got on his bike, peddled to the shop, and gathered up the deliveries for that afternoon. There were a lot of them, but I had no doubt that he'd still be able to get them done and get back to the shop before I closed for the day.

  It was nearly six when I finally closed the shop and headed for my car; at almost that very same moment, Vincent Giordano had locked the front door of his produce market, then picked up his cell phone and called his wife, telling her not to worry—he'd be home before the news.

  You see it suddenly, the face. It swims toward you out of the crowd, so utterly clear and distinct and achingly recognizable that it blurs all other faces. It drifts toward you with wide, searching eyes and streaming hair, like a head carried in a crystal stream. She lifts her hand in greeting when she sees you seated in your booth beside the window. Then she moves down the aisle toward you, a face you have not seen in years and remember most from the flyer you taped on the window of your shop, a face that seemed to hang from a jagged fence of big black letters—MISSING.

  "Thank you for doing this, Mr. Moore," she says.

  "I would do anything for you, Amy."

  She is twenty-three, her face a little fuller than before, but with the same flawless skin. You see that she is adorable, your mind returning, after so many years, to the word Warren used, and from which you judged him suspect in crimes both near and distant.

  "I'm not sure what I'm looking for," she says.

  She draws a dark blue scarf from her head and lets her hair fall free. It is shorter than it was then, with no hint of wave, and you recall how it fell well below her shoulders the last time she was in your shop. You remember the penetration with which she peered at the cameras on display, as if touching the knobs and dials with her inquiring mind.

  "I'm getting married, I suppose that's part of it," she says. "I just want to ... settle everything before I start a family of my own."

  She waits for a response, but you only watch her silently.

  "Does that sound crazy?" she asks. "My wanting to talk to you?"

  "No."
>
  She peels off her raincoat, folds it neatly, and places it on the seat beside her. You wonder if she's going to pull out a notebook, begin to take notes. You're relieved when she doesn't.

  "I've told Stephen everything," she says. "Stephen's my fiance. Anyway, I told him everything about what happened. At least, everything I remember." She sits back slightly, as if you are giving off waves of heat. "Maybe I just wanted to say thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For noticing things," she says. "And for doing something about it."

  I recall the sound of Keith's footsteps in his upstairs room, his soft tread across the carpet, back and forth, back and forth, how, during those lonely minutes, he must have been trying to decide what he should do, weighing what I'd earlier told him, weighing it all the next day before finally dismissing it, and in that fateful dismissal, becoming for all time a man.

  "I didn't do anything about it," I tell her.

  "Yes," she says. "That was Keith."

  "Only Keith."

  I see what I could not have seen at the time. I see my son at school, see him glance at the pay phone in the lunchroom, stop, think it through again, then dial the number he'd seen posted on flyers in the school lobby and on shop windows throughout the town,' a number used for rumors, wild notions, false sightings, vicious gossip, unfounded suspicions, and occasionally, very occasionally, the shattering possibility of salvation. I hear the voice, which I had always judged weak and irresolute, but which now sounds powerful in my mind, forceful, confident, determined.

  "I just wish it had all happened before"—her eyes hold the immemorial regret of our kind, the iron door that closes with each movement of the second hand—"I want to tell you how sorry I am."

  Her father's words echo in my mind—I'll be home before the news.

  What had he meant by home? I wonder suddenly. Had he meant the house he'd shared with his wife and daughter? Or had it been some other home he expected to reach, the place where he hoped to find peace, or at least forgetfulness?

  "It was all so terrible," she says. "So unfair. Especially since Keith had already called the police."

  You hear your son's voice, hear it as clearly as when Peak played it for you three days later.

  "This is Keith. Keith Moore, and last night my dad and I went for pizza at Nico's and we saw a man who might have delivered pizza to Amy Giordano's house that night, and he smokes Marlboro cigarettes, and I just think you should at least go talk to him because, you know, well, maybe it's not too late ... for Amy."

  Now images rise from the gray depths. You see the man taken into custody, a little girl carried up basement stairs and out to a waiting ambulance, her long dark hair tangled and matted with filth, one eye swollen shut, her lips parched and cracked. You hold this image in your mind as you stare at the face that faces yours, healed by time, the lips moist, hair immaculately clean and neatly combed.

  "He would have killed me really soon," she tells you. "He'd already dug the grave."

  You have no doubt that this is true, that had your brave and noble son not made his lonely, lonely choice, Amy Giordano would be dead.

  "I only wish I could have thanked Keith."

  Now the final hours of your family life pass before you in a series of photographs that were never taken, but which you have carried all these years in the grim portfolio of your mind. You see Keith on his bicycle, pedaling back from his deliveries. You see him turn into the parking lot, holding one leg out as he always did, the photo shop in the background. You see him coast down the hill toward the shop, a green van now entering the frame. You see the slender barrel inch from the van's open window, a hunting rifle, complete with scope. You see your son in the crosshairs, his arm lifted, waving to you as he hurtles toward the shop, where you stand, staring helplessly, until the awful sound reverberates, and your son rises from the seat of his bike, rises as if rudely jerked from it by an invisible hand and hurled backward onto the dark pavement where he lies writhing as you run toward him.

  "I don't know why he did it," she says. "My dad."

  You see yourself in pictures now. You see yourself collapse beside your strangely still son, gather his lifeless body into your arms, then shudder as another shot rips the otherwise ghostly silent air, and your eyes dart toward the sound, and you see a second body, slumped over the wheel of Vincent Giordano's green van.

  "He did it," you say, "because he loved you."

  Her eyes glisten, and for a moment the two of you flow one into the other and become a single, irremediable ache.

  "I'm sorry, too," you tell her.

  And it's true, you are sorry for Amy, and for Karen who never married again, and for Meredith who could not hold on to anything after Keith's death, could not live with you or even in the town where you'd made a family and briefly a good life, and so she had drifted first to Boston and then to California and then to some third place from which she has sent no word.

  "Well," Amy says, "I just felt that I wanted to see you and tell you how sorry I am for everything that happened." She shakes her head. "There was just so much ... misunderstanding." She starts to get up.

  "No, wait," you tell her.

  She eases back into the seat and peers at you quizzically.

  "I want to talk to you," you tell her. "You're getting married, about to have a family of your own. There are things, Amy, you need to know."

  She nods. "I know there are," she says.

  "I'd like to help," you tell her. "Give you the benefit of what I've learned."

  "Okay," she says, then waits, ready to receive whatever gifts you have.

  You think of Warren, Meredith, Keith, the family you briefly held, then doubted, and finally lost. You recall your final glimpse of your house, the winding walkway that led from the driveway to the front door, the sturdy grill, the Japanese maple you'd lovingly planted so many years before, how on that final day you'd glanced at the ground beneath it, so baffled now, so tormented by doubts and suspicions that you could no longer tell whether you saw a pool of blood beneath its naked limbs or just a scattering of red leaves.

  You close your eyes, then open them, and all of that is gone, and you see only Amy.

  "I'll start at the end," you tell her. "The day I left my house." And then, as in a family photograph, you smile.

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  Document creation date: 4.12.2012

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  Document authors :

  Thomas H. Cook

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