Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

“She’s understandably mortified,” Leigh said. “She and Charles don’t have the chummiest relationship. But for now, she’s going to have to depend on him.”

  “Or get a job,” Paul said, lighting another cigarette. “Bless her heart.”

  26

  AT THE NEXT REHEARSAL, we ran Cinnamon’s scenes as Alan’s mother. Cinnamon struggled vainly to put on the guise of a sorely repressed religious fanatic. I tried to reassure myself that she would be more convincing in costume. Observing her awkward efforts, I began to suspect that Rex LaPage’s casting of Cinnamon was not a gesture of charitable goodwill but rather one of perverse irony. To her credit, Cinnamon went at it gamely, with a sort of wink-and-nod self-awareness.

  When Cinnamon was done, LaPage called for a ten-minute break to go over lighting cues with the stage crew. We drifted to the rear of the house. Cinnamon took a seat in the back row and lit up.

  “What’d you think?” she asked.

  “You were great,” I said. “Really.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” she said.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  Cinnamon abruptly stood and pointed.

  “Look,” she said.

  Someone was striding purposefully down the aisle toward the stage. When he reached the orchestra pit, his face came into the footlights. It was Paul.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Mr. LaPage said, his voice high and shrill. “Can I help you?”

  I ran over to Paul.

  “It’s my brother, Mr. LaPage,” I said.

  Whispers fluttered among the students lingering in the wings and scattered around the house. Richard’s brother, they must have been saying. The murderer. For weeks the cast and crew had politely ignored the elephant in the room—that is, the fact that one of the play’s two leads slept under the same roof as the prime suspect in the Twin Oaks slayings. But I knew people were talking about it. Now here he was, right in their midst—the Boone’s Ferry bogeyman himself.

  “What is it, Paul?” I asked.

  Rayner must have found something out, I thought. Paul was going to be arrested. He’d ditched his tail somehow and risked everything to say a hasty good-bye before running away again, this time forever.

  “Come on,” Paul said. “You’ve got to come with me.”

  “We’re in the middle of a rehearsal, sir,” said Mr. LaPage, a little more politely.

  My mind flashed back to that unforgettable day when I stood in the hallway outside the principal’s office at my elementary school, Paul beside me in his navy blazer and Macon Prep regimental tie, asking me to follow him out the door.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Rocky,” Paul said. “It’s the Old Man.”

  WHEN WE REACHED the hospital, Miss Anita and Leigh were already there, waiting in the hallway.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “No, darling. It’s not his time,” Miss Anita said, as if to suggest she was not guessing. Leigh looked less certain. She had been with the Old Man when it hit, Paul had said.

  “Go to your father, boys,” Miss Anita said.

  He lay in the bed with the covers pulled up to his chin. My mother sat beside him, caressing his forehead. I came closer and leaned down toward the Old Man’s face. He slipped his hands from beneath the covers and clutched mine and pulled me down so that his sour breath filled my nostrils.

  I looked down into his watery eyes. His chin quivered violently. My hands began to throb with pain as he clenched them tighter. It seemed impossible that anyone on the verge of death could have such a grip. He seemed desperate to say something to me—some last bit of wisdom to serve as a lantern on the shadowy path of the future—but he was unable to find the words. This frightened me more even than the shaking or the horror in his eyes—the Old Man rendered incapable of speech.

  I peeled my hands from his stiff, powerful fingers and moved to my mother’s side. Paul took my place on the bed. The Old Man pulled him down so that their faces were almost touching and mumbled something incoherent. Paul softly hushed him, as if he were trying to lull an infant to sleep. At last the shaking subsided. The Old Man’s hands relaxed and fell to his side, and his eyes slowly narrowed and closed. His chest rose and fell, exhaling a long, raspy gasp.

  Paul stood up from the bed and tiptoed to the door. My mother and I followed him out into the hallway.

  “Is he dead?” I asked for the second time.

  “No,” my mother said. “No, honey, he’s not dead.”

  Of course he wasn’t dead. The machines attached to the wires on his chest and shoulders still beeped. Peering back into the room, I could see his medicine-ball belly still rising and falling.

  My mother reached for Paul’s shoulder as if she wanted to hug him. For a moment it seemed as if they were on the verge of making their peace with each other. She stopped short, however, when she looked past him down the hallway, where she saw Bobby Carwile making his way toward us, followed by a uniformed sheriff’s deputy.

  “Oh, my,” my mother said.

  Carwile grasped his hands in front of his waist.

  “Hello, Mrs. Askew,” he said. “Paul.”

  “What do you want?” my mother asked, her voice curt, almost angry.

  “We just need you to come along and answer a few questions for us, Paul,” Carwile said. “Help us rule some things out.”

  “What if I say no?” Paul said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Carwile said.

  “Surely you know why we’re here,” my mother said. “Must you do this now?”

  “It’s all right, Alice,” Paul said. “My truck’s in the visitor lot, Bobby. I’ll meet you over at the school.”

  “Why don’t you just ride with us, Paul?” Carwile said.

  “What for, Bobby?” Paul said. “My escort isn’t going to let me skip town.”

  “It’ll be easier if you come with us, Paul,” Carwile replied. “Understand?”

  Paul’s eyes widened. Even with the beard disguising the rest of his features, I could see that he was startled—even afraid. The look on Carwile’s face was almost pleading. I realized what was happening. Paul was being arrested; Bobby Carwile just didn’t want to cuff him and read him his rights in the hospital with all those people around and the Old Man on the other side of the door, fighting for what was left of his life. Carwile was trying to be a gentleman about it all.

  “All right,” Paul said. “I guess you can give me a ride.”

  Miss Anita and Leigh returned just as they were taking Paul away.

  “Where are you taking him?” Miss Anita said.

  “Pardon me, ma’am,” Bobby Carwile said.

  “Shame on you, young man,” Miss Anita said, as if he’d made some minor breach of social etiquette like refusing to open a door for a lady.

  “It’s all right, Miss Anita,” Paul said.

  “I’m coming with you,” Leigh said.

  “That would be fine, Miss Bowman,” Carwile said.

  “She’s not going anywhere with you,” Miss Anita said.

  Carwile looked at Paul as if appealing for his assistance. Paul shrugged.

  “Her father’s not going to like this one bit, young man,” Miss Anita said.

  “Mrs. Holt—” Carwile started.

  “It’s all right, Miss Anita,” Leigh said. “I want to go with Paul.”

  She smiled and took Paul’s hand. Together they started down the long hallway, flanked by Carwile and his deputy. We stood still as the four of them disappeared around the corner. As soon as they were gone, my mother turned without a word and started down the hall toward the pay phone, where she placed a call to Rayner Newcomb.

  27

  IT WAS MORE THAN a little strange walking the halls of Randolph High with everyone knowing my brother was in the field house annex, under arrest for murder. There was one upside, at least as far as Mr. LaPage was concerned: after Paul and Leigh’s detainment, the box office saw an unexpected spike in advance ticket sales. Normally the spring play
would attract no more than a dozen audience members who were not blood relatives of someone involved in the production. By opening night, however, all three of our scheduled performances had sold well over a hundred tickets—this for a play without a single show tune. The final Saturday night performance was nearly sold out. People must have thought it would be a sort of fun-house thrill, seeing a creepy play about madness a few hundred feet away from the building where the town loon and her evil hippie boyfriend were being detained, perhaps about to confess to what everyone had already decided they were guilty of.

  Paul, at least, would never give them the satisfaction. My mother remarked that the task force boys could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they’d just asked her how often Paul or Rayner had ever been made to admit to anything.

  Paul had been booked, but Leigh was being held under something called investigative detention. No one was allowed in to see them but Rayner and the lawyer Judge Bowman had hired to represent Leigh.

  “Prentiss Bowman’s behind all of this,” Rayner explained.

  He had come to meet with my mother in the waiting room at the hospital after sitting through the first round of Paul’s interrogations. The Old Man had just recovered consciousness; my mother was taking great care to hide the reason for Paul’s absence from him.

  “He’s brought in a hotshot trial lawyer from DC,” Rayner said. “They want Leigh to pin it all on Paul.”

  “And what does Leigh say?” my mother asked.

  “Not a chance,” he said.

  “She told you this?”

  “They won’t let me see her,” he said. “But if she’d given them anything they could use, the DA would have charged him already.”

  “So he’s arrested but not charged?”

  “That’s right,” Rayner said. “They can hold him for up to seventy-two hours. After that, they’ve either got to charge him, apply for an extension from the attorney general, or let him go. They have to let Leigh go tomorrow.”

  According to Rayner, Judge Bowman had reminded Leigh that with a word he could have her recommitted. Her choices were either to detach herself from Paul or to get hauled back to the funny farm in a straitjacket.

  My mother sighed and buried her face in her hands.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Askew,” Rayner said. “They’ve got nothing on us.”

  “Us?” my mother said.

  “Well, they were with me on the night in question,” Rayner said. “I’m the alibi.”

  The way he said it—smirking, almost smarmy—did nothing to allay my fear that Paul did in fact have something to hide.

  THE OLD MAN was stable enough for us to go home. The next morning, my mother went back to work, and I went back to school. It was Thursday—the night of final dress rehearsal for Equus. That week, as we drew closer to opening night, the whole production had been overtaken by a mood that could fairly be called funereal. Only Mr. LaPage remained undaunted. For my own part, Paul’s arrest had conveniently given me something else to worry about.

  That day in English class, we were studying Yeats. “The center cannot hold,” said Mrs. Worsham, reciting the famous lines from “The Second Coming.”

  “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” she said. “Surely some revelation is at hand.”

  The words felt weighted with personal import. Thoughts spun through my mind like Yeats’s infernal rotating gyre, the tail of which descended down toward Twin Oaks, its facade gray, the eponymous trees in its foreground withered and sick with disease. I couldn’t help imagining Paul as Yeats’s apocalyptic messiah, the “rough beast” sent to unleash the “blood-dimmed tide” onto the Culvers’ plush pile carpet.

  FRIDAY MORNING, WITH opening night looming, Mr. LaPage decided to pull me into the office for a heart-to-heart, right in the middle of class. I leaned against the door while he settled into his desk chair.

  “How’s your daddy, honey?” he asked.

  “He’ll live, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

  “Is he going to be able to go home soon?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I hope so.”

  “And your mother?” he asked. “How’s she holding up?”

  “OK,” I said.

  “She’s a tough one, you know,” he said. “A steel magnolia.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He stroked his beard and smiled gently.

  “We can use Dylan, you know,” he said.

  Dylan was the name of my understudy.

  “You can walk away,” he said. “We’d all understand.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’ll even tell everyone you came down with the flu,” he said.

  “I want to do it,” I said. “The show must go on, right?”

  LaPage smiled. He stood and rounded the desk and drew close to me.

  “You can use it, you know,” he said. “All the things you can’t control. You won’t think about it once the curtain rises. But it will be inside you. Right here.”

  He reached out and gently touched his finger to my chest.

  “Find your deepest fear,” he said, “the scariest place in your heart, and draw on it. You can do that.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Rex sat back on the edge of his desk. He crossed his arms and smiled.

  “All life is performance, you know,” he said. “And the performance is life.”

  Later I would wonder whether LaPage’s little pep talk was more about saving the play than about consoling the mess of a kid I happened to be at that moment. Regardless, I walked out of the room believing every word.

  A chill rain fell that day, but I knew Cinnamon would still be out in the yard past the pavilion, under our tree. I found her there, smoking as usual, gazing down the slope toward the throng of rubberneckers at the edge of the fence nearest to the field house annex.

  “The natives are restless,” Cinnamon said.

  “Did something happen?” I asked.

  “Leigh showed up a while ago,” she said. “She came out with two old men and got into the back of a BMW.”

  “Judge Bowman and his lawyer,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” Cinnamon replied. “You’re never going to guess who just went in.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Your old girlfriend,” she said. “And her new boyfriend.”

  “What are they doing in there?” I asked.

  “Shit if I know,” Cinnamon replied.

  After school we hung around on the loading dock while I waited for my mother to swing by so that I could sit with the Old Man at the hospital until it was time for me to report back to Randolph for the play. Cinnamon smoked as we looked down the hill toward the field house annex, hoping to see something—some new arrival or departure that might ease the looming dread. I imagined Paul in a small room lit by a single naked lightbulb, smoking impassively while Bobby Carwile and some other more ill-mannered and imposing detective put the screws to him.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. I nodded, but I couldn’t tell her what I was thinking: that soon everything would again be as it had been for all the years before Paul showed up like a bomb dropped out of the sky that snowy February night. Leigh Bowman would go back to being an object of pity, destined to be an old spinster, pedaling around town on her bicycle with its basket full of titles from the Christian bookstore. The Old Man would continue to wither, and my mother along with him. Cinnamon would leave for California. I would go back to being another aimless, anonymous kid collecting classic rock records. And Paul would be in prison, body and soul.

  THE OLD MAN was asleep in his bed when we arrived. I sat with him while my mother went to the nurses’ station to sign another stack of paperwork. A few moments later, to my surprise, Leigh Bowman appeared in the doorway. I stood and motioned to her to take the seat by the bed. The Old Man opened his eyes and tilted his head toward us. When he saw Leigh there, his dry lips formed a weak smile. He shifted his hand on the bed so that the palm
faced up. Leigh reached up and held it.

  “Are you all right, Leigh?” I said.

  She smiled and nodded weakly. Her eyes were dark and heavy with worry and weariness.

  “I came as soon as I could,” she said.

  “I know,” I replied.

  “My father,” she said, “has decided to involve himself.”

  “I know,” I repeated.

  “I suppose I can’t hate him for thinking the worst of me after everything I’ve put him through,” she said.

  Her voice was shaky. I hoped she wasn’t on the verge of another one of her episodes.

  “What happened in there, Leigh?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “Poor Bobby Carwile. He’d rather confess to the crime himself than say an unkind word to a lady. My father, on the other hand—well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Do you know what he’s saying now? That I’ve repressed it all. He wants me to talk to yet another psychiatrist who will help me remember. I know how badly he wants to get rid of Paul, but I never dreamed he’d stoop so low.”

  I thought of Leigh alone at the same table where I’d envisioned Paul being questioned by angry policemen in shirtsleeves, smoking cigarettes beneath a harsh white light. This time, however, it wasn’t the police but rather Judge Prentiss Bowman and a gray-haired man in a white doctor’s coat.

  Leigh looked up suddenly.

  “Do you think we did it, Rocky?” she asked. “I know what everyone else in town thinks. I know what my father thinks. What do you think?”

  She watched me expectantly—almost imploringly. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t summon a single word.

  “Oh, Rocky,” she said.

  The Old Man tugged on her hand. When she looked up, she met his mournful gaze. He couldn’t have known what we were talking about or what had upset Leigh so. Without his hearing aids in, he was almost completely deaf. Regardless, the tenderness in his expression appeared to calm her. I wondered whether the love in his eyes could make up for the contempt she must have seen in her father’s. Despite his many flaws and failings, the Old Man was never afraid to love, even when it broke his heart.

  “Who would have dreamed one day I’d be interrogated like a common criminal in the Randolph High Field House Annex,” she said. “I never even went inside that building when I was a student.”