The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  2.

  Beth was astonished. How could this have happened?

  She kept asking and kept getting nothing, getting answers that were not answers, getting absolute mush-mouthed gee-whiz-ma’am bullshit.

  “How could this have happened?”

  “Mrs. Keener, we are going to find out. We are absolutely going to find out.”

  “Oh, terrific. I can’t wait.”

  The man in the stupid blue tie nodded earnestly, absolutely no idea that she was being sarcastic. He was the head of security services at Valley Village Methodist Hospital, this asshole, and he seemed to think that they had met before, but if they had Beth had no memory of it. He was a pasty and mild-looking man in his late fifties with a gray comb-over and brown shoes and this absolutely awful blue tie, and he looked no more qualified to be running security at a hospital than she was.

  His name was Brad, of course. Brad Corman. Somehow all these hospital idiots were named Brad.

  Beth turned away from him, turned to look at the girl who had been caught sneaking into room 906, dressed as a nurse. The girl—being held now by two burly security guys, part of the same elite Brad-led squad who had let her get in here in the first place—was still staring adoringly at Wesley.

  “I’m sorry,” said this crazy fucking bitch, who was dressed as a nurse but was not a nurse. The police had been called and were on the way. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “How did she get in here,” said Beth, “is what I’m trying to figure out. What we are trying to figure out.”

  She turned to Richard, who stood beside her with his arms heavily crossed, staring at Brad the security schmuck, who—plainly terrified—would not meet his gaze. It was pretty crowded in 906: the crazy girl and the hospital guards, Beth and Rich and Brad.

  And Wes himself, of course. Wending his way between them, back and forth, from the door to the window. Step by step, his arms at his sides. Staring straight ahead.

  Beth looked at her boy and then away, back to Brad. It was easier to be angry. So much fucking easier.

  “I thought you had him under some kind of special protection.”

  “Well, he is, of course,” said Brad. “He absolutely is. And we are committed to the safety of all our patients.”

  “Sorry, but—can I just say one thing?” said the girl in the nurse’s uniform. She had blond hair, streaked with brown, gathered into two loose, disheveled ponytails. “I would never hurt Wesley. Never. I love Wesley. I love him.”

  “You shut up,” Beth told the girl, who smiled sweetly and mouthed the word “Sorry” while Beth jabbed a finger at the security Brad, poked at his chest behind the blue tie.

  “I don’t care about all your patients. OK? Most of your patients aren’t getting the fucking National Enquirer coming to take pictures of them, right? Are they? Most of your patients don’t have fucking lunatics trying to break in, so they can see him or touch him or—” She looked at the fake nurse again. “God knows what.”

  “Marry him,” said the girl serenely.

  “What?” said Beth.

  “Shut up, sister,” said one of the hospital guards, but she ignored him.

  “We are to be married,” she explained to the Keeners. “We’re to be wed. Not in this life, though. In the next.”

  Beth shuddered. In the girl’s purse they had found a syringe loaded with a clear liquid that Brad said he thought was sugar water but which had yet to be tested. Beth was glaring at the girl in the nurse’s costume, clenching and unclenching her fists, thinking she might have to leap at this lunatic and strangle her with her bare hands. Rich, sensing this possibility, put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it hard. Beth exhaled.

  Brad, meanwhile, had put his hands on his hips. He addressed Beth and Rich together in a tone that was probably meant to be firm. “Unfortunately, our resources are limited. It will never be possible for us to protect a patient like Wesley from every person determined to do him harm.”

  “Oh, OK. OK. Well. As long as you protect him from most people determined to do him harm. To kill him, or marry him, or”—she looked at the girl, who was gazing openmouthed at Wesley again, at Wesley as he plodded dead-eyed from the window to the door—“or both.”

  “Ma’am,” said Brad. “I understand your frustration. We at Valley Village Methodist are committed to—”

  “Jesus Christ,” shouted Beth, as loud as she could, because here they were, back at the beginning, the conversation circling and circling and circling.

  Brad Corman, as maddening as he was, had a point about the difficulty of providing around-the-clock protection to a single patient in a busy hospital and soon enough the Keeners and Valley Village would arrive at a special accommodation. At the end of that week, Wesley would be discharged from room 906; he would be moved down to the basement of the hospital, where he actually could be put under a permanent armed guard. The cost of this service would be billed to the Keeners, who of course could not pay it, and the invoices would be added to the growing ledger of permanent-care costs for which Shenk was suing.

  In the meantime, the cops did come, and the fake nurse was taken away. She was arrested and charged and subsequently remanded for psychiatric evaluation. The liquid in the syringe when tested was found to contain not sugar water but a solution of bleach, Windex, and various other over-the-counter cleaning products.

  When the room had emptied out—when the intruder had been taken away by the police, when Brad’s guys had gone back to their rounds and he to his office—Beth walked beside Wesley for a few minutes, petting his back as she did sometimes, reassuring him, as if he could hear her words, that everything was going to be OK and that they would protect him forever.

  Richard through all of this kept his peace. Totally silent. Watching. Locked up inside himself. He looked angry, of course, but he often did. In public? In situations? That was the default. He always looked pissed. Something about his size, the way he held his head, the scowl that seemed etched in his features. People always thought, and especially during the dark period inaugurated by Wesley’s accident, that Rich’s silence was a seething silence, that his arms were crossed over his chest to restrain the furies boiling in his heart.

  He wasn’t angry, though. Not at that moment, and not in many of the moments when people read his silence for anger. If you could see through his eyes into his brain, if you could find a radiologist to perform the appropriate scans, what you’d find was that he was praying.

  3.

  “It would be so funny if you were faking,” said Evelyn.

  This was a few nights later; the same week as the fake nurse, the unsettling near miss; the week that would end with Wesley being transferred to the basement, where he would stay until that arrangement, too, proved unsatisfactory.

  It was dinnertime. Beth had gone down to the lobby cafeteria to get them two of those rubbery bagels and squeezable packets of cream cheese. Evelyn had asked if she could have a ginger ale too, and Beth said maybe.

  Evelyn sat in the big armchair, waiting, her legs folded under her, peering at Wesley as he walked.

  “I was just thinking, if you just like suddenly blinked your eyes and were like, I’m OK.”

  She waited.

  Wesley walked. His eyes still looked like his eyes. They had the same kind of eyes, she and her brother, dark and wide. People were always saying that. God, your eyes.

  She knew her mom thought he was gonna get better. She didn’t know what her dad thought, but she saw how Beth looked at Wesley, when she was fussing around in here, dusting the night table, walking next to him, neatening his hair. She thought it would get better.

  Evelyn didn’t think so. She spent a lot of her time in the hospital listening to the nurses murmur. Whispering to one another, tilting their heads toward room 906.

  “No growth,” they would say. Stuff like that. “Zero.”

  “None.”

  “Five months. No change.”

  “One hundred twenty-seven pounds.�
�

  “To the pound.”

  Evelyn heard it all. How he never stopped walking, unless you physically held him in place, how even then his legs would keep moving, until you moved out of the way. Like a windup toy. How he never pooped, never peed. Never slept, never grew, never stopped walking.

  They had tried to give her brother solid food, but he didn’t chew it. It just fell out, like food you put in a doll’s mouth. They had given him an IV, even, hung a plastic bag of fluids on a mobile cart for an orderly to wheel along at Wesley’s side, trying to pump in nutrients. But nothing happened. He didn’t absorb anything. He didn’t—what was the word?—metabolize it.

  “Everything disappears,” a nurse said, not knowing Evelyn was just beyond their station, sitting cross-legged with a book of word searches, listening.

  “He’s like a black hole,” said another nurse, and made the sign of the cross over her chest. Evelyn saw her do it. Evelyn didn’t think her brother was like a black hole. But she didn’t think he was going to just suddenly wake up, either.

  Or—not wake up. That was wrong. He was up. He was always up. He was walking.

  She knew how dumb it was to think he might be, like, putting everybody on. But it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “I heard Mom say to Dad that when you come home we’re going to get a dog.”

  Evelyn had heard no such thing. Beth was badly allergic. It was a nonstarter. Evelyn used to ask, when she was little, but hadn’t in years. Not like it mattered. Wesley kept walking.

  Evelyn looked up at the squeak of a cart’s wheel on the tile.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

  The woman who had come in, carefully piloting the cart, had high cheekbones and hair in sculpted waves and sturdy plump arms. She wore scrubs with Tweety Bird on them and electric-blue high-top sneakers.

  “You’re so pretty, sweetheart,” said this woman.

  Evelyn said “Thank you” very quietly. She didn’t think she was pretty. The prettiest girl in her grade was named Daphne Voss, and Evelyn basically paled in comparison.

  “How old are you? Are you ten?”

  “Twelve,” said Evelyn.

  “Twelve!” said the woman, and wagged a finger at her. “You’re gonna break some hearts, honey.” She had not so much as looked at Wesley, who was walking. Who just now reached the window and turned. “You’re gonna break some real hearts.”

  “OK,” said Evelyn. “Thank you.”

  “Now, you listen to me,” said the nurse, or orderly, whatever she was. She was suddenly very serious. Suddenly it seemed as if she had actually come into 906 just to talk to Evelyn.

  The whole rest of her life, Evelyn would wonder what her name had been. She’d be in the studio, or listening to her tour manager talk about festival invitations, and she’d have a sudden vivid memory of this stranger, this moment, the wobble of the fat of the woman’s upper arms, as she crouched before Evelyn like a penitent and laid her hands on her bony knees.

  “Don’t you walk forever in a shadow, OK?”

  “What?”

  “Do you hear me? Everybody gets a life.”

  Wesley walked past, so close to the kind stranger that his hand brushed her back, but she didn’t turn. She squeezed Evelyn’s knees, both knees, until it actually hurt a little. She smelled like some kind of lavender bath rinse. “Even you. Especially you. OK?”

  What do you say to that?

  “OK,” said Evelyn.

  “OK.”

  The woman rose and took hold of her cart and was gone.

  January 17, 2019

  The Rabbi had a shift in the morning.

  A nine-hour shift, starting at 7:30 a.m., which was now just five hours away.

  But he had never been good at going to sleep, and he knew that tonight—after seeing Jay, after seeing Evie—sleep would be a lost cause. He would lie still. He would stare at the ceiling, his mind buzzing and burning.

  His T-shirt smelled like the musty beer-stink of the club.

  He paced around his small apartment, not looking at the file.

  The file was on one of his two Ikea chairs, the pair of them among the very few pieces of furniture he owned. It was a manila file, a few pages thick. What Jay had thrust at him in the cafeteria: People v. Richard Keener.

  As he flipped open the file he could hear his father’s sickly-sweet voice, cheering with triumph—He’s in! He’s gonna do it! My boy!—and he shut the file again.

  Instead he gazed out the window of his apartment, at the Koreatown streets six stories below. Ruben lived in a studio apartment in a medium-size building on Oxford Avenue, in one of the dense sub-neighborhoods of vast Koreatown. Ruben had no roommates and had made no friends in the building. It was mostly Korean families; a handful of working guys who kept themselves to themselves and looked Salvadoran or Guatemalan; a young white boyfriend-girlfriend couple, gentrifiers with Whole Foods bags, their nervous apologetic smiles in the hallway a constant unspoken acknowledgment of privilege.

  Ruben had ended up here because the realtor had mentioned that K-Town was one of the most densely populated areas in the whole country. He liked to think about the crowdedness of his neighborhood when he was heading home after work, and when he was sitting alone in his apartment: one among a hundred thousand strangers, sliding anonymously past one another in a hundred overpopulated blocks.

  But it was quiet out there now, late enough that even Western Avenue was mostly deserted. A few straggling drunks and night owls. The occasional pair of headlights cruising past in the darkness. In the morning he’d be back at his cutting board, flicking his knife up and down, parrying Sunny’s pretended advances.

  OK, here we go, thought the Rabbi.

  He opened the file.

  Richard Keener had murdered Theresa Pileggi with malice aforethought on the night of December 20, 2018, in room 109 of Cosmo’s, one among a stretch of budget motels along Sepulveda, just south of Venice Boulevard.

  Mr. Keener had planned this murder for months, according to the signed confession provided to police detectives in the early hours of the following day. He had contacted Dr. Pileggi at her home in Indiana, on a pretext having to do with his ailing son, with the sole purpose of luring her to Los Angeles so he could kill her.

  Intending to take his victim by surprise, Mr. Keener had arranged to meet her at a local restaurant but then went instead to her motel room, where he forced the lock and waited for her to return. When she did, she found Mr. Keener standing in the center of the room, brandishing a handgun; something called a Donner P-90, an 8mm semiautomatic pistol that had briefly been manufactured in Austria in the 1970s. He had purchased this weapon at a gun show many years ago and always kept it in a safe in the basement for emergencies. He told the police he had never told his wife about the handgun, not wanting to scare her, knowing she would make him give it away.

  He had told the police everything.

  He’d told them how, when Dr. Pileggi entered the room, he immediately opened fire, missed, fired again, and missed a second time. The victim then attempted to flee the room, but Mr. Keener prevented her from doing so by grabbing her and pushing her up against the wall. After a brief struggle, Keener seized a lamp from the bedside table and struck Dr. Pileggi on the back of the head with its heavy base, causing her death.

  Then he called the cops and waited for them to come.

  When they arrived at 9:22 p.m.—this was all according to the police report and Mr. Keener’s subsequent confession—they found the door to 109 open and Mr. Keener sitting on the bed with the gun on his knees. He was covered in blood, which proved, when tested, to be a mingling of the victim’s and his own. More blood was found elsewhere in the room: blood splattered onto the wall against which Pileggi had fallen when struck; blood in the fibers of the carpet where it had seeped from her shattered skull.

  “I did it,” Richard told the cops when they entered, guns drawn. As they forced him down on his knees, as they handcuffed him and read him his rights
. “I killed her.”

  When Ruben was done reading, he placed the file back on the chair.

  None of what it said was important, really. The events were not in dispute. Richard had done these things—he had never tried to deny it. He had confessed in detail.

  What mattered was what Jay had found out about mitigation, the various factors a California judge was allowed to consider in reducing a sentence. If Richard really had been unbalanced, if the anniversary of his son’s catastrophic accident had sent him into some sort of psychological tailspin, it could be presented to the judge as a mitigating factor, and it might spare Evie’s father the death penalty.

  Or—more likely—nothing would happen.

  More likely he would try, and fail, and let her down.

  Ruben sighed, pushed his fingertips into his eyes. I don’t have to do this, he told himself. Then he said it out loud, to his distended reflection in the window. “I don’t have to do this.”

  Meaning, get involved. Be pulled back into the slipstream.

  We think of our lives as being composed of thousands of small stories, different chapters and sections, but really it’s just one story. One long story, looping and overlapping, and so naturally Rich Keener had killed Theresa Pileggi and inevitably here was Ruben Shenk, age twenty-four, in his studio apartment, reading his father’s notes on the case, trapped inside an endless spiral, the same as the Keeners, the same as everyone.

  Ruben had thought many times how he could permanently disengage himself from Shenk, disclaim this relationship by referring back to its origins. He held no blood of this man in him, after all. They shared no genetic code. Their bond was of the laws of man and not of nature, and the laws of man—as Jay Shenk of all people was well aware—were not as permanently wrought as people liked to pretend. Ruben could sign papers, pay money, and permanently undo the connection. Renounce any claim of Shenk upon him.

  But if he was going to do that, why hadn’t he done it years ago? He didn’t feel that he could. If he was not Shenk’s child, then whose?