The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  Still the adults did not come.

  Their moment together outside the Palladium stretched out.

  “How is he doing, by the way? Your brother?” Ruben asked, and it seemed like a safe question, but of course it made Evelyn’s face go slack and sad, and she shrugged.

  “The same,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Ruben. “Right.”

  “He’s always the same.”

  3.

  Beth wasn’t fucking crazy. She had seen Wesley look at her. She knew what Rich thought, but fuck him, he wasn’t there. She had seen it.

  It was just a few weeks ago, during a brief transition period when they were still securing the lease on the Palladium. Miracle boy Wesley Keener was a top secret priority guest at a boutique hotel in Marina del Rey, a six-story two-star outfit at the end of Admiralty Way. The room had been provided by someone who knew the owners, a short-term solution, a place between places.

  The room only had one bed, a king, but of course they only needed one bed, and they didn’t even really need that one, because Beth—as always when she shared a room with Wesley—pretty much couldn’t sleep at all. She woke up every half hour or hour and would watch him, walking, back and forth across the carpet, in and out of the patch of moonlight that came in from the harbor side.

  Finally she slept, and she was dreaming or half dreaming, the same thing she always dreamed of: she was at Wesley’s seventh birthday party and watching him play with his little friend Bernie. But in the dream Bernie got trapped underwater in their pool, caught under a slippery tangle of legs and arms, and Rich pulled the kid out of the water and laid him on the lawn, and there were these terrible frantic moments before he sputtered and coughed, before his face returned to a human color—and Beth, dreaming in the chair, was little Bernie, trapped in a bubble of half death, sputtering—

  Then she happened to open her eyes—or she opened them because she heard something, or felt something shift in the air of the room—and she saw right away that Wesley was looking at her. He had stopped walking and was standing by her bedside, as if drawn by her suffering, and he was looking at her, not the dead-eyed empty stare of his illness but a real stare. He was looking at her. His eyes were open all the way.

  “Honey?” Beth said.

  Her blood lit up and she sat up and grabbed his upper arm, which felt the same as always under her fingers: his light teenage arm hair and his warm, soft flesh. She pinched the arm, and Wesley winced.

  “Wes. Wesley!”

  She let go of the arm, and he didn’t start walking again. He stayed right where he was, still staring at her, and his eyes now held a gentle, knowing expression. He smiled.

  He was awake. He was seeing her. He loved his mother.

  “Oh my God,” Beth said, and fumbled for the phone, absolutely awake, more than awake, wild with wakefulness, her blood roaring in her ears. “Wesley? Baby? Hey. Do you recognize me? Hey!”

  She called Rich’s cell, and while it rang she stared into Wesley’s eyes—he had stopped walking and was holding her gaze, perfect clean eye contact. His mouth was moving, as if trying to find a word.

  “Come on, Richard!” she said. “Answer your goddamn phone!”

  But her husband was the deepest of sleepers, dead to the world from the instant his head hit the pillow. She was going to have to get Wes in the car and drive home, forty minutes from here to the Burbank rental; she would have to run down the hall to the bedroom, shake him awake, yank on his beard and pour water on his face. She had to get him, though, so he could see—

  He had gone away, abandoned his physical frame, and now he was back.

  She got dressed as fast as she could, where the fuck were her pants, she was casting about for her keys, and Wesley was looking at her, was he still looking, and she was calling to him, “Wesley, please—just—please stay here—stay with me—”

  She lived the whole life that would be next: Wesley coming fully into himself, blinking, turning his head, asking for water, and then he would see her crying and he would cry too, and press his confused head to her chest, and then at home they would take things slow at first, give him time to find his feet, to get used to being upright, and then God how those kids would flip when he returned to school.

  He would pick up his life, right where he’d put it down. He’d been teaching himself “Blackbird” on the guitar. The Beatles song. He had the first four measures pretty good. Now that he wasn’t sick anymore, he’d get right back into it, learn the rest.

  Beth had found her keys. She had them in her hand. But it was too late. Too late. Wesley’s face had gone slack. His eyes had emptied out. He was walking.

  “Goddamn it!”

  She grabbed at him, and he was pliant as ever, so she held him in place and slapped him, and then again, hard, and his face pinkened from the impact and his head rolled with the blow but he did not flinch or cry out. A mannequin. A doll. A dressmaker’s dummy.

  She stuffed Wesley in the car and drove to Burbank and rang the bell and Richard lumbered down the hall, scratching his nuts, sighing, skeptical, and his skepticism was confirmed: Wesley was the same.

  “Beth, baby—” Richard began, and she said “You know what? Screw you.”

  Wesley walked in their living room while she sat watching him, refusing her husband’s efforts to console her, pushing his arm off her shoulder.

  “It fucking happened,” she told him. “It did.”

  Hope had been kindled in Beth’s heart, in a way it hadn’t before, and some piece of every minute that passed from that point on would be dedicated to the idea that what had happened in those thirty midnight seconds, in the Marina Hotel, would, one day, happen again.

  But had it happened?

  There were no video cameras set up in the hotel, of course. Why would there be?

  So no one had captured the scene: Wesley’s very brief period of normal behavior, the easy smile he gave to his mother, or else Beth’s imagining of it. There is no record one way or another of this event, if this event occurred at all.

  So he woke up or he didn’t wake up; he saw his mother or he didn’t see her; he smiled or he didn’t smile. These facts cannot be verified, and so they are neither true nor false. But Beth’s fervent belief that her son had for those instants been returned to her became a kind of truth in and of itself. And not in some bullshit symbolic sense, because that’s what is conjured up by sidelong phrases like “a kind of truth,” but literally so.

  The event that she perceived is burned into her memory in the same way that real events are soldered onto the consciousness. A memory of a false event leaves the exact kind of neuronal record as a memory of a “real” event. So in the long run it has the same claim to truth.

  Meaning, basically, that if Beth believed it and held to it tightly, from that point on, like a diamond pressed sharp into the flesh of her palm, then why can’t that be OK? Why can’t you let her?

  4.

  “Mayorski Financing.”

  “Stella! How are you?”

  “Oh. Mr. Shenk. Hello.”

  “How’re the kiddos?”

  “They’re just fine. Thank you, Mr. Shenk.”

  “Six and nine—somewhere in there?”

  “Mr. Shenk, if you’re calling about the loan application, I’m afraid I do have some bad news.”

  “Oh, you, uh—wait. What kind of bad news?”

  “We have reviewed the file—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “—and I’m afraid we can’t help you with this one.”

  “Any particular reason you can’t help me out here, Stella?”

  “Uh, numerous.”

  “What?”

  “Numerous reasons, I’m afraid. Bottom line, though, is that our analysis department feels you’ll struggle to convince a jury of the hospital’s culpability.”

  “Your analysis department? But that’s just Jerry, right?”

  “Mr. Shenk, as always we appreciate you reaching out.”

>   “Is Jerry around, by any chance?”

  “He’s looking at another matter right now.”

  “Stella.”

  “Mr. Shenk.”

  “Stella. I’d like to speak with Jerry, Stella.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Shenk.”

  “Wait, now.”

  Jay pressed STOP on the treadmill and rolled to a halt.

  “Wait!”

  February 4, 2019

  1.

  “Oh my goodness. Evelyn. Hi.”

  “Hey, Mom.”

  Beth reached for her daughter, stunned. She had come here with Jay Shenk to see Richard, and now they had run into Evelyn, unexpectedly, at the threshold of the sterile visiting room. There was something not right about it, she and her daughter happening upon each other here, by happenstance. They should be here together. They should have come together. Looking at Evelyn, holding her lightly by her arm, Beth felt a bubbling of pleasure and bafflement, like she was looking at a picture of someone she’d loved a long time ago.

  There were bored prison guards standing in the corners of the room, carrying weapons and wearing brown uniforms. Nothing else in the room but metal tables and hard benches, nothing on the wall but clocks. Come and visit your prisoner. Sit on your uncomfortable bench and watch the time go by.

  Beth might have thought that there would be a silver lining in all this, in Richard’s arrest and imprisonment. A knitting together of mother and daughter, whose relationship had always alternated between distanced and strained. But no—no. And it wasn’t just that this tragedy had come just as Evelyn’s career was exploding. Beth would call and get no answer, and then when Evelyn called back she would just watch the phone ring, somehow unable to summon the emotional energy required to say hello. Having to quietly admit to herself that she had been glad when Evelyn didn’t pick up in the first place.

  “Sweetheart? What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? Are you serious?” Evelyn—no, Evie, it was always Evie now—Evie with her slick platinum rock-star hair, rolling her eyes like a teenager. “I’m here to see Dad. I wanted to see him before tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow he would be sentenced, and once sentenced he would be transferred from the relative proximity of the Pitchess Detention Center off of Highway 5 to the death row at the California Institution for Men, all the way up in Chino. From the gray of waiting to the bleak black permanence of his death sentence.

  “I know, but we were coming.” Beth felt confused. She half turned to Jay, pointed to him for evidence. “We could have all come together.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you were coming, OK?” Evie’s sour adolescent expression hardened, and she planted one hand on her hip. “Can we move on?”

  “I wasn’t attacking you, darling.”

  “I didn’t think you were attacking me.”

  Richard watched all of this from where he was sitting, hands chained together, on one side of the rickety metal table. He said nothing, and his silence for once was not mysterious. Richard might be dumb enough to have murdered someone and confessed, but he wasn’t dumb enough to get between his wife and daughter in an argument.

  Meanwhile Jay Shenk stood behind Beth, shifting on his heels, examining his hands.

  “Well, I’m just…I’m glad you’re here, Evelyn,” said Beth. “And I’m sure your father was glad to see you.”

  Richard nodded. Beth blinked, feeling confused, exhausted. The lights were very bright here. No hiding from the light in the visiting area. Evie, at last, kissed her mother and allowed herself to be kissed, and then said she was going.

  “Well, wait,” said Beth. “Let us give you a ride.”

  “I got a ride from Bernie.”

  “Wes’s friend?”

  “He’s my friend, Mom. He’s in my band, remember?”

  “OK, darling. OK.”

  Beth smiled weakly. She hadn’t remembered, honestly. Her daughter’s face, somewhere along the line, had become an adult’s face. So familiar and so alien: the bright white hair, the pursed red lips. The row of gold studs riveted into the folded crest of her ear. All the affectations that would be reconsidered or embraced as time went on. No wonder we are a little frightened of our children, Beth thought. They are strange visitors from the future, emissaries from a world we will never see.

  Rich had always paid more attention to his daughter’s music career than Beth had. He had, over the years, tried to get her interested in Evie’s burgeoning success, but Beth found it hard. She was always so busy, and always so tired. Lately her fingers had become stiff, and she worried that it was some kind of arthritis, coming in early and coming on slow. Her knees hurt all the time, so that she was finding ways to cheat out of certain postures that came with cleaning a house. But she had to work, as much as possible, whenever possible. Saving up for the long stretches she spent out in the desert with Wesley. She and Rich made just enough together to keep the place paid up, keep the caretaker on duty. Once there had been a team of them: the home health aides, the tough security dudes, a whole infrastructure dedicated to Wesley’s comfort and safety. That was a long time ago.

  So no, sorry, Beth, she didn’t think enough about Evie. She didn’t go hang out in dark clubs at night and watch her daughter sing; she didn’t usually respond to the emails from her friends about having read a magazine interview or seen the NPR Tiny Desk Concert on YouTube. Beth was too busy to feel proud.

  Underneath it all, the part that Beth was aware of but didn’t like being aware of: it wasn’t fucking fair. Wesley had been the musician, Wesley her funny little poet, and it was Wesley’s life Evie was leading, his place she had taken, while he, still stricken, walked in circles.

  I should go after her, she thought suddenly, and had a crystal vision of herself like a figure from myth, racing down the hallway and past the metal detectors, bursting out into the daylight, catching her brilliant daughter and begging her forgiveness.

  Instead she took a seat on a bench across from Richard and asked him how he was doing in here.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  Beth gazed blearily at her husband. She knew him so well, and not even a little bit.

  Here he was, facing the rest of his life in a cage. Fingers laced on the metal table, staring back at her. He was as still as scattered shrapnel after an explosion; he was like a broken fever. They sat together in silence for a moment, while the guards shifted on their feet. The low, hopeless sound of the room’s other conversations murmured around them.

  “What does he want?” said Rich, tilting his head toward Shenk, who hovered a few feet away, his hands in his pockets.

  “He’s your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have anything to talk about with my lawyer,” said Rich. “Sentencing is tomorrow, right? So tomorrow we’re done.”

  “He’s got a question.”

  She stood up and Shenk sat down, and Rich’s whole face changed. Eyes hardened, and mouth sewed up tight. Drawbridge closed. Beth watched anxiously, gnawing on her thumbnail, as Jay got to work.

  “Well, look, Rich, it’s pretty simple.” Shenk scratched his forehead. “Did you shoot at Theresa Pileggi, or did she shoot at you?”

  “What?” he said, and behind him, Beth said, “What?”

  “What you’ve said is that first you shot at her, that didn’t work, so then you hit her with the lamp. But, uh—” He paused, cleared his throat. “There’s some evidence, seems to suggest maybe you hit her with the lamp because she shot at you first?”

  The clock ticked off three long seconds before Rich answered.

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  Shenk smiled wanly. “Why aren’t you answering?”

  Rich wouldn’t be baited. He leaned back, crossed his arms, and scowled.

  “Sweetheart?” said Beth, and he spoke to her, not Jay.

  “I shot at her, and then I hit her with the lamp. That’s what happened. OK?”

  �
��My investigator doesn’t think so,” said Jay. “He thinks maybe it was self-defense.”

  “What investigator is he talking about?” Rich said to Beth. “Whose money is he spending on all this?”

  “Rich,” said Jay. “Listen—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. Hold the fucking phone.” Beth sat down, hard, next to Shenk, and smacked her hands down on the table. All the guards looking up sharply, Jay laying a warning hand on her shoulder.

  “Is this true?” she said. “Is it?”

  “No. I told you. I’ve told everyone. I killed her. I did it.”

  “Right, but was it self-defense, like he’s saying?”

  “No. I mean—who cares?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Look, baby—” Rich leaned forward until his forehead was nearly touching Beth’s. But she pulled back, pulled away. “Baby—”

  “Hold on,” said Jay, and Rich looked at him with such a cold and brutal expression that Beth felt genuinely afraid. There he was: there was the man who was capable of murder.

  Jay plowed on. “The thing is, if you killed her because she was trying to kill you, and we can prove that, that’s exculpatory. That’s—”

  “No,” said Rich.

  “We can change your plea—”

  “No.” He ignored Jay. He just looked at Beth. “How many times do I have to say it? We’re not doing a long trial. And then the appeals, the whole thing—who needs it?”

  Beth stared at her husband, astonished.

  “He wants this,” she said to Jay, and then she pointed at her husband. “You want this. You want to go to prison for the rest of your life. You want to die.”

  Rich was shaking his head, muttering into his hands. “No. Come on.”

  “Richard!”

  She was furious, burning inside, her fists forming themselves into balls at her sides.

  “Richard!”

  Shenk watched them argue. He grimaced. He pushed a lock of gray hair behind his ear. He wondered if it was worth it, this new strategy, half-baked and hasty as it was. Rubie had called from a departure gate at the airport on the way to Indianapolis, of all places. Pileggi had shot Richard, not the other way, he said; Pileggi had started it; Ruben was going to prove it, or try.