Five Days (19 page)

‘Actually, it was a perfectly appropriate question. And one which I think you already know the answer to.'

Silence. I broke it.

‘So after the MIT Math Camp . . . did he get help?'

‘Naturally I got the school therapist immediately involved. She was a very nice woman, if something of a lightweight who talked all this touchy-feely stuff, but was very out of her depth when it came to dealing with the clinical reasons why Billy had done something so destructive, so calamitous. She did send him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed depression and put him on Valium. A reasonable year followed. He saw the psychiatrist once a week. The medication seemed to be working. Billy finished his senior year in high school. He scored high on his SATs – including a 750 in math. The incident at MIT was in the past. I paid the four thousand dollars in damages. They never pressed charges, so there was no record against Billy. Several colleges were seriously interested in him – including Chicago and Cornell. Another great triumph happened when CalTech came through with a complete four-year scholarship. CalTech! Billy was thrilled. I was thrilled. Even his mother was truly chuffed that her boy got into one of the world's great science and math schools. The thing was, Billy was going out with a girl from his class. Mary Tracey. Lovely young woman. Quite the chemistry whizz. And she seemed to really understand our quirky son. She'd even gotten accepted on full scholarship to Stanford. It all looked so good.

‘Then, around three weeks before his high school graduation, he disappeared. Vanished completely. The local and state police were involved. His photo was in all the papers and on all Maine news bulletins. The fact that he had taken Muriel's car and stolen her ATM card – he knew her PIN number because she'd asked him to get money out on occasion – well, naturally, this was serious stuff. The bank informed us that he'd only made one withdrawal of three hundred dollars on the day of his disappearance. We didn't stop the card because, as the police advised us, they'd be able to easily track his whereabouts. But after that first withdrawal, nothing. No sign of him anywhere. The trail had gone cold. And I couldn't help but fear the worst: that he'd taken his own life.

‘But then, eight days after he'd disappeared – eight days during which I had maybe slept three hours a night – we got a phone call at around four in the morning from our local police captain, Dwight Petrie. Bath's a small town. Dwight and I had gone to high school together. His father had been in the police force. My dad had insured their family house and cars. Dwight came to me for all that when he got married and started a family. He was the only friend I confided in about the business at MIT. He was one of the few people I could trust to keep a secret. The fact is, the MIT business was kept pretty hush-hush. Billy's disappearance, on the other hand, was big local news – and somehow word got out about Billy's MIT business. I'm pretty damn certain it was a parent of one of Billy's classmates. Her son was also at the same math camp, but he'd been passed over by CalTech and everywhere for scholarship. This woman – her name was Margaret Mallon – went around telling everybody that it was absurd that “that little freak Billy Copeland gets all the scholarships” and her boy got nothing. It was Dwight Petrie who told me she'd been overheard saying that. Being a police captain, Dwight never repeats anything incriminating unless he's received it from impeccable sources. Next thing we know that too got into the newspapers. And the world being so linked now by Google and Yahoo, naturally someone in the admissions office at CalTech flagged it. The college guidance counselor at Bath High then got a call from the director of admissions at CalTech, demanding to know why the school had concealed Billy's expulsion. The Bath college guidance counselor told him this was the first he had heard of it. Which meant that Muriel and I were asked to come into the principal's office and were essentially carpeted for concealing this “felony”, as the principal put it. I tried to explain that, since the matter wasn't reported to the police and it was all privately settled between ourselves and MIT, we didn't feel it essential to “share” this information with the school. I knew this sounded lame – and that we were essentially guilty of a cover-up.'

‘What makes you think that?' I asked.

‘The school should have been informed.'

‘Did MIT know the name of Billy's high school?'

‘Of course. They had all his details.'

‘But they chose not to inform Bath High that he had been expelled. The very fact that MIT didn't think it necessary to inform Bath High School of this unfortunate incident—'

‘It wasn't an “incident”. It was an offense.'

‘Your son is bipolar . . .'

‘That diagnosis came later. And arson is hardly a petty crime.'

‘Still, MIT decided the
infraction
was not so severe as to ruin the future of a hugely gifted young man.'

‘I lost around a half-dozen clients. And they all said the same thing – they didn't want to do business with someone who played fast and loose with the truth.'

‘That's awful and pretty damn judgmental, if you ask me,' I said.

‘You're being far too kind.'

‘Are you saying that because you're not used to kindness?'

Silence. Richard closed his eyes for a moment. From the way his lips tightened I could only wonder if I had crossed a forbidden frontier, and if he might just stand up and end our lunch before it had ever really begun.

‘I'm sorry,' I heard myself saying.

Richard opened his eyes.

‘For what?'

‘For prying into something that I had no business—'

‘But you're right.'

Silence. I chose my next words with prudence.

‘How am I right?'

‘About me not being used to kindness.'

Silence. Now we both reached for our drinks. Then:

‘I know a thing or two about that as well,' I said.

‘Your husband?'

I nodded.

Silence. The waiter broke it, arriving at our booth, all smiles.

‘How are you guys doing. Ready for another mary? And just to remind you of our brunch specials—'

‘Why don't you do that in around fifteen minutes?' Richard said.

‘No problem, no rush,' the waiter said, getting the message.

‘Thank you.' Then, when the waiter was out of earshot, he said:

‘So . . . your husband . . .'

‘We'll get to that. Anyway, my point was—'

‘What's his name?'

‘Dan.'

‘And he got laid off at L.L.Bean and starts again in the stockroom on Monday?'

‘Good memory.'

‘Salesmen remember everything.'

‘But outside of the insurance business, you don't strike me as someone who's always selling, always trying to close.'

‘Maybe that's because, when I'm selling, I'm playing a role. And outside of that—'

‘Aren't we all playing a role?' I asked.

‘That's a point of view.'

‘But one with a certain veracity to it. I mean, we all construct an identity, don't we? The problem is, do we like the identity we have made for ourselves?'

‘You don't expect me to answer that, do you?'

I laughed, and Richard favored me with a sly smile.

‘OK – cards on the table,' I said. ‘I look at my life and frequently wonder how I have ended up with this existence, this identity, this daily role to play.'

‘Well, we all do that, don't we?'

‘So what role would you play, if you could?'

‘That's easy,' he said. ‘I'd be a writer.'

‘No doubt, living in a house by the water up in Maine . . . or maybe you do that already.'

‘Hardly. We live in town in Bath. And the house, though nice, is pretty modest.'

‘So's mine.'

‘Anyway, if I was a writer I would be living here, in Boston. City life and all that.'

‘Then why not New York or Paris?'

‘I'm a Maine boy – which means Boston is my idea of a city. Small, compact, historic, in the East. And then there's the Red Sox . . .'

‘So you
are
tribal.'

‘Aren't all Red Sox fans?'

‘Most everyone is tribal. Especially when it comes to their own flesh and blood. Look at that woman, Margaret what's-her-name, who ensured that your son's incident at MIT went public. Why did she do that? Because her own son wasn't as talented or gifted as Billy. So she turned tribal and decided to wreak havoc. From where I sit, that's five times worse than you and your wife saying nothing about Billy's math camp problem. You were simply trying to protect your son. She was being deliberately malicious – and, in the process, damaging a young man. She ought to be ashamed of herself.'

‘Trust me, she isn't.'

‘What happened after CalTech found out about Billy's problems?'

‘The inevitable happened. They withdrew their offer of admission and, with it, the full scholarship. What made this even more terrible was that this transpired while Billy was still missing. Next thing I knew I had reporters on me from all the local and regional papers, even a TV team from the NBC affiliate in Portland, parked outside my house, wanting a statement from me about why I covered up for my son. I'm surprised you weren't aware of it all, Maine being such a small place.'

‘I rarely watch TV. And I tend to get my news from the
New York Times
online. Dan always says that, for a Maine lifer, I have little interest in local stuff. Maybe because it's often nothing more than local gossip. Other people's small-town miseries and tragedies. I'm sure if I asked some of my colleagues at the hospital about the incident they'd remember it all. But, trust me, I'm not going to do that.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Did you release a statement to the press?'

‘I had my lawyer do it. A short statement saying that, as Billy was still missing – and we were genuinely fearful about whether or not he was still alive – we asked to be left in peace “during this very difficult time” and all that. To Dwight Petrie's credit he came out on our side, declaring that since MIT had decided it was a private matter, he felt we were right to say nothing to the school – and he was appalled that “some very bad citizen felt it necessary to inflict more damage on a clearly troubled young man by leaking it to the press”. Dwight also made it clear that we had been friends for forty years – and under the circumstances he would have done what I had done. But the terrible fact was, Billy's chances of getting into any college were null and void. And all thanks to the maliciousness of one little woman.

‘Meanwhile, the trail had gone cold in the search for Billy. Those eight days . . . they were beyond terrible.'

‘And how did your wife take it?'

‘She did what she often does when things get on top of her – she voted with her feet. Went to stay with her sister in Auburn. Called me once a day for an update. Otherwise she was elsewhere.'

‘And it didn't get to you?'

Silence. His eyes snapped shut again for a moment – something I noticed that frequently happened whenever the conversation strayed into difficult territory. Yet he never tried to dodge the tough stuff. Instead, opening his eyes again he said:

‘I thought I would go out of my mind.'

‘Was there any specific reason why he'd vanished?'

‘His girlfriend told him it was over between them. Just like that. Out of the blue. I only found this out around seventy-two hours after Billy went missing. Early one morning – it must have been around six – someone started banging loudly on my front door. I staggered downstairs and found Billy's girlfriend, Mary, standing there, tears running down her face. Once inside my kitchen, the whole story came out – how Billy had become over the past few months so remote, so difficult and unsettling, that she finally had no choice but to tell him that it was over. As she filled me in on all this, I felt a desperate sense of shame, especially when she asked me: “Did you notice him acting stranger than usual?” The truth was, I hadn't noticed anything different about him, yet here was my son coming undone due to this break-up with the first woman who had ever loved him.'

As if reading my thoughts – or maybe the expression on my face told all – he looked at me and said:

‘That's right. Billy never knew much in the way of maternal love. But in Muriel's defense, I suppose she did her best.'

‘Do you really believe that?'

‘No.'

He met my gaze straight on as he said that – and I felt the strangest shudder run through me. Because from the way he was meeting my gaze I felt what he felt: that this was a moment of shared complicity. And a silent frontier had just been traversed.

‘So where did they finally find Billy?' I asked.

‘Way up north in the County,' Richard said, using the Maine verbal shorthand for Aroostook County: the most isolated, underpopulated, and largely unexplored corner of the state, defined by its vast forests and intricate network of logging roads that never appeared on any official map of the state.

‘How bad a shape was he in?'

‘Very bad. He told the state trooper who found him that he'd driven up to Presque Isle, went into a Walmart there, bought a garden hose and some thick electrical tape, and was planning to drive deep into the woods, tape the hose to the exhaust pipe, feed it in through the car window, use the tape to mask the crack in the window, then turn on the engine and leave this life.

‘But he also bought a week's worth of food at the same time and a sleeping bag and a portable stove. So I can't help but think that part of him still wanted to live. Then, once he had all these supplies, he started driving deep into the woods, crossing eventually onto those logging roads that are off-limits to anyone not working for one of those big paper companies up there. He drove and drove and drove until the car hit a ditch on one of those unpaved tracks. It broke an axle. There he was, in late April, snow still on the ground up there, the temperatures still well below freezing after dark, stranded in real wilderness. He had all the equipment necessary to take his life. But instead he simply lived in his car. Keeping the heater on at night until his gas finally ran out. Using the woods as a toilet. Eating meals made on the portable stove. All alone in the forest. And – as he told me some months afterwards – happy for the first time in his life. “Because I didn't have to confront the fact that I was this freak of nature who couldn't fit in anywhere. And because being alone is, Dad, the best place for me.” His exact words.