The Guilty One (2 page)

A long pause, the cars going past, the moments of this life, hers and his, twined together in links forged in misery, splattered with the blood of all that had ever been precious. “I just wanted to give you something,” he finally said, his voice thin and breaking, just before he hung up.

HE SAW THE
patrol car pull over and knew he was too late. God, he'd fucked this up royally. He shouldn't have called her; he should have let the act speak for him, let it say everything that everyone needed to hear. Or a letter. A letter would have worked; he could have mailed it before driving into the city, dropped it into the mailbox out in front of the Noah's Bagels on his way from the office to his car. Maris would have gotten it Wednesday, Thursday at the latest, she could have read it in private, decided on her own if she was going to just throw it away or . . . or if it might have helped her, just a little.

Two cops got out of the car. One was a woman, young with a pretty, smooth face. The other one was faster, though, walking purposefully with his hand on his belt. Reaching for what, his radio? Taser? Some small corner of Ron's mind wondered what the protocols were for this, even as he chastised himself for not thinking it all through, for wrecking what was supposed to be his last act.

He looked down, the wind rippling the fabric of his pants near his ankles. It really was windy out here, something they mentioned in the tourist information. Ron had googled “Golden Gate Bridge” last night, which was kind of pathetic. He and Deb had been meaning to walk the bridge for how many years? Since Karl was a Boy Scout, at least, because they'd almost done it then, a family event organized by the scoutmaster, but then Karl had gotten strep. So Ron had to look it up: “Park in the southeast parking lot . . . be prepared as it's usually windy and cold.” That had prompted what was perhaps the most surreal moment of the last twenty-four hours: going to the coat closet for his windbreaker, despite the fact that it was ninety-four degrees outside and the air conditioner was running full blast, and hiding the jacket in his car so Deb wouldn't see it and wonder what it was doing there. As Ron stuffed the jacket under the driver's seat, he realized he was making provisions for his own comfort in what were to be the final moments of his life, a thought so absurd it made his head spin.

But now he was glad he had the jacket to protect against the cold wind. The zipper pull snapped up and hit him in the chin. It hurt. Other cars were slowing; soon there would be a traffic jam. He wondered if someone had called the cops or if they'd just happened on him . . . it seemed like he'd read that they patrolled the bridge regularly. Looking for jumpers. Looking for guys like him.

“Hey, how are you?” The male cop shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand and gave Ron a friendly grin. He was good-looking. Fortyish, chiseled features, big jaw, all of that. His partner was also attractive, and they smiled at him like they were all old friends.

This was embarrassing. Ron wondered if there was any way to pull off acting like he'd just been stopping to think, that he'd never . . . but no. Not when he was standing on the wrong side of the orange metal wall like this, holding on to the cold steel cables. He'd chosen this spot because there was a space that was mostly hidden from traffic, a support behind which he'd managed to clamber over the wall, and then a drop of a few feet to the ledge he was now standing on, so it would be pretty hard to see him unless you knew what you were looking for. The only risky part was the climb over, and while Ron had waited until there was a break in the traffic and managed it pretty nimbly, someone must have spotted him.

Such a stupid mistake. What he should have done . . . if he had to call Maris, if he couldn't have put his thoughts into a letter—which was probably the case: Ron had the hardest time putting anything in writing, his mind just didn't work that way—he could have called her while he was walking out on the bridge, had his say, and
then
scrambled over and gotten the job done.

Of course, doing it this way—it was like he wanted someone to stop him. Wasn't that the conventional wisdom? He had built in the risk factor on purpose, hoping to be seen, to be talked out of it. And that's just what Maris had done. Had he seen that coming? Did he have some deep vein of gutlessness he wasn't even aware of?

Sure, he'd fantasized about doing something like this for a while now. Had let himself consider various means and methods before finally choosing the bridge, mostly because the problem of the body's discovery would be taken care of: there was no way Deb would be the one to find him if he jumped, and a very real possibility that his body would never be recovered. She could choose to memorialize him or not. She could let her life close over his absence much like the freezing cold water would close over him, and get on with things.

A selfless attitude for a man bent on dying—if he'd been sincere. But he wasn't. Ron
was
gutless. He was only here because he just didn't have it in him to go another round with Deb over their son's innocence or guilt. The terrible day a month and a half ago when the verdict was read—it had savaged Ron, but it had also brought him a strange measure of comfort. Because it was finally over. Because they wouldn't have to walk into that courtroom again. He could go back to work and lose himself in his job for a few hours a day. Finally, the atmosphere inside his home would be free of the weight of Deb's frantic, desperate hope.

Such an existence was far from perfect. It would never be good again. But Ron had finally been beginning to think they had leveled off, found their new normal. That they could endure. And then fucking Arthur Mehta had driven his ridiculous Mercedes roadster—with a woman who was not his wife in the passenger seat—into the median strip along North Main two nights ago, causing his tire to blow out and attracting the attention of a cop. This being Mehta's third DUI (Ron cursed himself for not taking that into consideration when they hired him to defend Karl), the media vultures were all over it, and Deb had worked herself into a frenzy yesterday as the images played over and over on the news.
Grounds for an appeal
, she'd bleated to him, the skin under her eyes gray with exhaustion, her fingers moving restlessly on the hem of her sweater.
Gross misconduct
. And all Ron could think, as he pretended to listen and agreed that they should move quickly while Mehta's arrest was still in the news, was: I can't do this again.

God, this was hard, trying to marshal all the directions his brain wanted to go. Especially with the two officers staring at him expectantly. And the flashers on their car . . . did they have to put on the damn flashers? Probably a traffic safety issue, but this was just going to draw even more attention.
Shit
.

“Hey.” His voice was swallowed up by the wind. He was still holding the phone, so he stuffed it back into his pocket, coughed, and tried again. “Hey.”

“It's a hell of a view, isn't it?” The male cop was grinning. Esteban—the little rectangular name tag on his shirt read Esteban. Ron had to squint against the sun to make out the female officer's name on her tag: Officer Dane looked considerably less comfortable with this whole exercise than her partner. She could stand to take a few pages out of Ron's favorite book, which—though no one knew this but Deb, who had found the paperback in a used bookstore in the early, flat-broke days of their marriage—was titled
Sell, Sell,
Sell
: Top Secrets of an Irresistible Pitch.
Ron had studied that book like the Bible, and it, more than all the career coaches and strategy seminars and corporate retreats in the decades since combined, was the secret to his success. A few years back, before he sold the silicon panel manufacturing business he'd built from the ground up—more to amuse himself than anything—he'd gone looking for the book, but it was long out of print.

So here Ron was, probably the greatest success story ever to profit from that forgotten decades-old business tome, crouching on the outer ledge of the Golden Gate Bridge, mere seconds from death. It seemed a shame that F. R. MacAuliff (Ron would never forget the author's name, or his grinning round face above a too-tight shirt and shiny wide tie in the photo on the dust jacket) had never known the effect he had had on his protégé. MacAuliff was probably dead now. Ron looked down at the water far below—murky and choppy today, suitable for despair—and then back at his would-be rescuers. Esteban and Dane—like actors on a seventies cop show, with just the right amount of appealing yet nonthreatening multiculturalism—and a girl with nice tits!

MacAuliff, Esteban, Dane. The 1970s—was fate trying to tell him something? The thoughts in Ron's head were starting to feel a little crowded. He'd been born in the sixties, but it was the seventies that had shaped him. His father had never laid a hand on him until he was eight years old. Magnus Isherwood's rage hadn't reached its peak until Ron was a teen, but Ron's memories of that decade were marked by his father's snarling fury, the fierce grabs that threatened to pull Ron's arm from its socket, the humiliation of being taken down by a kick to the back of the knees. His father's laughter as Ron gasped for breath after a gut punch. “Knocked the wind out of you?” he would jeer, as though even that was a sign of Ron's weakness.

And it was Magnus's voice that whispered in his head now, cackling, cocksure.
You couldn't even get this right, could you, boy? How hard could it be—all you had to do was jump!

“You like sports? You following the Giants?” Esteban said now. Dane was edging closer, to the left. “Man, I could stand to get out of the wind, how about you?”

Ron swallowed. His hand was cramping around the steel cable. Some orange paint was flaking from the steel plate at his feet. Underneath, the metal was tinged with rust. Ron rubbed the toe of his shoe on it and a flake came free and fluttered lazily down toward the water. The sight made his stomach flip, and he turned away from the water, gripping the cable ever tighter as he considered his would-be rescuers.

“It's a good day,” Esteban said, suddenly serious. “I mean, every day's got its challenges, right? And also, its good moments? I'd love to talk about that. Want to come up here and talk? We can go somewhere and take our time.”

“You don't have to make this decision right now,” Dane finally piped up. She sounded even younger than she looked. “It's a big decision. How about if we talk about it from up here?”

Ron wanted to respond, but he was having trouble putting the words together. Somehow, he'd gotten stuck in that lost era. It wasn't just his father's face . . . it was Karl's too. Karl's face twisted with rage the last time Ron had seen him. The hatred written there. And somehow, Ron knew he was responsible. It was entirely reasonable for Karl to hate him for what he'd passed along in the blood, because, after all, Karl was the one who'd paid.

“I always got away with it,” he managed to choke out, his teeth chattering. Was he cold? He
was
cold. Freezing, in fact.

The officers exchanged a glance. For half a second he saw Esteban's expression slip, and then the friendly grin was back in place. “Well, I don't know about that, but what I
do
know is that the future's wide open, my friend. It only seems like you can't—”

“You always got away with what?” Dane interrupted. She closed the gap, shuffling to the edge and resting her forearms on the metal wall, her hands only a couple of feet from Ron. He glanced down and thought about pushing off with his feet, hurtling away so fast she wouldn't even have time to reach for him.

Behind her, Esteban muttered something, and Ron figured Dane had departed from their script. But she had his attention.

“If you come up here, I'll listen,” she said, speaking low and earnestly. To him alone. “You can tell me what you got away with. Take as long as you like.”

And the thing was, Ron believed she wanted to help. For some reason—maybe it was the cheap diamond-chip gold cross on a thin chain around her neck, maybe it was the gap between her front teeth, or the way she was pretending it was just the two of them, when clearly Esteban was running the show—he trusted her. Not for later, when there were bound to be all kinds of reports and paperwork and maybe even mandatory evaluations, but in this moment, right now, he trusted her.

“It's okay,” he said. “I don't really need to, you know. I mean, I know what I am.”

“And what's that?”

Her eyes were brown, with a tiny scar through one eyebrow that left a furrow of white skin. She had a thin line of royal blue eyeliner above each eye that looked like it took forever to draw on. Deb's skin had once been every bit as perfect as this young police officer's.

There was nothing stopping him from telling her what he was: a monster, receptacle of his father's rage, a coiled punishment waiting to be unleashed. Maybe not so potent anymore. It had been years since it broke free.

But that was only because he'd passed it on. The rage had found another vessel.

He looked directly into Dane's eyes.

“We should never have had him,” he said, his voice clear even above the whipping winds.

“All right.” Dane nodded. “All right. Now give me your hand.”

And he did.

OUTBOUND TRAFFIC SNARLED
by three o'clock, but coming from the other direction, Maris was able to make good time. She kept her hand on her phone as she raced through the city, thinking she should call Alana, call Jeff, call someone, but unwilling to take the time or the risk to dial. That would be some kind of punishment for her hubris, wouldn't it, if she looked at her phone and got into an accident and therefore didn't reach the bridge in time. Her dead body laid out in twisted metal and broken glass while Ron's corpse caught on some sunken flotsam halfway out to the bay. A Greek tragedy of an ending.