The Guilty One (26 page)

As soon as they fell to the surface of the desk he knew what they were and how mistaken he had been to think the box might have held clues. It was only the letters from the early days of Ron and Deb's courtship—before cell phones, before texting. They were written in his careful, self-conscious hand on lined paper. She'd even saved a few of the envelopes. There was the address of that tiny apartment she'd shared with her cousin . . . a drawing of a sheep, despite it all Ron was mortified to remember how he'd written “I love ‘ewe,' ” covering up his desperation to tell her and tell her and tell her, to make her understand how much he loved her so she'd be his, always.

He searched through the pile, wincing at the earnestness of his words, his sentiments laid so much more bare in hindsight, the need he thought he'd masked fairly bleeding from the page. Deb had known and she had loved him back anyway, had believed in her ability to be what he needed, the vessel for his brokenness to rest, salve for the hurt and protection against the rage. Deb was clear-eyed with her love: she didn't miss his flaws, but saw the way that she would mold her love around them, to make him better.

The front door opened downstairs. The sound of Deb's shoes on the floor in the foyer, her purse being set on the little table. Coming up the stairs. He could have shoved the letters back into the box, the box back onto the shelf. He could at least have gotten up from the desk, slipped out of the room, bought himself some time. Instead he just sat there.

A moment later she was standing in the doorway. She looked at the ruined box, the letters spread out on the desk. She pressed her lips together and then she spoke and her voice wasn't angry, only tired. “What did you think you'd find?”

“You know something,” Ron said. “I know you know something about what happened and you aren't telling me, and I understand why and I'm even—I'm impressed, you know, when I look at it critically. I mean, all this time. Under the pressure, the questioning . . . but still.”

She moved into the room, standing inches from him, the soft pressed fabric of her skirt up against the corner of the desk. “I've only ever cared about two things,” she finally said. “You and him.”

Ron nodded. He knew that. He'd always known it. “But he still won't go along with it, will he? The appeal?”

Deb didn't say anything for a while. She picked up one of the letters, scanned it briefly, then folded it and laid it in the bottom of the box. “Not yet,” she said softly. “But I'm not giving up. I'll never give up.”

Anger simmered somewhere in Ron, in the forbidden place where he'd learned to lock his fury. “So you get to decide?” he asked quietly, but coiled in his voice was the potential for everything he had worked so hard to keep buried. “Just you? It's both of our lives, you know. All three of us. What makes it okay for you to drag us all through this again?”

“You could leave,” Deb said after a chilling pause. Her voice didn't even waver. “If you don't—if you can't do this, I wouldn't blame you. I won't fight you.”

“You would—” Ron struggled to find the words. He pushed back with the chair and it spun lazily on its axis. “You would throw away everything, our marriage, just to pursue this thing? If I refuse to get on board?”

“Oh, Ron,” Deb said, and she slumped onto the end of the chaise, her shoulders rounded. Her makeup was smudged and her hair had lost its glossy finish in the heat. “What have I got left anyway? You hardly even come home from work at night. You made us move here—I don't know anyone here. I mean, people in this stupid development don't even come out of their houses. They get in their cars and put up the garage doors just long enough to make a getaway.”

“I did that for us,” he said woodenly.

“No. You did it for
you
. Do you know how hard it was for me to pack up his room? You took away the home he should have been able to come home to.”

“Deb, that's
years
away, he won't even be—”

“That's the
point
,” she snapped. “Goddamn you, Ron. Will you for
once
in your
life
just listen to me? It doesn't have to be years!”

A dozen arguments went through Ron's mind and he let them all go by. Because it wasn't about any of it: the length of the appeal, his son's reluctance, the inexorable turning of the wheels of justice—truth itself, and what it meant to any of them.

What was left when everything fell away was his rage.

“You've never cared what I wanted,” he said, using the last of his will to keep from bursting from the chair, from picking up the fussy little lamp and hurling it to the floor, kicking the flimsy desk, grabbing his wife's hair and pulling her off that stupid chaise. Cracking his hand across her slack and exhausted face. The urge had not been this strong in a long while, but when it came back, it always came back like this: overpowering, enormous, devastating.

He stood up and backed away from her. He would go for a run, he would run until he couldn't breathe, until he collapsed on the dead weeds on the fire road.

“That is not true,” Deb said in a voice so quiet and resigned that he had to strain to hear it. “I've
only
ever cared about you. I've been waiting, ever since I met you, for you to be ready to trust me.”

“How can you think that?” he said, because what else was there? “I love you.”

“Just not enough.”

“Enough?”

“You don't
talk
to me.” She pushed herself into the corner of the chaise, huddling there. “You don't tell me what you're really thinking. You hide yourself. You hide your pain.”

“I don't . . . I don't do that.” Even as he protested, Ron knew how ridiculous it was: of course he hid his pain. Of course he locked himself down. It was his duty. What he had to trade, in order to deserve a family, a woman of his own.

“All those years and I would have listened. All those times I went to see him with you, that I had to watch the way he talked to you, I would have done anything for you.”

“Who?” Ron was genuinely mystified, but he also, on some level, recognized the shape of what was coming toward him. It was terrifying.

“Who do you think?
Magnus
. Your father. The way you grew up. The things you endured. I could have made it better. I would have been there for you. If you had just let me in, if you had just let me . . .”

“I don't . . .” He faltered, his body sagged against the wall.

But it was true. He had never let Deb see who he really was, at the core. He'd made that promise to himself on the day he asked her to marry him, and he'd never faltered. He'd never told the truth to anyone at all.

Until that September night a year and a half ago in that hotel in Sacramento, when he'd carelessly spilled his secrets like ball bearings across his father's shop floor.

september, twenty-two months ago

IRONICALLY, IT WOULD
never have happened without Deb's intervention. She came home from a planning committee meeting for the Los Angeles trip and told him she'd signed him up to chaperone. The committee was desperate—the kind of parents who could afford the Gale Academy were not the kind who could—or would—easily give up a three-day weekend. Once in Burbank, a good seven-hour drive, the parents were off the hook; the teachers would take it from there, shuttling the kids from the Museum of Tolerance to the Korean Cultural Center to the Nibei Foundation, a senior trip designed to make them more thoughtful, more broad-minded. Or maybe to make a deposit in the bank of their own liberal guilt so they'd eventually turn into generous alumni. It was just the drive down on a Friday, and back on a Sunday, but Deb had already committed to help out with a fund-raiser her friend was running.

And with Ron having a lighter workload since selling the company, Deb had thought—he didn't mind, did he? Take a bunch of kids in the Explorer, maybe visit his aunt in Thousand Oaks, it had been such a long time, and they shouldn't really take her health for granted . . .

And Ron didn't mind, really, though his aunt Regina hadn't known him the last time he'd seen her and he saw no reason to put himself through that. Instead, he'd focus on his relationship with his son. He'd begun what he privately thought of as his “Cat's Cradle” initiative, pursuing Karl for any spare moments of togetherness, even though Karl wanted nothing more than to get out of the house and off with his friends. And since the carpools were arranged with rigid fairness, a lottery system meant to stave off cliquishness and preserve Gale's we're-a-village patina—that meant, possibly, time in the car to talk. Put Karl up front in the passenger seat, let the rest of the kids sit in back. The car was a powerful incubator of conversation at this age.

It had worked modestly well, at least on the drive down. By Sunday, Karl's romance with Calla had begun, and on the way back the two of them defied the carpool assignment and managed to switch with some kid so that Calla wound up in the Explorer. The two of them rode all the way in back in the third seat, oblivious to everyone around them, leaving Ron with the burden of talking to some kid he'd never met before for hours. But on the way down, Karl and he managed to talk about any number of things, the conversation moving easily from one topic to the next, interrupted by long comfortable silences when Karl stabbed at his phone or turned up the sound for songs he liked.

But the most unexpected part of the trip turned out to be the first night, once the kids and teachers had been dropped off at UCLA for some evening colloquium, and the five parents drove back to the La Quinta out by the Burbank airport. One of the moms, a brassy woman whose son acted in theater productions in San Francisco, had suggested the five of them meet for dinner at the Elephant Bar a block away, in the parking lot of a mall. Ron had begged off, claiming a need to make some calls for work, but not before he glimpsed Maris Vacanti watching him with an amused expression. So he wasn't entirely surprised, an hour later when he was hiding out in the bar at the Hilton across the street, eating a rib-eye at the bar and watching ESPN on the TV mounted from the ceiling, when Maris came walking in.

Of course they ate together, being complicit in this misdemeanor, their shared escape from the other parents. “I don't know why we can't just let the kids go to Universal Studios,” Maris confessed, ordering a second glass of wine and poking at a salad. “Would it kill them to spend one weekend without someone trying to make them feel guilty just for existing? Though I guess that's why we pay the big bucks for Gale.”

And Ron, fueled by Jameson, had entertained her with stories of the basketball team bus trips from his own high school days. Even when Ron ordered another drink, the two of them having repaired to upholstered chairs in the lounge after dinner, he was merely happy to have some company to while away this evening in an ugly-ass part of town. It didn't occur to him until the waitress had brought another round and most of the other guests had cleared out that he might have wandered into some other territory.

Maris had been telling a story about Jeff, her husband, who had insisted on dragging his French horn from high school on every move they had made since getting married—even though she'd never heard him play it.

Suddenly, her eyes shone with tears. Ron, who hadn't been paying strictest attention, one eye on the game, was alarmed. More so when Maris leaned closer, her soft sweater gaping open to reveal the edge of her black bra. He hadn't seen this coming. Ron was that most rare of suburban species, a relatively happily married man.

If there had been signs of some attraction between them, the few times they'd met, Ron had missed them. As she kept talking, Ron wondered if she was just tipsy and desperate for someone, anyone, to talk to.
Jeff was too busy, Jeff looked right through her, Jeff didn't ever share what was on his mind anymore, blah blah blah
. Intrigued, and maybe testing to see how far Maris would take the flirtation, Ron responded by telling Maris about a period in his own marriage when he and Deb had been uncharacteristically distant with each other, making up a few supporting details.

Ron had only cheated on Deb once, and that had been in the early years of their marriage—his last few unsown wild oats, pure and simple. That urge was put to rest in the guilt-ridden days that followed. And he hadn't been tempted, at least not to the point of acting on any attractions, since then. He loved Deb, and their sex life was good, they still had fun together. He would have called her his best friend, if asked.

But Maris was so different from Deb as to seem exotic, at least by Linden Creek standards. She was opinionated and, if not outspoken, at least unafraid to say what she thought when asked. She had interests beyond their sheltered little suburb. She had a compact, trim attractiveness that was heightened by her ready laugh and somewhat sarcastic wit. She dressed simply but seductively, favoring spare dresses that showed her well-shaped arms and calves. Ron had, as it happened, once masturbated to a fantasy that featured her in a tennis skirt she was wearing when he saw her at the bagel place.

So when Maris paid such close attention when he spoke, her eyes wide and attentive as she sipped her glass of wine, concurring that yes, it was so hard in the early days with a baby, when everyone was sleep deprived and intimacy was the last thing on anyone's mind, it almost seemed like they were having two conversations at once, one finding common ground and one moving inexorably closer to something exciting and intimate. Which was why, perhaps, Ron didn't censor himself carefully.

“He was just such a tough baby,” Ron recounted. “Two months of nonstop crying. Nothing worked. Deb and I were just both so tired. I think it was during that time we decided we were only going to have one—and then we both felt so defeated that one seven-pound baby had ground us down so easily. And as for adult conversation, well, you can probably guess that went out the window.”