The Widower's Tale (56 page)

"Ms. Darling, can we get you a glass of water?" asked McCord.

"No," she said. She wiped her face with a sleeve of her peasant blouse. It was already smeared with soot.

"Can we please all take a break?" pleaded Ira. "A stretch?"

Ira crossed the room to Anthony. Through the window, he could just make out the equipment abandoned by the musicians. A large speaker had been shoved into the cattails at the edge of the pond. Would E & F's insurance pay to replace that stuff? Suddenly Ira feared for his job.

"Well," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have missed
this
party for the world."

"This is not the least bit funny," said Ira.

Anthony squeezed his hand. "Sorry. But I warned you about that idiot group of insurgents. I told you there'd be an implosion of some kind. Frankly, the whole thing smacks to me of school pranks gone haywire. These suburban cops want to believe they've got a homegrown Al Qaeda lurking in the privet--but I think it's more like SDS. I mean, SDS itself is back. There's been a whole revival--the same sort of nostalgia behind your Woodstock party."

Had it been only three hours ago when Ira felt so hopeful, so romantic? Yet as he absorbed Anthony's I-told-you-so, as he gazed out the window at the drowning audio equipment and then at the starlit pond, his knee-jerk anger faded. Ira remembered something.

Nothing but
nothing
would take this job away from him.

Chief McCord stood at the far side of the room, talking to Evelyn; her group had followed suit and were milling about, shaking out cramped limbs, drinking water from tiny cups. Ruth had volunteered to start a pot of coffee. Joyce had gone to her classroom and retrieved a tin of graham crackers and Fig Newtons.

Evelyn was attempting to make small talk with the chief about his family. Ira interrupted.

"I have something. Someone. To report." He spoke in a normal voice, but the room was small, with excellent acoustics, and everyone else stopped talking.

"Turo. Arturo. I think his last name is Cabrero, Cabrera. He's been around here a lot this year--too much." Ira tried to remember the substance of the strange conversation he'd overheard from the window back in the fall, but it didn't matter. Because he did remember seeing Turo emerge from the storage space that other time; seeing him in the nearby woods over Christmas vacation; seeing him, more recently, talking with Celestino on Laurel Connaughton's lawn.

"Arturo who?" asked Evelyn.

"He helped build the tree house."

Heidi murmured in recognition, and then Clover spoke. "Robert! Robert and his roommate! They ... Robert. My nephew." Her tone silenced everyone for a second time; in half a dozen words, it went from hysterical to chilly.

"Not Robert," Ira said to Clover. "I'm certain Robert's not--"

"Yes," Clover said firmly. "He hasn't been the same this year."

Ira looked at Chief McCord. "Arturo--the roommate--he's the one I've seen around here more. Robert would be here because of his grandfather. I think they're pretty close. That you'd expect. But it's the roommate who--"

"What would you know about Robert?" Clover demanded angrily. "I've known him his
whole life."

"Clover, there is no way--" In his peripheral vision, Ira saw Anthony standing, shaking his head. (A warning? Disapproval? Hadn't Anthony accused him of being a coward when it came to speaking out?)

"I need names," said McCord. "Spell the names." He started to write. And then the fire chief--when had he left?--entered the room and said, "Cap, the basement of the house. The Darling house. We have something there."

Behind the fire chief, Percy Darling entered. He looked like a parent who'd just been told of a child's death. His eyes went straight to Clover. They expressed relief for only a moment.

"Daddy, it's Robert," she said loudly. "He's been brainwashed. We should have figured it out before this! Robert's ruined
everything!"
She started toward her father, but just as urgently as he'd entered the room, Percy turned his back on her and left. Ira heard him run down the hall, heard the door fling wide against the wall of the barn, the impact loud as a gunshot.

The DayQuil had worn off. He felt as if someone had jammed a moldy rag into the space behind his eyes and nose. His brain felt physically smaller. It was 1:00 a.m., and he'd wasted close to two hours--well, not
wasted
exactly, but robbed from the time he desperately needed to finish that paper--having cake with Rosemary at the new cafe on Dunster. She was cool: heavy into bioethics on top of her concentration in history and urban planning. She'd be spending the summer in New York, too, doing an internship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her hair was like a jungle: dark and thick. Robert hadn't wanted to touch a woman's hair so much in ages. Her breasts--the tops of them, pushed up under her red blouse--were lightly freckled. She smelled like tangerines.

Would she have gone home with him? Probably his obnoxious cough had done him a favor there. He had to sleep, and he had to work. (He also had to face Turo, though hopefully not till morning.) He could take NyQuil and do the former or another hit of DayQuil and (maybe) the latter. Ah, the marvel of OTC drugs. He pondered the pros and cons of each choice as he turned onto Linnaean. A block shy of his building, he noticed the two police cars parked in front. Christ, not another break-in.

Too whacked to ask for details, Robert nodded at the officer seated in the first cruiser. He entered his building and took the stairs. He heard the voices, the abrasive bark of the radios, before he reached the third floor and understood that the cop-show sound effects were coming from the open door to his apartment.

The two uniformed guys in the hall saw him at the same time. One held up his badge.

"Hey. Jeez," said Robert. "What's happening?"

"Arturo Cabrera?" said the taller guy.

"No," said Robert.

"Robert Barnes?"

"Yeah, that's me." And then it dawned on him. "Oh my God," he said. "Turo, you total moron."

Through the door, Robert saw what his preconceptions, in two amazing seconds, told him he would see: everything, everywhere, rearranged, unplugged, pulled from walls, turned radically inside out. Every light was blazing. The
refrigerator
was open. One of the cops had already relieved him of his backpack--almost gently--and the other was frisking him, just the way you'd expect from TV. What Robert also knew from TV told him to shut the fuck up.

He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him. When he turned to look, one of the cops grabbed his arm, not at all gently this time, but when Robert saw the man jogging toward him down the hall, the wave of emotion that cut through his thickened senses felt more like joy than shame.

"Officer, that is my grandson you are about to arrest," said Granddad. "Whatever he may have done, he's a very good boy. Please bear that in mind."

21

Are you sure you don't want me to go in with you?"

"I'm sure."

"So--tomorrow. I'll pick you up at one. Yes?"

"Thanks." Robert wanted to close the door, but Anthony continued to lean across the empty passenger seat.

"I'll be fine," said Robert, even if he could no longer imagine what it meant to be
fine
. "You should go. Get stuff done you're supposed to be doing."

As if Anthony weren't being paid for this. Probably by Granddad. Robert's parents had posted his bail, but so far, till now at least, his mother had refused to speak to him, let alone see him. "She's more upset than mad," his dad had explained over the phone. But that was Dad, diplomatic by profession.

Robert continued to stand on the sidewalk after Anthony had driven away. His father's car was parked inside the open garage; his mother's car was gone. An Outback and a gargantuan SUV, strangers' cars, occupied the wing of tarmac partially screened by a rose-covered trellis. Car code, Robert had called it in high school, the way he'd know at a glance what was what, who was where. This configuration was the weekday norm: Mom at work, Dad in his office with clients. It meant that the kitchen door would be unlocked and no one would be there to greet him. It also meant that his parents had decided to follow their routines, as if nothing about today, about this particular homecoming, were the least bit weird. And what did
this
mean? Forgiveness? Contempt? Confrontation? Not denial. Robert knew that much about his parents.

Nothing the least bit weird in the kitchen, either, once he entered the house. Though what did he expect, a plate of home-baked cookies? A note of greeting? Well, maybe the note. He felt the flash of deja vu: home from school, drop his backpack on the bench, toss his coat on a hook, beeline for the fridge. A glass of milk, cold pizza or chicken. A note of warning or instruction from his dad, on the counter:
Don't touch those cherries!
or
Please thaw the pork chops
.

He sat on the bench. He had no backpack, no burden--no physical burden--to drop here. Under the jacket he'd been wearing the night he was arrested, he wore a shirt and jeans that Helena Sorenson had bought for him. For the past four days, she'd acted the part his mother had refused: taken him in, clothed him, fed him, driven him to Anthony's office when Granddad couldn't. She was like a figure in a fairy tale, the kindly old lady in the woods who, no questions asked, welcomes the lost, wounded traveler (the guy who, unlike Robert, would turn out to be a prince disguised by a witch's spell). The Sorensons, his grandfather's friends, were people Robert had heard about forever, but until now, he'd met them in the flesh only once every few years--like last Thanksgiving at Granddad's house. Robert flinched at the memory of Turo sitting next to Mrs. Sorenson on the couch, exuding his flattering, flirtatious charm. His
pathological
charm. Anthony's word.

Robert hoped for someone, anyone, to enter the kitchen. Get it over with, he thought. As if that was all he had yet to face: his parents' anger and disappointment. There would be no jury trial, according to Anthony, but Robert should expect hearings and meetings, dragged out over weeks, possibly months, to arrive at a "deal" and ultimately a sentence. Subject, verb. Like
You are fucked
.

He listened for the murmur of voices from the ground floor, the sparring of a couple as they broke apart under his father's guidance. Nothing. No fights today. He wondered if any couples had ever reconciled after meeting with Dad. Robert's mother claimed that his father was a born peacemaker. He was the one who'd answered the infamous "one phone call" in the middle of the night. Robert had been hysterical; he'd assumed Granddad would follow the cops from his apartment and get him released, but that hadn't happened; or not till the following evening, when Granddad showed up with Anthony along. Earlier, though, when Robert had been so entirely alone, alone as a man in a labyrinth in a story by Borges, his dad had steered him away from the panic.

All he really wanted to do right now was to lie down, try yet again to sleep, really sleep. His first night at the Sorensons, he'd slept for ten hours straight. Since then, he hadn't slept more than a couple of hours before he'd wake, each time remembering or imagining some new unbearable thing. The warehouse in Lothian, his hands blackened by all that ink from the newspapers he'd dutifully, robotically bound into bundles. (Honest to God, what had he
thought
they were for if not to fuel a fire?) His apartment, trashed and abandoned, a web of crime-scene tape. The exams he'd prepared for but wouldn't be free to take. Ever. The literature paper he'd never finish. He might have finished it if he hadn't been lured away by that smart, beautiful girl in the red blouse. Rosemary.

If not for her, he might be facing a trial. He'd found her number on the back of a receipt, deep in the pocket of his jeans. Anthony had made him search. How humiliating was that: the call she got was from a lawyer, to ask for an alibi, not dinner, not a movie, not a walk by the Charles.

He thought of the summer job that would go to someone else. Where would Robert be in two months' time? Not camping in the Adirondacks, that much you could bank on.

All too often, he thought of Clara. When he did, it felt as if iodine or vinegar flowed through his veins. He imagined how condescendingly sad she'd be acting. He pictured her talking about him as she lay entwined in the orangutan limbs of that J.Crew model, telling him how she'd seen it coming, how Robert had turned cold on her, how he'd been duped by politics, chosen his crazy, hubristic roommate over her--and for what?

Turo. Really, it was Turo and only Turo who woke him in the night again and again. Turo was the star of all his dreams, a Turo as versatile as Meryl Streep: menacing, mocking, beguiling, blaming, seducing. In one dream, Robert was in bed with Turo and they were naked. In that one, Turo apologized. But they were all nightmares; it didn't matter what went on, how convoluted the plotlines. Funny, in a way, how this was the only Turo that remained, Dream Turo. The actual Turo had vanished. Escaped, said Anthony.
Absconded
. JFK to Manila, the day after the fire.