Virginia Lovers (22 page)

“Takes one to know one,” said Danny. His voice fell faint and he gazed out the window as he spoke, though both Sean Merritt and Croom were looking at Thomas until he met their eyes, forcing them to focus elsewhere.

“You’re a homosexual yourself?” Croom said after a pause.

“Yes.”

“And did Brandon know this?”

“Yeah, he knew.”

“And did anyone else know?”

“No, sir. Well, maybe some people suspected, but they didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t go around broadcasting it.”

“Let’s get back to the night of the party,” said Croom. He was visibly embarrassed now, though Thomas knew him well enough to know that he would keep up the hard questions. “What happened while you were in the bedroom with Brandon Pierce?”

“I listened to him complain for a while.”

“And then what?”

“I went to the bathroom, right off his parents’ room, to get him a washcloth. He’d gotten sick again. While I was in the bathroom, Lee Tysinger came into the bedroom.”

“And what did you do next?”

“I stayed in the bathroom.”

“For how long?”

“For a good while. A half hour at least. Maybe longer.”

“Why didn’t you bring Brandon the washcloth?”

“Because Tysinger was in there.”

“You didn’t want to see Lee Tysinger?”

“Well, it didn’t seem like he wanted to see me.”

“And why is that?”

“Because he and Brandon were having sex.”

Thomas watched Sean Merritt scribble words on a legal pad. Croom asked Danny how he knew what was going on in the bedroom if he was in the bathroom at the time.

“The door was cracked.”

“You cracked the door yourself when you went to get a washcloth?”

“I used the bathroom first. I guess I forgot to close it all the way, because it was cracked enough for me to see what was going on in the bedroom.”

“And you stood there and watched these two boys have sex with each other?”

“Yes.” Thomas reached for his wife’s hand. She allowed him to take it.

“Why?”

“Well, I mean, what else was I supposed to do? Burst into the room and say hi? Tysinger would have killed us both then.”

“You saw Lee Tysinger kill Brandon?”

“No, I didn’t see it, but I know he did it. Who else would have done it?”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” said Croom. “So you’re in the bathroom still with the door cracked and the boys were in the bedroom as you say having sex. What happened afterwards?”

“When they were through, you mean? Brandon asked Tysinger to come back later, after everybody left, and spend the night with him. He said they’d have their own private party when everyone else was gone. He told Tysinger how much he wanted to wake up in his arms, take a shower with him, fix him breakfast.”

“And what did Mr. Tysinger say?”

“He told Brandon he wouldn’t stay overnight with him even if he was gay. Brandon kind of lost it then.”

“How did he lose it?”

“He said some things about Tysinger’s family.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Said they were trailer trash.”

“Is that all?”

“He said his mother was sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“As in no good. You know, worthless.”

“And what happened next?”

“Lee Tysinger hit Brandon.”

“Once?”

“More than once. He beat the hell out of him.”

“And you were watching?”

“Yes. I know I should have done something, but I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s hard to say why now. Everything I can think of feels really, well, lame. I guess I didn’t think it would go as far as it did. And also, I guess I thought Brandon pretty much wanted Tysinger to attack him.”

“Why was that, Danny?”

Danny seemed to harden even more when Croom called him by name.

“Because Brandon had no business asking a guy like Lee Tysinger to a sleepover.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s not the type of guy you ask to spend the night with you.”

“And why is this?”

“Because he’s a liar. He has sex with guys, but if it ever got out he’d deny the hell out of it just like he’s going to do when he gets up on the stand.”

For the next five minutes Danny answered the questions asked of him briefly, in a low monotone. Twice Croom asked him to speak up. Thomas paid close attention to Danny’s explanation of why he had not come to Brandon’s aid (he didn’t have anything much to add to what he’d said before but that he felt terrible about it, knew it was wrong) what he did after Tysinger left the room (helped Brandon into the shower, cleaned him up, and put him back into bed and returned to the party), and what he did next (stayed at the party for another half-hour or so, checked on Brandon again, found him conscious and still quite drunk, and drove home).

“You want to ask him anything?” Croom said to Merritt.

Merritt leaned forward in his seat, as if Danny was a kid, it seemed to Thomas. He hadn’t been a kid in a long time, and it had been a long time since Thomas had treated him like a kid. He was always so responsible, so dependable; when Thomas thought to describe the boy, the term
well adjusted
came always and swiftly to mind. And yet he sensed a deep discontent, an inner restlessness shown outwardly in the slightest ways—pauses in conversation, long stares out windows. Didn’t everyone feel such occasional sadness? Thomas had always been big on the Human Condition. So many of his editorials alluded to its inevitability, its inescapability. Now such easy determinism struck him as nearly cruel. He wasn’t dealing with a case history; this was his son, his first, the birth that changed everything, brought him into a world where time was even more his master.

“There’s going to be trial here in a few days,” Sean was saying to Danny. “We’re going to need you to tell the court what you told us here today.”

“All of it?”

“All of it and more. We need the truth, Dan. And we need you to testify against Lee Tysinger. You feel comfortable with that?”

“Comfortable?” Danny snickered, and Thomas did not care for his snicker, nor the sneer that settled carelessly across his son’s face. “You really care whether or not I’m comfortable, Mr. Merritt?”

“Okay, Danny,” said Sean. “I guess
comfortable
is not the right word. What I mean is, can we count on you to tell the truth about what you saw no matter what it will cost you?”

“Cost me? What have I possibly got to lose?” Danny let this hang for a minute. When no one challenged him he said, “Goddamn right I’ll testify against him.”

The edge in his voice, and the words themselves, sounded exactly like his little brother. It shocked Thomas, hearing Pete, though had he been there, this scene—Pete and his mom and dad together in a room with the chief of police and the district attorney—would have felt almost routine.

Croom thanked Thomas and Caroline, said he’d be in touch, and was halfway out of his seat when Caroline, who had not shifted in hers, said, “Wait a minute. I want to know what’s going to happen to him.”

Croom and Sean stared at her, then exchanged a glance, quick and quizzical.

“What’s that, Caroline?”

Croom’s smile was innocuous to Thomas, but he knew Caroline would find it patronizing, a challenge she would surely rise to.

“Daniel may think he has nothing to lose, but we all know better. I lost one son, and I’m not about to lose another. Danny didn’t murder anybody, but he knew who did, and he didn’t come forward. I believe you could bring charges against him for that, right?”

Thomas felt humiliated, both by Caroline’s resolve and his own failure to think of what might happen to Danny.

“Of course if there were any charges brought against Danny, we’d consider his helping us out here, Caroline,” Merritt said.

“What does that mean,
you’d consider
it?”

“It means we’d do what we could.”

“Not good enough,” she said. She leaned back in her chair and clutched her purse to her chest and held out until Sean Merritt agreed to her terms, which were nothing less than immunity for her only living son. Meanwhile, Thomas slumped beside her, slack with uselessness.

“Thomas, they’re going to humiliate him,” Caroline said to her husband later that evening. They had finished their silent, agonizing supper, and Danny had slipped off to his little brother’s room to play records.

Caroline said his name in a way that made it clear she was waiting for a response.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“I mean they’re going to make him look dirty and dishonest. They’re going to ask him all sorts of questions about sex and they’re going to embarrass him and us too. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

He did, but he didn’t know what he could do about it save stop Danny from testifying, which was hardly an option. Thomas did not know what Caroline expected him to do. This was not a new feeling—for years he’d felt inadequate, as a husband and particularly as a father, had sensed in her some unsaid disappointment, disapproval over some duty unperformed if even recognized. The one thing he knew for sure was that he could never say to her,
Well, what do you want me to do about it?

“Yeah,” he said. “They will.”

“It’s going to be so hard on Danny,” said Caroline.

What do you expect me to do about it?

“He doesn’t have much choice here,” said Thomas.

“Not now,” she said, stirring her untouched coffee. “Not anymore.”

“What is it Caroline? What did I do?”

“No, Thomas. Not you, we. That scholarship.”

“We never told him—”

“We never discouraged him either, did we? I know I didn’t.”

“I don’t see the good of having this conversation now. The last thing I’m thinking about is that scholarship.”

“You don’t understand it, then. How important it is.”

“Was. Was, Caroline, and yeah, I do. I see now how much his wanting to be different, to be someone he was not, hurt him. I see how it led him to make some really awful choices, like not going to the police, and running away to Washington. But he’s not the one on trial, and if he was on trial he would not be on trial for trying to win a prestigious scholarship.”

He paused for a minute, held his breath for her response. When she did not speak he said, “This whole situation is just too goddamn big.”

Still she was silent, and he was grateful for that silence, took it for agreement:
Yes, you’re right, too goddamn big.

“Think of the Pierces,” he said. “And even the Tysinger boy’s parents. He’ll likely get life.”

“I can’t think of anyone else,” she said, and then after a few moments, finally, “I don’t see how you can either.”

Was he wrong for trying to think of someone else? Was that what she meant? Or did she doubt his ability to sympathize with the other victims? Sometimes when he wrote a particularly strong editorial she would not comment on it directly in a way that let him know that she found it an agreeably felicitous piece of writing, deftly semi-coloned, cogently argued, and finally a lie. He feared the views he expressed were not completely his own, he worried that he sometimes stole ideas from other, better columnists, and, worse yet, that he was as guilty as the next man of cheapening a stance with sentimentality. He worried that there was a part of his character so skilled in lies that the other, scrupulous side was not even able to recognize the truth. Lately he wondered if it was all a lie, his entire crusading life. And if Caroline was the first to see through him.

But as much as Thomas feared Caroline’s judgment, he also welcomed it, for he could not count on anyone else to know him as well as she did. Yet now her judgment infuriated him. There was nothing to say, no way to make this better. Caroline seemed lost to him. Her defection seemed the largest injustice of all.

“You really want to go through this alone?” he said, hoping not to sound surly.

“As opposed to how else?”

“A couple? A married couple? As parents?”

“Thomas,” she said, and her tone said it all: that he was naive to think that there could be any way to go through this except alone.

“I refuse to accept this,” he said, tossing his napkin onto the table. “The way you act, we never had a family at all. Just you and me and Danny and Pete living in the same house, sharing the same meals every once in a while.”

“That’s pretty close to the truth,” she said. “Except it was less than every once in a while.”

Her honesty rankled but did not shock. He’d rather go maudlin than admit to such a thing.

“You can’t be serious, Caroline. You’re grieving, I’m grieving, we’re both hurting, but you can’t revise everything according to now. We were more than just bodies coming and going.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said after a silence. “Maybe everything’s colored by regret. I’m trying to figure out what happened and it seems to me now that all this started a long time ago and we both knew it but didn’t want to know it and we could have stopped it somehow, we could have taken more time to be together and we could have talked more and listened more and—”

“You want to blame yourself, fine,” he said. “We’ve got a trial to face. Danny needs at least one of us to be there for him, and if you stay up all night mulling over every goddamn thing you did or didn’t do since the boys were wearing diapers, you’re not going to be much help to anyone.”

He stood then and carried his dishes to the sink.

“Where are you going?”

“To the office.”

“Of course,” she said. “Where else.”

On his way to the office, Thomas found himself driving straight through town, caught up in the nightly parade of teenagers ticking away their adolescence with repetitive loops. Same route every half hour, for this was how long it took Thomas to complete the circle from downtown out to the Little Pep on the bypass and back down the boulevard to the Glam-O-Rama. The parking lot of the Laundromat was mobbed as usual. He swung through the lot behind the other cars in the parade, surveyed the parked cars and knots of smoking kids for Pete’s friends, for he knew no friend of Danny’s would waste a week night idling in the parking lot of the Glam. They would be finishing up their after-school jobs or studying advanced placement chemistry or writing papers on whatever novels high-schoolers read these days. Thomas drifted behind a souped-up Grenada, back out onto the boulevard, pulled along by a magnetism not at all his own, a rhythm as dull and desperate as it was steady and predictable. So different from his usual frenzied and purposeful accounting of every waking moment. Not his rhythm, but whose? Pete’s? Coasting along the boulevard, Thomas felt without consciously trying what his youngest son must have felt all those nights when he did not return home until hours after the agreed-upon hour.