"Know about him?" Neil asked, clearly a little baffled by the curious urgency he heard in my voice.
"About his life."
"Not very much, I guess," Neil answered. "He talks about music, sometimes. What bands he likes, that sort of thing."
"Has he ever talked about girls?" I asked.
"No."
"How about friends? He doesn't seem to have any friends."
Neil shrugged. "He's never mentioned anyone."
"Okay," I said. "How about the people he delivers to. Have you ever heard any complaints?"
"What kind of complaints?"
"Anything about him, anything he did that seemed ... strange."
Neil shook his head violently. "Absolutely not, Eric. Never!"
I looked at him pointedly. "You're sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
I nodded. "Okay," I said. "I just thought he might have come to you. I mean if—"
"If what?"
"If he had any ... problems he wouldn't know how to deal with."
"What kind of problems?" Neil asked. He looked genuinely baffled. "I mean, he wouldn't talk to me about girls, right?"
"I guess not."
He looked at me curiously. "It bothers you, doesn't it? That Keith doesn't have a girlfriend?"
I nodded. "Maybe a little. Meredith says it does, but I'm not so sure. I mean, what if he doesn't have a girlfriend. He's just a kid. That doesn't mean he's—"
"Gay?"
"No," I said. "Not just that."
Neil heard the awkwardness in my voice, the sense of trying to weasel out of the truth. "Do you think Keith's gay?"
"I've thought about it," I admitted.
"Why? Has he said anything?"
"No," I answered. "But he seems angry all the time."
"What does that have to do with being gay?" Neil asked.
"Nothing."
No one had ever looked at me the way Neil did now, with a mixture of pain and disappointment. "Yeah, okay," he said softly.
"What?"
He didn't answer.
"What, Neil?"
Neil laughed dryly. "It just seems like you thought maybe if Keith was gay, he'd have to be angry. Hate himself, you know, that sort of thing. A lot of people have that idea. That a gay guy would have to hate himself."
I started to speak, but Neil lifted his hand and silenced me.
"It's okay," he said. "I know you don't believe that."
"No, I don't," I told him. "Really, Neil, I don't."
"It's okay, Eric," Neil repeated. "Really. It is." He smiled gently. "Anyway, I hope everything works out all right for everyone," he said quietly. "Especially for Keith."
He turned back toward the front of the shop.
"Neil," I said. "I didn't mean to..."
He didn't bother to look back. "I'm fine" was all he said.
***
For the rest of the day, customers came and went. Neil kept himself busy and seemed determined to keep his distance from me.
At five the color of the air began to change, and by six, when I prepared to lock up, it had taken on a golden glow.
The phone rang.
"Eric's Frame and Photo."
"Eric, they're coming here again," Meredith told me.
"Who?"
"The police. They're coming to the house again."
"Don't panic," I said. "They were there before, remember?"
I heard the fearful catch in her breath. "This time they have a search warrant," she said. "Come home."
PART III
You stop now. You take a sip of coffee. You are halfway through the story you intend to tell. You realize that you have reached the moment when the lines you thought ran parallel begin to intersect. You know that from hens on the telling will become more difficult. You will need to speak in measured tones, make the right connections. Nothing should blur, and nothing should be avoided. Particularly the responsibilities, the consequences.
You want to describe how the history of one family stained another, as if the colors from one photograph bled onto another in an accidental double exposure. You want to expose this process, but instead you stare out at the rain, watching people as they stand beneath their soaked umbrellas, and consider not what happened, but how it might have been avoided, what you could have done to stop it, or at least to change it in a way that would have allowed lives to go on, find balance, reach the high wisdom that only the fallen know.
But the wheels of your mind begin to spin. You can feel them spinning, but there is nothing to do but wait until they find traction. Then, without warning, they do, and you understand that all you can do is go on, start at exactly where you left off.
FOURTEEN
Come home.
I often repeat the words in my mind. I recall Meredith's caught breath each time I repeat them, hear the icy dread in her voice.
I hear other things, too—a whispery voice, a gunshot—and with those sounds I recognize that I've gone through all of it again, reliving every detail from that first night when Keith and Warren strolled down the walkway and disappeared behind the Japanese maple to the moment when I passed under that same tree for the last time. In retrospect, I suppose, everything seems inevitable, the whole course of events summed up in the grim irony of that line of poetry I read while I waited for Keith to come home from Amy Giordano's house that night— "After the first death, there is no other."
But there was.
***
I drove home quickly after Meredith's call. The sun was just setting when I pulled into the driveway, the air beneath the spreading limbs of the Japanese maple already a delicate pink. Meredith met me halfway up the walkway.
"I sent Keith into town. Because I needed to concentrate on writing a lecture. That's what I told him. He knows not to come back for a few hours." There were tiny creases at the sides of her eyes, as if she'd aged several years during the brief time between her phone call and my arrival. "I didn't tell him the police were coming over. I was afraid he might do something. Hide something."
I looked at her quizzically.
"It could be anything," she added. "Some dirty magazine, pot, anything he wouldn't want them to see. And if he did that, you know, not even thinking about it, it would still be obstruction of justice."
"I see you've talked to Leo."
"Yes," Meredith said. "I told him I was going to send Keith to the store, keep him out of his room. He thought it was a good idea."
"Because he doesn't trust Keith," I said. "That's why he thought it was a good idea."
Meredith nodded. "Probably."
"Is he coming over?"
"Only if the cops want to question Keith." She looked at me worriedly. "I don't want to talk to them, either. Especially Kraus. On the phone, he sounded hard—like we're the enemy?" She looked at me pleadingly. "Why would he act like that, Eric?"
"Maybe he doesn't think we're exactly ordinary," I said cautiously. "Did Leo mention the hotline? Things people might have said?"
"Said about what?"
"About us," I told her. "He has a source somewhere. With the police, I guess. And this source, whoever it is, told him that the police had gotten the idea that there was something wrong. Those were his words—something wrong. He thought somebody might have called on the hotline, told the cops something about us."
Meredith looked stricken, helpless, a small creature caught in a vast web.
"Leo has no idea what might have been said," I added. "But with the police under all this pressure, he's worried they'll believe just about anything they hear about us."
Meredith remained locked in grim silence, but I could see her mind working.
"Maybe someone saw that car pull into our driveway."
"Maybe," Meredith muttered.
"And there's something else they might have seen," I told her. "Remember when Leo asked Keith if he'd ever been around the water tower? I'm not sure Keith told the truth when he said no."