"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"I was like a lot of fathers, I had great plans for my son," Price told me. "The trouble is, they weren't his plans."
"What are Keith's plans, did he tell you?"
Price shrugged. "I'm not sure he has any. Except this idea of getting away."
"He can't do that now," I said. "Not after Amy. He has to know that."
"I'm sure you've made it clear."
I realized that I'd done no such thing, and that the reason I'd not done it was no more complicated than the fact that I simply didn't like talking to Keith, seeing his dead, dull eye peering at me through the slit of his open door. The weight of the truth hit me like a hammer—the fact was, my son simply and undeniably repulsed me. I hated the way he slumped around, the tangle of his hair, the listlessness that overwhelmed him, the sheer dull thud of him. I hated all that, but had tirelessly labored to give no sign of it. Instead I had cheered his every modest achievement, praised and photographed his ridiculously infantile science project, patted him on the back so often and with such false force that my hand had grown numb with the practice. I had worked hard to conceal what I really thought, and I had failed utterly. For all his seeming obliviousness, Keith had seen through me, divined and suffered silently the full depth of my contempt.
Price touched my arm. "It's not your fault, the way Keith feels," he assured me. "I can see how much you love him."
"Yes, of course," I said, then shook hands, said good-bye, turned, and walked through the scented air with my wife's words echoing in my head—Everybody lies.
Meredith was on the phone when I arrived at the house a few minutes later. I heard her voice as I opened the door, no doubt surprising her, since it was still early in the day and I wasn't expected back until the end of it.
"Gotta go" I heard her say, then the snap of her cell phone closing shut. She'd sunk it into the pocket of her housecoat by the time she greeted me.
"Oh, hi," she said as she walked out of the kitchen. She smiled. "I was just making another pot of coffee."
On the counter behind her, I noted the coffee machine sitting idly, the first morning pot still half full.
"You're getting to be a purist, I guess," I told her.
She looked at me quizzically.
"A coffee purist," I explained. "Never drink coffee that was brewed more than two hours before."
She laughed, but tensely. "Oh," she said, "is that the rule for coffee snobs?" She tossed her hair. "Where do you hear things like that, Eric?"
"Television, I guess."
For a moment, we faced each other silently. Then Meredith said, "So, what are you doing home so early?"
"Peak was waiting for me when I got to work," I told her.
Suddenly she paled. "The hotline," she blurted. "Someone's spreading—"
I shook my head. "No. This is not about the hotline. They found out a few things about Keith. Things we have to talk about"
I turned, walked into the living room, and sat down on the sofa.
Meredith trailed behind and took the chair opposite me.
"Peak told me two things," I began. "That Keith has been talking to someone. Delmot Price. He owns the Village Flower Shop. Anyway, Price caught Keith stealing from him. They started talking about it. Keith told him that he was stealing because he needed money."
"Needed money?" Meredith asked.
"To run away," I added grimly. "That's why he was stealing."
She was silent for a long time, like someone hit between the eyes, dazed, groping to regain her balance.
"Peak talked to his teachers, too," I added. "They say he has a problem with low self-esteem." The last piece of information was the hardest, but I had no choice but to deliver it. "That's part of the profile, he says ... of a child molester."
Her eyes began to dart around, as if the air was filled with tiny explosions. "The car," she said tensely. "Do you think it was Price?"
"No," I said. "I talked to him right after Peak left. He's a good man, Meredith. He had a son like Keith."
"What do you mean, like Keith?"
"A kid with this problem, you know, esteem," I said. "Only worse. He killed himself."
Meredith's lips parted wordlessly.
"Price was just trying to help Keith," I said. "A shoulder to cry on, that's all."
Meredith shook her head slowly.
"It gets worse, Meredith. They found some pictures on Keiths computer. Little girls. Naked."
Meredith's right hand lifted to her closed lips.
"Not pornography exactly," I added. "But bad enough."
She stood up. "This is terrible," she whispered.
"Keith can't run away," I told her. "We have to make sure of that. No matter what he was planning before, he can't do it now. The police would think he was running away from this thing with Amy. They would never believe that—" I stopped because for a moment the words were too painful to bear. Then, because there was no choice, I said them. "That he was running away from us."
She nodded heavily. "So you have to talk to him, Eric."
"We both do."
"No," Meredith said firmly. "It would look like we were ganging up on him."
"All right," I said. "But I'm going to tell him everything Peak told me. Everything Price told me. And I'm going to ask him who brought him home that night. I want an answer to that."
Meredith released a weary breath.
"I won't take some bullshit story, either," I said. "This is getting worse and worse, and he has to know that."
"Yes," Meredith said. She seemed far away, and getting farther, like a boat unmoored and drifting out into the open sea. "All right," she said. Then she turned and made her way down the corridor to her small office, where I imagined she remained, waiting anxiously for her son to come home.
TWENTY
It was nearly four in the afternoon when Keith appeared.
During the hours before I finally saw Keith peddle down the unpaved driveway, I tried to find the best way to approach him. I remember how clumsy my mother had always been at such interrogations. She would ask Warren about some misdeed. He would deny it. She would accept his denial, and that would be the end of it. My father, on the other hand, had relentlessly pursued him, puncturing each alibi, watching sternly, his eyes gleaming with superiority as my brother steadily sank deeper into the mire of his own inept little falsehoods. If Warren claimed to have been watching television when some small misdeed had been committed, my father would whip out the TV Guide and demand to know exactly what Warren had been watching. If Warren were clever enough actually to have named a program, my father would rifle through the pages until he found the show and then demand that Warren tell him precisely what, exactly, the show had been about. He'd always managed to be two or three steps ahead of Warren, waiting for him like a mugger in a dark alleyway, poised to strike.
But Warren had been easy to frighten and confuse. After only a few minutes under my father's inquisition he would invariably surrender, confess what slight crime he'd committed, then accept whatever punishment my father decreed. Warren had always been pliant, straining to please, contrite, eager to say or do whatever my father commanded.
I knew I could not expect the same of Keith. His mood was volatile, resentful, sullen. At the slightest provocation, he might bolt out of the room, storm into the night, make his run for it. More than anything, what I feared as I watched him slip off the seat of his bike and trudge up the walkway toward the house was that in the end it would turn physical, that in order to prevent him from running away, I would have to use force.