somebody. Then, after the facts came out about the crimes, those people are shocked and dismayed. Family members, lovers, friends, none of them can believe what the offender did.
For a moment I thought about pointing this out to Sean, telling him that you can never really know someone, not really; that at times every one of us acts in ways that are inconceivable to others and, in retrospect, unthinkable to ourselves; that, in essence, no one lives up to his own convictions or aspirations. But from past experience I realized that bringing any of that up at the moment wasn’t going to help.
“We really don’t know who’s responsible for the murders,” I said as tactfully as I could. “Until we find Donnie, it’s best to avoid assuming too much. He might be all right. There’s still a lot to figure out.”
Sean looked at me oddly. “Aren’t most domestic homicides committed by husbands and lovers?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s missing.”
“Yes, he is.”
“The logical conclusion is it’s him.”
“We lack confirmatory evidence, and the logical conclusion when you lack evidence is to suspend judgment.” The words had a cold and impatient professionalism to them, and I immediately regretted saying them. I tried to tone things down. “I’m just trying to say I think it’s a little early to conclude anything.”
He looked like he was going to respond, but held back.
When Nan arrived with our food, Sean went ahead and ordered a bratwurst. Soon she brought that too, and the conversation during the meal felt stiff and forced, the past-both my history with Sean and my history with his wife-weighing down every word.
It hadn’t been an affair, at least not a physical one, but you can sleep with someone and never fall in love with her, and you can fall in love with someone without ever sleeping with her. From what I’ve seen, the second scenario is a lot harder to get over than the first.
And a lot harder to know how to deal with.
I’ve heard people throw around the term “emotional affair,” so maybe that’s what we’d had, but I’m not even sure what the phrase means. How many text messages or phone calls or smiles or secrets do you have to share before you’re having an emotional affair?
And is it something you should even admit? Do you go up to your brother and say, “Hey, five years ago I fell in love with your wife. But don’t worry, we never actually slept together”?
As far as I knew, Sean had no idea what had happened, and as time wore on, I could think of fewer and fewer reasons to bring it up. Contrary to the popular mantra of pop psychologists, I’ve always thought that when you apologize it shouldn’t be for your own benefit but for that of the other person. I don’t think you should ask someone to forgive you just so you can get something off your chest or quiet your guilty conscience. If an apology isn’t in the other person’s best interests, it’s not serving to reconcile anything. It’s just a subtle form of selfishness.
And in this case, I couldn’t see how my true confessions would serve Sean. After all, he’d had one marriage fall apart, and I would never forgive myself if I were the cause of his second one disintegrating.
But in truth, Amber wasn’t the only issue that stood between Sean and me.
My gaze shifted from her to the deer heads on the wall, and as Amber tried to navigate Sean and me through the conversation, I became lost in my thoughts.
Because a deer was what caused the rift between me and my brother.
Or maybe there was no deer at all.
22
It happened twenty years ago on New Year’s Eve when I was seventeen.
We were driving home from Amy Lassiter’s party.
A stark and cold and moonlit night.
Sean was behind the wheel and I’d closed my eyes, exhausted from cross-country skiing most of the afternoon.
I knew Sean had been drinking a little at the New Year’s Eve party, but we hadn’t been hanging out together and I wasn’t sure how much he’d had.
I never saw the deer.
He swerved, lost control of the car on the icy road, and we spun into the other lane, where an oncoming vehicle struck us, smashing into my side of the car and whipping us around toward the shoulder. We skidded toward the side of the road into a snowbank, which was probably the only thing that kept us from rolling over.
Sean and I both walked away from the crash, but the driver of the other car, a fifty-one-year-old woman named Nancy Everson, didn’t make it.
I never saw the deer.
At the time, the responding officers hadn’t questioned Sean’s story about why he swerved and, as far as I knew, hadn’t asked him if he’d been drinking at the party or done a Breathalyzer test. If they had, none of it raised any suspicions.
In the flickering swathes of emergency vehicle lights, I’d watched the paramedics roll the gurney with Mrs. Everson’s motionless body onto the ambulance. Then, troubled and deeply saddened, I looked away to the side of the road.
The moon was bright, and I expected to see deer tracks, but the field of snow looked pristine, unblemished.
Excusing myself for a moment from the paramedic who’d just checked Sean and was now approaching me, I walked closer to the side of the road.
No tracks.
I crossed the road and took some time to study the snow stretching beyond the other shoulder but saw no sign that a deer had recently fled across the field on that side either.
A week later, after Mrs. Everson’s funeral, I’d brought it up to Sean. “Which side of the road did you say the deer came from?”
“The right.”
“The right.”
He looked at me oddly. “Yes. Why?”
My heart was racing. I had one more question, and though I didn’t want to ask it, I did. “How much did you have to drink that night, Sean?”
I could tell by his silence that he was reading all the subtext of my words, and for a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, his voice had turned cold. “I only had two beers.”
I hadn’t replied. What could I say?
Whatever else Sean might have known about what happened that night, he kept to himself.
But things were different between us after that. He retreated into himself, and his normally infrequent outbursts of anger became more common, more pronounced. Everyone else believed it was from unnecessary guilt about the accident, but I’d always wondered if maybe the guilt was deserved.
Since then, the two decades of unwieldy silences had only deepened the rift in our relationship.
“Pat?” Amber said.
Her word jarred me back to the moment. “I’m sorry?”
She and Sean were staring at me.
“I was telling Sean how you might be teaching at the Academy again.”
“Possibly,” I said absently, still caught up somewhat in my thoughts. “Yes. I might.”
We talked for a few minutes about the Academy and how the move to DC might affect Tessa, especially if we left Denver before the end of the school year.
“She tells me it doesn’t matter, that she’s cool with it if I want to go.”
“She might be saying that just because she wants you to be happy,” Sean observed.
“True,” I admitted, a bit reluctantly. “You might be right.”
