Red Leaves

'Keith wouldn't talk to a counselor,' I said.

'How do you know?'

'He doesn't talk to anybody.'

'But everyone wants to reach out, don't you think, to someone?'

'You sound like a counselor, yourself.'

'I'm serious, Eric,' Meredith said. 'Maybe we should think about setting up something with Stuart.'

I didn't know what to say, whether counseling was a good or bad idea at this point, and so I simply said nothing.

'Look,' Meredith continued, 'Stuart's going to be at Dr. Mays's party on Friday. I'll introduce you. If you think Keith might respond to him, we can go from there.'

'Fair enough,' I said.

With that, Meredith turned out the light.

I lay in the darkness, laboring to fall asleep. But sleep eluded me, and as time crawled forward, my mind drifted back to my first family, which, for all its tragedies, seemed less besieged by trouble. A sister dead at seven, a mother impaled upon a steering wheel, a destitute father living out his days in a modest retirement home, an alcoholic brother—these were, for all their misfortune, not problems unknown to other families. Other families had yet different problems, but those, too, now struck me as common, ordinary. In comparison, Keith's situation was much darker and more sinister. I couldn't shake the image of him slouching out of the shadows and into the house that night, then stealthily trudging up the stairs to face the door when I spoke to him, as if he were afraid to look me in the eye. There was something familiar in the scene, a sense that I'd lived through it before. But try as I did, I couldn't bring the earlier moment back until I suddenly remembered how, on the morning before Jenny's death, Warren had returned from Jenny's room where he'd been more or less stationed by my father to see her through the night. It wasn't a job he'd wanted, and he'd tried to get out of it, but my father had insisted. 'You just have to sit by the goddamn bed, Warren,' he'd barked, a clear suggestion that any more complex task would have been beyond my brother's limited capacity. Warren had gone to Jennys room at midnight, then returned to his own room when my mother relieved him at six in the morning. He'd looked lost and bedraggled as he trudged down the corridor in the dawning light, his heavy footsteps awakening me so that I'd walked out into the hallway, where I saw him standing, facing the door, just as Keith had, his eyes fixed and unmoving, unable to look at me when I'd asked about Jenny, muttering only, 'I'm going to bed,' before he opened the door to his room and disappeared inside.

It was the similarity in those two scenes that struck me now, one that went beyond the stark choreography of two teenage boys tired and bedraggled, walking down a hallway, standing rigidly before the closed doors of their rooms. There was a similarity of mood, tone, a sense that these two boys were laboring under similar pressures, both of which had to do, I realized suddenly, with the fate of a little girl.

My anxiety spiked abruptly. I drew myself from the bed, walked out into the corridor, then down the stairs to the unlit kitchen, where I sat in the darkness and thought each scene through again and again, trying to locate some reason beyond the obvious one as to why they so insistently bore down upon me.

It came to me slowly, like the building light of dawn, darkness giving way to gray, then to steadily brightening light. The real similarity was not between the two scenes, but between my brother and my son, the fact, hard though it was for me to admit, that in some sense I thought of both of them as losers in life's cruel lottery, locked in failure and disappointment, members of that despised legion of middle-aged drunks and teenage geeks whose one true power, I thought, must be their unheralded capacity to control their own consuming rage.

He took her hand and led her inside.

Warrens words suddenly called another scene into my mind, Keith summoned by the Giordanos to babysit this daughter they so completely loved. Amy Giordano. Raven-haired, with flawless skin, smart, inquisitive, her future impossibly bright and radiant, destined to be one of life's winners.

Keith's words tore through my brain in a sudden, chilling snarl—Princess Perfect.

In my mind I saw Keith take Amy's hand and lead her inside the house. Could it be, I wondered, that her beauty and giftedness worked on him like an incitement, everything about her an affront, her shining qualities always in his face, goading him from the general sluggishness that would have otherwise stayed his hand.

My own stark whisper broke the air. 'Could he have hated her?'

I felt another anxious spike, walked out into the yard, and peered up into the nightbound sky where, in the past, I'd sometimes found comfort in the sheer beauty of the stars. But now each glint of light only reminded me of the mysterious headlights of the car I'd seen that night. Now I imagined a mysterious figure behind the wheel, Keith on the passenger side, then I added a frightful third image, a little girl crouched naked on the floorboard, tied and gagged, whimpering softly if still alive, and, if not, stiff and silent, my son's unlaced tennis shoes pressed against her pale, unmoving face.

ELEVEN

It was a horrible vision, a fear for which I had no real evidence, and yet I couldn't rid myself of it. All through the night, I thought of nothing but that car, the ghostly driver, my son, all of it tied to the fact that Amy Giordano was incontestably missing and my growing suspicions that Keith had lied to me and to others for no reason I could figure out.

I alone knew about the car, of course, but by morning I also knew that it wasn't a knowledge I could keep to myself anymore. And so, just after Keith trooped down the stairs, mounted his bike, and headed off to school, I broke the news to Meredith.

'I think Keith may be hiding something,' I blurted.

Meredith had already put on her jacket and was headed for the door. She froze and immediately faced me.

'He said he walked home that night, but I'm not sure he did.'

'What makes you think he didn't?'

'I saw a car pull into the driveway up by the road,' I said. 'Then, just a few seconds later, Keith came walking down the drive.'

'So you think someone brought him home that night?'

'I don't know,' I answered. 'Maybe.'

'Did you see who the driver was?'

'No,' I answered. 'The car didn't pull all the way down the driveway.'

'So you couldn't tell if Keith got out of that car?'

'No.'

'Why didn't you tell me about this?'

'I don't know,' I admitted. 'Maybe I was afraid to—'

'Confront it?'

'Yes,' I admitted.

She thought for a moment, then said, 'We can't say anything about this, Eric. Not to the police or Leo. Not even to Keith.'

'But what if he lied, Meredith?' I asked. 'That's the worst thing he could have done. I told him that when I saw him in town the day the police were here. Before I brought him back. I told him that he had to tell the truth. If he didn't, then he has to...'

'No,' Meredith repeated sternly, like a captain taking charge of a dangerously floundering vessel. 'He can't take anything back. Or add anything. If he does, they'll keep at him. More and more questions. He'll have to lie again and again.'

I heard it like distant thunder, dark and threatening, inexorably closing in. 'Lie about what?'

She seemed to struggle for an appropriate answer, then gave up. 'About that night.'

'That night?' I asked. 'You think he knows something about—?'

'Of course not, Eric,' Meredith snapped. Her voice was strained and unconvincing, so that I wondered if, like me, she'd begun to entertain the worst possible suspicion.

'The problem, Eric,' she added, 'is that if they find out he lied, there'll be more questions. About him. About