'Right? You mean because you've decided that Warren was a pedophile?' Her gaze was pure challenge. 'And what, Eric, makes you so sure of that? A few pictures on his computer? The fact that he liked to watch kids play? Jesus Christ, anybody could—'
'More than that,' I interrupted.
'What then?'
I shook my head. 'I don't want to go into this anymore, Meredith.'
I started to turn away, but she grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face her. 'Oh no, you don't. You're not walking away from this. You accuse Keith of being a pedophile, a kidnapper, and God knows what else. You accuse me of suggesting that something awful is in your family. You do all that, and then you think you can just say you're tired and walk away? Oh no, Eric, not this time. You don't walk away from an accusation like that. No, no. You stand right here and you tell me why you're so fucking sure of all this bullshit.'
I pulled away, unable to confront what I'd seen in Jenny's room that morning, then conveyed to Warren in a single glance, how, upon that accusation, he must have finally decided that the world was no longer a fit place for him.
But again Meredith grabbed my arm. 'Tell me,' she demanded. 'What did Warren or Keith ever do to—'
'It has nothing to do with Keith.'
'So, it's Warren then?'
I gazed at her desolately. 'Yes.'
She saw the anguish flare in my eyes. 'What happened, Eric?'
'I thought I saw something.'
'Something ... in Warren?'
'No. In Jenny.'
Meredith peered at me unbelievingly. 'Jenny?'
'The day she died I went into her room. She was trying desperately to tell me something. Moving all around. Lips. Legs. Desperate. I bent down to try to hear what she was saying, but then she stopped dead and pulled away from me and just lay there, looking toward the door.' I drew in a troubled breath. 'Warren was standing at the door. He'd been with Jenny that night and...' I stopped. 'And I thought maybe he—'
'Jesus, Eric,' Meredith gasped. 'You said that to him?'
'No,' I answered. 'But he saw it.'
She stared at me as if I were a strange creature who'd just washed up on the beach beside her, a crawler of black depths. 'You had no evidence of that at all, Eric,' she said. 'No evidence at all that Warren did anything to your sister'—there was a lacerating disappointment in her gaze—'How could you have done that? Said something like that without ... knowing anything?'
I thought of the way she and Rodenberry had stood together in the parking lot, their bodies so close, the cool air, the night, the rustle of fallen leaves when the wind touched them. 'You don't always need evidence,' I said coldly. 'Sometimes you just know.'
She said nothing more, but I felt utterly berated, like a small boy whipped into a corner. To get out of it, I struck back in the only way that seemed open to me.
'I saw you tonight,' I told her.
'Saw me?'
'You and Rodenberry.'
She seemed hardly able to comprehend what I was saying.
'In the parking lot at the college.'
Her lips sealed tightly.
'Talking.'
Her eyes became small, reptilian slits. 'And?' she snapped. 'What are you getting at, Eric?'
'I want to know what's going on,' I said haughtily, a man who knew his rights and intended to exercise them.
Fire leaped in her eyes. 'Wasn't Warren enough for you, Eric?' she asked. 'Isn't one life enough?'
She could not have more deeply wounded me if she'd fired a bullet into my head, but what she said next was said with such utter finality that I knew nothing could return me to the world that had existed before she said it.
'I don't know you anymore,' she added. Then she turned and walked up the stairs.
I knew that she meant it, and that she meant it absolutely. Meredith was not a woman to make false gestures, bluff, halt at the precipice, or seek to regain it once she'd gone over. Something had broken, the bridge that connected us, and even at that early moment, when I was still feeling the heat of her eyes like the sting of a slap, I knew that the process of repair would be long, if it could be done at all.
TWENTY-FIVE
Warren was buried on a bright, crisp afternoon. My father had told me flatly that he had no intention of going to the funeral, so it was only the strained and separating members of my second family, along with a few people Warren had gotten to know over the years, regulars at the bars he frequented, who came to say good-bye to him.
Meredith watched stiffly as the coffin was lowered into the ground, Keith at her side, looking even more pale and emaciated than usual. He'd reacted to Warren's death by not reacting to it at all, which was typical of Keith. Standing at the grave, so small a force beside the tidal wave of his mother, he looked incapable of weathering any of life's coming storms. I could not imagine him ever marrying or having children or adequately managing even the least complicated and demanding aspects of life.
When the funeral was over, we walked out of the cemetery together, Merediths body so rigid, her face so stonily composed, holding down such sulfuric rage, that I thought she might suddenly wheel around and slap me.
But she didn't, and so, as we all passed through the gate of the cemetery, I suppose we looked like a normal family, one whose members shared grief and joy, made the best of whatever life sent our way.
At least that is certainly how we appeared to Vincent Giordano.
He was standing outside his delivery van, its door oddly open, as if in preparation for a quick getaway. His eyes were no longer moist and bloodshot, not at all like the day he'd approached me outside the photo shop. He stood erect, rather than stooped, and there was nothing broken or beggarly in his posture. He pulled away from the van as we approached our car, his body rolling like a great stone toward us.
I looked at Meredith. 'Get in the car,' I told her, then turned to Keith. 'You, too.'
By then Vince was closing in.
'Hello, Vince,' I said coolly.
Vince stopped and folded his large beefy arms over his chest. 'I just came to tell you it won't work.'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'That brother of yours shooting himself,' Vince said. 'It's not going to get that son of yours off the hook.'
'Vince, we shouldn't be having this conversation.'
'You heard what I said.'
'Its in the hands of the police, Vince. And that's where it should be.'
'You heard what I said,' Vince repeated. 'That kid of yours is not going to get away with it. You can hire a fancy lawyer, do whatever else you want to, but that kid is not going to get away with it.' His eyes flared. 'My little girl is dead.'
'We don't know that.'
'Yes, we do,' Vince said. 'Two weeks. What else could it be?'
'I don't know,' I said.
He looked over my shoulder and I knew he was glaring at Keith.
'They found his cigarettes at Amy's window,' Vince said. 'Outside her window. He said he didn't leave the house. So, whose cigarettes are they, huh? Tell me that. Why did he lie, tell me that!' His voice rang high and desperate, reaching for heaven. 'Tell me that. You or that fancy lawyer you hired to protect his fucking ass!'
