Red Leaves

unfounded suspicions, and occasionally, very occasionally, the shattering possibility of salvation. I hear the voice, which I had always judged weak and irresolute, but which now sounds powerful in my mind, forceful, confident, determined.

'I just wish it had all happened before'—her eyes hold the immemorial regret of our kind, the iron door that closes with each movement of the second hand—'I want to tell you how sorry I am.'

Her father's words echo in my mind—I'll be home before the news.

What had he meant by home? I wonder suddenly. Had he meant the house he'd shared with his wife and daughter? Or had it been some other home he expected to reach, the place where he hoped to find peace, or at least forgetfulness?

'It was all so terrible,' she says. 'So unfair. Especially since Keith had already called the police.'

You hear your son's voice, hear it as clearly as when Peak played it for you three days later.

'This is Keith. Keith Moore, and last night my dad and I went for pizza at Nico's and we saw a man who might have delivered pizza to Amy Giordano's house that night, and he smokes Marlboro cigarettes, and I just think you should at least go talk to him because, you know, well, maybe it's not too late ... for Amy.'

Now images rise from the gray depths. You see the man taken into custody, a little girl carried up basement stairs and out to a waiting ambulance, her long dark hair tangled and matted with filth, one eye swollen shut, her lips parched and cracked. You hold this image in your mind as you stare at the face that faces yours, healed by time, the lips moist, hair immaculately clean and neatly combed.

'He would have killed me really soon,' she tells you. 'He'd already dug the grave.'

You have no doubt that this is true, that had your brave and noble son not made his lonely, lonely choice, Amy Giordano would be dead.

'I only wish I could have thanked Keith.'

Now the final hours of your family life pass before you in a series of photographs that were never taken, but which you have carried all these years in the grim portfolio of your mind. You see Keith on his bicycle, pedaling back from his deliveries. You see him turn into the parking lot, holding one leg out as he always did, the photo shop in the background. You see him coast down the hill toward the shop, a green van now entering the frame. You see the slender barrel inch from the van's open window, a hunting rifle, complete with scope. You see your son in the crosshairs, his arm lifted, waving to you as he hurtles toward the shop, where you stand, staring helplessly, until the awful sound reverberates, and your son rises from the seat of his bike, rises as if rudely jerked from it by an invisible hand and hurled backward onto the dark pavement where he lies writhing as you run toward him.

'I don't know why he did it,' she says. 'My dad.'

You see yourself in pictures now. You see yourself collapse beside your strangely still son, gather his lifeless body into your arms, then shudder as another shot rips the otherwise ghostly silent air, and your eyes dart toward the sound, and you see a second body, slumped over the wheel of Vincent Giordano's green van.

'He did it,' you say, 'because he loved you.'

Her eyes glisten, and for a moment the two of you flow one into the other and become a single, irremediable ache.

'I'm sorry, too,' you tell her.

And it's true, you are sorry for Amy, and for Karen who never married again, and for Meredith who could not hold on to anything after Keith's death, could not live with you or even in the town where you'd made a family and briefly a good life, and so she had drifted first to Boston and then to California and then to some third place from which she has sent no word.

'Well,' Amy says, 'I just felt that I wanted to see you and tell you how sorry I am for everything that happened.' She shakes her head. 'There was just so much ... misunderstanding.' She starts to get up.

'No, wait,' you tell her.

She eases back into the seat and peers at you quizzically.

'I want to talk to you,' you tell her. 'You're getting married, about to have a family of your own. There are things, Amy, you need to know.'

She nods. 'I know there are,' she says.

'I'd like to help,' you tell her. 'Give you the benefit of what I've learned.'

'Okay,' she says, then waits, ready to receive whatever gifts you have.

You think of Warren, Meredith, Keith, the family you briefly held, then doubted, and finally lost. You recall your final glimpse of your house, the winding walkway that led from the driveway to the front door, the sturdy grill, the Japanese maple you'd lovingly planted so many years before, how on that final day you'd glanced at the ground beneath it, so baffled now, so tormented by doubts and suspicions that you could no longer tell whether you saw a pool of blood beneath its naked limbs or just a scattering of red leaves.

You close your eyes, then open them, and all of that is gone, and you see only Amy.

'I'll start at the end,' you tell her. 'The day I left my house.' And then, as in a family photograph, you smile.