Confession

  I opened the scrapbook and gasped aloud.

  There, on the first page, blown up in grainy black and white photography, was my Geof. Somebody’s Geof. It was his senior high school photograph, greatly enlarged. It showed him as I remembered him from back then, with hair to his shoulders, a stubborn straight line of a mouth, clear skin, and amused, hard, cynical eyes. He looked like a tough, wild, scary kid who was good-looking enough to be dangerous to imaginations of nice girls like me. I was a freshman then. Judy Baker and Ron Mayer would have been seniors, too. I glanced up at the actual teenager in our living room, then back down at the photo of Geof. Funny, did they all look alike, these teenage boys? It was oddly still in the room, as the air usually is before tornadoes or hurricanes, as if the house was holding its breath, or maybe the two males were.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked them but got no response.

  I turned the pages one by one. Geof was the featured attraction on all of them. There he was on the football team, a short-lived career if there ever was one. There were newspaper advertisements for Bushware, Inc., his family’s dynastic hardware company, which he had chosen to abandon in favor of becoming a policeman. There were clippings and photos of his parents in the local society pages; more than once, coincidentally, they were shown hi group shots that included my own parents, before my mom got sick. There were articles about the Bushfield family’s relocation to up-state New York after Geof graduated from high school There was Geof listed as a new police cadet, then a photo of his installation, along with notices of every promotion, even stories about crimes he helped to solve—or not—and every little quote he’d ever given to a newspaper reporter. There were photos of his weddings—all three of them, which meant I finally came across my own mug grinning up at me. Of course, there being clippings about his weddings, there were Geof’s two divorce notices as well. Then there were even clippings about my own exploits. Toward that point in the scrapbook, things were not pasted in, they weren’t even neatly scissored but looked as if they’d been torn out of the newspapers and then stuffed into the scrapbook. The last thing in the book was a copy of an editorial that concerned my resignation as director of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation. In the ragged margin, somebody had penciled in the word wife.

  Too weird!

  I left the book open there, and I stared over at David Mayer, then at Geof.

  “So what’s this all about?”

  So what’s this round, red thing? asked Eve.

  “My mother saved all that,” David said.

  Geof caught my hand in his and held it. “Jenny, he says he’s my son.”

  An invisible hand shoved my chest, pushing me backward into the couch, making it hard for me to breathe or speak. Oh, no! I thought. No no no …

  “No!” The boy yelled it for me, springing to his feet and to vehement life. His eyes—hazel like Geof s—flashed a message of indignation and insult. “My dad was my father! You’re incidental, asshole, you’re not related to me at all, you’re Newtonian, that’s all, you’re just a biological accident, you’re just the stupid cause of an effect. My dad was my father! You’re nothing to me.”

  He was visibly trembling and, by then, so was I.

  Through his hand that still held onto mine, I could almost feel Geof absorb the attack, like a sponge taking water. He was known to snap at me now and then or occasionally at the cops who worked under him, and he could yell as loud as anybody, but he also knew how to contain it, how to accept the other person’s anger and hold it within him until he figured out what to do with it. This was one of those times when he wasn’t going to fight back, not yet.

  I, on the other hand, wanted to hit the kid.

  My sympathy for him dried up shockingly fast in the hot surge of protectiveness I felt for my husband. I wanted to shelter Geof from this boy’s accusations and hatred. I was taken by surprise at the intensity of my resentment, my fear, and my protectiveness.

  Like an angry child, I blurted, “Says who?”

  Geof gently squeezed my hand to restrain me.

  “He can take a blood test,” the kid shot back. “I’ve done mine. He can do it, too. Prove he’s not!”

  “How do you know?” I insisted.

  He turned my way again that half smile of bitter amusement I’d seen at the front door, and he said in a singsong, mimicking a toddler, “Because my mommy told me so.”

  “When? What did she say?”

  “I’ll get the blood test,” Geof interrupted me. “Don’t worry.” I couldn’t tell if he was saying that to the kid or to me.

  Don’t worry?! I stared at my husband and realized, My God! He’s excited, he hopes it’s true, he’s delighted! I felt utterly confused: How could he take this boy’s word just like that? It didn’t have to be true! She could have lied, and this scrapbook could be the product of a schoolgirl obsession that never died …

  “Why now?” I asked coldly.

  Geof looked at me, and I glimpsed his desire in his eyes.

  “Why is he coming to us now?” I repeated with cold precision for Geof’s benefit to try to wake him up. I felt rigid with suspicion and frantic with Geof’s lack of it. Was he just going to swallow a “son” whole simply because he’d always wanted one?

  He faced the kid. “Because Judy wanted me to know? Is that why?”

  Because you want money from us, is that it? I thought.

  “No! Hell, no!” David Mayer stepped away from the couch so quickly that he bumped against it. He came closer to Geof as if he wanted to loom over him but didn’t quite dare it. “It was my mom’s secret, and I’d rather you never knew the truth! I’m only here for one reason, and that’s because you owe me, cop!” And suddenly the boy was a hardened and fully grown man, his voice low and coarse and so threatening it made the hair on my neck rise again and a shudder passed across my shoulders. “I’ve come to collect your debt, that’s the only reason I’m here.”

  Ah yes, I thought. I was right. He wants money.

  And still Geof absorbed the boy’s attack, holding the boy’s anger and gently containing his own emotions as if he cherished everything that was happening to us in that room. I wanted to shake him!

  “What do you want from me, David?”

  By his first name, so intimate, so accepting!

  The kid leaned forward on the balls of his feet and stabbed his right forefinger at Geof. “You said … the cops said … my dad killed my mom. And then he’s supposed to have shot himself. And it’s all a fucking lie. My dad wouldn’t do that!”

  “It wasn’t even Geof’s case,” I protested.

  It was true that at one time, back when Geof and I first got together, he would have been involved with any case like that. But he was a homicide detective then, one of only a few on the force, and it was his job to investigate any suspicious death in Port Frederick. Things were different now. For one thing, he’d been promoted. And for another, our “town” had become a small city, thanks to a boom period of new business and population growth, all of which brought more crime, which therefore required a larger police force. He wasn’t the only lieutenant by any means, and now there were many cases that he only heard about, like any other citizen.

  But again, Geof squeezed my hand, infuriating me, preventing me from defending him, and I saw that I was so wrong: This was going to be much, much more costly than money could ever be.

  “David, do you have new evidence … ?”

  “Shut up, cop! I don’t have to tell you fucking anything! Here’s all you need to know from me: My dad didn’t do that! No way! I want you to fucking prove it! You pay up! You prove they didn’t die that way.” The boy choked over those words, he began to cry, but he fought the tears, wiping them furiously away from his face by hitting his own cheeks with the backs of his hands.

  I watched him coldly, feeling a detached kind of sympathy that I might feel for any stranger that I read about in a newspaper. It was too bad his parents were dead; it was tragic how they died, and ho
w sad for a boy to be left alone like this. But it didn’t have anything to do with us. There was a swelling of warmth in my chest, a hint of a deeper feeling of compassion that wanted to break through, but I fought it back, I didn’t want it, I wanted to stay cool, evaluative. If Geof wasn’t going to defend himself against this craziness, then one of us had to defend us.

  Raging over us, David Mayer choked out the words: “You prove they didn’t die like that! You clear my father’s name!”

  He practically spat the word father at Geof.

  “Well, David, if your father didn’t do it …”

  “My father didn’t do it!”

  “And you don’t think your mother—”

  “Are you kidding!”

  “Then who—”

  “You tell me, cop!”

  “All right, David, I’ll try.”

  I stared at my husband. “Just like that?”

  “Don’t give me your fucking try!” The kid’s voice was rising again, filling our living room with violent noise, shoving all the peace and quiet out of our home. I tried to pull away from Geof, I wanted to jump to my feet to confront the boy. Somebody had to stand up to this kid. But my husband held me down on the couch with both of his arms while the boy yelled at him, and I fumed. “Just do it, cop! You owe me! You pay up!”

  And still, Geof absorbed it all.

  “If I’m going to do this for you, there are questions …”

  “Forget it!” The kid looked as mulish as he sounded.

  “What do you mean?” For the first time, I heard a spark of indignation in Geof’s voice. “David, if I’m going to reopen the case, I’ll have to ask you—”

  “Not me, you don’t have to ask me anything, cop. I got no answers for you. Somebody else has all the answers, and that’s your job. Not mine.” The kid was holding something, which he tossed to Geof: keys tied together on a string.

  “What are these for?” Geof cupped them in his hands.

  “They’re for 3582 King Terrace.” The kid spoke with sarcasm so deep his voice couldn’t contain it and shook with it. “Home sweet home. You go there, you see for yourself. Don’t come asking me how to do your job. Listen, man, my dad taught me when somebody goes in debt, they don’t keep going back to the person they owe money to, they don’t keep asking him how they’re supposed to pay it back. That’s your job to figure out.”

  And suddenly, he was leaving, turning on his heel, turning away from us, heading for the hallway and the front door, moving out of our lives as abruptly as he’d entered them.

  “Wait!” Geof stood up, called out. “David, wait—”

  But he didn’t, wouldn’t, and even as Geof stepped around the table as if to follow and detain him, the kid broke and ran. I watched him disappear out of the living room, heard his feet hitting the hardwood in our front hall, heard the screen door open and slam shut, listened to the sound of feet running across gravel, an engine revving up, his motorcycle roaring out of the drive. He didn’t care if we heard him leaving; it was only his approach that he’d hidden from us.

  From the doorway, Geof looked back at me.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed.

  “Is that a prayer?”

  He smiled slightly, and I glimpsed it again, his excitement, and with his next words, he proved me right. “When he first told me, Jenny, I was so astonished! And I wanted to say, ‘No kidding, really? That’s incredible, let me look at you! You’re my son? This is fascinating! Tell me all about you, I want to get to know you! Come on in here!’ But I couldn’t, it was so obvious he hated my guts, I couldn’t show him how I felt right then.”

  “And how do you feel right now?”

  “It’s amazing!” But he either heard something in my voice or saw it in my face, and suddenly he changed course. “What do you think about it, Jenny?”

  “I think I could kill you.”

  He looked surprised, hurt. It appeared that he didn’t feel he had to absorb my anger in the same way that he’d taken whatever the kid dished out to him.

  “Why in the world do you feel that way?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, yes. This isn’t your problem.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said bitterly. “Right. Geof, I don’t remember you dating Judy Baker. When did you? Well, obviously you did about seventeen years and nine months ago, but when was that exactly?”

  He looked embarrassed. “Well, I didn’t exactly.”

  “You mean you just screwed her, was that it?”

  “Well, once. I think, just the once. Yeah.”

  “A one-night stand?” My voice rose. “This is the result of a one-night stand?”

  “Jenny, that’s the way she was, don’t you remember?”

  “She?” I shot back. “I guess that’s also the way you were.”

  “All right, But it was different for guys—”

  “It is not dif—”

  “And even if it was only a one-night stand, that doesn’t make him any less my son—”

  “Your son? Just like that? You accept it—”

  “Yes, I do! I think that scrapbook’s pretty damned convincing. And if Judy said so, if she actually told the boy, then I can believe it. Why can’t you? Why in the world would she lie about it—”

  “There could be a thousand reasons!”

  “Why don’t you want to believe this?”

  I stared at him, knowing he’d caught me out. I didn’t want to believe a word of it. I knew why, too, but I couldn’t tell him, not right then, because I didn’t know how to put it so that it wouldn’t sound selfish, so that it wouldn’t cast me in an unflattering light, so that it wouldn’t make him turn away from me.

  “It isn’t your problem,” he repeated more gently this time.

  How can you be so naive? I thought, feeling frantic again. Don’t you know this is going to change our lives, don’t you realize that?

  When I didn’t answer, he held up the keys in his right hand.

  “Want to go take a look?” he asked me nicely.

  “Now?” I said not so nicely. “Oh hell, sure, why not?”

  When I went back into the dining room to find my sandals where I’d left them, I forgot about the blue watering pitcher that I’d left on the floor, and I stumbled against it and knocked it over. At the same time, I heard him on the phone in the kitchen, talking to Lee Meredith, who was a young sergeant, one of Geof’s protégés in the Port Frederick Police Department. I heard Geof apologize for disturbing her Sunday with her family, I heard him confirm that she had assisted on the Mayer homicide/suicide, I heard him ask her to refresh his memory about the case, I heard him tell her the truth about why he was asking and to keep it confidential, I heard him ask her to come over to our house tomorrow night and to bring her files with her, I heard him thank her, and then I heard him hang up the phone.

  He appeared in the doorway in front of me.

  “Sergeant Meredith says everything pointed to murder/ suicide,” he told me. “She says it was an easy case, open/ shut, and she doesn’t think I’ll find any evidence to refute that.”

  “Then why try? Don’t you trust your own people?”

  “Oh, come on, we make mistakes.”

  “What if you have to tell him it’s no mistake?”

  “Then I’ll tell him.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll help him to accept the truth. And maybe in the process, I’ll get to know him.” He turned away from me, and soon I heard him bounding up the stairs to the second floor as if he were feeling a burst of adrenaline.

  I stared down at my feet. All of the water left in the pitcher had spilled onto the rag rug and seeped over onto the hardwood floor.

  “Damn,” I said softly, despairingly.

  Damn, damn, damn you!

  4

  THE DREGS OF THE DAY SMELLED LIKE BAKED grass and honeysuckle.

  It took us two hours to leave the house, because it had come to me as I was standing in my bare feet in the puddle of water on the dining room floor that I must refuse
to be rushed. And so I insisted that we clean up around the house and that we both shower and change clothes and even that we fix and consume sandwiches before we left. Geof went along with it all without saying much; he mostly walked around with a hypnotized look on his face, as if somebody had cast a spell on him. I didn’t attempt to break it. The tuna fish on wheat bread that we ate for supper sat like wood chips in my mouth, but I forced it down so I wouldn’t get hungry and cranky in addition to already being worried, angry, ashamed of myself, disappointed and depressed. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, chewing, swallowing, and I thought, Where did the happiness go? Then I looked at his face, so bemused, so stunned looking, and I amended that to, Where did my happiness go? From the looks of him, Geof still had his.

  Because of all of that delay, twilight was already weaving a sticky violet web around us as we climbed into the Jeep for the ride into town to 3582 King Terrace. It was Geof’s new car, a snappy, khaki-colored number with a tan top. In fact, we both had new vehicles although for different reasons. His rationale was strictly practical, he claimed: fourwheel drive, tow hitch, able to ford broad streams in a single bound. He nearly hadn’t bought it because of how it would sound: Geof’s Jeep. “Too goddamn cute,” he’d groused, and he did take some ribbing from the other cops, not to mention the robbers: Bushfield’s Bush Wagon was one of the milder nicknames, along with Yeof’s Yuppie Yeep and Geof’s Go-Cart. After he pulled a couple of them out of ditches last winter, what they said was “Thank you.” I had other reasons for buying my new car, none of them practical, and I didn’t make any excuses about it either.

  We sat clean and neat in our fresh shorts and T-shirts side-by-side separated only by the gearshift and his car phone and an emotional abyss the size of the ocean to the east of us.