But then there was that small and slight crack of doubt. Did I see that bat hurled into the air as I angrily walked away from the two of them, spinning in that arc of light and then disappearing into the black night?
I did not do that, Carly. How can you think I would do that?
“I know you’re still sad, Carly,” my father said. “Your mother and I know that and we understand, we do. But there is nothing for you to do but to begin to heal. I miss Truman, too.” He put his finger in the air to stop me. “Please, Carly. I know most of your time with Truman was over there, but I know how much you loved him. We knew what a good boy Truman was despite whatever he was in your life or didn’t become in your life or whatever…”
“Please, Daddy,” I said. “Please just leave me alone on this. You have to trust me that I’ll get better, but it has to be on my time and no,” this time I put my own finger up to stop him, “I don’t want to see a counselor and I don’t want to go the Engroffs’ to…what? To commiserate with those people who have lost their only son? It would be like me saying to you I understood what you were going through if you had prostate cancer.”
And then I began to cry and my father took me into his arms and I smelled his aftershave and stale coffee and a hint of late-afternoon perspiration and I compared it to the smells of Ethan Engroff and how I had wanted to take him into the woods and do something to make him forget at least for a few minutes.
“I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do, Carly, but I won’t let it go on much longer before I
do
step in and demand you get some help. No softball? You hardly look at your books? You rescheduled your SATs? I know, I know, you don’t have to say anything, but it can’t go on like this. Your mother and I are beginning to go slightly crazy with worry.”
And it was then, with that mild ultimatum, that I knew I could not live with the kind of torture I felt every single night when I tried to sleep and instead heard that sickening sound of those fists and saw my Truman down on the ground, never to get up again, never to look at me with his beautiful black eyes, never. My betrayal was an agony. It was agony that I had not only betrayed Truman by ever once being with Tommy Beck, but, even worse, that I’d betrayed Amy and Ethan by not going to them straightaway and telling them the truth. That I had stood by and watched their son brutally murdered by a person not fit to even be in the same room with Truman, let alone to touch him or think he had the right to end his life.
I can’t imagine how much he must have been freaking out after I left that night. I don’t know what he did with the bat or with his own bloody clothes. I know he must’ve thought so many thoughts those first few weeks. Because even though he almost immediately started walking by me in the hallway and giving his little show of regret and contrition—
Please, Carly, please, I did not do that! How could you think I would do that?—
I knew what he really was thinking was,
How do I find out if she is going to finally tell?
I know that’s what he was thinking. I know he was.
A few times when he walked by and said the same words,
Please, Carly, please,
I dropped my shoulders as a sign of recognition or surrender and I knew at once he was encouraged until one day he stopped there and waited as I took the books out of my locker. When I stood I saw his face, and he had that look of remorse but also of assurance I’d once loved to see.
“I thought…” And he stopped and waited for me to say something but I didn’t. I didn’t walk away, either, though, and I could see a sliver of relief that I stood there. Tommy’s expression then reminded me of the times I’d gradually opened the door to my room after a scary movie and finally walked in to find everything was the same. I could see he was making those same calculations in his head.
“What?” I finally said, impatiently. “What do you want, Tommy?”
“I thought…I thought we could talk. I thought maybe after school…”
“I’m busy,” I said before he could finish.
“I just need to talk to you is all, Carly.”
He’d used his eyes to get me to do things in the past so many times and now he was doing it again, his eyes smoldering with the whole background of his father being an asshole and his mother putting up with his father and kissing Tommy’s ass and his sister Sam resenting the attention he’d always been paid because of his athletic ability and the coaches making the teachers make special cases for him and me, me, me, sleeping with him for all of those reasons and the fact that at one time I’d thought he was so beautiful to look at. He was using that now, using his eyes to try to draw me back.
“What do you want to talk about?” I said, shifting my book bag so it wouldn’t be so heavy to one side.
He leaned into me and I smelled the special cologne he wears and I wondered if he was already wearing it for someone else. He put his face close to mine. “You know, Carly. Jesus Christ, we have to talk about what I’ve been trying to tell you and you won’t fucking listen. I don’t know what happened after I left, but it wasn’t me!”
“You might need to talk,” I said. “I didn’t do anything but watch, Tommy.” And then I wondered if I’d said that a little too loudly. The hallway was clearing for the next class.
“No,
we
do. I need to talk to you.”
I nodded and looked away from him and down the hallway. We stood side by side for too long. I heard the second buzzer for our next class. Finally I looked at him.
“I have to go. I have class.”
“Can we?” he said, his voice persistent and almost full of alarm.
I looked away from him again and nodded.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
I started to walk away and he grabbed me by the arm. I turned on him and stared at his hand. He withdrew it quickly. I turned again and began to walk away. Again, I thought of Tommy cracking the door to his room, hoping there was not anyone or anything on the other side.
Ethan
Thirty-one days after Truman’s death
From Persia to Tioga County and Wellsboro is approximately a four-hour drive, depending on traffic. I left at four in the morning on a Wednesday. I didn’t tell Amy. The drive was as beautiful as it had been when I’d gone there with Amy and Truman now two years ago. It was almost the same time of year and, although the first time was an adventure for all of us, I thought of this time as an adventure also. Alone. I’d bought a six-pack of Heineken for the ride and the six-pack sat on the floor of the passenger side for most of the ride. The trees, as I got further on Route 80, had less fully developed leaves, even though it was now the middle of April. It had been a long and hard winter in that area. I’d read that in the Google research I’d done. The trail the three of us had walked to the bottom of the canyon and its return was closed due to mudslides and felled trees. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be hiking this time.
For the past three weeks, every Wednesday, I’d taken eight hundred dollars cash out of the TRUAM business account. I told Susan not to be alarmed by the withdrawals. I told her I’d needed the money to begin to search for a place for Amy to “rest.” She’d nodded her understanding. This was one of the reasons I’d always felt so happy to have Susan, to keep her content with raises and good insurance and tolerating her fastidious and fussy and finicky personality. She protected my interests. But now I wondered if I should fire her. She had that suspicious, sidelong look whenever monetary questions arose, as if the money were partially hers and she needed to keep a close watch on it. In the past I’d appreciated her exactness about TRUAM’s money, but now it only complicated these transactions.
The farther west I drove the harsher the land became. It doesn’t have the softness of the part of New Jersey where the three of us live. The two of us now. The trees struggle in this harsh and less loamy soil, and I thought of Truman and how he’d struggled in an environment that spurned those not suited for the political and social climate I’d unwittingly placed him in. Or maybe I saw it as a struggle… No. His murder proved that where I’d made him and Amy live was not suitable.
I saw now how arrogant I’d been. I thought of the day I’d bought Amy the Dolce & Gabbana and how pompous I was to think I could just begin a business and that the world according to me would continue to grant me unending privilege. I’d continued on that course until the day my son was killed. My spurious notion that our lives were special, and protected somehow, not by God, really, but by some inscrutable force, was wrong, very wrong. Now it’s clear that my belief system, such as it was, was haphazard and self-important. The one-star general would assent to that characterization. If he’d voiced his opinion, he would’ve said,
Boxes? Who the fuck makes a living manufacturing boxes?
Good question. Who does?
I
did. Although the general had been in the business of boxes also, but his contained bodies. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm.
Taking Amy and my Truman to Europe and crisscrossing the United States and having our long weeks and summers on Cape Cod, staying weeks on end in Camden, Maine, and it seemed so perfect because I’d invented it all and felt…what? god-like? impervious? likely to appear on anyone’s fatuous list of what success is, because I’d invented some way to make money that didn’t require thought? Every night since Truman had died I’d been hashing over the same admissions of my own guilt, drinking whiskey after whiskey knowing we should’ve lived in Manhattan—I think of Manhattan as full of profiteers, though of course it would’ve been a better, more open place for a gay kid to grow up—and I should have done work that had nothing to do with the pursuit of profit and the community of profiteers who inhabit the town and area of the state I housed my wife and child in. I was guilty. I was fucking guilty. Now I had to show contrition.
Driving on 80 West I felt Truman in the car with Amy and me again, bemoaning his involvement in this “hare-brained” idea. I was the genesis of all the hare-brained ideas. And I should have known that the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania—
the Grand-fucking-Canyon!
in Truman’s mind—would be boring as sin to a fifteen-year-old kid. But he’d loved it and I have the pictures to prove it. Amy took a picture of me and Truman on the trail coming back up from the bottom of the canyon, arms around each other, his head resting on my shoulder, his smile the real, genuine Truman smile, me smiling too, knowing that, quixotic trip or not, my son was glad to be with us. The vacation had been a success. Truman had been gregarious, warm, very close with us both. He may have been experimenting with cigarettes at that time. He’d leave the room in our hotel at midnight, stealthily, thinking we were both asleep. I wanted to get up and follow him, but Amy refused to let me.
It’s Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Ethan. No one is going to steal him away from us. If he’s smoking, he’ll soon quit.
There was that smell of cigarette smoke when he returned an hour later. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t.
And he did quit. Amy was right. Not a speck of evidence that he ever smoked tobacco again, even though I smoked until I was in my mid-thirties and still long for a Camel non-filter on nights when I anguish to see the face of my son. I don’t, though. I only prevent myself from lighting up because of Truman.
Don’t you see, Tru, that everything I do now, every action I take is considered under your scrutiny? I want to please you. I want you to still love with me. You will see.
Off of 80 and onto Route 15 North toward Wellsboro, through spectacular country. Mountains on either side of the road. Suddenly I began to cry. I could feel Truman in the back of the car, prone on the seat, texting or reading, or listening to music, anyway refusing to sit up and look at the view. His own silent protest for having to join us.
I paid cash for gas and, even though I have an E-ZPass, I paid cash for the tolls. When I reached the outskirts of Wellsboro, I found a small motel with vacancies, poised on a hill overlooking a small valley. There were a few trucks in the parking lot, and I decided to go inside and see what the reception area looked like. There was a television blaring behind a curtain. The room was small with pine walls and a large picture of the real Grand Canyon, perhaps as a joke. There was a Coke machine, a rack stuffed with brochures for “sights to see,” an ice machine, curtained windows (clean), a counter shiny with polish. No smell of cigarettes. Two chairs with plastic covering, but clean, on either side of a window looking out at rows of rooms on two floors.
“Hello,” I yelled. I heard a stirring.
A man came out, a patch of wispy gray hair attached to the top of his head. He looked as if he’d just come from a nap, though I didn’t know how he could’ve slept with the din of the TV. He had on a flannel shirt and a pair of creased slacks. The shirt was buttoned to the top and above that hung a fleshy waddle. He was clean-shaven, tanned, probably in his mid-sixties.
“Didn’t hear you with the television blasting. The old lady can’t hear too good.” He smiled as if I’d been part of a long-standing inside joke. He leaned out over the counter where there was an overhanging roof. My car was parked in front of the window, my license plate in full view.
“Come up to see the canyon?” He leaned back and stood staring at me. He had a nice smile, friendly. His hands were clean, manicured fingernails. He stooped behind the counter and came up holding a card.
“Yes,” I said.