“I do,” I said.
“What?”
“I know, for instance, that it’s a very good school.”
“I’ll tell Dad that. ‘Dad, Carly says it’s a very good school…for instance.’ He loves you so I know it’ll be the zinger. I think he wants to get in your pants, anyway.”
“What a fucked-up thing to say, Tru. You can be so fucked up, you know that?”
The thing was, I’d always had a small crush on his dad. He was really handsome—like his son—and he had this really sweet way about him. He was always putting his hand on my shoulder or touching my arm. Nothing perverted, just sweet. Plus he was soooo smart and so different from the other people in Persia.
Truman just smiled. “You know he does, Carly. Who wouldn’t who is straight and male? That’s why I can’t see what you see in… Never mind.”
That was the thing about him. I knew how he felt about Tommy and yet he tried not to say much about him. I could count the times on my fingers he ever even mentioned his name. He was so fucking frustrating. I guess I expected him to talk me out of even being with him, but he didn’t. It hurt me, because it seemed like he didn’t care enough to say how he felt. I probably would’ve dropped Tommy in a minute if he’d told me to. I know that sounds so fucked up, but that’s how much he meant to me, how much I wanted always to please him.
“Never mind what?” I asked.
“Don’t digress, Carly. Make believe you’re on the ball field. Stay focused.”
“You’ve never liked Tommy. Admit it.”
He took another hit and held it in his lungs longer than he normally did. I knew he was thinking. Finally he let out a cloud of smoke.
“I’m sure he’s nice to you, Carly. I can’t imagine you being with anyone who isn’t.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He’d been sitting down with his back against his bed, and he stood. I was sitting with my back against his couch. He stood over me unsteadily, looking down at me with his smile.
“Okay, Carly. Okay.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “First, if I were straight I’d marry you right now. We’d run away like Holden Caulfield always wanted to do with Sally or whatever her name was. Only we’d do it. You’d go with me. I know you would because you love me and I love you. There is nothing better than that. Nothing better. And if it wasn’t for the little thing about me I’d be the happiest person in the world with you. I really would. I could pump gas and we’d live in a cabin and all the things young people dream about doing when they’re in love. That’s what I would want to do.”
Tears started coming down his cheeks and dripping on my bare legs. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I’d never seen him cry before, and he was crying about me, about us.
“That’s what I’d want to do, Carly. Only I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair for you.”
He leaned over me and put his hands on the top of the couch and looked out at the beautiful lawns—the Engroffs called them that, “our lawns,” surrounding the house. I watched his shoulders shake and I wanted to get up and wrap my arms around him, but I didn’t. There were times I knew not to touch him. We were quiet together for a long time and then he turned to me. His face was streaked with tears.
“You asked for it.” He took another deep breath. “Tommy Beck is Neanderthal. I don’t know if they use silverware in that house. I’m almost sure they don’t. It would be a violation of their living standards. He is a perfect example of a boy who followed in his father’s footsteps…or wait, his father’s knuckle-marks. The only reason he’s made it through high school to this point is because he can do things with his body and do things with balls other more developed humans can’t. I don’t know what you see in him, Carly. I have my suspicions, but I will keep them to myself. He’s obnoxious, rude, and yes, Carly, his humor is scatological. But you would know better about that. I know you won’t be with him much longer, which is the only thing that prevents me from never speaking to you again.”
He stopped talking. I stared at him and realized it’d stopped raining. The light from the late autumn sun made his hair even more golden and part of his beautiful face was in shadow and my being so stoned made him look even more exotic, more perfect. There was a long silence and I was trying to think of something to say, something stinging so that I could hurt him for what he’d just said. But I couldn’t get any anger up to do it. I wasn’t angry. I was still too full of emotion about what he’d said about loving me, about us being together. No anger came. None.
Instead I began to laugh. At first it was like just fucking blurting out a laugh, sort of quiet, but then I thought about what he’d said about Tommy and then I started to laugh loudly, uncontrollably, so that I rolled over on my side and held my stomach and I laughed until it hurt. Truman and the room and everything else disappeared, everything but his words, and they were all mixed up and tangled and soon I was sobbing and I couldn’t stop that, either, until Truman finally lay next to me and put his arms around me and began to stroke my hair. I felt the strength of his arms and I never wanted to leave that floor, that room, that house, that sun, that beautiful, beautiful moment.
So I’m a coward in line with the rest of the mourners and then finally I’m embraced by Amy. She was holding me as if she could literally, physically absorb me. I love Amy, and I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I was weirded out. I could feel her fragile body, a body I’d always thought was strong and full of energy, and now it was like holding a bird with only heart and bones and no flesh.
“Drink wine,” she whispered in my ear, so seriously I couldn’t help but giggle. I could smell the alcohol on her breath and in her pores. It was so strong, badly disguised by the perfume I was so familiar with, that I finally had to tear myself away from her otherwise I would have gotten sick.
And beyond her was Ethan. He looked as if his body had been run through a car wash and then blown dry so the only thing left of this person I had loved all of my childhood was a bleached, dried-out shell. He held me, and I buried my face in his shoulder and I could feel Truman. For the first time I realized that Ethan Engroff and his son were the same person, only now he was nearly as dead as the son he’d loved lying in the box behind him.
And all the time he held me I couldn’t say the words I wanted to say to him: how I felt now and had always felt about his and my Truman. Truman who was always sprawled out on his bed and me across from him on his couch for so many days and for so many years, and always it was him looking at me with his black, Truman eyes. How could it be that Truman was dead? How could it be?
Detective Parachuk
Two days after Truman’s death
I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never encountered a more distraught woman. I knew she was on Klonopin, because I’d spoken with her physician. He told me he’d considered hospitalizing her because he was concerned she might be suicidal.
Once we’d confiscated Truman’s computer (his cell phone was never found)—it was easy to break his password, which was the name of his childhood dog and the number 9—we found nothing of much interest. Some gay porn sites (they must not have interested him because there were only two bites), e-mails to Carly Rodenbaugh, mostly about school and scoring pot, a few e-mails to a boy at Columbia—Logan?—and one particular e-mail to a boy in Cincinnati he’d befriended on Facebook. We were doing a check on him with the Cincinnati P.D., but it didn’t seem like it would come to much. He had 678 people on his friends list and all would be checked out, a laborious task. His Facebook profile was that he was born September 6, 1993, was interested in men, was a student at Persia High School and believed the universe beyond this globe was the only matrix of logic and reason.
Every inch of the park—trash, drains, inside World War I and II and Vietnam War artillery and statues—had been checked, and we’d found no cell phone, no baseball bat or other blunt object. A subpoena was in the works to acquire all his phone records, both incoming and out-going, but the process was full of legal jumping-through-the-hoops bull.
I met Amy Engroff in the same living room where I’d met her husband the day before. Her washed-out eyes reminded me of a sky where the earliest parts of high rain clouds are moving in. She never once looked at me during the interview. I was already seated when she entered the room. She was wearing a flowery dress with shoes like ballet slippers.
“I’m sorry I have to talk to you under these circumstances, Mrs. Engroff.”
She walked directly to me and extended her hand. I took it and it was as if I was touching something made of cold papier-mâché.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you are.”
She released my hand. After an unsteady journey to the couch she finally sat opposite me with her knees pressed together, her hands listless in her lap. Under any other conditions I would’ve thought she was beautiful. Even looking so pale and tired, she was.
“What do you want to know, Mr.…?”
“Parachuk,” I said. “I’ve already spoken to your husband about the circumstances of Truman’s death.”
She looked at me as if I’d said her lawn needed manicuring.
“Whatever did he say? I can’t possibly imagine. Truman was found dead in the park. He was beaten to death. He only identified him.”
From where I sat I could see the photograph of Truman in what his father had called his “black period.” She turned and looked, too.
“Truman is Truman,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
She smiled, a twisted gesture.
“That’s a wonderful question. A grand question. That question would be like me asking you how you do a police procedure. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what you meant even if you told me.”
“It might be easier to understand than you think. Where was Truman going the night you and Mr. Engroff last saw him?”
“I don’t know, Mr.…”
“Parachuk.”
“Yes. I don’t know. Truman didn’t say. He was very private most of the time.”
“So he didn’t say where he was going. Didn’t mention anything during the day? He didn’t have someone who he knew you might assume he was going to see?”
From the look on her face I could tell she thought the question was stupid and didn’t deserve an answer. When she didn’t offer one up, I said, “I’ve been told by the students who knew Truman at school, and his teachers and administrators, that he was brilliant.”
“Fuck them,” she said with equanimity.
Her fierce words were made even more startling by her flat aspect.
“Do you respond that way, Mrs. Engroff, because you think they had reason to fabricate that judgment?”
“No, I say it because all the people are terrible. All of them.” She glared at me for a moment and I was certain she was including me.
She stood and walked to a long table I hadn’t noticed on my first visit. There was a decanter of wine and two wine glasses. She poured a glass and, with the decanter poised, asked, “Would you like a glass of wine, Mr. Parachuk?”
I put my hand out like I was surrendering.
“No, thank you.”
She walked back to the couch and sat, took a large sip of wine.
“I’m not supposed to drink, but then…” she didn’t finish.
“In general, Mrs. Engroff, how do you think people felt about Truman…in school? In Persia?”
For the first time I saw some small sign of torment and sadness.
“I told Ethan we shouldn’t move here. I told him it was a horrid place with horrid people.”
She said this with a violence in her voice and I suddenly understood she was blaming her husband. I wasn’t surprised: Someone had to be at fault.
“Why?” I asked.
She laughed but it was a laugh like heat lightning, there and gone in an instant.
“Go through Truman’s things and then ask that ridiculous question. No…don’t you dare go in that room!”
I could hear the tick of a clock somewhere and I had to wonder who’d taken the time to wind it. Like before, silence went on too long.
“Tell me about Persia, Mrs. Engroff.”
Again, there was a short, derisive laugh.
“You don’t know for yourself, Mr. Parachuk? You haven’t lived here long enough to know how egregiously close minded these people are?”
A tear rolled down her cheek. She drained the wine in her glass and wiped the moisture away with her frail, white hand.
“Do you think a lot of the people here resented Truman’s lifestyle?”
“You mean the fact that he was…is gay? You can say it. Watch how easy it is to say: gay, gay, gay…or fag or cocksucker or…”
She stood again and went to the decanter and poured another glass. She emptied half of it while she stood there looking beyond me. I don’t normally feel emasculated by people—especially women—but now I felt the urge to stand, to meet her gaze at eye level. I didn’t.
“Your husband said you and Truman were very close—that you had a unique relationship that maybe would help us know more about who might have wanted to harm him.”
“Have you gone through the Persia phonebook? That might be a place to start.”
I tried a different tack.
“Mrs. Engroff, tell me about the relationship between Carly Rodenbaugh and Truman. I’m told they were best friends until recently.”
She finished the rest of the wine and placed the glass on the coffee table in front of her. She folded her hands together as if in prayer.