“Now that I’ve got you on the couch, I’m going to shrink its price!” he says, trying to sound like a famous Austrian psychoanalyst but coming across more as a horny Nazi. A mental health organization in Buffalo lodged a complaint, but it only encouraged him to do more.
Even though I kept fooling myself, thinking I could sidle past Ravelson’s like it wasn’t there, it just wasn’t possible. I’d crane my neck upward and study the corniced edge of the building’s roofline. The place where Scott had stood, for how long I don’t know, thinking God knows what, before deciding on a quicker way to descend four stories than taking the stairs.
He didn’t jump from the front of the store, but the side, which brought him down into the parking lot. Onto a handicapped spot. It was there that the police — Officer Ricky Haines — found him.
Walking past this time was no different. I stopped, and stared. The store wouldn’t close for another half hour, and there were the occasional couple going in and out, cars starting up and leaving the lot.
As I always did, I surveyed the scene. Starting at the handicapped spot, rising past the four rows of windows, stopping at the roofline.
How long would it have taken? Two seconds? Three? I saw his body falling, plummeting, hitting the pavement. Three seconds seemed about right. Certainly no more than that. What was he thinking on the way down? Was he terrified? Did he realize, once he’d gone off the edge, what he’d actually done? In those two or three seconds, had he wondered whether there was anything he could do to save himself?
Or was he happy? Did he hit the ground with a blissful smile on his face? And which would have been better? To realize, in his last second, that he’d made a fatal mistake, or to spend his last moment drugged to the eyeballs, meeting his maker as happy as a lark?
It didn’t do me any good to dwell on these things.
But there were so many to dwell on. Like how he’d gotten up there in the first place. I wanted to blame the good folks at Ravelson Furniture. After all, if they hadn’t given Scott a job for the summer, he wouldn’t have had access to the roof. But I knew that was akin to blaming Starkist for cutting your finger on the lid of the tuna tin. If anything, Kent Ravelson had gone out of his way to give Scott a break. The kid didn’t have much of an employment history, nor the kind of upper-body strength needed to work in a furniture store. But Kent found Scott plenty of tasks, even if they never included lifting a refrigerator. He even gave our boy a taste of sales, letting him work the mattress department one day when one of the regular salesmen was sick.
I had a sense that Kent, and his wife, Annette, who ran the store with him, had taken something of an interest in our son possibly because their own boy, Roman, didn’t want any part of the family business. He was twenty-one and, from what I’d heard, aspired to greater things than running a furniture store; he spent his time hanging out at home, tapping away at zombie screenplays on his laptop, which had, so far, failed to attract any attention from Spielberg or Lucas or Scorsese.
Donna and I had hoped the responsibilities associated with a summer job would have a maturing effect on Scott. Instead, it just meant he had more money to spend on booze and drugs, which he’d consumed in considerable quantities that night on the roof.
The police investigation, such as it was, concluded that Scott, possibly with friends, had been up on that roof more than once. They found a number of discarded liquor bottles, marijuana butts, and a couple of dropped ecstasy tabs.
What fun it must have seemed, having the roof to himself, a view of Griffon below, and in the southern distance, Niagara Falls, the Skylon Tower on the Canadian side looking like some enormous golf tee on the horizon.
I had been up there myself, twice, since Scott’s death. Both times, as a father, but I couldn’t help but take in the scene as an investigator. Trying to figure out how it happened, re-creating the events in my head. I could picture him larking about, letting the combination of drugs and alcohol carry him away. A brick ledge, a kind of lip, ran along the roof’s perimeter, but it was only about six inches high. Not a barrier that would break a person’s fall if he tripped near the edge, and certainly not a barrier that would present any obstacle to someone who thought he had the ability to fly. I’m usually okay with heights, but the two times I’d been up there, standing right up next to that brick lip, I could feel the vertigo kicking in. Was I really dizzy, or was I imagining Scott’s delirium at the time?
And I remembered vividly that knock on the door. Donna and I’d been in bed, but neither of us asleep, wondering where Scott was. I’d tried his cell without success, and was just about to get dressed and go looking for him when there was a hard rap on the front door.
“Oh God,” Donna’d said. “Oh no.”
I don’t put a lot of faith in premonitions or a sixth sense. But right then, when that knock came, I think we both knew we were about to get very bad news.
I’d run down to the door in my robe, Donna trailing after me. When I opened it, we saw a Griffon police officer standing there, a name tag on his shirt that read. When he saw Donna, I could see surprise in his eyes.
“Ms. Weaver,” he’d said. “I had a feeling, when I checked his wallet, it might be the same Weaver.”
“Ricky?” Donna’d said. “Why are you here? What’s happened?”
“It’s about your boy.”
We’d both held our breath. Officer Ricky Haines took off his hat and held it over his chest, obscuring his name tag. “I’m awful sorry, but I have some bad news.”
Donna clutched my arm. “No,” she’d said. “No, no, no.”
I’d pulled her into my arms as Officer Haines said—
“Hey, Cal. Cal? Cal?”
I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts of the past I hadn’t noticed a person standing to my left in the present. It was Annette Ravelson. She was late forties, round but not quite plump, what they might have called zaftig in another time. She stood about five eight, but would have been five five without the heels. Gold hoop earrings the size of coasters dangled below her poufy gray-blond hair, and there was a powerful whiff of some flowery fragrance about her.
“Hi, Annette.”
We’d known the Ravelsons even before Scott went to work for them. We’d bought furniture here over the years, then got to know them better during the summer Scott worked there. But our encounters since the incident had been few.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I kept saying your name, but you didn’t seem to hear me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What happened to you?” She pointed to my temple, which had puffed out slightly.
“Took a tumble,” I said. “No big deal.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I’m fine.”
Annette stopped looking at my head and sized up my vantage point. She had to know what had been going through my head.
“Is this a good idea, Cal?” she asked hesitantly. “I mean, coming by here all the time, standing here—”
“You’re right,” I said quickly. “Absolutely right. I should get going, anyway. I was just walking over to town hall.”
“Oh,” she said. Worry crossed her face. “Council meeting tonight?”
“So I gather.”
“Cal, please, tell me you’re not going to ask them for a new law mandating higher railings on the edges of buildings or something like that. That’s what people do these days. They think some new ordinance will prevent another tragedy like—”
“No, I’m not doing that.”
Now Annette Ravelson looked mortified. “I’m sorry. I should never have said that. That was awful of me. Forgive me.”