He clung to hope like a bare-knuckle climber clutching at a rock face. Robbie wasn’t remotely effeminate. Girls hung around him like fleas on a rat, pestering him for dates. Perhaps he was just shy? A late bloomer? It was possible.
Your kid was sucking my kid’s dick.
Mrs. Dellal was leaving, sweeping up her fur coat and Chanel quilted purse like Cruella de Vil.
“I mean it. If I see your homo son within ten miles of our house, or Dom’s school, I will call the police. And you better pray the cops find your boy before my husband does.”
The front door slammed shut.
Silence.
“Daddy?”
Lexi stood in the doorway wearing a white muslin dress with butterflies embroidered on the sleeves and a blue bow in her buttermilk hair.
Peter thought: Look how innocent she is.
“What’s a pervert?”
To his great embarrassment, Peter felt himself blushing. “Gee, honey, it’s, erm…it’s a bad word.”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, sweetie.”
“Oh. Well, what’s a homo, then?”
For God’s sake. How much had she heard?
“Why don’t you go on upstairs and play, Lexi. I’ll come up in a few minutes and join you.”
“I’m bored of playing.” Lexi dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Does pervert mean S-E-X?”
“Go and watch The Jungle Book. Tell Mrs. Grainger I said yes to TV just this once.”
Lexi skipped off to the playroom with squeals of delight. Peter sank wearily onto the couch. Oh, Alex. Why aren’t you here? Why is it still so hard? He knew he had to talk to Robbie about the Dellal boy. He just didn’t know where to start.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Robbie broached the subject himself. Rolling home at eleven o’clock, drunk as a lord, he found his dad in the kitchen.
“You’ll be pleashed to hear I’m gunnaway,” he slurred. “Meanmy-frendom.”
“You’re drunk, Robert. I can’t understand you.”
“My friend.” The word rolled cruelly off Robbie’s tongue. “Me and my friend Dom are going away. To New Orleans. I’ll be out of your hair for good. Break out the champagne!”
Raising his hand, as if making a toast, he lost his balance, gashing his head against the kitchen table as he slid to the floor.
“Oops.” Tears of laughter coursed down his cheeks.
“Your drinking isn’t funny, Robert.”
“It’s not? Jeez, that’s strange. Yours was always hilarious.” Contempt blazed in Robbie’s eyes. “Maybe I should pull a gun on you? Liven things up a bit. Would that be funny, Dad?”
Peter felt like crying. When had the word dad become an insult?
“Dominic’s mother was here this afternoon. Making threats. She says if you go near her son again, she’ll report you to the police for proselytizing.”
“Prozshele…what-le-tizing? Man, that’s a new one on me. We’ll have to try that some time. Dom loves to try new things.”
Peter snapped. “You’re revolting! Do you think this is a game? That boy is barely sixteen years old.”
Robbie shrugged. “He knows what he’s doing. As a matter of fact, he’s damn good at it.”
“His parents will prosecute. You could go to jail, Robert, you do realize that?”
“Not if they can’t find us.”
Robbie’s head was heavy. After he left Lionel Neuman’s office this afternoon he’d wandered from bar to bar, slowly drinking his way into the numbed, half-conscious state that had become a way of life for him recently. Holding a conversation was like trying to swim through thick, warm soup.
The truth was he didn’t even care that much about Dom Dellal. It wasn’t like they were in love or anything. But his father’s disgust made him want to lash out. It reminded Robbie of all his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing.
Just my luck to be the world’s first gay homophobe.
“I went to see Old Man Neuman today.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Took myself outta the will.” Robbie dissolved into drunken giggles. “I told him. I said, ‘You can stick your money. I don’ wan’ Kru-gerfugginbren.’”
Peter sighed. “You can’t simply write yourself out of the will, Robert. There are trusts…it’s complicated.”
“Not anymore it ain’t. I gave it all to Lexi.”
Robbie stood up. The room spun like a clothes dryer. Putting a hand to his forehead, he felt the sticky warmth of blood on his fingers.
Peter thought: Has he really repudiated Kate’s will? Can he do that?
Out loud he said, “You’re too drunk to talk sense now. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“I won’t be here in the morning.”
Robbie took an unsteady step forward, squaring up to his father. His eyes glinted with drunken, reckless rage.
Peter’s stomach lurched. Robbie was so close, he could smell the stale alcohol on his breath. I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of my own son.
“I’m going to New Orleans. With Dom.”
“If you leave this house tonight, don’t bother coming back.”
The words were out of Peter’s mouth before he knew they were in his head. “Don’t worry. I won’t. Good-bye, Dad.”
“Good-bye, Robert.”
Peter watched his son stagger out of the room, blood still flowing from the gash on his head. Seconds later, he heard the front door slam.
He waited for the guilt to hit him. This is the part where I run after him. Tell him I didn’t mean it. Seconds passed. Then minutes. Peter realized that the feeling swelling inside his chest was not guilt at all.
It was relief.
Switching off the downstairs lights, he tiptoed up to Lexi’s bedroom.
It’ll be just the two of us now, darling. You don’t need your brother. Daddy’ll take care of you.
He wouldn’t wake her. He’d just kneel next to the bed for a moment. Breathe in her sweet child’s smell. Take comfort from her warm, sleeping, innocent body.
He pushed the bedroom door open slowly. The room was pitch-dark. Picking his way toward the bed from memory, gingerly stepping past the toy box and over the discarded clothes, Peter knelt down next to the bed and reached out a loving arm.
A gust of wind in the face caught him by surprise.
He glanced up. The bedroom window was open.
Beneath it, in the dim glow of the moonlight, he stared at the empty bed.
Lexi was gone.
EIGHT
THE FIRST THING SHE WAS AWARE OF WAS DARKNESS.
Total darkness.
Not the darkness of her bedroom. The thick, cold, suffocating darkness of the grave.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Something had been stuffed into her mouth, a bitter-tasting cloth. She couldn’t breathe.
Where am I?
Panic began coiling its way around her heart like a snake. Was she dreaming? She sat up. Her head cracked painfully against something solid and metal.
A coffin? No! Oh God, please, no!
Daddy!
Again she screamed. Again the cloth choked her, stifling the sound in her throat. Slowly, consciously, she began to inhale through her nose.
Keep calm. You’re alive. Don’t panic.
Air filled her lungs. Relax.
Bedtime stories about her great-great-grandfather Jamie McGregor came flooding into her mind. Jamie had been brave and cunning and resourceful. He’d battled sharks and land mines, escaped shipwrecks and fought off assassins. No situation had been too hopeless for him to figure a way out of it.