I leaned back against the car. She leaned back against me.
“You think we’ll ever go to bed?”
“I’d sure like to, Karen, but I can’t.”
“Donna?”
“Yeah. I’m really trying to learn how to be faithful.”
“That been a problem?”
“It cost me a marriage.”
“Maybe I’ll learn how someday, too.”
Then they were back. Somebody, presumably Forester, had torn Price’s nice lacy shirt into shreds. Haskins looked miserable.
Forester said, “I’m going to tell you what happened that night.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got some beer in the backseat. Would either of you like one?”
Karen said, “Yes, we would.”
So he went and got a six-pack of Michelob and we all had a beer and just before he started talking he and Karen shared another one of those peculiar glances and then he said, “The four of us — myself, Price, Haskins, and Michael Brandon — had done something we were very ashamed of.”
“Afraid of,” Haskins said.
“Afraid that if it came out, our lives would be ruined. Forever,” Forester said.
Price said, “Just say it, Forester.” He glared at me.
“We raped a girl, the four of us.”
“Brandon spent two months afterward seeing the girl, bringing her flowers, apologizing to her over and over again, telling her how sorry we were, that we’d been drunk and it wasn’t like us to do that and—” Forester sighed, put his eyes to the ground. “In fact we had been drunk; in fact it wasn’t like us to do such a thing—”
Haskins said, “It really wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”
For a time there was just the barn owl and the crickets again, no talk, and then gently I said, “What happened to Brandon that night?”
“We were out as we usually were, drinking beer, talking about it, afraid the girl would finally turn us in to the police, still trying to figure out why we’d ever done such a thing—”
The hatred was gone from Price’s eyes. For the first time the matinee idol looked as melancholy as his friends. “No matter what you think of me, Dwyer, I don’t rape women. But that night—” He shrugged, looked away.
“Brandon,” I said. “You were going to tell me about Brandon.”
“We came up here, had a case of beer or something, and talked about it some more, and that night,” Forester said, “that night Brandon just snapped. He couldn’t handle how ashamed he was or how afraid he was of being turned in. Right in the middle of talking—”
Haskins took over. “Right in the middle, he just got up and ran out to the Point.” He indicated the cliff behind us. “And before we could stop him, he jumped.”
“Jesus,” Price said, “I can’t forget his screaming on the way down. I can’t ever forget it.”
I looked at Karen. “So what she heard you three talking about outside the party that night wasn’t that you’d killed Brandon but that you were afraid a serious investigation into his suicide might turn up the rape?”
Forester said, “Exactly.” He stared at Karen. “We didn’t kill Michael, Karen. We loved him. He was our friend.”
But by then, completely without warning, she had started to cry and then she began literally sobbing, her entire body shaking with some grief I could neither understand nor assuage.
I nodded to Forester to get back in his car and leave. They stood and watched us a moment and then they got into the Mercedes and went away, taking the burden of years and guilt with them.
This time I drove. I went far out the river road, miles out, where you pick up the piney hills and the deer standing by the side of the road.
From the glove compartment she took a pint of J&B, and I knew better than to try and stop her.
I said, “You were the girl they raped, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
She smiled at me. “The police weren’t exactly going to believe a girl from the Highlands about the sons of rich men.”
I sighed. She was right.
“Then Michael started coming around to see me. I can’t say I ever forgave him, but I started to feel sorry for him. His fear—” She shook her head, looked out the window. She said, almost to herself, “But I had to write those letters, get them there tonight, know for sure if they killed him.” She paused.
“You believe them?”
“That they didn’t kill him?”
“Right.”
“Yes, I believe them.”
“So do I.”
Then she went back to staring out the window, her small face childlike there in silhouette against the moonsilver river. “Can I ask you a question, Dwyer?”
“Sure.”
“You think we’re ever going to get out of the Highlands?”
One of Those Days, One of Those Nights
The thing you have to understand is that I found it by accident. I was looking for a place to hide the birthday gift I’d bought Laura — a string of pearls she’d been wanting to wear with the new black dress she’d bought for herself — and all I was going to do was lay the gift-wrapped box in the second drawer of her bureau...
...and there it was.
A plain number ten envelope with her name written across the middle in a big manly scrawl and a canceled Elvis Presley stamp up in the corner. Postmarked two days ago.
Just as I spotted it, Laura called from the living room, “Bye, honey, see you at six.” The last two years we’ve been saving to buy a house so we have only the one car. Laura goes an hour earlier than I do, so she rides with a woman who lives a few blocks over. Then I pick her up at six after somebody relieves me at the computer store where I work. For what it’s worth, I have an MA in English Literature but with the economy being what it is, it hasn’t done me much good.
I saw a sci-fi movie once where a guy could set something on fire simply by staring at it intently enough. That’s what I was trying to do with this letter my wife got. Burn it so that I wouldn’t have to read what it said inside and get my heart broken.
I closed the drawer.
Could be completely harmless. Her fifteenth high school reunion was coming up this spring. Maybe it was from one of her old classmates. And maybe the manly scrawl wasn’t so manly after all. Maybe it was from a woman who wrote in a rolling dramatic hand.
Laura always said that I was the jealous type and this was certainly proof. A harmless letter tucked harmlessly in a bureau drawer. And here my heart was pounding, and fine cold sweat slicked my face, and my fingers were trembling.
God, wasn’t I a pitiful guy? Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself?
I went into the bathroom and lathered up and did my usual relentless fifteen-minute morning regimen of shaving, showering and shining up my apple-cheeked Irish face and my thinning Irish hair, if hair follicles can have a nationality, that is.
Then I went back into our bedroom and took down a white shirt, blue necktie, navy blazer and tan slacks. All dressed, I looked just like seventy or eighty million other men getting ready for work, this particular sunny April morning.
Then I stood very still in the middle of the bedroom and stared at Laura’s bureau. Maybe I wasn’t simply going to set the letter on fire. Maybe I was going to ignite the entire bureau.
The grandfather clock in the living room tolled eight-thirty. If I didn’t leave now I would be late, and if you were late you inevitably got a chewing out from Ms. Sandstrom, the boss. Anybody who believes that women would run a more benign world than men needs only to spend five minutes with Ms. Sandstrom. Hitler would have used her as a pin-up girl.