Which it did.
I wonder now how Wilson Doan proceeded. Was it by malicious forethought or by organic intuition? Or both, an alternation of ambiguous anger resolving into clear moments of joyfully bitter fulfillment? I don't know. I never asked the man. What is clear, though, is that Wilson Doan did destroy me. Piece by piece, pound by pound, dollar by dollar. And in the end, though not much was left, the result was not disproportionate to the intention, for the intention was great, his grief having no bottom.
People find it difficult to be with a man who killed an eight-year-old boy. Who can blame them? Even though they know it was "a freak accident, one in a million," they wonder, why didn't the wife tell him about the peanut allergy? That just "molecules" would do it? Or did she tell him, and he forgot? After all, husbands always forget things like that. Even I started to wonder if Judith had told me. She could have, on the phone to San Francisco. But she didn't. I was almost sure of it. But I was tired, a thousand details in my head. What if she had told me, in an incidental sort of way? She never claimed she'd told me, but what if she herself didn't remember? How could one forget a phrase like "a chain reaction in the immune system"? Didn't everyone know Thai food often contained peanut oil? (From the article on the death of Wilson Doan Jr. in the metro section of the Times: "Several owners of Thai restaurants contacted by a reporter each confirmed that they used peanut oil in many of their dishes, and each stated they would soon include disclaimers on their menus in an attempt to avoid this increasingly prevalent and occasionally serious malady.") Maybe, people thought to themselves, He'd been drinking. That would explain it. Or maybe He and his wife had been fighting. Maybe anything. And why hadn't I heard? After all, the boy was suffocating! He must have made some noise, no? Hadn't I heard it? Maybe they'd been having sex and didn't hear it for that reason. The wife still has a great rack, the men would think silently to themselves, eyes squinting with wolfish savvy. Or maybe I, the killer, was flat on my back with an empty heroin needle hanging out of my arm. (A surprising number of lawyers are addicted to heroin.) Maybe I was tweezering hairs out of my nose and listening to Louis Armstrong- it didn't matter. The death of little Wilson Doan happened on my watch, in loco parentis. I was responsible. Bill Wyeth, you did it. Yes. You're the bad guy. Yes. You did it, you fucker. Yes. Just me and no one else.
And I was sorry, terribly sorry, though that didn't matter, either. I imagined little Wilson Doan's mother staring disconsolately at her breakfast. Toast, cold eggs. She was said to be dangerously depressed. Losing weight and losing touch. A few years into the future, parents would clone their lost children. Society would decide it was acceptable and let them do it. But not yet. Maybe the Doans would have another baby, but even if they had buckets more kids, there'd always be an ache, a shadow. I had only to think of losing Timothy to imagine their agony. I'd wrecked half a dozen lives, I had not read the list of instructions for each boy, I had sought satiation in the form of Thai takeout and dancing babes, I had somehow not been as vigilant as I could have been. This I told myself. You idiot, look what you did. You and your stupid billable hours and retirement accounts and receding gums. You are revealed as a clown- no, a monster-clown. It doesn't matter if absurdity ravished un-likelihood. There are no complete accidents. All effects have causes. You did it. You suggested the boy be invited. You deserve to die instead. But you won't and you can't; you have a family to care for.
Yes, people find it difficult. They don't want you around their own children. They don't want the taint, the stain. The best of them smile blankly and find scheduling conflicts. The worst of them sport a certain anthropological curiosity and examine you for proof of remorse- teeth-gnashing perhaps, a sudden onset of Tourette's syndrome, the eating of glass, a burning tire placed around one's own neck, maybe. But if you are trying to live anything close to a normal day, if you still have responsibilities for such things as buying apples and paying your electric bill and kissing your own boy good night ("Everything's going to be fine, pal, I promise…"), then you are scraping by, dealing as best you can. And they, those scrutinizing the tightness of your tie knot, don't like what they see. They see you sigh and say, "We're just going to have to get through this." They don't like that because it's confusing. It's unpunished. They want to know if there are "legal ramifications." So what if it was an accident, a stray fingernail clipping of God falling in the wrong place? This is America. If you don't get convicted, you do get sued. O. J. Simpson escaped prison- even though he cut off his wife's headbut was successfully sued. They want to know how it's "affecting the marriage." How do you think? I wanted to scream, but didn't. We're dying.
Judith fell away from me almost instantly. She stopped having sex with me, and my idiotic banter about water skis and basketball disappeared like so much else. There was one night a month or so afterward when I felt her turn in her sleep and hold me from behind, like she used to do, her hands wrapped around my chest, and even as I felt a deep balm go through me she stiffened with a sudden inhalation of breath, pulled her hands back to herself, and turned the other way.
I could stand the loss of Judith, perhaps, but I could not stand the loss of my son. He didn't understand why people said bad things about his father. I explained what had happened, but the kids at school called him names, said his dad killed children. Said he was going to the electric chair. "It's not true," Timothy said hotly, repeating the conversation. "It's not true." But his eyes searched mine for some explanation as to how everything would go back to the way it had been before- Please, Daddy, his eyes begged, make it better — and when I couldn't do that, then his faith was diminished. The idea of dad, of father, shrank and curled inside him. He hated me, I knew, for I had destroyed his universe.
Yes, everyone finds it difficult. The school required counseling for Timothy and for us and suggested we seek "an alternative placement." We had to pull him out of the school, because of the tension, and again and again he asked why his friends didn't have him over for play dates anymore. The other families in the apartment house seemed less interested in taking him out to the park with their kids, as if a blond eight-year-old boy might somehow be a menace, might conduct lightning on a clear day. This was unfair, but expectable. We're still superstitious, all of us. Monkey-men clutching magic feathers and sniffing the wind. The secretaries in my firm, usually cackling and amicably rude, spoke to me with formality, especially after the firm kept me out of its biggest deal of the year, a $400 million office building finance-and-rent-back in midtown Manhattan. I lost eye contact with people. My accountant didn't return my calls. The grocery boy examined the bills in his hand as if they were soaked with plague. Our elevator man, who'd carried the EMTs up and the body of the boy down, whistled silently and looked away.
Meanwhile, Wilson Doan Sr. attacked. He was powerful enough at his bank to force a renegotiation of the bank's of-counsel relationship with my firm. Our performance had been excellent, largely, but I made sure to absent myself from the discussion, which occurred in their offices. We sent my colleague, a senior partner named Dan Tuthill. A good guy, Tuthill, a pal. He was perfection in the law firm, self-destruction everywhere else: he ate sludge for lunch (veal, German chocolate cake), went on extramarital dates with hookerish, raccoon-eyed women he met in bars, and always bought stocks at their top. But he was loyal and determined and righteous on my behalf. By prearrangement, he called my office on his cell phone as he was entering the bank's conference room and placed the phone on the table among his papers. I shut my door and put the call on my speakerphone. This is done all the time, by the way. Sometimes the conversation is secretly taped on the other end or transcribed simultaneously. I could hear the room start to fill, the warm-up chatter, the briefcases clicked open. Donuts and bagels on the side. The coffee-stirring of commerce. I realized that Wilson Doan was not in the room. The conversation went smoothly enough without him, though, and the bankers outlined how they would need the firm's assistance in the coming year. There were a couple of staffing issues, half a dozen technology questions, and a few minor grievances. Very typical. Then Amanda Jenks, the bank's negotiator, said, "Our last area of our concern involves Mr. Wyeth."