Most of the basement floor was covered by a huge rug that always smelled faintly of spilled beer and old potato chips. There were bookshelves, and a gunmetal gray filing cabinet whose drawers had been used mainly for storing old photographs, college notes, and textbooks, and, unbeknownst to the boy’s mother, some mild pornography. There was a battered red couch with a stained blue pillow at one end facing the TV. The pillow still bore the imprint of his son’s head and the couch had retained the shape of his body so that, in the dim light cast by the basement’s sole lamp, it seemed that the ghost of his son had somehow returned to this place, occupying his old familiar position, a thing invisible yet with weight and substance. Daniel wanted so much to curl up there, to mold his body into the ridges and hollows of the couch, to become one with his lost son, yet he did not. To do so would be to disturb the impression that remained, and with it to banish something of the boy’s essence. He would not lie there. Nobody would lie there. It would remain as a memorial to all that had been taken from him, from them.
At first, there had been only shock. Bobby could not be gone. He could not be dead. Death was for the old and the sick. Death was for the children of other men. His son was mortal, but not yet shadowed by mortality. His passing should have been a distant thing, and his father and mother should have predeceased him. He should have mourned them. It was not right, not natural, that they should now be forced to cry over his remains, to watch as his coffin was lowered into the ground. He remembered again the sight of his son’s body on the gurney in the morgue, draped with a sheet, swollen with the gases of decay, a deep red line circling his throat where the rope had cut into him.
Suicide. That had been the initial verdict. Bobby had asphyxiated himself by tying a rope to a tree, dropping the noose at the other end around his neck, and leaning forward with the full weight of his body. At some point, he had realized the awfulness of what was about to happen and had struggled to release himself, scratching and tearing at his flesh, even ripping loose one of his fingernails, but by then the rope had cinched itself tight, the knot designed so that, if his courage failed him, the instrument of his self-destruction would not.
The chief had asked them, in those first hours, if they knew why Bobby might have wanted to kill himself. Was he unhappy? Were there unusual stresses and tensions in his life? Did he owe money to anyone? The autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily before he died, and his motorcycle was found in a ditch at the edge of the field. It was a wonder, the coroner said, that the boy had managed to ride the bike so far considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed.
And all Daniel Faraday could think of was the girl, Emily, the one for whom his son had not been good enough.
But then the chief had returned to them that afternoon, and everything had changed. It was a question of angles and force, he had told them, although he, and the state police detectives, had already voiced their suspicions among themselves, given the nature of the wounds that the rope had left on his skin. There had been two injuries to his son’s neck, but the first had been obscured by the second, and it had taken the arrival of the state’s chief medical examiner to confirm the suspicions of her deputy. Two injuries: the first inflicted by asphyxiation from behind, possibly while the boy was lying flat on the ground, judging by some bruises to his back where his attacker had perhaps knelt upon him. The initial injury was not fatal, but had resulted only in a loss of consciousness. Death had occurred from the second injury. The noose had been kept around the boy’s neck as he was lifted to his knees, the other end of the rope secured around the trunk of the tree. His killer, or killers, had then put further pressure on his back, forcing him forward so that he slowly strangled.
The chief had said that it must have taken considerable strength and effort to kill big, strong Bobby Faraday in that way. The rope was being tested for traces of DNA, as was the lower part of the tree, but-
They had waited for him to continue.
The person or persons responsible for Bobby’s death had been careful, he told them. Bobby’s hair and clothing had been soaked with pond water and mud, along with his fingernails and the skin of his hands. The intention had clearly been to corrupt any trace evidence, and it had been successful. The authorities weren’t going to give up on finding Bobby’s killer, he reassured them, but their task had been made a great deal more difficult. He had asked them to keep this information to themselves for the time being, and they had agreed to do so.
After the chief left, Daniel held his wife as she wept in his arms. He was not sure why she was crying, and he was only surprised that she had any tears left to shed. Perhaps she was weeping at the horror of it, or because this was a new grief caused by the knowledge that her son had not taken his own life, but that his life had instead been taken from him by others. She did not say, and he did not ask her. But when he felt the first of his own tears slide down his cheek, he understood that his were not tears of loss, or of horror, or even of anger. He was relieved. In that moment, he realized that he had felt a kind ofas Ñlt a kind hatred for his son for killing himself. He had been raging at him for the selfishness of the act, for the stupidity of it, for not turning to those who loved him in his moment of direst need. He had hated his son for rendering his father powerless, and for leaving his parents to bear the weight of his awful grief in his stead. For the time that he had believed his son had died at his own hand, Daniel had contemplated the horror of the act during the long, still days and nights, the hours creeping by with relentless sloth. Grief, it seemed, was a kind of matter: it could not be created or destroyed, but merely altered in form. In dying, the sadness that might have driven Bobby to such an act had not dissipated, but had merely transferred itself to those left behind. There had been no note, no explanation, as though any explanation could have sufficed. Instead, there had only been unanswered questions, and the gnawing sense that they had failed their son in some way.
And Daniel’s first instinct had been to blame the girl. His son had not been the same since she had broken off their relationship. Despite his size, and his apparent ease with the world, there was a sensitivity to him, a softness. He had dated before, and there had been breakups and teenage traumas, but he had fallen heavily for the slim young woman with the dark hair and pale green eyes. She was a few years older than Bobby, and she had something special; that was undeniable. There had been rivals for her affections, but she had chosen him. His son knew that. The power had been hers, and he had always struggled slightly with the imbalance that it created in the relationship.
Daniel believed, as most fathers did, that his son was the finest young man in town, maybe even the finest young man he had ever known. He deserved the very best in life: the most rewarding of jobs, the most beautiful of women, the most loving of children. That Bobby did not share this view was both one of his best and worst qualities: admirable in its natural humility, yet frustrating in the way in which it stifled his ambition and caused him to doubt himself. Daniel believed that the girl was clever enough to play on that disparity, but then that was true of all her sex, for Daniel Faraday had always been suspicious of women. He admired them, and was deeply attracted to them (in truth, more than his wife knew, or pretended not to know, because he had acted on that attraction with others more than once during their marriage), but he had never come close to understanding them, and by engaging in casual conquests and then casting them aside he was able to balance this lack of comprehension with a degree of contempt, although he would never have been able to acknowledge his actions to himself in quite those terms. He had watched as the girl manipulated his son, twisting and turning him as though he were caught on a silken thread that could be used to draw him closer or keep him dangling at a distance, as she chose. Bobby knew what was being done, and yet he was so smitten that he could not bring himself to break the bond. His father and mother had discussed it more than once over a bottle of wine, but had differed in their interpretations of the relationship. While Daniel’s wife had acknowledged that the girl was clever, still she felt that there was nothing unusual in her behavior. She was merely doing what all young girls did, or what those who understood the nature of the balance of power between the sexes generally did. The boy wanted her, but as soon as she gave herself to Bobby unconditionally, she would cede control of the relationship to him. Better to force him to prove his loyalty to her before she surrendered herself fully.