Crying Wolf

32

Nat got two years for attempted extortion, all but four months suspended. His public defender was surprised that the case was prosecuted at all, then surprised at the verdict, and finally the sentence. She sensed some force working against them. Nat knew what it was. Mr. Zorn wanted someone to pay.

Nat paid. He wasn’t the only one. Mr. Zorn never endowed a chair in philosophy at Inverness, but he did donate a new residence in Grace’s name. The college accepted Professor Uzig’s resignation the day before the announcement. Philosophy 322 was deleted from the catalog.

Nat served his sentence in a minimum-security prison not far from Boston. It wasn’t too bad. His facial bones knit well after surgery. He had unlimited daytime access to the exercise yard with its basketball hoop. He started taking his foul shots again, hundreds and hundreds a day, sometimes thousands. Despite all this practice, he never exceeded 60 percent, not close to what he’d done in high school. He’d lost that soft touch, didn’t even enjoy it anymore. The ball, which had always wanted to go in for him, no longer did. But Nat kept shooting: part of the sentence he was giving himself.

He wrote the clock poem, a few others, started sending them to journals he found in the prison library. A review in Chicago accepted one of them. The payment was six free copies of the issue his poem appeared in. Nat showed it to Wags when he came to visit.

“Pretty cool,” said Wags. Wags was feeling a lot better, had applied for transfer to the film program at a few schools, was waiting to hear. The TV movie shot at Inverness, the one about the fraternity brother and the bone marrow transplant, was broadcast during Nat’s term. Wags had made the final cut, was visible for five or ten seconds, roasting marshmallows at a tailgate party.

Nat had other visitors. His mom came. She’d found a new job. It meant selling the house and moving to Denver, but the pay was better. Maybe not but but and, since she seemed to be looking forward to the move.

Patti came too, on the way to Fort Dix with her boyfriend, who’d been called up. The boyfriend was real, not a creation of Grace’s-Nat could see him through the chain-link fence, waiting in the rental car. But the question of who the father had been remained open in Nat’s mind. Patti didn’t bring it up and Nat didn’t ask. Did it even matter now? She brought him a present, a book of inspirational advice currently on the best-seller list. He donated it to the library, unread.

And Izzie.

She looked pretty good. Her eyes weren’t quite symmetrical anymore and she walked with a limp, but less of one every day, she said.

Izzie explained the switch. It was about what Nat had thought. At the last minute, after Izzie had called her father saying Grace had been kidnapped, Grace decided she should be the one up top, dealing with him. She hadn’t liked how Izzie handled the call. Izzie had gone down to the cave; Grace had dyed her hair, come up to Nat’s room playing the role of her sister. It was just a question of Grace being more capable when it came to thinking on her feet.

“She was,” Izzie said.

Nat was silent; he knew there was more to it than that.

“Better in every way,” Izzie said. “She was the special one.”

That saying people had when someone close to them died, the one about a part of them dying too: Nat realized it was true in Izzie’s case, maybe even literally. He took her hand. He hadn’t intended to do anything of the kind.

Izzie had rented an apartment in Paris for the year, was planning to take a few courses, maybe do some skiing when she felt stronger. She was leaving in a few weeks.

“There’s lots of room,” she said.

He didn’t speak.

“Why don’t you come?”

A dump near the prison attracted seagulls. Chased by a second gull, one flew over now, something shiny in its beak.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Say yes.”