Empty Mile

CHAPTER 35

The next day, in the morning, the world for the four of us at Empty Mile started to fall apart. Five, if you count Gareth.

Marla and I were on the stoop, waiting for him to arrive and begin work on the river. Stan and Rosie had come over for breakfast and were sitting inside the cabin at the kitchen table. Stan was picking at a plate of fried eggs and Rosie, who didn’t eat breakfast, was drinking black coffee.

I felt frightened and resigned and energized all at the same time. I don’t know if I thought there was any chance that the morning would end successfully for us, but I knew that what I was about to do was something that had to be done, something it would have been wrong not to do.

When Gareth climbed out of his Jeep and saw Marla a smile broke across his face and he made a pistol with his hand and cocked it at me.

“Dude, what can I say? This means so much, that you two would do this for me. I can’t tell you how fucking relieved I am that we’re not going to have any trouble about it.”

He held his arms out for Marla to come to him. She looked at him tiredly and shook her head.

“Jesus, Gareth…”

Gareth frowned and glanced uncertainly at me. “Dude?”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“Johnny, come on, man. Don’t fuck around.”

“You’re not getting Marla.”

“We were clear on the consequences?”

“Go tell the cops. Do whatever the fuck you want. I’m not putting up with this insanity any longer. This is the end of it.”

Gareth looked at Marla. I saw that she was staring at him, her eyes dark and hard, as though willing him to leave us alone. Gareth held her gaze for a long moment, then turned back to me.

“Know what I think? I think you’re bluffing. You don’t think I’ll go through with it, do you? But I have to tell you, Johnny, Marla was mine before she was yours and this is where things get made right.”

“You don’t share people, you fucking psycho. Just go down to the river and mine your gold.”

“You took away the only chance I had to be happy. My one fucking chance! Why didn’t you find someone else?”

Gareth was shouting now, almost crying, his face straining and red.

I heard Millicent’s front door open. She waved at us as she came down her front steps but by the time she reached the bottom some of the tension surrounding Gareth and me must have communicated itself to her because she paused and stood watching us.

“Do you know what you do to the people around you, Johnny? You fucking destroy them. Marla, your brother… Well, you’re not going to do it to me. I’m going to get what I want. And if it means taking you out, that’s what I’m going to do. You fucking asshole.”

Gareth turned and reached for the door of his Jeep. I heard footsteps behind me, someone coming out of the cabin and onto the stoop. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of gray and black as Stan, wearing his full Batman suit, rocketed past me, down onto the bare earth in front of the cabin. In his hand I saw the ugly black shape of Marla’s revolver. It was so incongruous a sight that for a second I was unable to process what I was seeing. Unfortunately, a second was all it took for Stan to raise his arm and pull the trigger.

He’d moved so quickly that no one had had a chance to call out or say anything and when the gun fired, it fired in a place where no other noise existed. Our small world was split by the gargantuan sound of gunpowder igniting, of explosive gasses jetting from the barrel’s opening, of a bullet moving across a few short yards, from the gun’s chamber to the middle of Gareth’s back.

For a moment it seemed that the intensity of the sound would freeze the scene, that we would be forever left staring at a three-quarter view of Stan with his arm extended, at Gareth thrown against the door of his Jeep, at the smoke in the cold air and the fine spray of blood on the car’s side windows.

But then the sound was gone and Stan lowered his arm and dropped the gun and Gareth slid down the side of his car and fell backwards onto the ground. There was a long smear of blood on the Jeep’s door. In it, a few inches below the window, a small round hole marked the bullet’s exit from Gareth’s body. Across the meadow Millicent wailed weakly.

Stan stood staring at what he had done, his body rooted to the ground, a rapid tremor playing over his arms and chest and head. I went to him and put my hand on his arm.

“Stan…”

“You can’t go to jail, Johnny. You just can’t.”

I felt so complicit, so responsible for what had happened, that I could think of nothing to say to him and we stood there in silence until Rosie, who had seen the shooting from the doorway of our cabin, came down and took Stan’s hand and led him across the meadow to Millicent. When they got there all three of them went quickly up the steps and into the house.

Marla came to me long before Stan and Rosie had finished crossing the meadow and she and I stepped close to Gareth and looked down at him. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood and more of it welled steadily from a torn cavity in the center of his chest. His bladder had let go and the crotch of his jeans was dark.

Marla slid her hand into mine and I heard her breathe quietly to herself, “At last…”

But Gareth wasn’t dead yet. His eyes had been half closed but they opened fully now and he coughed a mouthful of blood over his chin and spoke in a wet choking voice that made me think of a room filling with water.

“Looks like Einstein’s fucked himself up again.”

“Not as much as he’s fucked you up.”

Gareth laughed and choked and spat out more blood. “He’s going to go to jail for killing me to protect you from something you did to stop him from going to jail in the first place. I think you call that irony.”

He stopped for a moment and fought for breath. I noticed there were small bubbles forming in the pool of blood that had collected on his chest.

“Aren’t you going to call 911?”

“No.”

“They might be able to save me.”

“Honestly? I don’t think so.”

“And that’s okay because I killed your father, right? Well, I’m going to leave you with a little present. You too, Marla-you most of all. And if you’re smart, Johnny, you’ll do the right thing with it.”

Marla squatted so that her face was only a foot from his and hissed, “Don’t!”

“It’ll always be there between you if I don’t.”

“You promised.”

“Dying’s kind of a free pass. Johnny, get down here too, it hurts to talk.”

I squatted next to Marla. For a moment Gareth closed his eyes and gathered his strength. On the other side of the meadow I heard an engine start and a car pull away. When Gareth opened his eyes again the light had gone out of them and they were starting to look fixed and dull.

“Okay… I did fix the brakes on Ray’s car, same as Tripp’s. But I didn’t kill him. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have tried again, I just didn’t have to-”

I glanced at Marla and saw that she was watching me and crying.

“-because Marla did it for me. But you have to know, Johnny, it was an accident. It wasn’t her fault…” He paused and blinked rapidly several times. “And that pipe, I got rid of it weeks ago. Kiss my dad for me.”

Gareth tried twice to take another breath but couldn’t do it. The wound in his chest fizzed nastily. And then he was dead.

I stood slowly and looked down at him, at the now-cooling body of a man I had known for more than ten years-a friend I had robbed of the woman he loved, a friend I had made my enemy. So many years ago…

How could I have foreseen that his desire for Marla would one day lead my poor damaged brother to commit murder? There was no way, of course. Even so… even so, it seemed to me that I should have known.

Marla had her head in her hands; she wasn’t crying for Gareth, though. There was now a fresh horror in our lives demanding to be dug from its grave and examined. But I was terribly conscious that I had to go to Stan. Killing Jeremy Tripp had been something I could only just support. For someone like Stan, the most innocent of people, the act of murder would tear his soul to shreds.

I lifted Marla to her feet and began to pull her across the meadow toward Millicent’s house but she hung back and took her hand away from me.

“Johnny… Johnny…”

Her face was blotchy from crying and she stood in front of me unable to speak, her mouth twisting.

“Marla, come on. I need you with me.”

For a moment she didn’t move, then the briefest flicker of hope crossed her face and she held my hand again and ran with me, up the meadow to Millicent’s house.

When we got there I saw that the Datsun was gone. Millicent came to the door when she heard us on her stoop and the sight of her chilled me. That she was there meant someone else had driven the car away.

“What happened? Why did Stanley shoot that man? Is he dead?”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. They went into the bedroom for a minute, then Rosie got the keys and they took the car.”

“Didn’t they say anything?”

“Not a thing. Except Rosie stopped on her way out, just here by the door, and put her arms around me and told me, ‘Thank you.’ What for, I don’t know, but she hasn’t hugged me like that more than three or four times in her life.”

I called Stan’s cell phone from Millicent’s stoop but he didn’t answer. Marla and I ran back down the slope and got into the pickup and charged out of Empty Mile.

We went straight to Old Town first and then, when we didn’t find them there, doubled back to Back Town. With each street we checked I felt an increasing sense of foreboding. Marla tried Stan’s phone constantly but it went straight to voice mail.

Near the town hall a thought struck me and I accelerated past the remaining stores and headed out to the Oakridge commercial precinct. If Stan was being eaten alive with guilt he might go to the place he most closely associated with the beginning of that guilt.

But when we got to the Plantagion warehouse there was no sign of the orange Datsun. I got out of the pickup to look around just in case. The warehouse was locked up and deserted. Through the window I could see all the office furniture was gone. It seemed that whoever had inherited Jeremy Tripp’s estate had closed the business down. I made a circuit of the building but there was no sign Stan had broken in anywhere. When I got back to the pickup my cell phone was ringing. Stan-his voice dreamlike, as though while he was speaking to me he was looking at something of beauty.

“Hi, Johnny-”

“Where are you?”

“It’s okay.”

“What do you mean? Stan? I want you to go back to the cabin right now.”

“Rosie and me talked about it. And you mustn’t be sad, Johnny, okay? You mustn’t be sad.”

“Stan! Get back to the cabin now. Put Rosie on the phone.”

“I had to shoot Gareth.”

“I know you did, and it’s okay. I’m not angry with you.”

“I know that, Johnny. You’re never angry with me. You’re the best brother in the world.”

“Stan, please. Where are you? What are you going to do?”

I heard my voice break and though I knew I was crying I couldn’t feel the tears on my face or the tightness in my throat. My perception had narrowed to only the voice against my ear and the dreadful visions flying through my head.

“I love you, Johnny, and I know how you tried to make things good for me with Plantasaurus and the gold and you let me marry Rosie and you took care of me. And I remember all the times we had together, since you came back and before that when I was a kid. I remember them all and I’m going to take them with me. Just like when I drowned and came awake again. The first thing I saw was the sky and it was so deep and blue, and then I saw you looking down at me and you were so worried and I thought how much I loved you and even when you were gone I never stopped feeling that way. Don’t forget, Johnny. Don’t think anything else.”

“Stan, I’m not going to think anything. We’ll talk about it at home.”

“You should wear my costumes, Johnny. Sometimes when you put them on it feels like things can’t hurt you so much.”

“Stan, please… You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. Promise me.”

“I’m going to take you with me in my heart. I love you, Johnny.”

The line went dead. I dialed him back immediately but there was no answer. Marla put her hand on my thigh.

“Where is he?”

I shook my head and was about to tell her I didn’t know, but then it hit me-the only place it would make sense for him to be.

“The lake.”

I threw the pickup into gear and began the race to get to Stan before he did anything to himself.

I drove fast. I took the shortest route I knew-out the other side of the precinct and along the narrow road we’d taken the night Stan set fire to the Plantagion warehouse. It took me fifteen minutes at high speed to reach the Loop and another two from there to get to the start of Lake Trail.

I had to take it slower from here because of the road. Everything in me screamed to go faster, but the one time I tried it the rear wheels lost traction and the pickup slid dangerously on a bend.

Two hundred yards from the end of the trail we found the Datsun. It had gone off the road, fortunately on the uphill side, and ploughed sideways into a tree. The passenger side was heavily dented. I stopped the pickup and ran to it, but it was empty. There was a small amount of blood on the dash in front of the passenger seat, but nothing that suggested serious injury.

We raced up the last short stretch of trail and flew out into the sunlight going way too fast. I had to wrench the pickup into a hard left turn and hit the brakes to avoid careening over the grass and onto the beach. Marla and I jumped out and scanned the lake and the land surrounding it.

I didn’t know where to look, what part of the place to scour for a sign that Stan still existed. The world around me was a frantic series of snapshots, shuddering as I turned my head, impossible to assimilate. I felt as though some dazzling light shone into my eyes, allowing me to see only the edges of what I looked at. But then my brain caught up and all the images smashing at the air around me slammed into place and I was able to see what was happening at the lake that day.

So late in the year the weather was too cold for people to be swimming and there were only two vehicles in the parking lot. Gareth and David’s bungalow looked closed and without movement, though a weak column of smoke rose vertically into the air from its chimney. Beyond the bungalow and the cabins the wooden jetty caught my eye. The small rowboat that usually lay upturned at its end was missing.

I looked across the water and saw the boat empty and drifting, about as far from the beach as it was possible to get-out near the sheer rock wall that held back the land on the opposite side of the lake. There was nothing around it, no desperately flailing swimmers, no churned and broken water.

I moved my gaze quickly back to the beach, wanting to find Stan and Rosie sitting cuddled together waiting for me to find them and solve the problem of their crashed car. But they weren’t there. The beach was deserted except for two elderly couples standing at the edge of the water. I started to look beyond them, further up the beach, but there was something wrong. The old people were not admiring the stillness of the water or enjoying the thin autumn sun on their faces. They were pointing and shouting and looking desperately about them. I knew then where Stan was and I ran across the grass and the coarse sand to the lake.

One of the women spoke to me first. She appeared to be in her seventies. The weathered skin of her face was drawn tight with worry.

“Two people just drowned.”

“A man and a woman?”

“Yes, yes! We saw them out there and they were rowing and then both of them just stood up and jumped into the water. They didn’t even try to swim.”

The man standing next to her interjected, “They were holding hands when they jumped.”

The woman nodded rapidly. “They were on the surface for maybe a minute, then they went under and they didn’t come back up. We couldn’t do anything. We’re old. We couldn’t do anything.”

The two men nodded and made noises of agreement. The other woman was crying.

“How long?”

One of the men shook his head gravely. “They went under at least ten minutes ago. We called the police. There was no one else here.” He gestured uselessly with the cell phone he was holding.

I did the only thing I could do, a thing I couldn’t stop myself doing. I took off my clothes and swam out to the rowboat. It was a distance of almost two hundred yards and I was not a strong swimmer and when I got there I was gasping and had to hold on to the side of the boat to rest.

What I was doing was futile. The boat would have drifted and there was little chance I was close enough to where they entered the water to make an effective search. And even if I was, the lake here was more than fifty feet deep and they had been under far, far too long. But when I had my breath back I dove beneath the surface of the cold water and swam down as far as I could, stretching my eyes wide to see, groping about me as the light grew dimmer. I found nothing, touched no trailing limb, no waterlogged torso. I surfaced and dove down again, and again, and again, until the world became a tumbling storm of white bubbles and dark water and a terrible hunger for air.

I was so weakened that I would certainly have run into trouble, but at some point the police arrived and two officers swam out and dragged me back to shore.

There were three police cruisers there, pulled up on the grass at the edge of the beach, and while my rescuers dried themselves, their colleagues took statements from the elderly couples and then from Marla and me. When they were finished with us they went over to the bungalow and questioned David, but he had been in the barn out back and had no idea anything had even happened.

The Oakridge police had no resources to make a search of the lake themselves, and because there was no question that Stan and Rosie could still be alive, they shut the scene down until a dive team could be brought up from Sacramento the following morning. The couples were allowed to go, crime scene tape was strung across the entrance to Lake Trail to close it to the public, and a cruiser was posted there as backup.

Marla and I, however, were far from finished for the day. We had to take the police out to Empty Mile and explain why a dead body with a bullet hole in it was lying on the ground in front of our cabin. And how it connected to Stan and Rosie’s drowning.

One of the detectives who joined the uniforms at Empty Mile was Patterson, the lead officer on my father’s disappearance. There was, I think, some cynicism in his surprise that I was now part of a murder investigation, but the fact that Millicent confirmed she’d seen Stan shoot Gareth and that Marla and I had had nothing to do with it didn’t leave him much option but to accept the version of events we gave him.

The business of the crime scene-the recording of evidence, the videoing of the surrounding area, the photographing of the body, the repeated questioning-took until the middle of the afternoon. Then, around three p.m., Marla and I and Millicent, so shattered by the loss of her granddaughter that she had to be helped to stand by one of the officers, were taken to the Oakridge police station to give formal statements.

The police had a confirmed culprit, or at least they would have when they could raise him from the bottom of the lake, and we weren’t treated as suspects. The only finessing Marla and I had to do concerned Stan’s motivation for the shooting, but this was simple enough. In a private moment at the lake before we told them about the shooting we’d agreed to say that Gareth had sexually propositioned Rosie a number of times and that it had finally pushed Stan over the edge. We said nothing at all about Jeremy Tripp.

The statements took about an hour and a half and when they were done we were driven back to Empty Mile. The cruiser dropped us at Millicent’s house and Marla and I helped her up the steps and put her to bed where she lay staring at nothing, her hands loose and forgotten on top of the covers. Marla made tea but Millicent didn’t want it and after a while it seemed that we were out of place there, intruders on her misery, and so we excused ourselves and left her alone, lying in the slowly darkening room, without family now in the whole of the world.

Marla and I were silent on the walk across the meadow, dreading the conversation both of us knew we had to have.

Gareth’s body was gone from in front of the cabin. In its place there were small traces of police activity-strips of marker tape, empty evidence bags, some small yellow plastic stakes hammered into the ground to show where the body had lain. There was birdsong in the air with the approach of evening, but rather than soften the scene about us it made the place seem forlorn and abandoned as though, along with the corpse, the police had taken away with them whatever it was that had made the cabin and the land around it feel welcoming and lived in.

Marla went through the door with her head bowed. She walked straight to the couch and sat down and started talking before I’d finished taking my coat off. Her voice was flat, but there was relief in it as well, as though her words carried from her some poison that had been progressively corroding her system.

“When you came back to Oakridge Ray wanted to start fresh with you, to build a better relationship. But he thought the affair he’d had with me was something so terrible he wouldn’t be able to do this if he kept it hidden from you. The evening it happened, he came to my house and told me he was going to tell you what we’d done.”

Marla looked desperately at me. She had a small handkerchief in her lap and was shredding the thin material with her fingernails.

“I thought if you knew, we’d be finished. All I wanted was to be with you. It was all I ever wanted. And you’d just come back and I saw everything I thought I was going to have with you being taken away again. I begged him not to say anything, to just let it stay in the past. But he wouldn’t. He kept saying he had to tell you. Over and over. And I was going crazy. I was begging. But he wouldn’t change his mind. And then I pushed him. That’s all. I just pushed him on the chest, just to make him stop. Just a push… I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t even want to hurt him. I just wanted him not to tell you.”

Marla paused and sobbed and then with an effort gathered herself and spoke again.

“We were in the kitchen and he fell. I don’t know why. It shouldn’t have happened, he should have just stepped backwards. But he didn’t. He fell and hit the back of his head on the edge of the counter. I tried to revive him. I did CPR… I’m so sorry, Johnny. I’m so sorry.”

“But his car was found out at Jerry’s Gas. I don’t understand.”

“When I saw he was dead I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Gareth. He was the only person I could think of who’d help me. He came around and we waited till two in the morning then we drove Ray’s car out to Jerry’s to make it look like he’d run out and hopped a bus somewhere. It was a stupid idea but it was the only thing we could think of to lead the police away from Oakridge.”

Marla stopped again. She looked drained and utterly exhausted.

“What did you do with his body?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Gareth said it would be safer if I didn’t know.”

“You don’t know where his body is?”

“Gareth took it away. I don’t know what he did with it.” Marla started to cry again. “And you know what the crazy thing is? The most fucking insane thing of all time? It didn’t need to happen. Ray’s death, the things I had to let Gareth make me do afterwards… None of it had to happen. Because when you found out about the affair you didn’t leave me. You didn’t even stop loving me. What I’d been so frightened of turned out to be… nothing.”

For a long time I sat there and watched Marla and tried to muster some sort of anger toward her, but the plain truth was that I couldn’t make my father’s death more important to me than keeping her.

My father had been a good man, a man who knew right from wrong and lived according to this knowledge. He had been, perhaps, just as lost as I was, just as bewildered by the world and uncertain of his path through it. And in the terrible face of the universe he had been as innocent as all good men are. But he had not loved me. Or, if he had, his emotional distance, his stifling of all tender expression, had made it seem that he did not. Throughout my life he had been a cipher, an acquaintance, someone who bore me none of the forgiveness of true affection.

It seemed, toward the end, that he had wanted to change this. There had been the expensive presents he’d given Stan and me, the trust he’d shown by putting Empty Mile in my name, the need to come clean about his affair with Marla and, finally, his attempt at persuading Gareth to stop pimping her.

He must have seen even the smallest of these moves, even the shallow intimacies he attempted on the evenings after dinner as we sat at the kitchen table, as monumental efforts of engagement. To me, though, looking back across them now, they were small sad beacons in the gloom of our relationship, flickerings of what might have been if he had only cared more and sooner. And while I would treasure them they were too few for a lifetime and they had come too late to change my belief that he was essentially someone I did not belong to.

But Marla loved me. We were free now of Gareth and my father and Jeremy Tripp. We could be free, even, of Empty Mile if we wanted. We had a chance to build a life together, a chance for Marla to make real her aching dreams of emotional security. I believed her when she said my father’s death had been an accident. I had no doubt about it at all. But I think even if she had killed him with malice and planning my decision would have been the same.

What were we after all? Two killers who weren’t killers. Two guilty people who had never planned for guilt. In a way, perhaps, we canceled each other out. Neither of us, given what each of us had separately done, was fit ever to find or want another partner. So love was enough and forgiveness a concept that did not apply. We were as we had become, two people whose lives could no longer be matched against the usual measures of what the world considered right.

And if nothing else, she was alive and my father was dead. There was nothing I could do for him, but I still had a chance to make up for the unhappiness I had sentenced Marla to when I left Oakridge eight years ago.

So, that sad, dreadful evening I told her I loved her and we went to bed and clung to each other as the darkness came. I understood now so many of the things that had puzzled me about her-how Gareth was able to manipulate her, to make her strip naked for him in our cabin, to prostitute herself to Jeremy Tripp. She had said it was because she was frightened he would tell her employers about her hooking past, but the real threat he held over her, what gave him the power to make her do anything he wanted, was the fact that he knew she was responsible for my father’s death.

Her terrible depression and her need for physical punishment made sense. She had been living not only with the guilt of having killed the father of the man she loved, but also with the daily fear that she would be exposed for it. Gareth’s presence at Empty Mile must have made her life a living hell, knowing as she did that at any moment he might choose to drop that one fatal comment. It was no wonder that she had protested so strongly about him being there, or that she had been initially so reluctant to tell Jeremy Tripp that Gareth had made the video that drove Patricia Prentice to suicide. She must have thought it would provoke him to retaliate against her by revealing the truth about my father’s disappearance.

That it had not, made me realize how much Gareth must still have loved her. It had been a twisted, cruel love, but he had kept the secret of my father’s death for her even though he must have longed to use it to break up our relationship. And his revelation of it as he died had not been a last vindictive twisting of the knife but, as he had said, a gift to Marla. He knew that I had to be given the opportunity to forgive her, because without this forgiveness she would never be able to live beyond her guilt.

I could not sleep that night. My grief for Stan lay over me like a thousand miles of stone. Around two in the morning I got up and went outside.

Stan and Rosie’s bedroom occupied one whole end of their trailer and when I entered it I felt, at first, cheated. The brown Formica walls, the concertina door, the aluminum window frames… none of this was Stan to me. This was not where he had grown up, this was not where he had lived with me. This was Stan’s new life, a life which had existed independently of me.

But as I stood longer in the room Stan’s imprint on the place began to show. Like a photograph developing, his things rose one by one out of a background of unfamiliar furniture and a thin scattering of Rosie’s possessions-a comic book on the floor beside the bed that he must have been reading the night before, pairs of sneakers slung haphazardly against a wall, sketches of superheroes, an open can of Coke and a packet of potato chips… These glimpses of the everyday moments in his life, these small, mundane, intimate times when he was most himself, cut me so deeply I had to steady myself against the doorframe.

There was a closet beside the door. I opened it and ran my hands across Stan’s clothes. The leather jacket I’d given him when I left Oakridge was at the head of the row, and beside it the pale blue bowling shirt he’d been wearing on my first day back. I took the shirt from its hanger and sat at the foot of the bed and buried my face in it, breathing in the scent of my brother-perspiration and the perfume of Brylcreem-trying to breathe into existence a world around myself which still contained him. But of course I could not, and in the end the shirt served only to drive home how utterly and permanently gone he was. I sat and cried into it until I felt empty of anything worthwhile, empty of anything I might have held up as evidence that I was, if only in the smallest of ways, a good man.

When, finally, I put the shirt back in its place, I saw Stan’s two remaining superhero costumes and remembered his words to me about how I should wear them sometimes. I took them out of the closet and draped them over my arm. I spent another minute in the bedroom trying to absorb as much of him as I could, to parcel up and carry away with me forever these last, fading traces of his life, but I had come to my limit and did not have the strength to stay longer. The only other thing I took from the room was the leather jacket.

Outside, it was very cold. I walked quietly back to the cabin and sat on the steps out front. I put the leather jacket on and zipped it up and sat breathing steam into the air with my hands in its pockets, thinking about how I had destroyed Stan’s faith in life.

He had seen the world as a place of hope, as something that looked after the people who lived within it. There had been a magic to it for him. It was a place where you could hold a tree and be energized, where moths could somehow draw power to you. But six months in my presence had taken every last piece of this magic away from him.

My guilt was a condition of the soul that lay about me like a gray tubercular cloud, and Stan had breathed it in every day that he was with me. He had recognized it for what it was. He had told me to stop feeling bad, to leave the horrors of the past in the past. But it had made no difference. My self-loathing had sustained me for so long that I could not give it up. And Stan, who had never had the chance to build resistance to this most adult of afflictions, was unable to withstand its unremitting onslaught, unable to prevent his own trusting view of life becoming terminally infected with it.

He had worshipped me, he had looked to me for a model of how to live, and I had shown him only regret and hopelessness and a barren future where happiness was impossible. And it had been this, more than any attack by Jeremy Tripp or Gareth, that had changed him into a person capable of picking up a handgun, pointing it at another human being, and pulling the trigger.

Later, as it was starting to get light, Marla came out with coffee and sat next to me. I put my head on her shoulder and she stroked my hair and I wanted to stay like that forever, sitting there with the feel of her fingers taking away thought, never having to address anything or deal with anything or think about myself ever again.

Around 6:30 a.m. we got into the pickup and drove out to Tunney Lake to watch the police dive team from Sacramento search for Stan and Rosie’s bodies. On the way past Millicent’s house we stopped and knocked on her door. It took her a long time to answer, when she did she was wrapped in a quilt from her bed and her face looked gray and immobile. We asked her if she wanted to come with us, but she shuddered and said she couldn’t bear it and went back into her house.

The officer stationed at the entrance to Lake Trail recognized us and rolled his car back so we could pass. At the lake there was an ambulance and an Oakridge police cruiser in the parking lot. On the beach three large black SUVs with crests on their sides and long metal trailers behind them were backed up to the water’s edge. Three gray semi-inflatable boats had just launched. Two of them each held a driver and a pair of wet-suited divers, the third appeared to be some sort of coordinating vessel and carried a pod of electronic equipment and three guys in dark fatigues and peaked caps.

Two Oakridge police officers were on the beach talking to a guy with a mustache who looked like he was the head of the dive team. One of the officers saw us and came over and told us it might take most of the day for the divers to find anything. He pointed to the rocks at the far end of the beach and said that the most private place to watch from would probably be there. The man with the mustache nodded at us and tugged the bill of his cap.

Marla and I sat huddled in our coats on the sand where the rocks started. The divers were in the water now and the boats idled behind them, following their bubble trails. The cold air was still and sound traveled easily and around us the morning filled with the noise of outboard motors, the calls of the men in the boats, and the burble of two-way radios. The dive team had begun working near the shore and was only slowly making its way out toward the deeper water by the cliff face.

As I watched them, blankly waiting for the inevitable, I realized that Oakridge and all it had ever held for me was finished, that I would sell Empty Mile as soon as I could find a buyer. Gareth’s share would go to his father and I would give Stan’s to Millicent. Marla and I would take the rest and travel east across the country until there was no more land to travel across. We would find a place to live there and hope that the three thousand miles of land between us and Oakridge would be enough to keep us safe from the people we had been.

By midday the divers had moved across the lake and were within fifteen yards of the cliff face. They found Stan first. We heard one of the men in the boats shout, then all three boats quickly converged on a pair of divers who had surfaced and were supporting something between them. I couldn’t see much at first from where we were, but when the body was lifted into one of the boats I saw that it was dressed in gray and black.

The boat came into shore and the police and the dive team members on the beach jumped to meet it. They lifted Stan’s body out and lay it face up on the sand.

When Marla and I got there the men fell silent and made way for us. I stood close to Stan, staring down at him. He’d lost his mask and his glasses and the wet Batman costume stuck tightly to his rounded body. His eyes were closed and the dark lashes against the white skin made him look very young, as though death had stripped away the attempts he had made to disguise himself as an adult, leaving behind instead the soft brave boy he had always really been.

It was an impossible thing to accept that those eyes would never open again. The lids were not damaged, his face, though swollen a little, was unmarked. There seemed no reason why, if I shook him hard enough or breathed into him long enough, those eyes should not flutter open, that he should not smile and say to me, “Hiya, Johnny. Don’t worry, I’m fine.” It had happened once before.

But it wouldn’t happen this time.

I bent and put my hand against the side of his face. I was not prepared for how cold he felt, how hard the bone of his skull seemed beneath his skin, but I kept my hand where it was. He was my beautiful brother, the man I had come back to Oakridge to fix. My last, lost hope for absolution.

This was the last time I would see him outside a coffin, this was the last shred of connection between us before formal process took over. I wanted to stop this headlong race, this rocketing of him away from me. I wanted to hold on to him, to not let him go, and believe that by doing so I could keep some essential part of him alive. But he was already gone and there was nothing, not a thing in the entire universe, I could do to bring him back.

When I stepped away from the body two of the dive team picked him up carefully and placed him in a black vinyl body bag. As they were zipping it up one of them asked me if I wanted them to leave his face showing. I shook my head and they closed the bag and then all of the men on the beach gathered about it and lifted it in silence and carried it gently and slowly over to the ambulance in the parking lot.

Fifteen minutes later the same pair of divers who had found Stan found Rosie. When she was laid out on the sand we went over and stood beside her. She had been a quiet, closed presence and only Stan had really passed beyond the locked façade she held against the world, but she had been a part of our lives for six months and I was as responsible for her death as I was for Stan’s. Before they closed the body bag Marla stepped forward and smoothed Rosie’s hair away from her face and arranged the collar of her dress more closely about her throat.

After that there was nothing more for us at the lake. The police would pack up, the bodies would be transported to the coroner in Burton, there would be an autopsy, and sometime later Stan and Rosie would be released for burial. I wanted to get home as fast as I could, to close the door behind me and shut out the world, but as Marla and I were walking across the grass bank to the pickup there was a shout from the two divers who were still in the water. We turned to see them waving to their command boat. They were a long way out across the lake, almost at the cliff face, and it was impossible to see what they were holding just below the surface of the water. But I had a sickening feeling I knew exactly what it was they had found.

Marla clutched my arm and we stood there on that low grassy bank, unable to move, unable to look away as a third body was pulled from the water and ferried to shore. The police, having no reason to associate us with this one, paid no attention to us and unloaded the body and laid it out with less ceremony than they had previously.

This new body was in far worse condition than Stan or Rosie. If it hadn’t been for the remains of the business suit that clung to it, it would have been difficult to identify it as human at all from where we stood. It was a white, bloated thing that curved from head to toe like the back of a whale. Where the flesh was exposed the skin was tattered and peeling. The head was bigger than it should have been and most of its hair was gone.

But Marla and I both knew who it was.

I took a step forward but Marla pulled me back. Her eyes were wide and frightened. She whispered, “I can’t do it. I’ll give myself away.”

“If they knew anything about you and him they would have come to you when it happened.”

“I know, but I can’t do it, Johnny. I can’t.”

“Okay, go home and wait for me. I’ll get a ride back.”

I gave her the keys to the pickup and kissed her quickly. She nodded but her face was ashen and I wasn’t sure she was registering anything other than the fear of being connected to Ray’s death. She walked to the pickup, doing her best to look like what was happening on the beach meant nothing to her, and drove away without looking back.

All the boats were beached now and the police and the dive team were standing in a loose circle around the body. Several of them were talking on their radios, reporting this unexpected find to their various superiors. As I approached them the Oakridge officer who had earlier suggested we wait by the rocks held up his hand and blocked my path.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to stay back.”

But I had a clear view of the body now. I lifted my hand to my mouth and gasped, “That’s my father!”

And so a day which I’d known would be long became longer. Patterson had to be called out. I had to explain to him why I was certain it was my father-how I could tell by his watch and his clothes-that I had nothing new to add to the case, that him being found there was pure coincidence as far as I was concerned and, when the question was put to me, that I did not think the fact Stan had killed Gareth meant that either one of them had killed my father.

Patterson said they’d take my father’s body to the lab in Burton to determine the cause of death and to see if there was any forensic evidence. But he told me I shouldn’t be too optimistic they’d find anything that would further their original investigation, given the length of time he’d been underwater.

They gave me a few moments alone with the body. The months underwater had erased the features from its face and left it a pulpy ball on which it was hard to define any trace of personality at all. It was a shocking sight, but I was shocked more by my own ambivalence. The sight of my father’s dead body should have broken me with grief. But it did not. As I looked at the soggy mass I felt only a puzzled emptiness, as though this body was not that of my father, but of some unknown person I had once passed in the street long ago. I wondered how it was possible for a son to feel this way about his father. But I knew. I knew.

By four o’clock it was all over at the lake. The ambulance had taken the bodies away, the dive team had packed up and gone, and Patterson had headed back to town to deal with his paperwork. The two uniformed officers were the last to leave. They walked up and down the beach for several minutes picking up small pieces of trash the other men had left behind, then one of them came over and asked where they should drive me. All day long I had wanted to be gone, away from this place, but now I felt I could not leave without a last, solitary goodbye to a site that was both the start of the guilt I carried for my brother and the end of all the attempts I had made to fix it.

I told the cop I’d make my own way home. He looked dubious for a moment, then reached into the rear of the cruiser and handed me a folded survival blanket.

“Don’t stay too long, it’ll be cold tonight.”

He gave a small salute and the cruiser pulled away.

I looked across at the bungalow where Gareth had lived.

There was smoke coming from the chimney and I knew David would be inside, alone with the loss of his son. I thought about going to see him, but I had enough pain of my own. I sat on the grass bank and wrapped the foil blanket around me. There was less than an hour till the sun dropped below the mountains and the light on the lake was softening and small insects had come out to stand trembling on the surface of the water near the shore. It seemed to me suddenly that I had been cold forever, and I was cold still, even with the blanket. I drew it up so that it covered my head and I looked out from under it at the lake.

Eight years ago I had left Oakridge hoping to outrun the guilt I felt at Stan’s drowning, but far from distancing myself from it, I had compounded it, because by leaving I had added the guilt of abandonment, of sentencing Stan to the exclusive care of my emotionally arid father. Later, too, there had been more guilt as I realized better what my departure must also have meant to Marla.

I should have learned over those eight years that guilt can neither be worked off nor outdistanced. But I did not, and in the end my desperation to be rid of it had driven me back to my hometown. I worked hard there, with Stan and with Marla, trying to force the present to compensate the past. I did the best I could. But it didn’t make any difference.

Stan had believed that life would take care of him. And though his mind was less capable than mine he had been smarter than me. He had understood that you cannot hang on to guilt so desperately, so tenaciously, and hope to live a life that is either bearable or worthwhile.

Now, with my utter failure staring me in the face, I saw, finally, that he had been right. It was not the fixing of guilt that was important, but learning to find a way to come to terms with it, to understand that the past must be lived with, not forever battled against.

My guilt had become the structure of my world, but that day, as I watched the waters of the lake darken, the sheer weight of regret I carried finally pushed me beyond itself and somehow, by overload, cauterized that part of me which made such an ongoing agony of my mistakes. I’d simply had too much to take any more, but I also knew that if I kept feeding my guilt, kept it alive at such a level, I would certainly destroy what little there was left in the world that I still held dear. There would be no chance at all for Marla and me.

I was not absolved, I was not free of everything I had ever done. My past would always be with me and I would always regret so much of it, but there was now some curtain drawn across it, through which it could still be seen but which muted its sounds and colors and filtered it just enough that its incandescent horror could no longer scorch the present so deeply.

Perhaps it would not last. Perhaps my guilt would again catch me and begin anew the process of tearing the lives of those around me to pieces. But for now I was beyond it and I would use this respite from it as carefully as I could to build a life with Marla in which she and I would at last be able to find some measure of joy in each other. Sometime in the future. Sometime, if we were lucky.

I left the lake as the light was fading. There were clouds now in the sky and a breeze had started. Millicent’s Datsun had been towed from the trail and there was nothing where it had been but torn earth and the trunk of a tree from which the bark had been scraped. When I reached the Oakridge Loop I called Marla on my cell phone. Half an hour later she met me in the pickup and we drove home pressed against each other with the heater not working and whatever thoughts we were thinking kept silent inside ourselves.

Patterson called in the middle of the following week to tell me my father’s body had yielded nothing conclusive. The fact that he’d been found in the lake dressed in business clothes seemed to confirm a theory of foul play, but neither the wound they had discovered on the back of his head nor anything on his person gave any indication as to who might have been involved. Similarly, questioning David, the lake’s only permanent resident, had provided no useful information. Patterson told me he was sorry, but finding the body was probably as good as it was going to get.

Two days later, in the morning, we buried Stan and Rosie and my father.

The next day there was snow on the ground at Empty Mile.

And the day after that Marla and I locked up the cabin and got into the pickup and drove out of Oakridge toward the East.