Eyes Wide Open (aka Killing Hour)

Chapter One

A myriad of lights flickered brightly in the distance. The whoosh of the surf cascading against the rocks was only a far-off whisper hundreds of feet below.

From up here, the lights all seemed just like candles to him. Millions of candles! Like the whole world had all come out and assembled before him, an endless procession at his feet.

It made him smile. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. He had always wondered what it would be like from up here-the gigantic mound of rock, miles and miles of coastline stretching below.

Now he knew.

You could probably see all the way to L.A., the boy imagined. He was no longer a boy really, he was twenty-one-though sometimes he still felt like one.

What are the voices saying to you now?

He stepped out closer to the ledge. “They’re saying this is where I was meant to be.”

He had made the climb up hours ago, before it got dark, to be alone with his thoughts. To calm the noise that was always in his head. To see … And now it was just so beautiful. And all the voices had quieted except one.

His angel, he called her. The one voice he could trust.

Have you ever seen anything more beautiful? the angel asked him.

“No, I haven’t.” He looked down at the lights of the small coastal town. “ Never. ”

Waves crashed against the jagged rocks below. His heart picked up excitedly. “I can see the whole world.”

Yes, it’s all there for you.

He hadn’t taken his meds today. Usually that made him a little foggy, his thoughts jumbled. But today, maybe for the first time ever, his mind was clear. Completely clear. “I feel just like Jesus.”

Maybe you are, his angel answered.

“Then maybe I should just return from where I came. Maybe God wants me back. Maybe that’s what I’m feeling.”

You’re not meant for this world, the voice replied . You’re smarter. You were destined for greater things. You’ve always known that, right?

Yes. The voice was soothing and close to his ear. His heart began to pound like the surf. There’s only one way to find out…

He took another step, closer to the edge, the darkness surrounding him. The breeze brushed against his face. “That feels good. I feel good. I feel good about this.”

Just spread your arms, his angel instructed him.

“Like wings?” He opened his arms wide. “You mean like this?”

Yes, just like that. Now think of heading home. The pain you will no longer be feeling. You see those lights? They’re all so beautiful, aren’t they?

“They are!”

Beneath him, a piece of the ledge broke loose. It took several seconds until he heard the sound of it breaking apart on the craggy rocks below. He stepped back, fear springing up in him. “I’m scared.”

Don’t be. This is the moment it’s all been leading to. All these years. You know this, don’t you?

“Yes.” He nodded. “I know…”

Then open your arms. Just let the wind caress your face. Let the darkness take you. It’s easy…

“I feel it!” the boy said. He spread his arms. “I do.”

Feel how loving its touch is. How free of pain. You’ve been in so much pain lately.

“I have been. Yes, I have.”

It would be good to be rid of the pain, just for once. To stop the voices. To stop feeling he was letting everyone down. He knew how much of a burden he was. To his parents. To everyone who had expectations of him. The absence of pain is heaven, isn’t it? Heaven . That would be nice. To finally be free of it.

Then just reach out, the angel said. Let it take you. Like the wind. Just think of heading home. That’s all it is. You can do that, can’t you?

“I think so,” he said, nodding. “I think so.”

Sucking in a breath, he stepped farther out on the edge, his pulse picking up speed. Only the cushion of darkness beneath him. The welcoming sound of the surf far below. How incredibly peaceful it all was. And those candles, so beautiful…

So this was it…

“I’m so sorry!” he shouted to the panoply of lights. To his mother and father. He knew how much this would hurt and disappoint them.

“Like an angel…” he said, shutting his eyes. A final cacophony built in his brain. He stretched out his arms wide, palms in the air.

“Like this…?”

Yes, just like that, the angel said.

Then fly.

Chapter Two

The gal in the white lace sundress was as sexy as I’d ever seen.

She had shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair, a little tangled and windswept. Eyes as blue and inviting as a Caribbean cove, the kind you could dive right into. A strap of her dress dangled loosely off her shoulder, exposing the shape of her breast, and she smiled, bashful yet unconcerned. The second I laid my eyes on her I remembered thinking, Now there’s the woman I’ve been waiting for all these years. The one I could live with forever.

And as I stumbled down across the dunes to the ocean, lugging the bottle of Veuve Clicquot and our meal, the lights from our beach house washing over her face, I said for about the millionth time in the past twenty years just how lucky I was that I had.

“Get down here,” Kathy called. “There’s not much time before I start to freeze my butt off and the whole thing’s ruined.”

“You know, a little help might do the trick,” I yelled back.

I was balancing the champagne, the bowl of fresh pasta I had just topped off with truffles and butter, and my iPod speaker. The blanket was already laid out on the sand-the “table” set, the candles lit, re-creating that night from twenty years ago.

Our wedding night.

No fancy party or trip. Just us, for a change. Both of our kids were away. The truth was, we rarely even celebrated our anniversary, not since our daughter, Sophie, was born a year later on the very same day. August 28. But this year she was already at Penn and our sixteen-year-old, Max, was at fall lacrosse camp before school began.

We were at our beach house in Amagansett, basically just a cozy cape house nestled into the Hampton dunes.

“Yow, sand crab! ” I yelped, hopping onto a foot and almost pitching the tray.

“You drop that bowl, mister, and you can forget about whatever you have in mind for later!” Kathy jumped up, taking the pasta from me and setting it on the blanket, where she had laid out a hand-printed menu, bamboo place mats, fluted champagne glasses, and candles. There were even little name cards.

I looked closer and noticed that they were from Annette’s, up in Vermont, where we’d had our wedding.

The very same name cards-with the same little blue ribbons-but this time they were inscribed with the words: “ To my wonderful husband. For 20 beautiful years .”

I have to admit, my heart crumbled just a bit on that one. “Nice touch.”

“Thought you’d enjoy that one. Sophie did the lettering. Not to mention letting us have the day.”

“Remind me later to thank her,” I said. I sat down and started to pour some champagne. “ Wait- almost forgot!” I connected the speaker to my iPod and pushed the play arrow. “My contribution!”

Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight” spread over the beach. It wasn’t really “our song”; it was played a lot back then when we started getting cozy with each other at college. I was never the big romantic or anything. Kathy always said she had a thirty-second window to hold my hand before I would let go.

“So happy anniversary,” I said. I leaned in close to kiss her.

“Say it first,” she said, keeping me at bay.

“Say what ?”

“You know damn well what…” She lifted her champagne glass with a determined glimmer in her eye. “Not like you said it back then… like you really mean it this time.”

“You mean how you were the one I wanted to honor and take care of for the rest of our lives…?”

“Yeah, right !” She chortled. “If only you had said it like that.”

What I’d said, or kind of barked at her back then, going eighty on the New York Thruway-kind of a running joke all these years-after being nudged and pressed to set a wedding date, holding off until I’d finished my residency and hooked up with a job, then further delaying until Kathy was done with hers, was something a bit more like: “Okay, how about Labor Day? Does that work for you?”

“Does that work…?” Kathy blinked back, either in disbelief or shock at having received about the lamest proposal ever. “Yeah, it kinda works…” She shrugged.

I think I drove on for another exit before I turned and noticed her pleased and satisfied smile.

“Well, it seems to have…” I wrapped my champagne glass around hers, looking in her eyes. “ Worked. We’re still here!”

The truth was, I’d come from a family of revolving divorces. My father, five-all with beautiful younger women. My mom, three. None of the marriages ever lasted more than a couple of years. In my family, whenever someone popped the question, it was more like code for saying that they wanted to split up.

“So then say it,” Kathy said. Her gaze turned serious. “For real this time.”

It was clear this wasn’t her usual horsing around. And the truth was, I’d always promised I’d make it up to her if we lasted twenty years.

So I put down my glass and pushed onto a knee. I took her hands in mine, in the way I had denied her those years before, and I fixed on those beautiful eyes and said, in a voice as true as I’d ever spoken: “If I had the chance to do it all over again-a hundred times, in a hundred different universes-I would. Each and every time. I’d spend my life with you all over again.”

Kathy gave me a look-not far from the one in the car twenty years ago-one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break .

Until I saw her little smile.

“Well, you have, ” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Taken care of me, Jay. All of us.”

I winked at her. “Now, can we eat?”

I think we both knew we would stay together from the first time we met. We were undergrads back at Cornell, and I had long, curly brown hair in those days and broad shoulders. Played midfield on the lacrosse team. We even went to the Final Four my junior year. Kathy was in veterinary science. I still kept my hair kind of long, but I’d added tortoiseshell glasses now, along with a slightly thicker waist. These days, it took a hundred sit-ups and a half hour on the treadmill every couple of days to keep me in some kind of shape.

“Yes.” She started to spoon out the salad. “Now we can eat.”

My cell phone sounded.

I groaned. I hadn’t even realized I’d had it on me. Habit, I guess. After twenty years of being on call, the ring of the phone intruding on a potential Cialis moment was the ultimate deflating sound.

Kathy sighed. “Probably the kids. You know how they like to bust a good mood.”

I looked at the screen. It wasn’t the kids at all.

“It’s Charlie.”

My brother. Eight years older. He and his wife, Gabby, both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, lived in California as wards of the state, along with Evan, their twenty-one-year-old son. We helped out with their rent, pitched in financially when they got in over their heads. Which was often. They always seemed to need something. A call from them was rarely good news.

Kathy exhaled at me. “It’s our anniversary, Jay…”

My first thought was to let it go to voice mail, but I picked up.

“Hi, Charlie…, ” I answered, some irritation coming through.

It wasn’t him. It was Gabriella. “I’m sorry to bother you, Jay…,” she began, like she always began, in her gravelly, deep-throated voice and still-heavy Colombian accent. “Something terrible has happened here.” Her voice was shaky and distressed. “Evan is dead.”

“Dead? ” My eyes immediately shot wide, finding Kathy’s. Evan was their only child. He had always been troubled; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar as well. Out of school. Not working. In and out of trouble with the law. But dead? “ How? ”

“He jumped off the rock. In Morro Bay.” Then she choked back a sob, any attempt at control completely unraveling. “Evan is gone, Jay. He killed himself. My son is no more.”

Chapter Three

I turned to Kathy, the bottom falling out of my stomach. “Evan’s dead.”

She looked back at me, tears forming immediately. “Oh my God, Jay, how …?”

“He killed himself. He jumped off a cliff.”

Like everything with Charlie and Gabriella-every monthly call on how they were, how Evan was doing, every veiled plea for money or to be bailed out-it spun your head.

Just a week ago we’d gotten a call that Evan was improving. That he was back on his meds. He was even thinking about going back to school. I brought my nephew’s cherub-like face to mind, freckles dotting his cheekbones. That smug Don’t worry, I got it all figured out smirk he always wore.

“Oh, Gabby, I’m so sorry. I thought he was doing well.”

“Well, you know we haven’t been telling you everything, Jay. It’s not so easy to have to talk about your son that way.”

“I know,” I said, bludgeoned. “I know.”

I was a surgeon. I dealt with life and death every day. But when it’s someone close to you, your own… everything changed. They’d never had jobs or money. Or even friends that I knew. They lived on welfare, totally under the radar. Evan was their only hope. The only thing good in their own failed lives.

Now that was gone…

When he was younger, my nephew had shown a lot of promise. His early report cards were always A’s. He was kind of a basketball whiz, his room lined with trophies. I remembered how brightly Charlie and Gabby spoke of him back then.

“How’s Charlie holding up?” I asked. “Let me talk with him.” Kathy inched closer and took my hand. I shook my head grimly.

“Your brother cannot come to the phone,” Gabriella said. “He’s a mess, Jay. He can’t stop crying. He’s blaming himself for the whole thing. He can’t even speak.”

Blame… My brother’s life was a monument to blame. I could think of a million reasons he might be feeling that.

Charlie was my half brother, from my dad’s first marriage. Eight years older than I was; I barely knew him growing up. He was raised in Miami, in the sixties, brilliant in many ways-a math whiz, early into quantum physics and Eastern religions-but just as wild. My dad’s marriage to his mother had only lasted a year and a half; then he made his way up to New York; started his business, a women’s apparel firm; and married my mom. He barely even acknowledged he already had a son.

Charlie was smoking pot by the time most kids were hiding beers. Then he went upward from there: speed, mushrooms, LSD. He grew his hair out, totaled his Corvette. A ranked junior in tennis, he flung his racket into the stands at the state high school championships and never went back. He always had this dream of becoming a big-time rock star. And he even produced a record once, in L.A.-the only real accomplishment in his life.

Then there were a lot of dark years…

First, when he was twenty-three, it was the Hartford House of the Living, where he spent three months after the cops picked him up on the streets raving that he was Jesus Christ.

Then the street scene in New Orleans, with this ragged band of drugged-out bikers and felons known as the STPs-the Stinky Toilet People-who slept on the floors in abandoned buildings, whacked out of their minds. Charlie once told me that you could wake up with a knife stuck in your chest if you simply rolled up against one of their girlfriends wrong.

And finally that commune up near Big Sur, where I’d heard about this cult of stoned-out musicians and drifters, several of whom were later convicted of a string of horrible murders, though Charlie always claimed he was hanging around there only for the chicks and the drugs.

For years, he bounced in and out of hospitals and jails. Schizophrenic and bipolar, he’d been on lithium for thirty years, not to mention his own private pharmacy of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. He always battled with our father, right up to the day he died.

Ultimately, he did settle down. He met Gabriella in a recovery clinic back in Miami. Together, they moved out west and lived this quiet, codependent life in a coastal California town, granted disability by the state, just enough to squeak by.

They had Evan, and they tried their best to raise him. We always pitched in, anteing up for a car when theirs broke down or paying off their debts. Charlie once said to me, “You know how ashamed it makes me, Jay, to have to take money from my little brother just to get by.”

But of course they always took it. We were all that kept them from living under a bridge somewhere.

Now Evan…

My nephew’s life was a perfect storm of things that had gone wrong. Mental instability. No money. Violence and fighting in the house. At first, everything seemed on the right track; then it all changed. Scrapes at school became brushes with the law. He started taking drugs-speed, ecstasy, OxyContin. He and my brother began to clash-just as Charlie and our father used to clash-furniture tossed, punches thrown, the police called. Evan’s behavior grew increasingly erratic and withdrawn. He started hearing voices. He was placed on a daily diet of the same pills his father took-lithium, Klonopin, Thorazine-but he always seemed to be more off them than on. Finally he dropped out of school, got himself fired from a series of menial jobs. I tried my best to get him private counseling, to lure him away from their house. Once, I even begged him to come live with us and go to a junior college back east. But Charlie and Gabby never seemed prepared to let him go.

Only months ago, they’d told us that Evan had turned around. They’d said he was back on his meds, being helpful around the house. Even thinking of going back to college. Then only last week they’d left a message: He’d been taken away. He was in a state hospital. They were talking about finding him some kind of a halfway facility where they could place him under supervision. Force him to stay on his meds. We thought this was good. For the first time in years, we thought maybe there was a reason to hope.

Now this…

“Your brother needs you, Jay,” Gabriella said. She choked back a sob. “I’m afraid for what he might do. You know we don’t have anywhere else to turn.”

They had no money. No jobs to focus on. No friends to help soften the pain. All they ever had was this kid. And now he was gone.

I gave her over to Kathy, who tried to comfort her, but what was there to say? In a couple of minutes she put down the phone.

“I have to go out there,” I said.

She nodded.

I scrolled through my commitments for the following week-mostly things I could pass off on my partners, other than a procedure I had to perform on Friday on the teenage daughter of a friend.

“I’ll go Monday. I’ll only stay a couple of days.”

Kathy shook her head. “You can’t wait until Monday, Jay. These people need you. You’re all they have.” She took my hand in hers. “You have to go tomorrow, Jay.”

My gaze drifted to the meal spread out on the blanket, now cold. The glasses of champagne. Our little celebration. It all seemed pointless now.

I realized I hadn’t seen my brother in more than five years.

“I’ll go with you, you know,” Kathy said, moving next to me. “I will.”

“Thanks.” I smiled and drew her next to me. “But this is something I ought to do alone.”

“You’re a good brother, Jay.”

She handed me my glass. Then she took hers and we touched them lightly together. “Here’s to Evan,” Kathy said.

“To Evan.”

We took a sip and sat, knees up, watching the waves against the shore. Then she leaned over and re-pressed the play button on the iPod.

“Like the man says…” She put down her drink. “We’ve still got tonight.”

Chapter Four

The three-hour drive up the California coast on 101 to Charlie’s the following day gave my mind time to wander to some old things.

It went to my brother as a long-haired eighteen-year-old who had just dropped out of college, his conversation rocketing back and forth between complex string theory, Timothy Leary, and how the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the new gospel, in what I knew now, but not back then, was one of his uncontrolled, manic rants.

It went to how he had once visited me at Cornell-after he was released from the psychiatric home in Hartford-and how we took a weekend trip to Montreal. I recalled how we had trolled for girls along Sherbrooke Street, near McGill, and how Charlie had ended up screwing our waitress back in the hotel room after he’d convinced her he had taught Eric Clapton all he knew, and air-played her the opening riff from Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” while I pounded the pillow over my head in the other bed, alone.

My brother could charm the birds out of the trees.

It’s easy, Charlie always said, with that sly, mischievous grin. If you ask every chick you run into if they wanna screw, now and then one of them says yes! Even when you look like me!

Eventually, winding through the wooded canyons around Lompoc, my thoughts roamed here:

To the last time he had any kind of relationship with our dad.

It was maybe twenty years ago, Charlie’s last chance at a real life before he permanently gave up.

Somehow he had persuaded my father to dispose of his old design samples by sending them down to Miami, where Charlie had set up a rack in a women’s hair salon near his mother’s dance studio, selling them as one-of-a-kind creations.

It was only a wobbly metal rack in the rear of this cheesy salon, crammed with colorful velour and cotton cashmere sets-my dad’s particular genius. But to Charlie, it might as well have been the epicenter of the apparel world. He held court, shuttling back and forth between hair stations, his own hair bound neatly into a ponytail and dressed as cleanly as I’d ever seen him, the blue-haired women eating out of his hand. He’d mesmerize them with stories about his famous father in the rag trade, the glamorous women he screwed while in L.A., celebrity rockers he did coke with, lurid tales of his years on the road, all the while pushing oil stocks on the Canadian stock exchange.

He was turning dozens of sample sets each week at fifty to sixty bucks a pop. Real money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Living in a decent place on Biscayne Bay with Gabby and his infant son. He had an exuberance I’d never seen before-a twinkling in his eyes.

For the first time he was making it-in the real world.

And with his father, who had let him down a hundred times.

Later, he took me back to the storage room where he kept his stock. Charlie’s mood shifted. He started ripping open shipping cartons, his voice accusatory and familiar. “Look at the shit he’s trying to pawn off on me,” he said, tearing out newly received merchandise still in plastic bags. I could see rips, flaws, mismatched color panels mixed in with legitimate samples. “You see the kind of business I’ve got going here. These people don’t want crap. I’m selling ‘one of a kinds,’ not this garbage. And look -” He ripped an invoice out of the box. “He’s fucking billing me for them! He’s not even giving me terms.”

Everything always came back to this: Charlie trusting himself in our father’s hands, and Lenny pulling the rug out from under him again. “ I can’t sell these, can I? ” He looked at me for confirmation. And, yes, there were a few seconds, the prior season’s returns that had probably been in someone’s stockroom forever, design prototypes with busted zippers and mismatched panels.

“It would be hard,” I said, agreeing.

“He’s trying to screw me again, isn’t he? ” Anger rushed into my brother’s face. “You know what he did? He had his accountant call me up and demand payment. His accountant! I’m his son, for Christ’s sake. He just can’t stand to see me successful… We’re selling dozens a week of these, and he doesn’t want me to take his luster away from him so he’s trying to shut me down.”

To me, it was probably just the shipping manager throwing in the kitchen sink. My father probably didn’t even know about it.

But to Charlie it was like he had personally handpicked them to ensure he would fail.

A fight ensued, and weeks later, my dad stopped shipping to him for good. There was a huge battle over payment. My dad called Charlie “an ungrateful sonovabitch.” Charlie threatened to come up north and kill him.

They never spoke again.

He took Gabriella and Evan and moved out to the coast. Ten years later, when my father-drunk and down on his luck-drove his Mercedes into the waters of Shinnecock Bay, he wouldn’t even come to the funeral.

I got off the freeway at Pacific Crest Drive. Pismo Beach was a quaint, sleepy beach town tucked under rolling hills of dazzling gold and green, leading down to rocky bluffs overlooking the Pacific.

Grover Beach, where my brother lived, was its seedier next-door neighbor.

I’d been out there only once before, five years ago, when I brought the family while we were vacationing in San Francisco, four hours to the north. Up to then, my kids hadn’t even met my older brother. They’d only met Evan, their cousin, the couple of times we had brought him east.

Their place was a tiny two-bedroom apartment provided by the state with a single bathroom and pictures covering up cracks in the plaster in a downtrodden two-story building across from abandoned railroad tracks.

That visit, we sat around for most of a day, listening to Charlie and Evan banging on their guitars, belting out barely recognizable rock tunes in hoarse off-pitch voices, amid my brother’s rants about how his father had ruined his life and how by the time he was Sophie’s age, fifteen, he was already whacked out on LSD.

It was scary.

We watched them apportioning their cache of colorful medications on the kitchen counter. Gabby said how she was once a beauty queen back home and had never bargained for this kind of life, and how she might just go back to Colombia, where her family would gladly welcome her.

My kids were a little freaked out. We took them out to lunch, to a café on the main street overlooking the beach, lined with surf shops, tattoo parlors, and oyster bars. Charlie said it was the first time they’d been to a restaurant other than Denny’s in years.

We left the next day.

I drove down the long hill toward the ocean and turned on Division Street. I found Charlie’s building a half block down, the familiar blue Taurus I had bought for him parked beneath the carport out front. I pulled into the next space and sat for what seemed like a full five minutes.

What could I do for them here?

My mind went back to something.

The day Evan was born. Back in Miami. Kathy and I happened to be in Boca, so we went to see them at the hospital. Charlie was so different from how I’d ever seen him before. Cradling his little Evan in his arms, in his blue blanket, looking like any doting new dad, but with his wild, Jerry Garcia hair and bushy beard. He let Kathy hold the baby for a while, and he and I went down to the cafeteria.

“This is the start of something new for me,” Charlie said. “I can feel it.”

But as he picked up the coffee cup, something changed. “I need you to promise me something, Jay…”

“Sure.” I was twenty-eight then, still in med school. Kathy and I weren’t even married yet.

“I need you to promise me you’ll take care of him. Whatever happens to me, okay? I need to know Evan’ll be safe.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Charlie. Of course he’ll be safe…”

“No.” There was something dark and brooding in his eyes, a storm massing. “I need you to promise me, Jay, that whatever happens, you’ll be there for him.”

I said, “Of course I’ll be there, Charlie.” I met his worried eyes. “You have my word.”

He smiled, relieved. “I knew I could count on you, buddy. I just hope-”

Someone moved behind us on the line and he never finished. But now, all these years later, I thought I knew what he was about to say.

I only hope he doesn’t have what I have .

My son. The demons in his brain.

I only pray his path is easier.

He’d asked me, not Dad. And sitting under his carport, I couldn’t help but wonder: If it had all somehow worked out, back in that stupid salon…

If they had lived in a place without cracks in the walls… If their boy could have grown up proud, instead of filled with shame and anger…

Would his fate have been different or the same?

Even if the demons had found him, would my nephew still be alive?

Chapter Five

I went around the side through a brown, patchy courtyard, past a broken plastic kiddie car on its side. I stopped outside apartment two, wincing at what smelled like dog urine. Lurid, brightly colored graffiti spread all over the asphalt wall.

I knocked on the door.

After a short while I saw the curtains part, and the door opened. Gabriella appeared in a blue terry robe. She was normally a pretty woman with short blond hair, a nice shape, and a deep, throaty laugh, but now her cheeks were sunken and pale, her eyes raw from tears, her hair matted and unkempt. As she let me in she kind of turned away, almost unable to face me. “I’m sorry that you have to see me this way, Jay…”

“It’s okay, Gabby, it’s okay,” I said. We hugged, and I felt her latch on to me. It always made me feel a bit awkward, her gratitude for me for how we helped them get by. “I’m so sorry, Gabriella.”

“Oh, you don’t know what it’s like.” She moaned, anguish etched into the lines around her eyes. “I never thought I would ever feel something as difficult as this. Never to see my son again. My heart breaks, Jay…”

“I know.” I kept hugging her. “I know.”

“Your brother is not so good.” She pulled away, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know how he’s going to make it, Jay. You’ll see for yourself. He’s old now, and Evan was all we had. I’m glad you’re here.”

She led me inside. The place was small. Still, it was neat and tastefully decorated, with floral pillows and pictures of her family in Colombia and even some watercolors done by Charlie’s mother.

I heard a familiar voice on the stairs utter quietly, “Hi, Jay.”

My brother came down. He looked grayer, older, hunched a little in the shoulders, a shadow of what I last recalled. His beard was flecked with gray now, his hair straggly and wild. Charlie always had a twinkle in his eyes and an irresistible, wiry grin. It was what always captivated the girls. But nothing seemed to be there now. He wore a pair of ragged sweatpants and a brown flannel shirt. He forced a smile. “I’m glad you came, little brother…”

“Of course I came, Charlie.”

“C’mere…” He got to the bottom of the stairs and we hugged. I was surprised how natural it felt. Hugs weren’t exactly the norm in our relationship. He placed his face on my shoulder and started to weep. “We’re sunk, Jay. It’s gone for us. I can’t believe Evan is dead.”

“I know. I know…,” I said, squeezing him back and patting his shoulder.

“We failed him, Jay. He was a good kid, in spite of everything. We didn’t do right by him.”

“You did your best, Charlie. He wasn’t an easy kid.”

We all sat down at the small table in the kitchen. Gabriella poured some coffee. She laid out the long line of medications he was taking: trazodone, Caduet, felodipine, Quapro, Klonopin. Sedatives, blood pressure controllers, mood stabilizers. I didn’t really know much about what had happened. Only that Evan had jumped off a rock, but not how he had gotten there or why.

“Can you talk?” I asked him.

Charlie nodded, cupping a few of his pills in his hands and knocking them back. Dully, he looked up at me like, What is there to say?

I said, “Then tell me what happened.”

Chapter Six

“We always took care of our son.” He peeled an orange and put it on a small plate in front of him. “No matter what anyone can say, we tried to do our best. We always kept him safe.”

“I know that, Charlie,” I said, squeezing his arm.

Tears shone in his dark eyes. He shook his head. “I just don’t know how he could do that to us…”

Gabriella got up and wrapped her arm around him from behind. She picked up for him. “Ten days ago… You know for a long time, Jay, our son had been acting really crazy…”

Of course I knew. Sitting around in a silent state all day in the house, no job, no school. Usually off his medications.

“Well, he’d gotten worse. He was off his meds. We no longer knew how to handle him. He would just sit there-on that couch-for twenty-four hours straight. Not a single word-just staring. Into space.

“Just a few weeks back we heard noises in the middle of the night, and we came down. He was just sitting there, talking”-Gabby pointed to what looked like a wood-burning heater in the corner-“to the furnace, Jay. My son was talking to the furnace! He told me, ‘I hear voices in there, Mommy…’ I said to him, ‘Evan, you have to let us help you…’ We didn’t know what to do.”

“He was always so angry at us,” Charlie said. “He wouldn’t take his pills. He would just hurl them at us. Then he’d just smile coyly. I couldn’t fight him anymore. It was like he was torturing us, trying to make us suffer along with him.”

“Two weeks ago”-Gabby took a breath to steady herself-“we found something…”

I took a sip of my coffee. “What?”

“This is so hard for me to tell you, Jay. It really is… I went through his things. Because I was scared. I was scared at some of the things he was saying to us. He called me a stupid, uneducated whore… a wetback scum. He called your brother a miserable kike who could never get a job. His own father… I wanted to see where he was learning this from. What was influencing his crazy mind? And we found something. An application…”

“For a job?”

Gabby laughed. “ For a job? If only for a job! It was an application to buy a gun! A twenty-gauge shotgun. From a gun store in the next town. And for what? To kill someone, Jay. Maybe kill us. You see these stories on the news, about what people like our son can do. We said, this kid can’t have a gun… He’s mentally unstable. He’s been diagnosed by the state. He has a record with the police. These people cannot sell him a gun…”

I screwed up my eyes in disbelief. “ How? ”

“He lied, Jay. He lied about everything on his application. That he wasn’t sick; that he had no record. Maybe they would have caught it, or maybe not-but we went there. To stop them. We told the man at the shop, ‘Are you out of your mind? You can’t sell my son a weapon! Do you know what he might do with it?’ We threw the application back in his face. We were scared…”

I said, “I don’t blame you for being scared.” I thought of my troubled nephew with a gun, with the image of Columbine or Virginia Tech vivid in my mind, with all the anger and sociopathic behavior he had shown. “You did the right thing, Gabby.”

“I know we did the right thing. But then we found something else…” She looked at me, eyes downcast. “I can hardly even say it, Jay…”

“We found a kind of diary Evan was keeping,” Charlie interjected. “These ramblings, crazy things…”

“I have to cross myself to even tell you these things,” Gabriella said. “Things like, ‘Better to suck the dick of the devil than to live here with these two dead people one more day…’ That’s us, Jay. Our son was talking about us-your brother and me!” She dabbed at her eyes, shame and grief etched deeply there. “But we didn’t know what to do… We knew he’s acting truly crazy now. Off the charts. We can no longer control him. It’s clear he hates us… That he wants to kill us. And then himself. And who knows, maybe take other people with him…”

“So what did you do?”

“We showed it to him.” Gabriella looked at me as if seeking dispensation. “Everything. You know what he did? He takes me by the hair, and twists me, like he wants to kill me right there, and throws me against the wall. Look! ” She opened the top of her robe and showed me purplish marks covering her shoulder and onto her neck. “He’s too big for us to fight now. Look at your brother. He’s weak, old. He is no longer able to protect me. We didn’t know what to do…”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“What did we do? We called the police,” Gabriella said.

Truth was, I had always pushed them to do exactly that. To put their son in custody when he assaulted them. But they never would. They never once pressed charges. How could we? they would say. On our own son. And then the excuses would start. He’s just a boy. He’s ashamed of what he’s done. He promises to stay on his medication. I guess I understood. Who wanted to make that kind of choice? But by not getting Evan help, by always protecting him and shielding him from treatment, I saw the events build that could lead nowhere but to catastrophe.

“When the police came”-Gabby rubbed her forehead, shaking her head-“Evan went out of control. He looked at me. ‘You do this to me, Mommy? You called the cops-on your own son!’ I saw something in his eyes I had never seen before. Like an animal. I told him, ‘ You’re sick, my son . You need some help .’ He grabbed me by the hair again and tried to beat the shit out of me. Your brother, he tried to help. But Evan threw him against the wall. He almost broke a rib. The cops saw it all. They finally got Evan in a choke hold. They came and took him away. To the hospital, in San Luis Obispo. To the mental ward. That’s when I called you, Jay.”

“They placed him under a suicide watch,” Charlie said. “They took away his belt. And laces. Put him under twenty-four-hour observation. I’ve been there before. I know the drill. Apparently he told the doctor who first examined him that he wanted to kill himself. That the gun he was trying to buy was intended not for us, but for him.”

He shook his head. “We failed him, Jay. They said they were going to take care of him. Help him.” A mixture of grief and anger hung in his eyes. “We thought maybe we finally did the right thing. That maybe this was the best way. The social worker there told us they were going to keep him safe. That they’d watch him, for as long as they possibly could. Three weeks, they said. Then they’d find somewhere for him. I said, ‘Whatever you do, you can’t put this kid back on the street. You see how angry he is? He’ll blow people away…’ ”

“You know the name of the doctor?” I asked, something starting to tighten in me. They had trusted the authorities to take care of Evan, and they had let them down.

“Derosa. Mitchell Derosa. But we never even spoke to him. No one would speak to us. Only the social worker there. His name was Brian something. We have it written down. And a nurse. They said for us not to worry, they were going to have several doctors observe him, and they would get him into some kind of facility.”

Gabriella chortled cynically. “You know what we were thinking? We’re thinking, Maybe this is a good thing after all . That’s when I called you, Jay. You probably thought it was just for more money, but it was to tell you, maybe Evan is in a good place at last. We felt relieved.”

I nodded.

“But then they call and tell us they’re going to release him! This social worker. Brian. After around four days. He says Evan is stable now and they had found a place for him. Four days? They said three weeks! I’m telling you this kid was psycho, Jay. I said, ‘Are you sure, so soon…?’ But they said, ‘Your son is an adult, Ms. Erlich,’ and that they couldn’t hold him indefinitely against his will, now that he had calmed down and was no longer a threat to himself. What kind of a crazy thing is this? I said, ‘You can’t do that. Maybe he’s an adult, but I am his mental guardian. You see the shape he was in.’ But they say Evan agreed, and they’re gonna put him in a good place.”

“What kind of place?” I asked.

“They didn’t tell us shit!” Charlie snorted. “They wouldn’t even talk to us. That’s what happens when you’re poor and on disability in this town.”

“But now they’re scared,” Gabby said in a haughty tone. “Now they all see what happened. It was on the TV. On the news. They know they screwed up. They’re all running to cover their own asses now.”

Something brushed against my leg. I looked down. A gray and white cat was nuzzling against me.

“That’s Juliet,” Gabby said. “Poor baby-she misses Evan too.” She reached down and lifted the cat up, took her to the back door, and put her gently outside. “Get back outside. You can’t be bothering us now.”

The cat slinked back to the yard and jumped onto the fence.

“So where did Evan finally end up?” I asked.

“You want to know where they put him?” Gabby replied, her tone hardening. “You want to know where they threw my son, like some sack of garbage? In this unsupervised home in Morro Bay. Completely unrestricted. With a bunch of fucking old people. Alzheimer’s patients. Walking around like the living dead. Evan called me. He said, ‘Why did they put me in here? Why did they put me with all these old people, Mommy?’

“The woman who’s in charge there said he went to take a walk. She just let him go. Waved him out the door. They don’t give a shit. They get their money. Evan was just a voucher to her. A check from the state. That’s all! They had him on so much medication. Seroquel. Two hundred milligrams. Two hundred milligrams is enough to drop an elephant, Jay. You know this stuff. You know what it does. It makes you act like a zombie. It takes away your will. She didn’t care, as long as she got paid. My son went to take a walk and never came back. This woman, Anna, she called us late that night. Two days ago. Evan was missing. Where is he, she asks. She said she thought maybe he came home to us. But you know where he was, my son…? You know where Evan was? He had climbed the fucking rock there, that’s where he was. He was probably already dead.”

Anger flared up inside me. This just didn’t wash. Every patient had a medical history. Treatment charts. Diagnoses and evaluations. They don’t just dump people at will. In a place where they won’t be watched.

“She just let him leave?”

“Yes. Walk out. I told you, she don’t give a shit, Jay. That’s the way it is here. But, believe me-she was scared when she called us. She knew she screwed up. And the next morning, my son, he turns up dead. He was up there on the rock, Jay. The whole stinking night. In the cold. Alone. Without anyone to watch over him.” She started to sob again. “My boy was on the rock. I want to sue that bitch.”

“You want to know what really hurts?” Charlie took her face and brought it against his shoulder. “We were watching the news that morning. Friday, I think. Or Saturday… I don’t keep track of time so well anymore. They said some kid had jumped off Morro Bay Rock. A John Doe. No ID on him. We go, ‘Thank God that’s not Evan. Thank God he is in a safe place.’ And it’s our own son, Jay! They were talking about Evan. We’re listening to a report about our own son…”

He started to sob, loud choking tremors. Gabriella held his head in her arms. “We just failed you, Evan… We let you die.”

It was horrible. I didn’t know what to do or feel, other than my hands balling into tight fists. Rich or poor, it didn’t matter. There was a complete breakdown. Not only of treatment, but also of responsibility. And Evan was the victim of it. I knew in my world, this could never happen. Not without some kind of response, accountability.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“At the coroner’s,” Charlie said. “They’re doing their autopsy and tests. We can’t even see him.”

Gabriella wiped her eyes. “He called me, you know. The day before. I asked, ‘Are you all right, Evan? You know I love you, don’t you, my son?’ And you know what he told me? He said, ‘I’m gonna make the best of it, Mommy.’ Make the best … Does that sound like some kid who wanted to kill himself the next day? They say it’s a suicide, but it doesn’t sound like that to me. You know what I think? I don’t think my son would kill himself. It sounds like murder, Jay. By the state. They took my son and screwed his head up on drugs, then dropped him in a place that wasn’t right for him. They murdered him. ”

As a doctor, I was always quick to assume that the system handled things correctly. Sure, mistakes were made, but generally it did things right. But as an uncle, I couldn’t disagree.

It was like murder.

We sat around in silence for a while. Charlie and Gabriella just hugged each other, helpless and crying. Then Gabriella got up. She cleared the table, put the coffee mugs in the sink, and ran the water over them. Then she turned and faced me, her palms back against the counter. “At the end, it was very, very bad, Jay. You have no idea. Our son never left the house. He would just sit there, on that couch all day, never even talk, just smile at me. You know that little smile he had, like he had the whole world figured out. Like he knew the truth and no one else did.”

“I know it.” I wasn’t sure whether to smile or shake my head in sorrow. I smiled.

“He said to me, just last week, before he did this… He said, ‘I think maybe I’d like to be a cop. Or an FBI agent.’ He said he was talking to the police and they wanted him.” She cleared her throat derisively. “ A cop? My son barely left the house. He didn’t talk to anyone, Jay. No friends. No girls. Not even us. Only to the fucking furnace! He was dreaming. Like he always did, Jay- dreaming .” She looked at me. “He might never have gotten better-I understand that. But he didn’t deserve to die.”

She came back to the table and sat down next to me. “We took care of our boy for twenty-one years. Then we give him to the state-for four lousy days… And he’s dead! Maybe we don’t deserve medals, Jay. But we damn well deserve to know why, don’t we? We deserve to know why my son had to die!”

I looked back at her, my gut tightening.

Years of the differences between us peeled away.

I said, “Yes you do. You damn well do deserve that, Gabby.”

Chapter Seven

My life had been easy, to this point.

I mean, we’ve all faced hardships and disappointments. I was no genius, but I always did well in school. I could whip a mean underhanded crank shot that got me a ride to Cornell; I married the girl of my dreams. We raised kids who seemed to be equally achieving, who were polite and self-assured and didn’t seem to mind being around us.

I’d worked my butt off to get where I was: I’d put in the eighty-hour weeks and still remained on call twice a week. We had friends; we went on bike trips to Spain and Italy. For my fortieth birthday I got myself flying lessons and now had my own Cessna. Two years ago, when it came time for the hospital to name a new head for our department, the chief of staff didn’t hesitate and turned to me.

Still, I felt like I’d barely broken a sweat in life. The world always seemed to open up just enough for me to slip through. But for Charlie, the world always seemed to close at every chance and shut him down.

I don’t know if I was a good brother. I don’t know if I ever lived up to that vow I made regarding Evan. I knew I’d always done just enough to keep them from sinking.

Enough , but no more.

Maybe it was too late to put myself on the line for Evan.

But I could damn well start doing it for Charlie and Gabby now.

I checked myself into the Cliffside Suites, the nicest of the motels perched along a high bluff overlooking the Pacific. My room was at the end of a long outside corridor above the parking lot. Inside, it was clean and large and I stepped out through the sliding glass doors to the terrace with a panoramic view of the ocean and the steep cliffs below.

I threw myself on the bed and thought about Evan and his last visit to our house. How everyone thought he was so weird, no matter how much I tried to defend him: He was smart. The odds were stacked against him. He was my brother’s son.

“He doesn’t even know how to order food, Dad,” Sophie had said. “He always seems a bit stoned out.”

“He does spend a lot of time off in space,” Kathy said . “You have to admit he’s a bit weird.”

I told them, “He’s on medication, guys. Cut the kid some slack.”

“I’m sorry, but he gives me the creeps,” said Maxie. “How much longer is he going to stay?”

I spent the next couple of hours watching a baseball game and picking at a burger from room service. Around four my phone rang. I was happy to see it was Kathy.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey…” I exhaled wearily.

“You sound exhausted. How are they doing? I called a little while ago, but neither really wanted to talk.”

“Devastated. How else could they be? You’re not going to believe how it happened, Kathy.”

I told her everything I’d learned. How Evan had been looking to buy a gun. How he was taken in and put in isolation after trying to beat up Gabby, and then released after only a couple of days. To the care of a halfway house that let him walk out the door.

“That’s just so awful, Jay.”

“Someone has to get to the bottom of this for them. They’re not capable. It’s tearing them apart.”

She hesitated just a bit. “Get to the bottom of what, Jay?”

We hadn’t always seen eye to eye about things with my brother and Evan. Usually, it was how we were always coming to their rescue. First, for a nicer place for them to live. Then tutoring for Evan. Then when he smashed up the car. And finally bailing them out from under all that credit card debt. “When do they try, just a little?” Kathy would say. “Gabby can work. Our kids get summer jobs; why not Evan?”

But mostly, it was that incident with Max.

It was on Evan’s last trip east. He and Maxie were playing a little one-on-one in the driveway. Something set them off. Things always seemed to cross the line with Evan.

I was in the den, flipping through some medical magazines. Suddenly I heard screams. Sophie’s. From outside. “Get off, Evan. Get off! Mom! Dad! ”

I bolted up.

Somehow Kathy, who was in the kitchen, got there ahead of me. She jumped on Evan’s back, Evan’s arm wrapped around Maxie’s neck; Maxie was turning blue.

“Evan, let him go! Let him go! ” Kathy screamed, but at six feet, close to two hundred pounds, Evan was too big for her. “You’re going to kill him, Evan!”

“First he has to take it back…” Evan squeezed tighter. “ Right, Max? ”

Max couldn’t take anything back. He was gagging.

Kathy screamed, unable to pry him away. “ Jay! ”

I got there a second later and ripped Evan off by the collar, hurling him across the lawn.

My nephew just sat there, eyes red, panting. “He called me a frigging freak!”

Max had had bronchial issues from the time he was three. He needed a respirator back then, twice a day. His face was blue and his neck was all red and twice its normal size. He was in a spasm, wheezing convulsively.

I knew immediately he had to get to the hospital. I threw him in the car and told Kathy to get in. I called ahead to the medical center. In eight minutes we were there. They immediately placed him on oxygen and epinephrine. His airway had closed. Acute respiratory distress. Five minutes more and he might have been dead.

When we got back home, Evan tried to say he was sorry.

But it didn’t matter. Kathy never quite forgave him. She wanted him out of the house.

The next day I drove him to the airport and he was gone.

“I need to get to the bottom of why he was let back on the street, Kathy,” I answered.

She didn’t respond right away. “Look, I know I haven’t always been the most supportive when it comes to this… You’re right, they need you, Jay. Do what you can. Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Just promise me, this time, you won’t let yourself get drawn in. You know how you always get when it comes to your brother.”

Drawn in… Meaning it always ended up costing us something. I didn’t want to debate it, and the truth was, she was probably right.

“Deal, ” I said.

Chapter Eight

The next morning, I called the county coroner’s office and set up a meeting with Don Sherwood, the detective handling the case-the only person, Charlie and Gabby said, they could get any straight answers from.

He was the one who had knocked on their door two days earlier and asked if Evan was their son-he had ultimately been identified through fingerprints from his police record-and after asking them to sit, showed them the photos of Evan in the county morgue.

Sherwood said he’d be nearby in the early afternoon and we could meet at the station in Pismo Beach around one P.M. I told him we’d be there.

My next call was to the psych ward at the Central Coast Medical Center. I asked for Dr. Derosa.

The nurse who answered asked who I was, and I gave her my name and told her that I was a doctor from back in New York and Evan Erlich’s uncle. She kept me on hold awhile and finally she came back on saying how very sorry they all were, but that the doctor would be out all day on an outside consult and would have to get back to me.

I left my number and said that I’d be around only a few days. I figured I’d hear back in a couple of hours.

A few minutes before one, I went with Charlie and Gabby to the one-story police station on Grand Street and met Detective Sherwood in a small interrogation room there.

He seemed to be in his midfifties, ruddy complexioned, with a husky build and thick salt-and-pepper hair. He stood up when we came in, gave Charlie a shake with his thick, firm hands and Gabriella a warm hug. Charlie had said Sherwood had worked for the local PD and coroner’s office for more than twenty years.

“How’re you holding up?” he asked them, motioning to us to sit down at a table in the cordoned-off room.

“Not so good,” Gabriella said, shrugging sadly.

Sherwood nodded empathetically. “I understand.”

“This is my brother, Jay, from New York,” Charlie said. “He’s a doctor.”

The detective sized me up-my blazer; an open, striped dress shirt; jeans my wife had picked out for me-and showed a little surprise.

“Thanks for seeing us,” I said.

“No problem at all.” He nodded. “Very sorry for your loss.”

“My brother and sister-in-law have a few questions they’d like to ask,” I said. “Not only about Evan, about what happened… but also about his treatment at the hospital. How he could have been released after just a few days and put in a place where he was essentially allowed to roam free. I’m sure you understand how this isn’t sitting well with them.”

“I know you have some issues.” He looked at Charlie and Gabriella. “We’ve scheduled an autopsy and a toxicology lab later today. But I’m happy to fill you in on the details of what I know.”

“Thank you.” Gabriella nodded gratefully.

“Some time late Thursday afternoon,” the detective said, opening a file, “Evan apparently left the halfway house in Morro Bay saying he was going to take a walk.”

Charlie narrowed his eyes. “ A walk? My son was medicated.”

“The woman who runs the facility suggested she took it as a positive sign. His first day there, he’d been pretty withdrawn.”

“They told me they were putting him in a restrictive facility,” Gabby said bitterly. “That woman killed my son.”

I squeezed my palm over her clenched fist to calm her. “What happened then?”

“Some time that afternoon it appears he wandered down to the rock in the bay and found a path up on the southwest face. He was probably up there a considerable time. Some time during the night, at maybe two or three A.M., it appears he fell from a large height onto the rocks below. We can approximate the time from the body’s temperature”-he turned to me-“as I’m sure you understand.”

I nodded. The lower the body temperature, the longer the body had been dead.

“He was discovered early the next morning by two clammers at seven A.M. The coroner’s finding is that your son was killed on impact. The wounds on the top and back of his skull are consistent with his belief that essentially Evan did a back dive from a height of around a hundred and fifty feet and hit here …”

Sherwood placed his palm on the back of his head.

“Oh, God! ” Gabby’s hand shot to her mouth. She crossed herself.

Charlie just sat there numbly and shut his eyes.

“Are you okay hearing this?” Sherwood asked. “It’ll all be in the coroner’s findings when we’re done, which you can read at a later time.”

“No, we’re okay,” Charlie said. “Go on. You’re sure it was a suicide? He could have just fallen, couldn’t he?”

“I suppose there’s always the possibility, but there were no defensive wounds on his hands or arms that might’ve come from trying to brace an unexpected fall. The first part of him that contacted the ground was his head. He seemed to choose a location that had an unencumbered path to the rocks below. Not to mention what his motive would be in even being up there in the first place, at night. I’m sorry, but I’m not exactly sure what other ruling there would be.”

Charlie fidgeted in his chair. “Did anyone see him climbing?”

The detective shrugged. “Not to my knowledge.”

“The first time you saw us you said he was missing one of his sneakers?”

Sherwood nodded blankly. “That’s correct. Yes.”

“Did you ever find it?”

“No.” The detective looked at him quizzically. “Not yet.”

“So maybe he was just climbing,” Charlie said, pushing, “and just slipped. He always kept his laces undone. Maybe that’s what did it. Maybe he just lost his footing up there. That could be right, couldn’t it?” His question had an air of desperation.

“Look, we’re looking into everything,” the detective said, “but we have to make a determination and given when he left the recuperation facility and the time of death, taking into account his state of mind and how long he was up there… I know how painful this all is. I know how tough it was not to have been notified for so long and to have seen the story on the news. Just know, we’re doing everything we can.”

Gabriella started to weep. She took a tissue out of her purse. “I want to see my son.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible right now. They’re finishing up the autopsy and toxicology findings. Anyway, the trauma was quite severe. There’s going to have to be a bit of reconstructive work done… Maybe in a couple of days.”

Gabriella put her hands in front of her face.

“Look, I’m no psychiatrist,” I said, a hand on Gabby’s shoulder, “but one of the things my brother and sister-in-law are trying to deal with is why Evan would have even been released from the county hospital and transferred to that facility in the first place, given that only a couple of days before he tried to purchase a weapon and had been removed from his home in a pretty violent state, put on suicide watch, and heavily sedated with a mood-altering antipsychotic. I’d like to talk to the doctor in charge of his case. I don’t understand how they could make a determination to just dump him back on the street.”

“They didn’t dump him,” the detective said. “They put him in a state-approved halfway house. Maybe not the best suited, as it turned out… I know where you’re heading. But I’ve looked at the doctor’s reports. He was deemed to be stable and mentally capable upon his release. He told them that he no longer harbored any desire to terminate his own life. He was over twenty-one. They’re only permitted to hold him against his will for a matter of days.”

“This kid could have been a hazard to anyone, ” I said, “if he followed through on that weapon, not just to himself. You’re saying all you have to do is claim that you’re no longer suicidal and they can put you back on the street?”

“Not can, Dr. Erlich. They have a legal obligation to do so. It’s the law. If they don’t feel like he’s an imminent threat. As I say, he’d stabilized. I didn’t want to say this myself, but apparently he’d informed them there he did not wish to return back home upon release. They process thirty or forty people a week through that ward. They found a bed for him at a smaller facility, where he’d receive proper attention…” He turned back to Charlie and Gabriella. “I promise you, everyone is extremely sorry about what happened.

“In the meantime,” he said, placing a folder on the table, “I do have some things for you…”

He took out a large manila envelope and pushed it across the table. “Your son had these in his possession at the time…”

Charlie and Gabby’s eyes stretched wide.

There was a large plastic bag inside. I saw a couple of dollar bills and some loose change. A metal-link key chain with a single key attached. A crumpled candy wrapper. And something else…

Gabby pulled it out.

It looked like one of those cheap plastic holograms that came from a Cracker Jack box. An eye-wide open if you looked at it straight on. Then it closed, in a kind of wink, when it was shifted the other way.

“Evan was always picking up stupid stuff off the street.” Charlie shook his head forlornly.

“He went around collecting recycling,” said Gabby, eyes glistening. “For the money. He would go through people’s things-their garbage. Bring things home. People’s shit. You wouldn’t believe what was important to my son…”

She picked up the bag and held it like a cashmere cloth against her cheek. “I can feel him, my Evan. I know he didn’t kill himself. He would never do that to me…”

“You have to look into that sneaker,” Charlie said, his eyes fixed on Sherwood, as if it was the missing piece of a puzzle. He jabbed his finger. “That could be the key.”

“I promise, I’ll do my best.” The detective nodded obligingly. He stood up and caught my eye. “Got a second?”

I stood up across from him. “Of course.”

He went around and opened the door and walked me outside to the hallway. “Your brother said you’re a doctor?”

“Vascular surgeon. At the Westchester Medical Center. In Valhalla.”

“Vascular…” He nodded thoughtfully. “You work on hearts?”

“Veins, predominantly. Endovascular repairs. I keep the works flowing. Guess you could call me more of a plumber than a mechanic.” I smiled.

Sherwood nodded. “I’m a liver recipient myself. Going on two years now. So far so good, I guess. I’m still here.”

“Good for you,” I said. Liver transplants resulted either from cirrhosis from booze or from hepatitis, the C kind, the killer, but something made me suspect the first.

“Now all I got is this TMJ.” He massaged his jaw. “Hurts like the devil whenever things get stirred up. In fact, I’m starting to feel it now… You say you’re from back in New York…”

“Westchester.” I nodded.

“I got a cousin back there. Nyack.”

“That’s across the river. In Rockland County.”

“Well, wherever it is”-the detective looked at me directly-“trust me, Dr. Erlich, it’s a whole different world out here… Look, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings-I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know how hard it is to hear-but this kid plainly wanted out of the game. You know what I’m saying, don’t you? He’d made statements that he wanted to end his own life. He claimed to the doctors that the gun he was looking to purchase was intended expressly for him. I shouldn’t go into this yet, but your nephew’s toxicology report came back. He was clean. Nothing in him at the time of his death- nada . Not even Seroquel, doc. You catching what I mean…?”

I caught exactly what that meant. Evan hadn’t been on his meds.

That explained how he had managed to climb all the way up there. How he still would have had the urge to follow through with it.

It pretty much explained everything.

“So how the hell did he manage to find his way all the way up there?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “But I do know how the death certificate is going to read. Death by suicide.” He reopened the door and looked at me before he headed back in. “What the hell else would the kid be doing up there in the first place?”

Chapter Nine

After they left, Sherwood slipped back into the interrogation room, shutting the door.

He took out his cell and pressed the number for the hospital over at County, worriedly thumbing the edge of Evan Erlich’s file.

Stories like his happened every day out there. Gang executions, drug ODs. Runaways. They all had mothers who wept and didn’t understand. Suicide or accident? What did it really matter? The kid was dead. A tragedy was a tragedy. If it hadn’t ended like this, the next time-and there would have been a next time, Sherwood knew-he would have likely taken the mother and father out too.

His job was to try to make sense of the rotten outcomes. Just not too much sense.

Tomorrow, sure as sunrise, there’d be two more.

The hospital operator answered. Sherwood placed the phone to his ear. “Dr. Derosa, please.”

He knew about tragedies. And not just on the job. He thought of his son, Kyle, more than twenty years ago, and his wife, Dorrie-almost two years now. He had this new liver. A gift. From a minister. Edward J. Knightly. Now he even peed righteous, Sherwood sometimes said with a laugh. This whole new chance at life. This new lease. What the hell was it even for?

How do you make sense of others’ tragedies when you can’t even figure out your own?

A voice came on the line. “Dr. Derosa here.”

“It’s Sherwood,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “I’m calling about that Erlich kid. That jumper…”

“Yeah…” The doctor sighed, as if he didn’t need to be reminded. “We’re all really sorry about that one here. I got a call this morning from some relative of his. A doctor.”

“And how did you handle it?”

“How we always handle it, Don. You know we don’t put ourselves directly involved.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you ought to get a bit more directly involved in this one.”

The psych ward doctor cleared his throat. “What do you mean?”

“They want a look at his medical records. They’re right, of course. Funny, they want to know how the hell their son was dropkicked back on the street and a day later ended up dead. And you know what?”

“What? ” The doctor sounded a little peeved.

“I can’t say I really blame them on this one, Mitch. Just thought you’d want a heads-up.”

“The kid was a ticking time bomb, Don. We do our best to stop ’em. This one went off.”

“Well if I were you, you might want to look at it again. That it’s all buttoned up.”

“Buttoned up? ” The doctor’s tone now had an edge of irascibility to it.

“Any loose ends…” Sherwood stared at the file, at the copy of Evan’s medical records included there.

Ones the poor, grieving family would never see.

They didn’t need anyone tugging on loose ends here. Not the family; not some pushy outsider from New York. The problem with loose ends was, once pulled, you just never knew what would tumble out.

“I think you know what I mean.”

Chapter Ten

I tried the hospital again as soon as we got back to the apartment.

Again, no luck.

The doctor in charge, Derosa, still hadn’t called me back. Which was starting to piss me off, since several hours had passed, and it was professional courtesy to receive a reply. A secretary at his office said he was still at an outside consult.

Even a call to Brian, the mental health social worker there, went straight to his voice mail.

I was beginning to feel like a wall of silence was being erected, and the doctor and his staff were bricks in it.

Finally I got fed up. I was losing valuable time. I tried the nurse’s station at the psych ward. I got to a Janie Middleton, who identified herself as the chief nurse on the ward. “I’m told you wanted some information on Evan Erlich?”

“Nurse Middleton”-I softened my tone-“my name is Jay Erlich. I’m a surgeon in vascular medicine at the Westchester Medical Center back east in New York. Evan was my nephew…”

“Oh,” she said, betraying some nerves, “I assisted him while he was here. He seemed like a nice boy to me. We’re all so, so sorry for what took place…”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “Look, Janie, I know Dr. Derosa isn’t around…”

“He’s-” For a second I thought she was about to say He’s right here . Then she seemed to catch herself. “I was told he might not be back for the day, but the first step in any patient inquiry is to request the doctor’s report. The next of kin is entitled to it, of course…”

“Of course.” Everyone was hiding behind the damned report. I just wanted to speak to somebody…

“Janie…” I took a breath, trying to hide my frustration. “Are you a parent?”

“Yes,” she said, her reserve softening as well. “I am.”

“Then you’ll understand. My brother and sister-in-law have just lost their only child. They want an answer.”

How Evan went from being on suicide watch to being released, after just days. How he was placed in an unrestricted facility and a day later he was dead. “You can understand that. They’re feeling-they were making the responsible decision to put their son in the hands of the county when he got out of control. And no one’s giving them any information on how this happened.”

“Of course I can understand,” the nurse replied. “Look, just petition the medical records. Off the record… then the doctor has to officially respond to your questions. I honestly think that’s the best way.” She lowered her voice. “I hope you understand what I’m saying…”

Was there some kind of cover-up going on? Was that why no one was willing to get on the phone with me? What was the hospital hiding?

“I hear you,” I said, sighing. “So how long does that generally take?”

“Four or five business days, I think.”

“Four or five days!” I wouldn’t even be there then.

“Ask for the medical reports,” she said again. “That’s about the best I can say. We’re just all so sorry…”

Frustrated, I thanked her for her time.

“See, now you’re starting to see what shits they are out here,” my brother chortled, as if in vindication. “How no one lifts a finger for you if you’re poor. You’re just not used to that, little brother.”

“I’m not done.”

I called the hospital one last time and asked for the head of the Psych Department, a Dr. Emil Contreras. I explained to his assistant who I was. She told me Dr. Contreras was at a conference in New Orleans and wouldn’t be back until Thursday.

Thursday I’d be going back home.

“When he checks in, if you can please have him give me a call. It concerns Evan Erlich. It’s urgent.”

I left my cell number. I wanted to slam down the phone.

It was only two. And I wasn’t sure exactly what I had accomplished. “What’s next…?”

“I think I need to see it,” Gabby said.

“See what?”

“Where it happened.”

Charlie looked at her warily. “You’re sure?”

Detective Sherwood had given us detailed directions to the spot where they found Evan. Underneath the rock.

“Yes. I have to see it.” Gabriella nodded. “I have to see the place my son died.”

Chapter Eleven

It rose, gigantic and majestic. A single mound of volcanic rock dominating the coastline, six hundred feet high.

We could see it from miles away, before we even reached the quaint coastal town. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Partly because of its vast size. And partly because of what happened there.

“This is crazy,” Gabriella said, hiding her face in her hands and glancing toward Charlie. “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. Going to the spot where my son died.”

The massive rock was situated on a narrow strip of land, overlooking the tiny fishing bay. Sherwood had said to drive all the way to the parking lot along the south side of the rock, then go through a chain-link gate and across the shoals. A narrow path snaked up the rock face there. He said to look for a ledge about a hundred feet up, above the jagged rocks.

The place where a couple of early-morning clammers had found Evan.

My heart poured out, thinking of Evan being drawn to the site as he walked there, alone and confused, voices clashing in his head.

“Now you see, you see what my poor boy climbed?” Gabby turned to me. “In the fucking dark. You have to be crazy to do that, right?”

I didn’t answer, but there was nothing in me that disagreed .

We parked the car and walked out onto the rocky shoals in the shadow of the mountain. A handful of people were milling around. Fishermen tossing out lines, tourists snapping photos, a few makeshift souvenir stands. The breeze picked up, and Charlie and Gabriella seemed to waver.

My brother said, “Maybe he went up there to see God. Evan was like that. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do.”

I had heard about as much of this “Evan was Jesus” stuff as I could bear. “The kid was disturbed, Charlie. He wasn’t looking for God. He was sick.” I heard myself echoing Sherwood. “What the hell do you think he was doing up there anyway?”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Gabby said, suddenly white as a ghost.

I went over and put my arm around her. “You don’t have to, Gabby. We can go back.”

“No, I do. I do have to.” She brushed back her hair and fortified herself with a breath. “Let’s go.”

We walked, Charlie trailing, until we found the chain-link fence Sherwood spoke of. There was a gate to walk through, but also a sign: NO VISITORS PERMITTED PAST THIS POINT.

There was no park ranger around, no one stopping us. Sherwood had said to keep going as far as we could walk.

“I think it’s over here!” I shielded my eyes and looked up. A craggy overhang protruded high up the cliff face, nothing in its way to break a fall to the rocks below. I noticed a loose path winding up the face and another sign that cautioned against climbing.

Gabriella looked up, tears massing in her eyes. “I can’t believe this, Charlie, I really can’t. I can’t believe our boy would do this.”

Charlie leaned against me, his long hair whipped by the wind. “He didn’t kill himself. I know it. Don’t you see, that’s why they never found the other sneaker. He slipped somehow, climbing up. Maybe it lodged in the rock. It’s up there somewhere. He wouldn’t have jumped. I have to believe that, Jay, you understand?”

I wanted so much to tell him, Stop it, Charlie, just stop. Evan’s dead. Like Sherwood said, accident or suicide, what did it even matter now? Instead, I just squeezed his shoulder and nodded. “I understand.”

Gulls cawed, flapping in the breeze. We stood there for a while with my arms around both of them, solemnly staring at the place where Evan had fallen. Pain was etched in their drawn, anguished faces as they relived the image of their son’s backward descent, picturing him landing hard onto the unforgiving rocks. They had seen the photos: the blood on his face, his spine shattered.

Having to think of him lying there all night. The surf washing against him. Gulls picking over his body.

I remembered Gabby’s words: Your brother feels responsible, Jay .

Of course he feels responsible . Evan had become him. Charlie had passed his legacy of disease and blame onto him. Fanned it, like a brush fire, with their anger and how they lived, pointing the finger at everyone for what had gone wrong in their failed lives.

And not to mention they were the ones who had called the police and sent him away.

Gabriella shook her head in frustration and balled her fists. “Oh, Jay, you don’t know how tough this is. I held him in my arms. That first day. Every parent has a dream for their child. I told my son, ‘You are going to make us proud. You are going to live the life we’ve never led.’ A child is supposed to go farther than their parent. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, right? That’s the law of nature. Not this …”

I gazed up at that ledge and knew whatever hope they still harbored that their son had simply slipped was just another of their delusions. Why would anyone have climbed all this way, other than to jump? Why would he have remained up there through the night? And, ultimately, like Sherwood grimly said, why did it matter? Evan was dead. No one would ever tell us what was in his mind.

Suddenly Gabriella picked up a stone and flung it against the rocks. Then another, freeing her pent-up rage. “ You bastard! ” she yelled into the wind. “Damn you!”

Damn you.

I didn’t know if she meant Evan or God, or maybe even the giant rock.

She yelled, “I want to know why my son had to die! I know we’re poor. I know we don’t matter. But I deserve that, don’t I, Jay? Evan deserves that.”

She was right-this wasn’t the ending that had to be. It was the ending Evan received, because the system looked the other way.

We all did, in our own way.

Gabby hurled another stone against the rocks.

Yes, Evan deserves that, I answered her in my mind. That’s the least he deserves .

Watching her, I knew why I was there.

Chapter Twelve

The Harbor View Recuperation Center was a converted white Victorian house with a large front porch and a green awning on a quiet street, a few blocks from the town’s touristy center.

If Gabby wanted answers, this was the place to begin.

“You’re sure you want to go in?” I asked Charlie and Gabby as we pulled up across the street.

“This woman killed our son! ” Gabriella declared bitterly. “She let him leave-when he was supposed to be in the care of people who would watch over him.”

“Okay,” I said. We parked the car and headed in.

A couple of Adirondack-type chairs with chipped paint sat on the porch. The lawn was thick and a bit overgrown, in need of trimming. Inside, we found a couple of elderly people milling about, just as Evan had described. I didn’t see any guards or orderlies around.

“Look at this place,” Gabriella said, her eyes flashing with barely controlled rage. “I can’t believe they dumped my son in this shit hole.”

I knocked on an office door and a squat, pleasant-looking woman in black pants and a floral blouse glanced up from her desk. She appeared Filipino.

“My name’s Dr. Jay Erlich,” I said, introducing myself. “Evan was my nephew.”

Anna Aquino’s almond eyes grew wide. “ Oh…” She jumped up, came around the desk, and took my hand. “I am so, so sorry about what happened. I’ve run this facility for eight years. We’ve never had anything like that happen here before.”

“These are Evan’s parents…”

Instead of being defensive, Anna Aquino took Gabriella’s hands warmly in hers and gave her a compassionate hug. “I spoke with you the night he disappeared. When he didn’t come back, I was so worried. He seemed like such a good kid, your son. If I knew he was in such a state, I never ever would have allowed him to be admitted.”

Gabriella pulled away. “What do you mean, if you knew he was in such a state? You let our boy just walk out of here. We trusted you to take care of him and now…” She glared at the woman with reproach.

Over the years, I’ve seen my share of indifference when it came to caregivers. Nurses just going through the motions, care facilities doing the minimum, bilking the insurance companies. But Anna Aquino wasn’t like that at all.

“Ms. Erlich,” she said, “I know how you must feel, but look around… This is an open facility. We don’t keep people here against their will. We’re not set up for that sort of thing here. We can’t even force our patients to keep on their medications. It’s strictly voluntary.

“That first day, your son was like a zombie here. He was totally snowed on so much Seroquel he could barely talk. He wouldn’t even eat. But by the afternoon of the next day, he seemed so much better. I know he called you-”

“Yes,” Gabriella said, “he said he wanted to make the best of it here, but…”

“That afternoon, he came up to me and told me he was going to go for a walk. I was actually excited to hear it. I thought he was coming back to life. He said he was just going to walk around the town. When he didn’t come back, of course, we were worried, and that’s when we called…”

“I think what my brother and sister-in-law would like to know,” I asked plainly, “is just how a violent, bipolar kid on suicide watch just a couple of days before could simply be allowed to walk out the door.”

Anna looked into my eyes and shook her head. “Because no one ever informed us of that, Dr. Erlich.”

I squinted, not sure I’d heard her properly. “ What? ”

“No one told us your nephew had been suicidal. Or about any of his behavioral history. I had no record on him at all, other than he was bipolar and had spent time at County and was placed on a high dosage of Seroquel. Believe me, if I thought he was a danger to anyone-or to himself-there’s no way I would have ever admitted him here. You can see for yourself we’re not equipped for that sort of thing.”

“You’re telling me you received no patient history?”

“No.” Anna shook her head. “Zero. They just drop them here. Like baggage. With a two-line diagnosis and a medication chart. When they saw I had an open bed, they brought him here. I’m a state-funded facility, Mr. and Mrs. Erlich, so I can’t simply refuse. This is my biggest frustration. They never give me any history. You see my patients here… We specialize in dementia and Alzheimer’s care. Believe me, if I knew your son was schizophrenic-not to mention suicidal! -I would never have let him stay here even for a night. Poor kid, I’m heartbroken over this…”

My anger was increasing. No history. Not even a medical report from the hospital. They might as well have pushed him off that ledge themselves. What was the hospital hiding? “Do you mind if I see his charts?”

“Not at all,” Anna Aquino said. “I have them right here.” She went around the back of her desk and came back with Evan’s file.

A two-page transfer form from the Central Coast Medical Center read, “History of bipolar behavior.” It listed his medication, Seroquel, and the dosage, two hundred milligrams. A hundred milligrams was normally the prescribed dose. A drop-dead maniac would be turned into a zombie on that! The form said the patient had been released from care and was being transferred to the Harbor View Recuperation Center on a strictly voluntary basis.

It was signed Brian Smith, Social Worker. And cosigned Mitchell Derosa, MD.

My blood stiffened. I saw that Evan had signed it too.

I had to restrain myself from crumpling it into a ball and hurling it against the wall.

There was no history of his previous psychological behavior. Not a single word about the nature of his treatment in the hospital. Nothing on the violent actions he had manifested when the cops took him away. Or his attempt to purchase a firearm.

Not even a mention of his urge to kill himself.

They had basically just thrown him here! As soon as a bed opened up. Like Anna Aquino said- baggage .

What had happened to the restrictive facility they had promised Charlie and Gabriella? Where their son would receive monitoring and attention? They were right-everything just fell between the cracks because no one felt they mattered.

“Can I have a copy of this?” I asked, handing Anna back the forms.

She shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know how we’re going to handle this… But would you go on the record on any of this? What you just told us. To the head of the hospital, or even to an attorney? It would be helpful if we could count on your support.”

“I’ve been on record on this for years,” Anna Aquino replied. “Just look at the people who are here. They’re not threats to anyone… Look at our staff. We couldn’t even restrain someone like your son. It’s almost criminal…”

Yes, it was. It was almost criminal!

She turned to Gabriella and, almost with tears in her eyes, said, “I’m so sorry… I thought I was doing the right thing…”

Charlie looked at me as if to be saying, Now you see, you see what it’s like to be poor. You see what it’s like to be in a place where no one cares…

I checked my watch. It was four now. No one from the hospital had called me.

But at this point, I was no longer giving a shit about procedures.

Chapter Thirteen

Charlie and Gabriella had mentioned a local television station where they had first seen the story of the Morro Bay jumper, then a John Doe, three days before.

“You’ve got to be careful, Jay,” Charlie said, cautioning me. For twenty years they had lived under the radar, afraid that the state would cut them back. “You can’t just stir up trouble for us here. It’s not like with you. We live off the state. We can’t make waves.”

“Sometimes you have to make waves!” Gabby said. “This about our son, Charlie. We need to do this.”

I looked up the number for KSLN and asked for the news department. For the reporter who had handled the segment on the Morro Bay jumper. I gave my name, identifying myself as an uncle of the dead boy.

It took a couple of minutes, but finally a woman came back on. “This is Katie Kershaw. I’m an assistant producer in the newsroom.”

“Katie, hi. My name is Jay Erlich. I’m a doctor from back in New York, and I’m the uncle of Evan Erlich. Your station did a story on him.”

“Yes, of course. That was terrible.” She knew who he was immediately. “We would have followed up, but it’s a policy here, for family reasons, we generally don’t report on suicides.”

“I guess I can understand that,” I said. “But listen, Ms. Kershaw… I think your station is missing the real story behind what happened with Evan.”

Two hours later a reporter named Rosalyn Rodriguez and a colleague with a handheld camera knocked on Charlie and Gabby’s door.

Gabby seemed lifted. She had changed, washed her face, and applied a little makeup for the first time since I’d been there. Finally someone was going to take their side.

Charlie seemed a bit edgy. “Are you sure this is the right thing?”

“You always want to do nothing,” she said to him. “You’re always afraid the state will find us. They’ll discover your brother is helping us with the rent. Our disability will be cut. Yes, I want to do this. It’s for our son, Charlie! ”

When the reporter arrived, we all sat in the small living room. Her questions closely followed the narrative I had given their producer on the phone.

How did you first find out what happened to your son? What do you feel about what happened? Do you think the doctors at the hospital bore any responsibility? Do you think your son belonged in a more restrictive facility?

“That’s what they promised us.” Gabby nodded. “Yes.”

Charlie just sat there, not saying much.

Gabby started with Evan’s being released from the county psychiatric ward after just three days. Three days after having attempted to acquire a gun. How they were being stonewalled from getting even the simplest answers to their queries. How the Harbor View facility didn’t even have a clue what kind of patient they were dealing with.

I jumped in and said, “ The police… they just seem to have washed their hands of all this. They want to get rid of the case as quickly as they can. Maybe it’s because my brother and sister-in-law aren’t important here. They live on welfare. To be frank, they’re concerned that because they draw their income from the state, everyone’s just stonewalling them in the hope it will all just go away. They’re convinced they have no right to look into their son’s death.”

The reporter glanced at her cameraman, basically asking, You getting this?

“Look, I’m a doctor, for God’s sake,” I said. “Wouldn’t you want to know how a twenty-one-year-old kid goes from twenty-four-hour suicide watch in a locked cell to an unprotected halfway facility in just a matter of days-and then ends up at the bottom of a six-hundred-foot cliff?”

At this point, I no longer cared whose feet I was stepping on.

“All they’re getting from everyone is just, We’re so sorry. That’s tragic . Well, sorry simply isn’t enough. They want someone to take responsibility. They want some answers. You’d want that if it was your family, wouldn’t you, Ms. Rodriguez?”

“Yes, I would want that.” The reporter nodded, the cameraman shifting to get her reaction. I could see it was affecting her too.

She asked us for names. And we gave them to her.

The doctor, Derosa, who was clearly ducking my calls. And Anna Aquino, who ran the care facility Evan had been dumped in.

And Detective Sherwood.

She promised she would contact the hospital and speak with officials there.

“God bless you.” Gabby wrapped her arms around her and thanked her. “For whatever you can do.”

“I want them to know they can’t just shit on us,” Gabby said after they left, coming up and giving me a grateful hug. “We may be poor, but our son deserves some answers too.”

Charlie sat there, distracted, unconvinced. He picked up his guitar and strummed a few chords. “You’re going to go home, Jay, but we’re still here. These people own us. Maybe we just should have let it lie.”

Chapter Fourteen

That night, Gabby asked me over for dinner.

I came up with maybe a dozen reasons why she shouldn’t go to the trouble, but she insisted.

“You are here, Jay, and I’m allowed to invite you to our house. Maybe it’ll take my mind off everything.”

Sherwood had called earlier, saying we could come and look at Evan’s body tomorrow, which didn’t exactly elevate the mood.

In spite of it all, she threw together a pretty good meal.

A paella of chicken, sausage, and shrimp on a bed of yellow rice. I bought a local sauvignon blanc from a store called Scolari’s Market.

“What the hell,” Gabriella chortled, pouring a glass for herself as well. “I think tonight God will forgive me if I drink a little too.”

We ate and polished off the wine, and despite all that was going on, the mood managed to stay upbeat and light. We talked about Kathy and my kids. How adult they had become. I always tried not to build them up too much. Sophie and Max, who took AP courses, played on the lacrosse and field hockey teams, volunteered at food banks, went to the Bahamas on spring break. Even in their most ordinary moments, they had more to show than Evan had accomplished in his life.

Sooner or later, as it always did, the conversation came around to our dad.

Leonard the Good and Lenny the Louse, as he always referred to himself.

You never quite knew which one you would get.

No one could charm a room like my father. No one could be warmer or more captivating.

And no one could cast you out as quickly when he suddenly felt betrayed.

He always surrounded himself with a constantly shifting circle of wealthy, influential people: models, Wall Streeters, retail executives, movie producers, not to mention his inner circle of rakes and hangers-on, who eventually sucked him dry.

Dad’s charisma was boundless, but his temper was even larger. And it always seemed to rear up after a couple of scotches. He would elevate brand-new acquaintances as his closest friends in the world-true geniuses, movers and shakers, even those who it was clear only wanted something from him.

The same people down the line who when the tide eventually turned-and it always did-were banished from his sight.

His biggest customers-not just lowly buyers but upper management, even store presidents-loudly thrown out of his showroom and told to never come back. His panicked salesmen scurrying after them, feverishly apologizing. They even came up with a brand that poked fun at his legendary outbursts: Lenny Didn’t Mean It, it was called.

He would introduce me to his pals as the “Remarkable Dr. Jay,” even as a kid. And I had to admit it always made me feel like the most important person in the world. Growing up, he would take me out for dinners with his drop-dead girlfriends at Gino’s or to sit at the bar with his Irish bookies at PJ Clarke’s.

Then he wouldn’t call for weeks, completely forget important events. Disappoint me terribly.

I never understood what was behind my father’s rage. The truth was, if he were diagnosed today, maybe we would know. He ran away from Brooklyn in the forties and headed out to Hollywood, where he took up with starlets and ingenues and managed to become the right-hand man of Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. His homes were always filled with bikinied beauties in the pool and glamorous people dropping by. Opera blasted over the beach on the stereo.

He made millions over the years-and gave back every penny.

At the end, his business partners grew shadier and shadier, as the glamour crowd wanted nothing to do with him. The Wall Street honchos became shiftier and the retail bigwigs turned into low-priced discounters.

There was the suspicious fire in his warehouse in Brooklyn. The SEC was on his back over cash that had disappeared from the firm, as well as the IRS over back taxes.

He became sort of a sad figure, driving around in his ten-year-old Mercedes, scrounging around the city’s flea markets, arriving unexpectedly at the house with some bizarre new “find”: paintings no one wanted or retro board games for the kids missing the key pieces. “ Lenny Presents! ” they grew to call him.

We managed to become close in those years.

Ten years ago, he downed his usual two Rob Roys at a local watering hole in the Hamptons, where he still had a small house near the beach. The bartender remembered him going on about some new idea. A couple of women were at the bar, but they didn’t want to be bothered by him. He threw a twenty on the table and waved good-bye.

The next morning they found his car at the bottom of Shinnecock Bay.

After dinner, we sat around the living room, Charlie strumming on the guitar. “Evan was getting pretty good himself,” he said with pride. “Even better than me!” He picked through versions of “Get Back” by the Beatles, the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “White Room” by Cream, Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae.”

“Jay …” His eyes lit up. “You remember this?” He sang, “ Just when you say your last good-bye / Just when you calm my worried fears…”

I did recognize it. It was the song he had recorded back in L.A. More than thirty years ago. “One Last Thing.”

“Just when the dawn is breaking / There’s always one last thing…”

He always played the same two verses. Only them. To this day, I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard the whole thing through.

Charlie cooed, happily. “ Ooooh, girl, it’s always one last thing…”

He put down his guitar. “You know it got to number twenty-nine on the charts,” he said with his ground-down grin. “In 1973. Of course I was crazy as a loon back then. Not to mention I was popping LSD like vitamins. I got to thinking my record company was trying to screw me. Hell, I thought everybody was trying to screw me then…” He cackled, a glimmer in his eye.

“Hey, check this out, Jay!” He went over to the chest against the wall and came back with a bulging photo album. It was stuffed with artifacts from his past: pictures of him, of him and Dad in happier days at his beach house. Charlie growing up in Miami in the sixties, before his crazy hair and wild eyes.

He laughed, “I was so deluded on acid I told them I would burn down their fucking building if they didn’t send me out on tour. And you know what they did? They pulled the record! Right off the airwaves.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that! And you know what? I could hardly blame them. Who would put a nut job like me out on the road?

“But you know what, Jay? Maybe if I hadn’t been off my rocker back then, you might be sitting here with Rod Stewart. You wear it well… In a mansion in Brentwood, not this shit hole here, right? Look…”

He opened the album and pushed it over to me, a soft smile lighting his eyes.

It was a clipping from an old Billboard magazine. Yellowed, dog-eared, protected in a plastic liner. Top Singles for the week.

I noticed the date: October 1973.

At number one was “Angie” by the Rolling Stones. Midway down, I saw a red, drawn-in arrow marking number twenty-nine:

“One Last Thing.” Charlie Earl.

“Hey! ” I grinned. I’d never seen this before. I never even knew if I truly believed him, all the times he talked about it.

Charlie winked. “Not bad from your loony older brother, huh?” Then his grin seemed to wane. “Hell, who’s kidding who, right? Biggest moment of my life, and I fucked up the whole damn thing. Guess that’s where all our similarities end, right, Jay?”

He picked up his guitar again.

“Charlie, what do you want me to do?” I asked him. I came over and sat across from him. “About Evan. You want me to find you a lawyer? You want to try and make a case against the hospital? You know I’m going to have to go back in a couple of days.”

My brother nodded, scratching his scruffy beard, pushing his graying hair from his eyes. “We don’t want a lawyer, Jay. People like us can’t make waves. You go. Gabby and I, we appreciate what you’ve done. You just being here.”

I patted him on the shoulder and got up. “I’m going to make a call.”

I went outside and stood against the building in the cool night air. Their apartment faced a grassy courtyard. Beyond it was a darkened street. The light from a single streetlight cast a glow.

People were arguing loudly in an apartment across the courtyard.

I called the house.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Kathy answered, happy to hear my voice. “How are Charlie and Gabriella?”

“The poor kid should never have been released.” I exhaled. “You should see where they put him.” I took her through my day, my frustrations. “All the doctors here are just stonewalling us.”

“You’re going to be coming home in a couple of days. What are you going to do, Jay?”

“All they want is an answer, Kath. Someone has to take responsibility. That’s what I’m doing.” I told her about visiting the rock and the halfway house. Then the TV station.

“I warned you, didn’t I,” Kathy said, a little in jest, but a little in truth too, “you’d get drawn in.”

I was about to tell her she was wrong. This time I wasn’t being sucked in. I just had to help get them through some things.

That’s when I noticed something out on the street.

A car, black, or dark blue maybe, parked beneath a tree. A VW or a Kia or something. A hatchback.

And someone sitting in the driver’s seat. The person’s face was hidden under a cap. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, but the window was cracked slightly and the person was smoking.

And they seemed to be watching me.

“Jay…?”

Kathy’s voice brought me back. “Sorry…” I said, ducking back under the carport.

“I said that Maxie’s coming back tomorrow. I’m picking him up at school. And Sophie said she texted you… She’ll call them later today.”

“Okay…”

I heard an engine start up and glanced back and saw it was the car I’d been watching.

The headlights flashed, momentarily blinding me. I was about to turn away when the driver’s window rolled down and the person behind the wheel, eyes still seemingly fixed my way, flicked their cigarette onto the street.

In my direction.

Then they rolled up the window and drove away.

The whole thing had the feel of some kind of strange warning.

“Jay, have you even been hearing me?” Kathy sighed, frustration in her tone. “You know, you’re not going to change them. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know that, Kathy.”

I stepped out from under the carport and watched the car drive away down Division Street. “But what happened to Evan was wrong, Kathy. And when I get back on that plane Thursday, what the hell else have they got?”

Chapter Fifteen

“That was nice,” Gabby called from the kitchen after Jay had left, finishing cleaning up.

Charlie had picked up his guitar again. “Yes.” He strummed a few chords distractedly. “It was nice.”

“Here, do something…,” Gabby said to him. “You’re always in your own world. Make yourself useful.” She bundled up a bag of trash and handed it to him to take out.

“All right.” He put down the guitar and, without objecting, took the bag outside to the plastic trash bins on the side of their apartment.

She was right, of course, he decided-it was nice to have Jay out here. To feel they were close again. Like time had taken them back to a simpler and better day. Even if… Suddenly the reason Jay was there came back to him.

Even if it was because Evan had died.

He lifted the plastic trash cover and was about to drop in the bag when…

He barely noticed it at first.

It was just lying there, on top of yesterday’s trash. Staring back at him-as if alive.

And in a way it was alive!

“Gabby! ” he tried to scream. “ Gabby! ” dropping the trash bag, but nothing came out.

Only a tsunami of shock and overwhelming confusion swept through him.

It was a black Nike sneaker.

His heart came to a stop. Evan’s sneaker.

The one he’d been wearing up on the rock the day he died.

The one they never found.

Hands tingling, Charlie gingerly picked it out of the trash bin. Yes, he was right-he was sure!

It was Evan’s sneaker.

What could it possibly be doing here?

At first his heart almost exploded. Overcome with joy. This proved it, didn’t it? What he’d felt all along? That Evan wouldn’t have killed himself.

He turned to shout: Look! Look what I found.

Gabby!

But then he stopped. The elation throughout his body shifted to fear. He scanned around, expecting someone to rush out of the shadows at any moment. But no one was there.

He held the sneaker like a priceless relic, tears welling in his eyes.

He knew he couldn’t tell anyone. Not Gabby-poor Gabby-who would die herself just to see this.

Not even Jay.

No, no one could see this. Because he knew who had put it there. The past had brought it. Just as he always feared.

The past.

That’s what it meant.

That the past had found him.

And there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do to stop it now.

Chapter Sixteen

I took Charlie and Gabby to view Evan’s body the next day, and it was one of the toughest things I ever had to do.

He had a deep gash in the back of his head. Some reconstructive work had been needed. He had a calm look on his face, that same little smirk, like he knew more than the rest of us, seeming finally at peace.

Gabby kissed him all over his face and hands and said her good-byes. Charlie seemed almost wary, saying once with his eyes wet, “I forgive you, son.”

The decision was made to cremate him later that afternoon.

It was a long, quiet ride back to Grover Beach, and Gabby spent much of it in the back weeping. Charlie just sat there with her, holding her hand. I got off the freeway and drove down the hill to drop them back at their apartment.

A thick manila envelope was leaning against the front door. It was from the county hospital.

Evan’s doctor’s report.

I didn’t know if it was pressure from the TV station or from Janie, the nurse I had spoken with. I was just happy to see it there.

I asked to read it over first and Charlie and Gabby agreed. I took it back to the hotel, but instead of going to my room, I ordered a beer at the bar and took it out to the grounds in back that ran along the bluffs overlooking the ocean. People were always milling around, observing the gulls and pelicans that congregated on the cliff, scanning the waves for a meal. I’d sat out there to clear my head a couple of times before.

I found a bench and took out the thick report. Central Coast Medical Center. Patient: Erlich, Evan. Patient #3233A32.

It began with his admitting evaluation. August 23. It stated that the patient had attempted to purchase a gun and that his parents had called the police. That Evan had demonstrated violent behavior toward them. There was a box with various courses of action:

Intent to harm self and Intent to harm someone else were both checked.

The report went on to say that “the patient was admitted in a hostile and agitated state and had exhibited extreme physical behavior toward his parents and resistance to officers on scene and was unresponsive to efforts to calm him.” He was sedated: Risperdal, Klonopin, and Ativan. He was placed in a treatment cell and put under full observation.

Day two, Evan was still a mess: “Patient appears calmer, responsive, but remains agitated and depressed. Admits to depression, feelings of isolation, hostility toward family, but has not taken his medicine in weeks. He feels the need to get a gun to protect himself from them.” There were further observations with comments like “agitated” and “anxious.” “Still having thoughts of suicide.” “Protective watch continued.”

As well as the heavy doses of sedatives and benzodiazepines.

I put it down, my gaze drifting out to the congregation of gulls and pelicans on the rocks.

“Hey, friend, got a buck for an Iraq War vet?”

A panhandler had wandered up to me in disheveled clothes and carrying a hand-scrawled cardboard sign. IRAQ WAR VET. NEED FOOD.

“Any chance you can help me out, chief? It’s Veterans Day tomorrow. Can you spare me something for a meal?”

I looked up at him. “Veterans Day’s in November, chief. Nice try.”

“Dude, every day is Veterans Day.” The guy grinned. “When you’re looking for something to eat.”

Our eyes met and the spark of humor in his eyes along with his gaunt, haggard appearance made my resistance soften. I thought of Charlie, who had been down and out for many years himself. I reached into my pocket and came out with a five, and handed it to him. “Here. You take it easy, man.”

“Dude! ” His steel-gray eyes were suddenly bright and he cocked a hand at me and pointed, as if aiming a gun, making me wonder if he had ever served a day. But I wasn’t caring. He backed down the path with a grin, his oversize pants brushing the pavement, and waved back at me. “You have a good day now, chief.”

I gave him a wave in return, reflecting that the contrast in this town was startling. Beautiful homes, a stunning coastline. But also a kind of refuge for the down-and-out, whom life had passed by.

I smiled as the guy walked away, waving at me one last time. “See ya around.”

I went back to Evan’s report. I wasn’t sure what I was looking to find, but in the next two days there were pages and pages detailing how Evan had gradually become more responsive. Seroquel was added to his treatment, two hundred milligrams, a massive dose. By the third day it seemed to have done its trick and blunted his rage. “Patient now denies any real anger toward his parents.” “Now admits the gun was meant for him.”

No kidding. He was a zombie, Anna Aquino said. Completely snowed.

On his last day, he had even begun to express remorse. “Patient indicates a desire not to return home as it is a volatile situation. It is suggested an intermediary living situation might be located.”

That made me angry. Anyone professional had to know the demons that were still lurking inside.

In the final pages, the report went on to note how Evan understood that he had to stay on his meds and even expressed a desire to get better. “Patient feels that the current environment at home may not be compatible with that goal. Social services is looking for an appropriate outside environment.”

Evan’s scrawled, semilegible signature was on the release form, along with Mitchell Derosa, Supervising MDs.

Maybe Sherwood was right. Suicide or accident, Evan was dead. I was leaving in the morning. What did it even matter if the system had let him down?

The kid was crazy, delusional. He was talking to the furnace, for Christ’s sake.

The die was really cast the day he was born.

Chapter Seventeen

That Wednesday night, I stopped off at Charlie’s to drop off the report and say good-bye.

To my surprise, they had a couple of people over. Two of Evan’s friends: One was Pam, a cashier from the store where Evan had bagged groceries for a while. She had a row of hoops in her ear and wore one of those gold-plated necklaces with her name in large script.

The other was a friend from Evan’s high school days, Miguel, a heavyset Latino kid with a shaved head and baggy denim shorts down to his knees, accompanied by his mom.

Both of the friends seemed to be genuinely sorrowed by Evan’s death. They traded stories of him at the store and at school. How he was always the smart one. “Always knew how to do things, you know, bro,” Miguel said brightly. How he used to dazzle everyone on the court. “That boy had game.”

“Yes, my son had a chance to really be something.” Gabby nodded, her eyes glistening.

While they chatted, I excused myself and went out with Charlie to the tiny, fenced-in backyard. “Here…” I handed him back the medical report. “I made a copy at the front desk. I’ll take it back with me if you don’t mind.”

His long, unruly hair was clipped back in a beret. “What does it say?”

“It says he was sick, Charlie. That he needed to stay on his meds and be in a place he could be observed. The rest…” I shrugged and held myself back. “I think they treated him with the intent to make him better. He just needed a lot more than three days in a county ward.”

“I understand.” He nodded. We sat down on his lawn chairs. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”

“In the morning. Look, you have to let me know what you want me to do, Charlie. If you want me to find you a lawyer. If you want, I’ll make some inquiries for you. But you ought to talk to someone. A social worker or a grief counselor. I’m not gonna be here for you.”

My brother shrugged, a cast of inevitability clouding his face. “I told you before, we can’t make waves, Jay. We have to accept who we are. Anyway, what does it matter for Gabby and me? It’s all over for us now. It would just be nice to get some answers.”

“I wish I could have done that for you, Charlie.”

“You did, Jay. You have any idea how much it means to us, you coming out here like you did? You did everything.”

He reached forward and put his hand on mine and squeezed. In that moment, he was no longer my crazy, wayward brother whose life had spun out of control, but someone who was every bit my equal yet was powerless and needed me. Whose life would never be the same.

I pulled him to me with a hug. “I truly wish it could have been different, Charlie. And I don’t just mean with Evan. I mean with all of it. Dad. You and me. Our lives.”

His grip tightened. “I wish that too, Jay.” I suddenly felt tears dampen my shoulder. “I love you, buddy. You’re all I have…”

“I love you too, Charlie.”

“You go back to that beautiful family of yours…”

“I will. Unless something changes, right?” I patted him warmly on the back and pulled away.

“Anyway what ever changes with us”-he smiled-“right?”

We went back inside. Pam and Miguel and his mom had stood up to leave. “I’m really sorry for your loss.” Miguel put out his hand to me.

“Thanks,” I said. I asked what he was doing with himself.

“Trying to get back into school. I’ve had some setbacks, you know. But I’m getting it back together. I start Cuesta in the spring.” Cuesta was the local junior college where Evan had gone for a semester.

“That’s good.” I walked him outside to the carport, where his mom and Gabby were saying good-bye. “Keep it together.”

He shook his head confoundedly. “You know, things could have been really different with Evan, man. The dude was smart. He used to show me how to do my math. Like it was nothing to him. He had a way out of this place. Not like the rest of us…”

He took a step toward his mom’s van, then turned back around. “You know, it was like with that cop. The one who was always looking for him…”

“What cop?”

“That old dude. He came around to the courts a few times, looking for Evan. First, maybe a month ago… Evan wasn’t around. Then he was back, a couple of weeks ago…”

I stared. “This cop was looking for Evan?”

“Yeah. I rang Evan up and he came down. Two weeks ago. That was the last time I ever saw him. We were all jiving him: ‘What do you got going on, dude? You thinkin’ ’bout becoming a snitch?’ My boy just laughed and said how the guy was only showing an interest in him. Said he was trying to get him to take the test.”

“What test? ” I asked, my heart suddenly jumping a beat.

“You know,” said Miguel, “the test to become a cop.”

It was like a switch was flicked, everything inside me brought to an immediate stop. I flashed back to what Gabby had told me that first day. Evan staring at the furnace, hearing voices coming from it. They want me to become a cop.

My son was sick, Gabby had said . He was always dreaming.

You’ll see, Evan had said with that all-knowing smirk of his.

“You know his name?” I asked Miguel, my pulse picking up again. “This cop? It’s important, Miguel.”

He shook his head. “Nah. Just some older dude. Maybe fifty, sixty. White hair. Not from around here, though. He showed us his badge. From somewhere down south. Santa Barbara, I think he said. I’m sorry, mister.”

“That’s okay.”

It might be nothing, I realized. Just another one of Evan’s ramblings. His stupid dreams, as Gabby said. One that happened to be connected to the thinnest thread of truth.

This cop, who wanted him to take the test.

Or maybe it did mean something.

I started after Miguel, who’d opened the van door. “You remember anything else about him? That cop. Other than he had white hair and said he wasn’t from around here.”

“I don’t know, man…” He scratched his shaved head. “He had kind of a limp. And, oh yeah, he did have something on his face. Like a birthmark, you know? This red blotch. On his cheek. Here .” He touched the left side of his face.

“Thanks, Miguel,” I said.

They backed out and I watched them drive away. I reminded myself I was leaving. Come morning, I was going to be in my car, on the way back to LAX. Then on a plane. Home.

I had things pulling me back.

But I couldn’t suppress the weirdest feeling, like the world had suddenly shifted.

Something just changed.

And a thought wormed into my brain, ever so slightly: What if Evan wasn’t quite as crazy as everyone thought?

Chapter Eighteen

I barely slept that night.

I tossed and turned for most of it, my blood racing. The echo of what Miguel had told me going back and forth in my mind.

They want me to take the test to become a cop…

I kept thinking, What if Evan’s ramblings might not have been total delusions after all, but were twisted with a thread of truth? Reality.

Why did an old detective need to find him? What could he have been caught up in? I kept hearing my brother’s voice: What if he had gone up to that ledge just to think? My son would never have killed himself.

I rose up. What if that stupid missing sneaker did actually mean something?

At two, I tossed off the covers and stepped out on the terrace, letting the breeze from the ocean cool my face. Listening to the whoosh of the dark sea against the rocks.

Did any of this make the hospital less responsible? No. They still bungled it. It didn’t change much. It wasn’t going to bring Evan back. Or alter my brother’s grief.

You’ve got to be on a plane in the morning, Jay.

My wake-up call shook me out of a deep sleep at just before seven. I had a one P.M. flight out of LAX and it was about a three-hour ride. Stacey Gold was being admitted that afternoon. I called in and told my secretary I’d be ready to scrub in at six A.M. tomorrow. I checked that everything was set for her operation.

Stacey was seventeen and was starting at Boston College that fall. The surgery had forced her to push back her start date. Though two years younger than Sophie, they had been in a dance class together a few years back, and in the summers, she worked the refreshment cart that drove around the course at our golf club.

A month ago, she started experiencing a throbbing in her right thigh near the groin and felt pressure on the pelvic nerves. An MRI discovered an aneurysm leading into the iliac artery. I had to feed a stent through the femoral artery. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was the only way to relieve the pressure; otherwise there was the risk of it bursting.

I turned on the Today show and hopped into the shower. Afterward, I stood in my towel shaving. On the tube, they were talking about a missing toddler in Tennessee and then they switched to the local news.

“A retired Santa Barbara detective is found murdered in his Santa Maria home…”

It took a moment, until the words “Santa Barbara detective” slammed me head-on and I ran to the screen.

They had the victim’s photo there. In his early sixties. A hard, square jaw, wrinkles around deep-set eyes.

What had Miguel told me? The cop was around sixty. White hair.

“Walter Zorn, ” the news report began, “ who for the past ten years had lived in the Five Cities area…”

Then they showed another photo of him-this time in uniform, receiving some kind of commendation.

Just like Miguel had said, there was the blotch of reddish pigment on his left cheek.

My eyes went wide .

Zorn. There couldn’t be any doubt. He was the cop who’d been looking for Evan.

And now he was dead.

He had been stabbed in his home during the night. In Santa Maria, fifteen miles down the coast. A neighbor had called the cops after hearing a scuffle. There were no immediate suspects. He hadn’t seen the perpetrator.

Something truly horrifying took shape in my mind:

Zorn had just been murdered, and Evan had died suspiciously the week before. They’d been in contact with each other.

Could their deaths be connected?

Then, my whole body crashing to a stop: What if my nephew didn’t kill himself after all?

I dressed, finished packing in a daze, my hands and chest tingling with something I couldn’t figure out.

I had a plane to catch.

I zipped my bag and headed for the door. Suddenly I heard the lead-in for a different story:

“Could a tragic local suicide possibly have been prevented? News Eight’s Rosalyn Rodriguez reports on this disturbing case when we come back in a minute.”

Evan’s.

The report came on and it was mostly fair, bouncing back and forth between Evan’s psychological issues and the suggestion that the hospital might have wrongly sped him through the system. They showed Gabby, a mother’s heartbreak etched in her face, and then flashed to me: “ The police seemed to have just washed their hands of it…”

I didn’t remember even saying that, but there I was…

They also managed to get a statement from a Dr. Vargas, the medical center’s chief of staff, who supposedly had been away.

But there he was. “We delivered a full report of Evan’s stay in the hospital to the family today. There are guidelines for privacy and disclosure we have to abide by, and despite this tragic ending, we feel the state-sponsored home he was assigned to, as well as his treatment here, met all established benchmarks of professionalism and care. The hearts of everyone here go out to the family.”

Established benchmarks of professionalism and care, my ass!

I hurried downstairs and threw my bags in my car. I paid the bill, said good-bye to the Cliffside Suites, and headed up to the freeway.

I had five hours to my flight. I should be at LAX in three, with time to spare. I pulled onto the freeway south, my gut still throbbing with something I couldn’t put aside.

Evan. Zorn.

I told myself I had to put it behind me now. What could I do? What did Charlie even want me to do? Evan had climbed up there in the dark. He had gone off his meds. Anything could have happened. A couple of days before, he’d been in a raging, almost homicidal state. He tried to buy a gun.

What the hell else for?

This retired detective, whoever he was, he was a completely different person. Who happened to intersect with Evan. His death probably had nothing to do with him.

Maybe I’ll become a cop. They want me to take the test…

C’mon, Jay. I focused back on the road. He was talking to the fucking furnace when he said that!

I thought of what was on my plate back home. What I had committed to in the morning. Stacey.

Here, there was only grief. And questions that would never have answers. That no one wanted answers to.

The kid was dead, Sherwood said. Next time he would have taken his parents with him. What did it even matter?

It damn well did matter.

Zorn and Evan. Something connected them. And I was the only one who saw it.

I brought to mind Evan’s face at the mortuary. Gabby’s tears. Then Charlie-the day his son was born. Promise me, Jay, that whatever happens, you’ll be there for him. Promise me, you’ll take care of him, Jay.

Promise me.

You have my word, Charlie.

I felt this sense building inside me that I was about to do something completely crazy.

I made it as far as the next exit and turned the car around.

Two minutes later I was back at the exit where I’d just gotten on and wound down the hill to Charlie’s apartment. I left the car under the carport and ran across the courtyard. It was barely seven thirty A.M. They normally didn’t get out of bed until around eleven. I banged on the front door.

“Charlie! Gabby, let me in!”

“All right, all right…” I finally heard my brother’s voice. “Who’s there?”

He opened the door, standing in a T-shirt and boxers, his hair loose and wild. He looked at me, befuddled. “Thought you were heading home, Jay.”

“Do you know the name Walter Zorn?” I asked him.

He shook his head, scratching at his beard. “Should I? No.”

“He was a retired detective. From down in Santa Barbara. He was killed last night. Here .”

He blinked back at me. “What does he have to do with us?”

I thought I saw something in his eyes. Maybe there was something in my question, some new conviction jolting him out of his ruined life, the ever-present grief he hid in.

But I just looked back at him, like a man who had finally accepted his vow. “Something just changed.”