Fault Line

13 DÉJÀ FUCKING VU

Ben was watching CNN in his Ankara hotel room when his mobile phone buzzed. He checked the readout, expecting a message from Hort. Instead, it was an e-mail. From… Alex?

He frowned, wondering what it could be about. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd heard from his brother. The estate stuff was long since done. He couldn't think of a reason they needed to be in touch. There were some cousins, an aunt… maybe someone had died?

He opened the e-mail and read the message, then read it again. He closed the phone and shook his head.

It was exactly like the shit in high school, the same old shit. Alex had done something he should have known better than to do, and now he needed his big brother to bail him out. Amazing. Déjà fucking vu.

Or more likely, it was nothing at all. To Ben, Alex's claim not to be paranoid was evidence of the opposite.

So fuck him. If Alex really wanted his help, he should have sent a different message. It would have read, “Hey, Ben, sorry I've been such a self-righteous asshole all my life. I had no right to blame you for everything that happened to our family. Oh yeah, I'm an ingrate, too.”

He stood up and looked at the phone. “You hear that?” he said aloud. “Here's a life lesson for you, little brother. Don't bite the hand and then ask it to feed you.”

He started pacing. Who did the little hotshot think he was, anyway? Not a word for six years, and then he e-mails to ask a favor? Not even a Hey, how you doing, Ben, just a straight-up I need your help, so call me. What was Ben, a servant? Some kind of housekeeper, kept on call to clean up after the messes his prick brother made?

“Tell you what,” he said. “I'll help you. You just pay me for it. Yeah, pay me. Servants get paid, don't they? Or do you think I'm your slave, is that it? You think I'm your slave now?”

He kept pacing. “Oh, and our house?” he said, wheeling and staring at the phone. “So it's still our house? Yeah, when you want to suck me into something, it is. You think I'm stupid, Alex? Is that what you think?”

He was breathing hard and he felt that crazy, joyous urge to fuck someone up, an urge that had gotten him penalized so many times for unnecessary roughness during his one season at Stanford that only his father's connections with the Board of Trustees had kept him on the team.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a fight, and he supposed that was good. Fighting was the antithesis of anonymity, especially with a camera and even video on every cell phone. But more than that, he didn't really trust himself to fight anymore. He wasn't sure he'd remember how. Fighting was essentially consensual. There were implicit rules, unspoken limits. But at this point, Ben was so conditioned to lethality he was afraid that in the face of even amateur violence he'd do what these days he did, without pausing to think about it until after.

It wasn't a happy realization. Fighting had been a good outlet for him, and he'd enjoyed it in a sick way. Not being able to anymore-it felt like he'd lost a part of himself, a part that, in retrospect, seemed oddly innocent. Maybe because most of his fights had been in high school. Maybe because high school was mostly before Katie died.

He'd been at a party that night, thrown by two popular girls from his class, Roberta and Molly Jones. The Joneses lived in an Atherton house with a huge backyard, and had parents tolerant enough to indulge their daughters’ periodic desire to throw a big high school bash. No one had planned it, but after the tournament, this one had turned into a kind of unofficial victory party for Ben.

Of course, alcohol was forbidden. And of course, the kids always found a way to drink anyway.

Ben had a couple of beers, but he was taking it easy. He hadn't had a drink since wrestling season had begun four months earlier; he'd needed to drop ten pounds to compete at 171; and as giddy as he was, he was also beat from the tournament. With a combination like that, a couple of nursed beers was about all he felt he could handle. Besides, a lot of girls were giving him the look. He was more interested in hooking up than he was in drinking down.

At some point a major hottie named Larissa Lee told Ben she'd just broken up with Dave Bean, the guy she'd been going out with for as long as anyone could remember. It was past time, she said. She was glad. She wanted a change. The only problem was, she didn't have a ride home, but maybe…

“Uh, yeah,” Ben told her. “Just tell me when you want to leave.”

“How about right now?” she said, looking into his eyes.

Right.

They were halfway to his car when he remembered: his dad had told him he was supposed to get Katie home by midnight.

But that didn't mean actually take her home, right? He was older, he could stay out later. And this was his big night, and getting bigger by the minute. He just had to make sure Katie got home on time, that was it.

He told Larissa he'd be right back and hustled into the party to find Katie. There she was, sitting with some of her girlfriends, laughing at something. Ben walked over, asked if he could talk to her for a sec. She got up and followed him a few paces away.

“Where's Wally?” he asked, looking around.

She smiled, maybe a little knowingly. “I don't know. Around somewhere. What's up?”

“Dad wanted me to get you home by midnight, but I was thinking-”

She laughed. “You were thinking you'd take Larissa home instead.”

Ben was careful to keep his face neutral. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone knows she just broke up with Bean. And that she's got the hots for you.”

There was a pause. The truth was, Ben had been with a lot of girls from his class, and some from Katie's, too. Some of them had boy friends, but no one ever found out because Ben never said a word to anyone. He didn't want to hurt anyone's reputation. He didn't want to hurt his chances of being able to go on doing it, either.

He shrugged. “Hey, I think she just needs a ride, that's all.”

Katie laughed again. “Yeah, sure.”

Ben looked around, then back at Katie.

“Don't tell anyone, okay?”

She smiled. “Have I ever?”

Ben couldn't help smiling back. Katie was smart, maybe as smart as Alex. The thing was, somehow she never hurt anyone with it, never made anyone feel inferior or condescended to or anything. Whatever Katie had, you always felt she would use it to help you, that she was always on your side.

“So, uh, you think you can get a lift with Wally?”

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

He turned to go, then looked back.

“Hey, he hasn't been drinking, right?”

“No, he's cool.”

For one second, Ben thought maybe he should just close the loop, check with Wally directly. Wally wasn't a bad guy, but he liked to party hard.

Then he thought of Larissa. Well, Katie said Wally was cool. She would know.

“Okay, then. Later.”

He headed back to Larissa, Katie still smiling at him knowingly, indulgently, with all the warmth and goodwill that had always seemed to define her.

Okay, then. Later.

The strange thing was, if the accident hadn't happened, he probably wouldn't even remember that hurried conversation, or the way Katie's smile had lingered in his mind as he left. It wouldn't have meant anything. No one would have questioned his decision to let Wally drive Katie home. Why would they? He wouldn't have done anything wrong. Or even if he had, it would have been a misdemeanor at most. A tiny oversight. An obvious case of no harm, no foul.

But it had happened. The conversation turned out to be their last. And lasts, he had learned, were in retrospect always imbued with a significance they had utterly lacked at the time. Probably, he had come to think, everything was like that. Everything was significant, just camouflaged with banality until some terrible thing stripped the banality away, like skin torn off to expose raw, screaming nerve endings you hadn't even known were there.

He'd driven Larissa home. They had talked on the way but he couldn't remember about what. What he remembered was how smooth her skin was, the maddening shape of her breasts beneath her light sweater, the slight smell of her perfume in the car's interior. Most of all, he remembered the way she had been looking at him whenever he glanced over, a look that told him he could have whatever he wanted and she wanted it just as much.

“My parents should be asleep,” she said. “But if you're really quiet, you could come in. They'll hear the door and think it's just me. They won't get up.”

“I can be quiet,” Ben said.

And he had been, much quieter than Larissa, in fact, whose mouth he'd had to cover not once, but twice while he whispered shhhh, shhhh as they were doing it right on her bedroom floor. It was a turn-on, exciting her so much she could forget herself that way, so much she would cry out not twenty feet from where her parents were sleeping, oblivious to it all.

Afterward, driving home, he couldn't stop smiling. She'd been good, she ‘d been so into it. It was like Bean hadn't been satisfying her or something. He half wondered whether she had cried out because she wanted him to cover her mouth, because she liked it, and even though he'd already come twice the thought gave him a hard-on. Man, there couldn't have been a more perfect end to a more perfect day.

When he pulled into the driveway, the first thing he noticed was that a lot of lights were on in the house. He glanced at the car's digital clock. It was nearly two in the morning. It didn't make sense.

Then he noticed his dad's car was gone. Uh-oh. Had Katie not made it home okay? Did his dad have to go get her? If so, Ben was probably going to be in deep shit.

He went inside and walked quietly up the stairs. The bedroom doors were all open. The lights were on in Alex's and his parents’ bedrooms.

“Hey, what's everyone doing up?” he called out.

There was no answer. He poked his head in Alex's room. No one was there. The bedcovers were kicked off, though. Alex was always anal about making his bed just right, so he must have been sleeping in it tonight until…

“Is anyone here?” Ben called out again, now walking over to his parents’ bedroom. It was in the same condition as Alex's, the lights on, the covers off.

“What the hell?” he said aloud, nervous now and telling himself there was no reason to be.

He walked down the hall to Katie's bedroom and flipped on the light. The bed was made.

Shit, Katie had never made it home.

No, he didn't know that, not for sure. All he knew for sure was that she hadn't gotten in her bed before…

Before what? Before they all piled into his dad's car and hauled ass out of there in the middle of the night?

But if Katie had called for a lift, why would they all have gone?

Suddenly he felt sure something was seriously wrong.

He walked down to the kitchen. No note, no nothing. Everything neat, the dishes all put away. Somehow the neatness, the order, was unnerving. It sharpened the incongruity of everyone's absence.

“Fuck,” he said aloud. He had no idea what to do.

The phone rang. He spun and stared at it for a moment. He realized he was afraid to answer.

It rang again.

He hesitated, sensing he was trapped in some precarious in-between place, his life and its safe assumptions on one side, the end of it all on the other. On the other side of that phone.

It rang a third time.

Come on, just pick up the goddamned phone.

But he didn't.

It rang again.

He thought, What if they hang up?

His paralysis broke. He strode over and snatched up the receiver. “Hello,” he said, his mouth dry.

“Ben.” It was his dad. “Thank God. You need to come to Stanford hospital emergency room right away. Katie was in an accident.”

A chill rushed through him. He tried to swallow but couldn't. “What? What happened?”

“Just come right away. Understand?”

“Okay. I'll leave right now.”

“Drive carefully,” his father said, and somehow, behind the two simple words, Ben sensed a bitter rebuke.

The rest of the night was a blur; the days after, a nightmare. His parents outright blamed him. Alex's silent, accusatory stare was worse.

Worst of all was the morning of the funeral. He was already crushed with grief and guilt and remorse. He was sitting at the desk in his room, staring at the wall, replaying the evening over and over again, imagining the thousand different things that could have happened, the thousand different things he could have, should have done.

There was a knock on his door. “Yeah,” he called out listlessly.

It was his parents. It had been, what, forty-eight hours since Katie had died? They looked like they hadn't slept a minute since. Like something inside them had… broken.

They sat on the edge of the bed across from him. “Ben,” his dad said. “What we said the other night… it wasn't right. It wasn't… correct.”

Ben shook his head, afraid to speak.

“We're… devastated, honey, you know that,” his mom said. She started to cry but managed to keep going. “When something like this happens, people sometimes blame others, even the people closest to them. Because if you blame someone, it's easier to believe someone had some control over what happened, that it could have been prevented.” A quaver had entered her voice and she stopped, took a deep breath.

“But that's not right,” she went on, her voice getting higher now. “Not everything can be controlled. Accidents… sometimes they just happen, baby, and it's not your fault.”

She was crying harder now, her eyes pleading with him through her tears.

“If it was anyone's fault, it was mine,” his dad said. “I wasn't clear when I told you about coming home. You didn't do anything wrong, Ben, and we were wrong to suggest that you did.”

Ben looked at them. He understood what they were doing. He could even imagine the conversation that had led to it: We have to protect him from the guilt. We can't saddle him with this, no matter how true it is. He's too young.

The problem was, the way they were now trying to protect him made the guilt a hundred times worse. Their previous recriminations had made him angry, and the anger was at least partly protective. Now, with the recriminations lifted, his anger dissipating, the truth shone through with a new and awful clarity.

Because deep down, he'd known what his father really wanted. The old man didn't trust Wally and wanted to be sure that Ben-Ben personally-would get Katie home safely. Maybe he didn't spell it out to the last detail because he didn't want to seem overbearing, overprotective, but that's where he was coming from. Ben had just been looking for a loophole, that's all, because it was his night and he was the conquering hero and Larissa Lee wanted to fuck him. He'd known, but pretended not to.

Ben wanted to tell them no, it wasn't their fault, his dad had been clear, Ben had understood fine but hadn't wanted to listen. Admitting it, owning up to it, it was the right thing to do, no matter how hard it was.

He tried to say something, but… he didn't. Maybe he was afraid to speak, afraid that if he did, he would lose control. Or that he'd say something wrong and make it worse. So he said nothing instead. His parents kept crying. Eventually his mom got up and left, and his dad followed her.

Part of him understood they needed to have the rest of the conversation now, that otherwise it wouldn't happen ever. But another part of him whispered that his parents were already bearing as much as they could; he needed to leave them alone for a while. There would be other opportunities for him to admit his guilt, sometime in the future when it could be discussed to the tune of a little less confusion and agony.

And he'd listened to that second voice. Just as he'd listened when Katie had told him, No, he's cool. He'd listened to what he'd wanted to hear.

Jesus, two turning points in as many days. And he'd gone the wrong way at both.

Why weren't those turning points marked? LETHAL CURVE AHEAD. CAUTION. Something like that. Something that might warn you: Hey, the seemingly humdrum decision you're about to face? It's actually your whole fucking life.

Ben sighed and shook his head. Then he went out to find an Internet café and a public phone.