Red Leaves

NINETEEN

Yeah, well, who is?

I had never said anything so disturbing, and for the rest of the morning, as it echoed in my mind, I recalled similar sentiments I'd heard of late: Meredith's Because people lie, Eric; Warren's Everybody's fake. That I would remember such painful statements didn't strike me as particularly unusual. What was incontestably alarming was that this time I'd made such a statement myself. Why? I couldn't find an answer. All I knew was that each time I tried to think it through, examine the tortuous changes I could feel in myself, I returned to a single gnawing memory. Again and again, like a loop of film continually unfolding the same image, I saw Jenny that last time, mute, dying, her eyes full of a terrible urgency as she pressed her lips to my ear. Clearly she had been struggling against all odds to tell me something. In the years since her death I'd imagined it as some great truth she'd glimpsed on the precipice of death. But now, I wondered if that urgent communication might have been no more than some similarly dreary truth: Don't trust anyone or anything—ever.

I thought of Keith, the way I'd found him smoking sullenly near the playground, then of the things Peak had told me, that he had "a father-son thing" with Delmot Price and that he was a thief and planned to run away. All of this had come as a complete surprise, facts, if they were facts, which I couldn't have guessed, and which, if true, pointed to the single unavoidable truth that I did not know my son.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a boiling wave of anger washed over me, anger at myself. What kind of father was I, really, if Keith had found it necessary to find another man, confide in him, reveal his most secret plans?

I had always felt terribly superior to my own father, far more involved with my son than he had ever been with any of his children. Even during Jenny's last days he'd made overnight business trips to Boston and New York, assigning Warren to stay at her bedside, see her through the night, a job my brother had made no effort to avoid, save on that last night, as I recalled now, when he'd emerged from Jenny's room looking old and haggard, a boy who, from his pale, stricken appearance on that gloomy morning, looked as if he'd seen the worst of things.

But now I wondered if, in fact, I was any better at fatherhood than my own father had been. When was the last time I'd actually talked with my son? Sure, we chatted over dinner, exchanged hasty asides as we passed each other in the hallway. But that was not real talk. Real talk bore the weight of hopes and dreams, tore away facades, and let each face shine in revealing light. Real talk was about life, the way we try to get through it, make the best of it, what we learn along the way. This kind of talk Keith had saved for Delmot Price, the man he'd gone to because he could not come to me, and who, if I were to begin to get a handle on my son before it was too late, I knew I would have to seek out, too.

Delmot Price wasn't hard to find, and the moment he saw me come through the door of his flower shop, he looked like a man who'd suddenly found himself in the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

He'd been wrapping a dozen long-stem red roses as I came into the shop. I stood off to the side and waited while he completed the task, took payment, and with a quick smile, thanked the woman whose roses they were.

During that time, I noted how gracefully he moved, his white hair gleaming in the overhead light, his long fingers folding the silver foil just so, tying the gold ribbon with a perfect knot. His fingers moved like dancers in a flowing and oddly beautiful choreography. There was no room for the slightest misstep, they had that kind of precision. And so it was obvious that in Keith, Price had not found a boy who was like himself, the way an English teacher might find a student with the same literary aspirations the teacher had once known as a youth. But instead, Delmot Price had found his opposite in Keith, a graceless, slovenly boy with tangled hair and a sullen smirk, a boy he'd befriended not out of admiration but because he pitied my son, felt sorry for how awkward and isolated and utterly directionless he was, how in need, as Price must have supposed, of a father.

He came toward me like a man wending his way out of a perfumed garden, weaving through swollen buds and broad-petaled flowers.

"Mr. Moore," he said. He started to offer his hand, then stopped, unsure if I'd take it.

And so I offered mine.

"I don't mean to intrude," I said.

He nodded, stepped to the door, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and ushered me to the rear of the shop where we stood discreedy hidden behind a wall of ferns.

"The police talked to me," he said. "I suppose you know that."

"Yes."

"Just so you know, I don't believe Keith had anything to do with the disappearance of that little girl."

"I don't, either," I said, then realized that in part this was a lie, and so, I added, "but he's done troubling things. He stole from you."

Price nodded softly.

"Why does he want to run away?" I asked.

Price hesitated, like a doctor just asked how long a precious relative actually has to live. "He's not happy, Mr. Moore."

"Can you be more specific?"

I could see him working toward an answer, searching through a lifetime of words, images, experiences, looking for just the right one.

"Let me put it this way," Price said at last. "I have a greenhouse at my home, and most of the time, when I order a particular seed, it comes just the way it's supposed to. If I order a rose, I get a rose. But once in a while, I get something I didn't order, maybe don't even like. Geranium, something like that. I plant the seed, hoping for a rose, and up comes a geranium. At that point, I have to change the plan. I can't feed it and water it like I would if it were the rose I'd hoped for. I have to say, Okay, it's a geranium. It'll never be a rose. But at least I can raise it to be a healthy geranium. See what I mean? I have to adjust, because I didn't get what I ordered."

"Keith thinks I want a different son?" I asked.

"No," Price said. "He knows you do."

"Okay, but what good would running away do?" I asked.

"None, probably," Price said. "Which is what I told him. 'No matter where you go,' I said, 'it goes with you.'"

"What goes with him?"

"Your low opinion of him."

He saw that he'd delivered a stomach-emptying blow.

"I had the same problem with my son," he said quickly.

"Did he run away?" I asked.

Price's eyes glistened suddenly. "No," he said. "He killed himself."

A vision of Keith doing the same shot through my mind. I saw him in his room, opening the Swiss Army knife I'd given him for his thirteenth birthday, sliding its now-rusty blade across his pale wrists, watching as the crimson stream flowed down his arms and puddled between his bare feet, watching it dully, merely waiting for the final sleep to come upon him, his face expressionless, indifferent to the worthless life he was ending, doing all of this with an utterly flat affect.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"I was like a lot of fathers, I had great plans for my son," Price told me. "The trouble is, they weren't his plans."

"What are Keith's plans, did he tell you?"

Price shrugged. "I'm not sure he has any. Except this idea of getting away."

"He can't do that now," I said. "Not after Amy. He has to know that."

"I'm sure you've made it clear."

I realized that I'd done no such thing, and that the reason I'd not done it was no more complicated than the fact that I simply didn't like talking to Keith, seeing his dead, dull eye peering at me through the slit of his open door. The weight of the truth hit me like a hammer—the fact was, my son simply and undeniably repulsed me. I hated the way he slumped around, the tangle of his hair, the listlessness that overwhelmed him, the sheer dull thud of him. I hated all that, but had tirelessly labored to give no sign of it. Instead I had cheered his every modest achievement, praised and photographed his ridiculously infantile science project, patted him on the back so often and with such false force that my hand had grown numb with the practice. I had worked hard to conceal what I really thought, and I had failed utterly. For all his seeming obliviousness, Keith had seen through me, divined and suffered silently the full depth of my contempt.

Price touched my arm. "It's not your fault, the way Keith feels," he assured me. "I can see how much you love him."

"Yes, of course," I said, then shook hands, said good-bye, turned, and walked through the scented air with my wife's words echoing in my head—Everybody lies.

Meredith was on the phone when I arrived at the house a few minutes later. I heard her voice as I opened the door, no doubt surprising her, since it was still early in the day and I wasn't expected back until the end of it.

"Gotta go" I heard her say, then the snap of her cell phone closing shut. She'd sunk it into the pocket of her housecoat by the time she greeted me.

"Oh, hi," she said as she walked out of the kitchen. She smiled. "I was just making another pot of coffee."

On the counter behind her, I noted the coffee machine sitting idly, the first morning pot still half full.

"You're getting to be a purist, I guess," I told her.

She looked at me quizzically.

"A coffee purist," I explained. "Never drink coffee that was brewed more than two hours before."

She laughed, but tensely. "Oh," she said, "is that the rule for coffee snobs?" She tossed her hair. "Where do you hear things like that, Eric?"

"Television, I guess."

For a moment, we faced each other silently. Then Meredith said, "So, what are you doing home so early?"

"Peak was waiting for me when I got to work," I told her.

Suddenly she paled. "The hotline," she blurted. "Someone's spreading—"

I shook my head. "No. This is not about the hotline. They found out a few things about Keith. Things we have to talk about"

I turned, walked into the living room, and sat down on the sofa.

Meredith trailed behind and took the chair opposite me.

"Peak told me two things," I began. "That Keith has been talking to someone. Delmot Price. He owns the Village Flower Shop. Anyway, Price caught Keith stealing from him. They started talking about it. Keith told him that he was stealing because he needed money."

"Needed money?" Meredith asked.

"To run away," I added grimly. "That's why he was stealing."

She was silent for a long time, like someone hit between the eyes, dazed, groping to regain her balance.

"Peak talked to his teachers, too," I added. "They say he has a problem with low self-esteem." The last piece of information was the hardest, but I had no choice but to deliver it. "That's part of the profile, he says ... of a child molester."

Her eyes began to dart around, as if the air was filled with tiny explosions. "The car," she said tensely. "Do you think it was Price?"

"No," I said. "I talked to him right after Peak left. He's a good man, Meredith. He had a son like Keith."

"What do you mean, like Keith?"

"A kid with this problem, you know, esteem," I said. "Only worse. He killed himself."

Meredith's lips parted wordlessly.

"Price was just trying to help Keith," I said. "A shoulder to cry on, that's all."

Meredith shook her head slowly.

"It gets worse, Meredith. They found some pictures on Keiths computer. Little girls. Naked."

Meredith's right hand lifted to her closed lips.

"Not pornography exactly," I added. "But bad enough."

She stood up. "This is terrible," she whispered.

"Keith can't run away," I told her. "We have to make sure of that. No matter what he was planning before, he can't do it now. The police would think he was running away from this thing with Amy. They would never believe that—" I stopped because for a moment the words were too painful to bear. Then, because there was no choice, I said them. "That he was running away from us."

She nodded heavily. "So you have to talk to him, Eric."

"We both do."

"No," Meredith said firmly. "It would look like we were ganging up on him."

"All right," I said. "But I'm going to tell him everything Peak told me. Everything Price told me. And I'm going to ask him who brought him home that night. I want an answer to that."

Meredith released a weary breath.

"I won't take some bullshit story, either," I said. "This is getting worse and worse, and he has to know that."

"Yes," Meredith said. She seemed far away, and getting farther, like a boat unmoored and drifting out into the open sea. "All right," she said. Then she turned and made her way down the corridor to her small office, where I imagined she remained, waiting anxiously for her son to come home.