Red Leaves

TWENTY-TWO

As I drove toward home, mothers long ordeal returned to me in a series of small grainy photographs that seemed to rise from some previously forgotten album in my mind. I saw her standing beneath the large oak that graced our neatly manicured front lawn. I saw her walking in the rain. I saw her lying awake in a dark bedroom, her face illuminated by a single white candle. I saw her in the dimly lit garage, sitting alone behind the wheel of the dark blue Chrysler, her hands in her lap, head slightly bowed.

In fact, I had only glimpsed these images of my mother's final weeks, glimpsed them as I'd hurried past her on my way to school or returned from it, far more interested in the day's boyish transactions than in the adult world that was eating her alive.

But now, as evening fell, I tried to measure the weight that lay upon her: an unloving and unsuccessful husband, a beloved daughter dead, a son—Warren—saddled with his father's contempt, and me, the other son, who barely saw her when he passed. So little to leave behind, she must have thought, as she sat behind the wheel in the shadowy garage, so little she would miss.

For the first rime in years, I felt burdened beyond my strength, desperate to share the load with another human being. It was at that moment, I suppose, that the full value of marriage proclaimed itself. I had laughed at a thousand jokes about married life. And what a huge target it was, after all. The idea that you would share your entire life with one person, expect that man or woman to satisfy a vast array of needs, from the most passionate to the most mundane—on its face, it was absurd. How could it ever work?

Suddenly, I knew. It worked because in a shifting world you wanted one person you could trust to be there when you needed her.

It was a short ride down Route 6, no more than twenty-minutes. The college sat on a rise, all brick and glass, one of those purely functional structures architects despise, but whose charmlessness is hardly noticed by the legions of students who obliviously come and go. It was a junior college, after all, a holding cell between high school and university, unremarkable and doomed to be unremembered, save as a launching pad toward some less-humble institution.

I pulled into the lot designated VISITORS, and made my way up the cement walkway toward Meredith's office. In the distance, I could see her car parked in the lot reserved for faculty, and something in its sturdy familiarity was oddly comforting.

Meredith's office was on the second floor. I knocked, but there was no answer. I glanced at the office hours she'd posted on the door, 4:30 to 6:30. I glanced at my watch. It was 5:45, so I assumed Meredith would be back soon, that she'd gone to the bathroom or was lingering in the faculty lounge.

A few folding metal chairs dotted the corridor, places where students could seat themselves while waiting for their scheduled appointments. I sat down, plucked a newspaper from the chair next to me, and idly went through it. There was little about Amy's disappearance, save that the police were still "following various leads."

I perused the paper a few more minutes, then glanced at my watch. It was 6:05. I looked down the empty corridor, hoping to see Meredith at the end of it. I even imagined her coming through the double doors, munching an apple, the early-evening snack she often took in order to quell her appetite before coming home.

But the corridor remained empty, and so I went through the paper again, this time reading articles that didn't interest me very much, the sports and financial pages, something about a new treatment for baldness.

When I'd read the last of them, I put down the paper and again looked at my watch. 6:15.

I stood up, walked to her office, and knocked again on the unlikely chance that she hadn't heard me the first time. There was no answer, but I could see a sliver of light coming from inside. She'd left the lights on, something she wouldn't have done if she hadn't been planning to come back.

On that evidence, I returned to my chair and waited. As the minutes passed, I thought again of my father, the terrible things he'd told me, which I suddenly believed were true. I don't know why I came to that conclusion as I sat waiting for Meredith that evening, only that with each passing second, the certainty built, and one by one, every dark suspicion took on a fatal substance. I believed that my mother had had an affair. I believed that she'd taken out an insurance policy on herself. I believed that she'd committed suicide. But at the same time, I also believed that my father had wanted her dead, might even have toyed with the idea of killing her, perhaps even killing us all.

I felt the air darken around me, thicken like smoke, felt my breathing take on a strange, frantic pace, as if I were being forced to run fester and faster along an unlit path, to leap obstacles I could barely see and twist around gaping pits and snares. A kind of rumbling shook me from within, distant as a building storm, and I found myself staring at the sliver of light beneath Meredith's door wondering if perhaps she were actually inside, knew I was in the corridor, but remained behind the locked door ... hiding.

But from what?

I stood suddenly, jerked up by my own volcanic anxiety, marched to the door, and knocked again, this time harder, more insistently. Then, out of nowhere, her name broke from my lips in a strange, animal cry—"Meredith!"

I realized that I'd called her name much more loudly than I'd intended. I could hear it echoing down the hall. It sounded desperate, even theatrical, like Stanley Kowalski screaming for Stella.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself, but my skin felt hot, and beneath it, hotter still, as if deep inside, a furnace was being madly stoked.

It was past 6:30 now, and as I looked at the otherwise inconsequential time of day, it took on a fatal quality, like the hour of execution, the prisoner now being led out. It was as if I had given my wife until that moment to explain herself, which she had failed to do, and so was now condemned.

I strode down the corridor, taking the stairs two at a time, and plunged through the doors out into the crisp, cold air. For a moment, the chill cooled my burning skin, but only briefly, because in the distance, at the end of the lot, in the space between her car and a sleek BMW, I saw Meredith standing with a tall slender man.

Rodenberry.

I darted behind a nearby tree and watched them with the skulking silence of a Peeping Tom. They stood very close to each other, talking intimately. From time to time Rodenberry nodded, and from time to time, Meredith reached out and touched his arm.

I waited for them to draw together into each other's arms, waited like a man in a darkened theater, waited for the kiss that would seal both their fates.

It didn't matter that it never came. It didn't matter that after a final word, Meredith simply turned and walked to her car, and that Rodenberry, with the same casualness, got into the gleaming BMW. It only mattered that as each of them drove away, I heard the click of the police hotline, then the whisper that came through the line, and knew absolutely who had spoken and what had been said.

When, in the throes of crisis, you have nowhere to go but to a lawyer, you should realize just how depleted you have become. But I was far from realizing anything that night, and so I went to Leo Brock.

His office was modest, simply a small brick building tucked between a gourmet deli and a hardware store. His far more impressive Mercedes was parked in a space reserved for it behind the office.

His secretary had already gone home for the evening, but the door to his office was open, and I found Leo in the leather chair behind his desk, feet up, idly thumbing a magazine.

"Eric," he said with a big smile. "How's it going?"

He must have known that it could not have been going very well if I were here, standing before his desk, looking shaken, like a man who'd stared into the pit and seen the dreadful face of things.

"You had another run in with Vincent?" he asked immediately.

"No."

He drew his feet from the top of the desk, and in that gesture I read just how dire I appeared to him. "What is it, Eric?" he asked.

"That thing on the hotline," I said. "What was it?"

He unnecessarily slid the magazine to the corner of his desk. "It was nothing," he said.

"What do you mean nothing?"

"Eric, why don't you sit down."

"What do you mean, nothing, Leo?"

"I mean it had nothing to do with the case."

"Keith's case."

"The Amy Giordano case," Leo corrected.

"But you know what it was?"

"I have an idea."

"What was it?"

"As I said, Eric, it had nothing to do with the case."

"And as I said, Leo, what the fuck was it?"

He looked at me as if sparks were flying off my body, gathering in glowing clusters on his oriental carpet.

"Eric, please, have a seat."

I recalled how he and Meredith had stood together in the driveway of the house, speaking in what now seemed secretive tones, how Leo had nodded to her reassuringly, how my wife's hands had then dropped limply to her sides as if she'd just shuffled off a heavy weight.

"I knew from the beginning," I said.

"Knew what?"

"Knew that Meredith told you."

Leo looked at me with what was clearly a fake expression of bafflement.

"That first day," I said, "when you came over to talk with Keith. Meredith walked you to your car. That's when she told you."

"Told me what?"

"Told you that there were things in the family," I said. "Things that were ... wrong. I even know why she did it. She was afraid that in the end it would come out anyway. "What she didn't know is that other people knew. At least one person."

Leo leaned back in his chair and opened his arms. "Eric, I don't have a clue what you're talking about."

"At the car, the two of you," I explained.

"Yes, she walked me out to my car, so what?"

"That's when she told you."

Leo looked both worried and exasperated, like a man before a cobra, wary, but also growing tired of its dance. "You're going to have to be a tad more specific as to exactly what it is you think she said to me on that occasion."

I recalled Meredith's voice as I'd come home that afternoon, taking her by surprise, the quick way she'd blurted, "Gotta go," then sunk the phone into her pocket. A series of memories followed that initial recollection: Meredith working late at the college; the wistful tone in which she'd said, "It will be the last time"; how it hadn't been Dr. Mays who'd told her the Lenny Bruce story; the fact that Mays had described Stuart Rodenberry as "very funny." Last, I saw Meredith once again in the parking lot with Rodenberry, pressed closely together, as I saw it, but duly cautious not to touch.

"That she was having an affair," I said quietly, like a man finally accepting a terrible, terrible truth. "That's what the police heard on the hotline. That Meredith is having an affair."

Leo stared at me mutely, a pose I had no doubt was part of a deception. He was almost as much in league with Meredith as Rodenberry, all three of them arrayed against me, determined to keep me in the dark,

"Here's another guess," I said sharply. "The person who called the hotline was a woman, wasn't it?"

Leo leaned forward and peered at me closely. "Eric, you need to calm down."

I rebuked him with a harsh cackle. "The wife of the man Meredith is supposed to be having an affair with, that's who called."

Leo now looked as if deep in thought, unable to decide between two equally difficult choices.

"A pale little wisp of a thing named Judith Rodenberry," I added.

Leo shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, Eric," he said.

He was lying, and I knew it. Again, I recalled that first day, when Meredith had walked him to his black Mercedes, the two of them standing there in the driveway, half concealed by the spreading limbs of the Japanese maple, but not concealed so much that I hadn't seen the way Meredith's hands fluttered about like panicked birds until a few no-doubt well-chosen words from Leo stopped them in their frenzied flight. "What had he said?, I wondered now, then instantly put the words into his mouth: Don't worry, Meredith, no one will find out.

"Did you hear me, Eric?" Leo said firmly. "I have no idea what you're talking about. The hotline matter, it had nothing to do with Meredith."

"What then?" I challenged. "What did this person say? What was this something wrong'?" I felt like a vial filled to the brim with combustible materials, everything poised at the volcanic edge. "Tell me the fucking truth!"

Leo slumped back in his chair and seemed almost to grow older before my eyes, more grave in his demeanor than I had ever seen him. "Warren," he said. "The 'something wrong' is Warren."