Twenty-Seven   

You’re sure about this?” Dooley’s uncle said a few days later. He had asked the same question the night before. He had asked it at breakfast when he’d told Dooley he would swing by the house around four and pick him up and drive him over there if that’s what he wanted. He had asked it when Dooley got into the car. And now here he was asking it again as Dooley got out.

“Yeah,” Dooley said. “I’m sure. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

He got out, shut the car door, and looked around. The place should have been familiar, but it wasn’t. He wouldn’t have recognized it without the address. Of course, it was daytime now and the last two times he’d been here—once a couple of years ago, with Gillette, and once the night Mark Everley had died—it had been night, not to mention the first time, he’d been completely out of it. Still, this was the place that had changed his life. He would have thought it would be burned in his memory. It wasn’t.

A little to his left, a guy came down a driveway with a giant-sized brown paper bag full of yard waste. He glanced at Dooley, probably wondering what he was doing just standing there. Dooley tried to block him out. But the man had stopped and was standing there at the edge of his drive, looking at Dooley like maybe he’d seen him some place before but wasn’t sure where. Dooley wondered if he had been in court, but he didn’t want to turn and look at him just in case he had been.

Okay, one foot in front of the other, that’s all it takes to get you from point A to point B. Off the sidewalk onto the pavement, across the pavement and up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Don’t stop now. Keep walking, up the path, up the steps onto the porch. He glanced back over his shoulder as he rang the bell. His uncle, behind the wheel of his car, nodded at him. The man was still standing at the end of his driveway, still staring at Dooley, but with a different look on his face, not recognition, but indifference. He turned and headed back up to his house. Dooley turned back to the door. It seemed quiet inside. Maybe no one was home.

A face appeared. A man peered out over half-moon glasses at Dooley. His eyes were dull and gray. The door opened.

“Yes?” the man said, saying the polite thing but looking with suspicion at Dooley.

“I was wondering,” Dooley said. He hadn’t felt this dry even when he was in rehab. “Mrs. Lytton. Is she home?”

The man was about the same height as Dooley, but he bowed his head when he looked at Dooley so that he would see over the top of his reading glasses.

“Who are you?” the man said. Then his eyes widened a little, and the suspicion changed slowly from you-look-familiar to no-it-can’t-be-you to what-the-hell-kind-of-nerve-would-make-you-think-you’d-be-welcome-here. “You’re that boy,” the man said. “You’re the one who put her in that chair.”

Dooley had been in this scene a million times. He’d lain awake nights imagining it, well, imagining running into the man accidentally, usually in a crowd, and the man recognizing him and saying pretty much what he was saying now, but yelling it so that the whole crowd would turn to look at Dooley as if he were some kind of monster. He’d dreamed it, same dream. He’d stood in front of a mirror and practiced what he would say in response. Or what he would say if he ever got up the courage to do what he was trying to do now. He’d spent even more time telling himself: what’s the point? Nothing you say now will change anything.

“I was wondering,” Dooley said, “if I could speak to her.”

“Speak to her?” the man said. He ripped the reading glasses off his face. “You want to speak to her?” He was up close to Dooley now, his voice high, his face twisted. Dooley had to fight the urge to step back, turn, and flee from the porch, down the path, out into the street.

“I wanted to apologize,” he said. “For what happ—for what I did.”

“You want to apologize?” the man said, his voice full of venom and disdain.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Dooley said. “I really am. And I know it won’t change things, but I just thought—”

“Oh, you thought,” the man said. “That must have been a new experience for you because as I recall from the trial, what you said is, you didn’t think. Couldn’t think, as I recall. You were too high. Have I got that right?”

“I just—”

“Just what?” The man stepped closer to Dooley, forcing him back a half-step. “Get out of here,” he said. “You might as well have killed her, the way she is now. At least she’d be out of her misery and I could have moved on. It wouldn’t have made a jot of difference to how long they kept you locked up, but at least she wouldn’t be suffering and neither would I. Get out of here.” His voice got louder with every word. Dooley glanced over his shoulder and saw that the man across the street, the one that had been carrying out bags of yard waste, was outside again, looking over at where Dooley was standing. He strode to the end of his driveway and stood there, listening, watching, then calling, “Walt, everything okay?” Dooley’s uncle got out of his car and stood there, his eyes wary.

“Get off my porch,” the man, Mr. Lytton, said, pushing the words out one at a time with a space between each one. “Get off my porch.”

“I’m sorry,” Dooley said. “Tell her I’m sorry.” And then there was nothing he could do except turn and walk away, feeling the man’s eyes on his back, aware of the man across the street watching. His uncle got back into the car. He leaned across the passenger seat and pushed the door open for Dooley. After Dooley buckled his seatbelt, his uncle said, “You can’t blame the guy.”

Dooley knew it was true, but, boy, he wished things were different.

The next Friday night, his arm still in a sling, Dooley was back at work, taking over the cash from Linelle, when Beth came into the store. She hovered near the door for a moment, then pulled herself up straight and marched over to where he was standing.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She glanced at Linelle, who said, “Why don’t you take a break, Dooley?”

He was about to ask her what was wrong with her, he’d only just come back from his break, when she gave him a little shove, propelling him through the opening in the counter.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” His knees were weak and his mouth dry as he looked at Beth.

“There’s a coffee place just down the block,” she said.

They walked there in silence. When they got there, she said he should grab a table, she’d get the coffees. He protested. She looked pointedly at his sling.

She came back with two coffees and settled in the chair opposite him.

“I went to your school, to tell them we’d changed our minds about the scholarship,” she said. “My mother’s afraid what people will associate it with. She’s afraid no one will apply for it.”

Dooley could see that. He felt bad about it, though.

“I ran into Marcus Bracey. He told me he heard that Win’s going to be okay,” she said. “He said the doctors say he’s lucky.”

“Yeah?” Dooley said. “I bet if you talked to the cops, they’d think they were lucky they get to make a case against him.”

“I talked to the police,” she said. She took a sip of her coffee. “Esperanza’s disappeared.”

“You mean, something happened to her?”

“They think she went underground. But they have her statement. They have the trunk. They have the pictures and the flash drive. And they have you and what you saw. So they’re pretty sure it’s going to be okay.”

He looked into the blackness of his own coffee for a moment and then up again into her coffee-colored eyes.

“Can I tell you something?” he said.

She nodded.

“It could be hard to hear,” he warned her.

“Is it about Mark?”

“It’s about me.”

She said she wanted to hear it, whatever it was. He started talking, slowly at first, but not stopping, telling her everything, the whole story, even though it took longer than any reasonable break time, even though Kevin was probably going to have a freak-out when he finally got back to the store. As long as she was willing to listen, he was going to talk. He was going to tell it all, every word of it, so that she’d know, she’d be able to make an informed decision when he finally got up the nerve to ask her what he’d been aching to tell her from the very first time she had walked into the store.