Rachel keeps the photograph pressed against the plexiglass. “You know that’s not possible,” she says.
I don’t reply.
“It looks like Matthew,” Rachel says, her voice a forced monotone. “I’ll admit it looks like him. A lot like him. But Matthew was a toddler when he…” She stops, gathers herself, starts again. “And even if you judge by the port stain on his cheek—this one is smaller than Matthew’s.”
“It’s supposed to be,” I say.
The medical term for the enormous port-stain birthmark that had cloaked the right side of my son’s face was congenital hemangioma. The boy in the photograph had one too—smaller, more faded in hue, but pretty much on the exact spot.
“The doctors said that would happen,” I continue. “Eventually it goes away entirely.”
Rachel shakes her head. “David, we both know this can’t be.”
I don’t reply.
“It’s just a bizarre coincidence. A strong resemblance with the desire to see what we want—what we need—to see. And don’t forget the forensics and DNA—”
“Stop,” I say.
“What?”
“You didn’t bring it to me because you thought it just looked like Matthew.”
Rachel squeezes her eyes shut. “I went to a tech guy I know who works for the Boston PD. I gave him an old photo of Matthew.”
“Which photo?”
“He’s wearing the Amherst sweatshirt.”
I nod. Cheryl and I had bought it for him during our tenth reunion. We had used that photo for our Christmas card.
“Anyway, this tech guy has age-progression software. The most up-to-date kind. The cops use it for missing people. I asked him to age the boy in the photo up five years and…”
“It matched,” I finish for her.
“Close enough. It isn’t conclusive. You get that, right? Even my friend said that—and he doesn’t know why I was asking. Just so you know. I haven’t told anyone about this.”
That surprises me. “You didn’t show this picture to Cheryl?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Rachel squirms on the uncomfortable stool. “It’s crazy, David.”
“What is?”
“This whole thing. It can’t be Matthew. We are both letting our want cloud our judgment.”
“Rachel,” I say.
She meets my eye.
“Why didn’t you show this to your sister?” I press.
Rachel twists the rings on her fingers. Her eyes leave mine, dart about the room like startled birds, settle back down. “You have to understand,” she says. “Cheryl is trying to move on. She’s trying to put this all behind her.”
I can feel my heart going thump-thump in my chest.
“If I tell her, it’ll be like ripping her life out by the roots again. That kind of false hope—it would devastate her.”
“Yet you’re telling me.”
“Because you have nothing, David. If I rip your life out by the roots, so what? You have no life. You gave up living a long time ago.”
Her words may sound harsh, but there is no anger or menace in the tone. She is right, of course. It’s a fair observation. I have nothing to lose here. If we are wrong about this photograph—and when I try to be objective, I realize that the odds are pretty strong that we are wrong—it will change nothing for me. I will still be in this place, eroding and decaying with no desire to slow that process down.
“She remarried,” Rachel says.
“So you said.”
“And she’s pregnant.”
Straight left jab to the chin followed by a powerful blind-side right hook. I stagger back and take the eight-count.
“I wasn’t going to tell you—” Rachel says.
“It’s fine—”
“—and if we try to do something with this—”
“I get it,” I say.
“Good, because I don’t know what to do,” Rachel says. “It’s not like this is evidence that would convince a reasonable person. Unless you want me to try that. I mean, I could take it to an attorney or the police.”
“They’d laugh you out of the room.”
“Right. We could go to the press maybe.”
“No.”
“Or…or Cheryl. If you think that’s right. Maybe we can get permission to exhume the body. A new autopsy or DNA test could prove it one way or another. You’d get a new trial maybe—”
“No.”
“What, why?”
“Not yet anyway,” I say. “We can’t let anyone know.”
Rachel looks confused. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re a journalist.”
“So?”
“So you know,” I say. I lean in a little. “If this gets out, it will be a big news story. The press will be all over us again.”
“Us? Or do you mean you?”
For the first time, I hear an edge in her voice. I wait. She’s wrong. She will get that in a moment. When Matthew was first found, the media coverage was kind and sympathetic. They played up the whole human tragedy angle, ladling it with fear that the killer was still out there so you, dear public, must remain wary. Social media wasn’t quite so enamored. “It’s a family member,” an early tweeter stated. “Dollars to donuts, it’s the loser stay-at-home father,” another, who received many likes, claimed. “Probably pissed off by his wife’s success.” And so it went.
When no one was arrested—when the story started to die down—the media got frustrated and impatient. Pundits started to wonder how I could have slept through the carnage. Then the small leaks began to turn into a pour: The murder weapon, a baseball bat that I had purchased four years earlier, had been unearthed near our home. A witness, our neighbor Mrs. Winslow, claimed to have seen me bury it the night of the murder. Forensics confirmed that my fingerprints and only my fingerprints were on the bat.
The media loved this new angle, mostly because it gave a dying story new life and thus eyeballs. They swarmed in. A psychiatrist who had treated me in the past leaked my history of night terrors and sleepwalking. Cheryl and I had been having serious marital issues. She may have been having an affair. You get the picture. Editorials demanded that I be arrested and prosecuted. I was getting preferential treatment, they said, because my father was a cop. What else had been covered up? If I weren’t a white man, I’d be behind bars already. This was racism, this was privilege, there was clearly a double standard at work.
A lot of that was probably true.
“Do you think I care about bad press?” I ask her.
“No,” she says softly. “But I don’t understand. What harm can the press do us now?”
“They’ll report it.”
“Yeah, I get that. So?”
Her eyes latch onto mine. “Everyone will hear about it,” I say. “Including”—I point now to the adult hand wrapped around Matthew’s in the photograph—“this guy.”
Silence.
I wait for her to say something. When she doesn’t, I say, “Don’t you see? If he finds out, if he knows we’re onto him or whatever, who knows how he’ll react? Maybe he’ll run away. Go underground so that we never find him. Or maybe he will figure that he can’t risk it. He thought he was in the clear and now he’s not and so maybe this time he gets rid of the evidence for good.”
“But the police,” Rachel says. “They can investigate quietly.”
“No way. It’ll leak. And they won’t take it seriously anyway. Not with just this photo. You know this.”
Rachel shakes her head. “So what do you want to do?”
“You’re a respected investigative journalist,” I say.
“Not anymore.”
“Why, what happened?”
She shakes her head again. “It’s a long story.”
“We have to find out more,” I say.
“We?”
I nod. “I have to get out of here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She looks at me with concern. I get that. I can hear it in my tone too. Some of the old timbre is back. When Matthew was murdered, I crawled up into a fetal ball and waited to die. My son was dead. Nothing else mattered.
But now…
The buzzer sounds. Guards step into the room. Curly puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Time’s up.”
Rachel quickly slides the photograph back into the manila envelope. I feel a longing when she does, a thirst to keep staring at the photograph, a fear that it was all an apparition, and now that I couldn’t see it, even for a few seconds, it all felt wispy, as though I were trying to hold on to smoke. I try to sear the image of my boy into my brain, but his face is already beginning to ebb away, like the final vision of a dream.
Rachel stands. “I’m staying at the motor lodge down the road.”
I nod.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
I manage another nod.
“And for what it’s worth, I think it’s him too.”
I open my mouth to thank her, but the words won’t come out. It doesn’t matter. She turns and leaves. Curly gives my shoulder a squeeze.
“What was all that about?” he asks me.
“Tell the warden I want to see him,” I say.
Curly smiles with teeth that resemble small mints. “The warden doesn’t see prisoners.”
I stand. I meet his eye. And for the first time in years, I smile. I really smile. The sight makes Curly take a step back.
“He’ll see me,” I say. “Tell him.”