Matthew lay on the bed in his motel room, the TV off, the squatty bedside lamp the only light burning. Now it was his visit with Goran Turzic at the retirement home that he couldn’t get out of his head. Of all the things he’d learned since coming home, the fact that both he and Abbie Green had gone to see the old man was the one that made the least sense to him. It drew a blazing connection in his mind between the fire at Cheryl Madigan’s house and the fire that destroyed Turzic’s store fifteen years earlier. He just didn’t know how that was possible. Not yet.
After returning from the retirement home, he’d spent the rest of the day locked in his room. His phone hadn’t rung. He got no e-mails, no texts. It was like the stuck, isolated feeling of Florida all over again. A few times he’d crept to the window and peeked out to make sure the CLOSED sign was still posted on the door to the pool room. He ordered a pizza and ate it sitting cross-legged on the bed while flipping through the channels on the TV. As night came on, he began to feel like he needed something to do with his hands.
He took his dad’s wallet off the bedside table and emptied it out, making little piles of cards and paper scraps next to him on the comforter. The wallet was an old trifold, gouged and nicked all over. Packed so fat the stitching had come apart at the corners. He studied his dad’s driver’s-license photo in the lamplight. This version of his father was older and heavier than the face in the scrapbook pictures or in the author photo he’d seen at Dorne’s house. There were networks of broken blood vessels in his cheeks, his eyes small and lost where he’d taken off his glasses for the picture. He sorted the expired credit and debit cards into a pile, wondering if he should take them to Laurie Porter. There was a public library card, an ancient university faculty ID with a face that looked more like the dad he wanted to remember. Behind the cards was a laundromat E-ZPass and a punch card from a frozen yogurt shop with only one punch taken out of it. A worn twenty-dollar bill was tucked into the cash flap.
Some of the mismatched paper stubs had words and numbers scrawled on them. He found old grocery lists, long strings of digits that looked like account numbers or pass codes or God knows what. When he thought the wallet was empty, he turned it upside down and let bits of confetti fall onto the bed. A final shake dislodged a black rectangle of stiff paper about the size of a business card. He turned it over in his fingers, finding just a series of three two-digit numbers written on the card in silver ink. There were no other markings, nothing identifying what the numbers might mean. He stared a long second, trying to remember if they might be a birthday or some other important date, but nothing came to him. He slipped the card back into the wallet and then loaded up the rest of the mess, sliding it into his pants pocket when it was full. It was like carrying around a little brick. There was comfort in its weight.
The stack of books he’d taken from the lake house sat on the bedside table and he went through that, too. There was a blue-and-green first edition of The Hobbit, an old hardcover Catcher in the Rye, and a paperback version of Joseph Kinsey Howard’s High, Wide, and Handsome. No inscriptions inside, no notes or wisdom from his dad. None of it told him anything useful. He held one of the books to his nose, smelling old paper and the faint reek of cigarettes. Finally, he switched off the lamp and lay back on the bed in darkness.
His eyes closed and he had almost drifted off when headlights pierced the curtains and glared on the room’s back wall. A car pulled in next to his rental and sat idling. He could tell from the mutter of the engine that it wasn’t Georgie’s truck and it wasn’t the cops coming back. Probably just a person visiting someone in another room, he thought. The car idled for what seemed like a long time, lights shining directly into his room. He turned toward the window, lying on his side trying to make out who it was through the glare. The driver’s-side door creaked open and a shadow emerged. The figure stepped up onto the sidewalk, carrying a large square object in both hands. Matthew sat up on the bed and lowered his feet to the floor. He had lake-house flashbacks—the mystery man out on the ice—until he heard the heavy thump of a load being dropped outside his door. The silhouette appeared at the window, cupping its hands to the glass, trying to peer inside. He sat still, not breathing. Could the person see him sitting there in the dark? In the bright of the motel breezeway and glow of the headlights, probably not.
He waited until the figure headed back toward the car before he sprang forward and yanked open the door. The man had his back to him, one hand reaching for the handle on a boxy, nineties station wagon. He wore a beat-up Carhartt jacket with jeans a little baggier than the current style. There was a slouch in his shoulders, like he hoped nobody would notice him, even though he stood a head taller than average. The noise of the door spun him around, surprise spreading across his face. Matthew recognized him immediately. He was all skinny angles, like his dad, and his face hadn’t changed from the childhood snapshots in Georgie’s scrapbook.
“Scottie?” he said.
Scott Dorne’s smile was sheepish as he stepped back into the light of the breezeway. “I thought nobody was home,” he said, squinting over Matthew’s shoulder into the dark, like he wondered how many more people might come tumbling out.
“I was just going to bed,” Matthew said. “You didn’t knock. How did you know I was staying here?”
“My dad told me,” Scottie said.
Matthew rubbed his eyes. He didn’t remember telling Chris Dorne where he was staying, but guessed it was possible Georgie or his mom had mentioned it to him. The thought of people talking about him behind his back made him tense up, but he covered it with a smile. “What’s this?” he asked, tapping a cardboard box the size of a microwave oven with his foot.
“Nothing,” Scottie said. “Just some stuff you left.”
“Left?” Matthew didn’t recognize the box. He bent to pick it up. The cardboard sagged as he lifted it, heavy and full, contents shifting inside.
“At the apartment,” Scottie said. For the first time he cracked a real smile, one corner of his lips turning up. “You all right? You look spooked.”
Matthew set the box on the table and flipped on the lights. “You want to come in?”
Scottie went straight for the dorm-style fridge. “The Ritz-Carlton was booked, I guess,” he said. “You got a beer or anything?”
There were two tallboys in the fridge. Scottie set one on the table for Matthew and cracked the other. The small room felt crowded with both of them in it. Matthew found a steak knife in a kitchenette drawer and sliced the tape across the top of the box. Inside was a heap of rumpled clothes: two pairs of jeans, a plain brown hoodie, and a black polo shirt with the name of a local casino stitched on the breast. He pulled the polo shirt out of the box, faintly aware of answering Scottie’s questions as he asked them. How long had he been in town? How long was he staying? Had he seen Georgie yet?
“I worked here?” Matthew asked, holding up the polo shirt, feeling the cheap, stiff material. “And we lived together?”
Scottie looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was supposed to answer. “Correct,” he said.
“Where? Where did we live?”
“Northside,” Scottie said, jutting his chin in that direction. “Jesus, it’s true, isn’t it? My dad told me you were all fucked up. You don’t remember anything.”
Matthew emptied the rest of the box. The weight at the bottom turned out to be a copy of his dad’s book—the same version he’d seen at Dorne’s house, with the rough green cover and gold lettering. This one was battered from being read so many times. Inside the front cover his dad’s name was written over the date: 1989. Matthew flipped a page and saw an inscription written there. The letters wobbled badly, threatening to tumble on top of each other. It said: Dear Matthew, it’s a father’s duty to protect his children any way he can. Can you ever forgive me? Love, Dad. He stared at the words, having no idea what they meant. At the lake house, with the cops eyeballing him as he loaded boxes into the rental car, it hadn’t occurred to him that his dad didn’t keep a copy of his own book. Now here it was. He might’ve lost himself in the jungle of his thoughts if Scottie hadn’t sat forward and clacked the bottom of his beer can on the tabletop.
“Matthew. Matt. Matthew.”
“What?”
“Do you know who I am?”
He looked up from the book. “Of course,” he said, though it was only true in a certain kind of way. “Where did I get this?”
Scottie drained his beer and crumpled the can. “Your old man mailed it to you,” he said, pulling open the fridge, making sure there was nothing else to drink. “A couple months before you shipped out.”
“This must have been his own copy,” Matthew said, noting pages marked with little slips of Post-it notes, passages underlined in blue ballpoint pen. “His own copy of his own book.”
Scottie leaned back and stretched. “So, you’re what?” he said. “Going to sue the army?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Maybe.”
He set the book on the table and pushed it far enough away that he wouldn’t be tempted to pick it up again. Forgive him for what?
From inside his coat, Scottie pulled out a breath-mints tin and a little black sunglasses bag. There was a pipe inside the bag. Packing it full of green crumbs from the tin, he asked Matthew if he wanted to smoke. “Sure,” Matthew said, surprised to find that he did.
He couldn’t think of the last time he’d been high, but with the pile of his forgotten clothes and his dad’s book on the table, he just wanted to feel different than he did right then. The weed made him dizzy, and when Scottie started talking about his work as a janitor on campus, Matthew had a hard time following it.
“Most of the work is at night,” Scottie said, “so I’m pretty much nocturnal now. I’d be headed to work right this moment, but it’s my night off.”
Matthew looked at the clock, shocked to see how late it was getting. When he looked back, Scottie had taken the snapshot of him riding in the canoe with Dorne off the sideboard and was staring at it. “Your dad gave me that,” Matthew said. “Said he kept it on the wall in his office for years, between one of you and one of Georgie.”
Scottie smiled. “Yeah, right,” he said. “To put up any pictures of us, he would’ve had to take down all his diplomas. Awards from the chamber of commerce. Key to the fucking city.”
Matthew didn’t know what to say to that. He must have made a strange face while trying to think of something because Scottie asked: “So, are you freaking out? Being back?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about when we were kids,” he said. “Trying to sort it all out.”
“Oh yeah?” Scottie said. “Good luck with that.”
The newspaper clipping about the candy-store fire was on the sideboard. Matthew reached for it and tossed it on the table in front of Scottie. “Do you remember this?” he asked. “You and me rode over on our bikes to watch?”
Scottie shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “I guess. Why?”
Matthew picked up his beer and discovered it was empty. He was tired of explaining himself to people, tired of feeling like every conversation he ever had was stuck in the same loop. “Nothing,” he said. “I found it at my dad’s house the other day. Does it seem meaningful to you? Why he’d still have it?”
Scottie looked at the newspaper without picking it up. “He was always a packrat. I bet he had all kinds of shit like this stashed away.”
Matthew thought how little of his dad’s stuff he found at the lake house. Packrat? Maybe in another life. He tossed the newspaper onto the bed, letting the subject drop. There was no reason for Scottie to remember anything special from that day. No reason to emphasize it over any other afternoon. A shudder of envy crept over him that his friend had so many days to choose from.
Scottie tapped the pipe on the table to empty it and carried the ash to the trash can under the sink. When he came back, he put his hands on top of his chair but didn’t sit. “It’s my Saturday,” he said, “and now I’ve had a beer and smoked some weed.”
Matthew felt it, too—the urge to get out of the room. He popped the billfold pocket on his dad’s wallet and showed Scottie the flash of green.
“There’s twenty bucks in here,” he said. “Want to go out?”