“You can’t stay in your room forever!”
Brady climbed the stairs after spending Tuesday afternoon at his office and heard Kat’s frustrated pronouncement to her brother. He agreed with her, but Sean wouldn’t. Brady didn’t know what to do to help his son. For the past three days, Sean had sat in his room and didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. Brady understood how his son felt but didn’t know how to assuage his grief. They’d heard nothing more from the detective in charge of the investigation. One of Sean’s teachers had called them, explaining she’d been contacted by the police. They’d interviewed her, investigating what kind of kid Sean was. She’d felt Brady and Laura should know. She’d explained to the detective that Sean, Gary and Boyd were best friends and Sean was a good kid, who had to work extra hard in school.
Brady was afraid the police were trying to pin Gary’s death on Sean somehow, or were searching for anything that would lead in that direction. Maybe he was just too cynical to believe when they heard the truth, they’d know it…that when they saw the truth, they’d believe it.
Standing at her brother’s door, Kat had her hands planted on her hips. She was upset. Brady knew she was worried about Sean, too.
When he and Laura had explained to her what had happened, she’d cried and hung on to them.
Brady stepped into the doorway of his son’s room. Sean was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“He won’t come out,” Kat complained. “He won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to anybody. Boyd called again a little bit ago and he said to tell him he was sleeping. I know he misses Gary and all, but he just can’t stay in here the rest of his life!”
“It’s been three days, Kat,” Brady reminded her, attempting to cut through her exaggeration.
“Can you get her to leave me alone?” Sean asked his dad with a mixture of exasperation and anger.
Brady clasped his daughter’s shoulder, “Why don’t you go downstairs and help Mom fix supper.”
“He’s going to starve himself, too,” Kat maintained, troubled. Then tears filled her eyes and she murmured, “If I had told Mom he was drinking, you would have grounded him. He wouldn’t have been there Friday night and Gary wouldn’t have died.”
Dropping his arm around Kat, Brady pulled her away from Sean’s door. “You aren’t to blame for what happened. Even if Sean hadn’t been at the cabin, this still might have happened. Gary acted foolishly and that wasn’t because Sean was there.”
When she gazed at him, he saw the logic might have gotten through. “I can’t believe Gary’s gone.”
Brady gave her a hug. “I know you can’t. Neither can I.” He felt Sean’s need pulling at him even more than Kat’s. Releasing her, he patted her shoulder. “Go downstairs. I’ll try to get Sean to come down for supper.”
With a last sad look at him, she headed for the stairs.
Brady went into Sean’s room, which Sean usually kept in decent shape. He was organized, maybe because his mind wasn’t organized. He liked to keep things in order when he could. Doing it physically seemed to help him mentally. “She’s worried about you and so are we.”
Sean still didn’t respond, just kept staring at the ceiling.
“Your mom wants to check on you every fifteen minutes, but I told her you need some time and a little space.”
Sean’s eyes met his. “I just want to be left alone. Did you know there were reporters here again today?” his son demanded, as if it was Brady’s fault.
“Your mom told me.”
“Why won’t they just leave me alone?”
The morning after Gary’s death, the news vans had driven up in front of the house once more. Brady had told them there would be no comment, that Sean had nothing to say. They’d gone after him then, since he was in the open, in their sight, and asked about the newspaper article. He’d simply said no comment to that, too.
“No one was here when I got home.”
Sean let out a string of curse words. Brady saw and felt all the emotion behind them. He and Laura didn’t abide that kind of talk, but he didn’t say anything to Sean now. Sean was like a powder keg ready to explode, either at the world or at himself.
“I realize it’s the last thing you feel like doing, but would you have supper with us? Your mother isn’t eating, either. Maybe if you get a few bites down, she will, too.”
Sean’s dark eyes weren’t angry now, only resigned. “I don’t want to talk about anything, and you’ve got to make Kat stop bugging me.”
“She just wants to know you’re okay.”
Now Sean kept his gaze on his sneakers. “She goes to summer camp soon for two weeks, doesn’t she?”
“She leaves next week. Remember last year? She came home after a few days because she was homesick.”
“Yeah, I guess she’s really still a baby.” Sean’s words weren’t pejorative, just matter-of-fact.
“Don’t let her hear you say that.” When his son didn’t comment, Brady went to the door. “I’m going to change. I’ll be down in a few minutes. It would mean a lot to all of us if you’d have supper with us.”
Sean didn’t say he would and he didn’t say he wouldn’t.
Ten minutes later, Brady entered the kitchen, glad to see Sean sitting at the table. He looked as if he didn’t want to be there. He wasn’t making eye contact. But at least he was there.
Laura’s gaze met Brady’s as she set a platter of chicken in the middle of the table. “I was just telling Sean that Valerie called again this afternoon.”
“She’s called every day,” Brady agreed, checking his son’s reaction. Sean had dated the past couple of years, but nothing serious. They’d been mostly specialty dates like the homecoming dance, the Christmas party, the prom. But he’d seen the way Sean had looked at Valerie at his graduation party.
Kat fidgeted with her fork. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t go to camp.”
“Why not, honey?” Laura asked.
Kat glanced at Sean. “It’s not that I don’t want to go. I mean, I was looking forward to it this year, and I know I won’t get homesick again. It’s just—” This time her eyes landed on her brother and stayed.
He looked up from his plate. “Don’t stay home because of me. Nothing you do or don’t do will change what’s going on. Gary’s dead. Nothing will make that go away. If the police decide to arrest me, there’s nothing you can do about that, either.”
The silence around the table was deafening. The phone’s ring cut the hollowness of it.
“I’m not here,” Sean mumbled.
Laura was up and out of her chair before Brady could push his back. They were both hoping the police would call and tell them Sean was in the clear.
When Laura snatched the cordless phone from its base, she went a little paler and Brady thought it might be the police.
But then she said, “Just a minute, Mr. Laslow.” She held out the phone to Sean. “It’s Gary’s father.”
Sean didn’t look surprised, just resigned. He took the phone and stepped into the dining room for more privacy. His conversation with Mr. Laslow was short, and Brady couldn’t tell anything from what he heard. “Yes, sir, I understand…I’m so sorry I couldn’t—Right. Goodbye.”
When Sean returned into the kitchen, he slammed the phone down on its base. “You want to know what that was all about? I’ll tell you. Nothing’s been in the paper about funeral arrangements. I wanted to know what was going on so I called Mr. Laslow this morning. The funeral is on Thursday, but he and Gary’s mom don’t want any of us there. They want to keep it private. In other words, they think we all killed him.”
“No, Sean,” Laura protested. “This is just a hard time for them. Losing a child is—” Her voice broke.
“Yeah, well, losing a best friend isn’t much better.” He headed for the door leading to the garage. “I’m going out.”
“Where are you going?” Laura called after him.
“Someplace. I don’t know. I’ll be back when you see me.” The door to the garage opened and shut with a slam.
Laura started to go after him, but Brady was up out of his chair and caught her arm. “No, let him go.”
“He could be in an accident.”
“We can’t lock him in his room and we shouldn’t want to. Maybe he’s going to Boyd’s or Valerie’s. Let him go, Laura.”
He could see she was near tears, but he was right about this. Sean had to start digging into the panic and grief and pain that was building inside him. If he didn’t, it would smother him. Getting away from them and the house and the familiar was a necessity. Brady remembered needing the same kind of escape.
He remembered it too well.
That night when Sean got home, he was drunk. Brady could smell it on him. He’d waited up for him, sitting in the kitchen, drinking a diet soda. He’d told Laura to go to bed. She hadn’t wanted to but she’d gone. Misery and worry and something like desperation hung between them because they didn’t know how to help their son. They were just living through it the best they could.
Brady held out his hand, “Give me your keys. You’re not going to drink and drive.”
“I’m eighteen. You don’t have any right—”
“I’m your father. You’re living under my roof. I realize you’re upset and depressed, but you’re not going to get yourself killed while you’re under my watch.”
“Under your watch? Since when? Seems to me you’ve never wanted anything to do with me.”
“That’s not true, Sean. I’ve always wanted what was best for you.”
“Yeah, well, that didn’t turn out so great, did it?” He turned in a huff to walk away.
Brady grabbed his elbow and swung him around. “Don’t let Gary’s death destroy you.”
“I might not have much choice about it. I could go to jail.”
“No. Everybody knows what happened that night. Everybody’s telling the same story.”
“Maybe the police will think it’s a conspiracy. Maybe they’ll think everybody’s protecting me. Don’t you watch TV? Anything can happen.”
“Sean, your mother and I love you. We believe in you.”
“A lot of good that’s doing me when Gary’s dead.”
Brady realized that absolutely nothing he said would get through to his son—not tonight, anyway. He released Sean’s arm. “If I have to put you in rehab myself so you’ll deal with this, I’ll do it.”
“You put me in rehab and I’ll just start drinking again when I’m out. Don’t waste your money, Dad.” He tossed his car keys at Brady. “Keep the damn car. Boyd will pick me up tomorrow night.”
Brady watched Sean walk away once again, feeling powerless to help him. Maybe once the investigation was completed, Sean would realize he had his whole life ahead of him. Maybe then he’d listen to what they had to say.
Going through the motions. That was all she was doing. Laura felt on the edge of tears most of the time, but she wouldn’t let them fall. She didn’t want either Brady or Sean to see her crying. Tears wouldn’t help what was happening to them, not to each of them individually or all of them as a family. It was almost a relief Kat wasn’t at home.
Two weeks had passed since Gary had died. Two weeks of watching over Sean whenever she could to make sure he didn’t do something stupid or desperate. Two weeks of feeling the tension and distance grow between her and Brady again because neither of them knew how to help their son. Two weeks since she and Brady had spent a wonderful night together, reconnecting, rediscovering each other, only to have it blown to bits with Sean’s phone call. Brady had held her since that night and she’d held on to him. But they hadn’t made love again. They couldn’t escape into that bliss when their lives were in such turmoil. Wasn’t that the reason? They were just too worried about their son.
Whenever Sean went out with Boyd, she knew he was drinking. She was ready to drag him to a counselor. Yet as with Brady so long ago, counseling wouldn’t help unless Sean was ready for it. Rehab wouldn’t help unless he admitted he had a problem and wanted to do something about it.
The past few days, they’d all been like captains of ships sailing on the same ocean but too isolated, too involved in steering their own vessels to even wave at each other, let alone use their radios to communicate.
As Laura removed a casserole from the oven, she knew this would be another silent meal where all of them ate little, pushed food around their plates and went their separate ways again. Brady had come home from work about an hour ago. He was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news, yet he really wasn’t watching. He was lost in his thoughts. Sean was upstairs in his bedroom, earbuds from the iPod in his ears blocking the outside world.
As she set the casserole on the hot plate on the table, the telephone rang. She picked it up, expecting to hear Pat’s voice. Brady’s sister had been calling every other day to check on Sean.
“Hello?”
Instead of Pat’s acerbic cheeriness, a male voice asked, “Is this the Malone residence?”
“Yes, this is Laura Malone.”
“Mrs. Malone, I’m calling for Sean. It’s Detective Sergeant Deerdorf.”
She recognized the name. Brady had told her he was the one in charge. Her heart began beating so fast she could hardly get her words out. “You’ve come to a decision?”
“I need to talk to Sean, Mrs. Malone.”
Sean was eighteen, an adult in the eyes of the law. “I’ll get him.”
Instead of using the intercom to alert Sean to the call, she ran to the stairs and called to Brady. “It’s Detective Deerdorf. He wants to talk to Sean.” Then she ran up to the second floor, knocked on Sean’s door and opened it. “Detective Deerdorf wants to speak to you.”
As soon as her words sank in, Sean looked terrified, like a small child who was lost in a strange place and didn’t know which way to turn. Almost in slow motion, he picked up the phone on his nightstand and put it to his ear.
“Hello?”
It was only a few moments until Brady came into the room. He murmured to Laura, “It’s a good sign he’s calling instead of showing up at the door.”
After Sean listened for a length of time, he nodded. “I understand. Thank you for calling.” With sweat beading on his forehead, Sean swung his legs over the side of the bed and just sat there for a minute.
“Tell us,” Brady prompted.
“Gary’s death was ruled an accident. The investigation is closed.”
“Oh, Sean.” Laura went to him and hugged him. She could feel him trembling.
When Brady approached them, she felt Sean tense.
“It’s over. You can put this behind you. I know you’ll never forget what happened, but you can go to college and—”
Sean tore himself from her arms and stood. “Go to college? Jesus, Dad, you’re acting as if this was an auto accident or something, a fender bender that can be repaired. Sure, Gary’s death was ruled accidental, but it wasn’t an accident. I mean, I could have prevented it. The autopsy showed high levels of THC in his blood. I could have taken the joints from him.”
“If he was smoking it that night, it probably wasn’t the first time that day,” Brady reasoned.
“It wasn’t just the pot. He didn’t stop drinking from the moment he got there. I could have dumped all of it.”
“Wouldn’t he have sent one of you for more?” Brady was still playing devil’s advocate and Sean didn’t like it.
“You don’t get it. I never should have left him alone. I shouldn’t have let him go out on that damn canoe. I should have swum harder, gotten to him sooner, did CPR better.”
Laura felt so much emotion rising inside her she was shaking. She felt gut-wrenching anguish for this boy who’d always been so close to her heart. She wanted to help him so badly. “His death was ruled an accident. That’s what it was, Sean, a terrible, terrible accident. You were not to blame.”
“Then why do I feel I was? Why do I feel I killed my best friend?”
When she reached out to touch him, Sean yanked away. “Just leave me alone, both of you. Get out of here. Just leave me alone.”
When Brady stepped closer to Sean, their son almost jumped away.
“Don’t you get it?” he screamed at them. “I just want to be left alone. Or should I call Boyd?”
“If you think another night of drinking will help this, you’re wrong,” Brady said quietly.
“You don’t know,” Sean yelled at him, tears falling down his cheeks. “You don’t know.”
Laura saw her son disintegrating before her eyes, but he wouldn’t let her near. He wouldn’t let her talk to him. He wouldn’t let her try to make anything better. That was because he knew she couldn’t. She knew she couldn’t.
But she still had to try. “I’ll leave you alone for now, but I’ll be back. You’re not alone, Sean, and I won’t let you think you are.” Then she left the room and went to her bedroom.
She heard Brady’s voice, heard him still attempting to reason with Sean. But he obviously didn’t get anywhere. He closed the door to Sean’s room and came into theirs.
She couldn’t keep the past two weeks of tension and grief and worry from pouring out. “I don’t know what to do for him. What can we do for him?” Tears slid down her cheeks now and she didn’t even try to hold them back.
“We have to give him some time.”
“Time? Time didn’t help you.”
“Of course it did.”
“No, it didn’t. It’s all still inside you. You’ve never let it out. You stopped counseling when you shouldn’t have. You never went back. Don’t you realize our marriage would have been so much different if you had?”
Brady’s face was absolutely immobile. His blue eyes had gone dark with surprise. His shoulders were straight, his arms taut at his sides. “How much different do you think our marriage would have been?” His question was on the edge of terse.
“It would have been very different if you had accepted more help. You said you resented my forgiveness because it was too big a gift, a gift you couldn’t accept. Maybe if you had gone to more counseling sessions, you could have accepted it. Maybe there wouldn’t have been any resentment, just joy and relief. Maybe if after Jason died, if you’d come with me to that parents’ group, you could have gotten over his death the way I did. Instead you let that sadness simmer inside you, so that when we adopted Sean, you couldn’t love him.”
“I do love Sean.”
“Maybe now. But you didn’t when we brought him home. After we adopted him, I thought maybe we’d made the worst mistake possible. I was so afraid you’d never feel for him…you’d never accept him for your son.”
“But I did accept him for my son.”
“When he was three or four or five? When you figured out he needed two parents to love him? When you realized we could help him overcome his learning disability and you could play a part in that?”
“Talk about resentment,” Brady muttered. “Apparently yours has been building up, too.”
She should stop. If she kept on letting out what had been buried for much too long, she’d tear them apart. But right now she needed complete honesty between them, no matter what it did, who it hurt or what it destroyed.
“Do you want to know what I resent most of all? I resent that you’ve always kept part of yourself hidden…that you’ve never given it to me or Sean or even to Kat. I thought that after your heart attack everything would change. The other night, it did for a few hours. We almost had back—”
A sob stopped her, but she swallowed it. “I have to wonder if that night wasn’t all about jealousy. You were jealous because Dr. Gregano might be interested in me. Your ego couldn’t take it and you had to do something about it. It was about sex and male pride, not about us and our marriage and the bond I felt with you from the moment we met.”
The silence that engulfed the room was claustrophobic in its intensity. She couldn’t believe she’d put it all into words.
Brady looked shell-shocked from everything she’d said…how much she’d held back for far too long. Emotion darkened in his eyes, but he wasn’t letting any of it loose. If only he would.
He raked his hand through his hair and just studied her for a few moments. “If holding you and making love to you again would make either of us feel better, I’d do it. But right now, I don’t think you want me anywhere near you, and we all need a breather. I’m going for a walk.”
He didn’t move for a moment…as if he wanted her to tell him not to go, as if he wanted her to say, Yes, hold me, make love to me, make it all better. But she couldn’t. She needed more than that and she couldn’t even tell him what it was.
When he left the bedroom and closed the door, she sank onto the love seat, dropped her head into her hands, and cried.
On the patio at 3:00 a.m. Brady sat in a lawn chair, a flashlight beside his foot, and stared unseeingly into the black night. His shirt was damp from the sweat he’d worked up on his walk through the woods. The trail was groomed, the path unmistakable with the flashlight’s beam. For some reason he’d needed to cut through the tress and brush…he’d needed to feel surrounded by night more primitively than he would have been on the street with gas postlamps lighting his way.
Propping his elbows on his knees, he dropped his head into his hands. He was going to lose Laura and Sean if he didn’t do something.
Apparently for years Laura had bottled up her feelings. They’d eaten at her. Although she’d remained loyal and loving, the resentment had eroded the bond between them that had once been so durable.
He’d always attempted to look forward, not back. He’d always tried to be strong so she could lean on him. Yet somehow in that strength, there had been so much weakness. The breakdown of his family had been caused by the walls he’d erected to keep his pain and guilt contained.
The pain and guilt from his Nam memories had lain moldy, corruptive and decaying in the pit of his soul. They’d tainted everything he did, said and was, though he’d tried to deny it. When Jason died, his grief had added another layer to the quagmire.
That quagmire had kept him from loving Sean as he should. It had kept him from giving Laura what she needed most—a depth of love that could only find roots in revelation and vulnerability.
Through the years, he’d known that if he spoke again of his guilt and remorse after their session with John, he would be too vulnerable. The idea of going to the parents’ group with Laura after Jason died had been anathema—because he’d known sharing his grief would lead him back to Nam. As he’d gotten older, he’d learned loss compounded loss and guilt compounded guilt.
As he lifted his head and looked up at the stars, he longed to find direction again. He longed to be connected—really connected—to Laura, to Sean and Kat, to his sister and brothers and friends…to himself.
One question echoed in his heart. What do I have to do?