I listened and waited. Business news. The Dow closed down fifty points for the week. The Federal Reserve was rumored to be cutting interest rates again.
And after the break, have you ever suspected that your dog might be a genius? Ernesto Sanchez interviews the headmaster of a new school for gifted pooches—
I shut off the radio and noticed, in the space between the seats, my Albright-for-Congress hat. I’d removed it before going into Antonello’s for dinner. Remarkable, I thought, how one minute you were optimistic enough to print your dream on a hat, and the next moment … this.
What if I were to keep driving? Just disappear? I played with the idea of starting over, new home, new identity. Maybe grow a beard. Become the captain of a Caribbean fishing boat. I understood right away how absurd this was, but I allowed myself a brief mental getaway to Fantasyland as I drove the very real streets of downtown Newfield toward the railroad station and into the parking lot. Only when, several minutes later, the train came into view and groaned to a stop did I reluctantly shake off images of palm trees and white sand.
I believed it was rotten of us, fooling Evan into coming. But he was a lawyer, a good one, and nothing seemed more valuable at that moment than his sage advice. I arrived just as the train did. Evan stepped onto the platform along with the dozens of other passengers returning from their long workday. He had on khakis, an orange golf shirt, and a Mets cap and was carrying his suitcase and golf bag. Unlike the rest of us, Evan was a serious golfer. His father had played varsity in college and made sure that Evan had grown up playing, too.
We shook hands, and I took his golf bag from him. As we walked to the car, he told me that Meghan, his new girlfriend, had just landed a gig as lighting designer for the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. I’d only met Meghan once, at a dinner party Evan had thrown around the holidays, and had liked her immediately. She had an honest, toothy smile and a habit of swearing like a sailor when telling stories. A vast improvement over his last girlfriend, the actuary.
He was launching into a story about a party he and Meghan had gone to last weekend when I said, “Evan, hang on a second.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s sit in the car,” I said. “We need to talk.”
We put the suitcase and golf bag in the backseat and got in my car. With the engine running, I explained that Jeffrey, Nolan, and I had gotten ourselves into serious trouble. And that we had no clue what to do about it.
“Tell me what happened,” he said.
I really wanted to. It was good to see Evan, extremely comforting, and I felt a strong desire to unburden myself and tell him every thing. But I knew I shouldn’t, for his sake. Luckily for him, he’d gotten tied up at work just long enough to be uninvolved. And I knew that the right thing was to keep it that way. “I can’t,” I told him. “It’s bad, though.”
“How bad?”
“Really bad.”
The train chugged to a start and left the station. We watched it go. When the station was quiet again, Evan asked, “Did one of you kill someone?”
Three hours earlier, the question would’ve seemed absurd.
“No.”
“Look, whatever’s going on, Will, you need to tell me. You’ll need a lawyer.”
“Maybe so.” I tried to word this delicately. “If you learned that a crime was being committed … you know, in progress … you’d need to report it, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Then I can’t tell you anything else.”
A quarter mile down the track, the train rounded a curve and blew its whistle. Then it was out of sight.
“Then what the hell am I doing here?” he asked. “I mean, if you can’t even tell me … Look, maybe I can offer you some hypothetical advice?”
Hypothetical advice, it suddenly occurred to me, was exactly what he was doing here. “A hypothetical situation would be okay for me to talk about?” I asked.
“Just be careful what you say.”
“All right.” I paused, considering my words. “Let’s say that, hypothetically, three men had gotten themselves involved in a situation.”
I was looking out the front windshield. Stragglers were getting into their cars and leaving the parking lot for a well-earned weekend. Early Monday morning, they’d be standing at this same train platform, carrying the same briefcases.
“Are the three men equally responsible for their … situation?”
“Say that one man is most responsible, but the other two didn’t do anything to make it better or to stop him.”
“Go on,” he said.
“And say that what happened was inadvertent.”
Evan looked at me. “What does that mean?”
“It was an accident.”