Suddenly Paul shakes his head. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re not even sure.”
“Not a hundred percent.”
“It’s just a lookalike thing.”
“Well, that and . . .” The way he makes me feel.
Paul shakes his head again. “Honey, I don’t think so. I just spent an hour with that guy. I’m a pretty good judge of character. And he told us what happened to his parents. You know, changing your name is one thing, but concocting a false past?” Paul shook his head. “It’s a resemblance, nothing else.”
I don’t want to argue, even if it feels as much like denial as logic coming from my husband. But in truth, all I have is a feeling.
Pieces of a memory.
A trace of a boy who saw something horrible.
*
There were ten minutes left in our fifth and final session. Mooney’s words had been ringing in my mind ever since she and Starzyk interrupted us. That may not be all he saw. The sense of urgency. I didn’t like it; it was anathema to my practice, but I understood it.
And then I asked the question.
“Tom?”
He looked at me. Maybe he heard it in my voice: I needed something from him.
Or, his father did.
And that’s how I approached it.
“If your dad could talk to you right now, what would he tell you to do? If you saw something, if you saw what happened to him — not afterward, but when it happened — don’t you think he would want you to tell?”
Tom gazed at me, impassively at first. I suppressed the urge to say more, I fought to give him space. And then his face changed — it started to crumble.
And the noise — at first, I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. A terrible sound, like a moan, at once both inhuman and utterly human. It was coming from him.
Tom opened his mouth, and he took a breath, and that moan escaped him again. Tears filled his eyes, then spilled over the lids, ran down his reddened cheeks.
I stood, my heart rate going up. What is this? What do I do? But that was foolish. I’d seen people cry, scream, go on a tear — I’d seen every emotion.
Okay, maybe not like this. Maybe not an eight-year-old boy with the sound of pure heartache issuing from his open mouth. Because that’s what it was. A depthless anguish.
“Tom . . .” I said, trying to soothe. I resisted going to him but reached out, fingers in the air just a yard from his face.
“I saw,” he managed.
“Okay.” I released a pent-up breath. “Okay, Tom. You saw . . . You saw what happened to your father?”
Tom moaned again, the pitch even lower. He gave a sidelong look at the door, exposing the whites of his eyes. Like he was remembering the police on the other side of it, wondering if they’d come back. If they were listening now.
“I saw her,” he said next.
“You saw her? Your mother?”
He was still describing his discovery of his father’s death, it seemed.
“I heard them.” Tom whimpered a little between each sentence. Like the words physically hurt. “They were yelling at each other.”
I didn’t interrupt. The police had said there were signs of forced entry. That someone had broken into the Bishop home and David Bishop had confronted them, had words.
“They were yelling and it woke me up and I went downstairs.”
But this was different. I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the assailant or his mother. We were in different territory from what he’d told the police.
“I went down and . . . I went down and I saw them fighting.”
I had to speak. To clarify. “The intruder and your daddy?”
Tom looked at me — I’ll never forget the haunting in his light-colored eyes — and he shook his head. He moaned one last time, swallowed, and said, “Mommy and Daddy. Fighting. And Mommy had a hammer.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
I have to know.
First of all, the resemblance is uncanny. We’ve all heard stories that everyone has a double in the world — maybe this is what that is. Or perhaps time has distorted my memory. That would be fine. I prefer the possibility of dementia or confabulation to the alternative: Michael has sought us out for some reason. Revenge? Because I unlocked the truth that had his mother convicted of capital murder?
But the odds that Michael is Tom, and Michael just happened to meet and date my daughter — then propose marriage — all the while innocently disremembering our time together — those are stacked too high. Too many coincidences. And I’ve learned from both my time spent working with law enforcement and my own experiences as a psychologist that coincidence rarely exists. There’s always a connection.
The last possibility is this: Michael is acting unconsciously, or at least semi-consciously. Memory is a wild place. I’ve had patients who’d forgotten whole chunks of their lives. Patients who misremembered things substantially — swapping out characters from their past, switching family members, confusing strangers with friends. Mostly, we humans compartmentalize. Especially when traumatized. We quickly and carefully hide away painful experiences in a mental room, lock the door and drop the key down a deep well.
I drink coffee as I contemplate, watching the lake through the picture window in the living room. Paul is out there now, using our push mower on the sloping front lawn. We have a caretaker, but we give him an August vacation. Paul likes to do his own mowing, especially when he has something to think about. And I suppose I’ve given him just that.
We’re not in agreement at the moment, Paul and me. He thinks it’s coincidence. But he knows me and knows where I’m headed. That I’m not going to be able to relax until I figure this out.
I wait, as patiently as I can, until Joni and Michael come downstairs. They’ve been up there for a half an hour, and they’re both looking a bit glowy. Joni has changed into a bathing suit, and Michael is wearing trunks.
“We’re going to take a dip, Mom. Then we’re going into town. Okay?”
“Sure.” I wrap my hands around my mug of coffee. “Have fun.”
They’re out the door like a couple of kids. And they are kids, really. Barely into their twenties. I watch them run down the lawn. Paul smiles and gives a wave. Once they reach the dock, Michael sweeps Joni off her feet. He carries her, like the bride over the threshold, to the end of the dock, where he pretends to toss her in. She makes a big show of it, kicking her legs and throwing her head back, which fans her long, highlighted hair. Then he sets her down and she promptly dives in off the end of the dock. Michael waits for her to re-emerge.
Our kids, Joni and Sean, grew up coming here. Paul bought the place when Sean was just two and Joni not yet conceived. She learned to swim in the lake when she was five years old. I watch her break the surface now — she was underwater for several seconds and she’s out a good ways — and then Michael jumps in.