So I dove beneath his desk to hide. I had no real plan. When Mr. Landry rattled the doorknob I closed my eyes and clenched my body and prayed like a coward for help from the same God I’d so often dismissed. And yet he did not open the door. He instead began securing the locks outside of it and the rattling noise of this endeavor traveled up the door frame like it was being zipped. In the street, the police cut off their sirens. I heard their footsteps on the sidewalk outside. Inside the house, I could hear Mr. Landry and Louise bickering with each other as they both moved toward the front door. When they opened it, Mr. Landry said, “What is the meaning of this?”
A policeman said, “Are you the parents of Jason Landry?”
I knew we were going down after this.
So I did what Jason suggested I do and opened the safe beneath the desk. If I was going to be arrested for breaking and entering, I at least wanted my hands full of evidence. Who knows what I expected to find. Lindy’s underwear? A signed confession? The entire enterprise suddenly seemed ridiculous. Still, I twisted the key and opened the safe and there was not much inside of it: six Betamax tapes with the word “Master” written on the labels, a few documents that looked official and scientific but were incomprehensible, and a medical case full of glass vials. In a cardboard box next to this sat a pile of syringes still in their plastic. I carefully removed the case and pulled a vial from its package. I did not recognize the name of this drug but recalled the pained face Tyler Bannister had made those years back upon the mention of this room and understood that no matter what Jacques Landry was up to with those children, it was abominable. I’ve never gone back to research this. I’ve never had the stomach. Call me what you will. Yet on that night I took this vial and grabbed as many photos from the floor as I could. I thought about grabbing the tapes, the camera, the spent cigars that were as round as dimes, and then I heard my father’s voice.
He was outside, calling Jacques Landry’s name.
I went to the window and nudged the curtain to see my father barreling down the street. Behind him, two police officers walked with my mother and sister, both of whom were in their robes. “Jacques!” my father yelled. “Where the hell is my son?” Mr. Landry stood talking to two policemen. He seemed totally unaware of my father’s presence until my dad broke through their huddle to confront him. He grabbed Mr. Landry by the shirt, and for one split second, before the voices all rose beyond comprehension, before the police pulled my father off Mr. Landry as easily as lint from a suit coat, it looked like my father was honorable. It looked like he was valorous.
And hereabout came a change in me.
Although it was dark outside and the lighting was bad, just a few rotating sirens, two streetlights lit and a third still broken, it looked like my father was invincible. If you could have frozen that moment in time, like we so often do in our photos, you would have seen my father about to reach into the throat of Jacques Landry and pull out his bullying heart. You would also see genuine fear in Mr. Landry’s broad face. More important, though, and what I am trying to tell you is that within this quick exchange I understood that it is inside all of us men to be both menacing and cowardly. It is in all of us to have virtue and value and yet it is also in our power to fall into irrelevant novelty or, even worse, elicit indifference from the people we’ve loved. This is the challenge, I suppose, of fatherhood. And so I knew that, despite my father’s errors, he loved me. He loved us. I also knew that big and important parts of him were sorry because I knew that he was willing to fight. What more could I ask for? I will never apologize for loving him back.
But it was my mother’s face that brought me out of the window.
She stood to the side of the growing crowd as confusion, in general, began to bloom. She watched my father argue with Mr. Landry, but I could tell by her expression that she was not listening to them. My mother, instead, was in some internal place, looking around at her life. I wondered what she was thinking then, in the same way I so often wonder that now. Was she considering her time with my father? Was she wondering how it had come to this? What is the exact path from old wedding photos to a night of horror outside of your dream house? What are the odds of one child dead and another one missing? The truth is, of course, there are no odds for this, and that is when I realized what my mother must have been doing. She must have been preparing herself. That’s why, when everyone else was yelling and getting emotional, my mother stood quietly off to the side, as if doing math in her head.
And me, I wanted to solve her problem.
I lifted the curtain and stepped out of the Landrys’ house.
For a second, I thought I was going to walk right through the yard, unnoticed, and into my mother’s arms. But this did not happen. Instead, I heard a policeman yell for me to stop. So I did. I imagine that he drew his gun and approached me, but I really don’t know. The only thing I saw was my mother’s face. She had not even looked up. I put my hands in the air and called to her.
“I’m right here, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine.”
The officer demanded that I drop my weapon, and I immediately realized how I must have appeared. I was sweaty and covered with mud. I had fistfuls of contraband. My mother finally looked up, and I still today cannot decipher the expression that broke over her face. I am not sure, in other words, if the lighting cast me in such shadow that she was trying to understand how her son’s voice came from this criminal surrounded by cops or if my voice on that night, so full of fear, sounded foreign to her coming from a shape she so obviously knew. If I had to guess, I’d think that my mother, in doing her private calculations, had likely advanced so far into the unfortunate algorithms of her future sadness that she had simply forgotten the possibility that I might be okay and that she would not have to suffer yet another loss. So the confusion on her face was not about my life, really, but about hers, and the idea that it might go on.
I looked at the policemen.
“I don’t have a weapon,” I said. “I have evidence in the rape of Lindy Simpson.”
I suppose there are five things to know about the next ten minutes on Piney Creek Road.
One: Jacques Landry had to be restrained when he learned I had been in his house. Two: my father had to be restrained when he saw that cop shove my face in the lawn. Three: the police thought I was Jason Landry. Four: unbeknownst to us, the actual Jason Landry was approaching the house from the woods. And, five: Lindy was standing in the street, watching all of this.
This was not good.
Lindy’s parents were out there, too, as was nearly the whole neighborhood. This type of entertainment was not typical on Piney Creek Road and so everyone wanted answers. Lindy’s father, for example, began frantically swooping up the photos I’d dropped on the ground. Lindy’s mom, on the other hand, put her arms around Lindy as if attending to a person in shock. I heard my father threaten a lawsuit, Mr. Landry demand my arrest. The police, of course, were totally unprepared for the totality of what they’d stumbled upon in Woodland Hills, and when the officer finally pushed me into the backseat of the patrol car, I began to understand why.
Past our houses, way off in the distance, I could see an orange light.
The Perkins School was on fire.
And although I later found out that Jason had spray-painted his name all over the school chapel and thrown his father’s business cards around the manicured quad before he set the place ablaze, I could not yet empathize with his desperate need for attention in the way that I do now. I could instead only watch this colored sky become a backdrop as Lindy walked toward the police car I was sitting in. It was obvious she had been crying, and I thought, for a second, that she might be grateful for what I had done. I smiled at her as she put her hands on the glass of the half-open window.
She yelled at me.
“What the fuck is your problem?” she said.