Reunion at Red Paint Bay

The postcard said: “What lies do you tell yourself about yourself? Come to the dock below the Bayswater Inn at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, alone. Faithfully yours …” It was leaning against the phone on his desk when he came back from lunch Monday morning. On the front was a giant moose and the caption IT’S BIGGER IN MAINE. On the message side there wasn’t any stamp, meaning it had been hand-delivered by the sender himself, or maybe by some kid paid a few bucks to do it.

He would not tell Amy. This time he’d go alone.



It was an uncommonly clear day on Red Paint Bay, the kind of late afternoon where you could see across the choppy stretch of water to the cabins on the opposite shore. It looked closer than a half-mile, so close that he had tried to swim to it the night after graduation. He came down to the dock at midnight, stripped to his boxers, and jumped in. A few hundred yards out he stopped to tread water for a moment and realized that for all his effort, the lights on the other side didn’t appear any nearer. He flipped over and did the backstroke to shore, staring up into the endless sky above him.

He wasn’t sure this was a good idea. In fact, he figured it was probably a bad idea to come alone to the dock below the inn to meet the person sending him anonymous postcards, one of them calling him Rapist! He had been able in the beginning to make himself believe that the messages were meant for someone else or related to hiring David Rigero. But the obituary, the questions at the reunion, and maybe even the car nearly running him down that night swept away any pretense. The sender knew something, or thought he did, and had no doubt tracked him down to blackmail him. He wouldn’t pay, of course. Acceding to blackmail would be admitting guilt, and he was innocent, at least innocent enough.

Simon heard movement behind him and turned. Crossing the beach was a man overdressed for the summer sun, in a sports jacket and tie, carrying his shoes. Simon tried to judge the stiff stride and exaggerated swing of the arms, but no name came to him to match the awkward gait. It seemed like a stranger stepping onto the dock, his heavy footsteps straining the planks. Simon suddenly felt trapped there, at the end of this narrow walkway. There was no escape but the water. Why had he let himself get into this position?

The man stopped a few feet away and nodded. He had dark hair, thinning on top, and a small clipped mustache. Yellowish skin, narrow eyes, and ears that seemed more fitting for a larger head. A face that could be easily recalled if he needed to later on.

Simon nodded back. “Sorry, but do I know you?”

The man laughed oddly in a way Simon thought he should recognize. “You bumped into me once.”

“Bumped into you?”

“In the hallowed hallways of Red Paint High. My books went flying.”

Simon pictured the likely scene in his head, sprinting down the narrow halls, late for class as usual, taking a corner and running over some kid, an underclassman who didn’t know enough to get out of the way at final bell. “That happened a lot, as I recall. You don’t hold it against me, do you?”

“You stopped and helped me pick up my books.”

Simon felt relieved, which surprised him, feeling any emotion at all over such a trivial incident. “Well, I’m glad to hear I didn’t just keep going.” He waited a moment, allowing the conversation to proceed, but it did not. “So …”

The man pressed his mustache, as if making sure it was still stuck on. “I’m Paul. I was a year behind you at school.”

“Paul,” Simon repeated. “I don’t remember any—wait, you mean Paulie, Paulie … Walker?”

“I’m Paul now.”

Simon searched the man in front of him for a hint of the skinny kid buried in his memory but couldn’t match the two images. “You delivered papers for the Register one year when I did, right?”

“You have a good memory.”

“I just flashed on you for a second—you wore a bandanna all the time, a red one, sometimes you pulled it over your face.”

“That was me.”

Of all people he knew on earth, Simon couldn’t think of a more unlikely person to be facing at this moment of his life. “So you’re the one who’s been sending me those odd postcards.” It was a bit disappointing that there wasn’t a more interesting person behind the mysterious correspondence. On the other hand, he felt safe finally knowing the identity of the sender, a former schoolmate, little Paulie Walker, almost a head shorter than him, not threatening at all.

“That would seem obvious.”

“Right, since you’re here.” Simon swept his hand in the air to create some movement to this situation. “Why?” He waited for the answer, some hint of blackmail.

“As I told you, I want to repay you for teaching me a lesson.”

“What lesson is that?”

“How to keep a secret.”

“A secret?”

“What you haven’t even told your wife. Graduation night. You brought your date here. Jean Crane.”

Simon felt his fingers tighten into fists. He felt his brain churning through recent events, forging the links. “Then you did marry Jean?”

“Another logical deduction.”

He didn’t like the condescending tone, or the way Paul kept staring at him, not looking away even for a moment, barely blinking. “I was sorry to read she died,” Simon said.

“Jean.”

“Yes, Jean. She was a very nice girl.”

“She was a very nice girl. How easy it is to slip into the past tense.”

“I just thought, since she’s dead …”

“We’ll all slip into the past tense one day,” Paul said. “She is, she was. He is, he was. Dead is such a nondescriptive word. Why don’t we just say, ‘She ceases to exist’? That’s all there is to it. You exist, then you cease to exist. Happens to everybody.”

Simon understood now the references to mortality in the postcards. Paul had death on the brain, which wasn’t a comforting thought. “Look, it’s kind of hot out here for a philosophical discussion. If you want to go up to the inn, I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk things over. I have a half hour before I need to be home.”

Paul laughed, an irritating little sound. “You’re willing to share thirty minutes of your remaining existence with me? That’s very generous. But I think we’ll just stay here and see how long this takes. Maybe only twenty.”

“Suit yourself.”

Paul set his shoes on the dock, squaring them next to each other, unnecessary precision it would seem. His socks were bunched up inside. He looked out over the water for a minute, then said, “How do you think the people of Red Paint will react when they know that the editor of their beloved Register got away with rape?”

Simon noted the wording—when they know, not if. Paul intended to expose him. “I didn’t get away with anything.”

Paul walked past Simon, brushing arms, a purposeful touch. Perhaps a provocation. He would not respond.

“This is exactly where you did it to her, isn’t it?”

“Why are you asking me? You seem to know everything.”

“I don’t know how you could rape her.”

Simon grabbed Paul’s arms. “Stop saying that! I didn’t do that.”

“That?”

There was no communicating with this man, no use trying to reason with him. The only thing to do was get away from him as quickly as possible. “Look,” Simon said, “did you bring me out here just to make a point, or do you intend to do something?”

“What I’ll do I’ll do,” Paul said. “You’ll know then. And so will I.”

“That sounds like a threat. There are laws against threatening people.”

“There are laws against a lot of things. That doesn’t stop them from happening, does it?”

Simon couldn’t disagree. “What do you want me to say, that I’m sorry what happened upset her? I am sorry. Okay?” He listened to his words, an apology on the fly, and knew it wouldn’t be enough.

“Upset her?” Paul said. “You think being raped upset her?”

Simon looked out over the water for a moment, as if they were having a casual conversation and he could be distracted. “Substitute whatever word you want—devastated, shattered her. Teenagers have sex all the time and it doesn’t ruin their lives.”

When he looked back Paul was still staring, his eyes fixed on him. “Jean didn’t have sex all the time. She was a virgin.”

“I knew that,” Simon said. “She told me when we were talking about doing it.”

“You talked to her about raping her?”

“We talked about having sex, Paulie. It was my first time, too.”

“But you got the chance to decide when to do it. She didn’t. She was a sixteen-year-old virgin.”

The number jumped out at Simon—sixteen? That couldn’t be right. “No, she was just a year behind me, so she had to be at least—”

“Just turned sixteen,” Paul said firmly. “She skipped a grade before she moved to Red Paint. She was a barely sixteen-year-old junior who thought it was wonderful to be asked out by a senior, the captain of the wrestling team, from one of the best families in town.”

“I thought she was seventeen.”

“So seventeen, you wouldn’t have raped her?”

“Shut the hell up!” Simon felt the anger coursing through his veins, massing for some action.

“There are laws against an eighteen-year-old having sex with a sixteen-year-old,” Paul said. “It’s called statutory rape. So that means it was one kind of rape or another. And you got away with both. That’s a neat trick.”

Rape. Statutory rape. One or the other. “It wasn’t any trick,” Simon said. “I told you, she never went to the police. She didn’t even tell her cousin anything had happened.”

“Jean kept quiet because you threatened her. She was scared.”

“That’s ridiculous. I didn’t threaten her.”

“You kept calling her.”

“She was my date for graduation. I liked her. I called to find out why she wouldn’t see me. When she told me I apologized—”

“You apologized for raping her?”

“Stop saying that—I didn’t rape her.”

“What do you call having sex with a person who doesn’t want it?”

Simon threw up his hands, unable to fathom what else to say. “What do you want from me, that I go to jail for something that happened twenty-five years ago? You think you can start this whole thing up again and testify for her in court?”

“There’s only one kind of justice I’m interested in—for you to tell the truth.”

Simon felt better—Paul wasn’t trying to get him arrested. All he wanted was the truth. That sounded simple enough. “I already told you what happened. We had sex, that’s all.”

“You were drunk, and you still think you know exactly what you did?”

“I know what I thought I was doing.”

“That’s not the same, is it?”

“You’re talking as if this happened last week. I don’t remember every little detail of what happened.”

“Jean did, the liquor on your tongue when you kissed her. The sweat on your face. She remembered how heavy you were on her, how she couldn’t open her mouth to take a breath. You smothered the words in her.”

Simon remembered the way she wriggled and bucked under him, and her nails clawing down his back. For days he twisted his head over his shoulder to look in the mirror, see the long red marks of her fingernails on his shoulders. It was obvious she wanted him. He even showed Brewer. It didn’t even feel like bragging then. “Look Paulie, Paul, whoever you are now, you better get yourself some serious help, because you’ve gone over the edge.”

“I am getting help,” Paul said quietly, “from a therapist right here in Red Paint. Therapists can be very understanding, especially the women. So perceptive, so hands on. I just came from seeing one, in fact. But we had a little falling out, you could say. She thinks she knows what rape is all about, but I didn’t think she really did.”

Simon grabbed Paul by the arms, held him there, inches from the water. “If you touched my wife I’ll kill you.”

Paul went limp in his grip, no tension at all, like a body without any life left in it. “I’ll kill you? That’s what any husband would say. You can do better than that.”

Simon let go with a little shove, and Paul laughed at him. The smirking face, the accusation, or maybe it was the silly mustache, but Simon jumped on him, rode him to the dock. Then what? What do you do to a person who doesn’t resist?

“This is how you like it,” Paul said, breathing up into Simon’s face, “being on top. You always have to be on top.”

Simon sat back, like a boy in a schoolyard fight, the victor who isn’t sure what he won. He got up carefully, wary of any sudden move to knock his legs out, spill him into the water. When he was clear he pulled out his cell phone and called Amy’s number, watching as Paul rose to his knees, then his feet. “She better answer.” The phone rang, and rang again. Then the recorded message. “Amy, where are you?” he said. “Call me if you’re there, call me right away!” He turned on Paul. “Where is she?”

Paul shrugged. “You’re lucky to have a beautiful wife like that.”

Simon’s memory triggered back to the Hall of Mirrors … You’re lucky to have a beautiful boy like that. This man, Paul Walker, had been stalking Amy and Davey. Simon felt his fingers gather into a fist. The fist rose up and swung. Paul had to see it coming, but he didn’t duck, even seemed to lean a little to catch the full weight of the punch to his face. The force of it sent him stumbling backward, over the edge. He hit the water, sending up a wave that drenched the dock, and went under. Simon watched the spot. A head started to break the water, then sank again. He began counting … one, two, three, and by ten it seemed like an eternity had gone by. Why wasn’t Paul surfacing? One punch couldn’t have knocked him out. Simon looked over the opposite side of the dock, and then the far end, checking if Paul was holding on there. Twenty, twenty-one—how long could a man hold his breath underwater? Maybe he hit his head on a rock below the surface. That would explain the blunt trauma to his face. No one would suspect a punch. Simon rubbed his right fist down his shirt—no mark there, no blood on his knuckles, nothing incriminating. What was he talking about, covering up a murder? Thirty, thirty-one …

The head bobbed up, the mouth spit water and gasped for air. Paul Walker was just a few yards from the dock, within reach of it almost, just a couple strokes away. His arms swatted at the water and then reached up toward Simon. He’s drowning. The thought of this was surprisingly reassuring—his accuser drowning, the man who was threatening his family drowning. Simon turned, looked toward the inn, the small parking lot, and around the bay, 360 degrees. Not a soul in sight. Paul’s hands were grabbing at the water now, yet his expression didn’t show any fear or distress. Was this what he wanted, to die? Would he be giving the man his wish?

The cell phone rang, da-da-da-da, the tone growing louder as he fumbled to pull it from his pocket. Amy.

“Simon,” she said, “what’s going on? Your message scared me.”

“You all right?”

“I had a little problem earlier, but it’s over with. What’s happening with you?”

“Nothing,” he said, watching Paul in the water. “I just was wondering where you were.”

“I’m at the office, but I need to talk to you.”

The head went under again, creating a little depression of water above it, then sank out of sight.

“Yeah, okay, but you’re breaking up. I’ll meet you at home later. I love you.” He pressed OFF and stared into the water. It was remarkably smooth, like a sheet of dark green paper, barely a ripple of disturbance.

After some time, he couldn’t say how long, Simon dove in himself.





He entered by the back door and hurried dripping over the kitchen floor to the laundry room. He unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it in the dryer. Then he undid the belt to his pants, let them fall to the floor, and stepped out of them.

“Hey, Dad, what’re you doing?”

Simon whirled about and pulled his pants in front of himself, then felt self-conscious doing that. He had always tried to be easy about his nakedness in front of his son, and besides, he was still wearing boxers. He tossed the pants into the machine. “I’m just drying some clothes, Davey. They got wet.”

The boy pointed at his father. “You’re hairy.”

“That happens as you grow older. You’ll get hair on your chest, too, in a few years.”

“No I won’t. I’ll pull every hair out.”

“Good luck with that.”

Davey stepped into the laundry room and boosted himself onto the washer. “How did you get so wet?”

Simon spun the dial to twenty minutes and pulled out the knob. The old dryer rattled on. “Well, I was drinking soda coming home and had to stop fast. The drink spilled all over me.” The lie came easily to him, no thought needed. He just opened his mouth and there it was.

“It must have been a really huge soda.”

“It was, from Burger World.”

Davey reached out and poked his arm. “You shouldn’t drink and drive, Dad. You could be arrested for that.”

“I think I’d get off easy since it was Sprite. But you’re right, I shouldn’t be drinking anything. Both hands on the wheel.” Simon saw his son’s eyes drift downward toward his wet, clinging boxers. He grabbed a towel from the pile on the washer and began drying himself. “Let’s not tell Mom about this, okay kiddo? I don’t want her to worry about my getting in an accident.”

“You mean you don’t want her yelling at you?”

“She doesn’t yell, she lectures.”

“Okay, I won’t tell.” Davey leaned back on the washer, as if getting comfortable in a familiar chair. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Then you wouldn’t have to tell her about me and Kenny, would you?”

“Kenny and me. What’d you two do this time?’

“His mom caught us playing mumblety-peg.”

“Mumblety-peg?”

“We weren’t throwing at ourselves, we were just tossing his jackknife at his sister’s teddy bear. If you hit him you lose.”

“What is it with you and knives all of a sudden?”

“You played mumblety-peg when you were a kid, didn’t you?”

Simon debated his answer. “A couple times, I guess.”

“So you know, knives are cool.”

“They aren’t so cool when they cut you. If you don’t stop playing with them I’m going to ground you for a month or however long it takes to get your attention.” The boy struck the washer with his heels in a rhythm, one two, one two. Simon grabbed the legs to silence them. “Are you listening to me?”

“So we have a deal?”

It was the wrong thing to do, bargain with your kid over playing with knives. No parent in his right mind would do it. Perhaps he wasn’t in his right mind, temporary insanity taking over, or more precisely, situational insanity. But how many times could he claim that? “Okay,” he said, “this once, so as not to upset Mom, we’ll keep our secrets.”

The boy spit on his hand and held it out. “Seal it.”

“I’m not spitting on my hand, Davey.”

“Then the deal can be broken.”

Simon lifted his hand in front of his mouth and made a spitting sound. The boy clenched their palms together, then turned them, grinding them together. Simon had forgotten this intimate adolescent ritual, how binding it really felt.

“Now we can never tell,” Davey said. “Ever.”



He heard her calling his name from the front door, then the pounding of her shoes as she ran up the stairs. He always found the heaviness of her step too insistent, unable to be ignored. He had hoped to be ready for her, to know what he was going to say, but here he was coming out of the bathroom with just shorts on, toweling off his head, no clue whether to tell the truth or lie. Either one had its dangers.

“Simon, are you okay?”

“Sure,” he said brightly, leaning forward for their usual kiss. “Why?”

She looked at him with a disconcerted expression, thrown off by his nonchalance, or something else. “Did you just take a shower?”

“I did.”

“You always take your shower in the morning before work.”

He tossed the towel into the clothes hamper in the hallway. “You’ll have to amend your assumptions about me,” he said, with a little teasing in his voice, “because as you can see, today I showered after work.”

She reached into the hamper, pulled out the towel, and took it to the bathroom. He could see her draping it over the shower rod. That was a good sign, her caring about a wet towel. She ran water and splashed it on her face, then stared at herself in the mirror. He turned away, into their bedroom.

She came in moments later and sat on the edge of the bed. “You scared me with your call,” she said. “I thought something happened to you or Davey or … I don’t know.” She pulled off her shoes. “Where is he?”

“Out back,” Simon said. “I saw him when I came in. He’s fine. We’re both fine.”

“You hung up so fast, and when I called back I got your message.”

“Yeah, like I told you, it was bad reception.” He opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a black T-shirt.

“I had a scare today at the office,” she said.

He pulled the shirt over his head, and it shrouded his eyes and ears, the world disappeared from his perception just for a moment. Then he picked up his hairbrush. In the dresser mirror he could see her behind him, watching as if there was some deep significance to his every move. He wondered how a man brushing his hair would look an hour after killing someone. What would give him away? “What kind of scare?” he said and set the brush on his bureau.

“The new patient I told you about, he wouldn’t let me leave my office.”

Simon felt a shiver of fear sweep over him, the same as he’d felt on the dock. Amy, trapped in her office by an insane man. She could have been assaulted or killed, and he would have been powerless to stop it. In fact he would have been the cause, bringing this lunatic upon them. He went to her, bent over her on the bed, surrounded her in his arms. She seemed smaller to him, some of the life let out of her, not the Amy he was used to. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could have done something.”

She made a slight wriggling motion, and he let her break free. “What could you have done?”

“I don’t know. I just always think I should protect you.” He looked out of the window and saw the tree house, wedged in the branching arms of the white pine, with the rope ladder dangling to the ground. The place where Davey took refuge when the stranger lingered at the front door.

“He never actually touched me,” Amy said, “he just wouldn’t get out of my way.”

This was a usable fact—Paul holding her against her will, with who knows what intent? He could incorporate this into his story line, if one were ever needed … He said he had just been with my wife in her office and implied he had done something to her … No, he didn’t say exactly what. I imagined the worst.

“So,” Amy said, “I called the police.”

Simon turned around faster than he should have. He would have to control his reactions better, not betray what was going through his mind. “Did you have to get them involved?”

“He said you wouldn’t want me to.”

“What?”

“My patient, Paul, he said you wouldn’t like it if I called the police and he told his story to them.”

His story—what would that be exactly? “I didn’t say I didn’t like you calling the police. I just asked if it was necessary.”

“He didn’t talk to them,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. He just turned around all of a sudden and left.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

She looked at him curiously, still sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, doing nothing but observing him. He realized now that it was a suspicious question. It was more difficult than he supposed to know beforehand whether a question sounded suspicious or not.

“No, he just strolled out the door like any other patient. I called back to 911 and told them there was no need to send someone, but they still had to.”

Simon got down on his knees and pulled sandals from under the bed, reaching far under to retrieve the pair. When he stood up again he said, “You’re not going to see him again, right?” He felt dishonest asking this, knowing what he knew. Of course she wouldn’t be seeing him again. He realized at this moment that he wasn’t going to tell her about meeting Paul, punching him, and watching him sink into the murky bay. She didn’t need to know.

“Of course I won’t see him again. He said he was leaving Red Paint anyway.” Amy stared at Simon for a moment, an uncomfortable silence, as he strapped on his sandals. “He did say something very disturbing. Maybe he was just trying to shock me, I don’t know, but we have to talk about it.”

Simon moved toward the window again to slow down the momentum of this conversation. He saw Davey in the yard now, at the base of the tree house, gouging at the trunk with something in his hand. It had to be a knife. Even under threat of perpetual grounding, there he was in plain view carving into a tree.

“Davey’s waving me to come out,” Simon said. “Can we finish this later?”

“Later as in never?”

He laughed a little. “I just mean a little later. It’s been a rough day.”

———

After the pasta and bread sticks, after the green salad and organic mini carrots stewed in brown sugar, after watching two hours of a Twilight Zone marathon (Davey’s choice) on television together sitting on the couch, the boy lying alternately against one and the other as if they were pillows, they sent him off to bed, and Amy said, “Is this later enough?”

Simon looked at his watch—10:05, the time they usually went up to bed themselves to read for a while. That wouldn’t happen tonight. “Sure, let’s talk.”

“I started to tell you, I had trouble with a patient today.”

“You should get some kind of security device in there,” he said, “connect to the police station. I think they can do that.”

“This man made an accusation, Simon. About you.”

“What accusation?”

“About your graduation night on the dock by the inn. He said you forced a girl to have sex.”

She was being uncommonly delicate, Simon thought. Paul would have said rape over and over again.

“Do you know what he’s talking about?”

Simon wondered how much to say, what to include, what to leave out. There were so many ways to tell a story. “The guy you’ve been seeing,” he began, “your patient, Paul Walker, he—”

“Paul Walker? He said his name was Paul Chambers.”

“I think Chambers is his middle name. I guess he was using it to hide who he was. He married the girl I took to graduation, Jean Crane. I didn’t really know her that well. She sat next to me in Spanish. She was pretty and smart, and since I’d just broken up with Ginnie, my steady girlfriend, I asked her to graduation. The party was at the Bayswater Inn. We ducked out a few times during the night to take a drink, me more than her, I guess. Then we went down to the bay, and things got carried away.” He remembered stumbling across the sand and looking up at the moon hanging in the black sky. He remembered the hip flask concealed under his tuxedo jacket and the Chopin vodka—the finest Polish mash—that burned down his throat, like swallowing fire. He remembered twirling around, his brain spinning, the world spinning all around him.

“You had sex?” She said this in a somewhat surprised voice, as if even that was disappointing to her.

“Yes, we had sex. I could tell she was upset,” he said, “after, I mean. She got her cousin, Holly Green, to drive her home. I called her the next couple of days, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Finally I went to her house and she told me that I had forced myself on her.”

“Oh, Simon.” He had never heard her say his name like this, with such a depth of disappointment. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”

“I’d prefer not to, trust me.”

“You’re saying you didn’t force her?”

“Of course I didn’t.” He heard himself answer quickly and matter-of-factly. He could have let the statement stand on its own, no elaboration. What compelled him to add, “At least I don’t think so”?

“You don’t think so?”

“I had a lot to drink, and I wasn’t used to it. I’d never had more than a few beers before, and this was vodka. We drank and were rolling around on the dock, and like I said, things got carried away.”

“Did she say no to you?”

“She said yes, no, yes, no … and she was laughing. At least I thought it was laughing. I guess she was actually crying.”

“There’s a big difference between laughing and crying, Simon.”

“No, there really isn’t, not when you’re drunk.”

Amy leaned back on the sofa as if she was going to sink into it, then bounced forward again, on the edge of the seat. “Wait a minute, the rapist from prison.”

“David? What about him?”

“Is that why you hired him, he’s like a kindred spirit?”

The suggestion seemed bizarre to Simon. “That had nothing to do with hiring him. I haven’t thought about Jean for years.”

Amy looked at him in amazement. “I imagine she thought of you quite a lot.”

“What are you trying to do, deliberately make me feel bad?”

“I’m trying to make you feel something. You tell this story like it happened to your old roommate Ray or somebody else you knew long ago.”

“It did happen to someone else long ago, me as a high school senior.”

“That’s still you, Simon. You don’t erase yourself at every stage of life. Human personalities develop in layers, one on top of the other. Scratch one layer, you can see what’s below.”

“Like a palimpsest.”

“What?”

“A palimpsest. It’s a parchment that’s been overwritten through the centuries, and you can still see parts of the underlying documents. If you’re going to use the image, you should know the word for it.”

“I don’t need the word. My patients get what I mean.”

“Well despite your palimpsest theory of human personality, I am different today, and I wouldn’t get myself in the same situation I did twenty-five years ago.”

Amy shook her head dismissively.

“What?”

“ ‘Get myself in that same situation.’ You make it sound like the circumstances happened to you.”

“What do you want me to say, that I got drunk and raped my graduation date?”

“If that’s what you did.”

“I told you, I don’t know exactly what happened. I only know what I thought I was doing at the time, which wasn’t rape.”

“Did you ask her if she wanted to have sex?”

“Of course. It’s not like I just suddenly jumped on her.”

“You asked her if she wanted to have sex with you that night?”

Simon nodded.

“Graduation night, on the dock, right before you had sex with her, you asked her if she wanted to and she said yes?”

“What are you, a goddamn lawyer? I didn’t ask her at that exact moment. We talked about it beforehand.”

“How much beforehand?”

“I don’t know. A couple days, I guess. Sometime the week before.”

“A week before? That night you didn’t ask her again?”

“I asked her, as we were starting to do it.”

“What did you say?”

He couldn’t remember his words exactly, only the moment, on top of her. “I just said something about how we had talked about doing it and she wanted to.”

“You were lying on top of her reminding her of what she said a week before?”

“You’re twisting things up. It was perfectly reasonable at the time.”

“The circumstances always seem reasonable to the male.”

“Maybe they are reasonable. You ever consider that the guy may be reading the situation as it really is and it’s the girl who gets it wrong? She misleads and flirts and sends all kinds of conflicting signals that a kid with a lot of hormones raging in him would have a hard time figuring out?”

Amy smiled in an unsmiling way. “The other side of rape.”

“What?”

“Your music-loving rapist—he stood in this house in this room and told me there’s always two sides to rape.”

Simon hesitated, not knowing how far to go with this. But he never could back away from an argument. “Maybe there are.”

“No, Simon, there are two people involved in rape, but there’s only one side—the victim’s. Catherine MacKinnon says—”

“Who’s that?” Another name she expected him to know.

“A feminist scholar. She says the real injury of rape is what the victim perceives, but in the law it’s the man’s perception of what the woman wants that determines whether she’s been forced to have sex or not.”

“So the law’s all wrong? Maybe we should have a system where a woman can claim rape even if she says beforehand she wants to have sex, acts like she wants to at the time, does have sex, but then feels guilty about it afterward. If that’s the standard for rape, we better start building a lot more prisons.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what your feminist scholar said. It’s all about what the woman thinks.”

“It is her body.”

“It’s his body, too.”

“Hey, what’re you guys fighting about?”

Amy jumped up from the sofa. On the stairs, slouching over the railing, there was their son, in gym shorts and T-shirt, his sleeping gear. “Davey, I thought you were going to bed.”

“Casper threw up on my sheets again.”

Simon stood up. “If you gave her her medicine every day like you’re supposed to maybe she’d stop doing it.”

“That’s helpful,” Amy said, then turned to Davey. “Pull your sheets off and put them in the hallway. Then sleep in the guest room for tonight. The bed’s made up.”

“I can’t sleep in there. It’s like a girl’s room.”

“Then get new sheets from the linen closet and make your bed up yourself.”

“But—”

“Do as your mother says,” Simon said. “Sleep in the guest room or change your bed.”

“What if …”

“Do it!”

Davey trudged back up the stairs, looking over his shoulder. Simon waited until he heard footsteps overhead in the hall.

“So, what, you going to treat me now like David Rigero, the social outcast?”

Amy thought for a moment, her head down. Couldn’t she even look at him? Her eyes slowly raised themselves, fixed on him. “Why did you hide this from me?”

He held her gaze. “I didn’t hide anything. I told you, I haven’t thought about it for years.”

“So you’re hiding it from yourself, too?”

“Spare me the therapy, okay?”

“Maybe that’s what you need, because I see this all the time. People wall off an unwanted experience in their mind. It’s like an abscess that keeps growing until it bursts unless you deal with it.”

“I’m not walling off anything. I don’t need to dredge up something that happened in high school.”

“Something you did.”

“What?”

“The something didn’t just happen—you did it, active voice.”

“Fine, you want to parse words, here it is: I don’t need to dredge up an alleged rape that I didn’t do—active negative voice—a quarter century ago in order to make peace with myself or you or anyone else. Is that clear enough?”

Amy bit her lip, and it reminded him of where Davey picked up the habit. “My patient, he said you told Jean afterward that she better not spread it around that she slept with you.”

“And you believed him? You think I’d do that?”

She didn’t answer right away. Finally, “I want to believe you.”

“You shouldn’t have to want to.”

“Don’t try to make this about me, Simon. I just went through a scary session with an unstable guy who accused my husband of one of the worst acts I can think of. So I’d like to know, did you call the girl who was accusing you of rape and tell her not to talk?”

“I told you I called her because I was wondering what was going on. I finally got to talk to her for about one minute on her porch, and I tried to make her see that if this got out, everyone would know we had sex and that would be bad for both of us, maybe worse for her than me. I said I was sorry if she felt I forced her, because I honestly thought she wanted to do it.”

“Apparently she didn’t, because twenty-five years later she killed herself.”

“Killed herself?” Simon remembered the obit—unnatural causes. Why hadn’t he considered this before?

“That’s what her husband says. An overdose of barbiturates.”

“God, I thought we were just having sex, that she wanted to do it, too. I really did.”

“How could you make such a serious mistake?”

Simon remembered the sting of the vodka going down his throat and how intoxicating it was to lie out on the dock at nightfall with a pretty girl in a satiny dress, her shoulders smooth and bare. It was strange, the few things one could recall from any point in time, how they had to stand in for the whole event. “I didn’t want to graduate without ever having sex with a girl,” he said, “and this was my last chance, the last night. Maybe I got carried away.”

Her face stiffened, whatever sympathy she had started out with now drained away from it. It scared him, how ghostly she looked. “You had sex with her because you didn’t want to graduate a virgin?”

It sounded despicable to him, the way she said it. “Look, we had sex like millions of kids do, and I’m embarrassed to say it took all of about two minutes. She wasn’t yelling or hitting me or anything. The only way I knew something was wrong was when she ran up the hill afterward and got a ride home with Holly. She chose to make it into a horrible event for the rest of her life.”

“That’s what men always do in date rape—blame the victim.”

“I’m not blaming her. I’m just saying she chose to be devastated.”

“Did she choose to be pregnant, too?”

“What?”

“You got her pregnant, Simon. That’s probably why her family left town, before she started showing.”

He tried to comprehend this new information. “What happened to the baby?”

“She lost it at birth.”

He didn’t know what to feel—relief at not having a child he had never met or regret that some life of his, some part of himself, had died. And what must Jean have felt, having a child so young and losing it? “I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded odd to him to be apologizing to Amy, but it was too late to apologize to Jean. “I didn’t know any of this, obviously. She went away and I never heard from her. It didn’t occur to me that she could be pregnant.”

“She was, and her husband came here to confront you. It’s not just a matter of strange postcards, Simon. He was getting pretty worked up in my office. I’m not sure what he might do.”

“He got what he wanted scaring you. He’ll go away now.”

“You sound sure of that.”

He was as sure as he could be that Paul Walker would not be surfacing in their lives again. He took her hands in his just like he might any time, playfully, as if he had caught her and wouldn’t let go. “I don’t think we need to worry.”

———

In their bed that night, after turning out the light, he curled himself behind her as always and reached his arm over her. He would not be the one to break the routine. She didn’t shake him off, and he let his body sink into her slowly, his muscles relaxing. After a moment she said, “Please don’t tonight.” He rolled away from her into the wide-open space of their king-size bed.

In the middle of the night he woke and thought, It can’t be true. I didn’t cause another person to die.

Yet it was true, or seemed to be. Of all things he could imagine doing in life, this had never occurred to him as a possibility. If Amy considered him so horrible as a rapist, what would she think of him as a murderer? But not murder, really. There was no premeditation. It was manslaughter at worst, or involuntary manslaughter; but not even that, just a terrible accident, a series of unfortunate events. He had even jumped in to try to save the man who had been stalking his family. Didn’t that count for something?

Simon eased himself off the bed and listened for a moment. Amy was a light sleeper. Normally she would wake at any odd movement and ask if he was okay. She said nothing. He walked out of the room and down the hall in his boxers, feeling moist from the humid night air. The house was silent, nothing else stirring. He looked in on Davey, as he often did. In the dim light he could see the boy lying sideways across his narrow bed in a tangle of sheets. Casper was curled around his head. Nothing seemed changed, which felt odd to him, since everything had changed. He, Simon Howe, the editor and publisher of Red Paint’s newspaper of record, had become the story himself. He imagined his mug shot, grainy black-and-white, nothing more than an accumulation of dots. He would appear disheveled, unshaven, despondent, the look of a guilty man. How many people would see him spread across the front page and say, “I’m not surprised. I knew he had it in him.” The Press Herald would surely give it page-one coverage in Portland, a former reporter gone wrong. A writer from New York or L.A. would descend on the town and poke around like it was a newly discovered historical site. He—or she, perhaps, the feminine touch right for this tale of rape and murder—would become a fixture at Red’s, overhearing bits of conversation, sliding her card across the counter for people to call her later and arrange a meeting at some out-of-the-way location. And they would talk, as Maine folk could once they got going, remembering stories of Simon as the talented but restless teenager, Simon as the young man who left for Portland to make his mark in journalism, Simon who ten years ago came back to buy his hometown paper, a curious move, the fallback position for a journalist who had never made it out of the state. It was obvious that he had hoped to go further. You could see it in his work. He wasn’t engaged in the town the way an editor should be. Standoffish, aloof. As for the incident on the dock twenty-five years ago, there had been rumors. The girl’s family left town quickly after graduation, and Simon was the last one to be with her in public. A few people put two and two together, figured something happened. Nobody said rape, though. Nobody went that far. But looking back …

Casper stirred on the bed, stood up, stretched, and sank back in the opposite direction around Davey’s head. Simon turned away and tiptoed down the thickly carpeted stairs into the kitchen. If he drank tea it would be time to boil water, search through the box of odd herbal flavors, then sit with his hands cupped around the mug, breathing in the scent. All very calming. He hated tea, the thin taste of it, and the way it reminded him of being sick as a boy. Bland tea was his mother’s cure for any disturbance of the stomach. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out the organic milk that Amy bought as part of her futile effort to put at least some healthy ingredients into Davey’s body. Simon poured himself a glass to the very top.

It was an accident. That would be clear to everyone if he turned himself in, explained the situation, how one thing led to another. But if he had done nothing wrong, why hadn’t he called the police when Paul failed to surface in the water? Why leave the scene, go home, change clothes, act as if nothing had happened? There was the sure sign that something had happened—acting as if it had not.