“Right,” I said. “Why would pot be relevant?” But he didn’t seem to catch my sarcasm.
I refilled his glass, even though it wasn’t empty. I topped mine off just a millimeter. I’d barely drunk any. As I leaned back on the pillows, I stretched my arms overhead, a move I’d learned men took as egregious flirting even though I never meant it that way; I just had tight shoulders. But I lingered with my arms up, stretching to the right and the left.
In the aftermath of my latest Yahav relapse, I’d had the unflattering realization that I had never once, in my life, gone after a man who was fully available. In my early twenties, I honed my skills on married men, men whose rejections and eventual departures it would be impossible to take personally. Even Jerome wasn’t someone I ever possessed completely, or wanted to. And look who I’d pined after at Granby: the hottest guy on the ski team, and Kurt Fucking Cobain. Men who could never hurt me, because I could remain invisible to them. (“Do you think this might have to do with your father and brother?” asks every new shrink, tentatively, as if it weren’t glaringly obvious.)
Now I said, to the boy in whose honor I’d once borrowed a library map of Connecticut just so I could look up the precise location of his street in New Canaan: “You know what the clock tower made me think of, the other day, was all the spaces people used to go to make out. Or smoke.”
He laughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Oh, man. I was never a smoker, so I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Right. You only knew the make-out places, and I only knew the smoking places.”
“You never got busy on campus?”
“Not once.” It didn’t sound pathetic, the way it might have if I’d said it at eighteen. “Where were the big spots? I’d catch people in the theater all the time.”
He said, “Aw, man, that’s not even creative. There was this guest apartment at the back of Jacoby. That was a good one if you had the key. But in spring they’d put up people interviewing for jobs, so that was out.”
I said, “I remember certain couples had spots that were, like, theirs. You’d never go to the Quincy balcony at night, because Sakina and Marco would be there.”
“Man! I forgot that. It was so territorial. Can’t you imagine a David Attenborough narration? The adolescents have staked out their breeding grounds.”
I laughed. “Totally. Angie Parker and that short guy, Steve whatever, they were always up in the English hallway.”
“Dorian,” he said, “when he dated Beth, they’d get a full-on hotel room in town. The rumor was she made him, she wouldn’t sleep with him on campus.”
“That tracks.” I laughed, this time not genuinely. Good God, I didn’t blame her, given what his friends had all seen. I said, “Where was—Robbie and Thalia had a place, right?”
He blanched, actually blanched, to the point where I couldn’t just play it cool; I had to say, “Why, what?”
I hoped he was drunk enough. I knew what I wanted him to say, and he just needed to be drunk enough to say it. He wasn’t. I could see his wheels turning, but he said nothing.
So I said, “Oh God, was it—was she waiting for him that night, you think? In the shed? I bet she was there looking for him, when someone—oh, shit.” Mike didn’t deny it, so I pressed on. “That makes sense, then, why you’d need to back up his alibi. Even before we knew it happened in there—it was so close to the pool. God, can you imagine? If the police had tried to put him right there by the pool?”
He said, quietly—as if lowering his voice would keep this just between us—“This is why he’s always felt responsible. They got their signals crossed, somehow. He thought she was meeting him at the mattresses, and she thought he was meeting her at the shed.”
“So you all knew she was at the shed. I’m not—don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but that’s got to be heavy, that you all didn’t mention the shed to the police.”
“We didn’t know it happened there.”
“Sure, no, of course. But if the police had looked there, if they’d found the blood, it might have changed things.”
He shook his head. “Right, it might have changed things just by putting a different innocent person in prison. I’m not saying I value Robbie’s freedom over Omar’s, but there’s no telling what else they would’ve gotten wrong.”
There were several things I wanted to scream at him. One was the fact that he clearly had put Robbie ahead of Omar. Another was that he didn’t even seem concerned about justice for Thalia, about the fact that maybe she wasn’t resting in peace, and maybe the person who did this had gone on to hurt more people.
Instead of screaming, I tucked a bolster pillow between my shoulder blades, stretched my shoulders back and pushed my boobs out.
I wondered whether Mike would testify to any of this—whatever his professional convictions, his personal ethics. My phone had been recording the whole time, just in case. I’m not an idiot.
“It makes so much sense, then, that you’d all get your stories straight. He was vulnerable.” I swallowed all the spit in my mouth and said, “Even if Robbie had shown up a little late at the mattresses, you’d have to say he was there from the beginning, right? Otherwise they’re off on some rabbit chase. Maybe they’d fully pin it on him.”
I expected Mike to look alarmed, but he shrugged. “He was there, though.”
“You remember walking with him?”
“After all this time, I mean—but he was in the pictures from the beginning. That’s rock-solid.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “He’s in the first one. Knowing him, it was probably his idea to take photos in the first place.”
“Right? If we were kids now he’d be the Instagram king. He always wanted everyone to remember how much fun they’d had.”
“That’s really sweet,” I said. “He’s a sweet guy.”
“He’s a sap. He used to listen to Phantom of the Opera. I could never figure it out, how does a guy get away with listening to Phantom of the Opera and not get ragged on? No one questioned his sexuality.”
“So if they asked you on the stand,” I said, “whether he was there from the beginning, you’d be positive? Because I’m having this crisis of confidence about testifying. Like, how do you remember things? It was so long ago.”
“I think for us, it helped that we talked about it right away. We’re sitting around listing who all was in the woods, we’re making sure we know what time we got there.”
“Was that all from Robbie? It seems like he was so smart about it, developing the photos and everything.”
I sipped my whiskey and intentionally spilled some down my chin, onto my tank top, so I had to paw myself dry.
Mike kept his eyes studiously above my head. “Yeah, actually,” he said. “He was the one who gathered a bunch of us. Or maybe—I guess we were in his room to check on him. It was the day after they found her. He started writing everything down in a notebook, who was there and what time we left the theater. It helped him process it all.”
The motherfucker. That entitled little floppy-haired motherfucker.
“For sure,” I said. “And I bet he was terrified. Of being blamed. I mean, what if he hadn’t been there? Or what if he’d joined you all later, or left earlier?”
“But he didn’t,” Mike said, and it felt like I’d hit a trip wire. He looked irritated, checked his phone. “Jesus, it’s late,” he said.
I threw a pillow at him. “No kidding! Get out of here and stop keeping me up!”
And there he went. There was Mike Stiles’s back as he left my hotel room like a lover departing after a tryst. The teenager somewhere in me, watching from 1995, was bewildered by it all.
I whispered to her: “It’s not what you think.”
26
I have some questions for you.