Wakeland called races the next day, too. Again it was Ben and Russell in the final round. It was another 200-meter IM, and nearing the first 100 it was a dead heat, the two of them crowding the line, their bodies surging forward with each stroke. At the turn for the first 25 breast, the fists knuckled the bags of Ben’s lungs and fire seared his legs. Coming into the wall, Ben was staring at the white bottoms of Russell’s feet, and following the turn those feet started to disappear into the bubbles and froth of his stroke. Ben was going down, worse than the day before, and in his distraction he sucked in water on the upstroke. He choked and then swallowed it down and shot his head above the water, spitting and huffing at air.
He felt it then, the oxygen bellowing his lungs. Screw the race. Just breathe. He dunked his head and stared at the black line beneath him. He imagined knuckles stabbing his gut. He tried to shove them away and the oxygen expanded his lungs. The power came back into his legs, the burn cooled by the oxygenated blood coursing through his veins. When he came into the wall, he flipped and caught the back of Russell’s feet. When he came into the wall for the freestyle, he flipped and pumped his legs for ten seconds before surfacing, never taking his eyes off the line, his muscles exploding with power, obliterating some physical wall built by his mind. Breathe. Just breathe. On the other side of that wall was nothing but open water, and in the open was nothing but Ben’s body torpedoing through the clear space. He closed his eyes and stretched it out, floating in that beautiful darkness, everything narrowing and opening up at the same time. Here, Ben hadn’t left his father dead in a ditch for forty-five minutes. Here, he didn’t feel unloved by his mother. Here, there was no lying stepfather. He didn’t feel like smashing his hand through plywood doors or stabbing himself with his fingernails, and he rode that blackness into an oblivion of time and space until someone was tugging on his arm and he was rifled back into the light.
“Stop,” Wakeland said, when Ben surfaced. “You can stop now.” Ben blinked into the light and looked behind him to find Russell and the other kids staring at him from the other side of the pool, an awed confusion on their faces. He’d swum an extra lap.
“You found something there, didn’t you?” Wakeland laughed, slapping Ben on the chest. “Yeah, you found something.”
—
RUTLEDGE WAS BACK at the table, his face flushed, the edges of his hair wet.
“You all right?” Ben said.
“I’m fine,” he said, but the man still seemed spooked. “About a month ago, I was down at Balboa Island with my grandkids. We were on the car ferry back. I saw Lewis and the boy sitting two cars up, in that little Corvette of his. I almost went over to say hello, but then I realized they were arguing—at least that’s what it looked like. The boy got out of the car, and then Wakeland hopped out and grabbed his arm. When they reached the other side, the boy got back in the car and they drove off.”
“You tell anyone about it?”
“No,” Rutledge said. “I figured they were arguing about the scholarship, about coming back to the team.”
“But…?”
Rutledge stared at the untouched chorizo and eggs.
“It looked like a different kind of argument,” he finally said—embarrassed, it seemed.
The kid’s out for a joyride with a teacher in Newport Beach, Ben wanted to say, and you don’t say a thing to anyone?
“Listen,” Rutledge said, shooting Ben a look. “The man’s married with kids, for Christ’s sake.” He rapped his knuckles once on the tabletop, as though checking its solidness. “I’ve known him for twenty—”
“Years,” Ben said, nodding. “I know.” He leaned back and let out a breath. “I knew this cop in L.A., in narcotics. We weren’t close, but we worked a couple cases here and there. Eighteen years on the force, and no one knew he was dealing in West L.A., from Santa Monica to Bel Air. Hooking up television stars and their kids, getting the stuff in South Central and jacking up the price ten miles north. Would have gotten away with it, too, if a washed-up movie star’s kid hadn’t OD’d on bad heroin. He was a nice guy. Had a wife and two sons, a Labrador retriever, let the guys use his condo in Mammoth for free.”
Rutledge was staring at the table, nodding slightly. “There was a settlement with the other kid, the one who took the bottle of aspirin.”
“What was his name?” Ben said.
“I can’t tell you that,” Rutledge said. “The settlement was confidential. But I think you should know he’s out there.”
“How long ago?”
“Enough years to make it feel like history—six or seven,” Rutledge said, lifting his cap and rubbing his palm across his damp forehead. “After this kid was out of the hospital, he started talking, to the therapists at the alternative school. Started throwing accusations Lewis’s way.”
“How do you know this?”
“Like I said, I was the kid’s old homeroom teacher. They called me to the district office to be grilled by the lawyers. Lewis talked to me about it, too. We went out one night, got some beers, and he spilled his guts to me. Said the boy was taking it out on him that he was kicked off the team because of bad grades. Said the boy had a lot of problems and needed someone to blame. I mean, why would he talk to me about it if he was trying to hide something?”
“You want me to answer that question?” Ben said.
Rutledge shook his head and looked away.
“What did the lawyers want to know?” Ben asked.
“If I’d seen a change in the boy’s demeanor. If he had confided anything to me about a teacher—” He stopped and swallowed. “About a teacher doing things.”
“Had he?”
“No,” Rutledge said, a strength coming back into his voice. “No, never. I would have said something if he had.”
Rutledge picked up his fork and stabbed it into the eggs but set it back down without taking a bite.
“What happened then?” Ben said.
“They settled out of court. The district paid up. Lewis never said another word about it.”
“Confidentiality.”
Rutledge nodded. “You think I’m a fool, right?”
Ben let that question hover between them for a moment. Most men could answer that question for themselves, if they were honest about it.
“Would you testify,” Ben said, “to what you saw with Lucero—the incident in the locker room, the argument in Balboa? Give an official statement?”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“It’s circumstantial,” Ben said, “but it’s something.”
“Lewis is a friend.”
“Is this friendship unconditional?”
Rutledge waited a minute to answer, had to think about it. “It’s nothing and you know it,” Rutledge said.
“Does Wakeland know about your girlfriend?” Ben said.
Rutledge’s eyes flashed.
“Is that why you won’t test—”
“My wife knows about Paula,” Rutledge said firmly. “That’s our business and it’s not illegal.” Rutledge put his elbows on the table and looked Ben straight in the eyes. “I don’t want to ruin a man over nothing.”
“You can’t believe it’s nothing.”
“I believe that what I saw can be interpreted any number of ways.”
He was right, but it didn’t let him off the hook.
“It’s the interpretation you choose that matters,” Ben said.