“But your mother sent me here to find you.”
He looked at her. His eyes clear green like the deep end of tide pools. They were intelligent eyes, but she could see an insecurity in them. He would have been the type of child who tried to keep his parents from fighting, the kind of kid who tiptoed around the house to keep his world calm. A man like Wakeland would notice that. For a man like Wakeland, that would be an invitation.
“The problem is,” he said, “I wouldn’t know how to answer that question. What did he do to me?” He watched a bulldozer push the torn-up trees into a pile near the chipper. “Freshman year I get busted,” he said, “in the parking lot, toking up. Goddamned resource officer trolling the lot has nothing better to do. He hauls me through the courtyard with the handcuffs on, right in the middle of lunch, in front of everybody. Wakeland just happens to be walking by and follows us out to the patrol car, jawing at the cop. ‘C’mon, Joe,’ Wakeland says. ‘He’s fourteen years old; get the cuffs off him.’ But the cop says he can’t do it and he slips me into the patrol car, and at this point there’s this throng of kids standing on the steps watching the scene.
“?‘Joe,’?” Wakeland says. ‘He’s one of mine.’
“And then the cop closes the door and I’m stuck inside the hot car with the windows up, watching the two of them talk. All I can hear is the police-radio static, so I have no clue what they’re saying, but a couple minutes later the cop opens the door, keys open the cuffs, and hands me over to Wakeland. ‘Lucky I’m a nice guy,’ the cop says. ‘No second chances, though.’
“So Wakeland hauls me over to his office in the swim complex, says he’s gotta call my parents. I beg him. I mean, I fucking break down and beg him not to tell my father. He’s got the phone in his hand, his finger in the dial, and I’m crying like an idiot. He puts the phone back on the hook, gives me a tissue, and watches me for a minute.
“?‘All right,’ he says. ‘This is between you and me.’?” Tucker laughed ironically. “Between you and me.
“So Wakeland makes me promise,” Tucker continued, “to come to his office each day at lunch, to get my homework finished. ‘If I find out,’ he says, ‘you’re smoking that garbage again, I’m calling the police and your parents.’
“And I did. I went to his office every day, did my homework, stopped getting stoned, got a B-plus average the next semester. My parents couldn’t believe it. My dad mostly stopped belting me—that’s how happy they were. They invited Wakeland over for dinners. Sent him Christmas cards. Let me watch movies at his apartment. I couldn’t believe it, either, to be honest. I mean, I didn’t believe I could do anything good, and here I was getting A’s on tests.”
The man running the chipper fed a severed branch into its mouth. A cloud of wood chips flew out across the ground and another man raked them beneath the new monkey bars and swings, a soft landing for kids when they lost their grip.
“It was almost a year,” he said, “before anything…” He ran his hand through his hair and blew out air. “The problem is,” he said, “he was like a dad, you know? He was like the dad I wanted. He’d show me extra attention after swim practice, giving me tips no one else got. We’d go to Angels games. I’d hang at his house, drinking beer. He’d help me with my homework, made me study for tests. I borrowed a fucking tie from him for my junior prom. It’s crazy,” Tucker said. “This college stuff is easy for me now because of Wakeland. I owe him for that, I guess, in a weird way.”
“You owe him nothing.”
“He kept copies of Playboy in his guest bathroom. Sometimes we’d look at them together, and somehow that started to feel normal, like the kind of thing you were supposed to do with a dad.”
“You were a child.”
“I was a teenager.”
“You were a child,” she said. “I could tell you a little bit about the childish brains of teenagers.”
He looked at her. “I never said no. That’s the problem.”
Natasha didn’t know what to say about that; whatever she knew about the teenage brain couldn’t help her understand it.
“Sometimes,” he went on, “even now, when things are shitty, I think about calling him. Like he’s just some old friend and the other stuff didn’t happen.” He let out a long breath. “Fucking strange. Gets you wrapped so tight around his finger.”
“You did, though,” she said. “You finally said no.”
“Not to his face,” he said. “I stopped eating. Couldn’t make myself go to school. Took a bunch of pills. I finally told my mom and she ran to the bathroom and puked. After that it was all lawyers and interviews in small rooms.”
“Confidentiality.”
“Why are you down here?” he said. “Why not a cop?”
“The detective assigned to the case is frightened to see you,” she said.
“Frightened to see me?”
“He knows,” she said, “that if he’d said something a long time ago, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Yeah,” Tucker said, “just another asshole that doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of Wakeland.”
“No.” Natasha shook her head. “It’s not that.”
Tucker stared at her, confused for a moment. “It happened to him? Wakeland?”
She nodded. “I think so.”
“So now you want me to say something.”
“Lucero, that was the kid’s name,” Natasha said. “He’s not getting any second chances. His mother won’t talk, either. She’s illegal and afraid she’ll be sent back.”
“God,” Tucker said. He put his palm to his forehead, as though shielding his eyes from the sun. “Wakeland knows how to pick ’em.”
“Let me get you with a detective,” Natasha said.
“The statute of limitations is up,” he said. “The law doesn’t care about what happened to me.”
“I know,” she said. “I know about the statutes. But not on Lucero.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Tucker said, standing now. “You don’t get it. This money’s putting me through college; I got plans for it. I said what I needed to say and no one gave a shit. Everyone retreated to their corners and protected themselves—Wakeland, my father, the school district. You know how long it’s taken me to stop thinking about killing myself, to be able to sleep with my girlfriend? I’m twenty-five years old. All my friends are graduated, starting careers or going to grad school. Some of them are married, have kids. I’m taking a fucking poetry class at a community college.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “I feel bad about it. I mean, I feel bad about this kid, I really do, but I can’t do what you’re asking.”
“Imagine how different your life would be if this detective had said something all those years ago.”
But Tucker’s eyes were closed now, his fingers pressed against his temples. “It’s hard enough to deal with my own shit,” he said. “You can’t expect me to be a hero, too.”