“I’m not going until I’m finished,” she said. “You’re the most dangerous kind of man, because you’re frightened, and you lie so you don’t have to face the thing that terrifies you. You think it’s silence, but it’s lying. You think it’s only yours, but it’s others’, too. Yours, mine, Rachel’s—Emma’s.”
“Leave Emma out of it.”
“It’s hers, too,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s not. No one knows where they stand with you. No one knows who you are, for God’s sake. You’ve given your wife—your child—the worst kind of pain.”
“She had the affair, not me,” he snapped.
“Because she was looking for what you wouldn’t give her,” she said. “Because she knows there’s somewhere in you she can’t access. She feels you don’t love her enough because of it.”
“You talking about Rachel?” he said. “Or are you talking about you? I mean, let’s keep things straight here.”
“Let me tell you something,” she said, furious at herself for blushing. “I think I might love you, Ben Wade, I just might, despite my better judgment. But that’s not what this is about. I’m not trying to take something from you. I’m not trying to have you. I’m trying to give you something.”
“You can give me something when I ask for it.”
“You know what’s funny?” she said.
“No idea.”
“You haven’t even asked me how I know. The investigator’s got no questions.”
She handed him a slip of paper. It had Tucker’s name on it, an apartment address, a phone number.
“You know about him, right? I mean, you did that much of your job?”
Silence, the paper shaking in his hand.
“Let me frame this another way,” she said. “I don’t expect you to tell me. I don’t expect you to care enough to do so. Fine. But I expect you to tell someone, I damn well do. You’re a policeman. You know what happened to Lucero, you know what happened to this boy, and yet you still keep that man’s secret. He’s out there and you know exactly where he is and still you do nothing.”
“Get out.”
“You’re the evidence, Ben. You.”
“Get out,” he shouted.
She started toward the screen door, threw it open, and stopped.
“I know what happened to you, Ben,” she said, “whether you tell me or not. I expect you to be the man I know, not the frightened child you were. And if you’re not going to do something about it, I damn well will.”
Then she was out the door, the screen slamming so hard behind her she thought she broke the frame.
14
AN HOUR LATER, BEN WAS at the Wedge. A south swell was pumping hard, the peaks hollowed out by steady Santa Ana gusts. Ten-, fifteen-foot crushers collapsing in two feet of frothy water. A few of the hardcore guys were out, the beach bums who lived in rotting wooden apartments and worked stocking grocery shelves so that they could ride the waves every day, but these were swells that seemed to carry the whole weight of the Pacific in their walls, and they exploded onto the beach like trucks dropped from the sky.
He was out into the break, diving beneath the grind of the first wave, only to be knocked backward by the next. A gasp of air and down again, deep below the crashing peak of the third wave, into the dark silence. His head shot above the water on the backside of the break, a line of swells stacking up again on the horizon, barreling toward him.
The first time it happened, Ben was fourteen and half drunk on Negra Modelos. Wakeland had thrown out his back lifting a lane-line reel, and they had sat on the patio in the sun, Wakeland gulping vodkas to take the edge off his spasmed muscles.
“I need your help,” Wakeland said. “I need to lie down.”
Wakeland leaned on Ben’s shoulder all the way to the bedroom. There he gingerly stripped to his underwear, lay on the bed, pointed to a bottle of lotion on the bedside table, and told Ben what to do: a dollop in the palms, and then start at the lower lumbar, down near the base of his back where the slatted muscles butterflied away from his spine.
“Not like that,” Wakeland said. “You’ve never done this, have you?”
Ben shook his head, embarrassed about all the things he’d never done.
“Let me show you. You learn to do this and the girls will love you.”
And then Ben was shirtless, pressed into the warm space left vacant by Wakeland, the man’s hands working down his back. The problem was, it felt good—to be touched, to have your muscles, sore from workouts, kneaded out. His mother didn’t hug, and he wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. He’d never had a girlfriend. Boys, friends on the swim team, punched one another, slapped backs, but no one touched him. It felt good to be touched, it did. Then Wakeland’s fingers pressed the muscle and bone just beneath Ben’s underwear line, and a nervousness pricked Ben’s body. He closed his eyes then and imagined Rachel. He had only just met her in algebra class—at least a year before she’d pay any attention to him—but he loved the way her hair hooked her ear, the way she held her pencil and ignored him while he watched her take notes. He tried to imagine, as he’d done every day in class, her thin body beneath her blouse, and he could almost do it, almost conjure the shadow of her shape beneath the fabric.
“Take these off,” Wakeland said, tugging on Ben’s jeans.
Ben kicked into the first wave of the set, his body flung forward on the crest, his feet pitching out above his head. He dug his hand into the face, and his fins found the glass below the lip, his lateral muscles slicing into the water, his left foot carving a wake into the peak. For a moment he shot through the tube, the lip of the crest spitting out above his torso, his world narrowing to a cylinder of churn and hollow rush. Then the sunlight turned green and the tube closed off, tossing him to the beach floor. He let the wave take him, the roil of it spinning him through the sand and seaweed.