She reached over and took my arm above the wrist, squeezing hard. “Do you want to wait for Dad to get home?” she asked. “Tell us both about it all at once?”
Despite everything I smiled a little. My mother was ever the practical one. “No,” I said. “I think I’d better tell you now. Before I change my mind.”
IN THE END I had to tell it all twice, the second time over dinner that night in order to bring my father up to speed. Oddly enough, it wasn’t any easier to talk about Terence the second time around. I said nothing to either of my parents about Fritz or what I’d learned from Lester Briggs. Instead, I told them about Terence’s death, about hearing the gunshot and finding Terence’s body in the river. I told them about later discovering the marijuana in his room and arguing with Ren Middleton, who was going to sweep it all under the rug and get me to help him do it. Still, it felt like less than half a confession, as if by telling them about Terence, I was trying, and failing, to balance out everything I wasn’t telling them about Fritz.
Dad listened intently the entire time, occasionally taking a bite of his dinner. Mom picked at her food and looked back and forth between Dad and me. I ate almost nothing, although I did drink from my glass of very good Pinot Noir.
When I finished, I realized I was starving, and in the hush that had fallen, I began shoveling food into my mouth. “Sorry,” I said, glancing at Mom. She shook her head and gestured at me to keep eating.
Dad sat back in his chair and took a reflective sip from his wineglass. “So, what do you want to do?” he asked mildly.
I shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s anything to do,” I said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Matthias,” Mom said.
I rolled my eyes, but I swallowed my potatoes. “It’s stupid, anyway. I don’t know why this bothers me so much.”
“That boy died, Matthias,” Mom said gently. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to find him.”
“It’s not that,” I said reluctantly. “I mean, yes, that was horrible. Finding him in the river. But it’s the whole thing with the drugs and Ren Middleton that’s nagging me, which seems stupid. I can’t let it go. I mean, what do I care if the kid was smoking pot, or popping Vicodin, or whatever? I’m not the morality police.”
Dad stirred. “No,” he said, “you’re not. But this Ren Middleton is manipulating you, number one. And number two, the whole thing doesn’t sit right with you. You don’t like lying.”
I almost laughed, bitterly, and instead drank the rest of my wine in one draft and reached for the bottle to refill my glass. “Funny thing to say about a guy who writes made-up stories,” I said. “I tell lies for a living.” Or used to, I thought.
“You write stories, Matthias,” Mom said. “You’re not lying. You’re telling a different kind of truth. Your novel wasn’t a lie. It’s not like you were trying to deceive anyone by writing it.”
I thought about saying something like writing was an escape, that creating stories was a way to shape the world into a nicer, neater version of itself—in other words, a kind of lying—but instead I turned to my father. “I don’t have the luxury of being morally outraged at what Ren Middleton does,” I said. “No, I don’t like how he’s holding a reference letter over my head, but what choice do I have? I screwed up by holding on to that pot I found in Terence’s room. If I were Ren, I’d be pissed, too. And Paul Simmons gets to walk away from it. Why shouldn’t I walk away from it?”
My father looked at me over the dinner table. “So that’s it?” he asked. “That’s how you’re going to let it be?”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Are you . . . You’re criticizing me?” I said, hearing my voice rise. I’d had too much Pinot and too little food. “You’re always telling me, ‘Most things in moderation’ and ‘Safe is boring, but it works,’ and now you’re telling me you think I’m a coward? What the hell is that?”
“Matthias,” my mother said.
“You are no coward,” my father said evenly. “But you’re giving up too easily.” I opened my mouth to argue, but his words plowed over me. “Ever since you graduated from high school, ever since Fritz disappeared”—at this I sat stock-still, my mother inhaling sharply—“you’ve been eaten up by guilt, like it was your fault. I know you felt that, and I think you still do, and it hurts me to see you do that to yourself. It changed you, Matthias. Just as surely as falling in love, or having a child, can change someone for the better. I know—” Here he glanced at my mother before continuing. “I know your mother and I blamed Michele for keeping you in New York City, but you left home long before you met her.”
“I went to boarding school, Dad,” I said. “Of course I left home a long time ago.”
“Yes, and Blackburne was your home for four years. It’s where you grew up. And you left that, too, but not because of graduation. Because of Fritz. You went off to college and never really came back. And then you moved to New York City and still didn’t come back. And now you go back to Blackburne for a teaching job, when you never really showed much interest in teaching before, so I’m guessing either your writing isn’t going so well or you’ve got other reasons for returning there.” I couldn’t say anything, just stared at him. “And then one of your students dies, in what the school says is a horrible shooting accident, and you find evidence suggesting it might be more complicated than that, and the school wants to whitewash it. And you wonder why you don’t want to let it go? It’s because it’s like Fritz all over again—”
“Terence Jarrar is not like Fritz, Dad,” I said.
“It’s like Fritz all over again because somebody was lost, except you think you might know why this boy was lost, and you feel like maybe you could do something about it, but Ren Middleton is standing in your way.” My father looked at me compassionately. “Matthias, I’m not trying to win an argument. I just want you to see what I’m seeing.”
My mother had tears in her eyes. My own eyes were blurry, and I wiped my arm across them, but I didn’t cry this time. I just stared down at my dinner plate, trying to calm the storm in my head. “I’m stuck,” I said. Saying the words was like lifting heavy rocks from a riverbank, but I managed it. “I think I’ve been stuck since he disappeared.” And then, slowly, the frustration and the anger of the moment began to seep away, as if everything I had said had loosened a plug in a drain. I exhaled and leaned back in my chair. “Nice work, Dad,” I said, conjuring up a smile, although it must have looked a bit sickly. “You’d have made a good psychologist.”