It was nothing, just a moment cookie-cuttered out of his day, but it was enough to see the look of hurt and incomprehension on her face and to brush it off too. How long had she known Adam? A couple of months. What was a couple of months? Nothing. A memory, a whisper, pages flapping in the breeze. He settled in at the table in back and picked up the discarded paper. When he looked up again, she was gone.
He was the one who’d had to identify Adam’s body, never any question that it was up to him and him alone because he wasn’t going to expose Carolee to that. It was there in a drawer at the morgue—he was there, Adam—looking as if he was asleep. There wasn’t a mark on his face but for a thin welt that might have been a rope burn, and what Sten was feeling in that moment was hard to contain. He’d seen corpses before, laid out on the ground, their lifeless faces turned to the sky, awaiting body bags and a chopper and then a flight back to the States, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. He didn’t break down, but it was close. Standing there alone in that room with its unnatural cold and the smell of chlorine bleach so harsh and pervasive it was like a public urinal, he fought to contain himself, because there was another odor beneath it and it wasn’t of the flesh or of its fluids, but of fear. Fear and regret. And what did that smell like? Like the body’s essence.
What he was remembering was Adam’s first day at the high school, freshman year, the teachers just back from summer vacation, everybody trying to settle in, the students decked out in their new skirts and jeans and oversized T-shirts, electric with excitement. First day. The whole year to look forward to, the ritual starting over again in a stew of hormones, timeless and immemorial. Math, history, the ballgame, senior prom, elections, lunch, gym class. There were never any fights the first day, never any discipline problems—everything was too new and everybody on their best behavior. Except for Adam. Within the first hour he was in the office, hauled in by Joe Buteo, the assistant principal, the enforcer. Adam had been in a fight. The other kid—a stranger to him as far as anybody knew—hadn’t done anything to provoke him. They were in the hallway between classes and Adam had seen something he didn’t like, something he couldn’t tolerate, some vision, some hallucination, and it was the other kid’s misfortune to have been part of it. It had taken two teachers to restrain Adam. The other kid—his victim, a junior twice his size who’d never caused anybody any trouble—had lost a tooth in front and his shirt was like a bloody flag.
Sten didn’t say anything, not then—this was the assistant principal’s job and he certainly didn’t want to give any impression of favoritism when it came to his own son—but when he got home you can be sure he laid into him. First thing. He came through the front door and stalked down the hall to his son’s room and he didn’t pause to knock either.
Adam was wearing a look that was to become habitual with him, his eyes hooded, his mouth drawn tight. He was in his dreadlock phase then, his hair matted and looped and hanging like brush in his face. He had a magazine in his lap. He didn’t even bother to look up.
Sten had never been violent with his son—violence didn’t work because it just provoked resentment and resentment led to more violence, a whole downward spiral of it—but he was on the verge of it that night. The principal’s son. First day of school. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “You don’t just go and attack people—what did he do, anyway? I’d like to hear that. I really would.”
“That kid?” Adam said, and he hadn’t moved. “He’s an alien.”
Nobody shouted out to him from that tree. Nobody said, “Throw down your weapon,” or read him his rights. Shoot to kill, that was the order Rob gave because Rob was left with no other choice. Adam was armed and dangerous. He had his finger on the trigger. He’d come after them, stalked and fired on them—and worst of all, the unforgivable sin, he’d made them look bad. They’d fired twelve rounds, the two officers in the tree and their team member stretched out flat in the dirt with his rifle trained on the trail that wound down along the streambed there. Seven rounds went home, all in the torso, crack shots, these SWAT team studs, with hundreds of hours on the shooting range and a squeeze as gentle as held breath: Adam must have been dead before he hit the ground. He hadn’t suffered. Hadn’t even known what was coming. At least there was that.
But Sara was gone, pulling out of the lot now in her battered blue car, the fuzzy dog sticking its snout out the window, and they called his number and he went to the counter to pick up his order, everything too loud and too bright, people everywhere. His first thought was to go back to the table, but then the cell started buzzing in his pocket—Carolee—and he decided to detour out the door and go get her and take her to the nice place. He didn’t want the burger anymore. He wasn’t even hungry, not really.
“Hello?” he said, pinning the phone to his ear so he could hear over the noise as he pushed through the door and out into the lot.
His wife’s voice, small and satisfied: “I’m ready.”
“Where are you?”
“On Main? That place with the redwood carvings out front?”