Little Children (31 page)

“Don’t get so excited,” she told him. “It’s not good for your heart.”

By the time they left, shortly after noon, he had decided that maybe the little trip wasn’t such a bad idea. One way or another, he was going to have to get through the next few days, and at least this way he’d be able to spend a couple of them without his mother-in-law breathing down his neck. Not to mention the fact that he was finding it extremely difficult that morning to look Aaron in the eye. It was almost a relief to leave him standing on the porch in his bathing suit and jester’s cap, waving good-bye along with his grandmother.

“What a cutie,” Kathy said, looking wistfully over her shoulder as they pulled away. “I kinda wish he was coming with us.”

They had been driving for about an hour in companionable silence—they’d always traveled well together, just as long as Kathy wasn’t driving—when she suddenly reached forward and turned down the stereo. He could feel her eyes on him, the tension gathering.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Do you love her?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

She laughed, sounding a little more amused than he might have expected.

“Let me know when you decide, okay?”

“It’s not funny,” he muttered.

“Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot.”

They hiked and swam after checking in, then ate a sunset dinner on a terrace overlooking the lake. It was all so pleasant—so much like their idea of a good day—that Todd had to keep reminding himself that he was leaving her, that their marriage was over. He only drank one glass of wine at dinner and refused a bite of her chocolate mousse cake, as if he no longer had a right to it. Before bed, she asked him if he’d like her to try on some new lingerie she’d bought for the occasion, but he said no, he’d prefer it if she didn’t.

“Are you sure? It seems like a waste to drive all the way out here and not even make love.”

“I’m kinda tired,” he explained.

“Fine,” she said, pretending not to care. “Suit yourself.”

He caved on Saturday morning, when she woke him with a long sloppy kiss and guided his hand between her legs. Before he even had a chance to remember why it wasn’t such a good idea, he was hard, and she was straddling his prone body, smiling down at him with an expression that mingled triumph and apology.

“This isn’t so bad, is it?” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” he conceded.

Actually, it was way better than okay, a greatest hits medley of their entire relationship, Kathy reprising every mind-blowing bedroom move she’d ever performed for him, vividly illustrating the cornucopia of pleasures he was on the verge of giving up. It was an amazing performance, marred only by the slightest trace of smugness on her face, a cool erotic confidence that he couldn’t help resenting on behalf of Sarah, whose undeniable enthusiasm for sex was often accompanied by a strange, almost adolescent clumsiness, as if she were acting on the basis of vague schoolyard rumors and half-remembered passages from dirty books, rather than years of hard-won adult experience.

A heavy silence descended upon the room when they were finished, Todd staring up at the ceiling with a profound sense of melancholy, trying to process the realization that this was it for them, that he and Kathy would probably never make love again. As if reading his mind, she rolled over and punched him in the arm as hard as she could.

“You shithead,” she said.

“What?” he replied, trying to look casual as he massaged his tricep.

“You think I don’t want a summer boyfriend? You think I don’t want to spend my days at the pool, holding hands with some cute guy I just met yesterday? How come you get to do that, but I have to spend my time in a smelly VA Hospital, listening to old men explain how they lost their legs?”

“I thought you liked your job.”

“It doesn’t matter if I like it or not, does it? I’m gonna have to do it regardless, unless somebody else in this family has a better idea.”

Todd had nothing to say in response. He didn’t have a better idea. All he had was a debt to Kathy he’d never be able to repay. Especially now, when he was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.

“She’s not a summer girlfriend,” he muttered, more to himself than to his wife.

Kathy laughed, as if she were enjoying this in spite of herself.

“And let me tell you something else,” she said. “Summer’s just about over, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

There was a sour taste in Larry’s mouth as he walked up to the front door of 44 Blueberry Court. The thought of what he was about to do sickened him. If he could have done otherwise and still figured out a way to live with himself, he would have been a very happy man.

But there was no choice for him. He had lived through something like this once before with the Antoine Harris shooting, and he had learned his lesson. Hard as it was for even his close friends to believe, Larry never really regretted pulling the trigger in the food court that awful afternoon. He had made a tragic mistake, of course, but he would go to his grave knowing it had been an honest one. In his own mind, he’d seen a man with a gun, not a kid with a toy, and he’d reacted accordingly, the way any cop would. No matter how many times he’d turned it over in his thoughts, he could never see his way out of firing that fatal shot, not unless he’d been an entirely different person.

But he could have apologized. He could have ignored his lawyer’s advice and presented himself to the family, told Rolonda Harris how heartsick and sorry he was for her unimaginable loss and for his own part in causing it. Maybe she wouldn’t have believed him. Maybe she would have slammed the door shut, or called him an evil racist, or even spat in his face, but so what? At least he would have tried, and trying would have been better than keeping silent, acting like the boy’s death meant nothing to him, like all he cared about was saving his own skin.

Still, apologizing to Rolonda Harris was one thing, and apologizing to Ronnie McGorvey another. Rolonda was an innocent woman whose worst nightmare had come true. Ronnie was Ronnie, a repulsive human being who dragged his mother into a mess she had nothing to do with. If it hadn’t been for him, Larry would have had no reason to be standing on the poor woman’s front lawn, shouting into a bullhorn at two in the morning.

You killed your mother,
Larry could have argued.
You did it, not me.

But he wasn’t going to go there, wasn’t going to let himself sink into that futile swamp of blame-shifting and self-justification. Ronnie would have to live with his own conscience, if he even had one, and Larry would have to do what he could to accept responsibility for his own undeniable role in May McGorvey’s death.

He rang the bell, steeling himself for the moment when Ronnie appeared in front of him. He wasn’t going to shake hands or make small talk. All he was going to do was look the pervert in the eyes and say,
I’m sorry for your loss
. Just that, not another word. And then he was going to turn around and drive home.

He rang a second time, but still no one answered, even though all the downstairs lights were on. If this had been any other house, any other errand, he would have given up right then. But it had cost him too much to get this far; he couldn’t bear the thought of having to do it all again tomorrow. He tried the knob, pushed the door open just enough to stick his head inside.

“Ronnie? It’s Larry Moon. I’m not here to hurt you.”

Maybe he was sleeping. Larry remembered how bone-tired he’d felt after his own father’s death. He’d collapsed right after the funeral, slept for almost twenty hours.

“Yo, Ronnie?”

He stepped cautiously into the hallway and peeked into the living room. The TV was going, the sound turned way down. Someone had left a dirty plate on the coffee table, a half-eaten chicken leg and some peas.

“Ronnie?” he called again, this time from the base of the stairs.

He thought about checking the second-floor bedrooms, but decided against it. A bad feeling had suddenly come over him, the kind of feeling a cop learns to ignore at his own risk. If there was something ugly to find in this house, Larry didn’t want to be the one to find it.

He circled through the kitchen on his way out. It was cleaner than he’d expected, a lot like his own mother’s before she’d gotten it renovated. An old gas stove, pictures of the grandkids on the fridge. Everything in order except for an open liter bottle of 7-Up on the table, alongside an ashtray full of cigarettes that had been smoked down to the filter.

And a note under the ashtray, a creased and crumpled piece of paper with frayed edges on one side. Two different people had written on it, almost like they were having a conversation. The first message was a plea, written in faint blue ink by someone with a shaky hand.

Please please be a good boy.

The response was in black, in jagged block letters that could have been scrawled by a child.

I’M SORRY, MOMMY, I DON’T THINK I CAN.

Sarah pushed Lucy on the annoyingly creaky swing, forcing herself not to check her watch again. She already knew it was close to nine-thirty, how close she didn’t want to know.

Please,
she thought, glancing over her shoulder to see if he might be approaching from the athletic field instead of the parking area.
Would you just get here already?

It had been a romantic flourish, this plan to meet at the playground, to revisit the scene of their first kiss, that impulsive transgression that had changed everything for both of them. Right now, though, the playground felt anything but romantic. Never having been here at night, Sarah hadn’t realized how creepy and isolated it would be, backed up against the school building and overhung by shade trees, separated from nearby streets by a parking lot on one side and a vast grassy field on the other. It wasn’t pitch-black out—there were a couple of floodlights shining on the parking lot—but the weak grayish glow barely made it to the swing set.

“I sleepy,” Lucy murmured. “We go home?”

“In a minute,” said Sarah. “As soon as Todd gets here.”

He’s coming,
she insisted to herself.
He just got held up.
Maybe Kathy had to work late. Maybe she and her mother went out shopping or something.

Or maybe Todd had just chickened out.

She knew he was worried about money, about the financial responsibilities he assumed would fall on his shoulders if he and Sarah decided to make a go of it. If he had been here, though, she would have told him not to worry. She had come up with the perfect solution to their problem.

“I’m going to be a lawyer,” she told her daughter. “What do you think of that?”

Lucy didn’t answer, but Sarah kept talking anyway.

“I could go to law school. I used to think it would be too boring and too hard for me, but now I don’t feel that way anymore. All you really need is an organized mind, and I think I have an organized mind, don’t you, sweetie?”

The decision had crept up on her over the weekend, while she was sitting in bed, plowing through
A Civil Action
. She’d been reading a lot of books about the law and legal education over the past couple of weeks—
One L, The Paper Chase, The Brethren
—thinking they might help her muster some good arguments to convince Todd to take the bar exam one last time, to not let his education go to waste, the way she’d done with her master’s in English. And then it suddenly occurred to her:
Why not me? Why can’t I be the lawyer in the family?
Todd could stay home, ferry the kids back and forth to school and music lessons and soccer practice, take care of the cooking and the housework if that was what he preferred.
I’ll get a job with a small public interest firm, do environmental or sexual harassment law, take on the big corporations on behalf of the little people
. She cultivated an appealing vision of herself standing in front of the jury box in a tailored blue suit, all those heads nodding as she made her elegant closing argument, asking her fellow citizens not to let big money trample on simple fairness, on America’s noble promise of justice for all.