Only Love Can Break Your Heart (28 page)

27

IT WAS MORE THAN
a little strange walking the halls of Randolph High with everyone knowing my brother was in the field house annex, under arrest for murder. There was one upside, at least as far as Mr. LaPage was concerned: after Paul and Leigh’s detainment, the box office saw an unexpected spike in advance ticket sales. Normally the spring play would attract no more than a dozen audience members who were not blood relatives of someone involved in the production. By opening night, however, all three of our scheduled performances had sold well over a hundred tickets—this for a play without a single show tune. The final Saturday night performance was nearly sold out. People must have thought it would be a sort of fun-house thrill, seeing a creepy play about madness a few hundred feet away from the building where the town loon and her evil hippie boyfriend were being detained, perhaps about to confess to what everyone had already decided they were guilty of.

Paul, at least, would never give them the satisfaction. My mother remarked that the task force boys could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they’d just asked her how often Paul or Rayner had ever been made to admit to anything.

Paul had been booked, but Leigh was being held under something called investigative detention. No one was allowed in to see them but Rayner and the lawyer Judge Bowman had hired to represent Leigh.

“Prentiss Bowman’s behind all of this,” Rayner explained.

He had come to meet with my mother in the waiting room at the hospital after sitting through the first round of Paul’s interrogations. The Old Man had just recovered consciousness; my mother was taking great care to hide the reason for Paul’s absence from him.

“He’s brought in a hotshot trial lawyer from DC,” Rayner said. “They want Leigh to pin it all on Paul.”

“And what does Leigh say?” my mother asked.

“Not a chance,” he said.

“She told you this?”

“They won’t let me see her,” he said. “But if she’d given them anything they could use, the DA would have charged him already.”

“So he’s arrested but not charged?”

“That’s right,” Rayner said. “They can hold him for up to seventy-two hours. After that, they’ve either got to charge him, apply for an extension from the attorney general, or let him go. They have to let Leigh go tomorrow.”

According to Rayner, Judge Bowman had reminded Leigh that with a word he could have her recommitted. Her choices were either to detach herself from Paul or to get hauled back to the funny farm in a straitjacket.

My mother sighed and buried her face in her hands.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Askew,” Rayner said. “They’ve got nothing on us.”

“Us?” my mother said.

“Well, they were with me on the night in question,” Rayner said. “I’m the alibi.”

The way he said it—smirking, almost smarmy—did nothing to allay my fear that Paul did in fact have something to hide.

TH
E OLD MAN
was stable enough for us to go home. The next morning, my mother went back to work, and I went back to school. It was Thursday—the night of final dress rehearsal for
Equus
. That week, as we drew closer to opening night, the whole production had been overtaken by a mood that could fairly be called funereal. Only Mr. LaPage remained undaunted. For my own part, Paul’s arrest had conveniently given me something else to worry about.

That day in English class, we were studying Yeats. “The center cannot hold,” said Mrs. Worsham, reciting the famous lines from “The Second Coming.”

“The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” she said. “Surely some revelation is at hand.”

The words felt weighted with personal import. Thoughts spun through my mind like Yeats’s infernal rotating gyre, the tail of which descended down toward Twin Oaks, its facade gray, the eponymous trees in its foreground withered and sick with disease. I couldn’t help imagining Paul as Yeats’s apocalyptic messiah, the “rough beast” sent to unleash the “blood-dimmed tide” onto the Culvers’ plush pile carpet.

FRIDAY MORNING, WITH
opening night looming, Mr. LaPage decided to pull me into the office for a heart-to-heart, right in the middle of class. I leaned against the door while he settled into his desk chair.

“How’s your daddy, honey?” he asked.

“He’ll live, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

“Is he going to be able to go home soon?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I hope so.”

“And your mother?” he asked. “How’s she holding up?”

“OK,” I said.

“She’s a tough one, you know,” he said. “A steel magnolia.”

“I know,” I said.

He stroked his beard and smiled gently.

“We can use Dylan, you know,” he said.

Dylan was the name of my understudy.

“You can walk away,” he said. “We’d all understand.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’ll even tell everyone you came down with the flu,” he said.

“I want to do it,” I said. “The show must go on, right?”

LaPage smiled. He stood and rounded the desk and drew close to me.

“You can use it, you know,” he said. “All the things you can’t control. You won’t think about it once the curtain rises. But it will be inside you. Right here.”

He reached out and gently touched his finger to my chest.

“Find your deepest fear,” he said, “the scariest place in your heart, and draw on it. You can do that.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

Rex sat back on the edge of his desk. He crossed his arms and smiled.

“All life is performance, you know,” he said. “And the performance is life.”

Later I would wonder whether LaPage’s little pep talk was more about saving the play than about consoling the mess of a kid I happened to be at that moment. Regardless, I walked out of the room believing every word.

A chill rain fell that day, but I knew Cinnamon would still be out in the yard past the pavilion, under our tree. I found her there, smoking as usual, gazing down the slope toward the throng of rubberneckers at the edge of the fence nearest to the field house annex.

“The natives are restless,” Cinnamon said.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

“Leigh showed up a while ago,” she said. “She came out with two old men and got into the back of a BMW.”

“Judge Bowman and his lawyer,” I said.

“That’s not all,” Cinnamon replied. “You’re never going to guess who just went in.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Your old girlfriend,” she said. “And her new boyfriend.”

“What are they doing in there?” I asked.

“Shit if I know,” Cinnamon replied.

After school we hung around on the loading dock while I waited for my mother to swing by so that I could sit with the Old Man at the hospital until it was time for me to report back to Randolph for the play. Cinnamon smoked as we looked down the hill toward the field house annex, hoping to see something—some new arrival or departure that might ease the looming dread. I imagined Paul in a small room lit by a single naked lightbulb, smoking impassively while Bobby Carwile and some other more ill-mannered and imposing detective put the screws to him.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. I nodded, but I couldn’t tell her what I was thinking: that soon everything would again be as it had been for all the years before Paul showed up like a bomb dropped out of the sky that snowy February night. Leigh Bowman would go back to being an object of pity, destined to be an old spinster, pedaling around town on her bicycle with its basket full of titles from the Christian bookstore. The Old Man would continue to wither, and my mother along with him. Cinnamon would leave for California. I would go back to being another aimless, anonymous kid collecting classic rock records. And Paul would be in prison, body and soul.

TH
E OLD
MAN
was asleep in his bed when we arrived. I sat with him while my mother went to the nurses’ station to sign another stack of paperwork. A few moments later, to my surprise, Leigh Bowman appeared in the doorway. I stood and motioned to her to take the seat by the bed. The Old Man opened his eyes and tilted his head toward us. When he saw Leigh there, his dry lips formed a weak smile. He shifted his hand on the bed so that the palm faced up. Leigh reached up and held it.

“Are you all right, Leigh?” I said.

She smiled and nodded weakly. Her eyes were dark and heavy with worry and weariness.

“I came as soon as I could,” she said.

“I know,” I replied.

“My father,” she said, “has decided to involve himself.”

“I know,” I repeated.

“I suppose I can’t hate him for thinking the worst of me after everything I’ve put him through,” she said.

Her voice was shaky. I hoped she wasn’t on the verge of another one of her episodes.

“What happened in there, Leigh?” I asked.

“It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “Poor Bobby Carwile. He’d rather confess to the crime himself than say an unkind word to a lady. My father, on the other hand—well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Do you know what he’s saying now? That I’ve
repressed
it all. He wants me to talk to yet another psychiatrist who will help me remember. I know how badly he wants to get rid of Paul, but I never dreamed he’d stoop so low.”

I thought of Leigh alone at the same table where I’d envisioned Paul being questioned by angry policemen in shirtsleeves, smoking cigarettes beneath a harsh white light. This time, however, it wasn’t the police but rather Judge Prentiss Bowman and a gray-haired man in a white doctor’s coat.

Leigh looked up suddenly.

“Do you think we did it, Rocky?” she asked. “I know what everyone else in town thinks. I know what my
father
thinks. What do you think?”

She watched me expectantly—almost imploringly. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t summon a single word.

“Oh, Rocky,” she said.

The Old Man tugged on her hand. When she looked up, she met his mournful gaze. He couldn’t have known what we were talking about or what had upset Leigh so. Without his hearing aids in, he was almost completely deaf. Regardless, the tenderness in his expression appeared to calm her. I wondered whether the love in his eyes could make up for the contempt she must have seen in her father’s. Despite his many flaws and failings, the Old Man was never afraid to love, even when it broke his heart.

“Who would have dreamed one day I’d be interrogated like a common criminal in the Randolph High Field House Annex,” she said. “I never even went inside that building when I was a student.”

Her eyes drifted to the window. I imagined her thinking of herself at sixteen, not quite carefree but beautiful and full of ardor, waiting in the parking lot at Randolph High for Paul’s purple Nova to come rumbling along.

“My father can’t comprehend how I would want to take up with Paul again after what happened,” she said. “I’m sure plenty of other people feel the same way. You understand though, don’t you, Rocky?”

My voice returned to me.

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, you are a little crazy, right?”

She laughed.

“More than a little,” she said.

She smiled sadly. Tears welled in her eyes.

“It all seems so remote now,” she said. “Like the people we were back then never even existed.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

“You once told me you wanted to forget the past,” I said. “That you wanted to file it away and pretend that it never happened.”

“But we don’t get to do that, do we?” she said. “Even if we forget it, it’s still there, like a snake in the grass, ready to strike you if you stumble too close to it.”

Her glance fell back to her lap.

“I thought I’d gotten over people pitying me,” she said.

I moved behind her chair and placed my hands on her shoulders. She turned her head and looked up at me. I lifted a hand to brush a wisp of hair from her face. The Old Man looked on with drowsy eyes. He hadn’t yet asked for Paul. I wondered how long we would be able to put off telling him what had happened.

“I had a surprise visitor today at Daddy’s house,” she said.

“Patricia,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Cinnamon saw her today at school, with her boyfriend,” I said. “Going into the Field House Annex.”

“I didn’t think they’d met.”

“She saw Patricia the day I took her to look at the house,” I said.

“Oh, right,” Leigh said.

“Why are they here?” I asked.

“Patricia has to sign some sort of paperwork for the task force and answer a few questions about her parents and the house. She drove over as soon as she was finished. You might say she was my angel of deliverance.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Well, once she arrived, my father had to leave me alone.”

She laughed uneasily.

“Patricia and Nelson are going to spend the night with Kiki Baumberger. I made the mistake of telling her your play opened tonight. I’m afraid she might come.”

It seemed oddly appropriate that Patricia should be there.

“We had a long talk,” Leigh said. “Her parents’ deaths have really opened her up emotionally, I think. I told her Paul and I had nothing to do with what happened, and she swore she believed me. She was very philosophical about it. She said that when people are afraid, they need a face for their fear.”

“She’s right about that,” I said.

“She asked about you, Rocky,” she said. “We didn’t talk about your little secret. I know she knows that I know about it. I’d never say a word—especially not in front of Nelson. Still, the way she talked about you—it was almost tender. She wanted to know all about what you’ve been doing. About Cinnamon. About the play. She seemed happy that things are going so well for you, in spite of all of
this
.”

Her hand leaped up from her lap and flapped out like a bird with a broken wing before resettling back inside the folds of her cotton dress.

“I have to admit,” Leigh said, her voice falling to a murmur, “I’ve felt very angry with Patricia in the past. I thought the things she did to both of us were deliberately cruel. She kept asking me to forgive her. I told her there was nothing to forgive. But she insisted that she was at fault—that I hadn’t been miscast by mere circumstance. Those were her exact words—‘miscast by mere circumstance.’ ”