Silent Witness (7 page)

Tony touched his shoulder. Sam blinked and then gazed at Tony with dazed incomprehension, like a child aroused from sleep. Tony could not restrain a bit of sadism. ‘Curtain time, Lazarus. Arise, and do the work of the Lord.'

Sam burst out laughing. Tony found this so frightening that he got out and opened the car door for him.

Together, they walked across the dewy grass. In the fresh light of morning, Sam was nearly white; Tony, who had seen this before, knew that Sam was moments from throwing up.

The pastor – a slight, sandy-haired man with glasses – spotted Sam and started toward them with a ministerial smile, which did not show his teeth. ‘Take deep breaths,' Tony murmured.

Sam did so, swallowing. ‘Good morning, Samuel,' the pastor said. ‘Are you ready to lead us?'

Humbly, Sam bowed his head; missing the grin that this concealed, the pastor seemed to take Sam's posture for awe. ‘The Lord will help you,' he told Sam, and introduced himself to Tony. ‘And where is your church home?'

‘Saint Raphael's parish.'

The pastor looked surprised, and then clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good, good. I hope you enjoy our service.'

As the pastor led Sam away, Tony saw that Sam's head was still bowed.

Looking around him, he saw Sue next to her parents, a brisk and amiable couple who both taught at the junior high school. Sitting next to her, Tony said hello to them. Sue was watching Sam. Under her breath, she murmured, ‘Is he okay?'

‘He thinks he is.'

Sue faced the podium again, her back straight, lips half parted. The service began. Both the pastor's prayer and his introduction of Sam were blurs to Tony. He knew only that the Sam Robb who the pastor implied stood before them existed nowhere in life.

When Sam stepped to the podium, Tony saw the sweat on his forehead, felt Sue's tense fingers curling around his. Sam seemed to swallow. ‘Last night,' he said in a shaky voice, ‘I really wasn't ready for this.'

Tony saw Sue's eyes close. Pausing, Sam seemed unsteady. ‘I was waiting to be filled with the spirit of the Lord. Instead I began feeling sick . . .'

‘What is he doing?' Sue whispered.

‘Then I listened to some beautiful music, about the beauty of God's rain falling on God's creations, and found myself saying to my friend Tony Lord, “Tony, you just can't do it alone . . .

‘“Tony,” I said, “you can't find life's joys without a partner. Someone you can feel deep inside . . .”'

Jesus fucking Christ
.

‘“And that can only be”' – here Sam paused, giving Tony a small smile of moral superiority – ‘“God.”'

With a kind of fascination, Tony stared back.

‘God,' Sam intoned, ‘is the way to fulfillment, to thawing the coldness around us, of realizing our deepest desires in the deepest possible way.

‘God is the climax of our lives.'

Tony recognized the hushed intensity – it was, to the life, the manner of Richard Burton's ultimate sermon in
The Sandpiper
. But he was not reading Tony's speech.

‘God alone can touch us where we most need to be touched.'

Tensing, Tony wondered when everyone else would get the joke. But when he glanced around, the congregation was attentive, unsmiling. Sam grew more vibrant.

‘God alone can relieve our suffering.

‘God alone can fill the empty places.'

God alone
, Tony thought,
can make our toes and fingers numb
.

‘God alone,' Sam said softly, ‘can give us what we really need.'

Sam, Tony saw, was even more pale. He gripped the podium tighter and spoke in his own voice. ‘I should finish now, 'cause I don't want to go on too long. But I can't tell you what a comfort that feeling was to me – I hope to Tony too. Maybe even to all of you.' He paused, as if in search of inspiration, and then finished. ‘Because I know what I need to do. What I think we all need to do. In the words of the old hymn, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me find myself in thee.”'

He sat abruptly. The effect was one of extreme preoccupation; Tony guessed that Sam was close to becoming sick.

Moving behind him, a teen choir began singing.

Sue bit her lip, and then Tony saw the tears in her eyes. ‘You've got to get him out of here, Tony. Before something happens.'

‘I know.'

The choir finished; mercifully, the pastor said a prayer and invited everyone inside for coffee and orange juice. As they stood, Sue's father turned and remarked to Tony affably, ‘That was pretty good. Actually, Sam surprised me some.'

‘Me too.'

Quickly, he said goodbye to Sue and went to Sam.

Sam stood with his head bent over, listening to a husband and wife, who, in Tony's mind, were most notable for refusing to let their daughter date Catholics. ‘Sam,' the husband said seriously, ‘I don't want to put pressure on you. But you may have a calling here . . .'

‘Excuse me,' Tony cut in, and turned to Sam. ‘You promised to go to Mass with me, remember? I don't want us to be late.'

The man's hawk-faced wife shot Tony a sharp look of irritation. Ignoring her, Tony grasped Sam by the elbow and hustled him across the lawn with such hurry that no one interrupted them.

They got in the car. Swiftly, Tony cranked down the windows and drove away. Sam leaned forward, breathing hard.

‘Never again,' Tony said. ‘Never again.'

Sam did not answer. Tony drove quickly down Erie Road, past Alison's sprawling house, and veered abruptly into the empty parking lot in the middle of Taylor Park. The park was empty; the only sounds were birds chirping in the trees above them.

Hastily, Sam jerked open the car door and leaned over the asphalt. The sound of retching started before Tony jumped out the driver's side.

Propped up by his hands on the asphalt, Sam hung halfway out of the car, his white-blond head almost touching the pool of vomit. Though he still retched, nothing more came out. When at last he stopped, shivers ran through his body.

‘Sam?'

Slowly, Sam turned over, head resting on the vomit-covered asphalt, and began laughing until the tears ran down his face.

‘I fooled them,' he said when he could speak again, and then grinned up at Tony, pale and wasted, eyes dancing. ‘I absolutely fucking fooled them.'

Tony and Alison pulled into the darkened lot of Taylor Park. Before he could turn off the motor, she said quietly, ‘I think we should be where no one can see us.'

Tony felt the constriction in his chest. Without answering, he drove across the grass until his headlights caught a grove of oaks clustered near the cliff above the lake. Slowing, he edged the car forward until it was hidden among tree trunks and low-hanging branches. When he switched off the headlights, it was pitch black.

Alison took his hand. ‘Do you want to know,' she asked, ‘what I told my parents?'

Though he could barely see her, Tony knew that he did not need to answer. Solitude, and emotion, seemed to soften her voice still more. ‘I told them that I loved you. And that they should get used to it. Because if that ever changed, it would be about something between you and me, not me and them.'

The certainty in her tone surprised him. ‘What did they say?'

‘A lot that you'd expect. Mostly that I'm too young to make decisions, for all of the reasons I'm still too young to understand. My mother cried.'

‘Over what? It's not like we're getting engaged.'

Alison was quiet. ‘I think she's afraid,' she said at last. ‘Not just of you and me, but that I'm starting on my own life, and that there are some decisions I'm going to make without her. Some without her even knowing.' Her fingers tightened around his. ‘I know that's how this feels to me.'

There was something new in her voice – at once wistful, fearful, and determined. Just as the decision she seemed to have made was not about her parents, Tony sensed it was also less about him than about Alison herself, resolving to share a moment of her life with him. It made him hold her close.

She leaned back, touching his face, and then kissed him without hesitance.

He did not quite know what to do. To kiss her passionately, as if trying to sweep away her senses, seemed foolish. What was happening felt too rational for Tony's comfort; he was not in charge, a seducer, but a partner in a rite of Alison's choosing. He felt both flattered and diminished.

As if sensing this, she stopped, looking into his eyes. ‘I had to be ready, Tony. It didn't matter what you did, or how much I might have wanted you. Can you understand that?'

Silent, Tony nodded. Alison leaned her forehead against his. He could feel her soft breath against his face: she was waiting for him, he realized. She knew what she wanted to do, but not how. This she would trust to Tony.

‘I've got something in the glove compartment.'

She shook her head. ‘It's okay, Tony. I just had my period.'

There was a chill in the car. Turning on the heater, he saw that the clock read 10:55. Alison must be home in little more than an hour.

Tony took off his letter jacket and, reaching over the front seat, spread it to cover the back upholstery. Shrugging out of her coat, Alison said with a touch of humor, ‘I hope it doesn't itch.'

They were in this together, Tony suddenly knew. He felt relief course through him.

Getting out of the car, Tony went to the passenger door and opened it for her.

She slid from the seat, knees and legs together, graceful even in her deep preoccupation. Something about this moved Tony so much that he pulled her to him and, for the first time that night, kissed her with intensity. He felt her tremor as she joined him.

‘God . . . ,' Tony murmured.

Hastily, he opened the back door and clambered inside after her. Kneeling on the back seat, Alison said, ‘It's
cold
out there. . . .'

Tony was suddenly aware that his hands were chill and numb, that their breath, the warmth they made, had begun to condense on the windows. Turning, he wrote on the window with the tip of one cold finger, ‘I love you.'

Alison smiled. Beneath it, she wrote, ‘Me too,' and added an exclamation mark. But her voice when she spoke was quiet.

‘This won't be hard for me, Tony. Not with you.'

Tony did not know whether she said this to encourage him or herself. Unbidden, Tony remembered his first time – remembered Mary Jane Kulas lying beneath him in this same back seat, her plump thighs open beneath him, a look of nothingness on her face. The first time had hurt her, and, although this went unsaid, Mary Jane had resented him for it. But not as much as she had when – after several more months had brought relief from pain but no real joy to Mary Jane, brief release and lingering guilt to Tony – he had broken up with her and so taken on the weight of still more guilt, which he now knew to have been unavoidable. Because he now knew that her
cri de coeur
– ‘You're dropping me for giving you what you wanted' – was the opposite of the truth: that only guilt had kept him from acting earlier on the realization that he could not really talk with her and that his own desire had concealed this from him just long enough to serve its selfish purposes. So that later he could not defend himself when Mary Jane, Catholic like Tony, had reacted to his dating Alison by calling him a social climber who had taken from her what was precious for mere sport. Nor was it much consolation that Mary Jane understood him so little that she did not know that Tony was unrelieved by the confessional and filled with self-contempt.

That had been a sin, Tony thought now. He did not wish
this
to be.

‘Undress me,' Alison asked softly.

Tony hesitated, and then said with equal quiet, ‘I love you.' Said this half for her, half to reassure himself. He felt Alison sigh as he cupped her breast.

Distracted by his own past sins, Tony helped with her sweater, then the rest of it, until she was naked with him, gently shivering with her own desire. He closed his eyes in something strangely like prayer.

His savior was the touch of her skin.

Feeling the responsive stirring of his own flesh, Tony felt protective and aroused at once – for who was there to protect her from, save him? He kissed her neck, the firm tips of her breasts. The soft sounds she made were to encourage him.

Suddenly the car was a cocoon of warmth, shielding Tony from his other, guilty self. They had come here as partners: he must help make this a moment for them both to remember, perhaps for as long as they were alive. Her body beneath his was warm.

When he at last touched her there, she was as ready as she knew how to be.

He stopped, resting on his elbows as he looked at her in doubt and in desire, afraid of hurting her. He saw her eyes smile back at him.

‘I want you,' she whispered. As he raised his body, she opened her legs for him. He felt a current run between the two of them.

The slightest cry, and then Tony was inside her.

He hesitated. Alison cradled his face to her shoulder, murmuring, ‘I love you, Tony. You feel so good to me.'

They were together in this.

Alison began to move with him. She was everywhere now: in the clean smell of her skin; the thick softness of her hair; the warmth of her hips and thighs and stomach. As they moved with one another, Tony forgot that Alison Taylor had passed beyond the near occasion of sin, to sin itself.

Time stopped.

Tony felt the blood course through him, become a seizure that he could not control except to stifle his own cries. They were together no longer; alone in his shame and ecstasy, Tony shuddered and was still.