Tell (6 page)

“I saw what Jack was talking about,” I said. “I figured out what Phil's tell was. After he looked at his cards, just before he bet, when Jack was looking at him,
studying
him”—I wanted him to get that part—“Phil's face changed. One minute he was right in there, watching everything. Then, just like that, he licked his lips and his eyes went kind of blank, like he was trying hard not to show what he was really
feeling, like he didn't want everyone to know he had a great hand for a change.”

“David, we need to get back on topic here.”

“Do you remember what my mother told you about my brother Jamie?” I said.

“David—”

“Do you?”

“She said he drowned.”

“We were at this cottage that Phil had borrowed from a friend of his,” I said. “We were supposed to spend two weeks there. My mom was nervous about it. She never learned to swim. She didn't like the water. Jamie didn't know how to swim either. Mom tried to make him go to swimming lessons, but he horsed around so much all the time that they kicked him out. She made him wear a life jacket just to go on the beach, and she made sure that either she or Phil was watching him all the time. Phil, he could swim. He always boasted how he was on the swim team in high school. He has a bunch of medals and ribbons in a display case on the wall of
his study.” They were probably the only things he had ever won. He was probably one of those guys whose best years were in high school.

“And you?” Detective Antonelli said.

“I took swimming lessons in school. My swimming instructor said I was a better swimmer than any ten-year-old he had ever seen.”

Detective Antonelli said, “This is going somewhere, right, David?”

I said it was. I told him how broken up my mother had been when Jamie drowned.

“If he was wearing a life jacket, how did he drown?” Detective Antonelli said.

“That's the thing,” I said. “Jamie never listened. Or if he did, he listened to what you told him to do and then he did the opposite. He was going out in the boat with Phil. The boat belonged to the same guy who let Phil have the cottage. It had a big outboard motor on it. They were out there together—Phil and Jamie. It was my mother's idea. You know, let them have a little quality time together and maybe
Phil would warm up to Jamie, and Jamie would listen to Phil for a change. I was on the shore. I could see them. They weren't out all that far. Phil had paddled out to where the water was deep and he wanted to start the engine. I could see that Jamie didn't have his life jacket on.”

“David, I'm sorry about your brother,” Detective Antonelli said. “But unless this has something to do—”

“I think my mother liked that Phil carried Jamie's picture around with him all the time,” I said. “I think that made her believe that Phil really loved Jamie. It sure made everyone else believe it. People were always telling Phil what a good guy he was, but how maybe he made it hard on himself, having that picture with him all the time. He got a lot of sympathy from it. One time he told me he got a lot of free drinks too, you know, from people who would see the picture on his key chain and say, Is that your son? And then he'd tell them the whole story.” Well, he didn't tell the
whole
story. He told his version of
it. “And people would feel sorry for him and buy him a beer.”

Someone knocked on the door to the interview room. It was a cop. He said, “The mother wants to be in here with her son. She's making a big fuss about it. She says she's going to call a lawyer.”

Detective Antonelli sighed and looked at me.

“She can come in if she wants,” I said. “But first I want to tell you about my brother Jamie.”

“After that you'll tell about your stepfather?”

I said I would. Then I told him about Jamie. I told him a few other things too. After he listened, he sent another cop to check on some of what I said. When the other cop finally came back into the room, he said something to Detective Antonelli in a quiet voice that I couldn't hear. Detective Antonelli said, “Show Mrs. Benson in.”

When my mother came back into the room, her eyes were pink and swollen. She had been crying. But her lipstick and mascara looked just fine, so I figured she must have done a repair job in the bathroom. The little gold-framed picture of Jamie still sat in the middle of the table. My mother seemed startled to see it there. Maybe she thought it should have been taken away as evidence.

“Please sit down, M rs. Benson,” Detective Antonelli said.

She sat down next to me, but didn't look at me. She didn't ask me how I was either.

Detective Antonelli said, “Mrs. Benson, do you think that what happened to your husband had anything at all to do with your son's death?”

My mother looked even more startled.

“I don't see how,” she said. “Jamie's death was an accident.” Her hand went to her hair, and she started to fiddle with the ends of it.

Detective Antonelli looked at her for a few moments. Then he glanced at me. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. But cops are supposed to be good at that. They're supposed to be good at not revealing things. I wondered if they were also good poker players.

“Do you think that you'd like to contact David's father?” he said. “His real father, I mean?”

“David's real father is dead,” my mother said. She continued to fiddle with her hair.
“He died in a car accident when David was barely two years old.”

“What about Jamie's father?” Detective Antonelli said.

My mother glanced at me. She was twirling hair around one of her fingers now. I wondered if she even knew she was doing it.

“I don't understand,” she said.

“David has something to say,” Detective Antonelli said.

My mother turned her head slowly to look at me. Her eyes were wide and scared-looking. “So it's true,” she said. “You did have something to do with it. What did you do, David? Why did you do it? You have to tell.”

So I did.

I didn't look at Detective Antonelli when I told. I looked at my mother. And I didn't talk about Phil, not directly anyway. I talked about Jamie. I told her about the day he drowned.

“Phil was irritated with him, remember?” I said.

“Why are you talking about this?” my mother said. “I don't want to think about that. It was a horrible accident.”

“Phil was pissed off and you said maybe, if he took Jamie out in the boat, it would be good for both of them. You didn't want me to go. You said it was just Jamie and Phil. And I got mad. Remember?”

My mother looked at Detective Antonelli.

“I remember,” she said. “But—”

“Phil paddled the boat out to where the water was deep and then he tried to start it. Jamie didn't have his life jacket on. Phil told you that later. Remember?”

My mother's face was pale. She nodded.

“You were sleeping on the dock, remember? And Jamie was acting crazy in the boat. Phil yelled at him. He told him if he wasn't careful, he was going to fall in the water. Remember?”

“I was asleep, David. I didn't hear that.” She looked at me closely. “And you weren't even there. You were up in the cottage. You didn't come down until after.”

What she meant was I didn't come down until she screamed. But she was wrong.

“When I got mad because you wouldn't let me go in the boat with Phil and Jamie, you told me to go up to the cottage. You said to have a time-out in my room. But I didn't. Instead I snuck back down and hid under the canoe on the beach. Remember that canoe, Mom? It was upside down on the sand?”

Her face turned even paler.

“I saw them. Phil warned Jamie. Jamie was standing up in the boat without his life jacket on. Phil started the boat and it lurched. Jamie fell overboard. He was splashing around. He yelled. You remember him yelling, don't you?”

I knew she did because Jamie's yell had woken her up. She'd sat up and put her hands over her eyes to block the sun. As soon as she saw that Jamie was in the water, she ran to the end of the dock and started screaming.

“Phil was just sitting there, remember? He was sitting in the boat like he was
frozen and you screamed at him to help Jamie. But he didn't move. Remember?”

“I can't swim,” my mother said quietly to Detective Antonelli. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“And I ran into the water,” I said. “Remember? I tried to swim to Jamie, but by the time I got there, he wasn't there anymore.” By the time I got to him, he was underwater. “I dove to get him. I heard you screaming again.”

“I thought you were going to drown too,” she said.

“And then Phil jumped into the water. He pulled me up and then he went down for Jamie. Remember? And he was down there a long time.” Maybe he was down there as long as he was because it took that long to find Jamie. Or maybe he was down there so long because he just wanted to make it look like he was trying. “And by the time he brought Jamie up—”

“Stop!” my mother said. “Stop. Why are you talking about this? What does this have to do with what happened to Phil?”

“Jamie wasn't breathing,” I said. “Phil dragged him to the shore and got out of the water. He was just standing there with Jamie in his arms. Do you remember what he said, Mom?”

I
did. I remembered perfectly. I'd seen it in my dreams a thousand times or more. “He said that he was so stunned by what happened that he just froze out there in the boat. That's why he didn't jump in the water right away. He said he just froze. Remember?”
I
remembered. He licked his lips a couple of times and his face changed and he said,
I froze
. “And I made him put Jamie down and I tried to do mouth-to-mouth on him.” I had learned a little of that from my swimming lessons. “Phil said it was too late. And you started to cry. Phil finally called 911. And when they came, there was nothing they could do because Jamie had drowned.”

“It was an accident,” my mother said. She kept touching her hair. I'd seen that before too. She did it when she talked about my real father. She did it when she
talked about Jamie. And she did it that day on the dock when she told me, “It was an accident, David. It was a terrible accident. We have to be strong. It was terrible what happened to Jamie, but we have to think about Phil too. About how he must feel.” She said, “No matter what anyone might say or do, nothing can bring Jamie back to us.” She said, “We can't blame Phil for what happened. People react in funny ways.” She said, “David, I don't know what we would do without Phil.”

“It was an accident that Jamie fell into the water,” I said to her. “But it wasn't an accident he drowned, was it, Mom?”

My mother was crying. Crying and fiddling with her hair. “Why are you saying this?” she said. “Why are you talking about this? It was an accident.”

“Phil could have saved him,” I said. “Phil was right there. He was a good swimmer. He could have saved Jamie, but instead he did nothing. And then he lied about it. And you knew he was lying.”

“No,” my mother said. “That's not true.”

“Yes, it is, Mom. I know it is.” I knew because I knew her tell. Phil licked his lips and got a blank look in his eyes. My mother fiddled with her hair. “I also know that you lied about my real father. I know he isn't dead.” Jack had told I. “And I know that Jamie and I don't have the same father.” Jack had told me that too. Jack was a good guy. He thought it was wrong for Phil to cheat me and wrong for my mother to lie to me. He said he knew where my father was and that, if I wanted, he could tell me how to contact him. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

My mother stared at me. Detective Antonelli looked at her. He had watched her play with her hair when she talked about Jamie, just like she had when she'd talked about my father. And he knew that my mother had lied about my father because he had checked with Jack before he let her back into the room.

A police officer escorted my mother out of the room. After she was gone, Detective Antonelli said, “Is that why you killed your stepfather, David? Because he could have saved Jamie, but he didn't?”

“I didn't kill him,” I said. “I swear I didn't.”

Detective Antonelli waited. So finally I told him the truth.

The truth was that it was a coincidence that I happened to see Phil at the bank
machine that night. I had gone for a walk, just like I said. I had stopped and bought an ice-cream bar, and I was just about to head home when I saw Phil. I ducked back out of sight because I didn't want him to see me. I had a curfew, and if he caught me out after it, he'd tell my mother and she'd be all over me.

“I ducked into the doorway of a store that was closed,” I said. “I was in the shadows, you know, so I figured he couldn't see me. Then I watched so I could see when he was gone and maybe which direction he was going in.” I'd been hoping he wouldn't jump in his car and drive straight home and find out I wasn't there.

“Then I saw this guy come up to him and say something to him. Phil said something back. I saw him shake his head. The guy said something else. Phil shoved him away and swore at him. He turned away from the guy. Then I saw the guy take out a gun. He pointed it at Phil. I knew he was going to shoot. I thought about yelling something, but I was afraid the guy might shoot at me
instead. The guy said something to Phil. Phil turned. The guy shot him.”

I'd been stunned. I could see it was going to happen, and at the same time I couldn't believe it actually would.

“Then the guy took his wallet and ran away.”

“Did you see him before he ran?” Detective Antonelli said.

I nodded.

“Could you identify him, David?”

I said I probably could. I said I could probably describe him pretty well too. And that was the truth. His face was burned into my brain.