The Tell (11 page)

In the baking parking lot, Owen struggled to fit the chairs Wilton had bought at the last minute into the back of the car. Wilton was already sitting in the car—it wouldn't occur to him to help. He wasn't much for physical labor. Once a week, he stood on his porch and watched like a king as the yard crew attended his already perfect grass. Owen gave the chairs an irritated push and slammed the door. Hadn't he just told Wilton something he was never going to tell anyone? He felt played by Wilton for the second time that morning.

Traffic blocked the road out of the lot and heat rose from the blacktop in infernal waves. Wilton fiddled with the air conditioning that hadn't worked for years. Owen turned north instead of home; he knew Wilton wouldn't notice the city's modest skyline receding. He hoped the wind off the water in Lincoln Woods might cool him in more ways than one. He wasn't happy that Mira had told Wilton his story, as if his private anguish were just another instance of something she felt she owed him, a way to pay him back. In a few miles, Owen pulled into the park and took its winding, shaded loop around the pond. Wilton smiled and looked out the window as though being driven around without knowing where he was or where he was going was fine and usual. Deep in the piney woods, people scrambled over enormous boulders. On a patch of land farther on, canopied by trees and carved out like a campsite, a kid's birthday party was underway and balloons bobbed in the branches. A bottle of orange soda glowed fluorescently on a bench.

“You and I have something in common,” Wilton said, after not having spoken since they'd gotten in the car.

“What's that?”

“This feeling of having made a terrible mistake is always with us. Would you like to know why I don't drive?” Wilton spoke to the trees.

“Tell me.”

Wilton seemed not to notice Owen's tone. “Anya and I were in a car accident years ago, when she was a little girl, just five. I was driving and I nearly killed her. I never drove after that. I couldn't bear to. I was too afraid.”

Owen pulled to the side of the road and they got out of the car. The breeze, scented with sunscreen, carried shrieks from the swimming beach across the water and whipped up tiny whitecaps. In front of them, old women had set up chairs at the water's edge, where they cooled their feet.

“I'd taken Anya to a party one night, a terrible, self-pitying party full of people who all wished they were better than they were in every way: younger, sexier, more famous, richer. The air was full of the poisonous spores of discontent. It got into my lungs. I could barely breathe.”

Like many of Wilton's stories, this one had a rehearsed feeling to it, the words too loaded and staged. The women had stopped talking and listened.

“Anya was in the hosts' bedroom, asleep in her party dress,” he went on, pulling Owen away from the eavesdroppers. “When the party was over, I put her in the front seat of the car, and about twenty minutes later, I drove into a wall.”

“What? Were you drunk?”

“Who knows, but I believed I was thinking very clearly. Drunk wasn't the problem.” Wilton took off his shirt and splashed his skin. With his sunken belly, long arms and face tilted up, he looked ready to receive some kind of visitation. “Anguish was, depression was. I was a mess. The truth is,” he said, “I drove into the wall because I was trying to kill myself. “

Owen's lungs squeezed. “But you weren't alone.”

“I wasn't. I wanted to take Anya with me. I wanted a big tragedy, a big story; I wanted the world to know. But the instant before the car hit the wall, I knew what I'd done, and I told myself that if she lived, if I lived, I couldn't ever see her again. That would be my punishment.” Two joggers passed behind them. “Almost twenty years of it so far.”

“But it wasn't an accident, then. It wasn't a mistake,” Owen said, furiously. “You tried to kill your own daughter. Jesus Christ.”

“You're shocked.”

“Shouldn't I be? It's fucking shocking.” He felt little for Wilton's regret, his description of despair; another man's pain was a pale, abstract thing, an impression made of words. The child, though, asleep in the front seat, was something real. “Your own daughter. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Yes, I know, my own daughter.” At the last moment, Wilton explained, he'd lost his nerve and only swiped the wall, busting a headlight. “I don't deserve to be alive, but fortunately, I was a failure at killing myself, too.”

“Stop pitying yourself.” Everything was drama with the man, everything a need to be looked at and listened to. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

‘I could say the same to you,” Wilton said sharply, surprising Owen. “You knew what you were doing when the gun was pointed at you, so no more self-pity. Time to move on, Owen. Time to stop using your story as an excuse.”

After a few silent minutes, Wilton explained that he had taken himself out of the picture after the accident. Sick with what he'd done, he had his breakdown, got himself treated and drugged up, and when Anya's mother—who was never his wife; he barely knew her and they had slept together only once—got married and left California a few months later, he didn't fight it. He had no right and no energy, no heart. Every year he'd send Anya's mother money and cashmere sweaters for his daughter's birthday, and early on he'd write to Anya and she'd write back, but he didn't see her because he didn't think he could bear it. And because it didn't seem fair to her. Anya had another father then, and soon another family, so who could blame her now for being so elusive and cold with the father who'd let her go without an explanation?

One of the women in the waterside chairs let out a grunt and splashed the water with her heel.

“And then she wrote me a postcard to tell me she was moving here,” he said, “and that was my cue that it was time to be with her again. I've waited and waited. And now it's time.”

Anya's single postcard had taken on the grandest proportions, a call back from exile, even redemption, when maybe she'd only wanted money to pay for medical school. Wasn't it possible she had no interest in seeing him, and all this expectation and optimism on Wilton's part was just delusion and wishful thinking? Owen could not imagine what it would be like to wait for a child all those years, but he knew that instead of diminishing, the missing would only intensify. In the way you could not imagine your own aging, it was impossible to imagine the aging of your child. How could Wilton know who this child had become?

“Does she know what happened that night?” Owen asked.

Wilton's jaw slid forward and he shook his head. “Maybe she remembers the accident, though probably not. That her own father tried to kill her? No. And she will never, never know that. What she knows is that I dropped out of the picture because I'm a selfish prick. Let her think I'm the worst kind of bastard. Better she hate me forever than ever know what I did.” He gave Owen a warning look—do not tell.

Finally, the three women twisted to see who was talking behind them, but Wilton had already turned and was walking to the car, ready to go. When they neared Whittier Street fifteen minutes later, Wilton asked Owen to pull over for a minute.

“Mira doesn't know the story,” he said. “No one but you knows. I don't think Mira would ever understand it, just like she wouldn't understand yours. She's like that—impossible standards, impossible loyalty. She expects a lot from people. I'm not sure we'd live up to her standards.” Wilton laughed uneasily.

“I know my wife,” Owen said.

“So then I can only ask you now, as a friend, not to say anything to her. Don't tell her the story. I trust you with this because I think you understand.”

“But you're wrong, I don't understand it at all. I don't understand how you could know what you were doing,” Owen said, “and then do it anyway.”

Wilton tapped his knee. “But so did you, Owen. You knew what you were doing that night with your friend and you did it anyway. You didn't save her. We both live with that shame, and who else can we tell but each other?” He stretched his arms up. “Confession feels good, doesn't it?”

Owen felt trapped. The obligation of confidence was dangerous, and Wilton's secret was a piece of glass in his pocket. Wilton was asking him to lie to Mira, and he supposed he was asking Wilton to do the same thing—enter into these sins of omission. Didn't Mira have a right to know?

When he turned into the driveway, he saw that his grass had been mowed, the bushes trimmed tightly, the corners naked of dead leaves and plump with deep brown mulch. The pea gravel had been raked to Zen garden perfection. A man with a leaf blower on his back disappeared around the far side of Wilton's house.

“They were coming anyway,” Wilton explained, as he slid out of the car, “and I asked them if they wouldn't mind doing your yard.
Por favor
, you know, and
gracias
. In preparation for tomorrow night. I want it to be perfect, and I didn't want you to have to do any work.”

When Owen got back from tutoring later that evening, Mira wasn't home. He called her cell phone, but it rang on the kitchen table. Wilton's house was dark. The air still smelled of fresh-cut grass. He sat on the front steps with a beer as the private nurses changed shifts over at Alice Jessup's: a man arrived, a woman left. The two had a cigarette and talked quietly in the center of the street; alone for an instant, the old lady might take that opportunity of solitude to croak. Mira and Wilton pulled into the driveway, windows open and singing to the radio. Wilton had a high, almost operatic voice. They didn't notice Owen on the steps as they got out and danced to the music on the pea gravel. Mira was not wearing her glasses and her eyes looked lit from behind. She was giddy, kissed Wilton on the cheek, and watched him go inside.

Owen called to her and she came and sat next to him on the steps, wrapping her arms around one of his knees. “You look like you're having a good time,” she said.

“It's nice out here tonight. Where have you been? You didn't take your phone.”

“I forgot it. It was so hot we went to Lincoln Park. Wilton said he'd been there with you earlier and wanted to go back.”

Owen laughed. “Not Lincoln Park—Lincoln Woods,” he said. “The park has the dog races and the slot machines. The woods have the water and the trees. Small difference.”

“Well, yes,” she said, laughing with him and taking a swig of his beer. “I figured out his mistake in about a second, but by then, we were already there, the AC was wonderful and we decided to check the place out. It's one of Rhode Island's finest cultural institutions, though the dogs looked pretty mangy. I've lived here all my life and have never been there, can you believe it? It seemed almost my civic duty to check the place out.”

That summer, it was as if two forces had come together: excessive heat and excessive speculation about the state getting its very own giant casino that would compete with the ones in Connecticut. Like converging weather systems, the two forces fueled endless debate and frequent, sometimes violent thunderstorms. A casino would either ruin the state or save it, and what went on inside, depending on where you stood, was either gaming or gambling, harmless or moral destruction. Letters in the paper talked about jobs and revenues and the rights of reservations, while others pointed out the proximity of proposed sites to schools, churches, and nursing homes, as if kids, parishioners, and the feeble were most vulnerable to the evil vapors.

“And so how was it?” Owen asked.

“Horrible. Really horrible.” Mira laughed. “But it turns out Wilton likes casinos. They're full of his fans.”

She and Wilton had bet a few dollars on the greyhounds and lost. Then Mira had played the slots. “There's one called Cleopatra,” she said, extracting a few wrinkled bills from her pocket and displaying them on her palm like stolen flowers. “There's a game called Linda's Lobsterfest, but a slot machine should not be about crustaceans. Where's the romance in that? Cashola—multistate progressive video slot machines. That's what they're called. Cashola. I love that.”

“Seems like you had a good time,” he said. “A good, horrible time.”

“I did. It was kind of exciting, actually. Something different. All that dumb luck, that dumb rush you get from it. Very easy stuff. There was something strange and wonderful about being so mindless for a few minutes. A very mini vacation. You should try it sometime.”

“It doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't get why people gamble any more than why they climb mountains,” he said. “Who finds the prospect of losing—or dying—exciting?”

“Maybe it's the prospect of winning or living that's exciting,” Mira said. “Depends on how you look at it.” She elbowed him. “Either way, you feel
something
. And feeling something is better than feeling nothing. Risk is thrilling. I get that part.” She tilted her head back, exposing her throat to the stars.

“Not me,” he said. “Risk is just risk.”

“Ah, my safe husband. Just try it sometime.”

Owen was glad to see her mood so high. She'd recovered from the disappointment of the fundraiser. Owen was grateful to Wilton for some part of that, at the very least that his money kept Brindle afloat for now. He looked over at the man's house. A shape moved behind a window, a dark reminder to Owen of the confidences they'd traded, the ones they would both keep from Mira. But what was Mira keeping from him? Wilton could be one thing to Owen and another to Mira, the man each of them wanted and needed. But you could not ask a man to keep a secret from his wife without also coming between them as a reminder of that promise. He felt Wilton's presence caught in the trees, and now falling over them.