When You Were Older (29 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘Did he tell you to throw it?’

‘I don’t remember if he said that.’

‘Ben. You have to try to remember. This is huge. This is really important.’

‘He was being weird. He kept saying everything would be OK if I did. The whole country. He said everything would be OK again. I could fix everything.’

A long, cold tingle started at the back of my neck and ran down my spine.

‘Did you tell the police all this?’

‘Maybe. I don’t remember.’

‘I have to go talk to them again.’

I spun on my heels and headed for the door, surprising the guard, who had to open it for me.

Behind me, I kept hearing Ben calling to me. Over and over.

‘No! Don’t leave me here! Take me with you, Buddy! I want to go home!’

Sometimes you have to close yourself up. Shut the portals into the places inside you that still know how to feel. Because there’s just nothing you can do.

I paced in front of Michelevsky’s cluttered desk. He kept indicating a chair. But I never sat in it.

‘How can you even consider charging Ben with a crime? He’s brain-damaged. He has the mind of a child. Mark handed him a lighted match and told him to throw it. He’s easily manipulated. He gets confused when you yell at him. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘So he says now. Jespers tells a different story. And Ben didn’t say any of that when we questioned him yesterday.’

‘He gets scared. He has trouble remembering details.’

‘Or he just wants to get out and go home.’

I stopped pacing.

‘Look. Based on what I know about my brother … I seriously don’t think he lies. I don’t think he has enough brain to think up a lie. He can’t even learn how to find his way from the bus stop to work. Two blocks. And you think he can figure out what to say to shift more of the legal blame on to Mark Jespers?’

‘He’ll be evaluated,’ Michelevsky said. As though that should be the end of things.

‘I’ve had a talk with a lawyer. You were never supposed to question him without a guardian present. He’s like a child.’

‘How was I supposed to know he was like a child?’

‘Everybody in town knows that about Ben.’

Michelevsky sat back, his chair squeaking. ‘I’m new around here.’

Just as I was about to call him out as a liar, which he may or may not have been, he said, ‘You knew. Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you say you wanted to be present?’

‘You said I couldn’t be.’

‘And you never said your brother was mentally incompetent.’

I sighed, and sat down hard on a wooden bench. He
was
right. It was my fault. Why hadn’t I insisted? Stubborn, pig-headed refusal to accept that Ben could have been a suspect. I knew he wasn’t involved, and expected everyone else to know it, too.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘he’ll be evaluated. Meaning …’

‘There’ll probably be a competency hearing.’

‘And if … I mean,
when
he’s found incompetent?’

‘Probably he’ll be transferred to the state hospital.’

‘For how long?’

‘That could go a lot of different ways. Worst case … for him … until they decide he’s not a danger to himself or others.’

I’m not sure how long I stood there, taking that in. Wrapping my brain around this entirely new set of future obstacles on the obstacle course that was now my life.

‘But … Ben’s never going to change. He’s always going to be just like this.’

‘True,’ Michelevsky said.

And that appeared to be the dead end of … well, many things. The least of which being that conversation.

I PARKED MY
mom’s old Buick half a block from the automotive shop and walked. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe to make it harder for Chris Kerricker to see me coming. Not that he shouldn’t have damn well known to expect me by then.

He was working inside the service bay, his head under the hood of a BMW.

I walked around to where he could see me, and his face fell.

‘I had no idea Kansans drove BMWs,’ I said.

He straightened up and hurled the wrench he’d been holding, bouncing it off the far wall of the shop. I remember thinking it must be a bad sign when people regularly hurl whatever they’re holding in their hand when they see you coming. Especially if it’s something of value, something they’re going to need again.

At least he didn’t throw the wrench at my head.

I still think it might be a sign that it’s time to reexamine your life.

‘I can’t take much more of you,’ he said.

‘I can think of a way to solve that.’

‘Fuck you.’

Oscar, long-time owner of Oscar’s Automotive, stuck his head out of the office and into the service bay, his eyes narrow. He took me in, then looked at Chris. He must have known by then that my daily visits weren’t happy ones. But he never asked. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe good mechanics are hard to find in a town the size of Nowhere-ville.

‘What just happened?’

‘Sorry, Oscar. Dropped a wrench.’

My guess is that Oscar had been around this business long enough to know the sound of a wrench slipping out of a hand and falling to the concrete floor, without force. If so, he chose not to pursue it.

His face disappeared again.

Looking back, I can’t help noting the significance of a thing dropped as opposed to a thing thrown. How they are two very different animals. I didn’t know enough to note it at the time.

‘I wasn’t there, man,’ Chris said. ‘I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there. How many times do I have to keep telling you I wasn’t there?’

‘Maybe until you can make it morph into the truth?’

‘I’m busy here. This is my livelihood. If you don’t mind.’

‘My brother Ben used to have a livelihood. Did I mention that? He loved his job. You know. The one he can’t go to now. Because he’s locked up in the state hospital. Doing time that rightly belongs to you and Mark.’

‘Mark is doing plenty of time!’ he snapped.

‘Mark could get out in as little as twenty months.’

‘That’s a lot of time!’

‘For nearly killing a woman?’

‘We didn’t know she was up there, man!’

Then silence. Embarrassed on his part, triumphant on mine.

Sounds like a key moment, right? Like I’d just cracked the case. But the truth is, Chris often committed little slips like that. If I pressed him hard enough. Then he’d look me in the eye, defiantly, and say he’d never said it, that it was his word against mine, that he’d deny it to the grave. Then I’d go back to Nowhere-ville’s finest, who would pull him in for questioning. Again. His father would call the family attorney to go in with him. Again. And somehow he would get his story straight. With them.

Again.

If I could get another round of questioning out of this one, that would make four full rounds. But I think everyone was getting tired of going over this same old territory. Except me.

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying none of us could possibly have known. Whether we were there or not, we didn’t know. That doesn’t
mean
that every single person who didn’t know was there.’

‘But you were.’

‘How do you know I was?’ he shouted. It wasn’t hard to make Chris lose his temper. I did it almost every day. ‘How the hell would you know?’ Then he lowered his voice to a tense whisper. ‘Even if you did see my car drive away from your house that night, which I have my doubts about, it doesn’t mean shit. I could’ve caught up with Ben later and brought him home. If you’d really seen me, and seeing me really proved I was there, I’d be in jail right now.’

Oscar stuck his head out again. ‘I got customers in here,’ he said.

‘Sorry, Oscar.’

We waited for him to disappear again. But he lingered. As though a little extra staring might be just what the problem needed. Then he shook his head and withdrew it.

‘You’re gonna lose me my job, man. Right, I know, we lost Ben his. I know everything you’re gonna say before you say it, man. Why don’t you give it up? I’m not volunteering to go to jail. I got a life. In case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘And Ben doesn’t?’

‘No. Ben doesn’t.’

And with that pronouncement, he crossed the shop, fetched the wrench, and stuck his head back under the hood of the BMW. As if ignoring me would solve
everything.
But, damn … that’s a big everything.

‘You have no right to say that. Just because it didn’t look like a life
you’d
want. Ben had a job. He loved that job. He saw just about everybody in town, every day. He liked everybody and everybody liked him. And he loves his home. You know, the one he’s lived in since he was six years old. And now he’ll probably never get to see it again. You have any idea how much he hates being away from home? He’s more miserable in that state hospital than you’d be in prison.’

‘I doubt
that
,’ Chris muttered.

‘Plus
you’d
get out after a year or two.’

He drew his head back out from under the hood. Looked right into my eyes. Pointed at a spot at the bridge of my nose with the wrench. I tried not to go cross-eyed.

‘Fuck you, Rusty. I’m not doing that to myself. I’m not doing that to my family. I’m not doing that to my girlfriend. I’m not doing it to Mark, either. You think I want to be responsible for Mark doing even more time?’

Bingo. Oh, snap.

‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘Two in one day.’

He rolled his eyes and ducked under the hood again.

‘So, basically, what you just slipped and told me is that if you were to tell the actual story of what happened that night, Mark would be charged with additional crimes. Like, and this is just a wild guess here, but … maybe the ones that are sitting on Ben right now?’

I remember thinking Chris must be a fundamentally
stupid
man. A smart one would have taken an oath of silence in my presence long ago.

For several minutes – or at least it seemed like several minutes – he just worked at loosening the bolts around the BMW’s fan. He didn’t look at me or speak. Then he stopped, and held very still. He continued to stare at the engine.

‘You can ride me like this till the fucking cows come home, man. I’m not doing it. Why are you even fighting this? I don’t get you at all. Great, you’re a fucking hero because you didn’t come right home and stick your brother in a mental institution first thing. But there must’ve been part of you that wanted to. Because I spent less than a day with that guy, and I nearly lost my mind. So now he’s away, and it’s not your fault. You can always say you did your best for him. Nobody can blame you after all you did. You’re better off. You can have your life back, man. Maybe the Muslim girl’ll even come back. You know. If she’s sure Ben’s locked up for ever. Because she sure as hell won’t want to spend her life with the guy who set her business on fire. Right under her hands and knees. You could have your life again. I don’t get why things aren’t OK just the way they are.’

I winced at the mention of her, but only inwardly. It was something I wasn’t prepared to let anybody see. I’d built strong armor around the fact that I still hadn’t heard from her. I dealt with it when I was alone, to the extent I dealt with it at all. In the shower. On the drive out to the state hospital. In bed at night, waiting for the
sleep
that first wouldn’t come, then wouldn’t stay.

I did not deal with it in the presence of Chris Kerricker.

He finished. And waited. He still didn’t move. He still didn’t stop staring at the engine. As though the engine were about to argue with him. Not me.

‘All good points,’ I said.

I watched him closely. He shifted his head as though he might look at me. But he didn’t. I guess he thought better of it. He didn’t speak.

‘There’s not one thing you just said that I haven’t thought of myself. And I’m not going to say you’re flat-out wrong about any of it. There’s just one problem with the whole damn package.’

I waited for input. I’m not sure why.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Tell me the problem. You will, anyway.’

‘I don’t think Ben did anything wrong.’

I waited a while longer, in case there was more he wanted to say. Apparently not. He finished unbolting the fan, and unhooked it from the three or four belts that circled it.

‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

He dropped the fan. Which I’m guessing was an expensive mistake.

‘Oh, bloody fucking hell!’ he bellowed. ‘When are you gonna leave me alone, man?’

‘When you tell me what happened that night.’

But nothing moved for a long time. So I decided to call it a day.

‘Well. Till tomorrow, then.’

I glanced over my shoulder to see Chris flipping me his middle finger as I walked away.

I arrived at the state hospital at twenty after eleven. Just like I did every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. With a ten-minute cushion to sign in before visiting hours. Maybe I had learned promptness from Ben.

I stood in front of the window, listening to the woman behind the desk snap her chewing gum. I hate it when people snap their gum. It puts me on edge.

Or maybe I’d been on edge lately anyway.

‘Dr Bosco wants to talk to you today,’ she said.

‘Before or after I see Ben?’

‘Before. Lemme call her.’

She had hot-pink fingernails so long that she had to dial the phone with the eraser end of a pencil. Looking back, that’s another connection I make now that I couldn’t have made at the time. Because the other half of that connection hadn’t surfaced yet.

‘Dr Bosco?’ I heard her say. ‘Yeah. He’s here. OK.’

She hung up. Dialed again in the same weird manner.

‘John? You want to come up front? Get Ben Ammiano’s brother and see him back to Bosco’s office? OK. Thanks.’

She hung up again.

‘Have a seat,’ she said, pointing with the dialing pencil. As if I wouldn’t know from experience where a seat could be found.

I didn’t sit. I was too off-balance to sit. I didn’t like the dangling sword of knowing the doctor wanted to talk to me.

The big door buzzed, then popped open. John nodded at me. Big John, they called him. The go-to psych tech when a patient gets out of hand.