Paul has a way of making you feel worse when you know you’re in the wrong.
After he leaves, Hadley gathers the cards and returns them to the box. “You knew they wouldn’t be happy, but they’ll come around. Or they won’t. If this is important, it’s up to you whether you want to keep going, whatever the consequences. You get to decide.”
I doubt Hadley’s apologized for much in life and wish I could match her self-confidence. She kisses my cheek and makes her way through the house and outside. I slump into a chair, not sure what to do next. Above me, my mother moves through the house, getting ready for bed, while out on the point, smoke billows against the moon.
I rest my hands on my knees and steel myself before stepping into the cool night air and following the path to the firepit, where Reid huddles beside the lake, the embers from the fire casting an eerie glow. I stop in the shadows. Reid’s normally angular face has grown slack, his eyes shining as he stares across the inky lake surface, and I wonder if I’ve transported him to another night like this one, if he’s thinking of our father, too. How often do these moments overcome my brother when no one’s watching? What terrors does he suffer in silence?
He takes a deep breath, seeming to return to the present, his face sharp, his eyes alert. “I can hear you,” he says.
I step out of the shadows and settle onto one of the boulders surrounding the pit. After a moment, I say, “I’m telling our story. Nothing more. I may tell the story for a podcast, and I may tell it for myself, but I want the whole story, not the pieces I’ve managed to cobble together.”
Reid stares into the fire’s embers. Where our mother seemed enraged, he simply seems sad. “I know you were there that day, too, Charlie,” he says, “but I wasactuallythere, in the boat, trying to survive while my own father waved a bloody knife at me, praying the whole time he couldn’t swim that far. Praying the boat wouldn’t spring a leak and sink with both of us in it.”
I imagine my father’s shouts, and Reid at the oars, breathing heavily with each pull. I imagine him cradling my tiny body between his knees.
“Dad was an angry, angry man,” Reid says. “There’s your whole story. Now find another one to tell, because this one isn’t yours. It’s mine.” He stands and puts a hand to my shoulder. “I don’t ask much of you, but leave this alone.”
He heads into the dark. He must bypass the cabin and cross the footbridge, because a moment later, his car starts and roars off into the night.
I owe Reid my life. It’s the one thing I know is true, and I could do what he asks and let this story go. If our situations were reversed, wouldn’t I want the same from him?
I send a text to Julian.??They know. They’re angry. Sad, too.??
It’s nearly midnight, but Julian responds at once.??Anger’s good. Keep it going. There could be a story there, maybe even something to hide.??
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Chapter Seven
The embers in the fire have nearly burned out when, behind me, a twig snaps, and Paul Burke emerges from the trees. “All by yourself?” he asks.
“Me and the loons,” I say.
He settles onto one of the boulders and rests a foot on the edge of the firepit. He wears a light wool coat and a striped scarf tied in a loop knot as if he’s prepped for a walk in Central Park. He tosses a canvas bag onto the ground beside me. A bag of marshmallows falls out. “I found those in the kitchen,” he says, handing me a metal skewer and keeping one for himself. “God knows how old they are.”
We both push two marshmallows onto the end of our skewers and rest them over the embers, rotating them as the exterior turns golden and the scent of caramelized sugar fills the night air.
Paul holds a special place in my life. Growing up, he visited me on parents’ weekend at prep school and took me to Yankees games in the summers. He drove me around New England on my college tour and used some connections to help me get into Newburg College in Connecticut. He’s someone I trust.
“I didn’t mean for you to find out about the podcast that way,” I say.
“Well, your mom knows about it now. So does Reid.”
I pull the marshmallows from the fire and slip off the crisp outer shell to savor the sweetness as it melts on my tongue. “Do you think about that night? About my father?”
Paul’s marshmallows catch fire. He lets them burn until they fall from the skewer and smolder in the embers.
“This is off the record,” I say, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m a lawyer. I worry about everything.”
“And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask questions.”
“What exactly is your job, Charlie?”
“I’m a journalist,” I say, though I can hear the question mark at the end of the sentence, because mostly what I do is edit audio.
“If you’re playing journalist, I’ll play lawyer. Who else knows about this project besides us?”
