“Something tells me your father’s tired of hiding.”
“That makes it sound like you’ve talked to him.”
“I haven’t, though you only have my word for it.” Hadley roots around in a cupboard until she comes up with a box of tea bags. “Are you sad about Reid?”
I should have deep and profound feelings right now, but I’ve been pushing something down for so long, something I haven’t named, and without finding that name, I’m not sure I can reach what’s on the other side or be whole. “None of this makes sense,” I say. “I’m panicked because I don’t trust Gilcrest, and I’m confused. I should be sad, too.”
The kettle whistles. Hadley turns off the gas and pours water over the tea bags. “Peel all that away. What’s there?”
Images flood my mind: my father in a crowd; Reid beside my bed reading a picture book; Paul at a Yankees game; Mrs. Haviland buying ice cream; Hadley regaling me with stories of seeing the world; my mother paddling beside Reid, their heads bent together as though no one else in the world mattered. Brief flashes of happiness where I’m on the outside, looking in. Beneath it all, I find a deep, profound sadness. “I’m lonely,” I say.
Hadley starts to speak and looks down. She takes a long sip of her tea and swallows loudly. “I should have been around more,” she says. “I should have watched out for you.”
“I don’t know what you could have done.”
“More than I did,” Hadley says.
I rub the bridge of my nose. “I keep searching for answers, but all I get are more questions.”
“And more tragedy,” Hadley says. “One question shatters into a thousand new ones, and each time, you scramble to find answers. But keep asking, and don’t hold back to protect anyone. Certainly not the dead. Reid did what he did.”
I picture Freya’s windshield covered in angry letters and Reid cowering by the brook while Freya stood over him with the rifle. I see his bedroom walls covered with images of her. “The police have video of Reid in Freya’s apartment,” I say. “If he threatened Freya, what else did he do?”
“I don’t know what Reid was capable of,” Hadley says.
I set my mug down and put a hand on her arm. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Hadley won’t meet my eyes. Eventually she says, “All I know is that after Isaac Haviland died, I told your mother Reid should go to a therapist. Jane shut the conversation down before it began.” My aunt glances up. “She told me Reid saw Isaac as a threat to your family. She also said she worried what Reid might say to a therapist, that Reid would want to own his choices.”
A child kills to protect a parent; a parent lies to protect the child. That story was told at least once a season onScene of the Crime. It’s the kind of secret a parent would go to the grave to protect, the kind that could make a second child spend his entire life feeling as though he’s come in halfway through a conversation, as though he’s not quite part of a family.
I stop and try to imagine the world that existed a few seconds ago, the one where none of this was true, but I can’t. It’s as though a part of me has known what happened all along. “You think Reid killed Isaac Haviland,” I say, my voice sounding as if it’s coming from somewhere else, fromsomeoneelse.
“I’m telling you what Jane told me,” Hadley says, “and now you have a thousand new questions.”
Actually, something that hasn’t made sense to me now does. Instead of walking through a door to find something new, it’s as though I’ve returned to the night when everything changed and can see it again for the first time. “For my whole life,” I say, “I’ve felt as if what happened on the lake bonded Mom and Reid in a way that kept me on the outside. I thought it was why she sent me to boarding school and kept Reid so close. But maybe—”
“Maybe,” Hadley says, “Jane was keeping you from your brother and protecting you all along.”
I lie in bed, unable to sleep, rehashing the conversation with Hadley, until I get up and cross to a bookshelf. I haven’t slept in the bungalow since the holidays, when I came for a weekend visit. Now I scan the spines of the books on the shelf until I come to the old thesaurus and retrieve the photo of my father I hid there years ago.
It’s a clipping from a newspaper, the color faded, the edges yellowed, a moment in time. When I’ve looked at the image before, I’ve mostly noticed myself in my father’s eyes, in his floppy hair, in his angular face. The image is dated from the October before Isaac’s death. My father stands against the lake, smiling, a riot of autumn leaves erupting along the shore behind him. The photo must have been cropped from something larger, because this time I note the disembodied limbs and shoulders of others around him and wonder who else might have been with him that day. Could it have been the entire gang of six, Hadley and my mother, Paul and Isaac, Andrea and my father, doing everything together?
In the next few months, my mother would begin an affair with Isaac, and soon after that, Isaac would be dead. Years later, my father would slam into me in the dark while his son’s cold body floated in the lake, but on this day, none of that could have seemed possible. They were friends, together, maybe for the last time.
I slip the photo into the thesaurus and place it on the shelf. In bed, I punch at the pillow and force myself to return to earlier this evening, to the sound of Reid stroking through the water, to the burn of gin at the back of my throat, to the warmth of the sun on my face.I love you and forgive you for every terrible thing you said to me,Reid said.But I don’t want to see you right now.
I imagine staying on the dock, waiting until he lifted himself out of the water and tucked his goggles into the side of his suit. “Can we start over?” I ask.
“Give it a try,” Reid says, still breathing heavily from his swim.
I could have asked about his life away from Idlewood, his friends in Boston, those trips all over the world he documents online. I could have told him about Seton, that we were both too scared to make the nextmove because we didn’t want to make a mistake. I could have confessed that I didn’t want to lose Idlewood because it would eliminate the one link between us. Without it, I feared we’d drift apart. I could have asked why we began each summer with a pot of Bolognese.
“Tell me where you were the morning Jane died,” I say. “Tell me why there’s no way you could have killed her.”
“That would be too easy,” Reid says. “And you already know the answer.”
I jolt awake, grasping at Reid’s words from the dream, afraid I might lose them for good.
