“Did he give it?” I ask.
“He told her he didn’t know what to say.”
Jack’s voice rises. “Did he advise her to kill herself?”
“Pu-leeze.”
“Or disappear?”
A chuffing sound is Paul’s response.
“How do you know?” Jack demands. His eyes are granite hard. This is the man I fled from twenty years ago. I hadn’t known how to handle him.
Paul seems to. In the face of anger, his composure grows. “Because I know Tom,” he says levelly. “I also know how difficult the last few years were for him. His mind wandered. I’d be sitting with him, and without warning he’d be back in time. Often it was to that night, and he was asking me what she’d been thinking. He kept saying there had to be another way, that nothing could be so bad to make her disappear like that. I’m not sure he knew what he wassaying or remembered saying it after he had—but beneath it all, there was a method to his madness. I don’t think his illness allowed him to lie.”
Jack rolls his eyes. “Dementia guarantees the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“Even before dementia. He was law-abiding.”
“So the cops got the whole truth? Did he tell them any of what led up to that night?”
Losing a tad of his composure, Paul lashes out, “Would you have wanted him to tell the police that she stole from her family’s estate and then covered it up? Or that she planned her disappearance so the problem would go away? Because he did think that. For years, he held onto that hope. But the fact is, Jack, he didn’t know. He didn’t know the whole truth.”
Jack wraps a hand around the back of his neck and says nothing. Wanting to bring him back, I grab onto the edge of his pants pocket and give a little tug, but he seems unaware.
“Look at it this way,” Paul argues. “Everything I’ve told you makes sense. When it came to money, the company was a sieve. There’s no hearsay about that. I saw the figures firsthand. Then your uncle suffered a personal crisis, and the estate was unable to help. Elizabeth told me this. She was horrified. She couldn’t sell the company. There were no buyers. So she had to watch her brother lose his business, his home, his wife and kids. He became a broken man, and she blamed herself.”
“And therefore committed suicide?” Jack asks. He and I have discussed this. We all did, back when it happened, albeit bewildered, since we lacked this background information. I tug at his pocket to remind him of earlier conversations we’ve had on this vein, but he is lost in the thick of it.
“I don’t know,” Paul says. “Tom didn’t know.”
Jack snorts. “Tom knew.”
But Paul is sharp. “It’s haunted him these last twenty years. He blamed himself for taking her out on the boat that night.”
“He should,” Jack declares. “If you know a person is suicidal, or just suspect or even just fear it, you donotgive them opportunity. If you care about a person the way he supposedly cared about my mother, you donottake them out on a foggy night with warnings of micro-bursts on the marine channel, and if you find yourself in the middle of one, you put on a fucking life jacket.” Tossing both hands in the air, he stalks off down the drive toward his house.
“Jack,”I call, twisting to watch.
His head is downcast, eyes refusing to see more. In the sole indication that he has heard my voice, he raises a palm halfway,let me be, you have nothing to say that I want to hear, you’re on the wrong side.And there we are, twenty years back.
Only we aren’t. We’re twenty years older, twenty years wiser, and, regardless of where our relationship is headed, I’m not letting words come between us. I may be an inveterate peacemaker. But making peace won’t work just now.
Bolting after him across the gravel, I shout,“Wait.”But his long stride doesn’t falter. Finally catching up, I grab his arm. “Walking away accomplishes nothing.”
He turns on me. The glasses on his head do little to tame his chestnut hair, which is nearly as wild as his eyes. “It makes me feel better.” His voice is dark. “He was your father. She was my mother. Nothing has changed.”
“It has so.” Ignoring everything else in the air around us, I hold his gaze. “We’re all brilliant in hindsight. Ofcourse,he shouldn’t have taken her out if he thought she was suicidal, but did he think that?”
“You’re defending him.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“He never defended you.”
“Right, and we now know why. So that was a flaw of his, but the issue here isn’t me. It’s your mother. I don’t believe there was anything malicious in what he did with her that night.”
“Shedied.”
