"Then I'm right. There is a relationship, isn't there?"
What was the point of denying the obvious? Keith nodded. "Yes."
"Won't you tell me? You have to tell someone; sooner or later you have to." Mel's voice was pleading, urgent. "You can't live with this thing---whatever it is---inside you forever. Who better to tell than me? I'd understand."
You can't live with this... Who better to tell than me?
It seemed to Keith that his brother's voice, even the sight of Mel, was coming to him through a tunnel, from the distant end, far away. At the farther end of the tunnel, too, were all the other people---Natalie, Brian, Theo, Perry Yount, Keith's friends---with whom he had lost communication long since. Now, of them all, Mel alone was reaching out, striving to bridge the gap between them... but the tunnel was long, their apartness---after all the length of time that Keith had been alone---too great.
And yet...
As if sorreone else were speaking, Keith asked, "You mean tell you here? Now?"
Mel urged, "Why not?"
Why not indeed? Something within Keith stirred; a sense of waating to unburden, even though in the end it could change nothing... Or could it? Wasn't that what the Confessional was all about; a catharsis, an exorcism of sin through acknowledgment and contrition? The difference, of course, was that the Confessional gave forgiveness and expiation, and for Keith there could be no expiation---ever. At least... he hadn't thought so. Now he wondered what Mel might say.
Somewhere in Keith's mind a door, which had been closed, inched open.
"I suppose there's no reason," he said slowly, "why I shouldn't tell you. It won't take long."
Mel remained silent. Instinct told him that if wrong words were spoken they could shatter Keith's mood, could cut off the confidence which seemed about to be given, which Mel had waited so long and anxiously to hear. He reasoned: if he could finally learn what bedeviled Keith, between them they might come to grips with it. Judging by his brother's appearance tonight, it had better be soon.
"You've read the testimony," Keith said. His voice was a monotone. "You just said so. You know most of what happened that day."
Mel nodded.
"What you don't know, or anybody knows except me; what didn't come out at the inquiry, what I've thought about over and over..." Keith hesitated; it seemed as if he might not continue.
"For God's sake! For your own reason, for Natalie's sake, for mine---go on!"
It was Keith's turn to nod. "I'm going to."
He began describing the morning at Leesburg a year and a half before; the air traffic picture when he left for the washroom; supervisor Perry Yount; the trainee controller left in immediate charge. In a moment, Keith thought, he would admit how he had loitered; how he failed the others through indifference and negligence; how he returned to duty too late; how the accident, the multiple tragedy of the Redferns' deaths, had been solely his own doing; and how others were blamed. Now that at last he was doing what he had longed to, without knowing it, there was a sense of blessed relief. Words, like a cataract long damned, began tumbling out.
Mel listened.
Abruptly, a door farther down the corridor opened. A voice---the tower watch chief's---called, "Oh, Mr. Bakersfeld!"
His footstcps echoing along the corridor, the tower chief walked toward them. "Lieutenant Ordway has been trying to reach you, Mr. Bakersfeld; so has the Snow Desk. They both want you to call." He nodded. "Hi, Keith!"
Mel wanted to cry out, to shout for silence or delay, plead to be alone with Keith for a few minutes more. But he knew it was no good. At the first sound of the tower chief's voice Keith had stopped in mid-sentence as if a switch were snapped to "off."
Keith had not, after all, reached the point of describing his own guilt to Mel. As he responded automatically to the tower chief's greeting, he wondered: Why had be begun at all? What could he have hoped to gain? There could never be any gain, never any forgetting. No confession---to whomever made---would exorcise memory. Momentarily he had grasped at what he mistook for a faint flicker of hope, even perhaps reprieve. As it had to be, it proved illusory. Perhaps it was as well that the interruption occurred when it did.
Once more, Keith realized, a mantle of loneliness, like an invisible thick curtain, surrounded him. Inside the curtain he was alone with his thoughts, and inside his thoughts was