to them,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. He just turned around all of a sudden and left.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
She looked at him curiously, still sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, doing nothing but observing him. He realized now that it was a suspicious question. It was more difficult than he supposed to know beforehand whether a question sounded suspicious or not.
“No, he just strolled out the door like any other patient. I called back to 911 and told them there was no need to send someone, but they still had to.”
Simon got down on his knees and pulled sandals from under the bed, reaching far under to retrieve the pair. When he stood up again he said, “You’re not going to see him again, right?” He felt dishonest asking this, knowing what he knew. Of course she wouldn’t be seeing him again. He realized at this moment that he wasn’t going to tell her about meeting Paul, punching him, and watching him sink into the murky bay. She didn’t need to know.
“Of course I won’t see him again. He said he was leaving Red Paint anyway.” Amy stared at Simon for a moment, an uncomfortable silence, as he strapped on his sandals. “He did say something very disturbing. Maybe he was just trying to shock me, I don’t know, but we have to talk about it.”
Simon moved toward the window again to slow down the momentum of this conversation. He saw Davey in the yard now, at the base of the tree house, gouging at the trunk with something in his hand. It had to be a knife. Even under threat of perpetual grounding, there he was in plain view carving into a tree.
“Davey’s waving me to come out,” Simon said. “Can we finish this later?”
“Later as in never?”
He laughed a little. “I just mean a little later. It’s been a rough day.”
———
After the pasta and bread sticks, after the green salad and organic mini carrots stewed in brown sugar, after watching two hours of a Twilight Zone marathon (Davey’s choice) on television together sitting on the couch, the boy lying alternately against one and the other as if they were pillows, they sent him off to bed, and Amy said, “Is this later enough?”
Simon looked at his watch—10:05, the time they usually went up to bed themselves to read for a while. That wouldn’t happen tonight. “Sure, let’s talk.”
“I started to tell you, I had trouble with a patient today.”
“You should get some kind of security device in there,” he said, “connect to the police station. I think they can do that.”
“This man made an accusation, Simon. About you.”
“What accusation?”
“About your graduation night on the dock by the inn. He said you forced a girl to have sex.”
She was being uncommonly delicate, Simon thought. Paul would have said rape over and over again.
“Do you know what he’s talking about?”
Simon wondered how much to say, what to include, what to leave out. There were so many ways to tell a story. “The guy you’ve been seeing,” he began, “your patient, Paul Walker, he—”
“Paul Walker? He said his name was Paul Chambers.”
“I think Chambers is his middle name. I guess he was using it to hide who he was. He married the girl I took to graduation, Jean Crane. I didn’t really know her that well. She sat next to me in Spanish. She was pretty and smart, and since I’d just broken up with Ginnie, my steady girlfriend, I asked her to graduation. The party was at the Bayswater Inn. We ducked out a few times during the night to take a drink, me more than her, I guess. Then we went down to the bay, and things got carried away.” He remembered stumbling across the sand and looking up at the moon hanging in the black sky. He remembered the hip flask concealed under his tuxedo jacket and the Chopin vodka—the finest Polish mash—that burned down his throat, like swallowing fire. He remembered twirling around, his brain spinning, the world spinning all around him.
“You had sex?” She said this in a somewhat surprised voice, as if even that was disappointing to her.
“Yes, we had sex. I could tell she was upset,” he said, “after, I mean. She got her cousin, Holly Green, to drive her home. I called her the next couple of days, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Finally I went to her house and she