Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,59

with a girl,” he said, “and this was my last chance, the last night. Maybe I got carried away.”

Her face stiffened, whatever sympathy she had started out with now drained away from it. It scared him, how ghostly she looked. “You had sex with her because you didn’t want to graduate a virgin?”

It sounded despicable to him, the way she said it. “Look, we had sex like millions of kids do, and I’m embarrassed to say it took all of about two minutes. She wasn’t yelling or hitting me or anything. The only way I knew something was wrong was when she ran up the hill afterward and got a ride home with Holly. She chose to make it into a horrible event for the rest of her life.”

“That’s what men always do in date rape—blame the victim.”

“I’m not blaming her. I’m just saying she chose to be devastated.”

“Did she choose to be pregnant, too?”

“What?”

“You got her pregnant, Simon. That’s probably why her family left town, before she started showing.”

He tried to comprehend this new information. “What happened to the baby?”

“She lost it at birth.”

He didn’t know what to feel—relief at not having a child he had never met or regret that some life of his, some part of himself, had died. And what must Jean have felt, having a child so young and losing it? “I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded odd to him to be apologizing to Amy, but it was too late to apologize to Jean. “I didn’t know any of this, obviously. She went away and I never heard from her. It didn’t occur to me that she could be pregnant.”

“She was, and her husband came here to confront you. It’s not just a matter of strange postcards, Simon. He was getting pretty worked up in my office. I’m not sure what he might do.”

“He got what he wanted scaring you. He’ll go away now.”

“You sound sure of that.”

He was as sure as he could be that Paul Walker would not be surfacing in their lives again. He took her hands in his just like he might any time, playfully, as if he had caught her and wouldn’t let go. “I don’t think we need to worry.”

———

In their bed that night, after turning out the light, he curled himself behind her as always and reached his arm over her. He would not be the one to break the routine. She didn’t shake him off, and he let his body sink into her slowly, his muscles relaxing. After a moment she said, “Please don’t tonight.” He rolled away from her into the wide-open space of their king-size bed.

In the middle of the night he woke and thought, It can’t be true. I didn’t cause another person to die.

Yet it was true, or seemed to be. Of all things he could imagine doing in life, this had never occurred to him as a possibility. If Amy considered him so horrible as a rapist, what would she think of him as a murderer? But not murder, really. There was no premeditation. It was manslaughter at worst, or involuntary manslaughter; but not even that, just a terrible accident, a series of unfortunate events. He had even jumped in to try to save the man who had been stalking his family. Didn’t that count for something?

Simon eased himself off the bed and listened for a moment. Amy was a light sleeper. Normally she would wake at any odd movement and ask if he was okay. She said nothing. He walked out of the room and down the hall in his boxers, feeling moist from the humid night air. The house was silent, nothing else stirring. He looked in on Davey, as he often did. In the dim light he could see the boy lying sideways across his narrow bed in a tangle of sheets. Casper was curled around his head. Nothing seemed changed, which felt odd to him, since everything had changed. He, Simon Howe, the editor and publisher of Red Paint’s newspaper of record, had become the story himself. He imagined his mug shot, grainy black-and-white, nothing more than an accumulation of dots. He would appear disheveled, unshaven, despondent, the look of a guilty man. How many people would see him spread across the front page and say, “I’m not surprised. I knew he had it in him.” The Press Herald would surely give it page-one coverage in Portland, a former reporter gone wrong. A writer from New York or