Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,69
come from seeing you. He made it sound like he’d done something to you. When I couldn’t get you on the phone, I figured he had.”
“So …”
Simon took a deep breath, wondering how much truth he could bring himself to share. “So I hit him, not hard really, and he fell in the water. He was kind of flailing a little, but he was only a few feet from the dock. I figured he was all right.”
“If he was that close, couldn’t you have just leaned over and pulled him out?”
That had been Simon’s instinct, to offer his hand. But something told him to wait a moment, to watch, to see how things went. “I wasn’t sure at first what to do, so I guess I hesitated.”
“You weren’t sure whether to save him or not?”
“I was scared about you, so I called your cell. Then he went under again. I jumped in to find him, but he was gone. I don’t know how that could be. It’s not even that deep there.”
Her expression changed, and he wondered if there was always this moment when her clients would notice her face seize up with the gravity of the matter. That was when they would see confirmed what they vaguely knew—there was something seriously wrong in their lives.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “First I find out a woman killed herself because she felt you raped her, and now you say you knocked a man into the bay and let him drown.”
“I didn’t know he was going to drown. I’m not even sure he did.”
“Were you hoping he would? Are you sure you didn’t wish your problem would disappear into Red Paint Bay—just like Jean Crane disappeared from town?”
“God, are we back to Jean again?”
“I’m just trying to get you to understand—”
“Why is that your job? I’m not your patient. You’re not the arbiter of my life. I was a goddamn horny teenager on graduation night, and you’re judging me like I was fully responsible for what this woman ended up doing to herself. She had all of those years to find a way to cope with what she thought I did, and she let herself be a nonfunctioning human being and a non-functioning wife.”
“She didn’t let herself any more than a person with PTSD lets herself be traumatized all of her life.”
“She didn’t choose to get help either, did she? She took her own life twenty-five years later, Amy—twenty-five years of making herself miserable and her husband miserable and now me.”
Amy cradled her wineglass in both hands. For once she was silent. For once he had the floor to himself.
“Paul Walker came here to ruin me,” he said. “He didn’t have to kidnap Davey or shoot me, like you thought might happen, he just had to make you think I raped her. Then he could leave town and let the story play out. He seemed like a passive guy, but he knew what he was doing.”
“This isn’t about him.”
“You’re right,” he agreed quickly, “but it isn’t just about me, either. It’s about you, too. You’re so used to sitting on your throne of morality that everything is clear-cut in your mind, all black-and-white. You took a crazy guy’s account of what happened decades ago without even considering that maybe he was using me as a scapegoat, that maybe Jean was unstable for reasons that had nothing to do with me. You were sure from the beginning that I was guilty,” he said, and then an unsettling thought came to him. “It’s like you wanted to believe I was.”
A waiter in black-and-white pushed through the kitchen door carrying a tray of desserts and walked past them without a glance.
“No,” she said, “I didn’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it.”
“But you can’t help yourself. For some reason you’re ready to think the worst about one stupid thing I did a long time ago and make it stand for my whole life.”
She sipped her wine, taking her time. “Letting Paul Walker drown,” she said, “that wasn’t a long time ago. It was last Thursday.”
She said this with a calmness that infuriated him, but she was right. It had been only a few days since he had soberly punched a man and watched him sink into Red Paint Bay. It seemed reasonable at the time, so reasonable that he couldn’t say he wouldn’t do it again, if Paul Walker reappeared. “He was stalking us, Amy—you, Davey, and me. Can’t you understand