Part 24 (1/2)
But she wasn't exactly sure she believed that.
She took the stairs slowly, holding tight to the banister with one hand, tighter to the gun with the other. By now the hand that held the gun was sweating.
On the landing she heard the sound of metal brus.h.i.+ng ceramic.
The chain on the table lamp by the window.
She peered around the corner, leading with the .38.
She saw him kneeling on the couch. Motionless. His elbows leaning against the back of the couch. He was staring out the window. She slipped the gun into the deep pocket of her nightgown hoping he wouldn't notice its dark heavy ma.s.s through the thin cotton.
She walked over and touched his shoulder.
”Robert?”
He didn't acknowledge her at all. Just kept staring. Sleepwalking? she thought. Please, G.o.d. Not that too.
”Robert?”
”He's outside,” he said.
”Who?”
But she knew.
”Do you think he wants to get in?” he said.
”Daddy?”
He nodded.
She looked out the window. The lawn, all the way down the hill to the street, was empty.
”Where do you see him? Where is he?”
”Over there.”
He pointed to the old elm tree near the center of the lawn. ”I woke up and saw him from my window and I came downstairs.”
He sounded calm enough. But his eyes were wide.
”He's hiding,” he said.
”Wait here.”
In the hall closet she found a pair of boots. She took a coat off the coat rack and slipped it on. Robert remained staring out the window. She transferred the gun to her coat pocket, unlocked the door and stepped outside.
As quietly as possible she closed the door behind her.
She stuffed both hands into her pockets and walked toward the tree. The boots and coat were no match for the cold but her face felt flushed and the hand on the gun felt greasy now with sweat. She approached quickly at first and then as she got closer slowed her pace.
She walked wide of the tree to the right until she could see around it to the other side.
Nothing.
To be absolutely certain she walked all the way around it. Circled it.
She felt limp with relief.
He wasn't there.
She wondered what she'd have said to him or done to him if he had been.
She walked back to the house remembering what Robert had said.
He's hiding, he'd said.
It wasn't true, not literally, not this time. Robert had imagined him out there behind the tree, dreamed him there no doubt and then come downstairs still frightened and half asleep. But in a less literal sense it was completely true.
Of course he was hiding.
And Robert saying that, acknowledging that, was probably as close as he was ever going to come to telling the truth about his father.
And accusing him.
Twenty-two.
The Hearing: Second Day
Waiting for Owen Sansom in the courtroom, sitting across from Andrea Stone, she tried to read a newspaper. It had been days since she'd seen one but now her attention kept slipping away. The stories took on the patchwork quality of a dream, one slipping into the other, none of them coming to any real conclusion.
One story managed to hold her though. In New York, a twenty-seven-year-old suburban woman had been arrested for leaving her children at home unattended while she drove to a nearby town to engage in acts of prost.i.tution. The woman had been abandoned by her ex-husband-a lawyer-over a year ago and since that time had received no child-support payments from him and had no training and was unable to find a job. Her two boys, aged seven and nine, had been placed in foster homes following her arrest. The woman said she had involved herself in prost.i.tution only to support them.
She thought how horrible it must be to become so desperate as to feel that this was your only option. That if her story were true then this woman had felt backed into the kind of corner in which responsibility and irresponsibility were all but indistinguishable.
The story troubled her.
”Where is he? Where's Owen?”
Andrea Stone was standing over her.
Lydia was aware of her cologne. Georgio, she thought. She was dressed in a dark blue tailored suit and white blouse, wearing a single string of pearls. She looked keyed-up, nervous.
Lydia put the paper aside.