Irreversible Read online

  Okay, I was interjecting. “Don’t be mental, Ray. This was not in any way your responsibility.”

  “Oh. I thought you were asleep. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry. Don’t mind me, go back to sleep.”

  “You have nothing, nothing to be sorry about. I can’t listen to that. I mean it, if you don’t stop that kind of talk—and that includes that kind of thinking, and I will know—then I swear I will pull up this door handle and toss myself right out onto the road.”

  “Jesus, Keir,” he said, sweating a little from the strain of it, of everything. He mopped his brow, then put a hand on his chest. “You know, there is a limit to how much load my system can take in one day.”

  “Right,” I said. “So it’s good we are done for now.”

  “It is,” he agreed.

  He went back to concentrating on the highway and getting us home. I went back to gazing and dozing.

  Ten minutes later he was at it again. “I was thinking,” he said.

  “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, it’s funny.”

  “Oh, well, funny is welcome. Desperately welcome right now.”

  “I know. So, I was thinking, even if you did fling yourself out there into the rocks at sixty-five miles an hour, when I doubled back to come and get you, you’d probably look exactly the same as you do right now.”

  “Oh, is that right?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding and smiling. He was pleased with himself and his contribution to my healing process through therapeutic hilarity. I was happy I could do that for him.

  “And you woke me up for that?”

  “Ah, you weren’t sleeping.”

  “Nah, I wasn’t. But I think I will now, okay? So . . .”

  “Sure, of course,” he said, waving me toward my window.

  It took less than a minute.

  “Keir,” he said, his voice all the way back to solid.

  I gave him a huffy dramatic sigh for his troubles. “Yes, Father?”

  “You are a good boy. A good man. Come what may, you know I know that.”

  I looked at his big, sad, proud head. I had no impulse to look out the window anymore, or to sleep. I twisted my body toward the inside of the car, toward my father, and settled in with an eye on him for the rest of the way.

  “I do know that, and it means everything to me.”

  At that, he whale-inhaled again, this time so deeply and for so long that by the time he breathed out again he could have delivered air from one state into another.

  “I remember now,” he said. “Nobody called me. Rollo came to the house.”

  I got a blast of hot blood filling my head.

  “Rollo?”

  “He didn’t say much. Chauffeur’s code or some stupidity. But under ordinary circumstances, Rollo don’t worry. It’s practically his motto, ‘Rollo don’t worry.’ He came to my door, Keir, so that I could see him worry.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad.”

  “Is there anything for us to talk about right now, Son?”

  “Nothing, Dad.”

  “Where is Gigi?”

  “I thought you trusted me completely.”

  “I do. Nothing changes that. I just need to know what I need to know to help you as best I can. A gentleman would see her home safe. Or, from where I sit, a gentleman asks about the lady. So, I’m asking.”

  “The lady is at home, Dad, same as the gentleman would like to be. That’s all he wants at this point, to be home. Please. Just home, and quiet.”

  What I got, on command, was quiet at least. A lot of dense, thick quiet.

  It was still a marvel, still a surprise and a responsibility I needed to be more aware of. How simple and effortless it was for me to make the man smile like he was a few minutes ago. And conversely, how easily and lethally I could make him suffer over me.

  ties binding

  One of the old man’s greatest accomplishments was shielding me from whatever nastiness lurked outside our doors and windows, waiting for a shot at me. I heard phones ringing and knocks at the door, muffled and not-so-muffled voices. And even if some percentage of all that was a product of my scared imaginings, or my increasingly torturous nightmares, that still left plenty of scope for unfortunate reality. I burrowed farther and farther into the darkened spider hole of my bedroom and hid from whatever I could.

  If you talked to some people, they might say Ray shielded me from too much nastiness. My sisters might be among those people; certainly Mary would. She’d say it didn’t do father or son much good, for him to be taking my lumps when I should have been learning to take them for myself.

  But she would be wrong. He always did his job when it came to me, and he was always brilliant at his job. And even if it felt a little uncomfortably familiar to be in the defensive posture we were in now, it didn’t make Ray wrong and it didn’t make Mary right.

  The familiar part of this was probably because I was innocent. I was innocent of ever doing anything wrong to Gigi Boudakian. And I was innocent of doing anything wrong when I made a hard tackle and somebody got hurt. He wasn’t crippled, like people said, and he obviously wasn’t killed. But he never played football again.

  • • •

  When you hit a guy with all your being, hit him the way a car hits a moose, you would expect it to hurt both of you. But it doesn’t hurt the hitter, if the hitter has hit perfectly. It is a strange sensation, almost a magical sensation. The car takes a crumpling, and the moose takes a mangling.

  My timing was perfect. The defensive back hit the receiver at the instant the ball arrived. A beautiful pop and explosion, like fireworks.

  And that was that.

  I never received so many hard slaps on the back.

  “Way to bang him, Keir,” somebody said, and banged me on the back.

  “Way to stick.”

  “Mowed him, Keir. Absolutely killed him.”

  • • •

  There. See there? Right there? That was a moment. Only I didn’t know it was a moment because I guess I had not had many moments of that type in my life, so I didn’t recognize it. I recognize it now. That there are precise moments in your life where you can grab hold of a thing and get it under control or you can miss that chance and let the thing get away from your control altogether and forever.

  I was no kind of killer. You could have asked anybody who really knew me, and they’d have told you there was nothing like that in me anywhere. I was just not that kind of guy. All I did was, I did my job and I did it very well, and as a consequence somebody got seriously hurt and I somehow got a reputation out of it.

  I made my name as a two-way player. I was a consistently good kicker, but I was a sporadically good defensive back. I made a lot more field goals than I did tackles, but when I made a tackle, I made it hard. I made it loud and I made it count and I made it hurt the receiver so that he would have to be thinking about it all day.

  In the big picture, my field goals mattered more, and that was what I loved. As for my reputation and what people wanted out of me, well, I was the only back in the state who could hit hard enough to be worth a damn. Except when I didn’t hit hard enough.

  Although everybody—teammates, coaches, parents—seemed to agree. I was gonna someday hit hard enough. And whoo-boy, when that day came, everybody hoped to be there to see it. Might even kill somebody, I heard once. Then I heard it again.

  I should have said right there on the spot, I did not kill him. I tackled him. Nobody’s going to bother nicknaming a guy “the Tackler,” and if they did, who would notice, or care or carry it on?

  But “the Killer”? That sticks to a guy. And no matter how wrong it might be, it follows him.

  • • •

  It was news. There were inquiries and investigations and editorials. I was home from school for a week, for my own good, for my peace of mind, because I couldn’t possibly concentrate, couldn’t hear a word with the constant roar in my ears coming from inside my own head and
from all points around it. The phone rang all the time, and my dad answered it. He never put me on the phone, never shied away from a question, never lost his patience with school officials or local radio or whoever. He took off work and stayed there with me and played Risk, the game burning on all week as we took great chunks of continents from each other and then lost them again in between phone calls and lots of silence and lots of talks where he said not much more than that everything was going to work out all right and that it didn’t much matter anyway what any investigation said because he already knew, knew me, and knew that his internal, in-his-own-heart investigation had cleared me.

  “You’re a good boy,” he reminded me every time I needed reminding.

  • • •

  By Friday of the week I stayed home, everybody had looked into the accident. It was an accident. And also, it was no accident, anything but an accident. Everybody concluded—though not happily—that I had not done anything wrong. I had not done anything out of line. I had not done anything blameworthy.

  “An unfortunately magnificent hit, in the universe of football,” was what the writer called it, in the article about my being cleared.

  • • •

  I was cleared of having violated either the letter or the spirit of the laws of football. A whole lot of people would have said that I had honored the spirit of football. I was cleared because I never did anything wrong. Because good guys don’t do bad things. And it seemed like my father was the only person in the world who didn’t need an official report to tell him I was a good guy.

  But by the time I returned to school, I was the Killer. Even if I wasn’t.

  • • •

  There was only one breach of Ray’s steel curtain defensive operation, a week or so after he’d brought me home.

  I didn’t even know for sure where I was when I first saw them. It was like one of those hokey movies when a dead person sees all the loved ones ringed around his hospital bed and saying wonderful things about him. But this wasn’t going to be one of those.

  Ray was standing at the foot of my bed. Fran was sitting to my left, on a plain oak chair brought in from the kitchen table. Her hands were folded, but opening and closing repeatedly in a worried exercise of distraction. From the way she studied my face, I’d say that would have been the source of the worry. Mary was standing, to my right, arms folded, her face all pinched up and dubious. She would have been worried too, but determined not to show it until I was judged worthy. That was pretty much them. I had been dying to see them, and dreaded seeing them.

  “Wow, hi,” I said, propping myself up with some effort to a sitting position. “This is a surprise. I didn’t expect to see you guys here. I didn’t expect to see them, did I, Ray? Or did I forget?”

  “You forgot,” Ray said. “But it’s understandable. Everybody understands.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing, though,” Mary said, sitting abruptly down on the side of the bed, right against my hip. I was wishing she had also brought over a chair, as her gesture of sibling solidarity might have looked like a comfort, but it felt like a challenge. “There is a problem with that, which I’m sure is not a surprise to you. There is a lot of not-understanding going around just now.”

  “Misunderstanding,” I said as directly as I dared.

  “That is an important distinction,” Mary said, nodding.

  This was exactly the fierce, lawyerly, social champion quality Mary always had and I always idolized. I remembered thinking that if you had Mary on your side, you were always going to be all right, and how lucky I was knowing that I had her. I never considered what it would feel like to be on the opposing side to Mary’s side. She was making me consider it at this moment, though, and it took no time to conclude that I much preferred the way it used to be.

  “Oh, stop with that already, May,” Fran said. There was something I loved about the way she would call Mary “May” sometimes, and that nobody else ever did. Dad and Mary both used to correct her and she never heeded them. Then Mary switched to saying that Fran was just reducing her to one syllable out of jealousy. “Look at him. There’s no need to intimidate him further, is there?”

  Mary made no move to speak, just held my eyes locked to hers while Ray echoed softly, “No, no need for that.”

  “What happened?” Fran asked, finally.

  I had not been asked that, which after all was something I knew should have happened already. Ray the gatekeeper was the answer there. Nobody short of law-enforcement types would get anywhere near me with that question as long as I was recuperating. And the only person who did get close to me before now was Ray himself. And he would have considered it maximum treachery to even think the question silently to himself. Ah, my Ray.

  “Nothing,” I insisted in a pitch of urgency that would have embarrassed my twelve-year-old self. That self would have also well recognized the absence of any detail or substance in my response.

  “Nothing,” Mary said. “That, Young Brother, is the kind of statement that isn’t likely to inspire anybody to rally behind you. And in case you haven’t been keeping up with things outside this one house, rallying behind you looks like a tough enough proposition already without you lending that kind of hand.”

  “May-ree,” Fran said, throwing her hands up in protest and scold. This caused her sister to sigh with frustration and her brother to nearly weep with gratitude. On the inside, there was no nearly about it, and I struggled to hold it together. Ray, now slumped over my footboard, may have been losing that same struggle.

  “Oh, May-ree what?” Mary snapped. “Please, Fran. If it was any one of our friends at school, we’d be among the first ones to rush in and support her.”

  I turned quickly to the left, anxious to hear Fran’s defense of me. There wasn’t one. Her eyes turned down.

  “Exactly,” Mary said. She appeared extra emboldened as she turned fire back on me. “Now, Keir,” she said, with force but also now with a small, really small, note of old recognizable warm feeling for me. “You must realize that ‘Nothing happened’ is not going to satisfy anybody who doesn’t happen to be your dad.” Fran growled low at her; Ray showed no sign of noticing the remark. “You have more to say than that, I know you do. I’m trying to be fair. I want to give you a chance, to have a voice, and I really want to believe only the best things about you because you’re my brother and I love you.”

  “No matter what,” Fran ventured cautiously.

  When I then quickly looked toward Fran with a nod and a weak smile of thanks for that much, this seemed to provoke Mary, who grabbed my forearm and my attention but good.

  “But like I said, if it was a friend of Fran’s or mine from school, we would be right there stuck into it. No matter who turned out to be her attacker.”

  “I never attacked anybody!” I yelled in my sister’s accusing face. I found myself surprised when that did not seem to back her off even a little. When I realized she still held a grip on my arm, I yanked it roughly away from her. When she still remained planted defiantly, on the side of my bed, right up against my hip despite my obvious desire to get up, I had had enough. I took my forearm and applied it to Mary the way coaches taught me to apply it to tight ends, and receivers who wanted to block me off the play. I swatted her with all the force I had stored up lying in that bed all those days, batted her off the bed, out of my way, and into the wall with a thud.

  “Keir!” Fran gasped, smacking the side of my head furiously as she ran to Mary’s aid. I had been head-slapped by brutes three times Fran’s weight, but none of them ever rocked me more. I held my skull tight with both hands in case any fragments tried to shoot across the room.

  “She can’t just hold me like that, like her prisoner,” I yelled. “She can’t do that.”

  When I passed Ray, he declined to rise from his personal huddle position. He remained instead folded and faceless, over the glossy blue footboard of the bed he’d bought for me eleven better years earlier.

  It took Fran ten min
utes to come and find me. More like, it took nine minutes to see to Mary and one minute to walk to where she knew I would be.

  “Oh yeah, this should fix everything. Good plan, Keir.”

  We were in the timeless basement, where I had learned to love the scents of damp, dust, and decomposing fabrics, and to associate that with solitude and peace. She was standing over me, fists on hips, as I sat in the tiny wooden toddler chair wedged between the big ancient furnace and an exposed and decaying stone wall. But it had always been decaying, and would always be, so it was all right.

  “You found me,” I said, something like joking.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m clever like that.”

  It had taken me years to work out that nobody went looking for me when I ran away because they knew where I was and that I was safe. It wouldn’t have killed them to fake a little worry, but I suppose waiting me out was better for making me grow more self-sufficient. Maybe. Who knows?

  “You can’t be shoving people like that, Keir.”

  “Some people need a shove,” I said, sounding every bit my six-year-old self.

  “And some people really, really need not to be shoving.”

  “Hnn,” I said. “How’s Ray doing?”

  “Ray? Ray, Keir?”

  “Ray, yeah, Ray. Our father. The guy who’s been doing all the taking care of me. I’m not going to worry about Mary, because Mary’s just fine. Mary’s always just fine, so I won’t be losing any sleep over her, that’s—”

  “Shut up, you petulant little brat, and get over yourself. Mary’s methods might need a little work, but at least she is here trying to help you somehow. In spite of yourself, and yes, in spite of Father Ray. You are in potentially serious trouble now, Keir, and you will do yourself no favors by posing as the tough guy you most definitely are not. That is the very type of swaggering macho bullshit you’ve been pulling for the past year or more. It doesn’t suit you and it doesn’t get you anywhere you really want to be and it does not ultimately shield your true softy marshmallow self from all the same stuff that scares everybody.”