Page 121 of What Boys Learn

“Is that it?”

“That’s neverit. If you looked into my background, Abby, you’d find lots of things. Stupid bar fights. Girls I shouldn’t have dated. Even more girls who shouldn’t have dated me. Things I wish I hadn’t done and that I’d never tell my mother. Know what I’m saying?”

I’d met Robert’s mother, Stella. She seemed like a woman you could tell anything, especially if you were one of her three handsome sons. According to her, they could do no wrong. “Things that would get you cancelled now,” he added, “if you were someone important, and I’m not. You called me a caveman once, and that’s probably true.” He rolled his shoulder back, neck cracking. He’d always said the long hours in the patrol car were bad for his back, as was the time he’d executed a flying tackle in order to stop a man intent on stabbing his wife. “So now you know I never could have been the right role model for Benjamin. I’m a bad influence, just like you always worried I might be.”

“Maybe a little. No one’s perfect.” I leaned over the low table between us, to take a better look at his face. “Plus you’ve been drinking a lot since you stopped working. Even if you’ve stayed at home to do it.”

“Guilty.” He hesitated. “But now you know what I’ve been holding back. I know it means losing your respect all over again. But I’m doing it for a reason. I think you’re holding out on something, too, and I want you to tell me. It’s not for us. It’s for Benjamin. No more secrets.”

I walked over to his desktop computer, on the far side of the living room under the signed and framed Bulls poster—the man would never understand interior decorating but at least he’d taken down theSports Illustratedpinups—and I signed into my email account. I pulled up the full hypnosis transcript but I didn’t let him read it over my shoulder. I had to be in control of this.

I started to tell him about that night—the driving, the drinking. How good it felt to be out of the house, partying with an older crowd. The fact that my brother wanted to get a discount on a used car. The fact that he was willing to offer my virginity for that discount.

“I’ll never know whether he was joking,” I said.

I fast-forwarded to the arrival of the cops, walking down the trail, finally getting picked up again by Grant and Ewan, the girl I had no memory of seeing. Then the accident and the failure to report it.

“I knew Ewan was convicted for what—obstruction of justice?”

“That was one of the charges. They weren’t able to prove that he withheld aid from Grant purposefully or even that he was part of the reason the accident happened in the first place. The only reason he’s still in prison is because he’s assaulted people in jail many times since.”

“But . . . geez. The girl?”

“She never came forward. Grant predicted she wouldn’t. But the next part is worse.”

I told him about Grant and what happened when the driver stopped to ask if Ewan and I needed help.

Robert stared at me, perplexed. “I just can’t see you as a young girl, failing to get help for someone, even if that guy was a jerk.”

“I don’t remember it, but I don’t want that to sound like an excuse. Obviously, I repressed it.”

“You were in shock from the accident. We can’t predict what we’ll do in those situations.” He scooted closer and put a big arm around me, carefully. “I’m sorry, Abby.”

I hugged him back, stiffly, then rolled my chair a foot away, needing more space, more time. Just talking about it made it all seem real in a way that made everything worse.

“So Curtis Campbell has something on you.”

“And that’s only half of it.” I’d saved the hardest for last—telling him about Benjamin possibly giving Izzy the clonidine that had caused her fatal reaction. “Curtis has something on Benjamin, too.”

Robert offered me another beer but I declined. It was nearly 11P.M. No one would be coming and going to Curtis’s vacated place at this hour. I knew what I needed to do next, and I knew I would do it alone.

45

BENJAMIN

Iexpect Dr. C to introduce himself to Lenora as Matt. Instead he says his name is Troy and he’s a podiatrist. He leads us aboard his boat and corrects me when I call it a yacht.

“Yachts are thirty-three feet and up,” Lenora says. “This is a Catalina 22.”

It’s written on the side, I realize now. And the boat’s name is written on the back. Lenora asks Dr. C—“Troy”—about the sailboat’s cutesy name, as I’m sure every person must, and now I see why he called himself a podiatrist, in order not to veer so far from the truth that she’d get suspicious.

“Pair of docs, get it?” he says.

“Oh. I get it now.”

“Good for you, dear. It’s a double entendre.”

They keep talking to each other—“bonding” my mother would call it—the whole time we’re getting ready to sail. I barely exist. He talks about her name and asks her if she likes Edgar Allan Poe and together they talk about engine sizes and jib sails. Just the stuff I thought she wanted to leave behind.