Sarah had not moved from the corner of the sofa, right where he had left her.
“I haven’t been honest with you,” he said.
“You’ve been honest about Angie,” Sarah said. “She is an addict. I don’t know why I couldn’t admit it. Or even see it. My blindness has been costly.”
“She can get better. I did.”
“You?”
“I was going down, just like Angie is now. It’s the first thing I haven’t told you, that I haven’t been honest about. I haven’t told you where I came from, and why I came to Radium, to get better, to go straight.”
“You came here? To the meth capital? To go straight?” She laughed bitterly. “Well that was one big fucking mistake, wasn’t it?”
He sat next to her.
“Maybe not. Because I met you here.”
“Me?”
“The second thing I haven’t told you, Sarah, is that I have feelings for you….”
“You have feelings for me? Since when?
“Since I don’t know when. Maybe since the first time I saw you at the Merc and you smiled at me, before I knew who you were.”
“And why?”
He shrugged. He knew she was worthy of his love, but not nearly so confident that he was worthy of hers.
“That had better be all,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Because I’m not sure I can take any more honesty right now.”
“Well, there’s more. Mark Brubaker is dead.”
“Dead?”
“It will be in Thursday’s paper.”
“I don’t understand what….”
“I don’t want you to learn about it by reading it in the paper. That’s why I’m telling you now. The sheriff suspects that maybe Ray killed him.”
“Ray? That’s impossible!”
“I know.”
“Ray would never hurt anyone.”
“I know. But if the sheriff thinks Ray is with Anya, you can see why he would suspect he might have had it in for Brubaker. He’d have a strong motive.”
“You can tell him,” she said. “You can just tell the sheriff that Ray is not with Anya. There’s no motive.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I went to see Brubaker after I met Anya. To talk to him. To try to understand what happened to Ray.”
Tom was studying Sarah’s reaction. Was she worthy of his trust? Clearly not, but the impulse had come over him when he was outside in his car, prepared to turn the key and drive away forever. Ray Jr., or whatever he had come to symbolize, had demanded nothing less of him than to unburden himself, to let go of a weight he could no longer carry alone, to trust her in the hope that she might reciprocate and trust him back. Somehow, he had concluded under the boy’s steady gaze that he had nothing to lose because to lose Sarah now would be to lose everything anyway.
Tom had not calculated how much to tell her. He was winging it. But the floodgates were open so he continued.
“And Brubaker attacked me and I defended myself and I killed him.”
“My God,” Sarah said.
“And then I made things worse. I should have reported it, but I didn’t. I thought nobody would ever find him and I wouldn’t ever have to answer for it. Now I don’t really know what I should do.”
Does everyone need a confessor? Was it a measure of Tom’s weakness or of his strength that he rashly opened himself up to Sarah? Probably it was both, he thought, as he sat beside her fully exposed. He did not feel more vulnerable than he had before he blurted out the truth, but he did feel less alone, even knowing that she now had the means with which to betray him. The risk Tom had taken had not been properly calculated, and this might well have been the perp’s fateful mistake, as prophesied by Sheriff Martin. How well did Tom know Sarah, really? Hardly at all.
He could see in her expression that she was struggling to process everything he had told her, and yet her response was not what he expected.
“It’s all my fault,” she said.
“How could it be your fault?”
“I told you about Anya. If I hadn’t done that you wouldn’t even have known about Brubaker.”
“I asked. And you didn’t tell me to go looking for her. In fact, you told me that Anya had nothing to do with Ray’s disappearance, and that turned out to be the truth. Or at least, right now, I think it’s the truth. Anyway, it’s not your fault that I tracked her down. I went looking for her all on my own. And I went out to Brubaker’s on my own, too.”
Tom was once again presented with the question of why he had so insistently pursued a story nobody else seemed to care about.
“I had my own reasons,” he said.
She was watching him intently.
“I was a reporter, Sarah,” he said, opening up the most painful chapter of his past to her. Sparing himself nothing, he told her how he had lost his career in Boston, and how he had abandoned Miranda, leading him, eventually, to Radium.
“I was a good reporter before I got messed up,” he concluded. “I used to care about the truth, just because it was the truth. That used to be reason enough to care about a story, because it was true. But then I lost that, and I think maybe I’ve been trying to get it back.”
“So what happened to me, and what happened to Ray, whatever it is, you’ve made it all about yourself. You’ve been using us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m glad, actually. It’s only fair.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll just have to figure it out.
“Do you realize that this is the first time we’ve ever talked about you,” she added. “Always before, whenever we talk, it’s been all about me.”
Lying in her bed later – after Ray uncharacteristically went to his bedroom early to allow them some privacy – and after they had made love, with Sarah breathing softly by his side in seemingly untroubled sleep, Tom retraced the steps that had drawn him so deeply into a situation that was so utterly hopeless. When had the journey begun? When he first met Miranda? Or when his career crashed and he left her? In Marathon? When he bought the Forum? With the news of Ray Walker’s disappearance?
Or was it only now that he was irretrievably committed, with the realization that he was in love with Sarah?
He couldn’t say. But whatever it was that brought him here, to Sarah’s bed, he didn’t want to leave, not ever. He had made promises to Sarah, but wondered how he could fulfill them. Even if he managed to save himself, how could he possibly save Sarah and Tyler and Ray Jr., and maybe Angie, but not Craig, who was far beyond salvation? He knew that Angie would only hate him for getting involved and Sarah would blame him when Angie crashed. Angie would break her mother’s heart and Craig would be breathing down his neck.
Ray Jr. was almost certainly doomed, too, but there might be hope for the baby, if he got away from the West End soon enough.
This frail family, these broken but gallant people, were now, somehow, his responsibility – because their true and faithful patriarch had gone missing.
Sarah stirred next to him.
“You were right not to tell the sheriff,” she said, sounding as if she was talking out of a dream.
“Why?”
But she didn’t answer because she’d already fallen back asleep.
Tom despised the painful reminder of his own past addiction in the form of the selfishness and the raw greed of a teenaged waif. He knew it was sheer arrogance to think he could help Angie. But there he was just the same, eating a burger with her at lunchtime at the Maverick.
He and Sarah had agreed that he would talk to Angie before the social worker arrived later that afternoon, hopefully to coach her in what to say and how to behave to improve her chances of regaining custody of Tyler as soon as possible. Sarah, meanwhile, had taken another day off work in order to take care of her grandson. Obviously, better arrangements would have to be made quickly, which was precisely the reality Tom hoped to impress on Angie.
Tom knew she would never cop to her addiction, not easily, not in a first meeting, and probably not without being forced to, but had also calculated that nothing would be gained by small talk.
“I know you and your family are going through hell,” Tom said. “And I’d like to help. I told your mom I’d try to help.”
“What can you do?”
She rolled her eyes and snorted to vent her doubts.
“Are you gonna bring my dad back? Can you get the cops to drop the charges against me? Or get me custody of my baby? I know! Maybe you could just write me a big fat check.”
“No big check,” he said, smiling despite himself. The girl was not as dull-witted as she had often appeared. “But I can listen and maybe I can help you figure things out. I might be able to suggest a good move or two.”
“Doubtful,” she said. “But I guess I would appreciate it if you’d keep fucking my mom. That’s a big help, actually. It keeps her busy and off my case.”
Tom was stung, not by the jab but by the surge of rage it produced in him.
“Actually, I’m not fucking your mom” he said mildly, masking his anger, thinking to himself that this was not a lie because what he had done the night before was to make love to Sarah. What’s more, he had done it only once. “What makes you think I am?”
“She told me.”
Had she? Tom doubted it, but it was at least possible and it reminded him that he’d been rash to make himself so vulnerable to her. Angie clearly thought she could wound him with it.
“I don’t really care,” she said. “She can fuck anyone she wants. She’s still married to my dad, so I guess that makes it cheating if you want to get all technical about it. But I think you’re safe. He’s not coming back.”
“How do you know that?”
“He finally got away. Why would he come back?”
“So you think he just left. No reason?”
She shrugged: “I think he probably had a lot of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe he was fucking somebody he wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Or maybe he was sick of us. Maybe he realized he couldn’t handle his daughter. But what’s it to you?”
“I like your dad. It’s not like we’re great friends or anything, but I care about what happened to him. Now that I’ve gotten to know your mom, I like her, too.”
“That’s just so sweet. Isn’t that what they call ‘a friend of the family’?”
“Something like that.”
“So … the great friend of the family fucks the missing husband’s wife. That’s nice.”
She smiled primly. Tom replied with a hard look.
“Who the fuck are you anyway?” she continued, pressing her advantage. “Just because you’re screwing my mom doesn’t mean you’re anything to me.” She stopped herself for effect and added, as if the question had just occurred to her: “But you might as well tell me this much. Is she a good lay?”
Now Tom shook his head sadly.
“She says you’re great,” Angie added, but the forcefulness of her delivery had been blunted, as if she realized too late that she had done enough damage and wanted to stop digging the hole deeper.
“I can see this was a waste of time,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a big mistake. There’s really nothing I can say to you.”
“Nope.”
She had not intended to so successfully push Tom away.
“So we’ll just finish lunch and then go our separate ways.”
The two of them sat quietly for a few minutes, Tom gazing out the plate glass window at the empty highway and Angie staring down at her plate. She twirled a soggy French fry in a pool of ketchup, drawing the pattern of her tangled thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, chastened, her tone dramatically softer. “I know you’re just trying to help.”
“If there’s anyway that I can,” he shrugged.
“I just don’t see what you or anyone else can do. I think I’m a hopeless case.”
“Well, you’re a hard case for sure. Maybe not quite hopeless, but hard as hell.”
She started to tear up.
“Do you even know what the problem is?” he asked.
“It’s everything,” she said, the tears flowing freely. “Everything is all fucked up. My dad disappeared and the baby won’t stop crying and Craig doesn’t help at all. And my mom is on my case all the time. Then I got busted. It’s every fucking last thing.”
Tom anticipated that at some later juncture, if they proceeded that far together, he would broach the problem she had conspicuously not cited: her painfully obvious meth habit.
“I understand,” he said.
She swallowed a sob and put her head down on the table. “It’s not like I want to be like this,” she cried. “This is not who I want to be. This is not who I am! But what can I do?”
“You can come work for me at the paper,” Tom said gently. “Maybe I can help you figure out a way to start over.”
She agreed and they made arrangements for her to report for work the next day, on Tuesday.