As soon as Tom wrote his story and got the paper out, he put new laces in a pair of old sneakers, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, and made his way to the Walkers’ house. As he expected, he found Ray Jr. on the court, shooting hoops.
Ray greeted him with a grin and by passing him the ball. The two of them played for half an hour without saying much until Tom, winded, held the ball to take a time-out.
“You know your dad was a hero,” he said. “He died because he was trying to help Angie.”
Tom and Sarah had earlier told Ray everything they knew, and all they had surmised, about what had happened to his father.
“I hate Angie,” Ray said.
“I know.”
“I hope she never comes back.”
Tom arced the ball toward the hoop, Ray rebounded, and the two of them dribbled, defended, and shot baskets for another five minutes, until Tom stopped again.
“I told your mom that you and I would cook dinner tonight.”
“I don’t know how to cook.”
“I was planning to teach you.”
Inside, Tom set out ingredients he’d brought from the Merc, from left to right on the counter, a package of spaghetti, a couple of onions, ground beef, a large can of tomatoes, tomato paste, dried Italian herbs, chili powder, a container of grated parmesan, yellow cheddar cheese, and finally a can of pinto beans.
“This is a trick every man must know,” he said to Ray. “Right here are all the ingredients you need for two staples of the manly diet: spaghetti and chili.”
Ray eyed him skeptically.
“Any woman will think it’s the best meal she ever ate if you cook it.”
Ray nodded.
“Which do you feel like tonight?
“Spaghetti.”
Tom set the chili powder, pinto beans and cheddar to the side.
“We’ll put those away. But if you’d said chili, we would have put these away.” He indicated the spaghetti, Parmesan and herbs.
Tom set Ray up with a cutting board, peeling and chopping the onions, while he rinsed lettuce for a salad.
“It’s late and your mom and Tyler will be home in an hour. Some day when we have more time I’ll show you how to dress the spaghetti sauce up and make it fancier. You can use Italian sausage and add other stuff, like peppers or mushrooms.”
“I don’t like mushrooms.”
“We’ll leave those out, then. You start the chili exactly the same way, chopping onions and browning ground beef, but you just use the chili powder instead of the herbs and add pinto beans.”
Ray nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“I just don’t get why Angie did it,” he said.
Tom didn’t answer quickly, allowing Ray’s question to hang in the air.
Ray had been the odd man out since his father’s disappearance. Angie and her meth baby had commanded all of Sarah’s attention and Ray’s stoicism had made him easy to overlook, as if he were adequately caring for his own broken heart by shooting hoops for hours on end and could be tended to later, if necessary, when it was more convenient. But Tom had known, from his own experience, that Ray was silently bleeding.
“Picture a track athlete running hurdles,” Tom said. “One of the biggest hurdles on the course is drugs and some people just sail over that hurdle and hardly notice it and go on to the next hurdles. Others get tripped up just a little bit but still continue with the race and then they do just fine. Others fall down hard but pick themselves up and still manage to finish. And some fall down and can’t finish.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows. It’s like how some athletes are born with talent and some have to work harder. Some have more drive than others. Some get good coaching and some don’t. Think about Tyler. He was born addicted. That huge hurdle of having to survive drugs was in front of him before he could crawl, even before he took his first breath. That’s just horrible bad luck. It’s nothing he did to himself.”
“Yeah.”
“But he has some good luck too.”
“Like what?”
“He has you for an uncle and Sarah for a grandmother,” Tom said. “Looks like those onions are ready to put in the pan.”
Ray handed Tom the cutting board.
“Tyler is lucky that he has you, too,” he said.
Six weeks later, after she got out of detox, Angie returned home. She looked worse than she had under the throes of addiction, not only her face but her torso and limbs broken out in acne, her eyes vacant; she was more sullen than ever, her affect was flat.
“They say I’ve broken the physical addiction,” she explained to Sarah, plainly reciting a script she’d been taught. “But I prolly won’t feel good again for a long time. They say I’ll need lots of emotional support or I could slip back.”
Mother and daughter hugged tearfully.
But it was no surprise to Tom when Angie disappeared after a few days, leaving Tyler behind. She also left a note telling them not to call the police because nothing bad had happened to her. She was needed to “start over.”
Sarah received a post card, postmarked Los Angeles, the next week.
“I couldn’t stay in Radium,” Angie had scrawled on the back. “I’m going to beautician’s school. Take care of Tyler. I’m sorry.”
Sarah was devastated by the loss of her daughter, which revived all of the pain of losing Ray. The noblest purpose of Ray’s life, protecting Angie from her malevolent father, had failed, but there was some meager consolation that Angie wasn’t entirely lost and might someday return. Closure was at least within sight.
Tom had imagined that closure for him would arrive when he finally learned what had happened to Ray Walker and he could break the story in the pages of the Forum. That had been his ostensible purpose, after all, and presumably the source of his drive: his need to affirm his profession. He sat down several times to start, but found himself blocked.
The problem, in a large sense, was that the tale of Ray’s disappearance wasn’t his to write, at least not as journalism. He had lost all objectivity and his perspective was too personal. He couldn’t report the truth, and certainly not the whole truth, without exposing himself as Mark Brubaker’s killer. To tell a partial truth, withholding the potentially self-incriminating crux of the matter, which was precisely how the truth had been uncovered, seemed impossible because the story wasn’t easily parsed to include what was safe to report and in the public interest and to exclude what wasn’t safe and was nobody’s business because it was deeply personal.
There was an added challenge of sourcing the information, since so much of what he knew was based on his own observations and actions, or on what he was told by the woman he loved, with no other substantiation. There were no living witnesses to support a story Tom might publish asserting that Ray had been killed by DeRichter’s henchman, Randy Wagner. Ray’s motive for trying to blackmail DeRichter was equally without supporting evidence, without revealing the details of Angie’s birth, which would have been a betrayal of both Sarah and Ray Walker and the very basis of the life they had led together.
Tom might have been able to write his way around all of those problems. But what could he do with Sheriff Trace Martin’s complicity? If Martin had agreed to let Tom off the hook with regard to the Brubaker killing, the obvious quid pro quo was that Tom would not look deeply into the sheriff’s relationship with Albert DeRichter, which surely had involved payoffs. Martin had strongly hinted that he knew exactly what happened to Ray Walker, just as he knew exactly what happened to Mark Brubaker. In both cases he had his own reasons, admittedly venal, for looking the other way.
In short, if Tom tried to report any aspect of the story, he would likely “end up with a big ole mess,” just as Martin had warned him could happen during an early interview after Ray first disappeared. “You don’t always report every detail you know, now do you?” Martin had asked then. And, of course, the answer was that no reporter ever reports all he knows. Along with information he may deem irrelevant, there are facts that can’t be verified and sources to protect. In this case, the primary source in need of protection was Tom himself. Nor did Tom see any percentage in either provoking or exposing Martin, however deserving he was of a prison cell. Their truce was fragile and could too easily be undone.
Neither truth nor justice is always best served in the public sphere, Tom reasoned. Sometimes newspapers unwittingly publish fictions and sometimes truths are best kept confidential. Even more frequently, the truth is misapprehended by people in the grip of fear or confusion or by those whose selfish motives cloud their perceptions. A good lie can have a half-life far longer than several human lifetimes, and when a secret is well kept the truth may be lost to human memory. By way of example, Tom was now the only living person who knew how Whispering Jim died. Unlike Ray’s disappearance, Jim’s was a story he could write and publish, and without compromise. Indeed, he felt a compulsion to write it and redeem Jim from the dust. There was no risk of betrayal in a story that began thusly: “The week before he died in the North Mountain fire, Dick DeRichter, the West End’s legendary Uranium King, revealed the previously unreported details of how his partner, Whispering Jim Stewart, disappeared in Iberia Canyon almost fifty years ago. Now that DeRichter has died, the story can be told.”
As DeRichter had allowed, Jim was now “history,” and so was DeRichter himself, and they were now immune to betrayal or retribution. But when the truth is irretrievable or unprintable, the only compensation may be karmic justice. Just so, in the public record, what happened to Ray Walker would forever remain a mystery.
At the same time, with the mystery of Ray’s disappearance solved to their own satisfaction, and with this truth as the basis of their bond, Tom and Sarah had reaffirmed their love for one another. They lived as a couple in the doublewide that Dick DeRichter had originally purchased for his mistress, Elizabeth Walker, and his bastard son. He and Sarah had become the parents to Tyler and Ray Jr. Soon, Tom thought, he would take his new family back East to meet his mother and sister. Someday, he and Sarah would quietly get married.
In all of this, although it had come at a high cost and was undoubtedly imperfect, there was a deeply satisfying sense of equilibrium having been achieved and of justice having been served.
Circumstance was the most powerful force in most people’s lives, Tom concluded, far more of a factor than their ambition or will or desire. That was as true of a kid growing up in suburban Boston who unaccountably found himself running a community newspaper on the West End as it was of the daughter of polygamists who was born there and never left, but the native West Ender had the advantage of never indulging any other conceit. Character was crucial, too, but Tom could never explain where Sarah got hers, or Ray Walker his, for that matter, making character largely a matter of circumstance, too.
In a world of unyielding moral ambiguity, each accommodation Tom had made seemed to him to have been his best option when it was presented to him. The choices, if they were real choices, added up to the quality of his character. Of course, he might have rejected the messy compromises Radium presented him with and fled, just as he had fled Boston, and he could have gone back to the Keys or maybe in the opposite direction, to Baja. But flight hadn’t worked then and even when he’d felt the most trapped in Radium he retained the awareness, however subconsciously, that running away wouldn’t have worked any better if he’d tried it a second time. Tom’s grip on his new life on the West End had been tenuous, but it was all he had. With foresight, he might have chosen somewhere less harsh to make his stand, someplace like Ireland, under a blanket of green moss, or San Francisco, wrapped in silky fog.
But at some point, and he couldn’t say when, it had become too late for that, and he had resolved to stay and fight.