If I Forget You(34)

Henry steps back, and for a while he just paces around barefoot, his hands in his hair. Then Ted is there and it is so surreal: Time has stopped. Margot’s father is on his feet. He is being led away by Ted and Margot.

Thirty minutes later, the police are there, a man and a woman from the sheriff’s office. The conversation is brief. He has broken a man’s jaw. How does he feel about that?

He’s lucky he’s not being arrested for murder, the female cop says. A punch like that can kill a man.

Henry doesn’t try to explain. He looks away from the sun and to the lake, where the steeples of Bannister College can be seen, ancient turrets rising up over the hills on the western side.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I am so sorry.”

They cuff Henry’s hands behind his back. And as they take him away in the car to Seneca Falls, he looks out the window at the passing cornfields that line the rural highway, their tassels nodding slightly in the warm summer breeze, placid witnesses to what he has done.





Henry, 1991

After he is processed, they take Henry to the back to one of the two cells in the sheriff’s office. They allow him to make his phone call and he struggles with whom to call. It certainly isn’t going to be his parents; just the thought of the two of them trying to figure out what to do from so far away, he can’t imagine.

So Henry calls Deborah Weinberg, his poetry professor, and an hour later, she is there with her husband, who teaches comparative literature and whom Henry knows mainly in passing. As they sit in wheeled-in office chairs across from where he is behind bars, he explains it as best as he can, that he didn’t know it was Margot’s father, Thomas Fuller, but thought it was some stranger assaulting her. Oh, if he could have that moment back.

“Wait,” Deborah’s husband, David, says in his soft voice. “Thomas Fuller? From the board of trustees?”

Henry nods.

“Jesus,” David says.

Deborah shoots her husband a look. “First things first,” she says. “We need to get you out of here.”

“They said I am going in front of a judge today,” says Henry.

“You need a lawyer,” David says.

“They’re giving me one, I guess.”

“We know somebody,” Deborah says.

That afternoon, Henry meets with his lawyer, a disheveled older man with the remarkable name of Rudolph Holmes. His office is on Main Street in the town of Bannister and he specializes in Bannister students in trouble.

“I don’t have any money for a lawyer,” Henry says.

“Deborah and Dave are taking care of it,” Rudolph says.

Henry bows his head, for the kindness humbles him and he doesn’t want it, but he also knows he has no choice.

The hearing itself lasts all of ten minutes once it is his turn. It is all a soupy mirage. They rise and move to the tables at the front. There is some kind of announcement that precedes this, which Henry hears as background noise. The woman before him, clearly pregnant, gets sentenced to forty-five days for bouncing checks. Henry tries to figure this out. When she will have the baby?

Henry listens to Rudolph Holmes saying it was all a mistake and that this is a good kid with no priors, a straight-A student, you understand, who thought he was protecting his girlfriend. What person would have done different? And, by the way, there is no history of violence or mental illness.

“A good kid, Your Honor,” Rudolph Holmes says, and then he sits down.

The judge, a small dark-haired woman with thick glasses, looks over at Henry and then back to the assistant district attorney. A few minutes later, he is outside, having been released on his own recognizance and into the custody of the Weinbergs, distinguished professors and unassailable citizens of Bannister.

David pats him on the back as he climbs into the back of their Volvo and then they take him on the same drive the sheriff took him on earlier, though in reverse. In the bright sun, they pass the cornfields, and then the road opens up and he can see the entirety of the lake stretching south toward Watkins Glen.

They pull down the long driveway to the winery, and when they come around the final loop through the vines to where it opens to a small sandy parking lot, Ted is waiting there, as if expecting them, and next to him are Henry’s two duffel bags. He hadn’t thought this far until now, but it is all he needs to know, and David and Deborah don’t even turn off the engine of the car as he gets out and walks over to Ted.

Ted looks at him and says, “You understand I don’t have a choice.”

“I know,” says Henry.

Ted lifts the bags and hands them to Henry. Henry stares at Ted for a moment and then Ted nods, as if there is nothing else to say, and Henry knows this is true.

David and Deborah take Henry back to their house, a two-story redwood house designed by Cornell architecture students, deep in a wooded lot a mile east of campus. On the way there, they drive through the heart of Bannister College, past the brick dorms and the great stone buildings. Henry has never seen it like this before, practically empty without any students, only a solitary figure visible here and there on the pathways that are normally bustling with young men and women, backpacks slung over their shoulders.

That night, Deborah makes up a bed for Henry in the guest room. The house is like nothing Henry has ever seen before, a great room of wide-plank redwood at the center of it, with bookshelves that extend from the floor to the ceiling, and two ladders on rails for access to the higher books. It might be the most beautiful thing Henry has ever seen, and looking around that room—that library—with something approaching wonder, Henry even forgets the events of the day for a moment.