Keep Quiet(66)

Ryan’s face fell, and he looked suddenly sad, but he didn’t cry. “Mom, you’re right. It isn’t my business. It’s more important that you explain it to Dad than to me.” Ryan faced Jake, with a heavy sigh. “Dad. I’m sorry. I thought you should know. Good night.” Ryan closed the door, leaving Jake facing the door, turned away from Pam.

“Jake,” Pam said hoarsely. “I can explain.”

Jake found himself walking stiffly to the door. He didn’t know why. He didn’t want to leave but he couldn’t stay.

“Jake,” Pam said, louder. “It’s over, it’s history. I ended it last year, before we went to counseling. It didn’t last that long, only six months. It was a symptom, and I knew it—”

Jake opened the door and walked out, not sure what came next. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have a plan.





Chapter Thirty-one


Jake found himself stopped at a red light, sitting at the wheel of the rental Toyota, without even remembering getting in. He came into the moment as if he’d been pulled into the present from his own subconscious, a black void that matched the darkness around him. He didn’t have his coat on but was still in his shirt and tie from work. He was stopped at an intersection, and there were no other cars on the street. The dashboard clock read 9:28 P.M. He’d been driving for two hours.

He checked the street sign on the corner to his right, but he couldn’t read it. His eyes were blurry and his nose leaking; he realized he’d been crying. He wiped his nose on his shirt-sleeve, looked around, and saw only the spiky black trunks and branches of trees, silhouetted in the light from the windows and front-door fixtures of the large houses, whose peaked roofs and massive entrances hulked shadowy in the night.

He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. He felt dislocated, disoriented, generally out of place. He glanced at the dashboard and determined that the car had a no-frills GPS, but he didn’t bother to turn it on. He didn’t know where he wanted to go. He had no destination, so he didn’t need a route.

When the light turned green, he was in no hurry to hit the gas, but he did anyway, proceeding straight through the intersection without knowing whether he was heading north or south, toward home or away. It didn’t matter. It was all uncharted terrain. He didn’t know how he had gotten here, not only literally, but to the point where he’d become a suburban husband and father who was driving around aimlessly, in a car that wasn’t even his own. He’d worked hard his whole life and followed all the rules. He had risen out of the ashes. He was a self-made man; he had made himself and his business. But the other things he had made were a son who was self-destructing and a wife who had fallen in love with a better suit.

Jake cruised down the dark street, hollow and aching inside, thinking of Pam. He wanted to know when her affair had started, and why. He wanted to know where they did it, how they did it, how many times they did it. Where they did it, which house, which car. If she liked it better with him, if he was a better lover. Who started it, and exactly how it ended. If it ended, why he was still calling her.

The darkness seemed to envelop Jake, swallowing him whole, but still he drove forward into the void. He didn’t know what Pam saw in Dr. Dave, other than the fact that he was so frigging helpful with Ryan. Jake kicked himself for not guessing that something was going on between them. There were too many phone calls, too many times she quoted Dr. Dave. Jake began to doubt the whole shooting-coach thing, questioning whether Dr. Dave became Ryan’s shooting coach in order to get close to Pam, in the first place.

Jake had never felt so stupid in his life, ashamed that he hadn’t realized she was cheating. He’d never cheated on her and had never really been tempted. His sin had been that he worked too hard, not that he ever dreamed of straying. He saw himself in her; they were so much alike that he never imagined she’d break the rules, or break her word, ever. That was why he’d been so surprised tonight, when she’d agreed to keep the secret about Pike Road. He always thought of Pam as the good girl to his good boy, and it was more her style to do what she had eventually done—nag him until he finally went to a marriage counselor. He didn’t want to think about her sleeping with another man, underneath another man, with her legs wrapped around him.

Jake spotted another car on the road, driving toward him in the oncoming lane, its high beams on. It was the kind of thing that usually made him nuts, and he would normally blink his lights to signal the other driver to lower his high beams. If that didn’t work, he’d been known to turn on his own high beams out of spite. But tonight he didn’t do either of these things. On the contrary, he fed his car some gas, and a different idea popped into his head:

He considered crossing the yellow line and driving straight into the lights.

He drove forward and so did the oncoming car, about a hundred yards apart, then ninety, then eighty. He thought of how easy it could be, just to jerk the steering wheel to the left at the last moment. He wouldn’t have to think about it, time it, or work very hard to make it happen. It would be just like when he hit the Dumpster. Easy, peasy.

He looked directly into the high beams, and they seared into his eyes. The cars were seventy feet apart, then sixty, then fifty. He hit the gas and stared into the light, forcing himself not to squint or look away, flooding his brain with a brightness that obliterated the houses, driveways, and recycling bins, like the white-hot blast of an atomic bomb.