Look Closer(84)

“Listen to me, son—”

“Yes or no?” My voice rising. I caught myself, even as my father shushed me with a hand motion. I didn’t want Mom to hear. I couldn’t let Mom hear.

? ? ?

Three minutes to seven. Three minutes until lights out in Grace Village.

Christian slows as he approaches Lauren’s house in his Grim Reaper costume. A rope is tied around his waist several times. A rope? That doesn’t come with the costume. Why a rope?

His costume fits him better than mine fits me. Mine, currently resting inside the pillowcase I’m carrying, nearly touches the ground when I wear it. But Christian is taller. The bottom of his robe only reaches the top of his boots. His Paul Roy Peak Explorer boots.

You and Vicky came up with a nice plan to pin this on me, Christian. But here’s the problem. As a wise man once said, If you’re gonna set someone up, it better be a surprise.

Christian turns up the walkway and disappears into the canopied front porch, a little brick cocoon that will blanket him in privacy when he rings the doorbell, and Lauren answers.

Don’t be long now, Christian.

? ? ?

The Thanksgiving dishes washed and dried, my father sat in our family room, elbows on his knees, staring at a glass of bourbon. Easier than making eye contact with me, standing by the fireplace.

“There are things that . . . a young man like you might not be able to appreciate,” he said. “Your mother and I, our relationship—I still love your mother and I always will, Simon. I always will—”

“But Lauren fucks you.”

“Hey, listen.”

I raised my eyebrows. I’d never spoken to my father that way in my life, but he had surrendered the high ground. “Okay, I’m listening. But that’s what this is, right? Mom’s in a wheelchair, and that doesn’t work for you, does it? You’ve got all this money now, you’ve dropped twenty pounds, you even have a new hairstyle. The New Slimmed-Down, Swingin’ Single Ted Dobias. And Mom doesn’t really fit into your plans anymore. You want some fun. And Lauren’s fun, all right.”

He raised a hand to his face. “You’ve always known how to paint me in the worst light.”

“Oh, it’s not that hard, Dad. Believe me.” I stood up. “This has to end right now. You and Lauren end right now.”

“That’s not going to happen, son.” On that point he was firmest, resolute.

I walked toward him, felt my lips quiver. “You’re going to leave Mom? Now when she’s unable to—”

“No, no, no.” He waved at me. “I’m not going to leave your mother. I’d never do that.”

“But you’re not going to stop seeing Lauren.”

He took a moment, then closed his eyes and nodded. “That’s right. I’m not. That’s my choice. It’s not yours, Simon. I’m sorry, but it’s not your decision.”

I didn’t know how to react. I could throw something, break something, but how would that help? I could punch my dad’s lights out, but how would we explain that to Mom?

Mom. The woman who gave everything to me, to both of us.

“And I think we can agree,” said my father, “that it’s better if your mother doesn’t know.”

I didn’t tell my mother. In the state she was in, a shell of her former self—sometimes lucid and alert, sometimes drifting and foggy—I kept her in the dark. I didn’t tell her, afraid that it would be the last straw, that it would devastate her. I couldn’t tell her.

I didn’t let Lauren Lemoyne wedge her way into my parents’ marriage. But I let her stay there with my silence. I became their accomplice.

We never spoke of Lauren again after that. I commuted back and forth to Hyde Park for my freshman year at U of C, leaving Mom at home during the day with our caregiver, Edie. I never said a word when Dad had unusually late “meetings” on Saturday nights or on Christmas Eve, when his “work” kept him later than normal on a Tuesday or Thursday night. I never commented. Nor did my mother.

Did she know? Did my mother, the smartest person I’ve ever known, the sharpest legal mind—even with her stroke-addled brain, did she know what he was doing? If she did, she didn’t say. Neither did I.

And neither did my father, until that day, nearly a year later, late October of 2004, when Dad came home and burst into tears, desperate and ashamed, and admitted that he’d put Lauren’s name on the account with all the money, adding her as a signatory with full rights and access, and now all the money was gone. “She said she felt like a second fiddle,” he told me through sobs. “She just wanted to feel like something of mine was hers.”

And that something had to be the account that held all our money?

But that’s what you do with the people you love. You trust them. You trust them until they prove you wrong. Until they betray you.

And then, you react however you’re wired to react.

? ? ?

“Happy Halloween!”

Well, turns out, it’s an exaggeration to say everyone in Grace Village comes out their doors at seven, at least this year, but many people do, calling out the finale to trick-or-treating.

But they’re pretty consistent with the lights. Within a second or two, virtually every light on every house goes out, the village plunging into near complete darkness, only a few measly streetlamps at the intersections.