The Unwilling(22)

7


I didn’t tell anyone what happened between Jason and Tyra, but thought about it all night and even when I woke. I’d never seen such raw emotion in a woman or a man so cool in the face of it. Tyra’s volatility was beyond question, yet in two short encounters, she’d bared everything a woman could bare—body and soul—and I was frustrated at how small I felt afterward, how my own life felt made of expectation, stillness, and pent-up frustration.

I wondered what Robert would say about that.

And what Jason was doing.

After school, I drove by the house on Water and Tenth, but no one there had seen Jason since the dustup with Tyra. They didn’t know where he’d gone or when he was coming back. “What about Tyra?” I asked.

“That crazy bitch?”

No one had seen her, either, so I left them on the sofa, and felt my way to the condo Sara and Tyra shared across town. I didn’t know if I wanted to see Sara or not, but hoped for some kind of epiphany. Parked on the street, though, nothing came. Her door was closed, the windows blank. I tried to imagine arousing the kind of passion I’d seen in Tyra, the qualities it would take in a man to generate so much desire and rage. I couldn’t get there, couldn’t even imagine it. I chewed on that, disheartened, then remembered Becky Collins and how she’d pressed that slip of paper into my hand.

Saturday night.

Seven o’clock.

On the way home, I took the top down, turned up the radio. At dinner, I spoke when addressed, used my manners, and ate everything on my plate. The quiet was no less oppressive, but I thought of Becky and Saturday night. I doubted she’d kiss me, but that was all right. We’d talk, and get to know each other.

I thought I had time.

I was wrong.

The trouble came first in hints, and started with my father. He stopped me after dinner, and took me into his office, a narrow room jumbled with files and boxes and books. Family photos covered one wall, awards and citations the other. “I don’t want your mother hearing this.” He closed the door, and looked hesitant. I’d seen my father angry, perplexed, and disappointed, but this reticence was strange to me. He twisted his fingers, and had trouble meeting my eyes. “Have you seen your brother?” he finally asked.

“Not for a few days.”

“No phone calls? Nothing?”

“What’s going on?”

He moved to the window, and peered into a dark night broken by streetlamps on the road. He stood there for a bit, then turned as if he’d reached some kind of decision. “Sit down, son.” We sat in flanking chairs. He leaned close. “I think Jason might be in trouble. They’re just rumors at this point, but cop rumors. You understand the difference?”

“No.”

“Okay. Fair. How should I say this? Your brother’s name has come up in, uh … recent investigations.”

“Drugs?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“His history, I guess.”

“Has he been doing drugs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you tell me if you did?” He studied my face as if looking for a secret door. “How about his location? If you knew where he was, would you tell me that?”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

“I can’t discuss that.”

“Hey, you brought me in here.”

“To ask if you’d seen him. To warn you. Jason might be a lost cause. You’re not.”

“Jason is not a lost cause.”

“I’m not asking you to rat him out or to stop seeing him. If he’s in trouble, I can help him. If he gets in touch, tell him that.”

“You could tell him yourself if you hadn’t chased him out of our lives.”

“Complications, son. We’ve discussed this.”

“Will he be okay? The cops, I mean.”

“If I can help him,” he said. “If I can find him in time.”

He touched my shoulder, nodding as he spoke. Neither of us knew the world was ending.





8


The same darkness pressing down on Gibby’s house deepened the sky above Lanesworth State Prison Farm, forty-five miles east. If anything, the night sky there was blacker, unspoiled as it was by streetlights or traffic or civilization of any kind. First opened in 1871, the walls at Lanesworth were three feet thick, the windows little more than barred slits in the stone. Situated at the end of a four-mile private road, the prison filled an empty corner of a rural county; and though it had not worked as an actual prison farm in over forty years, the signs of its original intent could still be seen in the ditch lines and fallow fields and new-growth forest. Before nature had retaken so much of it, men had suffered in the cold, died in the heat. The chain gangs were long gone, but the prison still sprawled across eighteen thousand acres of lowland and scrub. Built to house a thousand men, it held twice that number now. A few inmates were classified as moderate offenders, potentially dangerous, but most were the worst the state could offer. Killers. Drug dealers. Serial rapists.

In a subbasement beneath death row was a string of cells that stayed warm when others were cold, and cool when others were hot. In one such cell, a killer stood beside a bed, but it was not his bed, and not his cell. He didn’t like the man whose cell it was, but nothing at Lanesworth was about like.