CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That’s Really All That’s Important,
Isn’t It?
A few days later, I
turned the store’s date book to August. Since the book showed only
a week per spread, I wasn’t recreating the act that brought my
relationship with Iris to a head, but of course that was the first
thing that came to mind. Soon, Chase would have been dead for
exactly a decade. I’d long ago stopped expecting to hear his voice
when I walked into the house, but I knew I would never stop hearing
his voice in my mind. There was something very arbitrary about
noting a landmark anniversary. It was, of course, just another day
along the line. Still, I knew that the next few weeks were likely
to bring a wide range of emotional storms from which I had only a
modicum of protection.
I hadn’t heard from
Iris since before Tyler’s party. I had no idea what the rhythm of
our friendship would be going forward, but I had a strong
conviction that I needed to let her make that determination. I
didn’t want to force myself upon her by calling. The only way I
could show her that I meant what I said the last time we spoke was
by allowing her to make the first gesture toward whatever future we
would have.
At the same time, I
wondered how she would handle the melancholy that would surely come
in the next few days. She had handled the other anniversaries
without me, though by her own admission not particularly well. And
that was before we had returned to each other’s lives. Of the four
people who were most affected by Chase’s death, three of them would
be together to nurse each other through the memories. But I
suspected that the fourth would choose to deal with it alone. This
saddened me not only for what she was losing, but for what I was
losing as well.
I was in the back
office paying some bills when there was a knock on the door. A guy
in his early twenties poked his head in.
“I was looking for
Richard Penders and the girl up front told me to come back
here.”
“Richard’s not here.
I’m his son. Can I help you?”
“You were Chase
Penders’s brother?”
“Yeah, I’m Chase’s
brother. Who are you?”
“I’m with the
Amber Advisor and I’m doing a piece
about his death ten years ago.”
I turned my chair
around to face the man, shaking my head at the same time. “You guys
really don’t have enough to write about, do you?”
The reporter held up
his hands. He clutched a notebook in one of them. I was sure that
real reporters were using a more high-tech method for note taking
by now but, as I was well aware, real reporters didn’t work for the
Amber Advisor.
“It isn’t the Middle
East Summit, I know, but as far as local stories go, this one
definitely deserves a follow-up. Your father is a prominent area
merchant. Your brother was something of a local celebrity. And this
kind of suicide doesn’t exactly happen in our sleepy little town
every day.”
I edged forward in my
seat. “What did you say?”
“I don’t mean to be
flip. It’s just that this was an unusual event in
Amber.”
“Why did you say
‘suicide’?”
The reporter’s face
blanked. “I’m sorry; this must still be difficult for
you.”
“Suicide? My
brother’s car drove off the Pine River Bridge. He was drunk, if
you’re looking for an angle. But he sure as hell didn’t kill
himself.”
The reporter took a
step backward and seemed uncomfortable now. He clearly hadn’t been
doing this for very long. “I don’t know; maybe I jumped to
conclusions here. It’s just that there were always those questions
in the paper and then when I talked to someone in the police
department, he told me that there was no way that someone could
have driven off the Pine River Bridge without planning to do so –
even if they were very drunk.”
“There were questions
in the paper?” I’d of course never read the coverage of the
accident. “That flyer you work for actually asked questions about
my brother’s intent? You mean the Advisor led our neighbors in this ‘sleepy little
town’ to speculate over their morning coffee about the death of the
son of one of their ‘prominent merchants?’ And you want to bring
this speculation back to the surface after all this
time?”
I had raised my voice
and I could tell that the reporter was concerned about the fact
that he’d closed the door behind him when he entered.
“If you see it a
different way, I’ll be happy to include your thoughts in the
piece,” he said.
While my mind reeled,
I had enough composure to realize that I had come to a crossroads.
I could leap out of my chair, physically accost a person for the
first time in my life, and toss his fourth-rate newspaper out on
the street after him. Or I could realize that this guy probably had
no idea what he was getting into when he walked through the
door.
I sat back, turned
the chair around, and said, “Get out of here.”
“Is there a good time
for me to reach Richard Penders?”
I nearly turned
around then, but willed myself to keep my composure. “Trust me,
there’s no good time to talk to my father about this.”
The reporter left
without another word and I tried to force our encounter out of my
mind. I paid some bills, went up front to help Jenna with a rush,
and talked to Carl about what I wanted in the back-to-school
display. But it was ludicrous to think that I could operate as
though nothing had happened after that reporter attacked my
brother’s memory in such a way.
I thought about going
to my aunt’s house to read the articles written in the Advisor about Chase’s death. Did they openly
speculate about him killing himself? Or did they simply make a few
allusions to allow their readers to speculate for themselves? The
entire thing seemed so utterly absurd to me. There was no chance
that the Chase I knew would ever commit suicide, no matter what
might have been going on in his life. That anyone could even
suggest it was so deeply unsettling that I wanted to lash
out.
As the afternoon
stretched on, I found myself returning to the reporter’s mention of
a conversation with someone in the police department. I’d never
read the police report on the accident, either. Now it seemed like
it was essential that I do so, if for no other reason than to prove
to myself that the reporter had led the cop he interviewed to his
theory about what happened that night. I left the store a few
minutes later.
An hour and a half
after that, I sat with the same man the reporter had spoken to, a
copy of the police report between us. The report essentially listed
details: approximate time of the accident, angle of impact,
recovery efforts. Any speculation on the page seemed to be limited
to estimating the speed of Chase’s car when it hit the curb, took
off the top portion of the concrete embankment, and went into the
river.
“I’m obviously not a
professional at reading these things,” I said, “but I’m having a
tough time understanding how this information leads you to the
absolute conclusion that my brother intended to kill
himself.”
“I never said
‘absolute,’ and that reporter is lying if he said I did. What I
said was that the information in the report suggested that it was
probable.”
I pointed down to the
paper. “What are you seeing that I’m not seeing?”
The officer turned
the page toward him for a moment and then turned it back to me,
pointing to several places. “How fast he was going and the way the
skid marks veer off so sharply toward the lowest part of the
embankment.”
“He was
drunk.”
“That’s in the report
also. But this trajectory is not consistent with someone losing
control of his vehicle. It’s not even consistent with someone
veering out of the way of a potential collision. He was going very,
very fast and then suddenly made a direct line across the opposing
lanes and off the bridge.”
I glanced down at the
paper and then trained my eyes on the officer. “So you’re saying my
brother committed suicide.”
“I didn’t know your
brother, Mr. Penders.”
“I knew my brother. There is no chance he would have
killed himself.”
“If you believe that,
then that’s really all that’s important, isn’t it?”
But of course, it
wasn’t. For ten years I’d been living with my grief, living with
the loss of the Chase that was still to be, living with my sense of
culpability in the accident. And now someone was attempting to
alter the vision for me, to tell me that not only my perspective on
this event, but the very understanding I had of my brother, was
skewed. I had no idea what to do with this. My body physically
rejected this new information. But as it was doing so, I found
myself making subtle adjustments, allowing this speculation to
present itself as a possibility.
And in so doing turn
my world upside down.
I needed to talk to
someone about this and it certainly couldn’t be my parents. I got
in the car and headed for Lenox.