The Guilty One Read Online Free Page B

finally convincing the officers that Ron didn’t need to go to the hospital for an emergency evaluation. Deb had said, “I’ll drive,” and Ron had almost argued, out of habit—Deb was a slow and cautious driver, and he got impatient in the passenger seat—before closing his mouth tightly. This was only the first of the concessions he would undoubtedly have to make, now that he had done this thing, and he felt his mood changing to grim penitence.
    What made the most sense would be for each of them to drive their own cars home, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. Deb had nodded along with the promises he’d made to the cops: not to be alone, to let someone else pick up his car, to make an appointment immediately with a mental health professional.
    Still, Ron knew he wasn’t crazy. And he wasn’t ever going to kill himself, he saw that now. Which hadn’t made him wrong, exactly; he’d needed to go to the brink to see where he stood, what he was willing to trade. He still didn’t have much worth living for, Deb notwithstanding, and he still had a debt he couldn’t possibly repay, a net negative balance on this earth.
    But he’d dutifully consulted Maris, and Maris had turned him down, and that was that. They were members of a very select group now, the two of them. Maybe it was unforgivable of him to put himself in the same category as her—her child was dead and his was not, but Karl’s life had been altered so completely that it felt like he had lost his son. The person sitting in Panamint Correctional Institution for Men, two and a half hours away, was not Karl, not as he had been, at any rate. (Which didn’t excuse Ron from going to see him, he knew that. He had other reasons, other excuses.)
    But he and Maris both woke up each day to experience the horror of loss all over again. In some way, it was always new, it was always shocking. Deb suffered too, of course, but she had her belief—fantastical and pitiable though it was—in Karl’s innocence. That belief was her first thought in the morning and her last at night, and it seemed to give her what she needed to sustain her each day. And she had all the rituals of homemaking, the comfort of which had been incomprehensible to Ron even before last year: finding her life’s meaning through him, their son, their home; counting her own value in how meticulously she took care of all of them.
    Deb’s devotion to him had never flagged, and she drew strength from their marriage. Ron wished he could do the same—if there was some elixir he could take that would render him as dependent on Deb as she was on him, he would do it. Just so he wouldn’t have to be so alone . But it wasn’t possible. He loved Deb now as much as ever, perhaps more, but he didn’t need her. He faced all the terrible moments alone and knew that it wasn’t in him to do different.
    Not that it mattered in the end. The guilty verdict was inevitable, that was obvious after jury selection, the first time Karl was led into the courtroom and the jury got a look at him. Karl had engineered his own sentence with his behavior, his impenetrable mien, his palpable indifference, the hint of scorn that attended every gesture and sigh and proclamation of innocence.
    Maris and Ron had never spoken, all those long hours in the county courthouse. They settled wordlessly into a pattern, the Vacantis and Isherwoods, of staggering their arrivals and departures: the Vacantis coming early so they could have their seats close to the front, and him and Deb coming as late as possible, glad—though they never discussed it—when they could squeeze in somewhere at the last minute so they didn’t have to endure any more attention than necessary. It was reversed at the end of the day when Deb insisted that they try to catch Karl’s attention, offer a word of encouragement, gestures that were rarely returned