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“Why did you do that?” I asked. What a stupid thing to do. And what a stupid time to do it.
Rory shook his head but didn’t answer me. “This was such a mistake. If he gets caught... they’ll charge him for sure and we won’t be able to get him bail.”
I sat in the chair opposite the desk. “Do you think he’s going to Canada? If he’s hiking, maybe he’s planning on taking the Long Trail north.”
“Maybe. Probably.” Rory straightened up. He reached out and took my hand.
“But will he be safe? The weather... No one hikes north at this time of year.”
“Simon knows what he’s doing in the backcountry. If his plan is to go north, I’m sure he’ll get there. When he feels safe, I’m sure he’ll call us.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I just sat there and thought things through. “Maybe it is a good thing,” I said in the end. “In Canada he will be safe, right? And no one can accuse us of hiding him if we didn’t even know that he was leaving.”
“It makes him look guilty. It makes it harder to defend him. And Canada has an extradition treaty with the US. If he’s charged here, they’ll be able to arrest him there and bring him back. So unless he has a plan to move on from Canada... did he bring his passport?”
I looked at Rory’s desk. “They’re in there. Top drawer.”
Rory pulled out the drawer. Two passports inside, not three.
“Maybe we should try to get ahead of things. Do you think we could rent a place for him, and get money to him, but through... I don’t know, a corporation or something? Some way that can’t be traced back to us?”
Rory thought about it. “We could try, but anything we do to try to cover our tracks just makes us look guilty too. Right now he hasn’t been charged. Probably the best thing we can do is act like everything’s normal.”
“We could say that we wanted Simon to get away from the press and all the attention. He’s always wanted to hike the Long Trail. Now is the perfect time. He’s not at school. He needs to get away from people.”
“Except that we can’t tell anyone where we think he is, or they’ll just set out after him and pick him up before he reaches the border.”
“Then we’ll just fudge it for a few days. We won’t say anything about Simon going for now. We’ll wait. How long do you think it will take him to cross?” I started to feel hopeful.
“It’s about eighty miles from here. I think... Simon’s pretty fit. Five days, maybe. He might be able to do it in four if he pushes really hard.”
“Okay.” I tried to make my voice sound confident. “Then we just have to avoid talking to the police for five or six days. If they want to see Simon, we say he’s come down with something. Covid, maybe. And then when the time is up we can say he’s hiking to Canada for a break, and they can search for him all they like at that point. By then he should have been in touch, so we’ll have worked out a plan. Really, Rory, I think he didn’t tell us because he wanted to protect us. That’s not a bad thing.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Rory said. It was a platitude. It was obvious from his tone that he was thinking about something else entirely.
“I’ll leave you to it then.” But I didn’t leave. I sat there and looked at him. “He said it was an accident.”
Rory flinched, but we seemed to have abandoned all attempts to be careful about what we said, and I needed to talk about it.
“Do you believe him?” I asked.
It was a long moment before Rory spoke. But he looked me right in the eye when he did. “Yes. I believe him.”
He was lying he was lying he was lying and I could see it as clear as day. Had I always been able to read him so clearly? Pain settled in my heart like a shard of thick glass.
“Okay then.”
I left his office and wandered the house. There was nowhere I could go and no one I could call. I had nothing to do. I hadn’t listed any clothes online in a week and hadn’t responded to any messages about older listings. I couldn’t bring myself to care about it. Probably I was done with that now, for good. I would have to find a different way to earn money. I went back to the laundry room. The laundry baskets were full. I tried to remember the last time Rita had been to the house. A week? She hadn’t called or messaged to say there was a problem. I guess that meant she didn’t want to work for us anymore. I loaded the washing machine and switched it on, then had to fight the urge to sit on the floor and wait for it to finish. I wandered the house. I missed Simon. The missing was a physical ache, deep inside me. I loved him I loved him I loved him.
But I knew what he was.
What did that make me?
When Simon was a child, when he was eleven or twelve and he first started going on sleepovers at friends’ houses, I’d hated it. His absence left a void in the house. And other parents were so casual. I would drop him to the door of whichever friend had invited him and Simon would disappear into the house immediately. I might get a half smile thrown over his shoulder if I was lucky. I would stand at the door and make polite chitchat for the expected minute or two. I would plaster a smile on my face and make and respond to little jokes about how great it was to be able to offload him for a night. Adult time... ha huh huh huh. And all the time I had to fight the ridiculous urge to tell them that I hated letting him go, that he was so much more precious than they knew, and to urge them to be careful.
I still don’t know if other parents feel that way. They don’t seem to, but then most parents put on a front about their kids. There are clear social rules. If your kid is a straight-A student, you can acknowledge that, but only if you follow up with a comment about how completely inept they are at softball. If they’re a star athlete you have to say something about how the flip side of them being so single minded is all those nightmare 6:00 A.M. starts to get them to training. Basically, the rule is that you have to talk about your kid as if he’s something between a mild and a serious inconvenience to the life you actually want to live. What you are not allowed to say is that they are the light and purpose you live for. Not, at least, unless you lose them. Then you can say anything you want. You can tell the truth.
What are the social rules when your child is a murderer?
