The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney
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buddies: You realized that they would not talk, even when drunk. Besides, the three of you were no longer that friendly. Typical teenagers, you all had found other interests, other friends.
Those were the years when you needed to tell yourself what you were, and what you were not. So: You were a good person. You were not violent. Indeed, in those years you became milder and milder, almost as if shedding the ill-thought fashions of your youth like a bad sweater. Changing times. You held that memory in your stomach, but you functioned, actually, well. It had been three years then, and no one was going to find out. Then you went home for Thanksgiving. Your little Massachusetts town was spreading itself out, and you saw bulldozers edged up toward that once-remote place in the woods. A new housing tract. You spent the weekend sleepless, telling yourself that even when the body emerged, the police would have no suspects, no motive. But the soft ground in which your secret lay was wetland. New environmental laws had been passed, and the housing tract stopped less than a hundred yards from where the body lay buried. The next spring, you told your parents you were going to stay on at your distant school, do summer classes, accelerate, and when you were done with that you stayed on as a grad student. When those unbidden memories occurred, those predawn panics, you pushed deeper into your studies, forcing the ghosts away. You graduated with your parents and sisters smiling at your side for the picture, and then you moved farther west.
In love, you married. Some nights you felt so intimate with her you wanted to tell her, felt you had to. Felt she would hold your secret and love you still. But then one odd night, an awkward dinner, and you weren’t so sure you two were always in tune. The marriage evened into something mellow and a bit more distant, and the impulse passed. When you had children, you tried to be good. The business flourished, and the money came in without much struggle.
Why, in your late thirties, did the hidden crime begin to obsess you? When you began to read the articles about DNA, and how it could tell of a long-past crime, did you begin to see a story that hadn’t been completely written? You became an insomniac. You played that one minute of your life in an endless loop on the pale wall of your skull. The phone felt suddenly as if it would go off. You would see a police car two thousand miles from your hometown and feel an edge. You felt in those years as if your unmasking was imminent, but then nothing happened. During the holidays, you had your parents out for a visit to a warmer climate. Sometimes, your mother would start in about the missing sheet. You’d all laugh in reminiscence.
Your father died, and you flew back to take care of things. You went through his desk, sorting out his papers, tending to your mother. At the bottom of a drawer was a yellowed bit of newspaper, clipped down to a tiny headline and one-paragraph item. “Local Boy Reported Missing.” Strangely, the photo in the paper, though blurred, didn’t match the memory in your head, of that face on the side of the road, turning to meet the judgment of your headlights.
Why had your father kept this? What did he guess? Did you make noise that night as you came and went? At the funeral, a Navy ensign played taps, and your mother got the triangled flag. Your father went into that neat, nearly surgically cut hole with his own secrets. You burned the newspaper in his kettle grill on the back deck, kindling some charcoal and then making a steak.
That evening, you left your mother’s house near dark and went walking in those woods. Twenty years had passed, more. You’d built a life now. In this cold ground was what would always threaten to change it. You had an exact memory of the spot he was buried, but that memory failed you, too. You could find no place that was at all like the place you remembered.
Flying home, you realized someone had to have been following all this. Were the police so sure of the hitchhiking story, even in 1972? Could they not have tried to look into it? Who was assigned the case, and could he have known of you? But you saw no signs of any investigation. Maybe when Barry eventually did not return home, too much time had passed. Maybe they just didn’t care that much. But you knew a file must have been kept at the police station, and your desire to open that file and see what was written became instantly unbearable. But you were 35,000 feet in the air, over the arrayed pivot-circles of Kansas, heading toward the sun. By the time you landed, you felt the anxiety was finally over. In long-term parking, you slipped into the leather seat of your German car as if it was a glove that fit you perfectly.
In your forties, you thought of the boy less, but when the memory came to you it gave you an unremitting ache. You could barely remember who you were then, what urges drove you, or what aspirations you’d had. The indisputable irony was that the aftermath of all that had given you focus, and direction. Who would you have become instead, if It had not happened? You also felt a welling anger at Barry himself. If he was going to leave, why did he not just leave? Was this talk of hitchhiking just something to woo his wanted girl, or was he really going to do it? You thought about how, if he’d decamped a day sooner, or if you three had not drunk that plastic jug of orange juice and that bottle of vodka, that night would just be something forgotten, rather than a specific date on the calendar you suffered through each year, and by which you could count, to the very minute, your growing remove. The colors faded like a washed-out Kodachrome.
In the eleventh year of your marriage you found out your wife had been having an affair. She confessed; you were shocked. Boredom, she told you tearfully. Someone else had offered escape, she said.
“I love you,” she said, “but you’re a dull, passionless person. You have no fire.”
She was right, but now wrong. You knew who the man was. For the first time in thirty years, the familiar urge came back to you, for the same reasons. The careful decades of telling yourself you were different now crumbled, instantly. You could have done it again, right then, had you decided to. But you did not.
Instead you got up from the couch and went out on your deck with a drink (good wine, never the hard stuff) and looked at the sky and thought about the careful, boring man you had sculpted yourself into. No passion at all. Later, your tear-stained wife came out and sat with you in the wind of sunset and said she wanted to try to work things out, for your daughters. Her love of your daughters made her want to stay with you and find the middle ground. And you both did. You wanted badly to offer your forgiveness, as you badly wanted forgiveness for yourself.
Yes, you’d had chances for affairs, but had always held back. Your reason wasn’t strict morality, more the fear of the weight of yet another secret. The thought of that was just too heavy. You accepted life as it was, and you walked in the evening to get air.
One night, a few years later, the phone rang and your wife held it in front of you saying, “It’s Dennis.” Dennis who? You heard the voice and instantly you were back to that night. Dennis, your long-ago buddy, was not well. Lymphoma. Three or four months. He had the urge to tell, to unburden. He had thought about that night every day of his life, he said into the phone. He’d spoken of it many times over the years, he said, in the darkness of the confessional. Father Shea had told him his soul was now clean, even as it felt not.
“Dennis, I can’t tell you what to do,” you said to him. “We’re all different people now. Do what you feel you must. I would understand.”
“Thank you for that,” he said. “I guess telling would be easy for me now. I’ll be dead before I have to face the consequences. But I think we all should have.” You had the phone to your ear, listening to him. You were two strangers. As Barry had been. Someone about whom you knew nothing.
Dennis asked about your family then, and you told him. He said he had not heard from Jeff in years, no idea where he’d gone. When you hung up, you were giddy that the secret might come out. You were surprised, and gratified, at the relief you felt. For weeks you sat at your desk and prepared things, just in case. You slept straight through each night. You got on the computer and read about juvenile law. You were all sixteen when it happened. Had the three of you gone to the police that night, explained you’d been in a fight that went out of control, you would have been out by the age of eighteen. Now you quietly imagined the neat rectangle of a cell, with a thin mattress. The thought didn’t seem as foreboding as it had when you were young and felt the possibilities of life. This future now seemed orderly, calm. You had forgiven your wife, and you imagined and nearly craved her own understanding. You had never given her the opportunity,