Keeper of the Keys

26

K at hovered above the stream, looking down at the black water. So she hadn’t followed them.

Ray flicked a flashlight onto her face.

“Turn that off.”

“What’s that in your hand?”

“A chicken drumstick from the Colonel I picked up en route.”

“Got any more?”

“In the Echo.” They walked back toward the parking lot, down the pathway past the shrill, tired children on the monkey bars, past the flushed faces of the men at the barbecues, and climbed into Kat’s car, which smelled like a restaurant, rolling down the windows to the cool of evening. Ray felt ravenous. He seized a piece of chicken and began to eat.

Kat gave him thirty seconds. Then, “What did he tell you?”

“Two important things,” Ray said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “I want to know exactly what happened between you and your brother the last day of his life. Can you stand to go through it with me?”

She frowned. “Why?”

“It has to do with Leigh. Our marriage. Our problems. Why she left.”

“It was more than six years ago. What could it have to do with your marriage?”

Ray said half to himself, “It must get worse over time. You don’t forget. It grows inside you.”

“What?”

“Guilt. It’s a poison, like doubt.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Kat said, her voice shaky.

He put a gentle hand on her arm. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

She started off slowly. “They had an argument. Tom called me, and I finally agreed to meet him for lunch, even though things were really busy at work and I didn’t really have the time to waste. We went to a Tastee-Freez on Pacific Coast Highway.” She paused.

“The day he died?”

“Right. He told me Leigh had broken up with him. Well, you know, I saw it coming. Leigh told me she was getting discontented. She had someone new. That would be you, Ray. People our age, in our late twenties, broke up every day. Women complained in the coffee rooms about their ne’er-do-well boyfriends. They had so many issues. And I, well, at that point I had no boyfriend at all. I was working so hard, trying to find my own way. It just didn’t seem to matter so much. Tom had a hundred girlfriends before Leigh.”

“But nobody after her.” For a moment or two, they both stared into the dark trees.

“He wanted to talk. He had to go over each detail over and over and it didn’t seem to matter what I said, it didn’t help him. I had been invited to go to a party at a coworker’s who lived in a big fancy house in Hollywood. I rarely got invited to do anything social, particularly anything that involved wearing something new and cute, so I was resentful.”

“But he insisted you stay.”

“He said I was the only person he could tell it all to, because I knew Leigh so well. Really, a lot of it was, What did she say about me? How does she really feel? Do you think I could get her back? Those kind of questions. Over and over. He said I owed him because of the time he covered for me when I rolled through the ground-floor window drunk and when the folks asked about it, he told them I had the flu. I owed him for the many times he saved my ass. And that was true.”

“But.”

“He said, Forget the damn party. Come with me to the beach. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to a party, and I was just-just-thinking of myself and my own concerns, okay? I didn’t want to get involved in this shit between him and Leigh.

“He said it had to be the beach. And I’m afraid of the beach at night. Strange people come out and they’re messed up and they want to get friendly. And I’d be stuck with my younger brother crying over Leigh and no way to get away if it got to be too much. And I was upset because I felt like Tom was hurting my friendship with Leigh. I was very torn between the two of them. Too much complication!”

One of those summertime squalls had come up, and rain spattered the windshield. Any local understood this traumatic event might last maximum fifteen minutes. Kat didn’t even turn on her wipers. Ray wolfed down French fries while Kat went on soberly, “He said to me, ‘Oh, promise you’ll never tell anyone what I’m about to say!’ He asked me, ‘What would you do if I decided to kill myself?’”

Ray said nothing.

“You know what I said?”

She made fists with her hands, covered her mouth, and rocked back and forth. The words choked out of her. “I said, ‘Try to forget you as quick as I can.’”

Ray said, “You were young.”

“I was c-cruel and selfish. I’ll never forget the look he gave me. His eyes. Oh, God.”

“How did he die, Kat?”

“He dropped me back at work and he drove back to his apartment in Newport. He drank some and wrote notes.” She recited, “‘Don’t blame yourself, Kitty-kat, for me caving in to sentimentality and tomfoolery. ’You see, he was joking around, even when he was letting go of his precious, precious life. He complimented me on my jacket that day, too, before things got so heavy.”

“Oh, Kat. Don’t cry.”

“He left the notes under a vase of irises he had in his kitchen. He must have been pretty drunk. His handwriting was worse than ever. Then there was Leigh’s note. He quoted Yvor Winters, the poet. You know him?”

“No.”

“The note started off quoting or paraphrasing him: ‘Death. Nothing is simpler. One is dead.’ Then he talked about loving Leigh, and how right everyone was, what a loser he was not to be able to hold on to the person he loved more than his own life. He said she tilted him cosmically, and he would never be the same, and he could not go on without her.”

“Did Leigh see the note?”

“Of course. I’m sure it’s branded on her soul.”

“She said that he died. I knew it was suicide but she refused to discuss it.”

“He must have waited until it was good and dark, and then gone back out to the beach. And he swam out, and out until he was too tired to swim back in. I often imagine it at night, so dark, cold water, phosphorescence maybe out past the breakers…”

Ray gave her a handkerchief. She cried into it then blew her nose.

“Tom’s body washed ashore on the rocks at the tip of the peninsula. At the party, I panicked, and when I couldn’t reach him by phone I went to his house. When I couldn’t find him there, and saw those notes, I called the police. Beach Rescue started looking for him. Our darling Tommy. My darling brother.”

Ray’s right hand patted her knee. “A lot of things sent him out there,” Ray said. “Not just you.”

“Oh, it was me, all right. I put him over the edge. I could have talked him out of it if I’d stayed with him, not been so cruel. Ray? Y’see, I have never told anyone about being at the beach earlier with Tommy. I couldn’t stand to tell anyone. You’re the very first person to hear this in six years. I don’t even know why I’m doing it, but-anyway, I turned a lot of my misery on Leigh, tried to blame her instead. She was so hangdog, but I couldn’t explain. I just couldn’t. I let her think it was all her fault. That’s why I couldn’t talk to her all this time. Because I’m a liar and a phony.”

They sat in silence. After a minute Ray said, “There’s somebody else who talked to Tommy that afternoon. And he has been just like you, just like Leigh. Hugging his sins to himself, thinking he’s a monster.”

“What?”

Ray explained what Jim Hubbel had told him, adding, “He gave your brother facts. Facts register with guys. He made it seem as if it really was hopeless, and he was cutting about it.”

“Are you trying to tell me that”-she leaned back against the car’s headrest-“he thinks he’s totally responsible?”

“Didn’t you? Didn’t Leigh? Now, you have to take this in. Your brother made the decision, not you. He talked to a lot of people. God knows what Leigh said to him. Maybe other friends. He put it all together. You didn’t cause his death. Hell, I could take some of the blame myself. I was in love with Leigh, and I wanted the breakup, too.”