Guilt and Innocence

Prologue

Prologue

It was the summer of 1990, post Fourth of July, not yet August, a day when a person thought it was the hottest day of the year, only to find out the days could and would get hotter. The woods around us were eerily quiet. Even the birds were mute, resting in the shade somewhere, or hiding from the commotion. My best buddy Dougie and I were at one of our favorite hangouts, where a deep, powerful stream cut through tall gray rocky cliffs on both sides. This day, the place was anything but fun, serene, or romantic, a stupid word Dougie had once come up with while the two of us played in the water at midnight.

There was a place one could dive into the water safely for swimming and wet summer fun. There was also a place where doing so, either accidentally or on purpose, would mean certain death. As Dougie and I watched this particular afternoon, first in disbelief, then in horror, a drug-crazed young father dragged his wife and toddler up that high. His demeanor, the cries and pleading from the wife, both told us things weren’t likely to end well.

“Let them go.” Not even sixteen at the time, I found the balls to plead with the man, once Dougie, and I had risked life and limb to get up there, too. “Hand my friend the little girl.”

Their names were familiar. Steven and Gloria Leary were only a few years older than Dougie and I. The pair had been high school sweethearts, their relationship tumultuous from the start, often because of the consumption of alcohol. Everyone in New Mill Town knew their situation. The cops had been to the Leary home several times in 1990 alone. My father was a cop.

“Your baby’s pretty scared.”

So was I, shaking like the leaves hanging over our heads, even without a cooling breeze to move them. Maybe they felt the tension in the air, too.

Little Leslie would have had just one birthday, so far, her second one a few weeks off. I knew her name as well. Her chubby face glimmered in dappled sunshine. It was so muggy that day, the situation so frightening, it was difficult to tell the sweat from the tears.

“Please…” I worked hard to keep my voice even. “You don’t want to hurt her.” I hoped I was succeeding. “Pass her to Dougie.”

Dougie’s eyes were as wide as they’d been the day he awoke beside the stream to discover a snake had crawled up the leg of his swim trunks while we’d napped. His mouth agape, his fingers curled into fists, he hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten to the summit. He hadn’t even touched his droopy hair, something he usually did every two seconds, to make sure his hi-top was still straight and flat. I wasn’t even sure he was breathing. Me, I couldn’t shut up.

“We all want her safe. I know we do.” My mouth was as dry as the parched grass in my parent’s front yard after no rain for three weeks. Still, I kept talking. “Do the right thing.”

It had taken another ten to fifteen minutes of one-way dialogue.

“Whatever is going on in your head, all this is only going to make it worse.”

No one breathed, from the moment Steven said, “Okay, take her,” to the moment Leslie was safe in Dougie’s still quaking arms. The exchange was that perilous on the slippery shale.

“Good.” I finally exhaled. “Now, let your wife come with us, too.” I reached out for Gloria. “What’s your name?”

I was careful not to mention my dad, for safety reasons, and pretended not to know who they were, just to keep them talking.

“You can tell me your name.” I made eye contact, only with her.

“Gloria.”

Steven let her answer. That was a good sign.

“And yours?”

“Steven,” he said quietly.

“Steven…We’re going to do Gloria next, okay, Steven? You’re going to gently let go of her and let me take her hand.” I reached out.

“No.”

“Your daughter needs her mother. Come on, Steven. Please, let her grab hold of me.” When I took a step, a rock beneath my bare foot gave way, crunching, slipping, pinging as it bounced over the cliff down into the water. “Shit.”

“Stay back!” Steven jerked away, which sent more dirt and gravel pouring over the edge. His shoe went, too, making a surprisingly sickening thud—not a splash, but a thud—a loud one at that, for such a small object. “Stay back!”

“Fuck.” I slowly raised both hands in the air. “Okay, okay, okay. I’m listening. No more sudden moves.” My voice trembled, just like the rest of me. “We do everything carefully, now, Steven. We don’t want that to happen again, right?”

“No.”

“You don’t want anyone to fall, right?” I asked.

“No,” Steven said.

“Right. Not me, not you, not Gloria. I’m going to reach toward you again, and you’re going to let Gloria take my hand this time, okay?”

“Maybe. Maybe…yeah.” Steven looked down, though he still had a death grip on his wife’s wrist, so tight the skin had gone from red to white there. “Maybe,” he said again.

“Come on, Steven.” I asked at least four more times, until the sudden blare of sirens raised the tension a million fold. Somehow, someone had known what was happening and had called the cops. Long before the days of teens with cellphones, it definitely hadn’t been Dougie or me. “It’s all going to be over in a minute,” I said, just as my hand started to quiver even more, from muscle strain, holding it out so long, and also anxiety. “End it now.”

“I’ll end it, all right.”

The moment Steven leaned forward, signaling his intent to jump, I flew into action, too, never giving a moment’s thought to the fact my red cape was back at home in my old toy box. I grabbed Gloria’s arm and spun her around toward Dougie and the baby. Though she ended up on her knees, landing hard, and then skidding, at least she was on solid ground.

“Hang on, Steven!”

When Steven’s foot slipped again, I grabbed on to a nearby sapling, and then reached for him. The tree was tall but skinny, flaccid, bendable, not right for offering stability at all. “f**k!”

“Jesus, Justice!” Dougie cursed, too. Gloria gasped.

“Let me go. Let me die.” Steven and I met eye to eye, as he begged me to release him, and I did everything in my power not to, slipping and grappling to keep us both from plummeting thirty feet down onto rocks even rougher, sharper, and deadlier than those now spilling over the side.

“No way you’re taking the easy way out.” I wanted Steven Leary punished.

“Yeah, I am,” Steven said. “It’s me or us.”

“Not happening.”

He looked right at me. “Do the world a favor.”

“Nope.”

“It’s either just me, or me and you.”

“None of the above.”

“Wanna bet?” Steven Leary tried to make good on his threat. He twisted, flung himself, almost six feet and close to two hundred pounds, I’d have bet, to one side.

“Fucker!”

But as he jerked left, somehow, miraculously, I managed to flail myself to the right, taking us both to a narrow flat precipice, where luckily, the skinniest but mightiest sapling had enough root to hold my weight and his.

Barely wide enough for two sets of feet, at least the ledge was stable, once we both stopped rocking to collapse against the mountainous façade from which it came. Gloria was still sobbing by the time the first cop car arrived. Though I’d expected a struggle, once we’d taken a series of sideways steps to safety, where the roadway ran parallel to the water, Steven slid down the trunk of a sturdy, thick poplar, and hadn’t moved since. Bleeding from a deep scrape on his arm, he was stoic as he sat on the ground staring straight ahead.

“You could have been killed!” my father told me at the end of it all. “What would possess you to get in the middle of something like this?”

“I asked myself what you would do, Dad.”

“I would have let him fall,” my father claimed.

“No. You would have made sure he was alive to be held accountable.”

“Damned teenagers.” My father held me tighter than I had held on to Gloria up on the rocks. “Aren’t you afraid of anything?”

I looked over at Dougie, trying to fluff his stupid hair, of all things, which was sweaty, matted, and totally limp. Dougie was obsessed with his hair. “Nope.”

What a frigging liar I was.

I’d vowed from the start to reclaim the rocks, the stream, and nature in all its glory as a happy place, one where I could exist without thinking of Steven and Gloria, maybe without thinking at all, but just being. Dougie and were back there a million times that summer and over the next one. We’d lie in the water and just stare up into the blue for hours, quickly looking away if our eyes ever wandered down, then sideways to meet.

“I love you, Justy.” The words seemed to come out of nowhere, but deep down, I knew they had been building over time.

“Don’t say that, Dougie.”

“Why?”

“Because you probably don’t.”

“I’ve known you my whole life, since we were both little kids.” We were a year older, now, than we’d been that heroic summer, seventeen going on eighteen. “I think I always loved you in one way, and then it turned into something else. Isn’t that, like, the best kind of love there could be? I think it is.”

Every time Dougie tried to touch me, I squirmed out of it. “Yeah…you think.”

“I know, Justy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You call me Dougie, so I can call you Justy.”

There was no denying an eerie feeling still hung there at the stream, like the murky scent in summer or the clean, fresh smell in winter. Maybe it always would, but it was a place I still wanted to be. There was also no denying the feeling in my head at odds with the ones in my body.

“You’re my hero, Justice, whatever I call you. I love you.”

I sat up. “You shouldn’t.” We were always nearly naked there. That didn’t help.

“Why? Why shouldn’t I love you? Because you don’t love me?”

I refused to lie, so I just stayed silent.

“s**t, man. I felt it a long time, and then, suddenly, I was afraid of losing you and never getting to say it. That fear…of seeing you almost die…nothing can be scarier than that. I love you.”

“Dougie, cut it out!”

“You don’t think we’re written in the stars?” Still on his back, Dougie kept staring into space.

I looked up, too. “The sun is shining.”

“Just keep looking. Always up. Maybe we’re written in the sun, in the moon, in the clouds, Justy. I feel like we are.”

“You’re a hopeless romantic.”

“What are you, Justy?”

I wanted to say I was in love, too.

“No one could love me, right?”

I wanted to open my arms and take away any doubt, anything bad, and offer just reassurance and affection, even if not s*x. Maybe that could come, too. “Don’t say that, either. I could easily love you,” I said then. “If…”

“If what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Sometimes, you don’t seem afraid. Sometimes, you seem…eager.”

I was eager then, and it showed in my swim trunks, just below where I put my hand atop Dougie’s large, masculine one as it strummed at the light coating of hair on my taut, tan gut. “Yeah, well…”

“Don’t be afraid. That newspaper story says we’re fearless.”

I pulled away from Dougie’s sweet, gentle touch. “That newspaper article is wrong about one of us.”