The Quiet Boy Read online

  “Oh,” said Evie. “Cool.”

  Ruben smiled uneasily. He feared they had run their conversation to its end and now would sit in silence until the grown-ups returned. But no—Evelyn Keener had opened up somehow. Now she wanted to talk.

  “I have this stupid report I’m supposed to do,” she said. “On birds. For science. I had to pick a bird and for some random reason I picked emus. It’s like—what? Why did I do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Ruben scoured his mind. “Aren’t they, like—big?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I just started.” Evelyn yawned and moved restlessly in her seat, like she was bored of talking about emus and was wondering who had brought them up in the first place. “So wait,” she said. “Do you have a mom?”

  “Uh…” Another delightful topic. “Well, I have a biological mother somewhere. My adoptive mother died when I was little. She had cancer.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, obviously, but…” He scratched his nose where his glasses sat. “I’m fine.” He shrugged, trying to show Evelyn she didn’t need to pity him. The last thing she needed right now was a dose of his tragedy. “You too. I mean—your situation too.” Ruben cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry for what you and your family are going through.”

  “Yeah,” said Evelyn and nodded decisively. “It sucks.”

  Ruben was doing a fine job, he decided, out here in the waiting room. The little sister was content and entertained, and maybe this was even a good sign for how things were going in Jay’s office, with the Keeners. Ruben glanced at his watch, and it was after three o’clock. The Classical Poetry Confab had begun. Ms. Hutchins would be asking if we were expecting Ruben today. He wondered whether Annelise McTier had noticed that he wasn’t there.

  Evelyn had covered her eyes with her hands.

  “I haven’t gotten to see him.”

  “What?” Ruben returned his attention to the girl, feeling bad that his mind had wandered.

  “My brother. Wes.” She uncovered her eyes. “They say he’s not feeling well enough to see people yet. But, like, what it sounds like is that he’s not even really sick. What my mom was saying was that he was just, like, different, somehow.”

  The word different leaped out of the sentence. Ruben, a medium-to-intense devotee of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, flashed on a comic-book word: doppelgänger.

  What if the boy’s condition was not medical at all? He recalled his father’s brief and hesitant description of what he had witnessed in room 906. The boy walking, eyes unseeing, expression fixed. What if Wesley had been replaced, or—or transformed somehow?

  And then he thought, shut up, Ruben.

  Through the thin door of his father’s office he heard Shenk’s voice, bold and reassuring, saying something about how a lawyer was a promise, a promise forever, and he felt a rush of satisfaction. It was working. He had them.

  But Evelyn Keener had started crying. Her cheeks were pink, and her chin was all scrunched up. She raised her hands to her face.

  “Hey,” said Ruben. “Hey.” He got out of his chair and kneeled before her. “Are you OK?”

  “No.”

  She was trembling. Her whole body was shivering. “My brother plays in a band. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Ruben. “The school band?”

  “No,” she said adamantly, almost angrily. “A rock band. With his friends. He plays guitar. He’s going to teach me to play guitar. Plus he does wrestling. He’s—I don’t know. He’s my brother.”

  And then she really was crying, no question big-tears crying, her whole body shaking, and Ruben without thinking put his arms around her, and she leaned forward into him, weeping into the stiff cotton of his dress shirt. She smushed her nose into his chest. Ruben wasn’t sure if he had ever hugged a girl before. Maybe, like, in kindergarten. And he’d hugged his mom, of course, when his mom was alive.

  “It’s my fault,” she told him, and he immediately said “No” and patted her on the back, very delicately. He felt the bones of her spine, a range of small, fragile knobs.

  “Yes, it is my fault. When he got hurt, I was just, like, at school.” She looked at Ruben helplessly, her face a mess of tears. “I wasn’t even thinking about him.”

  “But—I mean—why would you have been?” Ruben said.

  “I was drawing horses. With my friend Carmen.”

  “It’s OK,” Ruben told her, and he held her. The clients’ kid was upset, and she needed someone to hold her, so he held her. He did have a purpose in this. There was a reason that his father had kept him out of school today and stationed him here. Jay had been right.

  “Listen, Evelyn. Hey. My dad is the best.” He was not authorized to talk this way to clients, but Evelyn wasn’t the client, exactly, and anyway this kid was obviously in serious distress. She was shuddering, all bunched up against his chest. “He’ll find a way to fix it.”

  She pulled out of the hug and looked away, embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” she said, and then “God,” and then, noting the slick of snot she had left on his chest, “Yuck.”

  The door to the inner office opened and the girl’s parents came out, with Shenk behind them. Ruben stood up hurriedly and stepped away from the daughter, hot with embarrassment.

  “You all right, honey?” said her mom, and Evelyn Keener nodded rapidly. “I’m fine.”

  She adjusted her hair and stood up. She glanced back at Ruben on the way out, and he realized he’d been wrong. He had thought she was ten or eleven, but actually she was closer to his age. More like twelve or thirteen.

  January 15, 2019

  1.

  There is a version of the story where the events of Jay Shenk’s life, in the years following Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation, were unavailable to his conscious memory.

  A version where he passes through the intervening ten years in a fog of half-life, each day indistinguishable from the one before. In which Shenk in the wake of his career’s defining case disappeared into a kind of twilight, walking automatically through his own existence in a manner pointedly analogous to that of Wesley Keener.

  But no, no.

  Shenk in the aftermath was diminished but not destroyed. He continued to work, and continued to live, and though he ruminated sometimes on the past, sometimes bitterly and sometimes sadly, he never allowed himself to be subsumed in it. He kept on living and working and forming memories, moving as we all do through the long row of days. Taking new cases, hiring and firing assistants, waiting for Malloy to call with his dispatches, each one a pencil-line map leading to treasure from the interior of someone else’s calamity. Ruben finished high school and turned eighteen, and then the room where the boy had been was empty.

  Slowly Shenk plowed through his midforties and early fifties. He got older, which could have been predicted, even for Shenk, and by now, by the early months of the futuristic-sounding year of 2019, he felt drafty and creaky, like a barn poorly constructed, wind and rain slipping through the ill-fitting joints. He was the same, except worn and weary; the same, except lost inside a gray haze like low cloud cover; the same, except grief sometimes would come shambling in on its heavy feet and clutch him and hold him down awhile.

  At some point Jay gave up on the treadmill. He hung a suit jacket over its handles. At some point the whiskey he favored started to make him feel too bleary in the mornings, and he discovered the more ruminative, less hangover-inducing effects of marijuana, which, as if for his convenience, became not only legal but ubiquitous, for sale in a thousand different forms in brightly lit storefronts.

  Physical decrepitude of course could be safely blamed on the passage of time. But what about all the joy? What about the joy that had gone from him, like the water that swirls from the drain when the plug is pulled?

  It was out there. Joy, the possibility of joy, an ancient version of himself perfectly preserved, awaiting rescue. A fossil in amber, frozen in ti
me.

  The cafeteria of the Superior Court of California was visible from the lobby, and the Rabbi could see the old man waiting.

  Ruben Shenk moved slowly through the metal-detector line, emptying his pockets as ordered, submitting to the uncomfortable intimacy of the wand passing over his thighs. His father was in there, tired and gray-headed, one hand on a coffee cup, the other on the table, gently patting it. Looking like he was trying to remember something somebody told him, a long time ago.

  As soon as Ruben came over, he gasped: “Oh God, honey, your finger. What happened?”

  “Nothing.” The Rabbi settled into his seat and made himself absolutely still. “I cut it. That’s all.”

  “It looks pretty bad. Did you need a stitch?”

  “No.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Sweetheart. Honey. For God’s sake.

  The Rabbi, stone-faced, stared down his past.

  Give him nothing, he thought. Your face is a wooden face. He looked down at the tip of his index finger, thickly wound in gauze. It probably had needed a stitch. Actually. It had been pulsing, as of yesterday morning, a dull intermittent pulse of pain. It was pulsing now. Fuck.

  The cafeteria was lit by two long fixtures, which cast a queasy pale yellow light over the scuffed floors. Their table, like all the other tables, was decorated with a chintzy little vase with a couple of bent fake flowers.

  “All right, so,” said Shenk, pushing a lank lock of hair off his ear. “Can I get you a snack?”

  He craned awkwardly around in the plastic chair to gesture at what was on offer behind him: a row of uninspiring pastries, a bunch of fruit cups on ice, a mini-fridge filled with no-brand cartons of milk and juice. There was a hot station, a couple of griddles behind a line of steel warming trays, but the place was pretty deserted, for lunchtime. There were only a couple of workers, both heavily muscled dudes in hairnets and aprons, and they were both over by the cash registers, dicking with their phones.

  “No,” said the Rabbi to the snack offer—and then, with rigorous formality, added, “Thank you.”

  “No coffee?”

  “No,” he said, firm and final, though actually, he could have used a coffee. What he wanted most of all, however, was to accept nothing from his father. Shenk was peering at him with frank affection, his eyes watery and fond. It made Ruben cringe. He shouldn’t have come.

  But what was he going to do—not come?

  Yes. What he could have done was say no. He could have known what was best for himself and done that thing.

  There was a burst of noise from the other end of the room, and Ruben jerked his head toward it: a sheriff’s deputy in regulation LA County khaki had climbed up on a chair to reach the TV, which was bolted to the wall by a metal arm, to turn up the volume or change the channel. The deputy wobbled and the chair’s legs danced perilously, scraping on the floor, and the deputy’s partner was hollering laughter, not helping. The volume came up, suddenly, a Clippers-Spurs game blasting into the room.

  “So,” said Ruben suddenly. Here we go. Unto the breach. “You said on the phone that Richard Keener had been arrested.”

  “Yeah.” Shenk nodded. “Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “Uh—” Shenk brought one hand up to his mouth, very quickly, then took it away again, before finishing the tiny, fractured sentence. “Murder.”

  The Rabbi closed his eyes. He felt things moving inside him. Lord God, just that name—the name Richard Keener and the word murder with its own ancient shock. Keener and murder, two words like two stones, banging together.

  It was hot in the cafeteria. Too hot. The year had started off a little cold, and Ruben guessed the city had turned on the heat in the courthouse last week, when it dipped below sixty, and now it was like an oven. Jay had sweat at the collar of his shirt, turning his fleshy neck an unhealthy pink. His father, Ruben thought, looked like total shit, his face pale and his long hair now old-man thin. He found the thought satisfying and then, in the next instant, hated himself for the feeling.

  Get out of here, Ruben instructed himself. Get up and go.

  He pictured himself running. Out there and running. Head down, breathing evenly, not thinking. Wide downtown streets; dirty public parks; the blocks around city hall. Uphill and down. Footfall and footfall and footfall.

  “Richard was arraigned last week,” said Jay. “But he’s being arraigned again this afternoon. In, uh…” He looked at his watch. “In twenty minutes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are they arraigning him again?”

  “Well…OK, so…”

  Shenk trailed off. Forget the way he looked: it was startling to see how slow the famously nimble mind of Jay Shenk had become. Ruben smelled marijuana, sweet and decrepit, and realized with horror that the smell was coming from his father. From his coat? His breath?

  “Well, see, Beth—you remember Beth?”

  Of course. He remembered them all. He remembered fierce Beth and poor Wesley and—a sliver-gleam of feeling, as clear as birdsong, slicing crossways through his heart—he remembered Evelyn.

  “So Beth came to my office. Last week. And she, uh—”

  The deputies booed loudly at the TV, and Shenk, startled, stopped talking. Ruben became aware of another table, just next to theirs: a family was settling in with their trays, a man and a woman and two kids, all of them staring sullenly at their ugly plastic-wrapped sandwiches and meager bags of chips.

  “Well, OK,” said Shenk. “So basically Beth came to my office. Ten days ago. And she told me Rich had been arrested. First-degree murder. Meaning, you know: premeditated.”

  “I know what it means,” said the Rabbi irritably, though he knew what it meant from TV shows and books. “Who did he murder?”

  Shenk scratched his head, gliding past the question, and Ruben watched a small dusting of dandruff tumble out of his hair.

  “Apparently Richard fired his public defender. In court. Like, during the arraignment.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he wanted to plead guilty. He did it, he confessed, and he doesn’t want to put his family through a—you know. A long trial.” Shenk massaged his temples, smiling grimly at the part that went without saying: another long trial. “But so the public defender told him, you know, no, you never plead guilty. On a capital charge, you don’t do that. It’s craziness. Other kinds of charges, armed robbery or something, you plead out and it maybe gets you a lesser sentence. Save the taxpayer the cost of the trial, all of that. But with murder one? You’re getting executed either way, so you might as well force them to prove it.” Shenk paused and shook his head, sighed again. “But Richard keeps telling the lady, ‘But I did it, I did it.’ You know? Basically standing there in court, saying, you know, hey, ‘I killed her.’” He stopped, sighed heavily. “And the public defender is like, maybe you want to stop saying that? But this is Richard we’re talking about, you know? You remember him. He’s, uh…”

  Ruben’s memory supplied a tumble of adjectives. Difficult. Obstinate. Unbending. He remembered how the man’s arms had always been crossed, his face always set in some shape of anger or distrust or maligned righteousness.

  “Anyway. So he fired this lady, and Beth came in to see if I would take over. The case. Finish it up.”

  The Rabbi did not respond. He kept his focus on his own body. On his breath, on the individual hammer hits of his heart. This was an old coping mechanism of his, in moments of stress or anxiety, his lasting takeaway from four years of wrestling, wrestling practice, wrestling meets: you can always focus on your body, because it is always there. Listen to it doing its work. The hushed crackle of nerves. The invisible plumbing of circulation. The riverine motion of blood.

  It was too hard, though, right now. Here in the sauna heat of this ugly room, windowless and beige, its speckled floors the color of vomit. The basketball game was blaring, unbearable. An
argument was brewing at the next table, the man and the woman with their plastic sandwiches starting to get into it. Ruben heard the hiss of the word bitch, the sharp smack of a palm on the table.

  “You don’t practice criminal law, Jay.”

  Ruben saw Shenk wince at the sound of his first name coming from his son. “Of course I don’t.”

  He’d begun calling his father “Jay” his sophomore year of high school. This was after the private universe of their lives had been exploded. They’d stopped being able to afford Morningstar and Ruben moved to the public school, and buried himself in wrestling, and stopped hanging around at Shenk & Partners, pretending to be a little lawyer.

  Then he’d moved out, started his own life, such as it was.

  “Did you tell Beth Keener that? That you’re not that kind of lawyer?”

  “Of course. I tried. I said, ‘Listen, Beth, this is not what I do. I do civil.’ I mean, I always get people calling, for DUI and such, you know, but I tell them, it’s like a department store. Shirts and pants are on this floor, housewares are up here. It’s a whole different department. But, uh…”

  Shenk trailed off. Moved his shoulders up and down: What could I do?

  “I guess she feels that I, uh—I promised.”

  “Yeah.” Ruben sighed. “I remember.”

  “You do?” Shenk straightened a little. He grinned, and his face became his old face, radiant with the light of the world. “You remember?”

  “A lawyer is a promise” is what Shenk had said, a grave and nonsensical commitment, made in the heat of the hunt. Trying to land a sale. “Once I am your lawyer, I will be your lawyer forever.”

  Shenk looked at his watch, so Ruben looked at his. He twitched at the sound of the sheriff’s deputies, hollering again at their game, battering their hands rapidly on the table like drum rolls. Ruben wondered with a flash of irritation where they were supposed to be right now, these guys.

  Ruben tried again to take solace in his body, but his body betrayed him. It sent out only signals of pain, the soft agony of his finger, the ancient pain of his right ear, mangled from years of being mashed into the mat.