Joan Didion: Run River

When Julie asked that night where her brother was, Lily said that he had gone out. “He’s not coming back,” Everett said. “He’s disloyal.” Julie looked at her father and then at her mother and her large eyes filled with tears: “I don’t believe that,” she said in her steady voice. “I wouldn’t believe Knight could be disloyal.” “I wouldn’t believe you could go swimming without any clothes on, either,” Everett said flatly.

After Julie had gone to sleep Lily sat down in the dark by her bed. She wanted to hold Julie’s hand, flung out from the striped lavender and white sheets, but was afraid that she would wake her. Instead she sat with her hands in her lap listening to Julie’s even breathing, and when Julie woke and looked at her with the tears beginning in her eyes again, Lily only smoothed her hair. “Go to sleep, baby,” she said, unable to explain to Julie, any more than she could explain to herself, just where the trouble had begun. “It’s all right.”

When Knight came home two days later (“That was absurd,” Lily heard Julie telling him, “running away in your mother’s car. That’s childish”), Lily prevailed upon Everett to accept, as she had done, his inarticulate, embarrassed apology. He brought Lily a dozen white roses, but was ashamed to tell her that he had bought them (“This guy gave them to me,” he explained. “This guy I know in a florist’s shop had them left over”); he asked Everett, carefully casual, if Everett minded if he stuck around and listened when the hop broker came at four o’clock. That was the day they began to be very polite to one another, dimly aware that they had been, more than they had ever been before, vis-à-vis the complexities, the downright complicity, of family love. (It had nothing to do with you , she tried to explain to Ryder, talking to him about it night after night. He did not understand what she was talking about, but it was better than talking to herself.)

Everett loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. Exhausted, he remembered for the first time that the gun still lay on the dock.

“Sit down,” Lily said. “Sit down, baby.”

He let her lead him to a chair. The house looked no different than it had earlier in the evening; he could not think why he had expected it to.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“What time is it?”

Lily looked at her wrist. She was wearing the watch he had given her the September of 1957, when she and the children came home from abroad. He had bought it the week she left and saved it until she came home in September, telling her then, embarrassed, that she could count it an anniversary present. Once he had seen it on her thin wrist, he had seen how wrong the heavy diamonds were for Lily, but in the jeweler’s that afternoon he had so wanted something which would make irrevocable his love and determination that if the jeweler could have worked the Cullinan Diamond into a wrist watch (the point of a wrist watch being that she could wear it every day) he would have borrowed on the ranches and bought it. Although he was quite sure that Lily did not like the watch, she wore it not only every day but so frequently in the shower and in the swimming pool that the parts were rusted and it seldom ran.

“One-thirty,” she said. “One-twenty-five.”

He looked at her. “The children,” he said finally.

“They’ll be a while. We have time.”

She poured some bourbon into two glasses and handed him one.

“I meant to,” he said. “I came here and got the gun. If I hadn’t meant to I wouldn’t have come here and gotten the gun. Would I.”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.”

He said nothing.

“Listen,” she said. “We’re going to make it all right. I’m going to tell McGrath what happened.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“It could have happened.”

“It didn’t.”

“Don’t you want it to be all right?”

He did not say anything.

She swallowed half the bourbon in her glass. “Everett. Listen to me. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to go to prison. You’re going to go to Alcatraz and maybe die if you don’t start listening to me.”

“San Quentin. Not Alcatraz. San Quentin.”

“Everett.”

He looked at her. He had been wrong about her down on the dock: she was no older, she was still the thin little girl with the safety pin in her sunglasses, and whatever had happened in the years between did not signify much. Channing did not signify much: he thought of Channing sitting there on the log smoking a cigarette, switching his flashlight toward the levee and calling Lily? then springing up and flipping his cigarette into the water when he saw that it was not Lily. (You better get off, Channing, you better get off this property , he had said, and Channing had laughed: O.K., Coop, O.K . He had imagined Channing maybe telling Lily, later, what had happened, imagined Lily laughing with him. O.K., Coop , Channing had said, you’re going to hurt somebody with that, and she’s no good to you dead.) None of it signified: whether Channing had tried to grab the gun to protect himself or because he thought Everett intended to shoot Lily; whether he had shot Channing because he had intended to all along or because he was angered by Channing’s thinking he could hurt Lily; none of it mattered. Channing pitching forward over the log, his flashlight rolling into the water: they were events of equal importance. After a while it had all been quiet again and he had wondered how the shot could have been so accurate when he could not remember aiming.

He smoothed the hair back from Lily’s face.

“Anyway,” he said, trying to make her smile. “We call it Quentin. Or just plain ‘Q.’ ”

“Everett.” She buried her face in his sleeve.

“Never mind. Don’t worry.”

“Listen.” She looked up at him. “You wouldn’t do it now.”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.” He got up and walked over to the window.

“The swimming-pool lights are on again,” he said. It suddenly irritated him: the pool lights left on when they were all at a party, the dock light burned out and not replaced, the waste everywhere, waste and erosion. “There’s no reason to have the lights on when nobody’s home.”

“Julie thinks they’re beautiful,” Lily said faintly. “I left them on for Julie.”

“Julie’s not home,” he said reasonably. “We can burn them all day and all night if Julie thinks they’re beautiful, but Julie has not been home all evening.”

“Everett. Please.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just a minute.”

“Sit down and listen to me.”

He opened and closed the screen door, examined the hinges absently, picked up his drink and finished it.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m going to call McGrath now.”

She sat forward on the edge of the couch. “You’re going to tell him what we planned? Everett?”

“Sure. Sure, baby.”

“Let me call.”

He closed the telephone book and dialed.

“Ed? Everett McClellan.”

Lily crossed the room and sat down by the telephone looking up at him.

“That’s right,” he said. “Once before. I called you in the middle of the night once before. Ten years ago.”

“You know Ryder Channing? That’s right. No, they’re divorced.” He paused. “Listen. I shot him.”

“Tell him why,” Lily whispered.

“I just shot him. We had a fight over a gun and I shot him. My gun. You get on over here and I’ll tell you about it.”