Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“I saw it,” Albie said, still looking at the television screen. It was a commercial, a pretty woman spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread.

“You didn’t see anything,” Holly said. Albie hadn’t been with the girls and he hadn’t been with Cal either. Albie had been asleep. On this point everyone was clear.

“I left before you got there. I saw everything that happened before you came.”

“Albie,” their mother said. Her voice was sympathetic because she thought she understood the way he felt. She too had been shut out of the story.

“You were asleep,” Holly said.

Albie spun around and threw his fork at his sister, threw it like a javelin in hopes of piercing her chest but it bounced off her shoulder without incident. Albie was ten and his gestures tended to be sloppy. “He got shot and I’m the only one who saw it.”

“Albie, stop that,” their mother said. She pushed her hands through her hair. She was regretting having asked them, the children could see that.

“It’s fine,” Holly said, cool and dismissive in a way that made Albie’s head burst into flames.

“It was Ned from the barn!” he screamed. “He shot Cal with dad’s gun. The one from the car, the gun that Caroline got out of the car! I saw it and you didn’t see it because I was the one who was there. They didn’t even know I was there.”

Jeanette and Holly were both crying then. Their mother was crying. Albie was screaming that he hated them, hated them , and that they were liars. That was how it ended.

On that worst of all August days in Virginia, Caroline had already decided to become a lawyer, and so she told the other girls — Holly and Franny and Jeanette — exactly what had happened even though they’d been right there. This was after they had run fast as horses to the house and Ernestine had called the ambulance, after they had taken Ernestine back to Cal. Ernestine, fifty pounds too heavy and in ill-fitting shoes, was running with the girls through the back field while Mrs. Cousins waited at the house to direct the ambulance. Somewhere in all of that Caroline had worked out the story in her head. When did she find time? While they were all still running? Once they were back in the house? Cal was in the ambulance speeding away with the lights spinning and the siren wailing for no reason (oh, but he would have loved it though), and the Cousinses were in their car following Cal’s ambulance to the hospital. Ernestine was trying to find Albie who somehow, in all the confusion, was missing. Their father was running through the parking lot of his law office in Arlington to jump in his car and race to Charlottesville to see his son for the last time. No one knew where Beverly was. That was when Caroline rounded the three other girls into the upstairs hall bathroom of the Cousinses’ house, pushed them in and locked the door behind them. Only Franny was crying, presumably because she had spent those extra fifteen minutes with Cal while the other girls had run to the house and then run back again. Franny alone understood that Cal was dead. Even the people from the ambulance wouldn’t say the word dead when all they had to do was look at him. Caroline told her sister to shut up.

“Listen to me,” Caroline said, as if they didn’t always listen to Caroline. She was fourteen that summer. Her voice was sharp, rushed. Flecks of cut grass were stuck to her legs and tennis shoes. “We weren’t with him, do you understand me? Cal went to the barn by himself. We came up later and we found him in the grass right where he was, and when we found him we ran straight back to the house to tell. That’s all we know. When anyone asks us, that’s what we say.”

“Why do we have to lie?” Franny said. What was there to lie about when they weren’t supposed to lie anyway? Weren’t the facts of the day bad enough without compounding them? Caroline, with the full force of her frustration at both the circumstances and Franny’s stupidity, slapped her sister hard across the face. Franny hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t braced herself, and the blow spun her sideways and knocked her head into the door of the linen closet. The knot on her left temple began to inflate before their eyes. It would be one more thing to explain.

Caroline was irritated by the crack her sister’s head had made against the door when she was working to keep them quiet. She turned back to Holly and Jeanette, the more reliable two. “We can be as upset as we want. They’ll expect us to be upset. But we’re upset because we found him, we’re upset because it happened, that’s all, not because we were there.” At that moment she could have told them that their only way out was to grow tails and swing through the trees and they would have done it. Caroline was thinking of their culpability, and maybe, because she was Caroline, how it might affect her own college admission. She would be in high school in the fall.

“Tell me again what happened,” Teresa said one evening to Jeanette. By this point it had been well over a year since Cal died. As a rule the people in her family didn’t ask Jeanette anything. Holly was studying at a friend’s house down the street, and Albie was riding his bike with the pack of boys he had recently assembled. Jeanette and her mother were for the moment alone together even though they were pretty much never alone. Her mother said it so casually, like it was just another thing she’d forgotten. Where is my lipstick? Who was that on the phone?

Jeanette could still see Caroline in the bathroom, hear the barking clarity of her directions. She could see how sweat had dampened Caroline’s hair at the temples and soaked through the collar of her yellow T-shirt. But she couldn’t see Cal anymore. In just a year his face had slipped away from her. “I wasn’t there,” Jeanette said.

“But you were there,” her mother said, as if Jeanette had forgotten.

“If you want to find the person who did it, you have to ask the same questions over and over again,” Franny had told Jeanette one summer when they were in Virginia. It was years ago, before Cal died. It was one of the police skills Franny was trying to teach her, along with breaking into cars and taking apart the phone receiver so that you could listen in on other people’s calls without their knowing. “Sooner or later someone always slips up,” Franny had said.

Jeanette wondered if her mother was trying to slip her up.

“He got tired of waiting for us,” she said. “He was going to go see the horses and we were going to catch up.”

“You caught up,” her mother said.

Jeanette shrugged, an awful gesture given the circumstances, disrespectful. “It was too late.” It was after Cal died that her mother finally lost her freckles, as if even they had abandoned her. Jeanette was looking at the bridge of her mother’s nose, trying to stay focused, trying to remember what she had looked like before all this happened.

“So who gave the pills to Albie?” their mother asked.

“Cal,” Jeanette said, surprised by how good it felt to tell the truth about something. “He always did that.”

With all that had happened that day, no one cared that Albie was missing except Ernestine. After checking in the attic and the cellar, she said he must have gone with Beverly. No one knew where Beverly was. She’d taken one of their grandparents’ cars and hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. If she’d gone into town she must have taken Albie with her. If it had been any other day the very thought of Beverly taking Albie with her anywhere, ANYWHERE , would have cracked the girls up.

* * *

The Goddamn Boys on Bikes is what the neighbors in Torrance called them, and later it was what they called themselves. They heard the words yelled after them as they cut over lawns, flashed between cars to the high-pitched skid of slamming brakes, swooped across grocery-store parking lots in fast, tight circles for the pleasure of terrorizing the mothers with loaded carts. People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them. Albie, a member of the Mattaponi tribe, Raul, El Salvadoran born on this side to parents born on that side, and two black kids, the smaller, handsomer, sleepier-looking one called Lenny and the other, the tallest of the four, Edison. They had all started riding together when they were eleven and ten, when they were still just irritating boys whose mothers wanted them out of the house in the afternoon. They were dangerous right from the start, forcing the cars they cut in front of to swing hard into people’s lawns. One car jumped the curb and went straight into a phone pole while the boys sailed on, whooping the way they imagined the Indians would. The summer they were mostly twelve a car door opened unexpectedly and sent Lenny straight up in the air. The other three slammed on their brakes in time to see their young friend tumble gymnastically across the backdrop of blue sky. It should have killed him, would have killed him had he landed anywhere near his head, but instead he reached out his right hand to catch himself and snapped his wrist so that the bone came through the skin. Albie crashed not two weeks later, a sudden downpour pulling up the oil embedded in the pavement and sending his bike spinning out from under him. Albie broke his shoulder and tore back one ear, which required thirty-seven stitches to reattach. Edison and Raul pedaled carefully around the bike paths in the park for the rest of the summer, scaring no one, not even themselves. Edison came to Albie’s house to visit and stood beside the recliner in the darkened living room. Albie had to stay in the recliner pretty much all of the time because of his shoulder.