A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [22]
“Maybe you and Dennis can play this weekend.”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know how. I never played before,” he added, seeing her frown.
“Dennis’ll teach you.”
“No. It’s too late. I’m too old.”
“Not for golf!” she scoffed.
“But that’s something you learn when you’re young.”
Dennis hadn’t played golf as a kid, she said. But Dennis was a born athlete, he reminded her. Sports had always come naturally. “Like everything else. Dennis just had the touch. No matter what he did.”
“That must’ve been a little hard to swallow, huh? I mean, you being the older brother.”
“Actually, I was always very proud of Dennis. He was very, very gifted.” He smiled. “And in a way, it diverted attention away from me. Which I wanted!” he added. “I was always so big. All I ever wanted was to fade into the background, and that’s not easy when you’re bigger than everyone else.” He laughed.
“Oh! Poor Gordon.” She patted his arm.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said stiffly. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself or making excuses. That’s just the way it was. Actually, it wasn’t until Fortley that I finally appreciated being so big.”
“But . . .” She sighed. “But in a way that’s part of it, when you think of it. I mean, being so big and always holding back. It all just seems so unfair. I mean, if you hadn’t felt that way, you probably wouldn’t have even gone with Jerry Cox that night, and none of this would have happened.”
“But it did.”
“But you didn’t mean to . . .” She gestured for the unspeakable.
“No. I don’t think that way. I can’t,” he said uneasily. If Dennis were here, he would have cut her off by now.
“You have to! You can’t keep being so hard on yourself, Gordon.”
At the trial his lawyer had portrayed him as a loner, a loser, a big, goofy kid so desperate for friendship that he had unquestioningly followed the sly, handsome, popular Jerry Cox into the house that night. So what? the prosecutor had roared during his closing argument. So what if he was the most unhappy boy in Collerton? Or in the universe? What justification could that possibly be for taking the lives of two innocent people?
“I have to be realistic, that’s all. I did what I did. And nothing can change that. Nothing.” If it were anyone else but Lisa, he would have gotten up and left.
“That’s what you say, but that’s not really what you mean, is it?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean,” he said coldly.
“I look at you and I see this . . . this tightness. Like a coil. Like it’s all inside and you can’t get rid of it.”
That she might think him still capable of violence left him speechless for a moment. “It’s hard. I—”
“Of course it’s hard, because you’re too hard on yourself, Gordon. God’s forgiven you. I know He has. Now why can’t you do the same?” She rubbed her arm, frowning. “You didn’t mean to . . . It’s not like you wanted to . . . to do that. You were just a kid. You were scared.”
What else was there to say? That Janine Walters had been so scared she wet the bed? That she wasn’t supposed to have been there? Jerry Cox had said the house would be empty, that she and her husband were in New York for the weekend. But Jerry Cox had said a lot of things that night, that she was hot for him and always left the key in the garage for him to let himself in any time he wanted. He said the booze was in the back pantry, so the plan was to just help themselves and then be on their way. But then Jerry started opening drawers in the dark kitchen and feeling around inside cupboards for the money he said they owed him for yardwork. Probably upstairs, he said. She did that sometimes, left it in her underwear drawer for him, wrapped up in the silk panties she’d worn that day.
It had all been said, all written down somewhere, delivered in testimony no one believed. Why should they? And even if they did, which word, fact, or detail would change a thing? No matter what he knew and remembered, the truth was ultimately meaningless. Like her grave marker, there remained only this rock-solid, irrefutable pyramid of facts: Suffocated or strangled, Janine Walters