“No,” I said. “Heard what?”
“My Mom and Dad are dead,” Jim said.
I knelt down beside him. “What happened?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He just kept staring straight ahead. “The funeral was this morning, and then I drove all day to get here. I didn’t want to be there anymore.”
“What happened, Jim?” I asked again.
He finally looked at me. “I was in Tallahassee when the police there found me. They pulled me out of class. I thought I was in trouble, but I couldn’t figure out for what. Other than spending too much after-hours time with the ‘scope and the other lab gear messing around with my own nano-machine projects, I couldn’t think of anything I’d done even remotely wrong.” He looked away again, off into the space in front of him.
Louise moved to his other side and reached to touch him, but I shook my head no and she backed off.
“As near as they can tell, he beat her to death, Matt.” He balled his hands and hit the sides of his head a couple of times. “He hit her too hard or too many times or something—I don’t know—but something broke inside her. They might have been able to save her if he’d just called for help, but the jerk shot himself first. One bullet from a pistol right through the brain; he got that right.” He looked at me. “No one called the police for days. I was at school, Matt. If I’d been home I could have stopped him, or at least gotten her to a doctor. I could have saved her.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that, Jim,” I said. “There’s no way you could have known to pick that particular time to drive all the way home from Tallahassee. No way. He did it, and it’s his fault.”
Matt stood. “Yeah, right!” he yelled. “I couldn’t have known that he was going to beat her to death that particular day. But what I could have known is that it was going to happen someday, that he was going to go too far one day and kill her! I could have taken him out first. I could have, and I should have.”
“No, Jim, you shouldn’t have. That would have been murder, and that would have been wrong.”
“Wrong? More wrong than my mother being beaten to death by that animal I had to have for a father?”
“I can’t say what would be more wrong. I don’t think it works like that. What I can say is that your mother was the one who had to make the choice. She had to leave. She had to make that choice, not you.”
“You think she deserved this?” he said. His hands were in fists and he looked like he might hit me.
“No,” Louise said quietly, so quietly I don’t think Jim heard her.
“No,” I agreed. “She didn’t deserve it.” I stood and faced him. “I’m not saying that at all, and I don’t for a second believe she deserved this. I’m just saying that she had to make the choice to leave, and nobody—not you, not anybody—could make that choice for her.”
“Well if I had, she’d still be alive,” Jim said.
“It’s not your fault, Jim,” I said.
He stared at me for a bit, but I don’t think he was seeing me. Finally, he said, “You mind if I crash here tonight?”
“No problem. You want the bed or the sofa?”
He looked at Louise like he was seeing her for the first time. “Hi, Louise,” he said. “Sorry about showing up like this. You guys keep the bed. I’ll just sit here for a while.”
We went into the bedroom. When I came out a few minutes later to get a glass of water, Jim was curled in a ball on the sofa, fast asleep. I threw a sheet over him and went back to the bed and Louise.
We talked until almost four A.M. that night, Jim’s tragedy making us both feel the need to stay awake, to stretch the day, to cling to another as if we needed proof we were still alive. We talked about our life after college, and I told Louise about the men who had visited me in my latest political science class, about the offers they made of a chance to really make a difference, to channel all my frustrations and energy into working to change the system. I told her the job would mean training in Virginia for a year or two, then moving around the world for a while. She didn’t want to leave the area and intended to get her Ph.D. in math at UNC and teach or do research if she could find a job. We agreed to worry about all this later and fell asleep curled tightly together.