We Are Water by Wally Lamb Page A

myself. Say it right to her face. But I’m telling you, Muriel , she came on to me, and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying. It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.
    And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.
    Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.
    Yeah. Much better, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working. The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell. . . .
    Don’t! I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid or his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here. . . .
    Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? . . .
    Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “ stay cations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo. . . . Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it. At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”
    “And what thing was that?”
    “He . . . molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”
    “And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”
    “It went on over a couple of years. Until he got caught.”
    “And how old is his victim?”
    “My granddaughter? She’s eleven. It started when she was eight. But anyway, I write to him, okay? Try to be supportive. But whenever I start one of those letters, I think about what he did and it fills me with rage.”
    “Well, that’s an appropriate response. But why in the world would you write him sympathetic letters?”
    “Because he’s my son. I love him in spite of—”
    “And that’s an in appropriate response. Personally, I think convicted pedophiles should get the death penalty. If my son did what your son did, he’d be dead to me.”
    Jesus, the poor guy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Show him a little compassion, will you?
    “Yeah, but the thing is—”
    “The thing , sir, is that your son did something so vile, so despicable , that it’s unforgivable. You should be focusing your energies on helping your granddaughter, not your piece-of-crap son. Stop being a weenie. He’s earned what he’s getting in there.”
    Well, there’s a counseling style for you: bludgeon the patient. I reach over and change the station. But what she’s just told that guy—that he should reject his son—ricochets inside my head and transports me back to that drab, joyless room on the third floor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where my mother lay dying. Where, three or four days before she passed, she and I finally touched on the untouchable subject of Francis Oh, the