Too Close to Home

“I had the laptop strap tight around my wrist, but the computer had dropped down below the ledge and caught on something, so I couldn’t move my arm up, couldn’t stand up, and was barely holding on to one of the railing posts with my other hand. Brett saw the fix I was in, he was shouting ‘Hang on! Hang on!’ while he was swinging his legs over the railing to help me, but he did it too fast, and when his feet landed on the ledge, he lost his balance.”

Ellen stopped. With her elbows on the table, she made a cradle for her face with her hands and began to sob.

“Ellen,” I said. I shifted my chair closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “Ellen,” I said again.

“You see, he went to reach for me, to help me, almost instinctively. But he hadn’t taken a moment to steady himself. And then I saw it in his eyes, as he realized he was teetering in the direction of the falls,” she wept. “He tried to reach out for the railing, and he almost had ahold of it, but he was such a slight boy, he had such small hands.”

Ellen looked away for a moment. “But the momentum was carrying him away. He couldn’t get a grip. And then he was gone.” She looked at me with her red, puffy eyes. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“He never even made a sound. He just slipped away into the roar of the water. I never heard him hit the bottom.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Somehow, I pulled myself back onto the bridge,” Ellen said. “I think I must have been in some sort of shock, I don’t know. I still had the laptop. I looked down, hoping for some sign of Brett, but there was nothing. I ran to the end of the bridge, where there’s that set of stairs that goes all the way to the bottom?”

She looked at me and I nodded. I knew the stairs.

“I ran down there as fast as I could, looked all along the water’s edge, and I knew in my heart that no one could survive a fall like that. Not with all the rocks at the bottom of the falls. And then I thought I saw Brett, part of him, his back and one of his legs, on a rock, the water falling down on him, and I knew he was dead.”

She stopped. “I’d done such a horrible thing.”

“You were trying to do the right thing,” I said. “What happened was an accident, plain and simple. You did do the right thing, warning him about Conrad, what he was going to do. For all you know, Conrad was planning to do him in himself. Maybe, if you hadn’t followed Brett out to the bridge, he might have taken his own life. Thrown himself off along with the laptop.”

“If I hadn’t followed him, I think he’d still be alive.”

I would have said more to try to assuage Ellen’s feelings of guilt, but I sensed there was still more to the story. “What happened after?” I asked.

“I didn’t know who else to go to,” she said, “except Conrad.”

“You should have come to me,” I said.

“God, I wanted to,” Ellen said, her eyes pleading. “But where would I have started? You didn’t know, at this point, that I had been. . seeing Conrad. To tell you about this would have meant, ultimately, confessing to everything, and, Jim. .” She reached out and touched my arm. “I didn’t have it in me.”

I nodded.

“But I felt I had to tell someone, and that had to be Conrad, because what I’d done, I’d done because of him-not for him-but because of what he was going to do. I’d fucked it all up royally, but I was angry at him, I wanted him to share the blame, because he was the one who’d set this in motion. I went to his house. He had a place just outside the college where he lived alone, not the house he has now, of course. I just walked in through the front door and found him at the kitchen table, marking papers. I threw the laptop right in front of him, and he said, ‘What the hell is this?’

“I told him what had happened. How I’d tried to warn Brett, told him how his professor had betrayed him, and Conrad was getting red in the face, like he was going to explode. And then I told him what had happened, how Brett had tried to throw his own computer over the railing, how I’d gone after it, nearly falling to my death, how Brett had died trying to save me.”

“And his reaction to all that?”

“When I got to the part where Brett was dead, Conrad suddenly changed. He went into this kind of dead calm. He asked me if I was kidding. He asked me if that computer was Brett’s, whether it had Brett’s book on it. I assumed so, but hadn’t actually checked, so Conrad took it out of the pouch and opened it up and had a look and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was scrolling through something, and he was nodding, and then he closed the laptop. And all he said was, ‘I’ll look after this.’”

“He knew then he could get away with ripping it off.”