“I’m not a babysitter, Mike.”

“That’s okay. My son isn’t a baby.”

TIA was holding the photograph of Spencer Hill.

“I don’t see how you can be sure it’s Adam.”

“I wasn’t,” Betsy Hill said. “But then I confronted him.”

“He might have just freaked out because he was seeing a picture of his dead friend.”

“Could be,” Betsy agreed in a way that clearly meant, Not a chance.

“And you’re sure this picture was taken the night he died?”

“Yes.”

Tia nodded. The silence fell on them. They were back at the Baye house. Jill was upstairs watching TV. The sounds of Hannah Montanawafted down. Tia sat there. So did Betsy Hill.

“So what do you think this means, Betsy?”

“Everyone said they didn’t see Spencer that night. That he was alone.”

“And you think this means that they did?”

“Yes.”

Tia pressed a little. “And if he wasn’t alone, what would that mean?”

Betsy thought about it. “I don’t know.”

“You did get a suicide note, right?”

“By text. Anyone can send a text.”

Tia saw it again. In a sense the two mothers were at odds. If what Betsy Hill said about the photograph was true, then Adam had lied. And if Adam had lied, then who really knew what happened that night?

So Tia didn’t tell her about the instant messages with CeeJay8115, the ones about the mother who approached Adam. Not yet. Not until she knew more.

“I missed some signs,” Betsy said.

“Like?”

Betsy Hill closed her eyes.

“Betsy?”

“I spied on him once. Not really spied but… Spencer was on the computer and when he left the room, I just sneaked in. To see what he was looking at. You know? I shouldn’t have. It was wrong- invading his privacy like that.”

Tia said nothing.

“But anyway I hit that back arrow, you know, at the top of the browser?”

Tia nodded.

“And… and he’d been visiting some suicide sites. There were stories about kids who had killed themselves, I guess. Stuff like that. I didn’t look too long. And I never did anything about it. I just blocked.”

Tia looked at Spencer in the photograph. She looked for signs that the boy would be dead within hours, as if that would somehow show on his face. There was nothing, but what did that mean?

“Did you show this picture to Ron?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did he make of it?”

“He wonders what difference it makes. Our son committed suicide, he said, so what are you trying to figure out, Betsy? He thinks I’m doing this to get closure.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Closure,” Betsy repeated, nearly spitting the word out as though it tasted bad in her mouth. “What does that even mean? Like somewhere up ahead there’s a door and I’ll walk through it and then close it and Spencer stays on the other side? I don’t want that, Tia. Can you imagine anything more obscene than having closure?”

They went quiet again, the annoying laugh track from Jill’s show the only sound.

“The police think your son ran away,” Betsy said. “They think mine committed suicide.”

Tia nodded.

“But suppose they’re wrong. Suppose they’re wrong about both of our boys.”

24

NASH sat in the van and tried to figure his next move.

Nash’s upbringing had been normal. He knew that psychiatric types would want to examine that statement, searching for some kind of sexual abuse or excess or streak of religious conservatism. Nash thought that they would find nothing. His were good parents and siblings. Maybe too good. They had covered for him the way families do for one another. In hindsight some might view that as a mistake, but it takes a lot for family to accept the truth.

Nash was intelligent and thus he knew early on that he was what some might call “damaged.” There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can’t know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy. Nash knew that all his wires weren’t connected or that there might be some bug in the system. He knew that he was different, that he was not of the norm. That didn’t necessarily make him feel inferior-or superior. He knew that his mind went to very dark places and liked it there. He did not feel things the way others did, did not sympathize with people’s pain the way others pretended they did.

The key word: “pretended.”

Pietra sat in the seat next to him.

“Why does man make himself out to be so special?” he asked her.

She said nothing.

“Forget the fact that this planet-nay, this solar system-is so in- significantly small that we can’t even comprehend it. Try this. Imagine you’re on a huge beach. Imagine you pick up one tiny grain of sand. Just one. Then you look up and down this long beach that stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see. Do you think our entire solar system is as small as that grain of sand is to that beach in comparison to the universe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if you did, you’d be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you’re still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you’re holding and still, still, our entire solar system-forget our planet-is smaller than that compared to the rest of the universe. Can you even comprehend how insignifi- cant we are?”

Pietra said nothing.

“But forget that for a moment,” Nash went on, “because man is even insignificant here on this very planet. Let’s take this whole argument down to just earth for a moment, okay?”

She nodded.

“Do you realize that dinosaurs walked this planet longer than man?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not all. That would be one thing that would show that man is not special-the fact that even on this infinitesimally small planet we haven’t even been kings the majority of the time. But take it a step farther-do you realize how much longer the dinosaurs ruled the earth than us? Two times? Five times? Ten times?”

She looked at him. “I don’t know.”

“Forty-four thousand times longer.” He was gesturing wildly now, lost in the bliss of his argument. “Think about that. Forty-four thousand times longer. That’s more than one hundred and twenty years for every single day. Can you even comprehend it? Do you think we will survive forty-four thousand times longer than we already have?”

“No,” she said.

Nash sat back. “We are nothing. Man. Nothing. Yet we feel as though we are special. We think we matter or that God considers us his favorites. What a laugh.”

In college, Nash studied John Locke’s state of nature-the idea that the best government is the least government because, put simply, it is closest to the state of nature, or what God intended. But in that state, we are animals. It is nonsense to think we are anything more. How silly to believe that man is above that and that love and friendship are anything but the ravings of a more intelligent mind, a mind that can see the futility and thus must invent ways to comfort and distract itself from it.

Was Nash the sane one for seeing the darkness-or were most people just self-delusional? And yet.

And yet for many years Nash had longed for normalcy.

He saw the carefree and craved it. He realized that he was way above average in intelligence. He was a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores. He matriculated at Williams College, where he majored in philosophy-all the while trying to keep the crazy away. But the crazy wanted out.

So why not let it out?

There was in him some primitive instinct to protect his parents and siblings, but the rest of the world’s inhabitants did not matter to him. They were background scenery, props, nothing more. The truth was-a truth he understood early-he derived intense pleasure from harming others. He always had. He didn’t know why. Some people derive pleasure from a soft breeze or a warm hug or a victory shot in a basketball game. Nash derived it from ridding the planet of another inhabitant. He didn’t ask this for himself, but he saw it and sometimes he could fight it and sometimes he could not.