River’s End

pencil. “Where are you?”
    “I’m watching the sun go down. I’m outside, and I’m watching the sun go down over the water.”
    “You didn’t tell me they were letting you out early, Sam.”
    “No.”
    “Are you in San Francisco?”
    “I was in San Francisco long enough. It’s cold and it’s damp. I wanted to come home.”
    Noah’s pulse picked up. “You’re in L.A.?”
    “I got a room off of Sunset. It’s not what it used to be, Brady.”
    “Give me the address.”
    “I’m not there now. Actually I’m down the road from you. Watching the sun set,” he said almost dreamily. “Outside a place that serves tacos and beer and salsa that makes your eyes sting.”
    “Tell me where you are. I’ll meet you.”
    Sam wore khakis and a short-sleeved chambray shirt, both so painfully new they’d yet to shake out the folding pleats. He sat at one of the little iron tables on the patio of the Mexican place and stared out over the water. Though business wasn’t brisk, there was a sprinkling of people at other tables, kids with fresh faces who scooped up nachos and sipped at the beers they were barely old enough to order. In contrast, Sam looked old, pale, and inexplicably more naive. Noah ordered more tacos, another beer for each of them.
    “What does it feel like?”
    With a kind of wonder, Sam watched an in-line skater skim by. “I spent a few days in San Francisco, to get my bearings. Then I took a bus down. Part of me kept expecting someone to stop me, take me back, say it had all been a mistake. Another part was waiting to be recognized, to hear someone call out, ‘Look, there’s Sam Tanner,’ and run over for my autograph. There’re two lives crossed over in the middle, and my mind keeps jumping back and forth between them.”
    “Do you want to be recognized?”
    “I was a star. An important actor. You need the attention, not just to feed the ego, but to stroke the child. If you weren’t a child, how good an actor could you be? After a while, inside, I had to put that away. When I knew the appeals weren’t going to work, the cage wasn’t going to open, I had to put it away to survive. Then I got out and it all came flooding back. And as badly as I wanted someone to look at me, to see me and remember, it scared the shit out of me that someone would. Stage fright.” Sam gave a small, sick smile. “There’s something I haven’t had to deal with in a long time.”
    Noah said nothing while the waitress clunked their food and drinks down. Once she’d walked away, he leaned forward. “Coming to L.A. was a risk, because someone’s bound to recognize you sooner or later.”
    “Where else would I go? It’s changed. I got lost twice walking around. New faces everywhere, on the street, on the billboards. People driving around in big chunky Jeeps. And you can’t smoke any fucking where.”
    Noah had to laugh at the absolute bafflement in the statement. “I imagine the food’s some better than San Quentin’s.”
    “I forgot places like this existed.” Sam picked up a taco, studied it. “I’d forgotten that before I went inside. If it wasn’t the best, I wasn’t interested. If I wasn’t going to be seen, admired, envied, what was the point?”
    He bit in, crunching the shell, ignoring the little bits of tomato and lettuce and sauce that plopped onto his plate. For a few moments he ate in concentrated silence, a kind of grim focus Noah imagined came from prison meals.
    “I was an asshole.”
    Noah lifted a brow. “Can I quote you?”
    “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? I had everything— success, adulation, power, wealth. I had the most beautiful woman in the world, who loved me. I thought I deserved it, all of it, so I didn’t value what I had. I didn’t value any of it or see it as any more than my due. So I lost it. All of it.”
    Keeping his eyes on Sam’s face, Noah sipped his beer. “Did you kill your wife?”
    He didn’t answer at first, only watched the last sliver of sun sink red into the sea. “Yes.” His gaze shifted, locked on Noah’s. “Did you expect me to deny it? What’s the point? I served twenty years for what I did. Some will say it’s not enough. Maybe they’re right.”
    “Why did you kill her?”
    “Because I couldn’t be what she asked me to be. Now ask me if I picked up the scissors that night and stabbed them into her back, her body, sliced them across her throat.”
    “All right. Did you?”
    “I don’t know.” His eyes