Now You See Him (14 page)
“People like you, Nick, you mean well, but you’re handicapped. You’re ignorant. You think you know, but you don’t. You don’t know anything. You’re Monarch, born and bred. What do you know, eh?”
“This is crazy,” I said out loud, brusquely shrugging on my coat.
“I feel sorry for you,” she said, “living your whole life like that. It was terrible of those people to do that to you. Of course
I
was involved as well.”
“You know what?” I was now buttoning up my coat with a kind of brisk ferocity. “I’ve had just about enough of this, Mrs. Castor, and of these crazy strange hints you seem to be throwing out. I’ve come all this way out of
politeness because you called me, and yet all you’ve done since I got here is mouth drunken gibberish.”
“Are you getting angry with me, Nick?” She seemed delighted. “Please tell me you’re getting angry with me. Are you going to cry now, big man?”
I was done.
“Your family has been very important to me over the years,” I said, turning to go, “but I can promise you that I’ll never expose myself to this kind of thing again. If you want to toy with someone, Mrs. Castor, get a dog. You need help, and it’s not the kind of help that I can give. I really do hope you seek treatment, and soon. Good-bye.” As I left I had a brief glimpse of her ruined, ancient face holding a kind of puckish joy.
“Tell your parents I saw you,” I heard her say over my shoulder, “and that I wanted to tell you the truth, but decided not to. Tell them that. Tell them that for certain people, death is an upgrade, and I can’t wait.”
I heard the stab and drag of her footfalls receding into the house as I walked down the long main hall, opened the front door and let in the shock of living air and light.
T
WO HOURS AFTER THE TELEVISED PRESS
conference announcing Rob’s crime, local and state cop cars roared into the streets of Monarch with the speed of a beachfront landing. Men in creased pants and blocky white shirts and ties began strolling up and down the sidewalks, peering in the windows of shops, talking to intrigued, excited residents. The first of the news crews arrived—just a small van. And that feeling of strange and glary election began; that elevation into self-consciousness of the citizens of Monarch that would last for many weeks.
Within days, due to the massive local press coverage, there was a run on retired-area police detectives and investigators who could put an educated-sounding spin on the manhunt. One of the lucky ones was a man from a neighboring town named Gary Nathwire, who had just recently retired as a deputy county sheriff. Nathwire had the dramatic, authority-invoking widow’s peak, the austere serious
bone structure, and the drawling delivery that inspired confidence in viewers. He was married to a schoolteacher, had two kids and had lived and worked in the shadow of a notorious scandal-ridden sheriff’s department for thirty years without ever being even minimally spattered by suspicion. Plus, he had a long history with fugitive cases. The producers fell on him with shouts of joy and we all quickly became familiar with his face.
From the beginning, Nathwire radiated a supreme confidence that Rob would quickly be apprehended. He explained just how difficult it is for someone, especially someone unskilled in the arts of evasion, to avoid a serious dragnet. Humans are sloppy creatures, he said. They deposit the cellular detritus of themselves on coffee cups in diners. They sticker everything they touch with their fingerprints. They leave “smell corridors” in the air easily traced by the highly developed olfactory neurons of blue-tick hounds, and travel in hurricanes of paper and electronic transactions. Almost invariably, they plug into the traceable grid.
If none of that happens, Nathwire said, then often while drunk, at bars or in the midst of making sexual advances, they talk; they blab of their exploits; they draw heroic pictures of themselves under siege and outsmarting the long hand of the law.
Nathwire’s granitic self-confidence never seemed to crack. He was absolutely certain that it would be only a matter of days until Rob was brought to justice.
And he was wrong.
A week after the press conference we were all still reeling; we were still sick at heart about the whole thing; we
were still faintly thrilled, despite ourselves, by the advent of something quite this large, this lurid, this electric in our midst. And we were also, many of us I think, secretly rooting for Rob to continue to evade capture, though under the circumstances we would never have admitted it. I was driving to work that morning when I saw two state police cruisers parked in a kind of vector by the side of the road, their lights going. I pulled over not far away and sat in the car, watching. The decision to do so was immediate and unthinking.
The cops had a German shepherd with them, one of those animals that seem to contain a kind of pedigreed fury, erect, quivering, big pawed, alert through the tapered muzzle. The cops whispered something in the dog’s ear, rubbed a piece of cloth under its nose, and it took off into the woods at a rollicking sprint. Sitting in my car, looking on quietly, I called the lab office on the cell phone and told them I’d be a little bit late.
The street we were parked on was a ways out of the downtown area, located in that district where the population density begins to open up to rolling, thickly forested hills. Called Cliffside for the way it skirts an old disused quarry, the road is not far from where I grew up. In the particular area where we were parked, a variety of trails cut away in several directions into the woods. I had the strangest inkling, as I sat there. I kept the inkling purposefully on the outer edges of my consciousness, but I felt it, distinctly.
After about ten minutes, the dog came streaking out of the woods. Whether dogs can smile is a question I’ve heard since I was a small child, but if a dog could, this one was sporting a killer grin. The dog was followed out of
the woods about five minutes later by a plainclothes cop carrying something in a black plastic evidence bag. I got out of the car, and approached the cruiser.
Out here, this far from the big city, police and the law are courteous, laid back, and like neighbors, mostly, with the tiniest of authority-chips on their shoulders. They’re a world away from
Homicide
and
NYPD Blue
.
“Morning, Officer,” I said to the plainclothes cop, who nodded, silent at my greeting. “Any break in the case?”
“You media?” he asked.
“Not by a long shot.” Smiling, I explained that I was just an old friend of Rob Castor, and that I was passing by. The cop took a long, measuring look at me, and then asked me my name. I told him, and he wrote it down on a small pad. Then he nodded to himself as if in confirmation that I’d passed some internal background check.
“Just a debris shelter,” he said, motioning with his chin in an approximate direction in the woods. My heart jumped, but I said nothing, and nodded back soberly. “Could be a vagrant’s, or it could be something more,” he added.
“Huh,” I said.
The man nodded, looked me over once again, and got slowly into the passenger side of his car. First his and then the other car, as if in a silent ballet, pulled out and left, one following the other. I stood there a long moment, listening, to make sure that they were out of sight, and then I got back in my own car. I sat there a few seconds while my hammering pulse slowed, before I pulled across the street, to an old construction site, and parked behind some brush. Then I got out of the car, squared my shoulders, and marched off into the woods.
I knew exactly where I was going. I cut through the woods along the trails I remembered more or less by heart, even twenty-odd years after the fact. It was high summer, and the green-leaf smell was strong. After about ten minutes, I made it to the brushy covert where Rob and I had first talked about breasts, and I had watched his foxy, sea green eyes open and close as he instructed me on the ways of the world. Dozens, maybe a hundred times total we’d gone there, and crushed the grass, and hung out in that essential enclosed space of childhood, auditioning our adult selves with each other. I stood there a long moment, remembering. Over the years, other people had found their way into our sanctuary, clearly, because there were crumpled cigarette packs, bits and pieces of old flaking food packaging, and even a rain-pulped paperback novel, its pages swollen in a rigid flower. Off to one side, I could see the blackened remnant of a campfire. Self-consciously, laughing inwardly to myself, I touched the darkened stones, but they were cold.
At a certain point I ambled across the clearing, wondering what it was they’d taken in an evidence bag. I was standing there, musing to myself, smiling slightly and totally lost in thought, when out of the sighing, wind-driven mix of forest sounds there came a strange call. Low and insistent, it came again.
I froze.
For about two years, when we were kids together, Rob had been big into birding. He’d carried field guides in a backpack, along with a pair of rubber-sheathed Leitz Trinovid binoculars, and often, a grubby life list rolled into his pocket. I enjoyed birds, but in the amateur way of some
one simply relishing their designer good looks, though I did remember Rob’s skill at mimicking their calls. I also remembered, years later, standing with him stoned one night in a park in Washington, D.C., deep in my unemployed pop-physics phase, and marveling at the shivering liquid notes of a particularly ambitious mockingbird.
The call came again, high, fluting on the air. It was a mournful sound, equidistant between a hoot and a bleat. It was coming from not that far away, somewhere in the woods on the other side of the clearing. I took a careful look around myself, and saw absolutely no one. For a long time I stood there, listening to the sound, the hair stirring on the back of my neck. Then I started slowly walking toward it.
T
HE TEARS ARRIVED UNEXPECTEDLY, AT
work. While filling out an order form for a wide-spectrum animal antibiotic manufactured by Knight Pharmaceuticals, I put down my pen and suddenly notified myself that I was about to start crying. It was the word “knight,” which, given the rolling boil of my mind of late, had acted as a spur to memory, and flung my thoughts all the way back to a childhood recollection of playing chess with Marc Castor. I had often played chess with the calm, unflappable Marc Castor, and he’d nearly always beaten me—with this one exception. I had been down to my last few scattered pieces that day, and in a sudden flurry of moves I checkmated him and won. What I remembered was the shocked surprise on his face, and the way he’d turned around in his chair, as if to summon a doubting audience to witness this stunning reversal. From that day forward, I had carried within me the victory—and the
look on his face—as part of the legend of my private expertise, and it was only now, sitting in my office, pen in hand, that I understood that Marc had let me win. It was a gift of his, a communication of a sort, and the sensation of reexperiencing it, akin to a living warm touch arriving at the end of a twenty-year-long arm, made me start to cry before I could stop myself.
It was clear what I had to do. I stood up from my desk, stalked out the back door into the parking lot (fully aware that my erratic recent behavior at work was increasingly becoming a subject of office conversation), drove straight to the travel agent, bought a ticket and then zoomed home to pack a bag.
When I got home, Lucy, alerted by my phone call, was waiting for me. I sat her down and told her that my father had had a “cardiac relapse” and that I had to fly out there immediately. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell her the truth. Perhaps it’s because, gradually and yet increasingly in the months since Rob Castor’s death, the truth had become an enemy. She looked at me appraisingly as I embellished my falsehood, and then she reached forward and, to my surprise, gave me a sincere hug. As welcome as it was, the contact with her was also shocking—not least for the surge of sexual electricity that accompanied it. I hadn’t had any physical contact with Lucy for several months, and I tried not to judge myself too harshly for the fact that, while her eyes communicated to me a moment of candid tenderness in which I could read, as in a series of fanned cards, her worry about my father, her grieving over our marriage, and her recent deep loneliness within it, my mind was blotted out with
thoughts of the quivering pink and white sensitivities of her body.
When the hug was over and the strange, mixed circuit that had enclosed us for a second was broken, I turned to go. Almost certainly, by the time I was backing the car into the street, she was already on the phone to Purefoy.
On the way to the airport, I called my parents, to announce my imminent arrival. My mother was taut and defensive, as if she’d sensed something from the start, and she tried briefly to duck seeing me by mentioning something about her book club, but I barreled right over her. Shirley Castor had “explained everything,” I said in a loud, clear voice, and I was coming down to “get some answers.” Her stunned inhalation of breath told me everything I needed to know.
I showed up at their door feeling like a single large, projected bullet, shot from a gun two thousand miles away. Breathing deeply a moment, I rang.
My mother opened the door and pecked me on the cheek, her face giving away none of her inner feelings. “How was your flight?” she asked in a flat, tense voice. She had on a concealingly loose sky-blue shirt, a pair of dark blue shorts that made her legs look slightly bowed, and pointy sneakers. Her hair was perfectly set in its characteristic sexless bowl and flip, and I was sure she’d been to her salon that morning for a wash and style.
“Fine,” I said, “and very smooth.”
“That’s good,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
I smiled thinly, thinking, this is not a divorce, what we’re doing now. A divorce happens in daylight, its facts are conscripted according to the fine print of contracts;
the children and properties are divided by law. But this is insidious, what was done to me. It’s like being eaten by bacteria from the inside out.
“Nick,” my father said from behind my mother. I went forward into the room, noting that he’d been upgraded from the infant uniform of pajamas to a pair of seersucker pants, a dress shirt and the requisite white sneakers. Strangely, he had his hat on, even though the back door to the patio was open, and through that door flowed the hot, thin desert air. My guess was that they’d opened it that morning and then received my call, and in the subsequent frenzy had simply forgot. Another time this would have provoked a reflex of sympathy on my part for the encroaching distractedness of age. But I was here, now, on different business. And it was clear that both my parents were girded for battle.
“Dad,” I said, moving toward him, and then pulling myself up a few feet away—the impulse to embrace short-circuited.
“Okay,” he said, as if acknowledging the newly chill climate between us. “Okay, then. So sit down.”
My mother had scurried off into the kitchen, and returned as I was sitting down on the couch with a tray of chips, salsa and lemonade. She set it down in silence. My father was still grumblingly lowering himself onto the couch; the hinges of his knees invariably locked at a certain angle and he dropped through space the last few inches to the cushions in a silent free fall terrifying in its implications. “So, Nick,” my mother said, “I’m so glad that all is going well with you”—she brought two hands up to her chest, and waved them around without obvi
ous purpose—“in your job and everything at home with Lucy.”
“Yeah.” I took a long swallow of my lemonade and nodded.
“Okay,” my father said, for the third time, “so here we are. One thing at a time. Strange as it seems, Nick, I’m glad you came.”
“Are you,” I said.
“I am, yes. You want some clarification, and we say fine to that. We owe you that, son”—and the word, so neutral in essence, seemed suddenly to flare a moment in the room—“at the very least. And we’re going to give it to you.”
“Everybody makes accommodations in life, and so did we,” my mother said, in what was clearly a preemptive rhetorical strike. She sat down next to my father, her right hand fluttering to her lips. “It was a different time.”
“So, let’s talk,” my father said.
“Fine,” I said.
“You’re wondering why it happened, of course,” my father said.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re thinking, possibly, ‘Why would a man do this to a person he called his son.’”
“You could say that.”
“A
very
different time, it was,” said my mother.
“I wanna start with the big picture first,” he said, “and one thing I’m gonna do as part of that is, I’m gonna level with you, okay?”
I nodded.
“You know depression, son? You know what it is?”
“I think I’ve got a vague idea.”
“No, you don’t, unless you’ve had it diagnosed. It’s not being sad because you got dumped or passed over on the job or audited. It’s like being trapped in some kind of smelly thick mud that closes over your head and you can’t move or see or even get out of your own way. And me, okay, I admit it, I was depressed. Hey, I was even seeing a shrink,” my father said astonishingly. “I was dejected about goddamn everything in the couple of years before your birth. And back then wasn’t like today, you know, when it’s like some new dance craze to be unhappy and everybody is doing it by the numbers, with the pills and the doctors. No, back then, you weren’t only sad as hell, you were also embarrassed about it. Your mother would say, ‘Larry, where are you? I can see you but you’re not there.’ Where was I? Good question! I’m not copping a plea here, I’m telling you I was suffering from not-wanting-to-be-alive disease. I was at the end of my rope, okay? So when what happened happened, and that despicable human person, that so-called friend of the family from across the street, who preyed on your lonely mom, calling her and dropping by constantly, drawing her in like a spider and wearing her down with his so-called compassion, because he could talk, yes he could—when he did that, and he took advantage of her good nature, well I guess what I’m saying is that it was just another bad thing happening among many. Also, it was like I was so far down inside myself that it was almost happening to someone else. Who knows, maybe it even made it a little easier to deal with, being depressed like that. And anyway, what do you think my choices were at that point, Nick?”
I simply stared at him.
“I’ll tell you. They were two,” he said in his high, weak voice. “They were either break up both of the families with a terrible fight of some kind, or fall on my sword and swallow it.” After a pause, he said, “I swallowed it. You should be aware that it did not taste good.”
Above me, I could feel, rather than see, my mother twisting slowly from side to side, hands retracted to her chest in a posture of silent supplication. I took a deep drink from my glass, feeling anger at how the impalement of my life on the shaft of convenience was about to be subsumed into yet another story in my parents’ anthology of “what we had to do to survive.”
“Why didn’t you just abort me, Mom?” I asked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said my father.
“Nick”—her voice was soft to the point of nearly inaudible—“please, why would you ask me such a thing?”
She reached out to touch my brow, but I jerked my head away from her. “Don’t do that, Nick. Please don’t do that. I didn’t want an abortion because I wanted
you
. I wanted exactly what I got, which was a wonderful person in my life. I wanted you. I got you. I’m incredibly proud of you. That’s why.”
“The doctor said she had a thin-walled uterus,” my father said, frowning, “and the abortion would have been very dangerous. Besides, she’s right, we wanted the child. We didn’t want Patrick to grow up without siblings.”
“We made accommodations,” my mother said.
“We came to a kind of agreement,” he added.
“It was a different time,” she said.
I shut my eyes and felt how on the far side of anger ran the deep, nearly bottomless canyons of inner fatigue.
How tired I was just then! I could have gone instantly to sleep right on the sofa.
“An agreement about my future without my participation,” I said, opening my eyes, “is not much of an agreement, from where I’m standing.”
There was a silence, during which my father looked down at the ground, and my mother, unable to stay still, took a swift couple of forward steps, but immediately converted the movement into aimlessly adjusting some photographs on a nearby tea table.
“Pardon me, guys, but I still can’t get my head around this.” I laughed hollowly. “I mean, when would you have told me if I hadn’t come to you now?”
“That was probably the worst part of the whole thing,” my mother said quickly, looking up from the photographs, “that we’d started this train in motion, and then you were already a grown man with your own family, and we still couldn’t stop the train. We didn’t know how to stop it. We wanted to, but it all seemed too late, and we were afraid that it would only create, what, bitterness and difficulty.”
“Regrettable,” my father said, “it was regrettable, yes.”
“Regrettable?” I asked, and laughed again, this time with a high, braying sound, feeling yet another wall of self-control come down with a slam. “A day of rain is regrettable, guys. Failing a test is regrettable. Missing a doctor’s appointment is regrettable. But having lived your entire life as a fucking lie is one whole hell of a lot more than just ‘regrettable.’”
But my father merely replied calmly, “There was no lie involved.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Of omission, maybe, Nick,” he said. “But we didn’t think of it like that. We thought of it as what we needed to do to save our own family, and give you the best life possible. And look at you now,” my father said, “all your arms and legs, a nice wife, a good career, two sons and a—”
“Stop it!” I shouted.
My father looked to my mother and shrugged his shoulders. Then he turned back to me and shook his head, as if in regret. “Stop what, Nick?” he asked.
“Just please stop this horseshit charade, Dad. Stop trying to pretend that everything was always normal and hunky-dory save for some small little out-of-the-way details.” I got to my feet, my hands involuntarily making sharp chopping motions in the air. “Don’t think everything’s fine. Everything’s not fine. I’m having an affair, I’m probably going to get a divorce, and I’ve taken so much time off from my job lately I may be out of work soon too. My life is falling apart, okay?” I saw my mother recoil. “Are you happy now, Mom? Is this the bastard child you were so fucking proud to raise?”
“Is such language really necessary?” said my mother.
“
Language
?” I grabbed either side of my head. “Can you stop caring for one goddamn minute about language and what is proper and nice? Can you just stop,” I was shouting, “for one whole minute pretending that we’re all trying out for the perfect goddamn family!”
“Go ahead,” said my father, lying back amid the cushions, “yell, scream, blow off some steam, son. It’ll make you feel better. You’re entitled.”
“What in God’s name did you think you were doing?” I cried.
“Love doesn’t need excuses.” My mother was talking faster now; she’d probably gone over this for years with her own battery of therapists and was down to her prepared lines. “We brought love into being, that’s the important thing. We loved you very much and you wanted for nothing. Every life has rain falling in it; there are bad days and skeletons in every single closet in the world. People die early, they go crazy, their marriages blow up. But on balance we gave you everything we could.”
“Except the truth,” I said, and then turned to my father. “And as for you, should I call you Dad, or Larry? Should I call you a sad sack stand-in who never had the balls to tell me the truth, or something else? Dad?”
There was a silence.
“Whew,” my father said, turning to my mother. “He’s really going after me today, isn’t he? I can’t say as I like it, and I can’t say as I’m going to take it. You wanna apologize, son?”
