The Good Father (29 page)

I watched my family during these visits and wondered: Is this really our lives now? I was amazed that the human animal could, over time, come to define any situation, no matter how unnatural, as normal.

I watched them and I worried. I looked at my two young sons. How would this experience affect them? I looked for signs of permanent scarring, of behavior that might give an early warning of long-term damage. Looking at my boys through the prism of Daniel’s life, I could not
help but analyze every word they said in anger, every sullen mood, every negative action. I was desperate to protect them, desperate not to miss any warning signs, the way I had missed them with Danny.

I spent hours talking to Fran about things we might do to minimize the damage. I suggested the boys stay home. I thought we should avoid exposing them to a prison environment.

But Fran said no. She thought the boys should see their brother. She thought they should understand that actions had consequences. That bad behavior was punished. So we continued to make the drive together as a family, listening to talk radio but rarely speaking ourselves.

Those afternoons Fran allowed me to take a few hours by myself, I would go to the golf course and spend two hours hitting balls at the driving range. I found the emptiness of the experience, the smooth, mechanical repetition, soothing. It felt good to escape into something physical, a thing that required no thought but real focus. When the first bucket of balls was empty I would buy a second. Around me, men in baseball caps used hybrid clubs for extra distance. Coeds took lessons from pros, giggling at double entendres. I set my feet, shifted my hips, settled in. Each ball I hit was a regret cast into the brush. I teed up, leveled my clubhead. I tried to stay loose, to empty my mind. I tried to let the club lift itself, to keep my left arm straight without thinking about keeping my left arm straight.

Afterward, I would drive into the mountains until I found a vista spot. I would park the car and stand among tourists looking into the far distance. I never got used to the overblown majesty of the mountains or to driving the curvy, narrow roads guarded by thin metal barriers. At first these sojourns were just a form of self-preservation, a way to satisfy my panicked need to keep moving, but I came to enjoy the drives. I came to enjoy pulling my car onto the rough, sloped shoulder and pissing into the dirt.

On weekdays I stood in front of a lecture hall filled with medical students. I talked about diseases of the nervous system. I explored the interconnectedness of things. I wore short-sleeve button-down shirts and Western-style slacks. My waist size had shrunk from thirty-six inches to the thirty-two I had been in med school. I kept my hair short. Every morning I did a hundred sit-ups, a dozen pull-ups. I started trail
running, rising before dawn, driving to a nearby state park. I liked the feel of my pounding heart, the thrush of my heavy breath. Some days I came home red-faced, cheeks scratched by brush.

“There are no small details,” I told my students, “only small doctors.”

I could not watch movies or television shows where soldiers faced certain death to save their fallen brother without a lump forming in my throat. I could not watch buddy pictures or dramas where beloved characters died of slow wasting diseases. Themes of forgiveness and loyalty made me weep privately in the downstairs bathroom. The same was true of films where the hero keeps his word at any price or where the weak were protected and the frail rescued. My son was imprisoned in a federal prison, waiting to be executed. He was beyond my reach, and I was trying to figure out how to live with that.

So I set my feet and tested my iron. I practiced my short game, chopping down at the ball. I ran through browning bramble, jumped over tree roots and fallen branches. I drove the green-brown back roads of Colorado, past ranches and farms, past Holsteins and men on horseback. I cooked steaks on the backyard grill and made small talk with the neighbors. I took the kids to water parks and helped them build boxcars. I showed Alex how to throw a curveball. I took Wally to a florist so he could buy flowers for the girl he’d never have. Inside, I made him put back the roses and pick out something less obvious. I went on date nights with my wife. We ate at mediocre restaurants and saw blockbusters at the cineplex. I drove her to the impossible vistas I had discovered, and we leaned against the warm hood of the car, gazing out at the moon.

“I think we’re doing okay,” she said. And I nodded because that’s what I wanted her to believe. That was my job now, to protect my family from the truth, which was that I might never again be whole. This change of character had unexpected side effects. Out of the blue, our sex life reignited. The routine we had settled into in Connecticut, a brief foreplay of kissing and manual stimulation, leading quickly to the missionary position, was thrown out. We attacked each other now with recklessness. Before, sex had been a means to an end. Now it became a destination. Passion is, in many ways, a kind of violence—the only sanctioned means by which one spouse can attack the other—and, in this spirit, Fran and I found ourselves grappling with an often frightening ferocity. She clawed
at me, bit my neck and shoulders. It was as if she had decided to use sex as a form of punishment. She would pin my arms to the bed and grind against me the way the ocean wears at the shoreline. In the depths of the night she expressed a newfound desire to penetrate me. For my part, I had lost the will to come. It was not that I was withholding my reward. It’s that I was often unable to climax. I felt nothing. As a result our sessions sprawled into the later hours. We would wrestle each other into exhaustion, collapsing winded and sore onto the bed.

“That was incredible,” she would say. And I would agree because it was. Incredible that life had brought us to this place. Incredible that pleasure could feel so much like pain.

I was beginning to understand what my son meant when he talked about levels of detachment. I felt, at once, of a thing and outside it. Was this how Daniel felt as he traveled the country? Was this who Carter Allen Cash was? The unnameable other inside each one of us? The part of my son that felt alone? Unconnected?

I went in for my annual physical. The doctor was Indian, an internist who was recommended by the head of the university. Dr. Patel. He took my pulse, my blood pressure. A nurse drew blood. They ran an EKG and took a chest X-ray. When it was time I bent over and allowed him to check my prostate, grimacing at the cold intrusion of his finger. Afterward, in his office, he asked how I was feeling.

“Fine,” I told him.

“No aches or pains? Headaches?”

“No,” I told him.

“How about your digestion? Any heartburn or diarrhea?”

“Occasionally.”

“How’s your mood?”

“My mood?”

“Yes. Your outlook. Would you say you are feeling well?” I looked at him, a young man with his whole life ahead of him. There was a photo on his desk, Patel with a smiling wife, a baby in her arms. Was I feeling well? The question was absurd, and what’s more, I knew this man was incapable of understanding the answer. What did he know about anything?

“I feel fine,” I told him.

He nodded. This was good news.

“Okay,” he said. “We should get the test results back in a few days, but your EKG was good, prostate was normal.”

I stood and offered him my hand. He rose and shook.

“Thank you for your time,” I said.

The next morning I told Fran I was going to run some errands. I drove to a gun range outside town, parked the Jeep in the shade. I told the clerk I wanted to rent a gun and buy a target. He showed me three shelves of revolvers and semiautomatics. I chose a 9-mm Smith & Wesson, then demonstrated that I knew how to disarm the weapon, ejecting a round and removing the clip. The clerk handed me a pair of headphones and some plastic goggles, then led me into the back. I followed him, carrying my pistol in a tray, clip out, along with a box of shells. The paper target, a simple bull’s-eye, I had rolled up under my arm. Inside the range, the clerk placed the tray on the narrow shelf and told me to return the weapon as it was, with the clip out.

There were three other men on the range, shooting targets. Through the headphones the sound of their shots was muffled but by no means quiet. I unrolled my paper target and clipped it to the line, then pressed a button near the shelf, sending the target gliding down the range. Next I opened the box of ammunition and slid eleven cold brass bullets into the clip, feeling a metallic click as they settled into place. My breathing was steady. My hands did not shake. I inserted the clip into the gun and chambered a round. My goggles were scratched but functional. I took a deep breath, let it out, then raised the gun and pointed it at the target.

My uncle had taken me shooting once when I was a boy. I remember the blood thrill of it, the way the pistol jumped in my hand like a living thing. It was that memory that sent me to the range several times during my college years, usually with one or two boys from my dorm. Once I started medical school, though, the allure of shooting wore off. During my surgical rotation I saw the damage a bullet could do to human tissue, witnessed the destructive mayhem of multiple gunshot wounds during a spin in the emergency room. After that there was no romance in guns anymore, no mystery. It had been three decades since I’d held one in my hand. It was heavy but balanced. I felt the wood of the grip against my palm. The air smelled of cordite and gunpowder. I thought of my son standing on a hilltop shooting cans. I pictured him on a motel-room
floor, oiling the barrel of a store-bought weapon. I remembered the photo of Daniel that had been taken at Royce Hall, wild-eyed, gun in hand, a Secret Service agent squeezing his arm.

I looked down the barrel at the paper bull’s-eye. My finger rested on the trigger. How was this different than hitting golf balls? How was it different than running through the Colorado greenbelt? I tried to imagine how I looked, an older man with a military haircut, his knees slightly bent, pointing a handgun down a narrow range. My son had confessed to murdering a man with a gun, much like this one. He had spent time in gun ranges all over the country. Could I know what he knew just by doing what he did? Could I understand the things that only he understood?

I was Dr. Paul Allen, son of Rhoda, father of Alex and Wally. Or was I? Was this man pointing a weapon at a paper target the same man who diagnosed illnesses, who treated the sick? Something was happening to me. I had lost direction. I didn’t know what I was meant to do anymore. My son was going to be executed. Why was I playing golf and hosting dinner parties? Why was I jogging and recycling? And yet, what else could I do? I owed it to my wife, my other children. I had to let my boy go. Around me the sound of gunshots was like a metronome ticking off the seconds of my life.

I squinted at the target. It was a man, a woman, a child. It was everyone I had ever hated, everyone I had ever loved. I put the gun back on the tray and took off my goggles. There were no answers here, only noise and violence.

For the first time in my adult life, I began to pray.

At night, when everyone was asleep, I wandered the house like a ghost. I watched my sons sleep in their beds. They were like windmills stopped in mid-turn. Wally had already forgotten about Maribel, the Mexican siren. He was in love now with a blond twelve-year-old with breasts, as I suspected were all the other boys at school. Alex had discovered football, and he spent hours in the yard throwing spirals at a plastic target.

They had been babies once, chubby and small. I used to change their diapers in the depths of the night. We would give them a bottle and read them to sleep. There was one book I think of now as I watch them sleep, a board book called
I Love You, Stinky Face
. In it a mother tells her son she loves him, and the boy says,
But Mamma, what if I were a big scary ape?
The mother says,
If you were a giant ape, I would bake you a cake of bananas and say, I love you my big scary ape
.

But Mamma
, the boy says,
what if I was a one-eyed monster?

During our visits to the prison, we were prohibited from touching Danny. At the end of each conversation—when the guard came to collect him—he would blow us a kiss, and we would reply in kind, standing to watch as he passed through the iron door and disappeared.

Wally seemed unaffected by these visits, but Alex developed night terrors. He took to sleeping in bed with us, the way he used to when he was three.

“Maybe you shouldn’t visit Danny for a while,” I told him one morning. We were the first ones up, and as he sat at the kitchen island eating cereal, I stood across from him stirring milk into my coffee.

“No,” he said. “I want to.”

“Maybe just for a little while,” I said, “you should stay home when we go see Danny. Or maybe we’ll all take a break. It’s been a really hard year. This is a lot to handle even for a grown-up. I think we all need a rest.” He thought about this.

“But what if they kill him?”

My heart skipped a beat. He was talking about the execution. I thought about the things I’d had to deal with as a child, my father’s death and the hole it created in my heart. I had gone to his funeral, had stood by the graveside and watched as his family and friends dropped dirt into the grave. None of it seemed real to me at the time. The grief came later, the true understanding of death, its finality. Standing in the kitchen, I thought about Alex and Wally, their awareness that Daniel had been sentenced to death, that he was stuck in prison waiting to die. By taking them to visit their brother hadn’t I really been bringing them to his funeral not once but week after week? My father’s death had been sudden. But Daniel’s was an event to be calendared, a landmark visible on the horizon, growing closer every day.

The horror of this thought made me sick to my stomach.

I put my hand on Alex’s back, still so small, so delicate.

“They can’t just execute him,” I said. “They have to set a date, and then there are appeals. Okay? We have time. It’s okay to take a break, to rest.”