The Good Father (33 page)

The cuffs came off in a hurry. Worried he’d gone too far, Carter assured them that he understood they were only doing their jobs. He asked them if they would wait while he packed up his things. He said he didn’t feel safe sleeping under the same roof with those guys, not after this. They gave him fifteen minutes to throw his stuff in a suitcase. He didn’t have much. Just some clothes and books. The frat boys were outside, smoking cigarettes on the curb, casting nervous glances at the windows. They started yelling when they saw the cops lead him out, not in cuffs but a free man, carrying all his worldly goods.

One of the officers took the frat boys aside and gave them a talking to. He could see them protesting, pointing. There was a heated conversation, which ended with a cop putting a finger in one frat boy’s face and telling him to
shut the fuck up
. The frat boys stood stunned in the middle of the street and watched as the cops put Carter’s suitcase and book box in the trunk of a prowler, followed by his bike. A uniform asked him where he wanted to go, and he said it would be dawn in an hour. Maybe they could just take him over to the Seagram campaign headquarters. He’d get some coffee at Austin Java and wait for the doors to open. And by the way, did the officer know of any available apartments?

And it was in this way that Carter Allen Cash came to relocate, waving from the back of the police car as the frat boys stood openmouthed on the curb.

That April, Ellen Shapiro called me from the parking lot of ADMAX. It had been five months since Danny was sentenced to death, ten months since the assassination. For Ellen, this worked out to eight haircuts, three hundred and six showers, eleven hundred daydreams, sixteen thousand waves of remorse and regret. This is how she saw it, she told me, the way your nails and hair continue to grow after death. As if each commute, each meal and troubled night’s sleep added bricks to the one-way street of her life.

“I’m here,” she said. “I came to see Danny. He looks awful. I told him I’d come back tomorrow, but I don’t even know where this is. I don’t have a motel. I’m driving a rental car.”

I gave her directions and told her I’d meet her halfway. An hour later I found my ex-wife sitting in a landlocked country diner, staring at a cup of coffee. Her hair had turned entirely gray in the months since Danny’s conviction. She wore it up now, loosely fitted with a clip. Her lips, which had always been thin, were pursed to the point of near invisibility.

“He looks bad,” she said.

“He doesn’t look that bad.”

“He seems vague to me now, like he’s already fading away.”

I unzipped my windbreaker. Ellen and I hadn’t spoken since Danny’s sentencing. Seeing her now brought back feelings from that day, an unwanted glimpse of all the hysteria and fatigue, like the view of the abyss from space.

“Did you talk to him about appealing?” I asked.

“He won’t have it,” she said. “I begged him, but he says no. I told him I was going to hire a lawyer. He said if I did he’d never talk to me again.”

I nodded. It was the same conversation I’d had with him.

“Don’t give up,” I told her. But I could see that she already had. It seemed I was the only one crazy enough to hold out hope for my son’s salvation in the face of all that had happened.

“I’m forty-eight years old,” she said. “And I never got a handle on things. I never figured out how to have a career. I never figured out how to make a relationship work. I never got my body back after the birth or learned to multitask. And now it’s too late. Danny was the only thing I ever did that I was proud of. And then he did this.”

“He didn’t do it,” I said.

“How can you say that?” she asked. “He confessed. They sentenced him.”

I considered telling her what I knew—Cobb and Hoopler on the train, the possibility that our son hadn’t been the trigger man at all, or that he had been brainwashed into doing it—but the leap was too great. I could see from her face that what she was looking for was forgiveness, not information. She needed to know that she was not the cause of Danny’s destruction. That giving birth to a murderer would not be the only lasting mark she would leave on the world. “I think he’s covering for someone,” I said.

She gave me a look, exasperated, pissed, like I was a con man who had fleeced her once then come back for more.

“But how do you prove that?” she wanted to know.

I shrugged. Ellen stared out the window for a long moment. A lock of hair fell across her face. I found myself feeling a tenderness toward her I hadn’t felt in more than a decade. We had loved each other once, had walked down the aisle, had made promises about forever, in sickness and health. We’d had a child together, had raised him in tandem for years, rising in shifts to handle his late-night needs. And then, when the fighting became too much, we split and started new lives.

“We were so young when we met,” I said. “It’s hard to believe.”

It had started to rain, and streaks of water ran through her reflection in the glass.

“You were a cute doctor at a party,” she said. “I was in town ten minutes. I thought everybody I met was going to be a movie star.”

“I was wearing scrubs and you asked if it was a costume.”

She smiled wistfully.

“I’m dingy. My brain gets things wrong. Danny would ask me to help him with his homework and I would tell him
that is not a good idea
.”

After a pause, I said, “I know we’ve been through it and over it a hundred times, but was there anything? When you think back, was there anything that we could have done? Anything we missed? A warning sign?”

She thought about it.

“He never really seemed that into girls,” she said. “I mean he had girlfriends, but he never seemed invested.”

I thought about this.

“What else?”

“I caught him a few times,” she said, “smoking pot with his friends. He was thirteen, fourteen. I picked up the phone to call you, but then I stopped because I knew you’d blame me. You’d make it my fault somehow.”

“Was I really that awful?” I asked her, strangely hurt that that was what she thought, the impression she had of me, her ex-husband, as some kind of punitive ogre.

“You judged people,” she said. “Me especially. I think you were embarrassed by me. You were this successful doctor and I was the ditz who didn’t graduate from college. And then we had a kid and you thought you knew better. All your complex theories about child rearing. But do you know what the most important part of being a parent is, Mr. Fancy Pants Doctor? Showing up. And I was there for that kid every day. So say what you want, but I did it. It’s not my fault.”

I reached out and took her hand. She pulled back instinctively, but I didn’t let go.

“I know you did,” I said. “And I want to thank you for doing that, for being there. I left. I admit it. I moved away and left you. I left him. And it is my one great regret.”

She looked away.

“Who’s going to take care of me when I’m old?” she said. “That’s what I keep thinking. I should have had another. I should have had girls.”

Not for the first time I wished that I could go back in time, make different choices. I wish that I could have helped her more with the transition.
That I’d stayed in L.A., helped her raise our son. I wish I could have found a way to share the burden, to free Ellen somehow so she could find some kind of happiness. But what would my life have been like if I’d done that? Would I be married now? Would I have children? At the end of the day was I really ready to sacrifice my other children so that my firstborn son could be whole?

And even if I’d stayed, there’s no way of knowing if Danny would be a substantially different person as a result, that events would have unfolded differently. Because it was equally possible that his inability to have meaningful relationships was chemical, not experiential, his impulse to buy weapons at gun shows and drive for weeks on end, talking only to his car.

The problem with alternate histories is that they provide no real insight into the lives we live today.

“Come on,” I said, trying to be playful, “you and me? We’re never gonna get old.”

She smiled sadly.

“We already are,” she said.

On June 16, a year to the day after the assassination, Murray surprised me by showing up in Colorado on his motorcycle. It was time to take the great American road trip, he said. The idea had come to him like a stroke in the night. His face was sunburned in a goggle pattern. There was a skinny blonde with him.

I was standing in the kitchen, eating a sandwich, when he knocked. For a moment, seeing his grinning face I had a complete sense of displacement. Who was I? Where was I? What day was it? I opened the door. Murray—in leathers—handed me a large manila envelope.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a bomber jacket.

“What are you—” I said.

“I like the haircut,” he said. “And the new wardrobe. You look very rural, very ex-military, middle America.”

I touched my head. I had gotten used to the new sparser me, with my crew cut and my dress-for-less wardrobe. But now I realized how strange I must look to someone seeing it for the first time.

“This is Nadia,” Murray announced, moving past me to get to the fridge. “Nadia this is Paul.”

Nadia smiled. She gave a little wave. Murray told me she was a Russian immigrant who spoke very little English.

“She’s got her green card,” he told me. “Although there’s a good chance it’s fake. She hangs around with some pretty skeevy guys.”

As he spoke I became aware of the package he had handed me. It was a nine by fourteen envelope. It weighed about a pound.

“What’s this?” I said, holding it up.

Murray was rooting around in the fridge for something to eat. He looked over.

“That’s the journal,” he said. “Danny’s journal.”

I felt all the blood leave my face. I stared at the envelope he had given me. It was as thick as a paperback book. I reached inside and pulled out a hundred loose pages. The top sheet was a photocopy of a notebook cover. Written on it were three letters:
CAC
. Carter Allen Cash.

Seeing the name, I felt the room start to spin. I took a shaky step backward. Nadia put a hand on my arm to steady me.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

“Guy I know at Justice,” he said, putting a bowl of pasta salad on the counter. “I hit them with an FOIA and threatened to sue. It showed up out of the blue last week.”

He peeled back the plastic wrap and started eating from the bowl with his fingers. I thumbed through the pages. My son’s handwriting stared back at me. Seeing it made me light-headed.

“Did you read it?” I asked.

“I looked through it. There’s no smoking gun. He doesn’t write
Must kill Senator Seagram
a thousand times. Or
Rode train with black ops conspirators
. There are no drawings of decapitated men or oversized animal penises.”

“So what is it?”

“A journal. He started it in Austin, but he goes back and writes about his time in Iowa, too. The stuff on Montana is pretty hard to take, the time he spent digging into Seagram’s life, visiting his childhood home. Reading it now, in context, knowing what he did. Honestly, some of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

I stared at the pages. I had gone to see Danny by myself for the first time three weeks ago. After Alex developed night terrors, we had decided to stop the family visits and give the kids time to get settled. I promised Fran that I, too, would take a break, but I hadn’t. At the prison, I’d passed through the metal detectors, raised my arms for the wand, emptied my pockets, and took off my shoes. I’d stepped through iron gates and thick metal doors until I was in the waiting area. It was about half full.

I found a plastic chair, sat, aware that people in prison waiting rooms
don’t like to look each other in the eye. The truth is, we don’t want to acknowledge why we’re there, the crimes of which our loved ones are capable. It’s not embarrassment. It’s shame, deep and biblical. So we keep our eyes on the floor. We listen with envy to the careless laughter of children, who have not yet learned to feel the way we do.

When it was my turn, I took my seat in the narrow visitation cubicle. The Plexiglas in front of me was crisscrossed with metal wire. When I’d first started coming here with the family I carried hand sanitizer in my pocket. But one day I realized that there was nothing I could catch in prison that was worse than what I already had, which was a convicted murderer for a son. So now I didn’t bother.

After a few moments, a guard led Daniel in. He sat across from me. He was pale, and he had spent the last six weeks growing a beard. It was a young man’s beard, patchy in places. He did not have the capacity to grow a great beard. He was a fair-haired kid with a young face. The beard gave him the appearance of a small-town meth addict.

“It’s time,” I told him.

“Time for what?”

“I need to hear you say it.”

He stared at me dead-eyed.

“If you did it,” I said. “If you killed him, I need to hear it from you.”

He stared at me. I realized I was sweating. There were men with truncheons guarding the exits.

“I don’t have any answers for you,” he told me after a long silence.

“Danny.”

He rubbed his nose angrily.

“You know, it’s okay if you want to come here, if you want to see me, but I’m not going to talk to you about those things. I’m not going to explain myself.”

“Daniel.”

He looked at me. What could I say to cross this gap between us? To convince him I was on his side?

“I know about Hoopler and Cobb,” I said. “The men on the train. If they were involved … if they made you do this …”

He closed his eyes.

“We’re done here.”

Without opening his eyes, he signaled for the guard to come get him.

“Wait,” I said, panic in my voice.

He stood, eyes still closed.

“What did they promise you?” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Don’t come here again.”