The Good Father (34 page)

The guard approached. Daniel turned to leave.

“Daniel, please,” I said. “Daniel.”

I watched him disappear through the metal door. I sat there as long as they let me, hoping he would come back. But he didn’t.

The next day I called in sick. I sat in the waiting room for an hour before a guard told me that Daniel wasn’t coming out. The day after that the guard at the gate told me that my son had asked that I not be allowed to visit him. I didn’t care. I drove to the prison every day for two weeks just to be turned away. I sat in traffic. I braved inclement weather. I listened to hate radio, to classic rock, to NPR. I drove to ADMAX so often I saw yellow lines in my sleep. But Daniel refused to come out of his cell. Every day I told the guards to tell him that I’d come. I did it so that he would know—I was his father. I wasn’t going to give up on him. I had made so many mistakes. I had let him ruin everything, but I was still his father.

The clandestine nature of these visits, their increased frequency, began to feel like an affair. For the first time in my life I understood how it was that a man could take a mistress. It wasn’t the sex. It was the transgression, the act of doing something you knew was wrong. By doing so, in many ways you cease to be yourself. A man builds a life. He starts a family. He loves his children. He likes his job. But one day he meets a woman, and despite all common sense, he begins to pull his life down brick by brick. Who is that man? Is he the same man who built that life? Or is he another man? An imposter?

Is he Carter Allen Cash?

Leaving ADMAX, I drove north in my used Jeep. I stood on the driving range and tried to drop my ball on the 150-foot tee, the 200, the 60. I interlocked my pinkies. I slid the covers from my drivers. I picked dirt from the heads of my irons.

I called Murray from the pay phone.

“We have to find Hoopler,” I said. “He’s the key.”

“Short of joining the CIA,” he said, “I’m not sure what else I can do. The guy’s a ghost. Literally. Meaning he may not even be alive. Cobb’s
body was dumped in a culvert. Hoopler could be at the bottom of the ocean.”

I ran uphill in the heat of the day, breathing through my mouth. At school I kept sporadic office hours. I encouraged my students to e-mail their questions to me. I would answer their e-mails at two or three in the morning, explaining the holes in their diagnostic philosophies, encouraging them to rethink a particular set of symptoms. Insomnia had become just another word for bedtime. After everyone else had gone to sleep, I sat on the back patio and watched the moon shift slowly across the sky.

If my son wasn’t going to give me answers, I thought, I would have to find them for myself.

And now they were here.

In the kitchen, Nadia stood smiling at us, uncertainly. She had yet to fully enter the room.

“Soda?” she said hopefully.

I thought about the word for a moment, how it could possibly be relevant to the conversation, and then snapped back to reality.

“Of course,” I said, moving to the fridge. “I’m so sorry.”

She took the soda and smiled again.

“
Spasiba
,” she said.

“Isn’t she great?” Murray said, his mouth full of pasta. “I met her at a nightclub. She’s from Minsk. She’s studying cosmetology in Queens. I asked her if she wanted to go to California. I’m not sure she understood we’d be driving.”

The journal felt like an anchor pulling me down. I laid it on the counter.

“I don’t think I can handle this,” I said.

“Put it in a drawer,” he told me. “Burn it. I just wanted you to see it. To know it’s there. For peace of mind, but also, it could help with the appeal, if you decide to go that way.”

He bit down on a cherry tomato and a stream of seeds squirted onto his jacket.

“You ever ride a motorcycle, Paul?” he asked, wiping at the stain. “Scares the shit out of me, but I do it anyway. Why? Because I’m a man. Or at least that’s what I need women like Nadia to think. God bless those girls. I’d forgotten how easy it is to get a twenty-six-year-old to
take off her clothes. You don’t even have to ask. It’s like a sport to them. What do they care about commitment? Marriage? Last night this chick rode my dick so hard I think she snapped it off.”

I looked over at Nadia, embarrassed, but if she understood what he was saying she gave no sign.

“Should I read it now?” I asked, after a moment.

“Not my call,” he said. “I just wanted you to have the option.”

CAC. Looking at the initials, I realized that this was not my son’s journal. Daniel Allen. It was
his
, the other man, Carter Allen Cash, the man my son had become. If I read it would I understand any better the journey that my boy had taken? Would I understand the moment he disappeared? The reason?

“What’s going on in here?” Fran asked, entering through the kitchen door. Her cheeks were flushed from the outdoors. Instinctively, I opened a drawer and stuffed the pages inside. Murray saw me do it but betrayed nothing. Fran threw her car keys on the counter, gave Murray a quick kiss on the cheek.

“We have silverware, you know.”

He shrugged, mouth full.

“I’m eco-friendly,” he managed. “Think of the kilowatts saved, the water conserved.”

Fran studied Nadia, who smiled winningly, and made a small
cheers
motion with her soda can.

“Who’s this?” Fran wanted to know.

“That’s Nadia,” I said, helpfully. “She’s Russian.”

“Did you offer her a chair?” Fran asked.

I stared at my wife, flummoxed by the question. She smiled patiently at me, but I could see worry in her eyes. Murray had long ago stopped being a source of good tidings in our house. He opened the fridge, shoved the nearly empty bowl of pasta salad back inside.

“Like I told Paul,” Murray said, “I just decided one night. The great trek. New York to California. I’m doing it. Tennessee was beautiful. Who knew? Next it’s the Southwest. Utah, the Grand Canyon. I showed Nadia our route, but all she knows is that we’re going someplace hot to stare into a giant hole.”

Fran considered a retort, but instead she reached up, touched her ear. The Bluetooth activated.

“I’m working on those reservations now, Mr. Colby,” she said, exiting into the dining room.

Murray wiped his hands on a dishrag.

“She seems happy,” he said.

“I’m trying.”

He took two sodas from the fridge, put them in his jacket pockets.

“Well, we should hit the road. I told the Russian we’d eat at this sushi place in Vail tonight.”

I nodded. “You’re more than welcome to … to stay,” I said. “A few days. Whatever you want.”

He put a hand on my shoulder.

“No,” he said. “This is your new life. You look good. Fit. I’m glad to see it. But I’ve got no place here. I’m just a bad memory. But I wanted you to have, you know, the thing.”

I felt panicked that he was leaving me here with the journal.

“I may come to New York next month,” I said.

“Cool. Call me. We’ll go out. Nadia’s friends with everybody south of Fourteenth Street.”

I showed them to the door. Nadia handed me back the soda can. “Bye bye,” she said, and gave me a wave.

At the door, Murray hugged me. His body felt lean and strong, like a wire.

“My suggestion?” he said, quietly. “Put it on the barbecue and spray it with lighter fluid. There’s nothing in there you don’t know already.”

“But that’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

I stood by the open door long after they were gone. I could hear the sound of dogs barking somewhere in the distance. A wind struck up, making the grass shiver.

Fran came up and put her arms around me.

“Did you know he was coming?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“They didn’t want to stay, at least for dinner?”

“No. He said they were gonna have sushi in Vail.”

She smiled and shook her head, then kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m going to go for a run,” she said.

It took me a long time after she was gone to work up the courage to open the drawer that held my son’s journal. I had to sidle up to it, moving
sideways across the kitchen under the auspices of getting a glass for water. The onus of the journal was too great. Its power to destroy my life. I stood for a while with my hand on the drawer pull. There was an invisible line in front of me. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. If I opened the drawer, if I read the journal, I would have to abandon all pretenses that I had moved on with my life.

Inside that drawer, quite possibly, was the end of my family. The end of everything.

But it also held the truth.

I opened the drawer.

The name stared up at me. Carter Allen Cash.

I closed the drawer. I wasn’t ready. But I couldn’t leave it there. It felt wrong, obscene to even keep the document in the house. I opened the drawer again, and grabbed the papers. I hurried out to the car and hid them in back, slamming the hatch quickly, as if to keep something from escaping.

For the next few days, wherever I went, whatever I was doing, I felt the journal in there, calling to me. I thought about driving somewhere and reading it, but the truth was, even that felt too close to home. I was like a man planning an affair, looking to cover his tracks—except in this case rather than cheating with another woman, I felt that by reading the journal I would be cheating on my new family with my old one.

I tried to ignore it, to forget it, but I couldn’t.

So I invented a reason to leave.

A few months earlier, I had been asked to present a lecture on Kawasaki disease at a medical conference in Austin. I’d declined, but now I decided to attend the conference anyway. It felt like fate. Austin was a place my son had spent time. A place that was, arguably, pivotal in his transformation. I would go and read the journal there. I would take one last trip and try to exorcise the obsession, to satiate it, and then cut it off like a limb that has turned black and begun to stink.

And so, ten days after Murray’s visit, I stood in the bedroom and packed a suitcase. Early the next morning, Fran drove me to the airport. We talked about how the rain gutters needed cleaning. She asked if I would be back in time for Alex’s soccer game on Friday. I assured her I would. I said it was only two days. She said she hated it when I was gone. She never knew when to go to bed. I told her to go to bed at eleven. We
kissed in the drop-off zone and she half jokingly suggested a quickie in the parking structure. I told her I didn’t want to miss my flight and opened the door, retrieving my suitcase from the back.

The flight was quick, just over an hour. I could have driven, but Fran said she didn’t want me on the road for that long. At the Austin airport I sniffed the air. I was looking for subtle changes, an indication that this place was different somehow from all the other places I had ever been. My driver met me at baggage claim. He took Highway 71 to South Congress and headed north. We crossed over Lady Bird Lake, and he pointed out how every night at dusk from May to September millions of fruit bats emerged from under the Congress Street Bridge, billowing like a cloud of smoke into the sky. He dropped me at the InterContinental Hotel. A bellboy took my suitcase.

In my room, I lay on top of the bedspread and stared at the ceiling. It felt dangerous being here. I had been doing so well. I had been keeping it under control, keeping my two halves separate. By coming here, by bringing the journal, I had broken my promise. To Fran, my kids, myself. I was a liar now, a keeper of black secrets.

The room was dark, blinds drawn. My suitcase sat on the floor like a corpse, watching me. I felt nervous in my hands, and as I stared at the suitcase, a great weight settled over me, a heavy blanket of exhaustion. Was it self-preservation that caused me to fall asleep then? An anvil of depression dragging me down? Whatever the cause, I slept like a dead man, waking hours later in a panic, unsure of where I was. Outside the sun was setting.

The suitcase hadn’t moved.

In my socks, I walked over to it and cracked open the lid. I dug down through suit jackets and toiletries and took the photocopied pages from their envelope. They still had a slight chemical smell, a residue of ink and heat.

And then, before I could chicken out, I turned on the lamp by the bed and settled in to read.

E
XCERPTS FROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
C
ARTER
A
LLEN
C
ASH
,
AKA
D
ANIEL
A
LLEN
.

[Editor’s note: What follows are the only surviving entries in the Montana Section of Daniel Allen’s personal journal. They begin seven months prior to the assassination of Senator Jay Seagram.]

To whom it may concern: This is a private journal! If you are reading this without permission you must stop! These words are not for you. You cannot understand their full meaning.