The Good Father (41 page)

But the cop was gone when he left the bathroom. The feeling he had on discovering this was that of a man who realizes that God is his accomplice. For a brief moment the hall was empty. He took six fast steps to the extinguisher and opened the door. He reached behind the extinguisher. The gun was still there. He fumbled at the tape, knowing that at any minute the cop would return or a dozen students would pour into the hall.

He was sweating by the time he freed the pistol. He tore off the tape, balling it and dropping it back into the well behind the extinguisher. The gun was sticky with adhesive residue, but he didn’t care. He slipped it into the small of his back, feeling it tug at the hairs there. Then he closed the glass door and started for the stairs. He was just starting to descend when he saw the officer heading up toward him. Carter smiled and nodded, feeling the stairs rise to meet him.

He entered the auditorium through the center doors. It was already half full. He could see security guards manning the exits and lining the stage. Music was playing over the PA system. The song was “What Light” by Wilco. Carter blended into the crowd. The gun in his back was like a power source feeding his heart. He had heard this song before, in Austin, the day Seagram had addressed the crowd at Auditorium Shores. The synchronicity of this was another green light. Amazing. It was clear to him now. He was born to do this.

He thought about the day he had left Vassar, the unnameable pull that had woken him from his slumber, the certainty that he needed to be lost to find himself. He had followed the feeling. He had seen the country. He had driven its febrile core. He had seen the hand of God as it tore asunder Iowa farmland, had lain in the spring-fed pools of Texas. He had waded through the waist-deep snows of Montana, ridden the steel-brown rails. All of the things he had done were training. He could see that now. He had had to get away, to truly lose himself in the silence of wild isolation in order to find clarity. How else was he supposed to hear anything in the clutter of everyday life?

The hall was full. The Wilco song ended and the familiar opening
of the Smashing Pumpkins song “Today” kicked in. The lights dropped. The crowd surged to its feet.

Today is the greatest

Day I’ve ever known
.

Can’t wait for tomorrow
.

Tomorrow’s much too long
.

As a child, he had fallen from the sky. He had that same feeling now in his belly. He worked his way into the pit. They were elbow to elbow, the youth of America, its future, standing on their feet, hands in the air, letting the moment overtake them. The stage lights came up. The heavy guitars pounded the balcony. Senator Jay Seagram walked onto the stage.

And though he could not see the future, Carter Allen Cash knew exactly what would happen next.

Epilogue

B
OY

Bonnie Kirkland was bald. It was the chemotherapy, she told me. Her hair had fallen out last month and she was losing weight. Her skin was papery, tinged yellow. There was a blue kerchief around her head. We were sitting in her kitchen. Her husband, Ted, was at the store, closing up. It was late afternoon. I had rung the bell fifteen minutes earlier. Bonnie had answered, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her condition took me off guard. I could see it immediately in the sallowness of her cheeks, the way the skin clung to her skull. It was a clear day, the kind you should spend lying in the grass and breaking clouds apart with your mind. I had landed in Des Moines that morning and rented a two-door Ford. The tan passenger-seat fabric was torn and patched. Despite a sign that read
NO SMOKING
, the car stank of cigarettes. I unfolded the map the clerk had sold me and headed east. The state was astonishingly flat, and voluptuously green. Cows and cornfields lined the interstate.

I called Fran from the road. I told her I was sorry. That I’d lied to her. I explained where I was, what I’d done. I said I knew I’d been a bad husband. I’d kept secrets. I’d been selfish. But I was finally ready to accept the truth, which was that Daniel was guilty. That somewhere, somehow he’d fallen apart and no one had been there to fix him, and now it was too late. I told her that I knew I had to accept it, to accept that I’d been a bad father to him, but that I had a new family now, a wife I loved and two beautiful boys, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

I told her I was coming home. That I just had one more stop, and then I would put it all away. I would come back to them, and be the kind of husband and father they deserved.

After I finished there was a long silence. I stood in a gas-station parking lot watching a cornfield shiver in the wind. It was noon exactly. I was a man who wanted nothing more than to make amends, to fix what he had broken, and to learn to live with the things that were beyond repair.

And then, after an endless silence, she said one word:

“Okay.”

And in that moment I knew we would survive.

“I love you,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know you do. We love you, too. Come home soon.”

I climbed back into my rental car and started the engine. On the radio, the DJ said, “This one goes out to everyone who’s ever missed someone.”

He played “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. I rolled the windows down and let the warm air rush over me.

The Kirklands lived on Lackender Avenue, at the end of a long gravel driveway. I climbed from the Ford, stepping out into the midday sun, my back protesting after hours of sitting. After spending the night at the airport I needed to go for a run, to stretch. Instead I walked to the front door and climbed the creaky wooden steps. And then Bonnie Kirkland was standing in front of me in her blue kerchief. I told her who I was, the father of the boy who had lived over their garage for three months. She told me she knew just by looking at me.

“You have his face,” she told me, and invited me in.

We drank sweet tea at a small wooden table between two doors. A ceiling fan spun lazily overhead. The sky outside was cornflower blue. The kitchen windows were open and a light breeze blew in through the screens. I was still wearing my gray suit. It was all I had. My suitcase was at the hotel in Austin, abandoned. There was nothing in there I would ever need again. I asked Bonnie how long ago she’d been diagnosed with cancer.

“Last fall,” she said. “Around the time your boy pleaded guilty.”

It was pancreatic cancer, she said. The doctors were not optimistic. They had removed a tumor and given her two courses of chemo and radiation, but pancreatic cancer is notoriously fatal. Only 5 percent of patients live for five years. Most die in months. I told her I knew a world-renowned oncologist who’d had success with focused radiation.

“I’d be happy to call him,” I told her.

She shook her head. “It is what it is,” she said. “Going to New York isn’t going to change that.”

“No,” I said, “but there are new treatments being developed all the time. Clinical trials.”

She thanked me, but insisted she had made her peace with it.

“It’s a funny thing. I think Ted is scareder than me. I’m determined to embrace it. I’d like to have a May death. May’s a good month for those kinds of things—weddings, babies, funerals.”

“People are always more optimistic in the spring,” I said.

“I find I’m seeing things differently now, patterns in the corn. The ground smells sweeter. I’m noticing textures, the way the shower curtain feels on my fingertips, the way a raisin feels on my tongue.”

We heard footsteps on the stairs and looked over. A girl of about twenty appeared.

“Dr. Allen,” said Bonnie, “this is my daughter, Cora. She dated your boy for a bit at school.”

Cora was a pretty girl with broad shoulders. What they used to call a farm girl. It was a strange thing to watch Cora realize who I was, to do the math: Dr. Allen plus father of a boy she used to date. When she added it up, her normally open face shut down quickly, anger coming into her eyes.

“You can’t be here,” she said. “We don’t want you here.”

I stood.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Cora,” Bonnie snapped. “Don’t be rude. We don’t treat people that way in this family.”

“But, Mom,” she said.

“No,” said Bonnie. “That boy was a good boy. I don’t care what they say he did. And his father has shown us the kindness of a visit. If you can’t be civil, then please go back upstairs.”

Cora kept her eyes on me, the way you watch a snake so it won’t slip into the shadows and come at you from a different angle.

“The doctor said my mother needs to rest,” she said.

“I won’t stay long,” I told her. “I just needed to see this place, to meet your family. I have a family, too, a wife and two young boys. Separate from Daniel. I didn’t want to leave them to come here, but I had to. The not knowing is worse. I had to see the place, to meet the people who
took my son in. But I promise, I’m only going to stay as long as it takes me to drink this tea.”

I touched my glass, holding her eye. I could see fear in there but also great sadness.

“You stay as long as you like,” Bonnie said. “Cora, why don’t you get some tea, and join us?”

For the first time Cora looked away. Her mouth was a straight line. “No,” she said. “I’m going out.”

She grabbed her car keys off the counter, took two steps toward the door, then stopped, turned.

“He was a lie,” she told me. “You thought he was just lost, but he was a lie. And we believed him.”

“I know,” I said. “But he’s sorry. He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in him. He didn’t do this to hurt the people he loves.”

“Why else would he do it?” she said, as if I was stupid, and left.

I stood in silence for a moment, listening to the whir of the fan.

“She’s wrong,” Bonnie said. “He was a sweet boy.”

I looked at her. The thing about chemotherapy most people don’t realize is it’s not losing the hair on your head that makes you an alien, it’s the eyebrows, the lashes. Without these markers, the face becomes something other than human. Some people, women mostly, choose to draw their brows back on with a makeup pencil, but Bonnie had left her face raw. It was the sign of someone who had surrendered her vanity, who had come to accept the direction her life had taken.

“Thank you,” I told her, sitting. “No one has said anything nice about my son in a long time.”

She stirred her tea.

“Cora feels responsible for Daniel coming here,” she said. “She says she
exposed
us to him, like the boy was some kind of flu.”

“You said he just showed up one day,” I said.

Bonnie nodded.

“We thought he was lost, a city kid looking for directions. But he told Ted he wanted a job, and then he said he knew Cora. Looking back, I guess it wasn’t that smart to take him in, a strange kid from another part of the world, but back then it seemed only Christian.”

“I didn’t even know he’d dropped out,” I told her. “For maybe three weeks, until the dean called to ask why Daniel hadn’t been in class.”

“With Cora we prayed she wouldn’t turn into one of those terrible teenagers they warn you about. We were lucky.”

“No,” I said. “You raised her right. Daniel’s mother and I, we got divorced when he was young. He spent his childhood flying back and forth between us, like a tennis ball. I didn’t think it bothered him that much, but clearly …”

She coughed into a napkin. With each cough color came back to her face, but it was only temporary.

“You never know with kids,” she said. “My daddy used to hit me and my brother. It was expected back then. Normal. You spoke out of turn, you got the belt. You broke curfew, you got the belt. I never felt damaged by it.”

“He was a good worker?” I asked. “My son.”

“He was. Conscientious, reliable. And he got along real good with the Mexicans, which surprised us. Well, not surprised, but they’re a pretty close-knit group. Sometimes I’d look out the window and they’d all be out back horsing around. It made me feel good, to think he was fitting in, that maybe he’d finally found a place. It was so obvious he was looking for that.”

The kitchen door opened and Ted Kirkland entered, kicking his work boots off on the rough rope mat.

“Hello,” he said, surprised to see a stranger at his table.

“Honey, this is Daniel’s father.”

The smile died on Ted’s face, but he recovered quickly.

“Well, think of that,” he said.

He wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck it out.

“Ted Kirkland,” he said.

We shook. His hands were rough, notched like old wood. I wondered what he thought of mine.

Bonnie got up to get Ted a glass of tea.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“Hush now,” she told him. “How was work?”

“They sent us the wrong boots again,” he said, washing his hands at the sink. “Third time this month. I’m beginning to suspect that Lambry hired that girl for her looks, not her brains.”