When Secrets Die (28 page)

And all that wonderful knowledge, all that experience, all that ability to be objective, to reassure the parents of his charges and to bask in their gratitude when he worked wonders with the kids who had baffled, enraged, and grieved them since puberty … yeah, all that shit had gone right out the window when it came to his own sons, most particularly the oldest, most particularly Kirby.

The trouble began with the transfer to Kentucky. Oh, Kirby had shown the usual teenage flickers before then, but it was the move that shifted everything into high gear. No teenager wants to leave his friends and his school, but army brats know the drill, and this transfer was going to be a good one. The army was going to reward Charlie and thus Charlie's family with a few years in a recruiting assignment—a nine-to-five, and crucial to a military that was converting to an all-volunteer army. They needed someone who could find the right kind of recruit, and then inspire said recruit to commit to a job that wasn't just a buck ninety-five an hour, and wasn't just the chance to become a servant to the whims of the U.S. government, it was the opportunity to become an indentured servant with benefits. Lots of benefits.

They'd moved from Denver, Colorado, to Lexington, Kentucky, settling into an apartment complex near Tates Creek High School and Tates Creek Middle School. The rent was cheap. Kirby was enrolled as a sophomore at the high school, which shared a parking lot and campus space with the middle school, where Mitchell was placed in the seventh grade and where his wife Janine got a job teaching geometry to advanced ninth-grade students. It had seemed perfect.

The cost of living in Lexington was high, housing in particular, but the economy was humming. It was horse farm country, which put land prices at a premium, kind of like Los Angeles, although this town was nothing like California. It was pretty here. The horse farms that circled the town would take your breath away, and the people weren't as conservative and Bible Belt as they were farther south in Tennessee. Everything was pretty, nothing junky, just miles and miles of rolling hills ankle-deep in green grass, four-plank wood fences painted tarry black, houses that just made you shake your head, and horse barns that would have been impressive on
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
.

So they'd signed a lease, unconcerned and in fact smugly pleased that their home was enmeshed with project housing. Charlie wasn't a snob, and he and Janine believed in helping people when they needed it. Charlie figured the projects would be nothing to a man whose family was used to base housing, and who worked with teenage boys and now girls every day of his career. For a man who'd handled himself pretty well during Desert Storm, it was no big deal to imagine a life where he was happy to help the single moms who might need some man-work done around the place; and the gang kids, he'd be happy to kick their butts. Charlie and Janine had never lived near project housing, and Janine's best friend, Natasha, who had grown up in the projects, told Charlie he was being an ass.

But he and Janine blithely ignored Natasha and her sour attitude and figured they'd buy or rent a house later on, after they'd had time to get acclimated to the city. They'd have time to find a place they liked and more importantly could afford in the Tates Creek School District, where the housing prices weren't so bad. They could have gone on and bought a house, they'd found one they liked on Boston Road, but Charlie had been swept up in the beauty of the farmland around Lexington and was toying with the idea of living in the country. Janine was dead set against it—said it would be hard on the boys at their age. Said they had enough trouble in the move-every-minute world of the military dependent and no point making it harder. So they'd rented and decided to wait and see. They were going to be more particular this time. Charlie was getting close enough to retirement that they were thinking about digging in someplace and staying put. Teenagers were difficult enough without moving them every six months. They'd seen a lot of that. A lot of their friends with families on the move—people with highly developed coping skills and tight family camaraderie, and all of it going to hell when the kids hit the age of the enemy.

In retrospect, Charlie often wondered if they'd been able to settle somewhere a couple of critical years earlier, maybe Kirby wouldn't have hit the wall like he did. Not that Charlie had been in a position to have made such a thing possible. It was just one of those guilt-inducing parent thoughts that he countered with the example of other parent-veterans he'd talked to—many of whom never moved once, but still went through a lot of shit with their kids, so who knew? The hardest thing he'd learned was that he
didn't
know.

He'd eaten a lot of crow. The man who had been understanding on the outside but sneering on the inside when he saw the shit storms some of these moms and dads took from their kids—he'd become one of those bewildered dads. He'd joined that club of Parents Without a Clue—the club he and Janine had joked about since before they'd even had children. They sure as hell weren't going to put up with any crap. They were going to be loving, but firm. They weren't going to be weak. Their kids weren't going to walk on the other side of the mall because they were embarrassed to be seen with Mom and Dad. Their kids wouldn't slink down in the car and will themselves invisible. And they'd know better than to mouth off—in public or private.

Just listing the kind of stuff he and Janine used to think had often helped them keep a sense of humor, helped relieve the tension and make them laugh, but it also made them cry. Ignorance is bliss, Janine said. Sometimes he could hear the echo of his own voice, when he'd said something stupid like “Any parent who thinks disrespect from their child, and the way they act, isn't their fault for being a weak or a stupid example is just kidding themselves.” He'd eaten those words every day for six years. They didn't taste any better now than they had the first time.

Now the boys were out of the house and into the dorms. Both Kirby and Mitchell had survived, and Charlie and Janine had made it through with their marriage intact and better than ever. Now they were on their own. The phrase “Sergeant Dad” had acquired an almost affectionate ring. The boys came home to hang out maybe one weekend out of six, not counting finals week, and once in a great while some problem might be approached in that side-angled subtle way young men have of skirting around an issue that could make or break them, something worrisome enough to mention in an offhand way to Dad.

The boys' mother had it even better. Janine, hell, Janine was a goddess as far as Kirby and Mitchell were concerned, and anybody who said the empty nest was a tragic place was either greedy for some sympathy to go along with the good life, female, or maybe just mentally ill.

Mitchell was a freshman at the University of Central Florida now, and continually wondering if he could cut an architecture degree while he kept up an A average, and he had trouble making friends. He'd posed the architecture question to Charlie during the spring of his senior year at Creek—which had gone much better than. Kirby's senior year, mainly because Mitchell had been in the band. Put your kid in the band, that's what Charlie told anybody who would listen. Mitchell had played on the drum line, which was what Kirby should have done, but at the time Kirby was just trying to stay alive, and band was the least of their worries.

Charlie's first reaction to Mitchell's question was to say, “Hell, boy, if you want to cut it, then put your nose to the dirt and make it happen, don't sit around whining about ‘what if.'” Luckily, that wasn't what he'd actually said. Reactions like that typified the kind of mistake he'd made with Kirby, and his oldest son had come so close to going over the edge that Charlie had been motivated by sheer parental terror into squelching those first reactions. It was almost a habit, these days, being careful with his opinions, and it had the unexpected benefit of keeping things cool with Janine. He didn't make quite so many dumb-guy mistakes.

Charlie was wise enough now to know that his answer to Mitchell's worry should have been, (1) he thought Mitchell was wise to take that kind of academic commitment seriously; (2) that he'd support Mitchell no matter what decision he made; and (3) that he had enough confidence in Mitchell that he had no doubts about his son's ability to not only survive but to excel in the architecture program. All of that would be topped off with a suggestion that maybe more information would be useful, and couched in a very gentle sort of wondering way.

That's how he reacted now with the kids he worked with in his job with the Kentucky Department of Child Protective Services, but at the time he'd just said, “Hey, go for it, what you got to lose?”

The only kind of person ignorant enough to give such an answer was the kind who'd never paid college tuition for his kids and then been rewarded with the grade report from hell. And that only if the kid was inclined to share this bit of information. Universities were clear on one issue—parents were there to fund the universities and their children's education, to enjoy significant responsibilities and zero rights. It was, by God, one time in your life when there was absolutely no hint of discrimination. White, black, male, female, Muslim or Baptist, skinny or fat—a parent was a parent was a checkbook. In high school, you complained that your kid thought you had
ATM
stamped on your forehead, but in college they wanted you to take out loans.

This kid Twyla, who he was on his way to meet with, was a particular frustration. No doubt she had some kind of disorder that made it hard.

It helped to like the kid, though, and he just couldn't stand this little twit Twyla. She wasn't stupid, she was just hell-bent on acting like it. And truth to tell, he just wasn't as good with the girl-child as with the boy-child. Girls were mystifying. Harder to scare, but easier to get under their skin, and then when you did, they made you feel so damn guilty about it—sometimes it just wasn't worth the effort. Girls were better motivated by showing them how to help themselves, or help someone else. By showing them how to get some kind of control over their lives, since, being female, they usually had so little, or so they thought. Helping them find the power was what he liked to do. The power to know what you want, and then go about getting it. Part Two was always harder than Part One, except with kids like Twyla. The problem with her was that what she wanted was just plain silly, plain unrealistic, plain dangerous. She wanted to be the center of attention, no matter what and no matter where, and no matter what anybody said about self-esteem, or upbringing, none of that mattered. She had to be the center. If she had to light a damn fire to get there, she'd do it, and in fact made a habit of doing it, which had landed her in his lap—that and her inability to attend school on any kind of a regular basis.

And he just didn't like her. In fact, he found her the most irritating person on earth. He reminded himself, as he did whenever he had a kid like this, that his own son, Kirby, hadn't been overly likable when he'd gotten into his bit of trouble.

Back then Kirby had been in the habit of wearing a worn top hat, which looked especially silly on a boy no more than five feet one inch tall, a skinny boy at that. A skinny boy in glasses, who oozed intelligence in such a way that he was irresistible to the neighborhood school bus bully—a kid called Reef who had locked on to Kirby like a heat-seeking missile.

Reef was an oversized coward, a six-foot-four, slope-shouldered idiot weighing in at roughly three hundred twenty-five pounds. Kirby, not one to wait for the fates, had lifted a small pistol from the collection at the house next door—a particular frustration to Charlie, who was strict about keeping firearms out of the hands of children—and gone looking for Reef at the Y.

School shootings and violence surprised Charlie as much as they did other people, just not the same way. He couldn't figure out why it didn't happen more often, considering the weapons people left sitting around.

Kirby confronted Reef in the YMCA lobby, pausing right by the door (for a quick getaway—the boy wasn't stupid). Sure enough, as soon as Reef caught sight of him, he started in. Only this time Kirby pulled out his little handgun and fired and missed three times. Reef had dropped to the ground and gone quiet, one of the few intelligent moments of his life, and the bullets had bounced harmlessly off the glass door, the pistol being of such negligible caliber as not to even penetrate the glass. All of this was witnessed by two women at the desk, one an employee, and the other newly arrived for an aerobics class.

Kirby, surviving in the netherworld of high school, was making sure the right people knew better than to mess with him. He hadn't been worried about that other world—the world of police, social services, the Kentucky State court system, and that fast train to trouble.

Cathy Reardon, on her way to a supervisory position at Child Protective Services, hated kids with guns in their hands and was a no-tolerance brick wall, deaf to any plea. Charlie could see her point. She looked at Kirby and saw the gun in his hand. He looked at Kirby and saw his son.

Kirby had been lucky, sentenced to community service at Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation Facility (where he would assist a brain-damaged victim of a gunshot wound, as it turned out), a strict eight PM curfew that could be checked up on by CPS any time they wanted to drop around, family counseling, and a parent training class for Charlie and Janine that galled like a knife in the gut but made the system happy.

Charlie wanted to be the kind of guy who saw it from both sides, the gun and the child. So far, that kind of even-handed emotion was impossible with Twyla, so as usual, he faked it.

He took her to Sonic. They sat outside at a picnic table on a measly strip of grass and gravel between the two caverns of overhangs where cars parked. Customers leaned out of their car windows and punched the speaker buttons, ordering from their own neon plasticine menus. Twyla loved Sonic. Charlie let her order whatever she wanted. Some kids you had to encourage to order because they were shy about it; others, like Twyla, blazed through the overhead menu like it was Christmas morning.