The Guilty One (28 page)

There was a candle in a Chianti bottle and Neal Young playing softly, a moment when George asked nervously if the food was all right, a joke that Maris had told before but, miraculously, managed to deliver just right for once. And then, before she'd made a dent in the enormous mountain of pasta, they were suddenly rushing upstairs to George's bedroom, their arms around each other, and when Maris saw how carefully he had made the bed, turning down the covers and putting a flower in a water glass on the bedside table, it broke her heart a little. But then he kissed her and she was in another place, and happy, oh so happy to be there.

AFTERWARD, THEY SAT
in his bed drinking the rest of the wine from tumblers.

“I haven't done that in a while,” Maris admitted.

“Could've fooled me.”

Maris blushed; George stroked her foot, which he had taken into his lap.

“You're sweet,” she said. “I mean, really sweet.”

He looked up at her with mock suspicion. “Is that a euphemism for I need to spank your ass next time?”

Maris laughed, a full-belly laugh that felt as rusty and welcome as the shivering orgasm half an hour earlier. She knew she had to make a decision—put a stop to this, or come clean about who she was. Things had gone too far for her not to be honest with George. But the moment wasn't right. Didn't she deserve to enjoy one evening of simple pleasure, of uncomplicated joy? Besides, she had some sleuthing to do.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Um, sure.”

“Does Norris have daughters?” She briefly explained what she'd found.

“He doesn't talk about that much,” George said when she'd finished. “That all happened pretty quick after we got back from the Gulf. We fell out of touch for a while and I don't know, I mean, you see it with some guys, it's like they want to do it all right away, everything they figure they almost missed. We had some close calls over there—I'll tell you about it sometime. But yeah, those girls were born in ninety-two, they'd be grown now I guess, and Renatta left Norris in ninety-three. Reason I remember is we started our business in ninety-four. He used to talk about them all the time, but he's a hardheaded man, used to be anyway. He and Renatta never did get along, and when she moved the girls to Bakersfield he threatened to take her to court, but in the end he just stopped sending her money.

“I know he always regretted that, felt like shit about it. By the time they were in grade school he was sending what he could, but things never got right with Renatta and he felt like she poisoned the girls to him. A couple of years ago when he got the house, he tried hard to reconnect, thought they might like to come visit from time to time; he used to talk about them going to college here. But you know, girls at that age . . . well, I don't know, I never had kids.”

Maris tensed, because here is where it would come: the natural question of whether she'd ever had them, ever wanted them. So far she'd escaped with only oblique references to an ex, to the past. She burrowed against him, hiding her face against his chest, and felt his arms circle her protectively. His breath was warm on her neck, and even that—his face touching her skin—was more intimacy than Jeff had given her in so long.

“My mystery girl,” George said, as if reading her mind. “So now that you've slept with me, do I get your phone number? Or is that like a five-date rule with you?”

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING,
Ron stopped at Noah's and picked up breakfast on the way to work like he usually did. Then, he went the wrong way on 580, realizing his decision was made only when he passed the windmills outside Livermore.

The bagel sandwich went untouched on the passenger seat of the car. Half an hour later, Ron couldn't stand the smell anymore and pulled over at the next exit and threw the paper sack away in the parking lot of a Walmart.

The drive to Fresno would take almost three hours. The return would be a little longer, even going against the traffic. That left only an hour or so, but Ron wouldn't need more: over the course of the last couple of years his father's mild dementia had become much worse.

As he drove, the sun beating through the windshield relentlessly and burning into his eyes even as the air conditioner left him uncomfortably chilly, Ron cycled through an endless loop of recriminations. Karl. Magnus. Himself. Mostly himself. Deb's face, as she told him he could leave her.
You hide yourself. You hide your pain
. What had she really been saying? Was she giving him an ultimatum? Get behind her plans for the appeal, or leave—as simple as that?

After years of trying to convince himself he had been a good husband, he had decided, overnight, that he had not been. He had been unfaithful twice, the first time meaningless, the second, anything but. The night Maris and he had spent together had not been merely the boozy flare of some misplaced emotion. He had felt more in those hours with her than he had in an accumulation of years with Deb—but it wasn't love. No. They didn't love each other and they could never have loved each other. Each was the repository for some desperate need of the other. Maris had been almost savage that night; he'd ended up with scratches that he'd had to make up a story—taking a fall while out running in the hills—to cover up. And he had woken in the chilled, antiseptic hotel room at five in the morning, hung over, with Maris's head on his chest and her hair tickling his nostrils, and instantly been far more sorry that he'd confided in her than that he had fucked her. If he could take only one thing back, it would have been that.

They'd avoided each other after that when possible. Their children's romance seemed, to Ron, like a clumsy attempt at irony from some peevish Fate. When the two couples saw each other at school events, Deb and Jeff didn't seem to notice that Ron and Maris barely interacted. When Calla broke it off with Karl, Ron's relief that the thing was finished eclipsed his concerns about what he perceived to be his son's overreaction.

Never, in all the months that followed, had he and Maris spoken again, until that day on the bridge. Ron had, for a while, attempted to convince himself that she had forgotten about the whole thing. He'd let himself out of her room without waking her; she had been drunker than he. After Calla died, each of them was so consumed with their own despair that it couldn't have mattered anyway. But Ron remembered just enough of his high school Shakespeare to have a sense that deeds like theirs weren't fully settled until they'd lost everything—not just their children, God help them, but their identities, their very lives, and everyone they loved.

Ron, realizing he was crying, smacked the steering wheel and pressed the gas a little harder. The thing, the thing. Yes, he had invited this disaster down: first by passing on his blood legacy of violence, and then by tempting fate by bedding Maris. He might as well have put a gun in Karl's hands. Except for one thing, one stubborn mitigating factor that, no matter how many times Ron tried to force the equation to a resolution, left him just shy of culpable: he was not the progenitor, he was not even the patient zero of the legacy into whose path poor Calla had stumbled. He was victim as well as villain.

Penance was not Ron's natural gift. He'd spent a lifetime parceling out mildly good deeds as a defense against the sins he feared his unchecked self would commit. And it had seemed to work. His wife was happy with the bland tokens of his affections, doled liberally but with little effort; his employees basked in the glow of the shared accolades they didn't realize meant nothing to Ron. Even when he'd become sloppy, he kept succeeding. The happy fool, the guy who got credit for showing up. The last Father's Day card that Ron had received, almost a year to the day before life as they knew it ended, had been emblazoned with the words “To the Best Father in the World.” A card, a sentiment, purchased by his wife and signed by his son.

“The best fucking father in the world,” he muttered, aware that if the highway patrol was out, his desperate errand was going to be brought to an abrupt end, or at least an expensive interruption. Ron was not a habitual speeder: behind the wheel, as in most things, he was deceptively moderate. But here, now, take note, he thought: the true nature of the man is revealed. Eighty-five, eighty-seven . . . he was flirting with ninety miles per hour and even that wouldn't be enough. Not enough to satisfy the hunger that had waited so long inside him for release.

(God, why hadn't he just jumped? The thing on the bridge, that had been stupid, self-indulgent, dramatic, even histrionic. But only because he hadn't followed through. If he'd pulled it off, wouldn't that have been a measure of penance, the real kind?)

Ron, heading hell-bent toward a score that he was too late to settle, had never loathed himself more. Magnus, sly upper-hand hoarder that he was, had managed to exit quietly from the world before Ron could finally exact his due, or even confront him with an honest examination of the facts.

Before it happened, before his son crushed the life from another human being, Ron had last visited his father over the holidays and convinced himself he'd forgiven Magnus. Ordinarily he tried to go every few months, but the Christmas visit had been unsettling: Magnus had called him by his brother's name twice; he'd seemed to forget that Ron and Deb were there. He'd bellowed an unintelligible string of curses at some imaginary slight committed by another patient, and at one point had stood and stalked down the hallway, his pants sagging off his bony hips, clutching the handrail with his gnarled hand. When Ron had sought out another patient, an old man he thought was his father's friend, the man had turned away in his wheelchair, shaking his head, eyes downcast. “A shame,” he muttered. “A shame.”

Another son would have been mobilized to act, maybe, though he and his brothers had researched care facilities with a zeal they all agreed Magnus didn't deserve four years ago when it was clear he could no longer live alone. There were a few strained phone calls with Neal, the brother Ron got along with best, but Neal was in Michigan and every phone conversation ended with him asking, “Well, do you want me to come out there and help?”—something they both knew was pointless and made no sense. What were they going to do, exactly? Their father had dementia. But he was a cruel bastard, and what Ron suspected that Neal was asking, really, was what did they owe the man who had raised them.

Maybe the answer to the question was his failure to act itself, the span of time that became longer and longer, with no visit and no call.

Last year, last terrible June, when Karl was arrested, Neal had offered to come out to California. So, to be fair, had Keith. But Keith had been laid off again, and Neal and Jess were having problems of their own, some drama with their daughter, which Ron barely paid attention to, and besides, he didn't want them there. He'd only wanted Deb. And now, a year had gone by and he'd dutifully gone to see Magnus earlier in the year when Neal finally came out with the daughter in question. The four of them—Ron and Deb, Neal and Ashley—had driven down to Fresno only to find Magnus snoring in his bed with a crust of something yellow around his mouth. They'd taken turns shouting at him—“It's me, Dad.” How often did the staff hear variations on that theme echoing exasperatingly up and down the halls? They pushed his geri chair into the garden where they sat until he started to complain about the heat. Ron had noticed the look of revulsion on Ashley's face with something like satisfaction.

What would Ron find today? What state would his father be in?

Around and around his thoughts swirled. Finally he reached Fresno, found his way by memory through the strip-mall-choked outskirts to the facility, a palm-tree-lined turd of a building. The receptionist was unfamiliar; the faces of the patients all looked the same. He might have recognized some of them, but perhaps not. There, the screamer—that one, at least, Ron remembered because the bent old man screamed obscenities all day long until his voice was hoarse.

“Don't mind him,” the receptionist said calmly. “You here for?”

“Isherwood,” Ron said, his voice cracking. He hadn't spoken a word since saying good-bye to Deb this morning; she'd been poring over her iPad and barely lifted her gaze, even though he broke his habit of years and didn't kiss her good-bye. “Magnus Isherwood.”

“Mmm-hmm,” the receptionist, who on second thought was perhaps a nurse, given that she was wearing scrubs. They all wore scrubs; it was impossible to tell them apart. Nurses, nurses' aides, and jobs even more menial than that, the luckless women and occasional man who'd been charged with bathing Magnus and wiping the shit from his ass and dressing him and strapping him into the geri chair when he grew too restless; who tried to return the possessions that the patients stole from each other's rooms on their eternal wanderings; who asked in loud voices who the darling children were on the laps of all the slack-mouthed, clueless patients in the photographs their loved ones left behind in frames bought cheap at Marshall's because everyone knew things went missing.

Saints, all of them, Ron thought, every one a better man or woman than he.

“You know where you're going, sir?”

“Room 219?” Ron asked, just in case they'd moved his father in the months since he'd been there, in case some new precipitous decline had consigned him to a different wing or corridor or cagelike common room. And was that a note of censure in her voice? Surely Ron wasn't the worst; surely there were other family members, sons and daughters and spouses, who never came at all. Besides.
Isherwood
. Didn't she
know
?

“That's right,” she said, handing over the plastic guest pass. Ron looped its cord over his head and thanked her.

The smell, the familiar sounds of moaning, the staff nodding to him as they passed pushing carts of supplies, medicine, bottles, and trays: it was all the same as before. Ron avoided everyone's eyes, patient and staff alike.