Passing trucks and buses, I sped down the fast lane way over the speed limit, thinking how to phrase this impossible phone call to my wife. Lily, he knows. It’s my fault. He knows and he’s coming to get you. Maybe Greer too. Blame me. No one else but me.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw an Audi driving up fast behind. Moving over to let him pass, I slid right back into the lane and tagged along behind him a couple of miles. Lily, Lincoln found out about the Meiers and flew to New Jersey. He read my diary—Another car appeared in the rearview. I pulled over again. It pounded by, followed by another right after it. Lily, pack a bag for you and Greer… I rolled the window down. Pack bags for you and Greer—
I was phrasing that one out when the sound came up on my left. Did I recognize it? Maybe, maybe some part of me did. A whining and clattering of metal that could only be a car with fatal problems sailing too fast down the road toward blowup land or collapse any minute.
Lily, I kept this diary—
“Hey!” The car was next to me, inches outside my window. “Hey, fuckhead!”
I snapped a look and there was Lincoln at the wheel of the junker, smiling, pointing a gun at me.
“Remember this?” His gun exploded.
I jammed the wheel to the right and braked. My car slewed wildly—too many things to do at once. I tried to correct it, but it wouldn’t go. A long overpass loomed. I skidded under it going much too fast. Steering wheel still pulled to the right, I smacked into a cement wall and scraped down along it forever. The evil sound of stone tearing metal on and on. Dark. The dark of a tunnel after the brilliant morning light outside. Scraaaaaaaaaaape!
I stopped. Finally it stopped. The car was still under the overpass in complete shadow. The smell of damp stone and hot rubber. I was all right. Safe!
Before my head cleared beyond that wonder, Lincoln’s face was inches away and yelling. “Get out of the fucking car, Daddy boy!” He must have opened my door because, still confused and terrified by a moment ago, the next thing I knew I felt myself falling out of the car onto the road. My hands hit gravel or glass. Very sharp and painful, it gouged deep. I tried to stand up. The close sound of traffic in a tunnel. Whomp. Whomp. Whoooosh.
“C’mere, you fucking hump!” He took me by the ear and marched me forward toward the light. The morning sun was blinding. Totally disoriented, I didn’t try to free myself from his hold even though he was much shorter than me. He kept pinching my ear and, once we’d left the overpass, pushed me off the shoulder of the road to the grass embankment behind. The two of us slid-stumbled down it till the road was high above us and we were crouched among sticks and wet earth. The traffic noise was all up there.
“Lincoln—”
He had the gun in his hand and I recognized it was like the one at home. He had two guns? What was the name? Clock? Crock? I wanted to know the name. It was important to know the name.
He punched me on the temple. Pain and dizziness splashed my face like water. I couldn’t believe he’d done it. No one had ever hit anyone in our family. Never.
“Shut up. Remember that day, asshole? Remember that crazy guy driving up next to you and shooting? Remember telling me that story? I love that story! I loved when you told it to me! I was your son and it was one of my father’s great stories!” He hit himself on the chest with his gun. Thump thump thump. After the last, he punched me on the jaw with his other fist. Pain. The whomp of a big truck going by overhead and then an angry long car horn. Lincoln’s face up so close.
Through my panic and pain, I realized something for the first time. “But there were bullets in his gun that day, weren’t there? And you protected me, didn’t you, Lincoln? You stopped it from happening. You were too young to know what was going on, but you still saved me! My God! I never knew till now!”
He laughed in my face, his spit hit my cheek. “You’re so scared you’re fucking crazy, man! So whacked… Protect you? Save you, criminal? Kidnapper! You and that goddamned Lily! Save you? Know what I want to do to you both? This, fucker, this!” He stuck the gun in the air and shot it three times very fast. The pain in my face was hot and pumping but I had to keep clear because within this moment was the answer. I needed to wipe snot from my nose and chin, but I was afraid he’d take it wrong and think I was trying something. I had to talk to him, tell him what I understood now; understood after seven wrong years.
“Wipe your face, man. Go ahead, do it, for Christ’s sake. I don’t care. I’m not going to shoot you, yet.”
Hands shaking, I tried wiping but couldn’t do it right. Disgusted, he jerked my shirt out of my pants and pushed it up across my face. “Come on, come on, get it off.” While I did, he started talking again. “Listen to me, and listen really good, because what I’m gonna tell you, you’re not gonna forget the rest of your life. Look at me.”
“I can’t—”
“Look at me, Max!”
I raised my head from the shirt and saw—myself. No Lincoln, myself. This was because I knew now.
“All along you and Lily playing God, thinking: It’s okay we stole him ‘cause we’re gonna bring him up so wonderfully that he’ll be Superman. King of Kings. The champion of the world. But you were wrong! You can’t take a kid away from his family and think it’s going to be okay. There’s no way he can be okay. Why didn’t you give me back when you knew? When you understood what she’d done!” His voice was a cry.
My face on him changed back to his face, Lincoln’s face. Teenage Lincoln’s face, so full of hatred for me. I had to tell him what I knew. Had to tell it to him exactly and well so he’d understand and know why it had all happened the way it had. Why Lily took him, why I had gone along with it, why we’d ended up here… How it was out of all our hands.
“Lincoln, can I—can I talk?”
“What?”
“Lincoln, you are my Guardian Angel. Do you understand? That’s why it happened. That’s why we’re here. Why Lily took you, why I met her in the first place.”
“What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying? What do you mean, ‘Guardian Angel’?”
“That’s what you are! Angels can come, but you have to deserve them. But I ruined you by not saying anything to Lily back then. See? I kept you from your real parents because I wanted you and your mother so much. I made you live the lie your whole life. I’m so much worse than her. As soon as I found out what she’d done, I should have fixed it. Taken you back to your real family so you could’ve lived the life you were supposed to.”
His face was dismay and confusion but that line went straight into him. He reared back and stuck the gun in my face. “Yes! You should have taken me home! You should have let me live my real life! Do you know what it was like last night, reading those papers? Suddenly knowing your whole life has been one big fucking fake? Finding about you two and who I really was all those years. All those years you pretended to be my parents? All this—all this stuff at once. Why did I even have to know? Why couldn’t I just have lived and not ever found out? My whole life, all you two thought about were yourselves!”
“Lincoln, you’re right. Everything you said is right, but listen to me. Let me explain this. It’ll help, I swear.
“Even if you and I had never met, you were born my Guardian Angel. Isn’t that beautiful? And it’s the truth; there really are angels. If you let them be and don’t kill them! But no, I met Lily and that was my end. Because the moment I discovered what she’d done with you, I was supposed to make it right again. You’re right—that was my test, my trial. I had one chance to truly deserve you, but my greed ruined it. Thou shalt not steal. I knew that. Thou shalt not covet. That’s why it’s all gone bad. It’s my fault. I ruined us all. You were such a terrific little boy before I found out, but once I did and did nothing… That’s how you were supposed to be your whole life. But I poisoned you. All the blood’s on my hands.” He looked at me with lightning bolts of pure energy and hate flashing, black, flashing across his eyes… He swung the gun across and hit me on the nose.