I stepped up to the porch and we shook hands. His was huge and soft. He offered almost no resistance during the greeting, as though he was afraid to hurt me with his grip. Shaking his hand was like sticking my hand into a warm loaf of Wonder bread. My tone more tempered, I said, "I'm Alan Gregory. But I think you already know that."
"Well, I do now, I guess. If I had known who you were before I would have said hello up on the road earlier. Where you live, you know? You kind of caught me by surprise up there. Embarrassing. I'm Kevin, by the way, Kevin Sample." He smiled in a manner I found quite affecting.
"I hear you've been asking around about some stuff that has to do with my dad."
Picking up my new crank at the bike shop would have to wait until tomorrow or the next day. I said, "Yes, Kevin. As a matter of fact, I have," and I invited Brian Sample's son into my office.
Kevin Sample was a veterinary student up the road in Port Collins at Colorado State University. I didn't ask but I assumed that he was planning to specialize in treating large animals.
Most of the strangers I'd met recently had been either new therapy patients-with all their inherent defenses-or people associated with the lives and deaths of Tami and Miko-with all their invisible agendas. Kevin presented himself so differently from either category that I was briefly taken aback by his manner.
The young man appeared to lack guile. Absolutely.
"You stayed at a B and B in Steamboat recently. The owner, Libby, is an old friend of our family. She phoned my mom and said you were asking questions about Gloria Welle's death. My mom told me about the call. I've been waiting a long time for someone to care enough to ask some questions about what my father did that day. I thought I'd come down and talk to you about him. Who knows, might help us both."
I was trying to decide whether or not to admit to Kevin that my queries during my recent visit to Steamboat were actually directed not at learning more about his father, but rather at learning more about Raymond Welle. I postponed the decision and asked, "Help you how, Kevin?"
"Dennis was my twin brother. Did you know that?"
His reply felt like a non sequitur. I said, "No, I didn't know that."
"Fraternal twins, not identical. But we were tight." I watched Kevin smile again, then watched the smile vanish.
"In less than a year I lost the two most important people in my life. I lost my brother first and then I lost my father.
And because of what Dad did on his last day on earth, I lost all sense of my family. I lost all my friends. Eventually I lost my school. Mom and I left Steamboat a few years after what happened up at the Silky Road. We had to, I guess. It's been just me and Mom since then. To be honest, she never got over Dennis's dying. And she certainly never got over what happened at the Silky Road."
I was still waiting to hear how talking with me about his father was going to help Kevin Sample. The tone of his words had caused me to begin to wonder whether he was perceiving me as a potential therapist.
"Can you imagine what it was like for him after Dennis died? For my dad?" he asked, and shook his head.
"You know that my father poured the drinks to the man who ended up killing Dennis? My dad felt that it was exactly the same as if he ended up killing his own son. Well, when you imagine what it was like in our house, imagine the worst. Because that's how it was. The guilt. The shame. The recriminations. The anger. The anger was vicious. It was all there in our house after the accident." Honestly, I said, "I can't really imagine. It's too horrible."
"The truth is I lost my father and my brother on the same night. Dad was never the same after Dennis died."
I needed a clarification.
"The anger? It was his?"
"No. Mom's. She could be… mean. Still can be. She had a mean streak even before the accident. But after? Especially after Dad decided he was going to sell the bar and she saw the writing on the wall. She knew they were going to lose the business and then we were probably going to lose the house.
She was cruel to him after that. And he just took it from her. It was like a penance for him."
"But it took its toll?"
"You know about the suicide attempt?"
I nodded.
"Not much. Just what I saw on the news." I didn't mention the fact that I'd seen videotapes of the news earlier that day.
"He took an overdose. Pills and alcohol. She found him in the basement. Mom did.
Made me drive him to the hospital. She wouldn't call for an ambulance. She didn't want the neighbors to know what he'd done. She didn't want anything to do with him. Didn't visit him in the hospital. She called him 'the coward' after that. To me. To his face. To any friends the two of them had left. He didn't have a name anymore. To her, he was just 'the coward." She wouldn't let him come back home after he got out of the hospital. He stayed with some people in town.
Eventually he got a little apartment."
Every day in my practice I saw men and women who had crumbled in the face of psychological stresses that didn't begin to compare to the pressures that this young man had endured as an adolescent. Yet he appeared emotionally intact. I wondered about things I couldn't assess so readily, about his relationships with women, and his relationships with mentors in the veterinary school.
Still, I marveled.
Kevin interrupted my reverie.
"That's when Dad went to see Dr. Welle. After the suicide attempt."
I nodded knowingly.
Kevin spotted my arrogance and corrected me, gently.
"No, you don't understand.
This is the part that people get confused about. Dad liked Dr. Welle. He liked him a lot. He wouldn't have done anything to hurt him. Anything."
I was perplexed. This young man seemed way too intelligent to discount, so cavalierly, the evidence of his fathers crime.
"You don't believe that your father shot Gloria Welle, Kevin?"
The young man's face tightened. I saw wrinkles around his eyes where there had been none before.
"Of course he shot her. There's no other explanation for what happened at the Silky Road that day. But it wasn't because he was angry at Dr. Welle. That's the part that everyone has wrong. And that's the part that I want to help everybody clear up."
"And you know that how?" My voice was soft. He was out on a limb and I wanted to offer him a cushioned place to fall.
"Because I had breakfast with him that morning. With Dad. He was pretty upbeat.
Not happy, not like that. He wasn't capable of being happy anymore. But he was up enough that we could actually have a conversation, you know? That hadn't happened a lot recently. He told me that Dr. Welle was a man he could trust. A man who was going to save him from himself." Kevin pulled a battered little notebook from his shirt pocket and slapped it on his thigh.
"I'm not making all this up. I kept a journal in those days. Like a diary?
That's how I know."
"So why do you think it, um… happened?"
"At first I thought maybe he just snapped. I'd been worried about him losing it-you know, going crazy?-for a while."
"But you rejected that?"
"Yes sir, I did. I didn't think he could go from being reasonable at breakfast to being psychopathic and homicidal midmorning. Now maybe that's possible with some people. But not with my dad. And then there's the gun he used."
"Yes."
"It was his. When Dennis and I were, oh, twelve or thirteen, he'd showed us where it was at home and taught us how to use it. He also told me that he could never use it himself-could never point it at another human being-unless the family was in danger. He wanted us to feel the exact same way. He meant what he said that day. I know it. I knew him."
I wanted to believe Kevin was correct in the same way I often wanted to believe in the veracity of my patients as they constructed and polished a version of reality that would shine more brightly than the tarnished one that often stains the truth. Kevin's view of his father was part of his ego's defenses against the enormous weight of his pain. I decided to say nothing that might interfere with the integrity of those defenses. He needed them.