But to appease Bridgette, I took a call from him about a year after his conviction. He sounded so happy, so relieved to hear my voice. I’m your father and I love you. Nothing, not even this, can change that. I just want you to understand that I’m sorry for all the ways I’ve failed you. I want you to know that you don’t have to be alone. And then he told me something else I didn’t want to hear.
I don’t think I said anything. I just muttered: okay and yeah, maybe I know. I just kept thinking about all the things he’d done to my mother. What did they expect from me? Did they want me to forgive? In real life, that doesn’t happen. People don’t forgive things like that. They don’t find peace. It’s pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don’t deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.
In the end, I think you’ll be glad you spoke to him, said Bridgette uncertainly as I wept with my face in her lap. But that wasn’t the end. It takes the state a good long time to get ready to press the button. It’s a kind of institutional procrastination. Everyone keeps delaying and waiting. It’s as if even the enforcers of the death penalty know how totally fucked up it is. They keep waiting for a loophole, a pardon, a stay of execution. They keep staring at the phone that never rings. But time was running out for my dad. Knowing this, I felt like someone had put a bag over my head and I was running out of air.
The cemetery loomed ahead and I slowed my speed, watching for the ghosts that I knew didn’t exist. The clouds above had cleared and the night was dark blue, and the stars seemed so, so small and stingy with their light.
I pulled the little headlight off of Beck’s bike and cast it ahead of me. Its beam fell on the overgrown cemetery with its skewed, weatherworn headstones. No, I was not afraid of the dead. It was the living that filled me with fear and anxiety. I leaned Beck’s bike against the fence, and my footfalls were impossibly loud on the rocky path.
At then end of the trail, the beam of the headlight shone dimly on the caretaker’s shack. I had seen its roof from the road. But coming up on it like this, in the dark, it looked even sadder, more ramshackle than I had expected. It seemed like a pretty grim place to come to work every night, and a perfect place to off yourself.
The windows were smeared with some chalky-white substance, one of them broken in the corner. Did they leave it like this? So that it looked more haunted? According to the article I’d read, there hadn’t been a caretaker on the premises since the suicide. Not surprising. I tried the knob and the door was locked. It was a newer lock, though. The old key I had didn’t fit. I felt the wood groaning and bending beneath my feet. If I were heavier, I imagined I could step right through the wet and splintering slats.
I walked around the side to see if there was another door, and in the rear of the building there was. As the wind pushed the leaves and litter around on the ground, I slid the key in the lock and it turned with a satisfying click. The door pushed open with a haunted-house squeal.
Standing in the doorway, I heard rustling, tiny critter feet shuttling away from the noise and the small amount of light that washed in from outside. I shone the light, and looked into the single long room.
There was a desk with a tilted lamp. A corkboard dominated the far wall and was littered with frayed and wrinkled pieces of paper that had faded and grown old. Whatever announcements, and to-do lists, and schedules that had been tacked up there had long passed into oblivion. The white computer sat abandoned and way too big, like dinosaur bones. The eternal office chair had an air of expectancy, waiting patiently to bear someone’s weight again.
I moved inside, feeling my heart start to pump a little bit. I’d have to be a robot not to be a little scared. I saw a frayed line of police tape, but no telltale stains, no shotgun blast in the wall. Just a room that was empty and had been empty and would, it seemed, be empty for the foreseeable future.
I looked around, shining my light in the dark corners and under the desk and into the storage closet. There was nothing here. Luke was probably at home having a good laugh. This, no doubt, was some joke. Or was I missing something?
I still hadn’t figured out the biggest part of the puzzle: why Harvey Greenwald had ended his life, and what it had to do with me. It had to have something to do with me, didn’t it? Luke was running some kind of weird agenda, right? Because otherwise, as a game, this pretty much sucked. Was it just going to be some lame haunted-house hop? He said it was going to be a history lesson. Is that all it was?
I was about to leave when my flashlight caught something. A bright white envelope tacked on the board among the yellowed and faded detritus. It had my name on it in the child’s printed hand, which was now familiar to me. I walked over quickly and grabbed it down. Instead of ripping it open, I stuck it inside my jacket. I suddenly had a strong urge to get the hell out of there. But as I moved toward the door, I saw a large dark form pass in front of the side window. There was someone outside.
12
Dear Diary,
He’s too small. That’s the big problem of the moment. In his preschool class, he’s by far the smallest child, though he’s the oldest in his class. He weighs about twenty-five pounds and is about thirty-four inches tall, well under the normal range. And that in and of itself is not a big problem, though neither my husband nor I come from small people. It’s just that, up until his last visit, he was progressing normally and suddenly, now, he isn’t.
It might be hormonal. A hormone deficiency, says the doctor. They toss words and phrases around that land like blows to the kidneys. She started talking about human growth hormone and the pituitary gland, but how it was too early to be alarmed, and she prescribed a battery of tests. But I wasn’t really listening. I was just thinking: Will nothing ever be easy for him? Will things always be hard?
His size is not the only problem. His teacher requested a conference last week. That, too, is a bit of a blur. He’s not very social, she said. Meaning that he avoids the other children, and they avoid him. He has a hard time finding a “work buddy.” He doesn’t smile. And then, of course, the tantrums. How disruptive they are, how violent they have become. Have we thought about having him tested? There might be some (she paused to choose her words carefully) challenges. Twice she referred to him as having special needs.
He was a high-demand infant, my husband said as if this explained something. But the teacher just nodded uncertainly.
The truth is, if there is not some improvement, we can’t handle him here, she continued. We care about him; you know that. But this is a small, private school and we’re not equipped to deal with- Again, she stopped short and searched for a gentle word. But she never did come up with one.
I found myself thinking that she was so pretty and young, and I felt bad for her, even as I envied and resented her. How nice, just to be able to send someone else’s problem home with them. It was a Montessori environment, small and intimate. The children worked together. There were three strong teachers and lots of order even within the free structure of the classroom. And while this is such a benefit to the children, when one child is causing continual disruptions, it hurts everyone. It drains our resources and leaves less of our attention for the other children. Surely, she said, you can understand that.
And I do. I wouldn’t want my child’s needs neglected because there was a problem child in his lovely, happy little classroom. There, I said it. A problem child. That’s what he is, isn’t he?