But Dad wasn’t here. He knew it before, but it wasn’t until he’d opened the door that he accepted it. Dad wasn’t here, and he felt like throwing up. Blood flushed his face. He gritted his teeth, and suddenly he knew what the emotion was that had boiled up inside him, that had been building for days. It wasn’t fear; it was abandonment. Dad left. He hadn’t come back, and not only that, but he’d started leaving years ago, not just when he’d left the cave, but years earlier he’d started separating himself from Eric. He thought, how long ago did I lose him?
Eric felt small again, as if the boy within had risen and taken a place in his heart, and the boy wanted to weep, wanted to lie on the floor and wait for Mommy and Daddy to make things better. One of the pictures on the wall showed his dad, smiling, shaking a hand across his chest with some important person, and for the first time Eric really looked at the black and white photo. Clouds muted the light. Grays dominated. Dad gazed into the camera, his tie loose and off-center. In the background, unfocused and barely discernable, stood Mom. By her side, clinging to one leg, was a little boy, no more than a white smudge of a face topped with a dark smear of hair, himself, not looking at Mom, not looking at the camera, but looking at Dad, leaning a little bit toward him, frozen in the photograph in a state of yearning.
Leda said, “Wow. Did you meet any of these people? That’s the Governor, isn’t it?”
“My dad is dead,” murmured Eric. As low as he spoke, the words still filled the room. Eric dropped his head. The lone tissue in the waste basket uncrinkled while he watched.
Leda turned away for a second. Eric could tell from the lines in the side of her face that she’d squeezed her eyes shut. Then she faced him, eyes dry and open, stepped toward him, and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I know,” she said. “So is mine.”
Seconds passed. Then her fingers pulled gently on him, and he moved into her arms. She held him long. He pressed his face against the top of her head, smelling her hair. Gradually, the fear… the abandonment… went away. It drained, like water. It flowed out of him until he almost felt whole. The office metamorphosed into just a room—not a monument to a harsh and distant deity. Leda’s cheek rested against his chest. She’d locked her hands behind his back. He told himself, it doesn’t matter if Dad made it home or not. Maybe I’ll never know what happened to him. He died like the millions of others, moving from one destination to another or hiding away in some unsafe place, leaving behind a lot of unfinished business. Eric tightened his grip. Leda raised her chin and met his eyes. He kissed her forehead.
“Thanks,” he said.
She gasped, like she’d been holding her breath, and then let it go. “I was afraid you hated me.” He started to release her, but she held on tighter. “After last night. I knew it was your first time.” The words rushed out. “I like you, Eric.” Her breath hitched up in her throat. “I’m alone, and I just don’t want you to hate me.”
He straightened a bit, in shock, and his first impulse was to say, “I thought you hated me” but he bit back the sentence. Her words, “I’m alone,” triggered a completely different way of looking at the last few days—it was a revelation—her way. What must it have been like for Leda? What griefs had she endured? What fears? She wasn’t hidden in some cave. People must have fallen sick all around her: her friends, her family, her neighbors. What must that have been like? When she climbed in her car that last time and started her drive across the city, where was she going? Was she seeking or fleeing? And what, he thought, have I been doing? He held her tightly, her shoulder blades pressing firmly against his forearms. Have I been seeking or fleeing?
Eyes closed, he leaned against her, and she against him, until finally he relaxed. The crisis passed. Breathing felt fine and normal and smooth. Goosebumps faded away. The sense of emergency that had harried him for days dropped off. Something else had changed too; he felt bigger, somehow—not older really, just bigger, as if the room had shrunk a little bit, as if he had grown within himself. He gave her one last hug and said, “Help me move this desk, will you?” Dad had said the key fit a drawer behind it. She let go, rubbed the back of her wrist under her eyes and took a position on one corner.
“Sure.”
Crushed between the back of the desk and the wall, a bundle of papers fell over as they pushed the heavy piece of furniture. Eric gave his side one last heave, moving it another foot, then picked up the bound sheets. Setting it on the desk, he undid the ribbon that held them together and looked at each wrinkled document: the house mortgage, a list of bank accounts and their balances, a handful of stocks, a legal looking paper with a key taped to it giving Eric the right to open the safety deposit box, and all the warranties to the major appliances in the house. Forty-two twenty dollar bills filled a new, white envelope, and at the bottom, he found a will and power of attorney naming him as the sole executor of the family’s assets.
“He must have thought that you might outlive him,” said Leda. Her hand rested on his back as they leaned over the papers. “Looks like they were dropped, then the desk was pushed up against them. Why were they on the floor?”
“Don’t know. They seem kind of useless now,” said Eric. “Let’s see what he left me in the drawer.” Eric dropped to his hands and knees behind the desk. At the bottom in one corner, he found a small knot-hole big enough for his key to fit it, and when he looked very closely, he saw the outline of the drawer in the wood, about the right size to hold the papers on the desk. The grain and finish hid it well. Only someone who suspected that the hiding place might be there would have a chance of finding it. He inserted the key and unlocked the drawer.
Inside, Eric found a single sheet of note paper. He read it, sat for a moment, reread it, then handed it to Leda.
Eric relaxed against the wall, his feet braced against the desk. Leda put the paper down. “It’s complete now,” said Eric. “No unanswered questions.”
Dad made it, thought Eric. They blew up the tunnel so he couldn’t come back to me. There were no ambulances in Golden. He saw how bad things were. There was no place to go but home, and that’s what he did.
Eric thought about the trip to see the eclipse when he was ten. Dad assumed I knew what an eclipse was. A thousand mile drive and he never once asked his ten-year-old son if he knew what an eclipse was!
Dad must have continuously assumed I knew things. Mom said Dad never shared what he thought, but there, at the end, he tried. He made it home to leave me a message, not knowing whether I’d find it or not. He died not knowing.
That knowledge hurt.
Dad left it anyway, Eric thought. At the end, he must have realized what Mom knew, that he assumed too much from me. At the end, he wanted to leave one thing, and this is what he left. It must have been the most important thing.
Eric reached up. Leda handed him the note. He read it for the third time. In shaky script—recognizable but not firm: not well—it said, “I have always loved you. Dad.”
“There’s advantages to the downfall of civilization,” said Leda as they walked out of the Littleton Target with new clothes, backpacks and supplies. She had chosen a man’s blue work shirt and had tucked them into her jeans. Eric thought the look complemented her. “I don’t need to go to work in the morning.” Eric struggled to fit the stiff, surgical tubing over the aluminum rods of the new sling-shot while at the same time carefully picking his way between the tumbled and smashed shopping carts that littered the parking lot. “No driver’s license test for me,” he said.