Croc was looking marginally better, definitely more alert. His father, still in his business suit, was at his son’s bedside and when he glanced at Jeremiah and Mollie, tears shone in his eyes. The resemblance between father and son was there, in the way their eyes crinkled, in the lines of their jaws. Jeremiah just hadn’t seen it when he’d met Michael Tiernay at his mother-in-law’s cocktail party.
“We can wait outside,” Jeremiah said.
“No-no, it’s all right.” Michael smiled tentatively. “You’ve been a better friend to Kermit in the past two years than I have. Please, stay. I…well, there’s no excuse. If I’d wanted to find my son, I could have found him.”
Croc moved the arm with the IV in it. His lips were swollen and cracked, but he managed to say through his wired jaw, “Forget it.”
“Kermit, whatever you need-a place to stay, an attorney, anything-you let me know. You tell me.” His voice faltered, and he blinked back tears. “I’m in it for the long haul this time, son. It won’t be so easy to get rid of me.”
“Dad…” Croc spoke haltingly, barely able to get the words out. “Thanks.”
Mollie took a step forward. “What about his mother?”
“She got as far as the elevator before she had to turn back,” Michael Tiernay said without looking around at her. “It’s difficult…I don’t know if you can understand, or I can explain. We were afraid he was dead. We would believe it one day, and then decide it couldn’t be true the next.”
“He never got in touch with you?”
“No. We’d made it clear we didn’t want him to unless it was on our terms. We thought-” He broke off, a proud man fighting for composure. “We thought we were doing the right thing. Helping him become independent.”
“Mr. Tiernay,” Mollie said gently, “I’m not in a position to judge you.”
“You should judge me, Mollie. We cut our son out of our lives. We insisted our friends and family do the same and cut him out of their lives. He was a troubled nineteen-year-old boy, difficult, hypersensitive, recalcitrant, failing at everything he did, refusing to live by our rules and standards. We didn’t see another choice.”
“What would have been another choice?”
Such a simple question, Jeremiah thought. Michael Tiernay gave a bitter laugh. “Love him.”
“But you didn’t stop loving him-”
He shook his head. “I don’t mean love as a feeling. I mean love as something we do. And we stopped. If he had been engaged in criminal activity, drinking and doing drugs, perhaps our alternatives would have been starker. But he wasn’t. He was simply…” He smiled meekly, turning back to his son. “He was simply a pain in the ass.”
Mollie was frowning, not fully understanding.
Michael Tiernay touched his son’s hand. “I’ll let you visit with your friends. I’ll be right out in the hall. It’s a clean slate, Kermit. In my eyes, we’re starting fresh.”
“Croc.”
“What?”
“You can call me Croc.”
His father laughed softly, his pain almost palpable. “Then Croc it is.” He turned to Jeremiah and Mollie. “Please, take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
“The police know anything more?” Jeremiah asked him.
“Not yet.” His gaze went steely, and Jeremiah could see his pride, the core of a man who’d built Tiernay & Jones into a formidable force in international communications. “But it doesn’t matter what they find out. I’m here to stay.”
He left the room in long, determined strides, and Jeremiah glowered at Croc. “Blake Wilder. You lying little shit.”
Croc gave him a crooked, miserable grin and flipped him a bird.
Jeremiah laughed. “I guess if I had a name like Kermit, I might head to fantasy land myself.”
“I’m named after my grandfather,” Croc said slowly, laboriously, “not the frog.”
“Kermit Atwood,” Mollie supplied. “Diantha’s husband.”
“Well.” Jeremiah straightened, felt the emotional and physical agony Croc must be feeling. “You’re here. You’re alive. And your father’s at your bedside eating some crow. You going to forgive him?”
“Already did.”
“Were your parents authoritarian? Did they beat you, make you toe the line?”
But Croc sank deeper into his pillows, drifting in and out, his pain medication, fatigue, and injuries taking their toll.
“We were disengaged,” Michael Tiernay said from the doorway. He walked into the room and adjusted the blanket over his son as if he were still a small, innocent boy, not a young man with a policeman outside his hospital door. “He would do anything to get our attention. And did. Positive, negative-it didn’t matter what kind of attention he got. When we finally did focus on him, we decided he wasn’t worth our effort and kicked him out.”
Jeremiah stared at him. “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?”
“No, I’m not. That’s why my wife couldn’t come up here, not because of what Kermit-of what Croc might have done, but because of what we’d done. He was still so young at nineteen. He needed us to love him-not without rules and standards, but unconditionally.”
That wasn’t how Jeremiah and his father had operated, not even in the dark, pain-filled years after his mother had died. When they had problems, they’d go off in the swamp together with a jackknife and matches. After a few days, everything would sort itself out.
Michael Tiernay gently stroked his son’s ratty hair. “He had everything. Boarding school, the best camps, trips to Europe, everything electronic a boy could want, his own private suite at home. Harvard. But he wasn’t a part of our lives, and he knew it.” He looked back at Jeremiah abruptly, as if he’d tried to contradict him. “We’re not bad people. In fact, we’re very good people. We loved him in our own way.”
“Mr. Tiernay, Croc never discussed his past with me.”
Tiernay might not even have heard him. “It’s not the money, you know.”
Jeremiah nodded. That much he did know.
“The money just made it easier for us to think we were doing everything for our son when what we’d done was nothing.”
“What about Deegan?” Mollie asked.
Tiernay shifted to her, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Deegan’s always been different. You don’t have children, but they come…I don’t know, they come with their own personalities. Kermit was always sensitive, creative, intuitive. Deegan’s more action-oriented, more direct, not at all introspective. That made him easier for reserved parents like Bobbi and myself to raise.”
She smiled, her naturalness not unexpected but infectious. “Croc would have done well in my family. Things were always chaotic, there was never enough money, and my parents and sister are the quintessential flaky musicians. I guess they’d have had fits with a kid like Deegan, though.”
Tiernay seemed to relax at her warmth and clarity. “Perhaps we all just have to play the cards we’re dealt. You’ve been good to him, Mr. Tabak. I gather he looks up to you.”
“Mr. Tiernay, I’m responsible for him being here. If I’d taken his warnings more seriously, worked harder-”
But Michael Tiernay was shaking his head. “I’ve known Kermit-Croc-all his life, and he has a mind of his own, which he’s willing to use. Which he’s desperate to use. He wants, and deserves, to take responsibility for his own decisions. It wasn’t his decision to abandon us. It was our decision to abandon him. In any case, unless he’s changed drastically-and my wife and I had nineteen years of trying to change him-it’s my guess he would only be annoyed if you tried to take the blame for his condition.”
“You’re probably right. Will your wife be in later?”