December Park(174)

“Uh, sure.” I handed him the cigarette, then took out another one for myself. I’d never smoked in front of my father before. When I brought the lighter to the tip of my cigarette, it was all I could do to keep the flame steady. Then I handed the lighter to him.

He lit his cigarette and eased back in the chair with a satisfied grunt. He gestured toward the empty chair beside him. “Have a seat.”

I sat.

“You doing okay?”

“I guess.”

We sat there smoking together in silence for a long time. After a while, I felt my hands shake and my face grow hot.

“I spoke with a fella from the Army this evening,” he said. “They still don’t have a lot of information, and there are questions I know we’ll never have answered, but he told me what they know so far. At least it’s something.”

I looked at him. The tiny red ember of his cigarette bobbed as he spoke.

“We were told Charles was killed when his unit attacked Iraq in February of ’91. Turns out many soldiers were killed, and very few bodies were ever recovered. Others were injured and taken to hospitals. A soldier named Frank Belknap was one of the injured. He spent a lot of time in the hospital before being discharged and sent back to the States. Police found Belknap’s dog tags and discharge papers in the Patapsco Institute, along with some of Charles’s stuff. Best they can figure, Belknap was killed and Charles stole his identity.

“Army doctors said the soldier they thought was Belknap—the soldier who was really Charles—suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder.” My father sighed heavily. “Charles could have been living in that building in the woods ever since he came back.”

“Why didn’t he come home? Why did he lie about who he was in the first place?”

Even in the poor light, I could see my father grimace. “There’re things about your brother you don’t know. Things I hope you never learn, though maybe all that’s pointless now. He didn’t want to join the military. I didn’t give him a choice. He had a temper. He was getting into trouble and needed to be reined in. He . . . he did a bad thing to a girl in Baltimore—an accident, I guess, but due to his own carelessness, though now I’m not so sure what it was exactly. He had to straighten up. He had . . .” His voice broke.

“I was his father. I did what I thought was best at the time. And he was your brother and he loved you,” he said, quickly regaining his composure. “You didn’t need to worry about the things I worried about. And you don’t need to change your opinion of him. Do you understand?”

And then I heard Adrian speak up in my head: What do you call it when you dream about something that’s gonna happen? Could there be an inverse to a prophetic dream? A dream that clued you in on the secrets of the past instead of the future, secrets that didn’t belong to you and you had no right knowing?

I thought about my own recurring nightmare, being chased through the woods by an unseen beast while I ran alongside my grandfather who was not my grandfather, my father who was not my father. I realized why the soldier looked like a younger version of my grandfather and father: he had been Charles. And Charles had ushered me through the rain forest and into the village where he told me to enter the hut. Inside, I had joined the Piper, who had also been Charles, only the dark and hidden side of him. I become you and you become me and us become us and we become we.

He was my brother, but he had been something else, too. A man hidden within a man.

Again, Adrian’s ghostly voice sang out to me: Turns out it’s a whole world under there—a world beneath a world and within a world but also somehow occupying the same space as the real world.

“Do you hate me for it?” I said at last.

My father stared at me.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I knew it was him.” It was like a confession pouring out of me.

“Angelo,” he said, leaning toward me, “I could never hate you. I’m proud of you. And what happened . . . what you did . . . it wasn’t your brother in there with you that night. That was someone who needed to be stopped. You were man enough to do it.”

Tears spilled down my face. My leg bounced uncontrollably.

“That story you had on your desk?” he said, changing the subject and shaking me back to reality. “It’s very good.”

“You read it?”

“After your teacher left that afternoon, I wanted to know what I’d been missing.” He patted my knee and I saw that his hand shook. “You’ve got a good talent. I think that Mattingly fella was right about moving you to advanced English.”

It won’t be here, I thought morosely. It won’t be at Stanton School. Not anymore. Because we’re leaving.

“AP English is full of nerds and dweebs,” I said.

“So maybe you’ll teach them nerds and dweebs a thing or two about writing stories,” he said.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said . . . then my entire body began to tremble. I couldn’t breathe. Tears spilled from my eyes, and the world lost its clarity.

“Oh, Angie. Oh, sweetheart.” He came toward me just as I fell toward him, and he held me in arms that felt like great bands of steel. He rubbed my back, kissed the top of my head, and let me get it all out. Soon he was crying right along with me. And once we’d finished, we held on to each other a little bit longer.