Redemption Road(75)
“Dad?”
Gideon’s throat was dry. The bullet wound ached.
“Dad?”
The shape in the corner went quiet, and Gideon saw eyes roll his way and glint like pinpricks. The odd moment felt more so for the length of it. Two seconds. Five. Then his father unfolded in the gloom and turned on a lamp.
“I’m here.”
His appearance shocked the boy. He was not just disheveled but gray, the skin hanging on his face as if he’d lost twenty pounds in a few days. Gideon stared at the deep lines on his father’s cheeks, the crueler ones at the corners of his eyes.
He was angry.
That was the difference.
His father was hard and bitter and angry.
“What are you doing?” Gideon asked.
“Watching you and feeling ashamed.”
“You don’t look ashamed.”
His father stood and brought a stale smell with him. He hadn’t bathed. His hair was greasy. “I knew what you were going to do.” He put a hand on the bedrail. “When I saw the gun in your hand, I knew.”
Gideon blinked, remembering his father’s face, and the crown of flowers in his hands. “You wanted me to kill him?”
“I wanted him to die. I thought for a minute it wouldn’t matter how that happened, whether you killed him or I did. When I saw you with the gun, I thought, well, maybe this is right. It was a flash of a thought. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But then you ran and were gone so damn fast.”
“So you do hate him?”
“Of course I do, him and your mother.”
There was the anger, and it wasn’t just at Adrian. Gideon ran the last hour in his head: the way his father had said her name over and over, the thrust of it like a blade. “You hate her?”
“Hate is not the right word—I loved her too much for that. That doesn’t mean I could forgive or forget.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You shouldn’t. No boy should.”
“How could you hate her? She was your wife.”
“On paper, maybe.”
“Stop talking in riddles, okay!” Gideon rose up in the bed, pain spreading under the bandages. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his father or expressed his own frustration. But so much of it was inside him, the filthy house and poor food and distant father. Mostly, though, it was the silence and dishonesty, the way his father drank himself stupid, yet had the stomach to curse and groan if Liz came by to help with homework or make sure milk was in the fridge. Now, he was talking about on paper as if he were not some kind of paper man, himself. “I’m fourteen years old, but you still ignore me when it comes to her.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. You turn away if I ask about what happened or how she died or why you look at me sometimes like you hate me, too.… Are you angry that I didn’t kill him?”
“No.” His father sat, and none of the tension left him. “I’m angry because Adrian Wall is alive and free, and your mother’s still dead. I’m upset that you’re shot and in this place, and that, when it came down to it, you were the only one of us with the courage to look her killer in the face and do what needed doing.”
“But, I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s not the point, son. The point is you had the gun, and I’m just the chickenshit who let you take it. Adrian Wall stole everything from me that ever mattered. Now, look at you, all shot through and small, and somehow bigger than I ever was. And why is that? Because I saw you with that gun and went weak inside for all of ten seconds. Ten goddamn seconds! How could I not be bound up and turned around and choking on the kind of anger that comes from that?”
Gideon heard the words, but thought they were bullshit. His father had half the night to stop him. He could have gone to the prison, gone to Nathan’s. “And my mother?” he asked. “What did she ever do to make you mad?”
“Your mother.” Gideon’s father turned his face away, then pulled a bottle from his pocket and drained a third of it. “When things got hard between us, we’d go to the church and pray. No reason you’d know that, but we did. If we argued about money or you or … other things. We’d kneel and hold hands and ask God to give us strength or commitment or whatever the hell we thought we needed. We were married in that church, and you were baptized there. I always figured if one place could fix us, then that’d be it. Your mother disagreed, but she would go to humor me. Goddamn.” He shook his head and stared at the bottle. “She’d kneel at that altar and say the words just to humor me.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Then, I’ll say one last thing and leave it at that. As much as I loved your mother and as pretty as she was…” He shook his head and drained the bottle dry. “The woman was no kind of f*cking saint.”
*
After the run-in with her father, Elizabeth left Channing at the house and pointed the old car at skinny roads that ran wild into the country. It’d been like that since she was a kid: confrontation, then speed, sometimes for hours, and more than once for days. The next state. The next county. It didn’t matter. The wind felt good. The engine’s scream. But no matter how fast or how far she drove, there was nowhere to go and no white tape marking the end. It was the same empty escape—the same race—and when it was done, Elizabeth’s world was no more than her father claimed, just violence and the job and her fascination with Adrian Wall. Maybe he was right about that life. He’d called it pointless once, an embarrassment of lightless rooms. She was thinking of that now, of decisions and the past, and of the only child she would ever conceive.