Finding Isadora(88)

Was that possible? No, I couldn’t imagine Gabriel doing anything so horrible. “Try me.”

A shadow of a grin flickered on his lips. He gestured to a big log and we sat, side by side but not touching. An elderly couple walked down the beach toward us, their arms around each other’s waists. We sat in silence as they passed, listening to the crunch of their footsteps and the ocean breathing in indigo sighs against the pebbly beach.

When the couple had moved on, and Gabriel’s words finally came, they were so quiet I barely heard them. “I killed my father.”

The air whooshed out of my body and for a moment I thought I would faint. But he was going on, and I had to hear the words. I gripped the log on either side of my hips, hanging on fiercely. Gabriel still faced the ocean, but I stared intently at the taut lines of his profile.

“Came home from hanging around with some kids one night, and he was hitting my mother.” His voice was tight, higher than I’d ever heard it. “I always tried to stop him, and I was getting big enough I could put up a good fight, though she always told me not to. She’d been making tomato sauce and he’d pulled the pot off the stove. The kitchen was orange with sauce and red with her blood. He’d broken her nose and was punching her, kicking her; every time I pulled him off her, he went back.” Gabriel’s speech got faster and faster, the words running into each other.

Under my clenched fingers I was dimly aware of rough wood, the retained warmth from sunshine.

“The big knife she’d used to chop the vegetables was on the table.” He paused, then said flatly, “I grabbed it and stuck it in his chest.”

I closed my eyes, then, as an image formed of Gabriel and his father, hurriedly opened them again.

“Only once,” he said, still not looking at me, his voice a husky breath in the night. “I stabbed him once, backed away, and he came at me. Then it was like the air went out of him and he collapsed. But it was too late for my mom. She was unconscious and died later that night.” He paused, then added, even more softly, “She never knew I’d killed him. Never knew she was finally safe.”

I sat frozen, unable to speak. I’d heard his words, but my brain was only slowly allowing me to comprehend them.

“Isadora.”

My lips were numb. Somehow I managed to force out words. “You didn’t mean to kill him. You had to protect her.”

Now, finally, he turned to me. The lines of his face were grim and he looked older than I’d ever seen him. “I think I did mean to.”

Oh, god. I still felt stunned, couldn’t come to terms with what he’d said.

When we’d been at his apartment, he’d told me he was fifteen when his father died. I tried to imagine an abused boy coming home, finding what Gabriel had found. “You reacted,” I told him. “You needed to stop him.”

“I killed him.”

He wasn’t going to let either of us take the easy road, escape the harsh reality. Suddenly, I realized what he needed from me, the thing he’d never been able to give himself. Absolution. But did I have it in me to give?

With trembling fingers, I touched his bare forearm. “You had to help your mother. He was killing her. How else could you stop him?”

His gaze held mine, and in his eyes I read a plea for understanding. “I didn’t stop him. Not in time. I’d tried before, should have found a way. Fuck, Isadora, I didn’t know how else to do it, I was such a dumb kid.” He took a breath then let it out. “That’s why I chose law. I wanted to learn how to help people. People like me and my mom, people who don’t have power in society, who don’t know how the system works.”

I squeezed his arm. “And you’ve done it, Gabriel. You do it every day. She’d be so proud of you.”

He hadn’t responded to my touch and now I moved closer, taking his right hand, cradling it between my palms, trying to thrust away the image of that kitchen, spattered with tomato sauce and blood. “When I asked you what happened after your parents died, you said you went into the system. Foster care?”

He nodded. “My father’s parents sure as hell weren’t taking me. And no-one was likely to adopt a kid who’d killed his father, even if the cops didn’t lay charges. I left the system when I was seventeen and made my own way. With the help of a friend of my mother’s.”

“Maria? The woman you mentioned before?”

“Yeah. She was a widow with kids of her own and wasn’t in a position to take me in herself, but she found me work, a house to room in. I grew up fast, scraped together money for university.”

We sat in silence and I was vaguely aware of people passing on the walkway behind us, anonymous shapes and voices. My attention was focused on the man beside me. I breathed deeply, inhaling the fresh, cleansing ocean air, then asked softly, “Are you all right?”

His hand squeezed one of mine and I realized I was still hanging on to him. Hanging onto a hand that had killed a man.

“Yeah.” His voice was rough. “Are you?”

“Me?”

“Shocked?” His gaze searched deep inside me.

I couldn’t lie. “Yes, of course. But the whole thing, the way you grew up, it’s all so different from…” I thought about my own childhood with Jimmy Lee and Grace. “I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been.” My parents loved me, loved each other, so much. I tried to imagine a scenario where…