The Good Father (42 page)

Bonnie put another glass of tea on the table, sat heavily. Ted dried his hands on a towel and sat next to his wife, putting a protective hand on
her arm. I watched them for a moment, a man who had loved his wife for forty years, a wife who would be dead in months. I could see from his face that he didn’t know how to let her go, and it was destroying him.

“Listen,” I said, “I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” Ted asked.

“For my son. For that moment when you turned on the TV and saw his face. For realizing the kind of boy you’d invited into your house. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with what he did. If I have. And I wanted you to know that his mother and I, we never suspected he was capable of that kind of … violence. If we had, we would have kept him home. We would have watched him closely, instead of losing track of him, which is what happened.”

I found I couldn’t look at them. I wanted it to be true, what I said, but I wasn’t sure. After all, hadn’t we known, deep down, that any child left unsupervised was going to get into trouble? Isn’t that the point of parenting, to watch them closely, if only to ensure the child knows they are loved?

“Mr. Allen,” said Ted, “I appreciate your coming here. I can only imagine the kind of burden you’ve been carrying around, but you don’t have to apologize to me or anyone. Your son did what he did. Him and only him. People blame their parents for everything anymore, but it’s just an excuse. Your son was a grown man, not experienced, but old enough to know better. This was not a schoolyard lesson you forgot to teach him, unless you never told him ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

“No,” I said. “We told him that.”

“Well then, there you have it. He was a smart kid. He had a good handshake and a ready smile, and he was strong where it mattered. I’ve known a lot of men in my life, and your son struck me as one of the better ones.”

Next to him Bonnie had started to cry, not dramatically, but with quiet sadness. She may not even have realized she was doing it.

“We begged him to stay,” she said. “At least until Christmas. He seemed happy here, and I didn’t understand why he would want to leave. Why he’d want to go someplace he didn’t know anyone, where nobody cared about him.”

“I think that was where he was from,” I said. “He grew up on airplanes.
I don’t think he ever felt settled or safe. We tried, but divorce is a kind of hypocrisy, and kids are smart. They know the difference between the life you promise them and the life they have.”

We thought about that for a minute. I thought about my son in his cell. Why didn’t he ever complain about the food, or the treatment, or the fact that he was trapped now, waiting for the footsteps that would walk him to his death? Unless he felt he deserved these things. Unless he believed he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

“Well, if you won’t let me apologize,” I said, “at least let me thank you. You took my son in. You were good to him, and he loved you for it. Maybe more than he loved his actual parents. And I’m glad for that, glad that he found two people he knew he could rely on.”

Bonnie looked at Ted. She had an expression on her face, a pleading look. Ted nodded,
go ahead
.

“He called us,” she said. “The week it happened. Maybe two days before.”

I tried to process this. My son, who, at that point in his journey, I hadn’t spoken to in weeks, had called Ted and Bonnie Kirkland two days before he murdered a man. “What did he say?” I managed.

“He said he was in California. He’d been all over, Texas, Montana. He told us he’d seen the spot where that lady tried to shoot President Ford in Sacramento, which I thought was weird. He said he was good, except sometimes he forgot to eat. I told him we all missed him. I said Cora would be home in a few days and maybe he should come back for a visit. I told him the Mexicans asked about him. He thought that was great. He asked me to tell them
Me cago en la leche
from him.”

“What does it mean?”

“I told Jorge that Daniel had said it, and he started laughing. He said it meant something like ‘I’ve had bad luck,’ except not as polite.”

I’ve had bad luck
. Was there meaning there? Or just a joke?

“I told Daniel he had to remember to eat. Did he need me to send him some more cookies? He said no. He’d be okay. He said he was in Los Angeles. I knew his mother was there, so I made him promise he’d call her. I told him that all mothers worried about their children. He didn’t want to be a bad son. He said he would. I told him a little bit about how
things were here, which was the same. Ted was working too much. Cora was doing good in school.”

“Did he say anything else? Anything about …”

I couldn’t finish, but I didn’t have to. Bonnie shook her head.

“No. He said he’d been doing some roofing, that he was bunking with some Mexicans from the job site. And then I heard him cover the mouthpiece and talk to somebody else. Just a few words, and then he came back on to tell me he had to go.”

“Do you know what he said?”

“No. It was something like
Just a minute
. I told him to call me next week when Cora was home. I said she’d get a kick out of talking to him. He promised he would. And that was it.”

“Nothing else?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were droopy. It was clear the conversation had taken a lot out of her. Ted noticed.

“Why don’t you go into the living room and lie down?” he told her.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I knew what tired was until this.”

I watched her look over at her husband. It wouldn’t be long before she stopped getting out of bed. Her strength was leaving her day by day, her will.

“You should eat more ice cream,” I told her.

“Will that help?”

“No, but it’s time to do the things you love. Do you understand?”

A beat. She nodded. I could tell from her expression that she did. Death. I was talking about death.

“I don’t,” said Ted. “What does he mean?”

She patted her husband’s cheek. Her look said it all, and I could see him swallow hard.

“I’m going to go and let you rest,” I said, standing.

Bonnie took my hand.

“It was good meeting you,” she said.

“I’m glad. Please tell your daughter that I said goodbye.”

I pulled my hand back, but she held on.

“Tell your boy,” she said, “tell him I’ll be waiting. Tell him not to be afraid. We are all of us going someplace wonderful, and he won’t be alone much longer.”

I nodded. There were tears running down my face.

Walking me to the front door, Ted said, “You know, she sold all her guns after it happened.”

“Her guns.”

“She collected them. Bonnie took Daniel shooting a few times, out in the country. She believes everyone should know how to handle a firearm. After he killed that man she said she couldn’t look at them anymore. She wanted them out of our house. So I packed them up and took them to a gun show, made almost ten thousand dollars. I wanted to use the money to buy a new front loader for the store, but Bonnie said no. She said we had to give the money away. So we gave it to Greenpeace.”

He opened the door. The bright Iowa sun blinded me for a moment. Ted put his hand out.

“Get home safe,” he said.

I nodded. There was so much I wanted to say, but he was not a man who wanted to talk about these things with strangers.

“Make her comfortable,” I said. “And then, afterward, change everything. You won’t be the same once she’s gone.”

He nodded.

“She’s the best person I ever knew,” he said.

Outside, I climbed into my rental car, with its bitter cigarette stink, and fumbled for the keys. Tears were pouring down my face, and it was all I could do to put the car in gear and drive away, wheels spinning gravel. I drove until I couldn’t see anymore through the tears, and then pulled over to the side of the road and wept for the first time in years, truly wept, a man in a car that was not his own, in a state to which he had never been, parked on an anonymous stretch of road, weeping, trying to catch his breath, making animal sounds, beating the hard plastic of the steering wheel.

When it passed, when I became aware of other sounds, of a world outside my own grief, I found I had parked beside a willow tree, next to a long stone wall. I got out of the car. The sun was hanging on the edge of the horizon. My legs felt weak. My arms were heavy. I had a jagged, swollen feeling in my throat. The willow stood beside a small cemetery. Grave markers stretched out in a lazy rectangle below a gently sloping hillside. The afternoon sun threw long shadows against the thick green grass. Looking at the gravestones, I knew that this was where Bonnie
Kirkland would be buried, in the cemetery that had stood near her house for a hundred years. For her, death wouldn’t be that long a journey after all. A mile, maybe, a short walk down a gentle road.

I thought of my son on his bicycle riding past this place, the wind in his hair, his face tan, his body lean, his soul fat with the loam of good work. I pictured a smile on his face, a smile he didn’t even know he was wearing. They would execute him soon, six months from now, December 14, a week before Christmas. A Wednesday. He would be led down a long hallway in an orange jumpsuit. Prison guards would lay him on a table and slip a needle into his arm. I would be watching through glass from the next room. I would stand as he entered so he could see me, so he would know that I was there, that now, in this final moment, I was where I should have been all along. By his side.

I would watch as they strapped him down, knowing that never again after I witnessed his death would I ever smile with real joy or laugh with true humor. I would watch as they asked if he had any last words and see him shake his head. There had been too many words already. He had said all he wanted. His eyes would be clear, his body relaxed. I would want to break through the glass and fight them all, to pull the needle from his arm, but I wouldn’t. We had come to this place, he and I, and there was nothing we could do about it. It was the last stop on the journey.

Once he had been a newborn boy who drank from his mother’s breast. He had learned to speak, to say
Dada
and
Mama
. They were the first words he spoke every morning, calling to us from his crib. He was a child who could not wait to see what the new day would bring, what new wonders. A boy who smiled with pure and unmitigated happiness every time he saw my face, who charged me, hands outstretched, diving into my arms. He was the reason I had been born, my mission. But soon he would be lying on a table surrounded by men in uniforms. And I, his father, would be watching from the next room as they stepped away, as they manned their machines, as they tilted the table back to flat.

There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.

They would tilt the table back and press a button, and the chemicals
would begin to flow, death in liquid form. I had seen it as a doctor a thousand times, the way the breathing slows and the color disappears from the skin. You start to count. Each breath is farther apart, each pause that much longer than the last. The body becomes still. That person you knew, his expressions, his gestures, the sound of his voice, that person whose identity was imbedded in every cell and follicle, dissipates. He takes a breath and you wait, but this time the pause is eternal. Life vanishes.

After he died we would bury him here, in a tiny graveyard in the last place on earth he had ever been happy. We would fly his body to Iowa, and stand around it on a dapper winter day. There would be no songs, no psalms, no sermons. The sun would hide its face behind the clouds.

I stood beside a cemetery in Iowa. In my bones was the ache of unrelenting burden. A wind kicked up, blowing through the willow tree with a shimmer that sounded like rain on the water. It was time to stop fighting. There would be no appeal, no last-minute stay. I would finally do what my son had asked, what he had been asking me to do all along.

I would let him go.

Acknowledgments

For their faith, passion, and guidance I would like to thank my agent, Susan Golomb, and my editor, Alison Callahan. To my father, Thomas Hawley, who taught me what it means to be a good father, all I can say is you are missed every day. And to my bonus father and mother, Mike and Trudy, I want to say thank you for taking me in and showing me that we are stronger with families than we are without. To Kyle, my wife, who supports me and gives my life meaning, thank you. You have made me a better man.

And to Guinevere, my Guinevere, for whom anything that happened in the past happened “last weekend,” and who insists on growing up no matter how hard we try to stop her—thanks for letting me be your dad.

You make me want to live forever.

About the Author

Noah Hawley is the author of three previous novels, including
The Punch
and
A Conspiracy of Tall Men
. He created and ran the ABC television shows
The Unusuals
and
My Generation
and wrote the film
Lies & Alibis
. Hawley’s short fiction has appeared in
The Paris Review
. He currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and daughter.