The Good Father (9 page)

“He didn’t do it,” I told her.

“I know. I’m just saying. When he was small I couldn’t get him to kill a fly.”

“I saw him,” I told her.

“Bullshit,” she said. “The Secret Service won’t even talk to me.”

“They had him at Cedars. He had a bullet in his leg. He’s okay. Banged up, but okay.”

She took off the sunglasses. Her eyes were red. She had been crying. It was unlike her. When we were married I never saw her cry. She was like a Green Beret.

“He called me last week,” she said. “He said he was coming to L.A. I told him to stay with me. But he said he was going to stay with a friend.”

I seized on this. A clue. A name.

“What friend?”

She shrugged.

“I said, ‘Call me when you get to town.’ But he didn’t. Is he okay? It’s killing me not being able to— I’m his mother. They should … it should be a law. You get to see your mother.”

She rubbed her eyes. I had left California when Danny was seven, moving to New York. From that moment on, Ellen had become his parent in a way that I would never again be able to claim. Yes, I visited my
son and he visited me. A weekend here. A summer. Christmas vacation. We spoke on the phone every week. But Ellen took care of him. She clothed him and fed him and got him to school. She took his temperature when he was sick and kissed his bruises. I was a voice on the phone. A letter in the mail. I was “Daddy,” the idea of a parent, a myth to deify or vilify.

Ellen and I had tried to keep the divorce as amicable as possible. Neither of us wanted to drag Danny through the minefield of our ruin. But it wasn’t easy. Ellen felt betrayed and abandoned. In the months leading up to our separation she had become demanding and needy. She wanted me home more. She felt like a single mother, she said. And I took offense at that, felt attacked, harangued. The move to New York was as much about putting some distance between the two of us as it was about a career opportunity. I told myself it was short-term. That I would come back to California in a year or two. “I promise,” I told Danny. “I’m not going to disappear on you.”

But in New York the short-term position became a long-term career. I took on more responsibility at the hospital, became a lecturing professor at Columbia. In New York I felt challenged, fulfilled. And then I met Fran, and we fell in love and got married. And suddenly the idea of moving back to California began to seem foreign and outdated. It was a resolution made by a different man in a different life.

Still, I was religious about calling Danny every week, about flying him out for long weekends and vacations. Fran treated him like a favored nephew, trying to make him feel welcome, even as our new family grew to include two more boys. When Danny was in town I would take time off work. We’d go to the park, the circus. I wanted him to want to come back. I wanted him to feel like Dad’s was the place he went to get a fair deal.

Back in L.A. Ellen went through a series of bad relationships. It seemed like she was always trying some new fad diet or completing the steps of a self-help regime. She went from working for a costume designer, to working for an entertainment lawyer, then back to school for landscape design.

If I can just get organized
, she would say.
If I could just catch a break. If I can just lose ten pounds, and stop dating the wrong men. But nobody wants to be with a single mother. It’s easier for men. Single fathers are sexy. Single mothers are Medusa. One wrong look and you’re stuck forever
.

I paid for Danny to go to private school, paid for guitar lessons and a new digital camera when he decided (for ten minutes) that he wanted to be a photographer. Because I felt guilty for leaving him, I took my son’s side in every argument between him and his mother. I didn’t have much love for his mother, so it was always possible to convince me that she was wrong and he was right.

And yet now I wonder: Maybe if I’d supported her none of this would have happened. Maybe if I hadn’t bad-mouthed her, hadn’t undermined her authority, hadn’t done any of a thousand things I’d done as a father, then Danny would be a normal twenty-year-old kid finishing his sophomore year at Vassar, instead of an indicted felon coming off a yearlong road trip. So many maybes. Was this what the rest of my life would be made of? Endless nights spent building alternate histories, running simulations, looking for a way out of the maze?

The year Danny moved in with us, Fran and I worked overtime to make him feel included, make him feel part of the family. But Danny wasn’t used to the formality of family life, the group dinners and weekend activities. He shared the same dynamic with Ellen that she had shared with her mother—that of inmates occupying the same cell. It was a relationship based on informality, on “friendship.” Ellen wanted more than anything for Danny to be her buddy, her partner in crime. This had worked in his younger years, but as he reached adolescence Danny rebelled. His mother’s funkiness began to seem like craziness, and so he fled to New York to see what being part of a real family felt like.

Inside the diner, I felt a sudden wave of exhaustion settle over me. It was just a taste of the ocean of sorrow that was waiting for me, a tidal wave of emotion rising on some dark horizon, coiling, marshaling its power, poised and ready to rumble forward, destroying everything in its path. I stirred my coffee, trying to ignore it. I needed to stay focused, to keep my mind sharp.

“We have to find out who he was staying with.”

“I’m sure the FBI already knows,” she said. “Isn’t that what they do?”

I sipped my coffee. I had been awake for more than twenty-four
hours. When I called home an hour ago, Fran said Murray was sleeping on the couch, and Ken Sunshine was in the kitchen drawing up a media strategy. I told her to keep the kids home from school.

“Let them play all the video games they want.”

Ellen’s espresso came. She drank it.

“He’s okay?” she said, her voice small.

I nodded. She started to cry again. I considered reaching out and touching her hand to comfort her, but I didn’t. This was the wife who had slept with a waiter and two surf bums while I was on my surgical rotation.

“How’s Harvey?” I asked. Harvey was her boyfriend. They sent out a Christmas card together last year. He wore a red sweater with Santas on it. Ellen said he was “in the business.” A producer of some kind.

“We broke up,” she said. “Last night. He said this was too real for him. He has his company to think of. The film he produced is up for a DGA award. He can’t afford the bad press.”

“Don’t you just love L.A.?” I said. She looked out the window at the gulls.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“Get a lawyer,” I told her. “Don’t say anything that doesn’t help Danny.”

“I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“Take out a loan,” I said. “The clock is ticking. They’re going to ask for the death penalty. They have to. I’ll sell everything I own before I see that happen.”

She looked at me from under her bangs the way she used to when we first met.

“What if he did it?”

“He didn’t do it. You said it yourself. He wouldn’t even kill a fly.”

“My friends won’t talk to me,” she said. “They’re very political. They loved Seagram. Everybody loved him. It’s like Danny shot Jesus.”

“He didn’t shoot anyone. Stop saying that.”

“You don’t understand. This is Malibu. People hug trees. They’ve been driving around with angry bumper stickers for years. This guy was our salvation.”

“Just keep it together,” I told her. “The last thing Danny needs is footage of his West Coast hippie mom flipping out.”

A table of senior citizens had been eyeing us for the last few minutes. Ellen fixed them with a cold stare. “What the fuck are you looking at?” I shook my head. “What did I just say?”

She shrugged. Ellen had spent her whole life claiming to be an artist. She had yet to produce a single sculpture, a single painting, a single anything.

Though I didn’t know it then, in the weeks to come, she and I would revisit every year of Danny’s life, looking for clues. She would call me at all hours of the night, often crying.

Remember that fever he had when he was two
, she would say.

Or:

What was that fat kid’s name? The bully. You know, sometimes Danny would come home from school with a black eye or a bloody nose, but he wouldn’t tell me what happened. That was the thing with those Columbine kids, wasn’t it? They were bullied and then they brought a duffel bag full of guns to school
.

I would take the phone into the bathroom and try to talk her down.
Our son is innocent
, I would tell her. He didn’t shoot anybody.

But there’s something
, she would say.
He’s not exactly right in the head. I mean, who drops out of college and goes on the road for a year? We don’t even know half the places he went, or what happened to him
.

If you love him
, I would tell her,
you just have to support him. No matter what anybody says
. As if love trumped fact, trumped public opinion, trumped bloodlust.

Now, in the diner, she wiped her face, and tried to pull herself together.

“How’s Fran?” she asked.

“Good. So are the twins. But I worry we’ll have to move. What possible future can these kids have at that school with everyone knowing?”

“Where would you go? It’s everywhere. Burma maybe.”

“Myanmar.”

“What?”

“It’s called Myanmar now.”

She had nothing to say to that. We watched the surfers rise and fall, tiny black dots bobbing in the whitecaps. As far as they were concerned
it was just another perfect California day. As far as they were concerned the surf was up and everything was easy. I had always wanted to learn to surf. I had nurtured a fantasy of a middle-aged surf adventure, an escape to Mexico, a diet of fish tacos, sleeping on the beach. Now I knew it would never happen. None of these shallow balloons of idle daydreaming would ever come true. The world was a desert now, a wasteland to be survived, not enjoyed. In less than twenty-four hours all my fantasies had been destroyed.

“When he was small,” she said, “he used to love to sleep on my belly. We would nap together on the sofa while you were at work. I can still feel him there, purring like a cat.”

We sat in the warm California sun and watched the surfers, a doctor and his estranged first wife, stunned half to death, like a deer that’s been hit by a car.

“This is all your fault,” she said suddenly.

“My fault?”

“That no-good uncle of yours. These things are genetic.” I looked at her. She was talking about my father’s half brother, Ellroy, who spent most of the fifties in jail for manslaughter. A convenience-store clerk killed in a botched robbery.

“First of all,” I said, “our son didn’t murder anyone. Second, Ellroy was a small-town boy and borderline retarded. You can’t possibly connect the two. And even if you could, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that murder is hereditary.”

“How else do you explain it? He’s a good boy. We were good parents. We were, weren’t we? I mean, not perfect … the divorce and … life. But lots of people get divorced, and their kids don’t—”

She put her face in her hands. I let her be for a moment. The waitress came over and refreshed my coffee.

“I’m hiring Danny an attorney,” I said, after she’d gone. “Forensic experts, whatever it takes. We are going to fight this.”

“I’m afraid,” she said. “This feels like one of those moments where everything falls apart. Like one of those moments you don’t recover from, and five years from now there’s a
where are they now
article in some local paper and it shows you drunk and living in a trailer. I can’t do it. I’m allergic to wood veneer.”

“Ellen,” I said.

She looked at me. I had always been the sensible one. She had always been the dreamer.

“You’re his mother,” I said. “He needs you to be strong. We can fix this.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think we can.”

Two

I
OWA

He dropped out of school in March. He felt it was a waste of time. He had been sleeping a lot, missing classes. He wasn’t depressed, he said. Just bored. When interviewed by the Secret Service, his roommate claimed he never saw Daniel spit after he brushed his teeth. He said Danny would just swirl the toothpaste and water around inside his mouth, then swallow. Was it true? Where had Danny learned this? It says right on the side of the package:
Do not swallow
.

On Thursday morning, March 12, fifteen months before Jay Seagram was gunned down in Los Angeles, Danny packed his footlocker. He drove his weathered yellow Honda up to the main entrance of his dorm. Refusing help from several boys on his hall, he dragged his footlocker to the stairs and pushed it over the landing. The long rectangular box flipped end over end, its loud crashing heard by residents throughout the building.

Daniel had made friends in school. He had dated several girls, some for several months, but he called none of them to say he was leaving. Nor did he call us, his family. Instead, at ten fifteen on a crisp March morning he levered his footlocker into the open hatchback of his Honda and drove away.