A Brilliant Death (25 page)

Travis failed to conceal the grin. “I was thinking, since this is the first meeting and all, that I’d try to keep it positive. You know, the highlights—honor roll, cross country, wrestling, stuff like that. That’s why I thought it would be good to write it all down. I don’t want to start stammering around and look like a stooge.”

“Why don’t you just relax? You’ve never had any trouble talking before, why would you think you would choke up now?”

“I don’t know, Mitch. Maybe because it’s the most important meeting of my life? Maybe because for the longest time I thought he was dead?”

“Just relax,” I said.

We gassed up twice and ate while we drove. The adrenaline was surging, and there was no need to stop and rest. We hit the restrooms at the gas stations as we continued south, while performing the near-impossible task of scanning for a radio station that wasn’t hillbilly.

The further south we drove, the more nervous Travis became. By the time we got to Asheville, at seven-twenty p.m., he was barely talking.

“You nervous?” I asked.

“Kind of.”

“You think maybe he’s not your grandfather?”

“No, actually, I’m pretty certain it’s him. That’s reason enough to be nervous.”

“How so? You’ve found him. The hard part’s over.”

“The hard part hasn’t even started. What if he doesn’t want anything to do with me?”

“Good lord, Travis, why would you think that?”

“How do I know he’s not going to take one look and see not his daughter’s son, but an extension of Big Frank Baron? I might just be a reminder of the fact that his daughter is dead.”

It was just a few minutes beyond seven-thirty when we checked into the Tar Heel Lodge on the city’s eastern outskirts. I called home immediately. I was hungry for hot food, but Travis wanted to take a drive and find the address on Easter Street. “Let’s run a brief reconnaissance mission, then we can eat,” he said. We had been given directions by the desk clerk at the motel and cruised through the business section of town to a residential development pressed into a soft hill. We drove through an entrance of red brick pillars that were partially hidden by the low branches of guardian pines. A stone in each pillar was engraved with the words, “Gloaming Estates.”

Easter Avenue was the first street that angled off to the right. The numbers began low and we started the long loop to the left. It was a half-mile drive to 771, a ranch-style home on our left. It had brick and cedar siding and a side-entry garage. The trim was painted light green and cream. An overhead light burned in the living room, visible through the sheer curtain covering the picture window just to the left of the front door. I slowed the car. “Do you want to stop by tonight?”

“No,” Travis said. “Not tonight. Let’s get some rest and come back fresh first thing in the morning.”

I was up at seven, awakened by a bright Carolina morning that was bursting through the only window in the room. Travis had already showered and been to the pancake house across the street for breakfast. He was sitting at the tiny table next to the door, reading the newspaper.

“What time did you get up?” I muttered.

“One o’clock. Three o’clock . . . three-fifteen, four, four-twenty, four-forty-five, five. I didn’t sleep very well. At five, I was lying there staring at the ceiling, and I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I got up and went out for pancakes.”

I kicked off the covers and stretched, but made no move to get out of bed. “You’re not planning to go knock on his door right now, are you?” I asked.

“Not with you sporting a morning boner like that. Shower up.”

I did. Travis sat with me while I ate breakfast—steak, fried eggs, and hash browns. It was twenty minutes before nine when we headed back toward Easter Avenue, and just before the hour when we drove through the brick pillars of Gloaming Estates. It was a beautiful, brisk morning under a cloudless sky, and the air smelled of damp earth and pine. Jacket weather, my mother would call it. The neighborhood was up and moving. Children were riding bicycles on the sidewalks, and several men busied themselves in garages. As we closed in on the ranch house, we both spotted the man with silver hair working in the front yard.

“Hey, he’s out,” I said.

As we neared, the man bent over the dead and dying remnants of a flower bed that ran from the porch along the front of his house to a rose trellis that lined the side of the ranch. He knelt on a blue rubber pad, wearing work gloves, white painter’s pants, and a gray sweatshirt, and wrestled with the dreary remains of what that summer had no doubt been a beautiful bed of annuals.

“This is great,” I said, turning to look at Travis.

The only other time I had seen that expression on his face was when he had walked into Mrs. Tallerico’s yard to fetch our baseball, only to find her German shepherd unchained and headed toward him in a full gallop.

“Keep driving,” he said.

I had already started to slow and pull to the curb. “What?”

“Drive, goddammit, drive. Keep going.”

It was like a pilot aborting a landing at the last second and jerking back into the sky. I hit the gas too hard, causing the Buick to rumble in the quiet neighborhood, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the old man turn to look. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Sorry. I need a minute. I’m just not ready. Take a lap around the block. Let me build up my nerve. I gotta get psyched up for this.” He was breathing as though he had just finished a cross country meet. “Once around the block, just one, and I’ll be ready.”

It took three more laps, and he still wasn’t ready.

“Travis, this is a nice neighborhood, and we’re circling it in a car with Ohio license plates. Someone has probably already called the cops because they think we’re staking out a house for a burglary. I didn’t drive halfway across the country for you to bail on me. Now, this time I’m stopping the car and your ass is getting out.”

I pulled to the curb across the street from 771 Easter Street and cut the ignition. Travis had gone white. The man had worked himself in toward the porch, tossing dead plants as he went. “Approach him while he’s outside. That way you don’t have to knock on the door.”

Travis sat and looked, swallowed, and said, “Okay, I’m ready.” He got out, crossed the street and cut across the yard, hands in his pockets. I could tell he was terrified. The man heard him coming and squinted into the morning sun. “Morning,” Travis said.

“Morning.”

“Uh, I’m looking for Ronald Virdon.”

The man put the steel claw he was working with down and stood, pulling off his gloves. “I’m Ron Virdon.” He was a little shorter than Travis, but still possessed straight, strong shoulders. He had a wide smile and friendly eyes. “What can I do for you, son?”

“Well, this is a little hard to explain.” From his breast pocket Travis pulled a photo he had gotten from the attic. It was a wallet-size, black-and-white graduation photo of his mother, wearing a black gown and mortarboard. Without a word, he handed it to the old man, who squinted at it, his seventy-plus-year-old eyes taking a minute to focus. When they did, his smile disappeared and his gray eyes turned quite serious.

“Where did you get this?”

“Out of my attic.” Travis swallowed. “Is it your daughter?”

The man looked back at the photo, then back at Travis. “Why do you want to know?”

As they stood, Ronald Virdon’s wife came out the front door with a glass of water. She could not see the photo, nor did she know the gist of the conversation. But she stared hard at the young boy and smiled. It seemed as though she was staring at someone she thought she should know, but just couldn’t quite put a name with the face.

“What’s this all about, son?” the man asked, his voice neither hostile nor friendly. “Why do you want to know?”

Travis swallowed again. “Because that’s my mother.”

It took a moment for the words to register with the old man. The eyes that had a second earlier been so intense softened and relaxed. He looked at Travis, then his wife, then Travis again. His hands were shaking when he finally showed the photo to his wife. She dropped the glass and put her hands to her face. “Oh, my sweet Jesus. Are you Travis?” she asked.

Travis nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She shrieked, began crying, and threw her arms around the grandson she had not seen since he was a baby. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. I don’t believe it,” she cried. The old man, too, had tears rolling down his face, and after a moment and a silent prayer, he draped an arm over Travis’s shoulder. Forty feet away, I was bawling, wishing I could jump out of the car and be part of the celebration. But it wasn’t my place. However, the exhibition that was unfolding before me had made the past three years of Operation Amanda worth the effort—the fear of being stranded in the attic above Big Frank, the nauseating pain of taking Clay Carter’s kick to my groin, the embarrassment of pissing myself not once, but twice. It was all worth it. But for all Travis and I had shared, this moment belonged to him, alone. I watched for several minutes as they hugged and cried and finally disappeared into the house.

Travis was finally getting the one thing for which he had searched all his life—unconditional love. It had been instantaneous. He was their daughter’s son, and that was enough. They took him into their home as though they had always been destined to do so. Travis had lived his life without the affection of a loving parent, or any relative who had truly cared for him. My mother had hugged Travis a lot because, she said, he needed hugging. I don’t think I ever understood just how much he needed it until the moment he walked through that front door.

Twenty minutes after they went inside, a car pulled up in front of the house and a couple with three children jumped out and sprinted for the door. The man stopped on the sidewalk and picked up the shards of glass. It was Travis’s aunt, uncle, and cousins. I was thinking that I might be making the return trip to Brilliant alone. Fifteen minutes later the uncle came out of the house and walked up to my car. “Come on in,” he said, in a friendly tone and a mild Southern drawl. “In all the excitement, Travis sort of forgot that you were sitting out here.”

“Not a problem,” I said, stepping out. “That was family time.”

“Heck, sounds like you and Travis are just like brothers. It was nice of you to drive him all the way down here.”

When I got inside, Grandma Virdon was already orchestrating a family feast for that evening. As I entered the living room, she abruptly stopped talking, ran across the room, and threw her arms around my neck. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing Travis back to us,” she said, pecking at both cheeks. “This is such a blessing.” She then went about her plans, sending her daughter-in-law to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries that included a turkey and hams and sweet potatoes. It was a day of celebration, of thanksgiving, at the home of Ronald and Esther Virdon.

The scene was chaotic for the first hour, and Grandma Virdon couldn’t begin to settle down or keep her hands off her newly discovered grandson. She kept holding his face in her hands and looking into his eyes and seeing, I’m sure, the reflection of her daughter. She didn’t begin to relax until the turkey entered the oven and her daughter-in-law and eldest granddaughter were busy in the kitchen, having ordered Grandma to retire to the living room with a glass of lemonade. And there, with Travis on the couch, the process of educating actually began.

“Everything,” Grandma Virdon said. “We want to know everything.”

Travis grinned. “How much of everything?”

“Absolutely everything,” his grandfather said. “Start from your earliest memory and tell us all that you can remember. Everything you’ve done—school, interests, sports, hobbies, just everything. We want to know all you can tell us about yourself.”

And so he began. It took hours, and there seemed to be few details that escaped him. His first day of school. Little League. Sneaking off to fish in the river. The death of his Grandmother Baron. The death of his Uncle Tony. His high school wrestling and running accomplishments. His academic prowess. He told them how Alex Harmon had helped us track them down. He told them everything, but nary a word about his father until his grandmother finally asked.

“He’s around,” Travis said. “We don’t get along very well.”

“Does he know you’re down here?” his grandfather asked.

“Oh, God, no. He wouldn’t be happy about that in the least.”

They nodded and didn’t press the issue. It was uncharted territory, though it would seem that Ronald and Esther Virdon’s unspoken opinion of their former son-in-law was very similar to that of the rest of the free world. “You said this man in Pittsburgh helped you locate us?” his grandfather questioned. Travis nodded. There was an obvious look of concern on the man’s face. “Why did you go to all that trouble? Didn’t you get the mail we sent you?”

Travis looked as though he had been hit in the gut with a sledgehammer. They never had mail delivery to the house. For years, Big Frank had rented a post office box, the combination to which had always been a mystery to Travis. He had assumed that his dad used the box for his porn-by-mail collection. Never had he imagined that it was simply a way to keep him from being contacted by his grandparents. “No. Never. I’ve never seen anything.”