Guilty (12 page)

I nod.

“Come on. Let's go downstairs and get some supper.”

“I'm not hungry, Dad.” I haven't been hungry since this whole thing started.

“Neither am I,” my dad says. “But we have to eat. Come on.”

He closes the closet door and throws an arm around me. We head down to the kitchen, where my dad pulls out everything he needs to make bacon and eggs—it's what he calls his specialty. While he's frying the bacon, I say, “Did you and Mom ever think about getting separated?”

My dad's back is to me as he stands at the stove, but he looks over his shoulder.

“Separated? Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I don't know.” That's not true. I know exactly what—
who
—gave me that idea. “I've been thinking about Mom since Tracie died. Thinking about that night, you know?”

“I know,” my dad says quietly. He turns back to the stove.

“I think I remember that you and Mom used to argue a lot.”

“All married couples argue sometimes, Finn.”

“I know. But it seems like you were arguing a lot before Mom…before she died. And I think I remember her saying that she needed some time alone.”

My dad's back is still to me. He cracks four eggs, one by one, into a bowl, and then pours them into the frying pan with the bacon.

“That's why I took you to the club that night,” he says. “Because your mother was tired and wanted some downtime.” He turns again, smiling gently, as if he's afraid that what he is going to say might hurt me. And, sure enough, it does. “It wasn't time away from me that she wanted, Finn. It was time away from you. You were a real handful when you were little, and your mom was here alone with you every night while I was at the club. That's why I started to take you with me. That's why I took you with me that night, even though it was a school night. So your mom could have some downtime. So she wouldn't have to deal with you.”

I stare at him. I can't think of a single thing to say to that. It doesn't even make me feel good to know for sure that Lila was wrong and I was right, because now I start remembering me at five years old and six years old and seven years old. I was always getting into something, and my mom was always telling me, “Finn, can't you sit still for five minutes?”

My dad slides two plates of bacon and eggs onto the table along with a stack of toast. He sits down opposite me.

“Eat,” he says.

And I do, even though I'm not even remotely hungry. I eat because I don't want to drive my father as crazy as I apparently drove my mother. I don't say another word. Instead, I listen to my dad tell me how things are going at the club. I think I even manage to look interested in every word.

Twenty

LILA

A
s far as the police are concerned, it's case closed—twice. I want them to be wrong, but I know they're not. I think about my father. I think about what he did and what he told the police he did ten years ago (a theft and a killing he said he didn't even remember, when he finally confessed to it) and what he told me he did. (“Nothing, I swear it. I'm going to make it up to you, Lila. We're going to be a family again—I swear it.”) I think about the other wives and children, the mothers and sisters and girlfriends who sat on the bus with me on my way to visit my father, who checked into the motels around the prison, who lined up and went through searches and filled out forms so that they could go and sit in the same room I sat in and listen to their husbands and fathers, their sons and brothers and boyfriends tell them the same thing my father told me: “It's all a mistake, I swear it. Everything is going to be different once I get out of here, I swear it. I'm going to make it up to you. I swear it.”

I think about the statistics. The numbers. I know them because my Aunt Jenny studied up on them and passed them along to me. “I'm not trying to hurt you, Lila,” she'd say. “But I think you should be realistic. I think everyone should be realistic. And the fact is…”

The fact is that people like my father, people who start along the wrong path early in life, usually find their way back to that same wrong path, no matter how good their intentions might be, every once in a while.

“For people like your father,” Aunt Jenny would say, “the easy way is the way they always drift toward. They can't help it. It's all they know.”

The easy way.

Detective Sanders: “Did he say anything to you about needing money, Lila?”

And there it is.

My fault.

Because even though he didn't say it, the fact is, he needed money.

“You're going to go back to school, Lila,” he said to me. He said it over and over, when he was still locked up. “You're going to be the first one in my family to graduate high school. You're going to be the first one to go to university. You're going to be the first one to make something of herself.”

“Yes, Dad.”

I studied. I did. But I also held down a job because… because I felt bad about being a burden on Aunt Jenny, even though she never complained about it. I felt bad about having to rely on her. I felt bad that she did what she did for me out of a sense of duty to my mother, her baby sister, and not because it was a choice she would have made otherwise. I felt bad that my father was such a screwup. I felt bad that he was in prison and everyone knew it. I felt bad asking Aunt Jenny to take me to see him; it cost money for the bus, money for the motel, money to take him things to make him happy. I felt bad all the time, and the only way to feel better was to make my own way.

So I did.

I'm making my own way now.

But working at one thing—a job—means less time to work at other things, like school.

And less time to work at school means lower grades.

It's like that story about the battle being lost because one single horse lost a shoe. You know: For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

I didn't do well enough to get a scholarship.

And because I felt bad about that—because I spent my whole life feeling bad—I told my father. I
confessed
. You see, I'm no better than you, Dad. That's what I was thinking, even if I didn't come right out and say the words. I'm no better than you. I made a promise, but I didn't keep it. I chose to do something else instead. And I knew, every day while I was doing that something else, where it was going to lead. Just like you, Dad, when you made the wrong choice every day. I knew what I was doing. I knew where it would lead. I knew it would mean that I couldn't keep my promise. But I did it anyway.

I'm just like you.

I am my father's daughter.

And because I didn't keep my promise, and because I didn't keep my mouth shut but felt I had to confess, I pushed you too. No scholarship means no money to make your dream come true.
Your
dream, Dad, not mine—that's what I want to say. But saying that is just a way of shifting the blame off me and onto you. I don't want to do that.

So, because I didn't keep my promise, because I disappointed you, you slipped too. You fell off the path of good intentions and onto the path called the Easy Way. You wanted money, for me. I know it was for me. You wanted the money to make your dream come true—to make me be the one, the very first one in your family, to amount to something. It doesn't matter how you get what you want, right, Dad? You need something you don't have, you know someone else who has it, so you take it.

Or try to.

But when Mr. Newsome refused to hand it over, then what?

Detective Sanders: “
Did he say anything to you about
needing money, Lila?
”

Me: “
No.
”

A lie.

I'm just like you. I break promises. I tell lies. I take the easy way. I tell myself I lied to Detective Sanders to protect you, but that's not true. I lied because I'm tired of being the daughter of a killer.

And now, like you, I surrender. There's nothing more I can do except go back home to Aunt Jenny and admit to her that she was right and I was wrong and maybe—
maybe
—find the strength to try again to do the right thing. Go back to school. Try to ignore what people will think, now that my father is a two-time killer. Focus myself. Study. Make something of my life. Aunt Jenny will tell me that it's time I finally did something for myself. But is that what I'm doing?

Is it?

I drop by the Salvation Army on my way home and tell them that I have a bunch of stuff that I want to donate to them but that some of it is furniture and I don't have any way to get it to them. The lady there is nice. She tells me they can send a truck to pick the stuff up. She asks for my address and tells me someone will be by the next day.

I go back to the flat and finish packing the kitchen stuff. I dust and clean off the battered old furniture as best I can. I call the landlord and leave a message for him to call me. I get the box of my father's things from “his” room, the one he slept in exactly twice, and add it to the boxes from the kitchen. I pick up the second box from my father's room, the box of books left behind by a previous tenant. I take it out back to the alley behind the row of rental houses, each with several apartments in it. There are mini-Dumpsters back there for garbage, and big plastic containers for recycling. I flip open the top of the big recycling container for paper and cardboard. It's empty, but not for long. I tip the box from my father's room into it. he books fall first. Then the notebooks. Then…

I stare down into the recycling container.

I drop the empty box and lean down, reaching inside.

I pull out the last thing that fell into the container—a photograph. It's an eight-by-ten full-color picture. Of me, age nine. Taken at school. What's my photo doing in a box that belongs to a complete stranger?

I reach into the recycling container again. There are more photographs, all of me, all at different ages. Every year a photographer would come to my school and take individual pictures of every kid. Every year we would take order sheets home. You could buy packages—so many little pictures, so many slightly larger pictures, so many big ones. Every year Aunt Jenny bought a package. And every year when Aunt Jenny would take me (against her better judgment, she always said) to see my father, I would take one of the big pictures for him.

There I am at age nine, and again at age ten. Then eleven and twelve…Inside the bin is every picture of me that I ever gave my father. I can see from the back of each one that they were fastened to the wall with tape. I start to cry.

It takes me awhile to settle down again and to think. What are my pictures doing in this box?

There is only one explanation.

The box belongs to my father.

I dig deep into the recycling container and pull everything out—the slim paperbacks and the books about hockey. My father was a hockey nut. He followed the Montreal Canadiens his whole life, even when he was inside. He knew all the players and all their strengths and weaknesses. He idolized the ones who were French-Canadian. My father was born in Quebec.

The grammar books.

And the exercise books.

I flip one open and stare at what I see inside. I page through the whole book. Then the next one and the next one. I feel a chill run through me as I stand in the alley alone, flipping from page to page, staring, reading my father's stories about his days in prison, his struggle with drugs, his remembrances of his daughter—me—when I was a little girl.

I realize how little I knew about my father and how many secrets he took with him when he died. I wonder if he would have shared them with me if things had been different.

I put my hand in my pocket. The neatly folded piece of paper is still there. I pull it out and unfold it.

Twenty-One

FINN

M
y father goes back to the club after supper. I slouch in front of the tv and don't answer my phone when it rings, even though it's John calling. I know what he wants. He wants to ask why I haven't been to school and how I made out with the girl—neither of which I want to talk about. Sooner or later the school will call my dad and ask when I'm coming back. My dad will find out I've been skipping. But I know how to play that one—with trauma and maybe a little grief. The first part at least will be true. But it isn't the trauma of seeing Tracie and that man shot dead in my driveway. It's older than that—and newer. It's the trauma of seeing my mother lying in all that blood in her bedroom, half forgotten (but never completely forgotten) and dredged up again by the latest shooting. And it's the trauma of what my dad has just told me—it wasn't him she wanted a break from, it was me. All this time I've been thinking, if only I'd been home that night. Now I find out why I wasn't. She didn't want me there. The whole thing really is my fault. If I'd been a better kid…If I'd listened…If I'd paid attention when she told me to…

I stare right through the tv screen. I don't have a clue what's on. I don't care.

Instead, I see my mother, like a ghost. She's right there in front of me, wearing one of the little black dresses she liked when she went out for the evening with my dad. She has her hair swept up, and she's wearing gold around her neck and on her fingers and around her wrists and in her ears. I see her as if she's really there, but she isn't. If I were to stretch out my hand to touch her, my hand would go right through her, and then she'd vanish like a wisp of smoke, never there in the first place, leaving behind only those gold earrings floating in the air to remind me how angry I am that they're gone.

It was bad enough that Tracie wore them. But to lose them?