Shame (41 page)

Caleb reached for his coffee cup, tried raising it up, but couldn’t. He covered his eyes with his shaking hands. Between hiccups, he said, “How—could—a—fuck—ing—ser—i—al—mur—der—er—act—so—no—ble?”

So that’s it, thought Elizabeth. And now she was crying as well. For so long it hadn’t made sense. Gray had been protecting his son. He had been given a role to play, the killer who wanted to die, and he had never deviated from it.

No more ghosts, Gray, she thought. No more ghosts.

“You didn’t kill him,” said Elizabeth, “you saved him. You offered him his only chance for redemption. Before you made that call, his life was already over. And it was wasted, so wasted. He knew what a terrible person and a terrible father he’d been, but you gave him an opportunity to do the right thing. It was his way of showing you that he cared. I know it’s hard for you to see it, Caleb, but what you did was the best possible thing for him. It saved him from killing again, and it was a chance for him to do right by you, his only chance.”

“I killed him.”

“He killed himself.”

“I don’t think you understand, Elizabeth. Maybe you better get your tape recorder out, or bring out your pen so you can take some good notes.”

“Why?”

“For the rest of the story. The kind of twist your readers are going to eat up.”

“I think you should go home to your family, Caleb.” Again, she offered him an out.

“Are you telling me you’d walk away now? You, the Queen of True Crime?”

“You’re distraught.”

“That doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true. All this time I’ve been telling you that I was nothing like my father. Well, that’s not true. The biggest sin of all wasn’t my calling up the Sheriff’s Office and posing as my father. No, that’s not even close. My sin was that I enjoyed the whole thing. I got a thrill out of knowing I was responsible for his death. Even as a boy, I sensed how addictive that power could be. I knew how I could get pleasure from taking another life. So when it comes right down to it, I’m not much different from my father.”

He expected her to react with horror, but instead she reached for his hands.

“Oh, Caleb,” she said. “You look like your father, but you’re nothing like him. Just because you wanted to see your father dead doesn’t make you some depraved criminal. What child at some time doesn’t feel that way? You’re not an evil person, Caleb. You were glad when your father was removed from your life, but that became your secret shame. You took some pleasure in his death, and that became your shame as well, because you learned that your father cared about you. But that doesn’t make you a killer, Caleb. It only makes you human.”

“You don’t know some of my thoughts....”

“And you don’t know some of mine.”

“I’ve wondered how it would be to kill.”

“So have I.”

“But I’m sure not like...” He stopped, confused. “When I listened to your recording, there were times I was attracted to the violence.”

“It might have seemed seductive to you, Caleb, but I know the reality wouldn’t have been.”

“But there have been times in my life when I’ve been so angry, and so afraid of what I might do.”

“People get angry, Caleb. Everybody does. But you’re not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“I’m still afraid of what I might be.”

“Helen Keller said, ‘Life is a daring adventure, or it’s nothing.’ I think your life, your adventure, is about to begin.”

“Whether I’m ready or not.” Then he surprised himself with a good memory and a little smile. “Lola said that the murderer really outed me. She was right.”

“How does it feel now?”

“I don’t know. In some way my secrets were my life. They dictated how I acted. I guess I’m still getting used to my freedom.”

“You were a prisoner for too long, and you started thinking like one. You forgot that the bars were holding you in, not holding you up.”

Caleb nodded. He still wasn’t sure whether he believed her. Maybe he would always feel tainted, one of Harry Harlow’s monkeys. Or maybe, just maybe, having experienced the bad in life he could now appreciate the good.

Their coffee was cold, and the sun was setting, but neither made a move to leave. Caleb sat with a calm he could not remember ever having felt before. He felt so light.

Elizabeth didn’t share his relief. She was fiddling with her spoon and napkin. She wanted to get up and leave but was afraid Caleb would take it personally. But staying, she knew, was dangerous. She knew about playing with fire and getting burned. This whole Shame thing was risky for her. She felt off balance, but most of all, she felt ashamed. She knew she had tried to dissuade Caleb from telling his story, had given him all sorts of chances to keep his secrets buried, but she hadn’t done it for him. She had
been afraid to hear what he had to say, afraid of what it might do to her. Honesty brings out its own madness.

“There’s evidence that Farrell was writing a book,” she said. She tried to sound casual, but her voice was much higher pitched than usual. “His title for it was
Cain’s Children
. It was going to be about the children of serial murderers. His private detective—Coleman—had done anonymous background checks on some children of serial murderers.

“It’s an interesting premise for a book. Maybe it’s a topic I might write about someday. But some books are better in concept than they are in print. I once tried to write a book called
The Club
. It was about smart women who made dumb decisions because they fell in love. These were women who involved themselves in terrible schemes that violated their own ethics and morals. In some cases these women ended up murdering family and friends, all in the name of love. Afterward, they wondered how they could have done such things. Some of them did their wondering in prison. Others in prisons of their own making. They looked at their emptied bank accounts and emptied lives. ‘It wasn’t me,’ they all wanted to say. ‘It couldn’t have been me.’”

Just because Caleb had gone and made his confession to her, Elizabeth told herself, didn’t mean she had to feel obliged to do the same thing. This didn’t have to be quid pro quo. But her mouth kept moving, and the words kept coming out.

“I set out to write that book,” said Elizabeth, “because I felt I was a club member in good standing. Some parts of the book were going to be autobiographical.”

One part. One large part. The book was supposed to be her big catharsis. She had felt this need to tell, but when confronted with what she had done, she couldn’t do it. Elizabeth had thought there would be safety in numbers and that she could hide behind the shield of being blinded by love, but it had proved to be too personal. The telling was never done and the book never written.
She had tried to mitigate and forget, and worst of all, she had tried to lie to herself.

Caleb’s feeling of lightness met her gravity. He focused on her and saw her distress.

“Elizabeth?”

“The shame immobilized me for so long,” she said. “I’d read about rape and incest victims, and I’d empathize with them, but I knew that wasn’t fair because what happened to them wasn’t voluntary. With me it was. But our sense of shame wasn’t that dissimilar. Like many of those victims, I felt I couldn’t tell anyone.

“Farrell had a right to be angry with me. Not to kill me, no, but he had a legitimate grievance. I didn’t just expose the story of Leslie Van Doren. I made it my vendetta. I wanted her to look unsavory and ridiculous. I wanted to lord my power and position over her. I didn’t want her to be only dirt; I wanted to grind her in that dirt.

“You see, I was jealous of her, but I couldn’t admit that to myself. I made Van Doren and her ilk out to be the scum of the earth. I was oh so supercilious about those women carrying on relationships with prisoners. ‘Outmates’ I called them. The nuns of the iron bars.

“I don’t know when I fell in love with your father. I think I only realized it a few weeks before he died. Even then, I knew it made no sense. I knew it was worse than wrong. This was a man who had murdered two of my sorority sisters, girls I was so close to. Because of what he did, because of his horrible, horrible acts, thousands of tears were cried on my shoulders, and I was forced to become intimate with the pain he’d caused to so many. I knew all about his dark side; no one had studied it as closely as me. And I knew how manipulative he could be. But none of that stopped me from falling in love with him.

“If I look for excuses, I suppose I can find them. Our close proximity; his imminent death; his reciprocal, or so I wanted to believe, feelings. But nothing excuses what I did.

“In my heart, I think he changed. I know there are those who say that men like him can’t change. I’ve read the psychological studies. They’d explain our relationship by saying I was this challenge for him, his full-time job while he was in prison, and that he used all his free time to figure out how he could inveigle his way into my affections. But it wasn’t like that, or at least I don’t think so.

“We were in the lawyers’ room, with a guard outside, when there was this disturbance in the cell block. I don’t know the details—I never learned them—but the guard felt compelled to leave his post. He’d seen me in there hundreds of times with Gray, and he knew that Gray wasn’t a threat to me.

“Sometimes I think I dreamed up what happened next. It seems unreal, implausible, and my memories are blurry. I might have gone to Gray, or he might have come to me, but I think we met in the middle. We started kissing, and the madness, and desperation, took both of us. I’d like to blame the fever of the moment. But I can’t. Our hunger was mutual. Everything happened so quickly I can almost pretend that nothing occurred, almost convince myself of that. Our physical union was so rushed it hardly qualifies as love making. I can count off the seconds and say, ‘There. That was nothing.’ But it was something.

“As the clock ticked, we probably weren’t left alone for more than three minutes. When the guard returned, we were seated. No one ever suspected. But because I’m the only one who knows what happened, does that make it any less real?

“I don’t believe anyone can ever really say, ‘I wasn’t myself.’ I’ve tried those words on myself, but they don’t fit. I know that what I did was the antithesis of professionalism. I know our being together was an unconscionable act. I was fully aware that this was a man who had murdered time and again, and he deserved no comfort, but I still wanted that intimacy between us.

“We never talked about it. It was another secret your father took with him. I think it was a defining moment for me. Maybe what I learned was even worth all the shame I’ve had to carry.

“I came to understand that lives can change in a single moment and that under certain situations people can do things that they would normally believe unimaginable. And I learned that everyone carries around secrets. Everyone. And these secrets, no matter if they’re great or small, shame us. I came to understand that all of us know things about ourselves that we don’t like to admit. Because of my own hidden shame, I became more attuned to ferreting it out in others.

“Of course, it took time to learn those things. Now I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book. I wasn’t fair to Leslie Van Doren. I tried to make her pay for my sins. She was more honest about her love than I was. But I wanted to have my cake—wanted to be known as the noble poet survivor—and eat it too. So I lied to myself. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t love him, that nothing ever happened, and that just made everything worse.

“Maybe now, though, both of us will be able to put our shame, and our Shame, aside.”

Their hands came together, her left, his right, and their fingers intertwined like hands put together in prayer. They both shivered.

“It’s cold,” said Elizabeth.

Caleb shook his head. “We’ve just been clothed in our secrets for too long.”

S
OME RISE BY SIN, AND SOME BY VIRTUE FALL
.

—William Shakespeare,

Measure for Measure

One of my favorite characters in literature is the little boy who says of the emperor, “He’s not wearing any clothes.” When people ask me about my work, I recount that story and I say my job is often writing about the emperor’s new clothes.

It was necessary for me to be that Hans Christian Andersen character throughout this book. I constantly asked myself what was real and what was false. I needed to be certain that my perceptions were based on truth, but in so doing I learned a hard lesson: sometimes we don’t know the naked truth even when we are looking at it. Certain revelations in this book were difficult for me, for I found that in the past I had contributed to the emperor’s new clothes, and though my fabric might have been invisible, my lies of omission were not.

This is a story where things were never as they seemed. Take, for example, the names of the three central characters. As adults, none had the name they were born with. Lyle Guidry not only changed his name to Lola Guidry but also changed his identity from male to female. Caleb Parker was born Gray Parker Jr. He
lost not only his first name but for the longest time the paternity of being a “junior” to an infamous serial murderer. And then there was John Farrell. He was born Gray Parker Van Doren, but he lost that name when he was adopted as an infant.