Son of Destruction (2 page)

‘He tried so hard, and I know he loves me.’ She was desperate to make him
like
the man she’d picked out to take care of them, she hoped for it even there, at the end of the arrangement. ‘I just don’t want you to miss him too much. Burt, I mean. When he goes.’

‘Like I would give a . . .’

‘Don’t, Danny. Don’t say flying fuck. Listen. I know you feel bad . . .’

‘I feel fine!’

‘But this might make you feel better. It. Uh. Oh Danny, I . . .’

‘Dan.’

‘Dan. Dan, it.’

It was cold. Spit was freezing on his teeth but they had to stay out here on the rickety back porch until she finished. ‘It’s OK, Mom. You don’t have to tell me . . .’

‘Please, I’m trying to tell you something important.’

He finished, ‘You just did.’

But she didn’t hear. ‘I should have told you before.’

She was a mess. God he hated Burt. ‘He’s going. We’re cool.’

‘That isn’t all.’

‘Mom?’ That little gulp of hesitation scared him. There was always the possibility that she was getting married again.

Inside, pots crashed: Burt fending for himself. Never mind what had just passed between them, or that he understood long before she tried to tell him. Lucy needed to spell it out. She took the requisite deep breath:
well
. ‘About Burt.’ Sigh. ‘I didn’t want you to go on thinking he was your father.’

An icicle dropped off the porch roof and knifed into the melting snow.

‘He was just a nice guy who came along at the right time.’

Oh, is that all.
Danny made her wait so she would understand what he was about to tell her. He dropped spaces between the words like bricks, to make sure she would remember. ‘Like you think I didn’t know?’

‘How?’

Oh, Mom. Don’t look so betrayed.
‘How could I not?’ He made a smile for her, but it was too late, or too fake. ‘Mom, what’s the matter?’

Water sheeted her eyes and hung, not spilling. It was a miracle of surface tension. Lucy was beaming, like,
Thank God that’s over
. This is how she surprised him: ‘I’m just so glad!’

‘Mom!’

She rushed on. ‘I’m taking my name back. It’s Carteret.’

He was trying to hang tough but as soon as she said it, the surface broke.
I always knew.

‘If you want to, you can too.’

Dan Carteret.

‘Yes!’ He covered his face fast, so Burt wouldn’t come running out to see what blazed out here in the dark just now, and shone so bright. He was that glad.

One day my real father will come for me
, he told himself. Prisoner of war, he thought, superhero, Marine deserter; the myth kept him going and it crystallized that night: it had to be one of the guys in that snapshot. Why else would she keep it for so long? It didn’t matter which one of the five it turned out to be, he was
Not-Burt.
Different. Unknown.

‘So you’re OK?’

Gulp hard, man. Breathe. Exhale carefully, so you don’t spook her by shouting. ‘I’m good.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go back inside.’

‘Not yet.’ Dan put himself between Lucy and the door, trying to lead her where they had to go. ‘So. Carteret. That’s my father’s name?’

‘No. Now, move.’

He swept her hand off the knob. ‘So. What’s Carteret. Something you made up?’

‘It’s my name, Dan, that I was born with. It’s who we are. Now, please. I’m getting cold.’

‘I said, not yet.’

She tugged the door open in spite of him. ‘We’re never going to see him, you know.’

He pushed it shut. ‘Why not, Mom? What is he, dead?’

‘Danny, don’t.’

‘Married?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She scrubbed her hands down her face. ‘It doesn’t matter!’

‘In jail?’ They were having a little battle over the door.

‘No. If he was in jail we could . . . We can’t.’

‘Why?’

Her face went through so many changes that it scared him. ‘We just can’t.’

‘Come on!’

Picture of Lucy, thinking. It took her a minute to come up with, ‘There are people I have to protect.’

‘Like who? Him?’

The look she gave him was uncompromising. Fierce. ‘Starting with you.’

‘Fine,’ he said bitterly. ‘So I don’t know who I am.’

‘You’re my son!’

‘I don’t know and you won’t tell me.’

‘You don’t have to be Dan Mixon any more, and that should be enough.’ Lucy’s hands were shaking. Her breath was shaking too. ‘Trust me, Danny, that’s all you need to know.’

‘Come on, Mom!’ Like a cop, he slammed the heel of his hand into his mother’s shoulder; they both heard the thud. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Who is he? Who is he really?’

There was a pause during which he actually believed she was going to tell him. Her head came up, but her eyes were looking past him at something else. Then her voice lifted and floated clean away. ‘Just a boy I thought I loved.’

Inside, a bowl broke on the kitchen tiles and Burt squawked. ‘Lucy!’ Had he guessed she was dumping him? Did he hear them out here on the porch? Dan didn’t think so. Burt didn’t care about Lucy, he was just pissed about the no dinner. ‘Lucy?’

‘What happened?’

She put her fingers over Dan’s mouth, shushing him. Through the back window, they saw Burt slam the oven door and stalk out into the front room. She whispered, ‘Nothing. I can’t tell you.’

God he was so angry. ‘That’s all? That’s all you’re going to say?’

‘That’s all you need to know.’ She turned, as if they were done.

He pulled her back. ‘No it isn’t, Mom.’

‘OK,’ she said finally. ‘It was a boy from home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lucy sighed. It was so sad. ‘He wouldn’t want you to know.’

‘That’s a lie.’ His head came up so fast that his neck snapped. ‘He wrote to me.’

‘Not exactly.’ Her expression told him he was right.

‘You tore it up.’

Stabbed in the heart. ‘I’m sorry! I had to protect you.’

‘What else did you tear up?’ He knotted his fists to keep from shaking her. ‘Marriage license?’

‘There wasn’t one.’

‘Funeral notice? Passport?’ If only he’d known what to look for that awful day when he was four, he’d know!
I know ways of hunting for things that leave no trace
. The treasures she kept hidden made no sense to him at the time: a newspaper he couldn’t read with photos she would not explain, gold football, old jewelry, empty plastic shell – diaphragm case, he understood at fifteen, but not back then – night school BA from Connecticut College – he and Burt wore suits to the graduation – and, what else? ‘My birth certificate?’

‘I would never do that.’

‘Why not,’ he said bitterly. ‘You trashed everything else.’

‘Not that.’ For a minute out there on the back porch they were like two kids squaring off.
You flinched. No,
you
flinched
. Then her face crumpled. ‘Oh, honey, that would make you a stateless person. I wouldn’t do that to you.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Of course.’ She sighed. ‘It’s on file in Town Hall, you can get a copy any time you want. You might as well know. I had to tell them something at the hospital, so . . .’ Oh, didn’t she take a long breath then, and wasn’t the voice she finally managed so thin when it came out that she sounded like someone else. Long breath. ‘I told them it was Burt.’

‘Son of a bitch!’

‘I did what I had to.’ Lucy had a strong, sweet face – too pale, but with those beautiful eyes. They loved each other, that was understood. She’d brought him up doing what she thought was best for him, that too was understood. She wasn’t being cruel. She was doing the best she could.

‘If I have a father he has a name, so, what? What’s his damn name? At least you can tell me that.’ When she didn’t answer he took her arm. It was too thin. Even in the heavy sweater, she was rattling with the cold. Was she already sick, all those years ago? He doesn’t know. That night his voice was so thin and shaky that he hated it. ‘If you loved me, you’ll tell me.’

‘I love you, and I can’t.’ She looked up with tears streaming.

‘Won’t!’

‘Won’t, then.’ For the second time that night, she surprised him. ‘I won’t tell you and you have to promise not to ask.’

Oh, Lucy. What are you afraid of?
‘Mom . . .’

‘I’m trying to keep you safe! Now, promise.’

‘Why do I have to . . .’

This popped out in spite of her. ‘
Because he wouldn’t want you to know!
’

‘Mom!’

Then Lucy’s fingers closed on his so tight that the nails dug in like little teeth. She was struggling to frame an agreement but she had run out of words. ‘Please!’ she cried finally, out of such grief that the implications silenced him.

For a long time they stood just there, Dan with his back stiff and chin jutting, until she jerked him into a hug. He resisted but she pulled him close. They stood, rocking. With her face buried in his chest –
When did I get this tall?
– his mother wheedled, ‘And you have to promise not to look for him. OK?’

There was a technical term for the answer Dan made her then, which he didn’t learn until he was in college. Let her think he was giving her what she wanted. ‘As long as we both shall live.’

‘Ever.’

The sound Dan came out with then, that let them end the clinch and go inside, could have meant anything. Because they had to survive the moment, she took it as a
yes
. He’d managed his first
broad mental reservation.

He still didn’t know who he was, but things were good. At least they were done with Burt.

Lucy went to court and got her old name back. Carteret. They took the birth certificate to probate court and got his name changed to match. He became Dan Carteret, and it suited him fine. He still didn’t know who his father was, but he went along all right, not knowing. Lucy went back to work on the sub base; she started as clerk typist and advanced to office manager. She looked better than she had in a long time and Dan started doing better in school. They did fine together, just the two of them. The house was quieter with Burt gone, and they let things relax to the point where magazines sat on the coffee table every which-way and you could no longer bounce a quarter off beds made so tightly that it was hard to get back in at night.

There would always be the central question, but Lucy had said everything she intended to say and he loved her well enough to let it pass, at least for now. For his mother’s sake Dan Carteret went along not knowing who he was. He finished high school and went to college outside Chicago not knowing; his mother loved him well enough to let him go to California to look for work. He hugged her hard, saying, ‘I’ll come back for Christmas.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’ She tightened the hug and then broke it with the little push that means goodbye. ‘It’s your life now.’

That first year was hard: no time, never enough money. He was waiting tables, writing spec scripts because in Los Angeles, everybody hopes. He wrote for one of the free weeklies. He even sold a couple of stories to
the
L.A.
Times
magazine – a way in. Three or four Christmases went by – she was celebrating with a nice new man, his mother told him when he phoned; she said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m happy. Do you know I’m teaching myself to paint?’ She said, ‘Have a great life,’ which he continued to do, not knowing who he was, really, or how Lucy was. By this time it was tacit that she wouldn’t talk about the father, and he wouldn’t ask. They loved each other that much; they understood each other that well, and he went along fine, not knowing. Dan was going along all right, not knowing whether when he went in on Monday, he’d still have his marginal job at the incredible shrinking
Los Angeles Times
because there was always something else that he could do. He was going along all right, not knowing who his father was, what he meant to her or what went wrong. For Dan Carteret in his twenties, not knowing was like the weather. A condition of life.

He went along fine, not knowing, until it became clear that not knowing was
wrong
because he didn’t know Lucy was sick until they called from the hospital to tell him to come, she was sinking fast.

Lucy was one of those people who claimed she never got sick, which he believed, until now. She was critical – cancer, stage four and moving fast; it was time to put the central question. When they phoned, she was too far gone for him to press her on names, places, details from her past, but he didn’t know that.

He flew home on the redeye, too anxious and disrupted to sleep. He and Lucy had a lifetime of unanswered questions hanging between them, but this one knifed him in the heart.
Oh, Mom. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?
She’d just say what she always said:
I wanted you to have your life
. He had to walk into that hospital and fix this. He had to badger and charm them into producing the right specialist, the right protocols, and she’d get better.

Then they could talk.

By the time he raced into her room, Lucy was beyond questions. She couldn’t speak, not really. She just beamed, shaking with joy at the sight of him. Grieving, he took her hands; she was too flimsy to hug. If there really had been a new man in her life, he wasn’t anywhere.

There was just Lucy, shining.

Her mouth was working and he leaned close, the way you do for a deathbed confession:
Who is he, Mom?
If she won’t tell you now, she’ll never tell you. Even when she knows you love her too much to ask.

She struggled to produce sound, but nothing came out. Dan bent closer, closer even, knowing it was much too late to pour out his heart; all he could do was close his hand on what was left of hers and keep murmuring – with love, ‘It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK.’

Listening. It was too late but he listened hard. He could smell death coming out of her mouth, and there was no way to push it back; it wouldn’t matter what miracle drug they fed, infused or injected, she’d never get out of that bed. She couldn’t even speak, but she tried, God, she tried. He loved her, so he tried to smile and pretended that she’d spoken and he understood.