The 7th Canon (41 page)

“What time is it?” he asked.

“After three.”

He struggled with the cobwebs. “Is Benny with your parents?”

She crossed her arms. “My parents are at the cabin. I can’t reach them. Probably better I don’t.”

“Who’s watching Benny?”

“Anne’s at the house. And Danny is still there.”

Donley struggled with what to say.

“Are you going to stay awake this time?” Kim walked closer and held his hand. With the other, she gently touched his forehead.

“I understand I’ve been in and out a few times?”

“Once or twice,” she said.

“I feel like somebody beat me all over my body with a two-by-four.”

“You look like somebody beat you all over your body with a two-by-four.”

He smiled wanly. “Some bedside manner you have, Doctor.” Donley stretched the muscles in his neck and grimaced. The soreness was sharp and tight.

“Whiplash,” she said. “You’ll be sore for a while.”

“What’s the rest of the diagnosis?”

“You broke your femur, but it was a clean break and should mend nicely. You’ll be on crutches for several weeks, maybe longer, and in a cast for six weeks. Then they’ll reevaluate. You have scrapes and bruises on your arms, one deep enough to require six stitches. The rest were cleaned and disinfected and bandaged. You could have some scars. Judging from your face, I’d say you’d better learn how to fall.”

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s not pretty. They’re monitoring you for a concussion. You’ll have some headaches and dizziness, but it shouldn’t be prolonged.”

Pieces of the night continued to come back to him. He reached up and touched a bandage on his ear, wincing at the recollection of Dixon Connor biting down on the tip.

“I left that one out,” Kim said.

“How bad is it?”

“You’re lucky you were passed out for that. The ear is cartilage. They can’t give you a local anesthetic. They used a razor to cut it straight.”

He grimaced at the thought.

“They say it was a human bite.” He could see now Kim was fighting back tears, and he felt horrible knowing how much worry and pain he had caused her. “You lost a piece at the top, but it’s toward the back. From the front, you really can’t tell. Just face forward when you talk to the jury. Or you can grow your hair long again like in the seventies.” She wiped tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Hey, come here.”

She crossed her arms and didn’t move. Her voice hardened. “What happened? What the hell were you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Her tone changed. “I’m your wife, Peter. I have a right to know. I was awake all night worrying.”

“I’m sorry, Kim. I—”

“When Ross called and said you were in the hospital, I didn’t know what I’d find down here. I didn’t know if I was going to be retrieving a body or just bits and pieces.”

“I’m all right. It’s going to be OK now.”

She stepped back. “Don’t pacify me. You can shut me out, but I won’t allow you to pacify me. Not anymore. That’s not good enough. Why did you do it? Why did you go out there by yourself? Do you have a death wish? Why don’t you let people help you, Peter?”

“Because I don’t know how,” he said. He looked away to wipe the tear forming in the corner of his eye. “No one ever helped, Kim. No one ever helped me or my mother. I waited eighteen years for someone to help us. No one did.”

“And are you going to hold the whole world responsible, Peter? What did it prove? What did going after Dixon Connor prove?”

He turned and faced her. “That I cared. It proved that I cared about Father Martin and those boys he killed—that I wasn’t going to turn my back on them and look away.”

“You nearly got yourself killed in the process,” she said. “You nearly left me a widow with two babies.” The last words came in a sob.

Donley searched her face and felt himself go numb.

“I’m about six weeks.” She put a trembling hand over her mouth. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I didn’t want to tell you like this.”

Donley reached out to her and pulled her close. He shut his eyes, but it did not stop the flow of tears down his face. He felt a mixture of joy and sorrow and guilt, recognizing the selfishness of his act. Kim was pregnant. My God, what had he been thinking?

After a minute, she grabbed a tissue from a box on his tray and sat on the edge of the bed blowing her nose. “I wanted to wait to tell you until a quiet moment when we were alone. I was hoping to surprise you Christmas Eve, but that sort of fell apart.” She sobbed again. “I want you back, Peter. I want my husband back.”

Donley pulled her to him and leaned his head against hers, but it caused a sharp pain in his neck. He grunted, and when she lifted her head, she hit the bandage on his forehead. He groaned and winced. His eyes watered. Their clumsiness made her laugh through her tears.

“Peter, if you don’t want to talk to me about your past, I know some people here at the hospital.”

He looked out the window. She reached out and gripped his hand.

He faced her. “I think that would be good,” he said. “But there’s something I also have to tell you.”

“What is it?”

He felt the emotions again, unable to speak.

“Just tell me, Peter.”

“It’s about my father. It’s about the night he died.”

Kim sat holding his hand. Donley took a deep breath and started slowly, explaining how his father had never wanted to marry his mother and had never wanted a child. He worked his way through the years, telling her everything he had never told her about the physical and verbal abuse. He told her about how he blamed himself for it all, how his father told him it was his fault. He told her everything—the times he wanted to run away, the times he wanted to die, the times he wanted to kill his father.

“It got really bad when I was about nine. The rest of those years are a blur. I tried to block them out. When I got the scholarship to Berkeley, it was the happiest and saddest day of my life. I was leaving. I was finally leaving, but I knew I couldn’t leave my mother alone in that house with him. I knew as soon as I left, the beatings would start again, and he would have eventually killed her.”

He looked down at the cast on his foot. “I called Lou and Sara and told them that I thought Mom was depressed and could use a weekend away. I asked them to take her. Her birthday was that week. It was a good excuse.” He raised his gaze and engaged her. “When it got dark, I walked out back and removed the main fuse.”

He saw in her face that she was figuring out on her own what had happened, and he saw that it scared her. He told her how he had sat on the steps waiting for the sound of the car engine chugging up the hill.

“The strange thing was, for the first time that I could remember, I wasn’t afraid. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of peace and relief. I had struggled with the decision for so long that, I think, to finally see the end of the tunnel actually made me feel free.”

Kim sat silent.

“He hit me first. He always did. But this time, I didn’t just take it. I was stronger than him by then. I was bigger, and the years of abusing his body had taken its toll on him physically. I had his throat in my hands, Kim. I had his throat in my hands.” He bit down on his lip.

“What happened, Peter?”

He shook his head at the recollection of his contorted and grotesque face in the mirror above the mantel. “I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill him. I knew that if I did, I would be just like him, and it would always haunt me. I think he knew it, too. I think he wanted me to kill him. I think he wanted it to be over.”

He looked up at her. “But I let him go. I let him go, Kim, and I turned to leave. I intended to leave. And that’s when I heard it.”

The sound grew to a deafening roar.

His father rushed across the room, swinging a shard of glass like the blade of a knife. Surprised, Donley raised his arms, and the glass split his forearm, opening a deep wound.

Donley stumbled backward, falling over the debris of the bannister, landing hard on his back. His father attacked again, slashing, but his foot slipped on the blood flowing from Donley’s arm, and he stumbled, giving Donley a momentary chance to roll and avoid the blade. As he rolled, Donley swept his right leg, hitting his father in the calves, knocking him off-balance.

It gave him time to scramble to his feet and grab a seat cushion off the couch, which he used as his father recovered and advanced. The shard of glass shredded the cushion. Donley tossed it aside. His father slashed again. Donley leaned back, but the tip of the blade grazed his cheek.

Donley shoved the hallway table into his father’s path. The man kicked it aside like a toy. Donley backed into the living room, dodging and ducking, looking for an opening. It came when his father swung wildly, leaving his side exposed. Donley drove a fist into his father’s kidney and a left hook that hit him square in the jaw and knocked him back against the wall.

His father just stood there, breathing heavily and perspiring profusely, wiping blood from his nose. For a moment, Donley thought he’d have the sense to just leave, to let them be, but they were beyond that now. They were too far along.

His father charged, his advance lazy and the swing of his arm looping and slow. Donley ducked beneath it and came up fast and hard, driving his shoulder into his father’s gut, lifting with all the strength he could summon from the muscles in his legs, stomach, and back, and hurled his father up and over his shoulder.

The plate-glass window behind him exploded on impact, the sound reverberating like a thunderclap. Shards of glass cascaded like falling rain.

Donley stood in the living room, a breeze blowing in through the gaping hole where the window had been. He looked down at his father’s contorted body. He lay sprawled on the concrete driveway, his neck and head twisted at an awkward angle, his body outlined in glass crystals reflecting the light from the street lamp, glistening like thousands of tiny diamonds.

And just like that, it was over.

Kim guided Donley’s face back to hers, lifting his chin, forcing him to look her in the eyes. “We’ll get through this,” she said. “Together. We’ll get through it.”

“I was taken to the hospital and stitched back together,” he said. “For three days, I sat in that room not saying a word, not to my mother, not to Lou, not to anyone. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I really didn’t want to live, Kim.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Peter.”

“Lou and my mother gave the district attorney a full account of the abuse, and Lou was able to convince him that my father had attacked me and I had acted in self-defense. Since I was the only one who knew what happened, they declined to prosecute me. Three weeks later, I checked into the dorms at Berkeley, anonymous. Both my mother and I had a chance to start over. Things went well for a while; Lou got Mom a job at the courthouse and moved her into an apartment, and they brought her to every one of my games. It was the first time I ever recalled her looking and sounding happy. Then, in law school, the doctors diagnosed her cancer.”

He shook his head. “After all she had been through, after all the crap she had endured. People say there is a God, but at that moment, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. What kind of a God would do that to her?”

“And now, Peter? What do you believe now?”

He smiled. “Only a God could have brought me you and Benny.”

Kim kissed him. “We’ll put it behind us,” she whispered. “We’ll put it behind us and move forward. We’ll do it together, Peter, whatever it takes—counseling, anything.”

Donley felt his emotions overcome him, and he choked out the words. “I wouldn’t have made it without you, Kim. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

They held each other, hearing the sounds of the hospital and low hum of a basketball-game broadcast coming from somewhere down the hall.

Finally, Donley said, “I’d like to go home. I’d like to see our son.”

Chapter 24

Kim and Donley managed to avoid the cameras and the crowd gathered outside the hospital by sneaking out a doctor’s entrance at the back of the building. The hospital staff brought Kim’s car. Unfortunately, there was no separate entrance to their home.