It’s been almost two years since I shot and killed a ten-year-old boy. It was an overcast day in early December, and I was hunting from the deer stand I’d built where my property meets the woods. The boy, David Rosen, was wearing drab colors, and I mistook his flitting movements behind a filigree of winter gray woods for those of a buck I had shot at and missed the day before. The boy knew that I had a deer stand there and that I hunted in those woods. I had even shown him my rifle a few days earlier.
When I saw him go down, I knew it was no buck I had shot. All I remember about my run through seventy or eighty yards of woods is that twice I stumbled and fell. I don’t remember the way David Rosen looked when I saw him lying there — only the dark, slick blood from his head on the winter leaves, mixing with patches of snow.
At the hospital, his parents stared at me for a moment with frozen expressions before David’s father, a rabbi, steered his wife in the opposite direction. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t approach them.
Early the next morning, Mrs. Rosen banged on my back door. Though a light snow was falling, she wasn’t wearing a coat. Her hand squeezed the porch post for support as she let fly her lacerating questions: “Why couldn’t you see that it was David? Why couldn’t you see it was my boy?”
I felt as though anything I said to her right then would have been offensive, especially an apology or a plea for forgiveness. How was it possible to apologize for such a thing? What right did I have to ask forgiveness? But I said, “I’m sorry,” anyway, the words coming out in a choking whisper. She stared at me with the frozen horror of the day before, then turned and walked away, shivering, snow dusting her hair and the thin turtleneck she wore. But she didn’t walk around the house, toward the street. She walked across my backyard, toward the deer stand. She climbed the steps to the stand and went to the rail and faced the woods, the direction I’d been aiming when I shot her son.
My wife, Alice, who had heard the screaming from upstairs, came to the back door, where I was still standing. “My God, Richard,” she said, “is that Karen Rosen?” Then Alice opened the door and, pulling her sweater closed over her chest, started across the yard. When Mrs. Rosen saw Alice coming, she climbed down the steps and headed into the woods, practically running. Alice yelled, “Mrs. Rosen, please!” But Mrs. Rosen turned halfway around, thrust her hand in the air, her open palm rigid, and cried, “No!” Alice stopped and watched her for a moment before turning and coming back to the house. My eyes followed Mrs. Rosen’s progress through the woods, but I turned from the window before she reached the place where my bullet had found her son.
I attended the boy’s funeral with Alice and our daughter Holly. As I sat between the two of them, holding their hands, I thought about the blame Holly might be fixing upon me. Among my daughter’s causes, animal rights and gun control were prominent, and some of our debates on these subjects had reached the point of hostility, unkind words, and hard feelings on both sides. It had been only a few years since Holly had come out to us as a lesbian, and after struggling to accept it, Alice and I had reached a plateau of peace, if not happiness, with that issue, an accord all three of us did not want to see threatened. But when I helped Holly with her taxes and saw the record of her contributions to organizations that wanted to ban guns and criminalize animal testing, I felt a flaring in my gut that led to more fiery arguments. Not only did I oppose these causes, but Holly, who was still living a graduate student’s spartan existence at the time, didn’t have enough money to be giving any away.
Now, having killed a boy with the sort of weapon she wanted to see banned — even hunting rifles were on her list — I watched her closely for any trace of “I told you so” satisfaction. I saw none, though at times her angelic support and empathy seemed merely a different brand of reproach. In a sense, she had won. The killing had proved her point about guns, and she could be magnanimous by never acknowledging her victory.
We sat in the last row of the synagogue, careful to keep our distance from the Rosens, thinking it was what they would want. The accusing stares I received from some of the mourners brought me an odd mixture of shame, defensive anger, and relief at having allies in my self-condemnation. Later that week, Alice helped me write a letter to the Rosens apologizing for what I had done. Even a letter to them seemed an audacious, provocative gesture. But two weeks after I mailed it, the detective who had interviewed me the day of the accident called and said the Rosens would not be pressing charges, and neither would the county district attorney’s office.
Less than a year after this, Alice died of brain cancer in the same hospital where David Rosen had died. Within five weeks of her diagnosis, she was gone.
I am not a religious man. I have not gone to church, except for weddings and funerals, in the thirty-one years since I married Alice. But in my work as a civil engineer, designing safety improvements for intersections and highway interchanges, I have come to a deep understanding of the concepts of symmetry and counterpoise, and the coincidence was too striking — the tumor’s dark groping inside her skull, working its devastation in the same area where my bullet had torn that boy’s soul from his body, and this a scant ten months later. In taking life from Alice, and thus taking her from me, the equalizing hand of some ultimate power seemed as unmistakable, as exact in purpose, as Karen Rosen’s hand had in refusing Alice’s comfort that frigid dawn.
A month after Alice died, and just a week before the anniversary of their son’s death, the Rosens sent me a card. The front showed a snowy copse of evergreens where a lamb curled up next to a lion, a soft gold moon hanging watchfully above them. Inside was a quotation from Isaiah:
The wolf . . . shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. . . . They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.
Beneath the card’s holiday message — “May this season of peace and love bring you many joys” — one of the Rosens had written, “We forgive you.” It did not look like a woman’s handwriting; it was more likely the Rabbi’s script. A clergyman under professional obligation to forgive. I have always doubted the inclusiveness, the sincerity of that we. The woman who appeared at my door that morning was not one to forgive such a thing so soon, if ever.
But it’s possible they had heard about Alice’s death and interpreted it as I had. And perhaps because accounts had been set aright, the Rabbi, with the added weight of his vocation tugging him in this direction, felt able, even compelled, to forgive me.
Soon after Alice died, I retired and sold the house in Pennsylvania where we had raised Holly and where on the final day of deer season I had shouldered my Remington 30.06 and killed a fifth-grade kid who had just learned to play “Zorba the Greek” on his trumpet. I now live year-round on Waverly Island, New Jersey, where Alice and I bought a house twelve years ago to spend our summers. There are no woods on this island, and the terrain is quite flat compared to our mountainous area of Pennsylvania. I read somewhere that travelers in medieval times, when coming in sight of mountain ranges, would shield their eyes; the alpine asymmetry of the earth was, to them, an indication of some divine error. But divine agency in my life shows only precise balance, like a cantilevered bridge. I don’t close my eyes to it.
It’s after midnight, and I’m standing at the living-room window, watching the revolving light atop the Farmingtons’ house across the street. Illuminated by spotlights anchored in the pebbly front yard, the house is a lurid pink, two-story stucco cottage. In the front, tapering up from the ground, is a chimney that the Farmingtons have painted with slanted black and white stripes and capped with a roofed glass cylinder. Every night at dusk, they turn on the rotating light inside the glass.
The past few months, to help myself sleep at night, I stand here in my pajamas, my feet flat on the parquet floor as a melatonin tablet dissolves under my tongue, and I count aloud one hundred revolutions of that wheeling lamp. Tonight, under the rote counting, I’m thinking of Holly and her new lover, who are coming tomorrow from Philadelphia to stay with me for the weekend. I wonder what Holly, the psychologist, would say about this sleep-inducing ritual of mine.
This time, my ritual doesn’t work; when I get into bed, sleep eludes me. Instead I see David Rosen, who comes to me on many nights. I see him walking across my backyard a few days before his death, standing at the foot of the stairs leading up the deer stand. He looks up and says, “Can I see your gun, Mr. Delaney?” I nod, and he climbs the steps as I release the bolt and unload the cartridge. I drop the bullet into the pocket of my field coat and rest the rifle barrel on the rail, my hand on the stock. When he takes the gun, it dips suddenly in his arms; he’s surprised by its weight. But he raises it to his eye and, squinting, trains his gaze along the sight blade.
I see the instrument case strapped to the back of his bike by the curb. “What do you play, son?”
“Trumpet. I just learned ‘Zorba the Greek.’ ” He squeezes the trigger and makes a small explosion sound with his mouth. “Blown away any deer lately?”
“Haven’t got one yet, but I’ve been scouting this buck for a month now. I know his habits, and there are three days left in the season. Hopefully I’ll get him.”
“You’ve seen him out there? Where, exactly?”
I start to point, then I think of something. “Listen, son, you know not to go into those woods, right? I’m not the only one hunting around here. And you should be wearing fluorescent orange if you’re even close to them.”
“OK, Mr. Delaney,” he says.
Some nights when I dream of David, he doesn’t walk across the lawn and ask to see my rifle. He lays his bike on the curb, takes the trumpet from its case, and, aiming his gaze at me along the horn, starts to play taps. I point the rifle at him, and the thunderous report when I squeeze the trigger echoes in the dark bedroom where I awake, trembling and sweaty.
When Alice was still alive, she’d awake with me and stroke my neck and back until I calmed down. She found so many small, skillful ways to guide me through the ordeal. On really bad days, when I felt the most like a condemned murderer, she would talk about how many lives my engineering designs had saved on the highways, or how good a husband and father I was. She’d make my favorite meal, London broil marinated in burgundy and olive oil and vinegar, slathered with red onions. When all else failed, she would just sit with me in silence and hold my hand or run her fingers lightly along my forearm.
One night a few weeks after the accident, when Alice had gone to her card club, I walked barefoot over the freezing grass and out into the woods with my rifle. Holding on to a pin oak with one hand, I set the butt on the mulchy ground, held the barrel upright, and lowered my forehead to rest on the muzzle. Three times I raised my foot and rested my big toe on the trigger; my hand wouldn’t reach unless I put the barrel in my mouth, which I had some aversion to doing. The cold, greasy steel on my forehead, I thought of the six-thousand-feet-per-second muzzle velocity sending my brains and all my angry guilt flying through the leafless branches overhead and off into the blackness.
But I kept thinking of Alice, too. And when I saw her car’s headlights sweep across the lawn as she pulled into the driveway, I dropped the gun and ran to the back door and was sitting at the kitchen table when she came in.
Two or three mornings a week, I drive to the Ganesha Car Wash on Bay Avenue. I sit inside my Buick as it’s carried on steel tracks through a forest of soapy sprays, whirling brushes, and foamy strips of cloth that snake and jerk over the windshield. The owner of the car wash is an Indian who calls himself Yogi Shanti Singh. He also runs a health-food store on Asbury, where he teaches meditation classes in a back room. The sign on the roof of his car wash reads, THE GANESHA BATH: AUTOMOTIVE ABLUTIONS. A large elephant’s head is mounted atop the sign, its mouth fixed in a sly smile, its trunk swinging on hinges and spewing a fine spray of water onto the pavement below.
The coastal skies are gray this morning except for the errant white fleck of a gull over the bay. A light mist leaves a film over the car as quickly as the Yogi can dry it with his chamois cloth. I like this little man in the red slicker, rubbing his cloth in swift circles around my hood and fender, understanding futility yet defying it. When I roll down the window to pay him, the Yogi says, “Maybe tonight you will come to my meditation class, Mr. Delaney? The heart needs ablutions, too. Why keep clutching your sadness, Mr. Delaney?”
I hand him a ten-dollar bill. “Thanks again for your concern, but it’s not for me.”
The Yogi frowns as rivulets slide down the hood of his slicker. “For you, the class is free.”
More futility. “I’ll see you later, Yogi.” I push the button and the window rolls up. The Yogi has been talking to me for months about coming to his class, offering me a reduced price, exhorting me to “let go” of my pain. Yet I have told him nothing of my life. Is my face as transparent as the windshield he wipes clean of beaded water?
I’ve been getting this “let go” psychobabble from Holly as well, but I am holding on to nothing. The events I’ve described are fastened on to me like a second skin. She might as well tell me to let go of my own hands — these hands that held the rifle, that held my wife’s dying body.
I don’t know why a woman as intelligent as Holly must resort to such maddening, fatuous ideas. She completed her doctorate in psychology last year, but there’s a creeping network of fissures and fault lines in her logic. I think that being a lesbian, and thus being the target of the sort of prejudice gay people must endure, has weakened her intellect. Alice and I always worried about her sensitivity, her clinginess and tendency to despair in the face of disapproval. Only when she was swimming did she seem truly strong, those spindly arms and legs propelling her through the blue with such swiftness and ease, her vulnerability lost in her eddying wake. I took scores of pictures of her up on the winners’ block, her face as radiant as the gold or silver medal dangling from her neck. But the confidence from these victories never spilled over into other parts of her life.
Now she’s one of those adult children who, in the face of great pain, flee to the coddling refuge of fairy tales. She wants to camouflage dark, jagged reality with smooth, pastel myths. When Alice died, Holly could not accept the bitterness or finality of it; she read books about near-death experiences and talked endlessly about how wonderful the afterlife was, how happy her mother must be now. She tried to get me to read them, but I know, and Holly knows, that Alice did not want to die at age fifty-seven, and no one can really say what she is experiencing now, if anything.
Holly’s fairy tales have been getting more elaborate lately. For almost a year, she has been attending a church with a congregation that’s mainly gay and lesbian. Aside from sexuality and some New Age–flavored theology, though, there’s little to distinguish them from the sort of holy-roller evangelicals among whom I was raised and who still make me nervous. And now Holly has been dating the pastor of the church, a Texan woman named Debra, for the past few months.
I’m apprehensive about their visit. Though I’ve not met Debra, I resent her influence on Holly. My tolerance for saccharine piety is low. I worry about their Christian agenda, whether they’ll try any proselytizing under the guise of telling me I need to “heal” and “let go.”
I drive down Bay Avenue past the condos and the harbors almost empty of boats. Through the mist, which has become heavier, I see a fishing boat being hauled out of the water by a blue pickup. Most summer residents have been gone for two months now, having departed the island in early September. Before, when David Rosen and Alice were alive and my vision of the world was still soft and blinkered, I would never have wanted to live here year-round. But the sparsity of the off-season suits me now. The awnings have been taken down from all the porches and windows, leaving the steel frames exposed. Some houses are blindfolded by shutters. This ghost-town desolation has a quiet appeal and reflects the blankness, the bleakness of the truth of things.
By afternoon, an ocean wind has cleared the clouds away. I pull my car out of the garage and start piling up the porch furniture, the beach chairs, the lawn edger, the gas and oil cans, the hibachi and charcoal. I have to clear out some space for a pig. When Holly called to tell me that she and Debra were coming down for the weekend, she also said they were bringing a “surprise.” The giddy trepidation in her voice irked me; I reminded her I didn’t like surprises, so she had better tell me what it was they were bringing. She said Debra had just bought a pig. I told her not to bring it, that it could not stay in the house. But she said there was no one who could take the animal for the weekend, that they couldn’t come unless they could bring “Terry.”
I wanted to say, “Why don’t you come by yourself to visit your father and leave the preacher to care for her pig at home?” But my daughter is fragile, and this is the sort of remark that makes her cry and not speak to me for a month. So I told her the pig could stay in my garage.
I’m just closing the garage door when a minivan with Texas plates pulls up out front. Holly gets out on the passenger side, waves, and starts up the driveway toward me. I can just see Debra’s profile through the van’s tinted windows as she opens the back door and reaches inside. While Holly hugs me, Debra comes up the driveway with this pig on a leash. Debra is a large woman whose crewcut looks like a darker, younger version of my own. She wears cat-eye glasses and a bolo tie with a triangular silver fastener. The pig is small, its hooves clicking against the cement.
Debra shakes my hand with a bracing grip. She’s as tall as I am and probably as heavy. I’m startled by her androgynous looks and bearing, because this has never been Holly’s type of woman in the past. My daughter has always had girlfriends as willowy and feminine as she is; women who, in the year or two after Holly first came out, I found it hard to believe were lesbians. I had a lot to learn.
Debra’s smile stretches across her wide face, mingling generosity with fearlessness. Though I’m still on guard — this woman is a Texas evangelical, I remind myself, no matter how she looks — I think perhaps I’m going to like her. She says, “I’m so glad to finally meet you, Mr. Delaney,” with only a hint of twang, and a softness that doesn’t match her powerful handshake.
So much startles me about this hulking woman with the gentle voice that it takes me a moment to notice the way Holly is looking from me to her and back again, trying to read this meeting. I have not seen Holly for several weeks, and I’m struck by the lightness in her lean, freckled face. Since Alice died, there’s been a core of sadness, a wilted, weighted look in her eyes that even her fantasies about the afterlife couldn’t touch. But it seems gone now. When she first came up the driveway, I noticed a subtle bounciness to her step.
The pig is snuffling and rubbing itself against Debra’s pant leg. I lean down, and we make eye contact, this pig and I. He’s pink with a few liver-colored spots, and his eyes are small and black. “I cleared out the garage for him,” I say.
“Actually, it’s a her,” Debra says. “Thanks so much for letting us bring Terry.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Holly says. “Thanks.”
“That’s a pretty remarkable looking house,” Debra says, gesturing toward the Farmingtons’.
“The owners are Geritol hippies who like to sail,” Holly tells her. “Their lighthouse is pretty controversial. The local paper did a story on it last year, and the guy who lives next door to Dad said he didn’t appreciate living across from a ‘Pepto-Bismol-colored absurdity.’ ”
I avoid looking at the Farmingtons’ house during the daytime; it seems to diminish the calming effect the light has for me at night.
“I think it’s pretty cool having a beacon across the street,” Debra says.
“I never thought of it as a beacon,” Holly says. She takes Debra’s hand and their arms swing a little. “You see such inspiring symbols in everything.”
For the moment I’m so glad to see Holly happy that I don’t care what it’s based on. Feeling grateful to Debra and even liking the pig, I open the garage door to show them Terry’s weekend lodgings.
Holly and Debra have insisted on taking me out to dinner on the mainland. We’re sitting at a table in the Starboard, an elegant bayside restaurant where Alice and I used to eat. I haven’t been here since she died. The east wall of the restaurant, where we sit, is all smoked glass, beyond which are the harbor-edged bay, the causeway with its two drawbridges going out to the island, and the long stretch of Waverly Island spread out under purple twilight. The November wind kicks up whitecaps in the dark water; a few hundred yards out, a light winks on a yacht heading seaward.
We’ve ordered our dinner, and I’m halfway through my first martini. Debra and Holly are drinking iced tea. They tell me about some “church friends” — a married couple, a man and a woman — whom they’re going to visit tomorrow afternoon. He’s a podiatrist, she’s a nurse in an AIDS hospice, and they have a teenage daughter who’s blind in one eye. “Their faith is so strong,” Debra says. “God is really working in their lives.”
I don’t want to hear about their church friends. I nod politely and ask Debra how she came by her pig.
I can tell by the way their faces register the switch that I may have been a bit rude — the martini is hitting me — but Debra forbears like a good Christian. “Good question, Mr. Delaney,” she says. She smiles. Holly smiles. We’re all at ease.
“I just really like pigs,” Debra says. “I had one when I was a little girl in Amarillo, and I got to wanting one again. You know, your daughter is among the few people I’ve met who don’t think it’s really weird to have a pig for a pet.”
“Deb appreciates my love for animals,” Holly says. Her green eyes linger on my face a moment. The way you never could, she’s probably thinking.
“Pigs aren’t such attractive animals, it’s true,” Debra says. “Not conventionally attractive, anyway. Some people actually think they’re ugly.” Behind her stubbly hair, outside the window, a line of headlights coasts across the causeway just above the choppy water. The lights appear to stream in one side of her head and out the other. “I just love creatures who are hard to love, I guess. Pigs have always gotten a bum rap — look at the Gadarene swine in the Bible. Jesus let the demons go into them, and they ran into the lake and drowned. I never understood that. I mean, didn’t Jesus love the pigs, too?”
Holly nods, her cheeks flushed, long russet hair forked over her shoulders. “In Buddhism, too, the pig represents ignorance, but pigs are really smart animals.”
“That’s right,” Debra says. The candlelight flashes in her glasses and the silver fastener of her bolo tie. “They know what’s going on at the slaughterhouse, and they put up a wicked resistance. Maybe I can relate to them because I’ve been hated for what I am, too — even though, like a pig, I did nothing to choose it.” A clerical resonance has entered her voice, and she seems to catch herself with a sigh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to start preaching. I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, having this pig for a pet — there’s some kind of teaching in it for me, I think. I hope it might make me better at my job.”
I was trying to steer the conversation away from religion, but now I can see that, with a minister, no topic is safe. I’m afraid to ask any more questions.
“Deb does a great job with the church already,” Holly says to me. “You ought to come and hear her preach sometime. She’s so comforting, so inspiring.”
Here we go. Why has Holly put me on the spot this way? She knows I won’t go to church for any reason. I can’t think of anything to say, so I try to smile, but my lips feel like a big, rubbery scar. The ensuing silence is awkward; I bolt down the remainder of my martini.
The hostess is seating a party at the table next to us: a fortyish couple and their two children, a girl five or six and a boy close to David Rosen’s age — that is, the age he was when he died. No bar mitzvah for David; no first kiss or college flame or seasoning parade of joys and sorrows such as winds through even a mildly fortunate life. At the funeral, his father spoke about how they had looked forward to the “bright horizon” of David’s coming-of-age, only a few years away. But even Moses, he said, died before he reached the Promised Land.
I’ve almost finished my second martini by the time our NBA-sized waiter sets my lobster in front of me, steam rising from its scarlet carapace. My eyes keep wandering over to the shining family at the next table. They all have blond hair, sculpted faces, blue eyes. Their conversation has a festive air.
Holly, the vegetarian, has gotten the pasta primavera, and she twirls the linguine onto her fork as she tells Debra about a nighttime deep-sea-fishing trip I took her on sixteen years ago. A whale calf swam next to our boat for a half-hour or so. “Remember, Dad,” she says, “how he was swimming just under the surface, and the boat’s lights showed him so clearly? He was only about ten feet away, so close that when he came up and spouted water, it splashed us. It was like a message.”
I nod, seeing again that gangly teenager with the jumping eyes, moonlight and spindrift on her face. The whale made her forget her seasickness.
“He was off the coast of Waverly for almost a week,” she says. “The newspaper said he’d gotten lost, separated from his mother during migration. He was only a month or two old.” Holly’s eyes are glittering now with the memory, the way they did that night. We were chumming for bluefish. We’d stop in one spot, fish for a while, then move on when the blues weren’t biting anymore. Holly caught a few fish, but after she saw the whale, she didn’t want to catch any more and never went fishing with me again. She said she didn’t like “killing.”
This was around the time when things started to change between us. Just the year before, we’d been so close. Holly was a fourteen-and-under state champion in freestyle and backstroke that year, and she and I flew to Miami, where she was to compete in the nationals. Alice caught the flu at the last minute and had to stay home. The day before the tournament, Holly and I spent a few hours on the beach. Because it was cloudy that day, we didn’t worry about sunburn. We were naive about the Florida sun and its scorching power, even through clouds. Both of us got badly burned, and Holly couldn’t swim in the tournament. I remember holding her on the beachfront terrace of our hotel room as she cried and cried. The sunburn must have made the holding painful for both of us, but I don’t remember that. We took a lot of aspirin, spent the tournament days sightseeing, and managed to have some fun in spite of the towering disappointment.
I’m cracking this lobster’s thorax, remembering how Holly and I used to be buddies, and how she started drifting away from me, becoming distant and contentious, around the time of that fishing trip.
“I thought of that whale at Mom’s funeral,” she says. “The casket was in the aisle next to our pew, and just when I couldn’t bear looking at it any longer, the priest came down from the altar with his holy water and sprinkled the casket. Then he aimed right at us, and the water hit me in the face. It was cold and a little shocking. I thought of that whale spouting his water, how it had hit me in the face the same way, how there was a kind of communication in it.” Holly’s eyes are brimming in the candlelight from the faceted globe on the table. “And then I started talking to Mom in my head, and I could feel her presence. She was right there with me. I felt peaceful.”
No absence has ever felt as absolute to me as my wife’s has this past year. But I don’t tell myself lies to feel better.
Debra reaches over to take Holly’s hand. The silverware clinks under their clasped fingers. “You never told me about that,” Debra says. “A moment of grace, it sounds like.”
Something skitters up my spinal cord with a stinging heat. When it hits my brain, the words fly out of me like shrapnel: “Sounds more like a moment of fantasy,” I say.
Instantly, before I even see the bludgeoned expression on Holly’s face, I’m sorry I’ve said this. But warring with the guilt and my concern for my daughter is this loyalty I have to the truth. I don’t want to prevaricate, even with silence. And I don’t want Holly to deceive herself.
Debra shifts in her seat and turns her head at an odd angle. In her expression, I see shock, curiosity, and an unsettling confidence, even a challenge. There’s anger there, too, snapping in her eyes, but she’s as calm as a pool hustler. “Why?” she says, shifting her gaze to Holly and then back to me. “Why is that fantasy?”
I look down at the olive in my drink. Its red gash of pimento stares back at me. I take a deep breath and let it out. “Listen, Holly, I don’t want to make you feel bad. We’ve been over this sort of thing before. I would love to be able to talk with your mother. But we have to face the fact that she’s dead. We can’t talk to her anymore, and she can’t talk to us —”
“Why do you think believing in nothing means you know everything?” Holly says.
“You don’t believe in an afterlife?” Debra asks.
“Anything that could bring him consolation or happiness just can’t be true,” Holly says.
I clear my throat. “I don’t rule out an afterlife, but I don’t see any evidence for it either.”
“Evidence,” Debra says. She sits back a little, a serene appraisal in her eyes. “Can you produce evidence of . . . your love for Holly?”
I’m liking Debra less and less. The collar of my cotton shirt feels as hot and scratchy as wool. I unbutton it and loosen my tie. “She knows I love her,” I say, looking at my daughter, but Holly’s glare concedes nothing.
The boy at the next table says in a loud voice, “But Mom thought they were dandelions.” Laughter peals from his parents and sister. The boy is outgrowing his suit jacket; his wristbones jut from the sleeves. The Promised Land awaits him, gleaming under the sun.
Debra takes off her glasses and gives me a penetrating stare. In the dim, wobbly light, with the crewcut and the mannish geometry of her face, she looks a bit like me — the way I looked thirty years ago. And, like me at that time, she’s determined, implacable. “Of course Holly knows you love her. But can you show any evidence of that, any proof?”
The resemblance is unnerving; it confuses, deflates me. “I’ve taken care of her all her life,” I say.
“You could have done that out of a sense of duty.”
I look at this youthful ghost of myself floating just beneath the surface of Debra’s skin; it’s a timeless face, etched with accusation and judgment. I turn to Holly, hoping she’ll say something, but her eyes are steely.
“Can you see my point, Mr. Delaney?”
Can I see your gun, Mr. Delaney?
“Richard,” I say. “Call me Richard.”
Our skyscraping waiter has appeared, his face beaming. “Everybody doing all right?” he asks with coercive cheer. Holly and Debra nod. “Fine, thanks,” Debra says.
She watches him go and then leans toward me in a posture of pastoral concern. “Richard,” she says, her voice tranquil now, nurturing, the confrontational edge gone, “Holly feels her mother’s presence the same way she feels your love for her. She knows it without requiring external proof. There can’t be any external proof of something like that. These subjective feelings are a different, but not a lesser kind of truth.” The image of my face is gone from behind Debra’s features. She smiles. “Can you see this?”
The handsome blond family is laughing again. The sound of all that wholesome mirth, the smarmy victor’s smile on Debra’s face, the gin fevering my blood: it’s all too much. “No,” I say, my voice climbing, “I don’t see this. I think what you two believe is pie-in-the-sky idiocy. This wonderful God, this unending life — it’s all horseshit. That’s what I see.”
Holly flinches, then her eyes narrow. “You want to lose me, too, don’t you?” she says in a fractured voice.
I shake my head. “I lost you a long time ago.”
Holly covers her face and begins to weep. Debra puts an arm around her. The blond family is stealing fisheyed glances at us now. My eyes meet the boy’s, and I hear his mother tell him not to stare. My brain’s a hot whirligig, spinning and burning. I get up and throw my napkin on the half-eaten lobster.
I wend my way past tables filled with warmly lit faces, the harmony and laughter of harmless people. My head feels swollen, elephantine. Moony faces swivel toward me as I rush by them, unsteady on my feet. I walk past the gawky coat-check girl reading a book in her booth, and then I’m out the glass doors into the cold, brackish air.
The sweat on my forehead chills in the wind off the bay as I head down the sloping pavement toward the harbor. The heels of my wingtips click on the cement. I push on the gate of the waist-high cyclone fence, but it’s locked. I climb over, lose my balance, clatter down onto the dock, jangly pain radiating from my bumped elbow and twisted knee. But I’m up again in a second and sweeping past the tar-stained piling as I head toward the end of the wharf.
At the end I stop, out of breath, my arm around a pile, and I look out across the water. The bay is chopped coal, webbed with skeins of light near the bridge. I smell salt and creosote, hear gulls squalling in the distance, the muffled clang of a bell buoy. The wharf sways and creaks under my feet as waves slap it. Alice and I once walked along this harbor, through a warm violet dusk, after dinner at the Starboard. We held hands; she wore a sundress. But that was in another universe.
A halogen lamp overhead projects my dim silhouette onto the water. The shadow ripples as the waves try to swallow it. I could dive and sink, my poisoned, poisoning life closed over. Big lungfuls of bay water solving everything. This is where all my truth has brought me.
I let go of the pile. I could fall headlong into the water, but instead I look back up to the Starboard. Through the scrim of smoky glass, I can see Holly and Debra at the table. Holly is dabbing at her eyes with a tissue; she keeps looking in the direction of the door by which I left them.
A car backfires on the drawbridge, and I feel an inflamed rocking in my chest. My balance falters. I fall to my knees, my hand grabbing, sliding down the rough pile. I have almost offed myself — with my daughter less than fifty yards away. The recognition sends a splintering through all of my certainties; they shiver apart in shards, they crack and split and rain down through emptiness. I suddenly know nothing. Nothing but that I love Holly, that I’ve hurt her, that I have to make amends.
And then she turns and sees me. It’s too far to make out her eyes, but I can see her face change, and I’m hoisting myself up, holding on to the pile, my hand tacky with tar, as Holly rises from her chair and makes her way between the candlelit tables. I’m scrabbling back toward the cyclone gate, the wind snapping at me, my body shaking. I get to the gate just as Holly comes out the restaurant door. She’s running toward me, this daughter I’ve bullied with my truth, and I’m going to need help making amends. I clutch the gate rail and throw my head up to the black sky. “Alice,” I cry, “you’ve got to help me with this.”
This story originally appeared in River Styx.
