“Glad to meet you,” he says, pumping Natalie’s hand. “Your first time in a penitentiary?”
She nods.
“Well, don’t let it scare you. We run a very secure facility here. You’re perfectly safe, let me assure you.”
Natalie smiles. She isn’t exactly worried about being caught up in a prison riot, if that’s what he’s implying. Her fears are much more personal.
“Will we be meeting here?” she asks, looking around.
The visiting room isn’t much to look at—bare walls, a plain wooden table separating two flimsy metal chairs, a fluorescent tube flickering uncertainly overhead—a place lawyers come to speak with their clients in the fleeting privacy accorded them by the Constitution.
“Next door,” the warden answers. “There’s an identical room. You okay on how this is going to work?”
“Everything’s set, Natalie,” Scopes interjects. “It’ll be just the two of you, like you asked. No intrusions or interruptions. We’ll be nearby if you need us, and there’s a guard right outside if anything happens. Not that I think it will. Ralston’s not going to do anything to harm you, not here anyway.”
The warden seems put off by Scopes’ interruption. “The man is not Hannibal Lecter, Agent Scopes. Ralston can be trusted, I promise you,” he says.
“I’ll be fine.” Natalie assures them. “When do we get started?”
“Right now,” the warden says. “He’s in there already. Let’s go.”
He makes as if to grab Natalie by the elbow. Instinctively, she pulls her arm away. “He’s there now?” she asks.
“Yes.”
Scopes leans in close. “Natalie, if you’re not up to this—”
‘‘I’m up to it,” she snaps. But the truth is, she’s suddenly not sure. She looks at the drab green wall that is now all that separates her from Ralston. After all these years, they are about to have their reunion, sole survivors of a family doomed and damned for the sins of its patriarch. Beyond that wall lies the man the hatred of whom has given her life its one and only vestige of meaning. What was she thinking, she wonders, to come here, into his house? What can this possibly accomplish?
The concept of moving in slow motion does not do justice to how time warps in a moment like this, how it becomes both short and long, bigger inside than at its endpoints. Natalie follows the warden out into the corridor, her limbs cold, every step an agony. Her body feels as if it is being shaken from the inside, and she wonders if anybody notices. She is aware of being studied, stared at by Scopes, the guards, eyes in the walls. Everyone wants to know why she is doing this, how she will handle it, where it will lead. So does she. What will she say to him when she sees him? What should be her first words? And her last? The questions teem inside of her, and in her mind they become like bait worms squirming and writhing in a Styrofoam cup, like the cups her father used to carry when they went fishing at his cabin. Natalie struggles to grab hold of the questions long enough to answer at least one, but every time she comes close to grasping one it wriggles free.
And then, just like that, after an eternity in the blink of an eye, she is standing in the doorway into the next room and the questions fall away and there is just that moment, frozen, still, immortal.
Like him, she thinks. Like the man facing her from across the small table, the trace of a smile engraved on his lips.
The portrait, she thinks, of soulless calm.
Ellsworth Ralston III.
* * *
“You’ll like him, Natalie, I promise.”
“But who is he?”
Natalie and her mother are driving in the mountains. Her mother is in a happy mood, humming to herself, sometimes giggling for no reason. Natalie has never seen her this way, giddy like a girl Natalie’s age. They are going to visit someone, a man and his friends, that’s all her mother has told her.
“Someone I met,” her mother says. “Someone special. Someone who understands me.” She turns toward her daughter, not minding the road. “Oh, you’ll like him so much. He’ll be like a father to you, a real father. in fact, that’s what everybody calls him, Father. I want you to do that, okay? That way he’ll know right away that you like him.”
“But I have a daddy,” Natalie argues.
“Huh,” her mother snorts and then, pleasant again, adds: “Not like this. You’ll see, you’ll understand.”
Her mother starts to hum again, not a tune Natalie recognizes. “‘Why couldn’t we tell anyone we were leaving? I didn’t even get to kiss Daddy goodbye.”
“I told you, Natalie—it was a surprise. Our little secret. I left a note for him, don’t worry.”
Natalie thinks of her father coming home alone to an empty house and feels sad for him. And for herself. He was going to take her to his lodge again soon, and they were going to trap butterflies.
“We’re not staying long, are we? When are we going home?”
“Oh, Natalie, stop peppering me with questions,” her mother chides, although not angrily. “In a couple of days you won’t even want to go home, trust me.”
A couple of days. Natalie latches onto that. They must be staying for just a short visit, although they brought an awful lot of clothes for just two days. Still, her mother wants her to trust her, and so she will. Two days, she can be good for two days.
They pass through a small town and turn left onto a dirt road, which they follow up a hill. At a post with a big red mailbox mounted on it, they turn onto a smaller road, more like a driveway, and follow it upward. Just over the ridge a small group of children are playing on a tire swing—they seem to be having fun.
“Can I go play with them?” Natalie asks.
“Later,” her mother says. “You have to meet Father first.”
Disappointed, Natalie slumps back in her seat. What does she care about meeting this man? She wants to go play. Maybe it won’t be so bad here, though, if there are children to play with.
They drive down the hill and park in front of a large, rambling farmhouse. It reminds Natalie a little of her father’s cabin in the woods, if only because it’s in the mountains and away from the city. This is a much bigger place, though, and full of people. Her mother honks her horn in greeting and a dozen adults converge on the car, all smiling, all saying welcome, tousling Natalie’s hair and saying how cute she is, grabbing their bags, helping them out of the car and pulling them toward the front porch.
The screen door bangs open and everyone falls immediately quiet. A man is standing at the top of the steps, a stern look on his face. He has long hair, longer almost than Natalie’s, and in his jeans and plaid shirt he looks like a cowboy.
An angry cowboy, or at least that’s how he seems, but then his face breaks into a wide-open smile and his eyes light up like nothing Natalie has ever seen. His happiness is so intense she can feel it, almost as if it’s her own. Everyone around them seems to start breathing again—Natalie hadn’t noticed how they had stopped—and the man says, “Megan, you don’t know how happy I am.” He strides down the steps and gives her mother an enormous hug and, surprisingly, kisses her on the lips. Then he kneels down in front of Natalie and says, “And you must be Natalie. What a joy it is to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m looking forward to us having a chance to get to know each other.”
He picks her up in his arms and carries her up the stairs to the front porch. He has a subtle smell about him—a rich, earthy smell, like fresh dirt, and something else, something fruity, like apples. Natalie doesn’t mind it actually. He smells better than most men, she thinks.
“You’ll like it here, Natalie,” he says as the others, including her mother, trail behind. “We’re going to have a lot of fun together.”
Which sounds altogether too permanent. But this man and the others seem nice and there are children playing games on the hill and her mother is happy and for the first time in she doesn’t know how long there isn’t the ever-present tension of home, and she relaxes against the man’s shoulder.
* * *
“Hello, Natalie,” Ralston says.
He is sitting ramrod straight, his face composed, his strong hands folded on the table in front of him. He doesn’t rise to greet her. Natalie was concerned he might attempt to touch her in some way, shake her hand maybe, but if he’s tempted, he shows no sign of it. He simply observes her as she enters the room, absorbing her with his deep eyes.
She is immediately struck by how confident he seems. how in control, which of course was always his thing. She knew prison hadn’t humbled him, that much was obvious from news reports, but somehow, in person, she expected him to seem more, what? Caged. The faded uniform on his back, the drab little room, the jelly-bellied guard standing outside, the distant jabber of rough men—everything around him speaks to his confinement. But he doesn’t appear like a man who is trapped, not to her. instead, he seems eerily calm, studying her with a serenity that defies circumstance, like a tiger staring out from its enclosure at the zoo, its slowly flicking tail an expression of hunger and infinite patience.
A sudden fear seizes her. Until this moment she has convinced herself that she will be able to handle Ralston, that he is merely the man behind the curtain, a pretender long ago stripped of illusion and made bare by the power of what she saw him do and dared to tell. Besides, she is an adult now, no longer a child, and nobody’s fool, least of all his. She defeated him once, and now, surely, she has outgrown him and his capacity to enthrall. if nothing else, she figures, her hatred will protect her.
That, at least, is what she thought. But looking into his eyes now, what she sees isn’t the loathsome wretch she anticipated. What she sees is Father, the man who, for better or worse, raised her. And what she feels isn’t the reassuring cocktail of hatred and scorn she expected; it is a more disturbing elixir, laced with the harsh taste of forgotten affection.
Almost as if some part of her is happy to see him.
Sacrilege. Cursing herself for even thinking it, she steps inside so the warden can close the door behind her, then pulls the open chair away from the table and sits down. The key. she tells herself, is not to let him get inside her. She has to stay focused, concentrate on the issue at hand, not let him lead her down one of his blind emotional alleys.
“Hello,” she replies.
Her goal is to remain cool and reserved, but almost immediately she stumbles. Hello, who? She realizes that she doesn’t know what to call him: Father is out of the question, but Ellsworth is too familiar and Mister Ralston implies more respect than he deserves.
“I suppose I should thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” she adds, hoping he didn’t detect her hesitation.
If he did, he doesn’t comment. “Did you think I might not?” he asks.
“No, I figured you would.”
“Then why thank me?”
She knows what he’s doing—making her explain herself as a way of establishing control over the conversation. She has seen it a thousand times in bars, men maneuvering to exert dominance; sometimes, if it suits her purpose, she even lets them think they’re getting away with it. This is a game she has mastered. But she didn’t learn its rules in bars—she learned them at home, from this man. In her mind’s eye, he is the master, the mentor, the high priest of the power game. And suddenly, in his presence, all the tricks she’s perfected over a thousand smoky nights escape her.
“Basic manners,” she says weakly.
He nods as if he takes her point and leans closer, his voice filling with sudden warmth and sympathy. “I was sorry to hear about your aunt, Natalie. She was a good woman.”
His rich voice resonates unexpectedly inside of her, confusing her. Images from her youth flash through her mind—Father consoling her when she was hurt, laughing with her over something she said. Good memories she doesn’t like to admit ever existed. She is actually glad for his sympathy and finds herself wishing she could respond to it, even though she knows that to do so would be a classic mistake, no less foolish than baring your neck to a vampire. For Ellsworth Ralston, she reminds herself, sincerity is a weapon.
“I’m not here to talk about my aunt.” she says.
This seems to sadden him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Her loss must be terribly painful for you. I guess I’m just surprised you’re here. Most people would be home grieving.”
Natalie looks around the small room. It is, as the warden said, a clone of the one next door, although it seems a shade smaller, a little more confining. On her end of the table, someone has carved the words “luvver boy” into the wood. The lettering is faint but Natalie can trace it with her fingers. Just like her aunt, she thinks, tracing patterns in the wallpaper last night.
She swallows hard. “Most people haven’t had the practice I have,” she observes.
“True.” He slowly pulls away from her until he’s sitting upright again. “Would it help if I told you how sorry I am?”
“For what?”
His arms open wide. “For everything. For what happened to your mother and your sister. And to you.”
The apology isn’t unexpected. Natalie thought he might try something like this and she’s ready with an answer, prepared over the course of years, but she hesitates just before giving it. Something inside of her wants the apology to be real, and she has to suppress the desire to hear more, to be placated with self-serving expressions of irrelevant regret.
“You are what happened to my family,” she says. “You killed them, and you orphaned me. Are you finally willing to admit that? Because that’s what I want, an admission, not an apology.”
Ralston’s face remains impassive, and when he doesn’t respond, she adds, “I didn’t think so. What about Selena Latham then? Will you at least tell me the truth about her?”
She expects him to feign anger, but instead he just waves his hand. “That’s not why you’re here.”
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t come here to discuss that little girl.”
“That’s ridiculous. She’s exactly why I’m here. Don’t tell me what I’m—”
“Think about it, Natalie,” he interrupts. “If I really did know where Selena Latham is or how to find her, you know I would never discuss it with you here, inside these walls. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself otherwise, but deep down, you know better, I’m sure of it. And yet you came here anyway. So I have to assume you’re not really here to talk about this girl whom neither of us has ever met. She’s just a surrogate for a conversation we’ve never been allowed to have, until now that is. A conversation about us, about your mother and me, your sister, you. About what happened. That’s it isn’t it?”
His short speech leaves Natalie’s head reeling. The walls of the little room, already close, seem to be shrinking nearer together, a tightening of the space, a thickening of the air in her lungs. Father’s logic. She could never argue against him—no one really could. He was too smart, too sure. Is that all this is? Or is there something real in what he’s suggesting? Did she honestly believe that she could trick him into revealing himself—him, the man who taught her the very meaning of emotional sorcery?
Maybe not. But to admit that—no, she shakes the thought from her head. She will not yield to him so easily. “Think what you want.” she says, “but I did not come here to take a trip down memory lane with you. I know everything I need to know about what happened,”
Ralston stares at her for several seconds, then turns away, breaking eye contact with her for the first time since she entered the room. “I see,” he says. “Tell me something, Natalie. A moment ago, you accused me of orphaning you. You used that word. Isn’t your father still alive?”
“I didn’t—”
“You did!” he interrupts, his head snapping back to face her, his eyes blazing. “You said I killed your family and orphaned you. I’m just wondering why you would
have used that word,”
“I was just describing how I felt. What difference does it make?”
“All the difference in the world. Whatever became of your father? Do you speak with him often?”
She turns away, unexpectedly wounded. Her father. Now, there’s a special memory.
* * *
“Natalie, your father’s here! Come on down!”
Natalie’s heart leaps at the sound of Aunt Emily’s call. She jumps up from her bedroom floor where she’s been reading a book and skips downstairs, her stuffed daypack in her hands. Her father is here! She’s been waiting for this, waiting for him to come and take her away. It’s not that she really wants to leave Aunt Emily, it’s just, well, he’s her father. And he lives in a fabulous house in California, far away from all of this, and he and his wife have children—half sisters and brothers she’s never even met. They’re younger. But she can help take care of them, maybe babysit them even. At least she won’t be so alone anymore. Maybe one of them will be like Stephanie.
“Daddy!”
Natalie drops her daypack and goes running into her father’s arms. He embraces her, but not like he did yesterday when he arrived on this visit, not as tightly as he did then. He pulls her away and leads her by the hand to the couch where they sit down. His wife, Leila—her stepmother, Natalie thinks; she’ll have to get used to that—sits next to her father, a warm smile on her face. Aunt Emily, looking sad, sits across from them in her chair.
‘‘I’m ready to go,” Natalie says. She tries not to sound too excited, because she doesn’t want to upset her aunt.
That’s why her father is here, though, to take her home with him. He and Lelia arrived two days ago and have been staying at the fancy new hotel downtown. Her daddy has lots of money these days, it seems, which doesn’t really matter to Natalie, but she’s happy for him, since it seems to matter to him and Leila.
“We need to talk about that Squirt,” her father says. Squirt is a new nickname he has given her. He never used to call her that when she and her mother were still living with him, but Natalie figures it’s an okay nickname for her to have since it’s coming from him.
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