by Lisa Tucker
The clerk was an older woman. She was shaking her head before he even finished talking. “You can’t go to Charles O’Brien’s place. He’s a recluse, know what that is?”
“Yes, but—”
“We never tell anybody how to get there. He asked us not to, so we don’t.”
Stephen suspected she meant pays us not to. “Look, I’m a friend of the family. I really need to get there tonight.”
“Nah you ain’t. That family got no friends.” “I know both of his children.”
“You do, do you?” She sat down the box of candy bars she’d been unpacking. “How?”
“I’m his son’s doctor. I’ve been treating him in St. Louis.”
She looked him up and down, but her demeanor changed as he hoped it would. This was what was left of his medical practice: using it to impress people in convenience stores.
After he showed her his AMA member card, she finally gave him directions. Good thing he hadn’t thrown it away.
It was twenty miles outside of town, and most of the road wasn’t paved. The Checker was designed to take abuse, but neither Stephen nor his cab were used to anything like this. On both sides of the road were steep cliffs. He could hear coyotes howling, and all around, he saw the blinking of what seemed like animal eyes: deer, owls, maybe even mountain lions. He’d never seen a clearer sky. The stars were so bright they looked three times their usual size.
The path to Dorothea’s house was even trickier. This was probably intentional, to keep away everyone that the convenience clerk didn’t stop first. He felt like he was driving through a war zone because there was a crater-size hole in the path every ten feet or so. But what would O’Brien do if someone got stuck? Unleash a cage full of wild dogs, and then push the car off the cliff?
As he bumped along, he wondered what Dorothea had told her father about why she’d come back. Nothing, he felt sure, but that didn’t keep him from hoping he didn’t have to deal with O’Brien.
He finally reached the top of the winding path and there was the house. It was even bigger than he’d predicted, but he’d forgotten to factor in that a millionaire out here could afford a lot more house than a millionaire in a city. It was two stories, shaped like an L, with a giant front porch made of stone with a roof supported by wooden beams as thick as tree trunks. There were fourteen windows across the downstairs floor and as many on the second floor. There was one light on in the middle of the upstairs, but the rest of the place was completely dark. He wondered if the light was in Dorothea’s room.
The entire time he was driving, he kept thinking that what he’d done to her was really unforgivable. It killed him to imagine how she must have felt, not just Sunday night, but the next morning, quietly packing her clothes (probably into grocery bags, since she didn’t have a suitcase and she hadn’t taken his), wrapping up her toothbrush, brushing her hair alone. Writing him that letter. Figuring out how to get to the hospital, and then the bus station. Leaving the city that he knew she was starting to love to come back to this place, which seemed as desolate as the surface of the moon.
It was unforgivable, but he had to ask for her forgiveness anyway. He got out of the cab.
There was no doorbell, so he knocked on the heavy wood door. And then he pounded. And pounded again. The side of his hand was hurting when he finally accepted that no one was going to answer.
Shit. If he turned the knob and the door was unlocked, he could just go in, but he wasn’t desperate enough yet to risk being shot as a trespasser. He decided to walk around and see if there was another door he could pound on. Maybe they were in the back, and they couldn’t hear him. It was possible in a house this size.
He found the back entrance—after walking right into a shrub—but pounding there yielded nothing either. He was just heading back to the front, to think about what to do, when he saw a small building in the middle of a field. He might have thought it was just a storage shed, except he saw a light on. Maybe it was a maid’s quarters or the gardener’s house.
If it was the maid, she could take him back to the main house and let him in to see Dorothea. If she was reluctant, he’d offer to pay her. It seemed to work well for O’Brien.
He was at the door of the building, an adobe with one or two rooms, tops. When he knocked this time and nobody answered, he decided to see if he could just walk in. The maid wasn’t likely to shoot him, and maybe she was asleep.
The adobe was unlocked. “Hello?” he said loudly, as he pushed the door open. He didn’t want to startle anybody.
As he walked into the room, he saw a gray-haired man lying on a brown leather couch, covered in several blankets. The man had his back to Stephen, but Stephen could tell he was asleep by the regular sound of his breathing.
He took this in at a glance before he was distracted by the unusual appearance of the rest of the room. One entire wall was covered with photographs of a woman who Stephen knew immediately was Dorothea and Jimmy’s mother. The resemblance was unmistakable. She had Dorothea’s mouth and nose, Jimmy’s red hair and chin. She was also an actress, that was obvious, because another wall had movie posters with the same woman, but her name on the posters was Lucy Dobbins, not Helena O’Brien. Stephen recognized the titles of all the movies, and he was pretty sure he’d seen one or two of them.
There was a large desk in the corner of the room with a computer and a printer and four tall stacks of paper. When Stephen walked closer, he saw that each stack was grouped into ten or fifteen bundles, each bundle fastened with a rubber band. He flipped through several of them until he finally got that they were movie scripts. They had characters’ names, stories and the tip-off: notes about camera shots.
The room also had a large rack that held maybe thirty cans of film and on the opposite wall, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player. The floor was covered with an Oriental rug that looked expensive. It was an elegant place, with the exception of a metal shelf in the corner that housed some gardening tools and a serious-looking chain saw.
Stephen turned back to the movie posters. One of them was for The Brave Horseman of El Dorado, and he realized he had seen that film. His mom and dad had liked it so much they’d bought the VHS. He’d seen it at their house, his second year of med school, when he was home for Christmas. He remembered that Christmas better than most, probably because it was right before he met Ellen.
He was facing away from the couch, still staring at the poster, when he heard the man say, “Don’t turn around, don’t even breathe.” Then he heard a clicking that sounded like a gun being cocked. “You have five seconds to tell me who you are.”
He recognized the voice and he quickly told Dorothea’s father who he was. Then, for reasons Stephen couldn’t fathom, O’Brien reached over and turned off the lamp before he said, “Why are you here?”
“I came to see Dorothea.” Stephen turned around, but he couldn’t make out anything. The room was so dark he couldn’t see his own hand when he raised it to rub his eyes. “I know she’s here. Jimmy told me she left yesterday morning.” It struck him as he said this that she had to be here, or her father would have been frantic at the news that Dorothea wasn’t in St. Louis with him anymore.
He waited another minute. “Mr. O’Brien?”
“Take a seat,” the man said.
He wished he could see O’Brien’s face. “Can I turn on the light first?”
“Not yet.”
Stephen felt around until he found the desk chair. He carefully sat down and swiveled the chair in the direction of O’Brien’s voice, all the while wondering what was going on.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” O’Brien said.
“No,” Stephen said, wishing he’d thought to grab his cigarettes from the glove compartment. He thought about asking for one of O’Brien’s, but then the man lit a cigar. After only a few puffs, the small room was already thick with smoke.
“I saw you examining my office. I’m curious, did you recognize the beautiful woman?”
“Dorothea and
Jimmy’s mother.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding pleased. “Both children look like her, each in their own way.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell them she was an actress?”
“A fair question. Perhaps you should tell me first what business that is of yours.”
“It would have meant a lot to Dorothea to know.”
“I doubt that. She and her brother haven’t seen movies or television since they were very small.”
“Because movies and TV are corrupt. I know, Dorothea told me. But not for you, apparently.”
“Does this upset you?” O’Brien asked mildly.
“It seems hypocritical.” Stephen was a little annoyed. “The TV you have now is state-of-the-art, but I’m betting you’ve always had a TV of some kind out here. What did you tell them this was, a storage room?”
“Yes, I told them this was purely storage. I also kept it locked, so they wouldn’t wander in here when I wasn’t watching them.”
“And you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that?”
“Ah, I think I’m beginning to understand,” the old man said, taking another puff. “You don’t approve of the way I’ve raised my children. Do you have any children of your own, Dr. Spaulding?”
“Can we turn on the lamp? This is getting ridiculous.”
“Tell me, do you have children? I assume you don’t, or you would have some sense of the difficulties—”
“I had a daughter.” The man was pissing him off. “She died.”
“I’m very sorry.” Again, O’Brien sounded like he was genuinely sad for him. “I can understand your self-righteousness, and perhaps you’re right that if she’d lived, you wouldn’t have made any of the mistakes I have. Perhaps you’ve never made any mistakes in your life.”
Stephen inhaled. “Of course I’ve made mistakes.”
“But nothing that you believe you can’t repair, or redeem yourself from by doing better in the future.” He snubbed out his cigar, even though he couldn’t have finished half of it. “Nothing that condemns you in a fundamental way.”
“I hope not.”
“I hope not for you.” O’Brien’s voice was so somber it seemed almost eerie, especially coming from the blackness, disembodied. “The wages of sin are not necessarily death, even when you want them to be.”
“Not sure I follow.”
“God has forsaken me. He has turned his face from me for my crimes.”
Stephen wondered if O’Brien could possibly be serious. It sounded like something from one of those old Bible movies. Then he remembered the pile of scripts on the desk, and it hit him that O’Brien had probably been a screenwriter back in California. Married to an actress. No wonder they could afford Malibu.
Maybe having the room dark was part of some kind of weird scene O’Brien was creating. Maybe the man really was a nut job.
“I hate to interrupt,” he said. “But I’d really like to see Dorothea.”
“Would you like to hear those crimes?”
Not really, Stephen thought. But the old guy sounded strangely desperate. He exhaled. “If you want to tell me.”
“I’m a liar.”
“Everybody tells some lies. It’s harmless.”
“I think very few people would consider my lies harmless. My name isn’t Charles O’Brien. Dorothea and Jimmy’s mother is still alive. I took the children from her nineteen years ago and came to this place, where I’ve been hiding ever since.”
Stephen leaned back in his chair. “Jesus Christ.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing. They had suffered so much. I wanted them to be safe and happy.”
O’Brien, or whatever his name was, told Stephen a long story then. It started with the day he met his wife Lucy. He went on and on about how perfect everything was for the first five years. But it all ended on September 21, 1982, when Lucy was assaulted at home during a robbery.
“She was stabbed seventeen times and left for dead. Dorothea was locked in a dark closet for almost two hours while her mother was tortured. When Jimmy and I came back, he ran into the sunroom by himself, while I was looking through the mail. He was so shocked at the way his mother looked that he couldn’t even scream. When I finally got there, maybe five minutes later, he’d turned into a painting of a boy, absolutely still, with his mouth stretched open wider than I thought physically possible, but making no sound.”
“My God,” Stephen mumbled. His eyes were finally adjusting to the dark, but he still couldn’t make out anything beyond a form reclining on the couch, next to a tall lamp.
He was already feeling very sorry for Dorothea’s father when O’Brien told him what it was like watching Lucy in constant pain, sitting with Jimmy during his nightmares, running to Dorothea before she passed out. Over the next two years, his family fell apart. Lucy drank too much and became dependent on pain pills. She lost a baby, and the doctor told them she might not be able to have another. The children didn’t get better. When it started to seem hopeless, he began preparations to leave L.A.
“It was easy to create a new identity and move money into accounts that couldn’t be traced. Within a few weeks, I had it all arranged. I left her the house and some money. I would have given her more, but I knew I would need it for Dorothea and Jimmy.”
“I don’t understand,” Stephen said.
“I loved her.” His voice grew thick. “I still love her, though I’m sure that’s impossible for you to believe.”
“For chrissakes, why did you leave then?”
“I didn’t feel I had a choice. I thought I had lost her already.”
The old man’s pain was undeniable; still, what he was saying made absolutely no sense. “But you did have a choice.” He thought of Ellen and Lizzie and he felt himself becoming angry again. “You could have stayed. You could have kept your family.”
“I loved her too much,” O’Brien whispered.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It became so unbearable. She would get drunk and drive home and I could see exactly what she would look like as she went through the windshield. Every time the phone rang, I thought it would be the police asking me to come in and identify her body.” O’Brien groaned as he moved on the couch. “I would dream of her screaming for help, but when I’d wake, she wouldn’t let me help her. I wanted her to be safe. I knew if she was attacked again, she might not make it. I wanted to protect her. I was terrified that she would die. I wanted to punish her. I wanted her to stop leaving me.”
The old guy’s voice was trembling, but Stephen found himself thinking of Dorothea, sitting in the main house now, unaware of what was going on in this dark room, this strange confession. What did O’Brien want from him anyway? Understanding? Forgiveness?
“You had no right to do it,” Stephen finally said.
“I made a mistake. It never occurred to me that once I’d done this, it would be very difficult to undo. Lucy initiated divorce proceedings almost immediately, so that the court would rule and give her full custody. She did it on the advice of a lawyer, who told her the police would take the situation more seriously, but it changed the act of taking my own children into a crime. I couldn’t bring myself to return Dorothea and Jimmy to the place that had almost killed their mother. That world was too corrupt. When I left, I vowed they would have no part in it.”
Stephen knew there was no point in arguing the corruption of L.A. He waited for a while. “Do you even know what happened to her?”
“She made two movies with a no-talent hack who was using her to give credibility to his schlock films. Lucy couldn’t save either movie and they flopped.” He paused. “Her drug problem got worse. Several times, I tried to help her get treatment. I sent the only person I’d stayed in contact with to see her, to offer to pay for any facility she wished. She didn’t know I was behind it, of course. She always refused.”
Stephen’s voice was harsh. “Maybe she would have stopped doing drugs if you’d told her where her childre
n were.”
“I thought of this, but I also thought of the other possibility that I would be charged with kidnapping and the children would be handed over to a woman who was too troubled to properly take care of them.”
Stephen knew this might have happened, but he still blamed O’Brien for starting it all. He’d brought this agony and loneliness on himself.
“Did she ever get treatment?”
“Yes. It was around Dorothea’s eleventh birthday when I heard Lucy had remarried. I don’t know where she met him, but apparently he was the one who talked her into getting help. He works for some company that makes education software. His name struck me as particularly appropriate. Al Goodman, the good man who saved my wife from what I’d done to her.”
O’Brien let out a low guttural sound, not quite a moan, not quite a cry. The sound of pure despair, Stephen thought, and sat back in his chair, as if to shield himself from the blast of the old man’s feelings.
“I pray to God for forgiveness, but he doesn’t answer my prayers.”
“Maybe you need to ask your kids to forgive you first.” Stephen could already feel what this would mean to Dorothea. Her father was a liar, just like Jimmy said. Her father’s entire life was a lie, and so, in a way, her life was too.
“I’m going to see Dorothea,” he said, standing up. “I know she’s in the house. I have to talk to her.”
“She isn’t there.”
“Where is she then?”
When the old man didn’t answer, Stephen decided he’d had it with this game. He walked over and fumbled until he found the switch to turn on the lamp.
“Holy shit.” O’Brien was facing him now, without the blankets, and Stephen knew instantly that the doctor who’d been telling Dorothea her father was getting better had been lying through his teeth. The old man had edema of the legs so severe he was only able to wear shorts. Edema of the face, especially on the right side, possibly fever or infection, causing the right eye to seem to recede when compared to the left. Muscle mass loss in the upper torso and arms. Symptoms consistent with starvation, possibly with underlying congestive heart failure, especially as the old man admitted he’d been having chest pains and shortness of breath.