As he recalled his eighteen-year-old self hitting the road that would lead him to great professional achievement, the discovery of the love of his life, and ultimately, heartbreak, he determined the answer was no. He didn’t desire paternal approval anymore because in the last several years he had realized his father had never been worthy to hold such power over him in the first place.
Then why could he not continue to New York without seeing the man first?
Aidan walked back to the house, fighting the urge to have another smoke. Procrastination wasn’t going to get him to the East Coast in a timely manner. He had witnessed his mother’s demise and defeated Mr. Mertz. He could handle his father, too. Besides, with the erratic way his nerves fired, he’d run out of cigarettes long before his courage trumped his anxiety.
With confidence as shaky as his legs, he ascended the first several steps to the porch. White light scorched his eyes.
“Fuck! Not now. Please.”
Aidan dropped into a sitting position and placed his head between his knees, yanking at his hair as if he could extract the memories of his mother’s attack along with his roots. Flashes of her broken, bleeding body and echoes of her screams launched from his subconscious, hijacking his muscles, his bones, his blood, until he was nothing but a sweaty, spastic mess.
When the vision ceased, he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Releasing a deep breath, he looked to the starless sky. It was fitting there was nothing for him to wish upon tonight. His luck had run out ages ago—if he ever had any luck in the first place.
The completion of his climb to the porch was made with steadier steps than the initial journey. He raised his curled hand to the front door but lacked the gusto to execute a knock.
When he exited the freeway, he’d gone through several scenarios in his head on how he would confront his father—jumping out of his Porsche immediately upon his arrival, hurling rocks at the windows along with profanities, and kicking down the front door were all attractive options—but now that he was here, the part of him still tormented by his mother’s murder and the neglect and blame his father subjected him to made him want to run away.
A stealthy entrance seemed like a more practical approach. Aidan walked the length of the porch and lifted the potted plant in the corner. The spare house key was still hidden under the pot as it was before he left for New York. This time, he didn’t pause before fitting the key into the lock and opening the door.
Darkness greeted him inside, accompanied by a tomblike silence, which made him question whether his father was even home. Lightning flickered through house as he made his way down the corridor as quietly as possible, soiling the hardwood floor with his muddy boots.
When he opened the door to his father’s office and turned on the light, he found the wood paneled room in pretty much the same condition as it had been five years ago. Neatly stacked papers embossed with Dr. Evans’ signet sat on his antique oak desk next to black-framed reading glasses. High back leather chair? Check. Fleischer stethoscope? Check. Remington DeLuxe Model Five typewriter? Check. All the accessories of a well-to-do physician.
Several new plaques were mounted on the walls. Their inscriptions confirmed they were presented to Dr. Evans in the last five years. They praised his skill, his genius, and his compassion, as if he was a patron saint of the medical community. He even had a photograph taken with the mayor, which had graced the front page of the Chicago Tribune last month, according to the date on the newspaper clipping. The sole photograph perched on the desk—a framed picture of Betty—established what Aidan had figured all along but hoped to disprove: It was as though he and his mother had never existed.
Aidan flicked off the light and left the office before he tore the place apart. The kitchen at the back of the house was equipped with new cupboards and appliances, a far cry from their dingy kitchen in Fairfield. His mother had loved to cook, but of course, his father had never provided her with such nice accommodations.
He passed through the archway connecting to the living room. His steps faltered. His mother’s piano…it was still here. Old and scuffed, it didn’t fit amongst its fancy surroundings, but to him, it was the most beautiful item in the house.
The cover lifted with a creak of its hinges. Aidan grazed his scabbed, bruised fingers across the keys—the same keys his mother had touched years ago. Rehearsing with her had brought him so much joy. Now the reminder plagued him with such agony he didn’t know how he’d play a single note ever again.
Grief. Sorrow. Guilt. Beth. He squeezed his eyes shut. Fuck. He needed to travel across oceans, not just the country, if he ever expected to extract himself from her life for good.
With his hand over his heart, Aidan walked to the patio doors leading to the backyard. Pulling back the drapes revealed an empty swimming pool and a manicured lawn—everything the same as before. Lightning struck again, followed by the roar of distant thunder, and then the sky opened up, unleashing the storm. Raindrops pelted against the glass like bullets fired from a machine gun.
“Back away from the window, mister! I’m warning you, I’m armed. So don’t try any funny business!”
Aidan turned around slowly. Lightning flickered like camera flashes on the red carpet, illuminating his surroundings briefly. His father stood across the room, dressed in flannel bedclothes, holding a baseball bat poised to strike.
Now that Dr. Evans was no longer a grainy image on a black and white newspaper clipping, Aidan identified his physical changes since their last encounter. His brown hair had grayed at his temples, and the lines in his forehead and around his eyes burrowed deeper, promoting the experience and wisdom befitting of a respected member of the medical profession. His hostile gaze and the scowl tightening his features disclosed the man behind the prominent title—the man Aidan knew all too well.
“Put your hands where I can see them.” Dr. Evans waved the bat as if he was Babe Ruth. When Aidan was growing up, his father never played sports or even listened to them on the radio. In fact, he was surprised his father owned a bat in the first place.
Aidan took a step forward.
His father drew back the bat. “Halt, I say!”
Lightning flashed again, igniting the living room with a fluorescent glow.
His father’s eyes widened. The bat fell to the floor with a clatter. “Aidan? Good Lord, son. Is that you?”
A frown tugged at Aidan’s lips. The man had some nerve to call him son after all these years. “Yeah, it’s me.”
Dr. Evans turned on a table lamp. “I thought you were an intruder!”
With his eyes downcast, Aidan muttered, “Aren’t I?”
“I heard footsteps, creaking noises.” He shook his head. “Darn it, son. You frightened me! If you wanted to come for a visit—”
“I didn’t plan on coming here, Pop. Or hell, maybe I did. I don’t know.” Aidan raked his hands through his hair and returned to the piano. His fingers fell to the keys corresponding to the first notes of Beth’s song.
“What was that tune you and your mother always used to play?” His father approached the instrument cautiously, confirming that blood ties were not strong enough to mend the bonds of broken trust. “It was not overly sprightly, but it had an uplifting chorus…”
Aidan retracted his hands as if the keys had electrocuted him. “How would you know? When you weren’t at work, you locked yourself in your home office. Ma and I barely saw you.”
His father tossed a wistful look toward the backyard. “I may have spent a lot of time in my study, but I still used to listen to you two laugh and play every evening after dinner. That particular song always bought a smile to my face.”
Aidan’s eyes narrowed. There was a rare vulnerability in his father’s gaze that he didn’t quite know how to interpret. “It was a Tchaikovsky piece. Opus 39, No. 4. Mamma.”
“You played beautifully, son, and at such a young age, too.” The vulnerability vanished with the next strike of lightning, replaced by a more fami
liar expression of wariness and contempt. “Why are you here, Aidan? You’re a long way from Hollywood or New York—wherever you’re living these days.”
“I’m here because…” Aidan screwed his eyes shut as misery, horror, and loneliness hit him with the determination of a boxer fighting for the championship title. Beth’s screams during his attack on Mr. Mertz, her pleas for him to stay…Nathan and Matthew’s despair, Connie and Olivia’s tears…Kazan, the closest person he had to a father, abandoned without an explanation. In one afternoon, he had destroyed his relationships with all the people who mattered most to him, and for some reason, gravitated to the man he couldn’t care less about. Why, indeed.
Aidan opened his eyes and ground his teeth to conceal his quivering lips. “Why did you keep the piano?”
His father’s eyebrows furrowed. “I bought it for your mother as a wedding present. Why wouldn’t I keep it?”
Aidan shrugged. “You moved on pretty fast after her death, marrying Betty within the year. The only reason you didn’t get rid of it then was because you knew I wouldn’t allow it. I’m surprised it didn’t end up in the junkyard five minutes after I left for New York. It’s not like you were concerned with preserving her memory, so you wouldn’t have kept it for sentimental reasons.”
His father glared at him. “How do you know how I felt after she died?”
“You’re right. I don’t.” Hatred escorted the words from Aidan’s mouth. “You distanced yourself from me even more after her murder. You barely acknowledged me unless you were harping on me about something stupid. The only thing I knew for sure was you blamed me for what happened to her.”
Dr. Evans rubbed the back of his neck. “Your mother died a long time ago. I don’t see how all this is relevant anymore.”
Aidan rolled his eyes. “Only you would think what happened to her is no longer important.”
“I refuse to be interrogated in my own home.” Dr. Evans thrust his forefinger toward the hallway. “Go back to your new life and keep out of mine.”
Aidan curled his hands into fists, fighting the urge to clock his father in the jaw. “No way. I’m done running.”
Dr. Evans’ features coiled with bewilderment. “Running from what?”
Aidan dragged his hands through his hair. “Damn it, Pop! You have no idea how messed up I’ve been all these years. You never bothered to talk to me, to listen to me. You never cared about me!”
“I kept the piano because I loved your mother very much—”
“This isn’t about the goddamn piano!” Aidan threw his hands in the air.
Dr. Evans sighed. “Then what is it about?”
Aidan gestured to him wildly. “Don’t you see?”
His father’s eyes sharpened like daggers, spearing him with the truth.
“No, of course you don’t. You never did, did you?” Aidan lifted a framed portrait of his father and Betty off the coffee table and pointed to their smiling faces behind the glass. “Who the fuck is this man, Pop? This carefree, happy man. Tell me, because I sure as hell never met him growing up.”
His father’s lips formed a tight line. “Are you intoxicated? Your hands are covered with lesions and contusions like you’ve been in a fight. And this crazy talk you’re spewing? It makes me question your mental stability.”
Aidan’s anger unleashed, rivaling the raging storm outside. He smashed the framed photograph to the floor, shattering the glass. With wide eyes, his father stumbled backward, reaching blindly for the bat on the floor.
“The fourteenth anniversary of her death was a month ago. Do you even miss her? Do you even care?” Broken glass crunched under Aidan’s boots as he marched toward his father. “I think about her every day. Her loss has haunted me every goddamn second since she died.”
“If you don’t leave right now, I will call the police and have you arrested for trespassing!” Dr. Evans grabbed the bat and raised it in the air.
Aidan eyed the weapon with calmness solidified by acceptance. He had no doubt his father would hit him. For his mother’s sake, he wished it hadn’t come to this.
“Graham? What’s going on? I heard a crash.” Betty entered the living room, clad in a pink housecoat, with curlers secured in her brown hair. When her eyes landed on their visitor, a smile sprung to her face. “Aidan, dear!” She rushed toward him. “How lovely it is that you came home.”
Home. If not for the graveness of the situation, Aidan would’ve laughed. This house was never his home, and the man standing before him was never his father.
Dr. Evans extended his free arm, preventing his wife from advancing further. “Betty, stay back. There’s broken glass on the floor.”
Betty looked at her husband and gasped. “Graham, what are you doing with the bat? This is your son!”
“Go back to bed.” Dr. Evans’ trained his eyes on Aidan. Even without the weapon, his threat was clear.
Aidan sneered. “Yeah, Pop. You better send her away. You wouldn’t want your perfect present life to conflict with your horrid past, right?”
Betty took another step forward.
Dr. Evans moved to the side, blocking in her way. “Betty, do as I say.”
She dropped her gaze and retreated into the hallway without further protest.
Lightning lit up the house like fireworks. In the wake of distant thunder, Dr. Evans hurled the bat across the room, knocking the lamp off the table and immersing the space in darkness. He stalked toward Aidan, a menacing shadow in red and blue flannel. “You want to talk? Fine, we’ll talk. Man to man.”
Aidan corrected his posture. “It’s about damn time.”
“Now, I don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that I was never there for you.” Dr. Evans shoved his finger at Aidan’s chest. “I worked hard to provide you with a roof over your head and food on the table. You wanted for nothing.”
“Materialistic stuff, sure. But I’m not talking about that, Pop. When my mother died, so did all the love in our house.” Aidan smacked his hand away. “Your blame infected me to the point where I can’t sustain a healthy relationship with anyone. It destroyed me, made me toxic to everyone around me.”
Dr. Evans laughed, but it lacked humor. “You think you’ve had a tough time since your mother died? It’s me who has suffered—”
“You didn’t see what I did. You never heard her screams, wrenched the knife from her chest, or held her while she bled!” Aidan winced as his voice cracked. Damn it. He couldn’t break down now. With his jaw clamped shut, he released a fortifying breath. “I have fucking nightmares, Pop, and visions that attack me when I’m awake.”
“Nightmares?” Dr. Evans scoffed. “That’s what bothers you? Like some kid afraid of the dark or a monster hiding under the bed?”
Aidan curled his hands into fists but kept them at his sides. He shook too violently to connect a successful punch anyway. “You have no idea what true guilt feels like—what it does to your self-esteem, your soul.”
Dr. Evans’ face glowed red. A vein in his forehead bulged. “If anyone is a victim in this room, it’s me!”
Aidan gaped at him. “There’s no way you’ve suffered half as much as I have!”
“You’re wrong!”
“You’re fucking delusional!”
“I was not at work the evening your mother was murdered!”
Aidan crept backward, like he’d stumbled upon a bloodthirsty predator and preferred not to be its next meal. “What do you mean? You had an overnight shift at the hospital.”
The shake of his father’s head felt more excruciating than if the man had gone for his jugular. “I was with Betty. We’d been seeing each other for two years at that point.”
“You—you what?” Aidan sucked in a strangled sob, introducing a load of air into his lungs that still couldn’t relieve the sensation that he was drowning. His heart pounded, as if hoping an insurgence of blood and oxygen could eliminate the ache brought on by deceit and betrayal. And the room…oh, man. The room spun so fas
t he felt he was about to vomit.
He staggered to the couch and wrapped his arms around his midsection, staring at the shards of glass on the carpet to try to settle his stomach like a cruise ship passenger focusing on the horizon to ease seasickness. All this time he had blamed himself for his mother’s murder, but his father had played an even bigger role than him. The drifter had targeted her because her husband was away and she was vulnerable. And it was all on account of an illicit affair.
Aidan launched across the room. His gait was unsteady, but his determination to confront his father was anything but. “You self-centered bastard! You cheated on my mother, the most honest, warmhearted person in the world. The woman who loved you more than you’re worth. She put up with your bullshit job, which kept you away from us, and remained a dutiful wife without complaint. And this is how you repay her? By abandoning her and leaving her open to an attack?”
Dr. Evans’ nostrils flared. “You can play the part of a teenage gang member successfully, but it seems you’ve forgotten how to act like a man. This behavior of yours is an embarrassment.”
“Is that why you never cried after she died?” Aidan choked back a sob. “Did you even care that she was gone? Or were you happy she was out of the picture for good so you could be with your mistress?”
Dr. Evans recoiled as though Aidan had clocked him. “I loved your mother dearly.”
“You’re a liar and a cheat.” Aidan raised his fist, blinking back his tears. “I thought I hated you before, but man, that’s nothing compared to how I feel toward you right now.”
Dr. Evans lifted his chin. “I have longed for punishment for over fourteen years. Go ahead, son. Hit me.”
Aidan drew back his hand but didn’t follow through on the punch. His hesitation didn’t make any sense. This had to be why he was here, right? To inflict physical pain on his father as payback for the emotional anguish he had suffered since he was a boy? Why, then, could he not take action?
“What are you waiting for?” His father’s eyes darkened. “Hit me.”
Stardust (The Starlight Trilogy #3) Page 7