Shame

by Alan Russell

  Caleb’s feeling of lightness met her gravity. He focused on her and saw her distress.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “The shame immobilized me for so long,” she said. “I’d read about rape and incest victims, and I’d empathize with them, but I knew that wasn’t fair because what happened to them wasn’t voluntary. With me it was. But our sense of shame wasn’t that dissimilar. Like many of those victims, I felt I couldn’t tell anyone.

  “Farrell had a right to be angry with me. Not to kill me, no, but he had a legitimate grievance. I didn’t just expose the story of Leslie Van Doren. I made it my vendetta. I wanted her to look unsavory and ridiculous. I wanted to lord my power and position over her. I didn’t want her to be only dirt; I wanted to grind her in that dirt.

  “You see, I was jealous of her, but I couldn’t admit that to myself. I made Van Doren and her ilk out to be the scum of the earth. I was oh so supercilious about those women carrying on relationships with prisoners. ‘Outmates’ I called them. The nuns of the iron bars.

  “I don’t know when I fell in love with your father. I think I only realized it a few weeks before he died. Even then, I knew it made no sense. I knew it was worse than wrong. This was a man who had murdered two of my sorority sisters, girls I was so close to. Because of what he did, because of his horrible, horrible acts, thousands of tears were cried on my shoulders, and I was forced to become intimate with the pain he’d caused to so many. I knew all about his dark side; no one had studied it as closely as me. And I knew how manipulative he could be. But none of that stopped me from falling in love with him.

  “If I look for excuses, I suppose I can find them. Our close proximity; his imminent death; his reciprocal, or so I wanted to believe, feelings. But nothing excuses what I did.

  “In my heart, I think he changed. I know there are those who say that men like him can’t change. I’ve read the psychological studies. They’d explain our relationship by saying I was this challenge for him, his full-time job while he was in prison, and that he used all his free time to figure out how he could inveigle his way into my affections. But it wasn’t like that, or at least I don’t think so.

  “We were in the lawyers’ room, with a guard outside, when there was this disturbance in the cell block. I don’t know the details—I never learned them—but the guard felt compelled to leave his post. He’d seen me in there hundreds of times with Gray, and he knew that Gray wasn’t a threat to me.

  “Sometimes I think I dreamed up what happened next. It seems unreal, implausible, and my memories are blurry. I might have gone to Gray, or he might have come to me, but I think we met in the middle. We started kissing, and the madness, and desperation, took both of us. I’d like to blame the fever of the moment. But I can’t. Our hunger was mutual. Everything happened so quickly I can almost pretend that nothing occurred, almost convince myself of that. Our physical union was so rushed it hardly qualifies as love making. I can count off the seconds and say, ‘There. That was nothing.’ But it was something.

  “As the clock ticked, we probably weren’t left alone for more than three minutes. When the guard returned, we were seated. No one ever suspected. But because I’m the only one who knows what happened, does that make it any less real?

  “I don’t believe anyone can ever really say, ‘I wasn’t myself.’ I’ve tried those words on myself, but they don’t fit. I know that what I did was the antithesis of professionalism. I know our being together was an unconscionable act. I was fully aware that this was a man who had murdered time and again, and he deserved no comfort, but I still wanted that intimacy between us.

  “We never talked about it. It was another secret your father took with him. I think it was a defining moment for me. Maybe what I learned was even worth all the shame I’ve had to carry.

  “I came to understand that lives can change in a single moment and that under certain situations people can do things that they would normally believe unimaginable. And I learned that everyone carries around secrets. Everyone. And these secrets, no matter if they’re great or small, shame us. I came to understand that all of us know things about ourselves that we don’t like to admit. Because of my own hidden shame, I became more attuned to ferreting it out in others.

  “Of course, it took time to learn those things. Now I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book. I wasn’t fair to Leslie Van Doren. I tried to make her pay for my sins. She was more honest about her love than I was. But I wanted to have my cake—wanted to be known as the noble poet survivor—and eat it too. So I lied to myself. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t love him, that nothing ever happened, and that just made everything worse.

  “Maybe now, though, both of us will be able to put our shame, and our Shame, aside.”

  Their hands came together, her left, his right, and their fingers intertwined like hands put together in prayer. They both shivered.

  “It’s cold,” said Elizabeth.

  Caleb shook his head. “We’ve just been clothed in our secrets for too long.”

  38

  SOME RISE BY SIN, AND SOME BY VIRTUE FALL.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Measure for Measure

  One of my favorite characters in literature is the little boy who says of the emperor, “He’s not wearing any clothes.” When people ask me about my work, I recount that story and I say my job is often writing about the emperor’s new clothes.

  It was necessary for me to be that Hans Christian Andersen character throughout this book. I constantly asked myself what was real and what was false. I needed to be certain that my perceptions were based on truth, but in so doing I learned a hard lesson: sometimes we don’t know the naked truth even when we are looking at it. Certain revelations in this book were difficult for me, for I found that in the past I had contributed to the emperor’s new clothes, and though my fabric might have been invisible, my lies of omission were not.

  This is a story where things were never as they seemed. Take, for example, the names of the three central characters. As adults, none had the name they were born with. Lyle Guidry not only changed his name to Lola Guidry but also changed his identity from male to female. Caleb Parker was born Gray Parker Jr. He lost not only his first name but for the longest time the paternity of being a “junior” to an infamous serial murderer. And then there was John Farrell. He was born Gray Parker Van Doren, but he lost that name when he was adopted as an infant.

  There are two other characters in the book. I am one of them. In this book I am both narrator and participant. You will be the judge as to whether I told my part true or whether I again wove some fabric out of thin air.

  The other character, who was over two decades dead when this story begins, still managed to cast his long shadow throughout these pages. I have told Gray Parker’s story before, and I never imagined I would have to tell it again.

  But then our sins, and our shame, have a way of following us.

  —From the introduction to Elizabeth Line’s

  Shame Will Follow After

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful that there were so many individuals willing to assist in the writing of this novel. My heartfelt thanks go out to Norman R. Brown, Don “Cookie” DeWolf, Erica, Sherry Gerrish, Lori Gore, Master Chief Doug Gorham, Eric Hart, Lieutenant Gerry Lipscomb of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, Eugene Morris of the Florida Department of Corrections, Chip Owen, Abigail Padgett, Mary Jane Tatum, and Kathy Wilson.

  Any mistakes made in the research of this book are mine and shouldn’t reflect on any of those acknowledged.

  About the Author

  Photo by Stathis Orphanos, 2012

  Alan Russell is an award-winning writer and California native whose wild imagination continues to get the best of him when it comes to his literary achievements. A proud father of three and an avid gardener, Alan blames his busy home-life for the long delay between works—though his readers agree each new book is worth the wait. Inspired by the “what if” f
actor, Shame is his sixth novel and explores the psychological inner-workings of a serial killer whose son is forced to live in his shadow. Drawn to the bold and daring, Alan continues to churn out new page-turners that are sure to continue to thrill his readers.