The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  I looked down the barrel at the paper bull’s-eye. My finger rested on the trigger. How was this different than hitting golf balls? How was it different than running through the Colorado greenbelt? I tried to imagine how I looked, an older man with a military haircut, his knees slightly bent, pointing a handgun down a narrow range. My son had confessed to murdering a man with a gun, much like this one. He had spent time in gun ranges all over the country. Could I know what he knew just by doing what he did? Could I understand the things that only he understood?

  I was Dr. Paul Allen, son of Rhoda, father of Alex and Wally. Or was I? Was this man pointing a weapon at a paper target the same man who diagnosed illnesses, who treated the sick? Something was happening to me. I had lost direction. I didn’t know what I was meant to do anymore. My son was going to be executed. Why was I playing golf and hosting dinner parties? Why was I jogging and recycling? And yet, what else could I do? I owed it to my wife, my other children. I had to let my boy go. Around me the sound of gunshots was like a metronome ticking off the seconds of my life.

  I squinted at the target. It was a man, a woman, a child. It was everyone I had ever hated, everyone I had ever loved. I put the gun back on the tray and took off my goggles. There were no answers here, only noise and violence.

  For the first time in my adult life, I began to pray.

  At night, when everyone was asleep, I wandered the house like a ghost. I watched my sons sleep in their beds. They were like windmills stopped in mid-turn. Wally had already forgotten about Maribel, the Mexican siren. He was in love now with a blond twelve-year-old with breasts, as I suspected were all the other boys at school. Alex had discovered football, and he spent hours in the yard throwing spirals at a plastic target.

  They had been babies once, chubby and small. I used to change their diapers in the depths of the night. We would give them a bottle and read them to sleep. There was one book I think of now as I watch them sleep, a board book called I Love You, Stinky Face. In it a mother tells her son she loves him, and the boy says, But Mamma, what if I were a big scary ape? The mother says, If you were a giant ape, I would bake you a cake of bananas and say, I love you my big scary ape.

  But Mamma, the boy says, what if I was a one-eyed monster?

  During our visits to the prison, we were prohibited from touching Danny. At the end of each conversation—when the guard came to collect him—he would blow us a kiss, and we would reply in kind, standing to watch as he passed through the iron door and disappeared.

  Wally seemed unaffected by these visits, but Alex developed night terrors. He took to sleeping in bed with us, the way he used to when he was three.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t visit Danny for a while,” I told him one morning. We were the first ones up, and as he sat at the kitchen island eating cereal, I stood across from him stirring milk into my coffee.

  “No,” he said. “I want to.”

  “Maybe just for a little while,” I said, “you should stay home when we go see Danny. Or maybe we’ll all take a break. It’s been a really hard year. This is a lot to handle even for a grown-up. I think we all need a rest.” He thought about this.

  “But what if they kill him?”

  My heart skipped a beat. He was talking about the execution. I thought about the things I’d had to deal with as a child, my father’s death and the hole it created in my heart. I had gone to his funeral, had stood by the graveside and watched as his family and friends dropped dirt into the grave. None of it seemed real to me at the time. The grief came later, the true understanding of death, its finality. Standing in the kitchen, I thought about Alex and Wally, their awareness that Daniel had been sentenced to death, that he was stuck in prison waiting to die. By taking them to visit their brother hadn’t I really been bringing them to his funeral not once but week after week? My father’s death had been sudden. But Daniel’s was an event to be calendared, a landmark visible on the horizon, growing closer every day.

  The horror of this thought made me sick to my stomach.

  I put my hand on Alex’s back, still so small, so delicate.

  “They can’t just execute him,” I said. “They have to set a date, and then there are appeals. Okay? We have time. It’s okay to take a break, to rest.”

  He nodded. I put my arms around him, feeling trapped. His hair smelled of sweat and children’s shampoo. The love I felt in that moment was savage and dizzying.

  That night, when everyone was asleep, I sat on the back patio, restless, agitated. It had been ten months since Daniel’s arrest. I’d uprooted my family, given away my clothes, cut off my hair, and started a new life in a new town, believing I could still save him. But at what cost?

  I sat in the backyard, shivering in the chill. The truth was, though I’d changed my life tectonically, nothing had really changed. The differences were merely cosmetic. It was foolish to think otherwise. Though I had packed away all evidence of my obsession with my son’s case, it was still defining our lives. Knowing this I felt both dirty and trapped.

  I was on a path, and I could no more change direction than I could turn back time and start again. That was clear to me now. A man was dead and my son was in prison. One death was pulling all of us inevitably toward another, like a whirlpool.

  What choice did I have but to fight?

  I called Murray twice a week from a pay phone at the driving range, piling my change on the metal shelf, listening to the snick of each quarter as it dropped into the coin slot. I was covering my tracks.

  “I’ve got a lead on a guy at the DOD who may be able to get us a look at Hoopler’s file,” Murray might say. Or “My guy thinks Hoopler may have visited his parents in New Hampshire last month. He’s trying to figure out what alias he traveled under.”

  I had stopped writing things down. I couldn’t afford to leave a paper trail. The truth was, everything that mattered, all the relevant details of Danny’s life, was already stored in my head.

  “I’ll call you in two days,” I told him.

  Afterward, I set my ball on the tee, shifted my weight. I ran up hills, my arms chugging. I took my kids for ice cream and showed them how to throw a perfect spiral. I made dirty martinis for the neighbors, and chimed in good-naturedly as we complained about our wives. I recycled, separating bottles from cans. My resting heart rate dropped from 102 to 74. My face was tan. My stomach was flat for the first time in decades. I was, for all appearances, a man in the prime of his life. And yet I felt nothing. I was a recording of a human voice, lifelike but artificial.

  When I’d packed up my son’s case files, there was one document I kept: Daniel’s psychiatric evaluation. I hid it in a folder filled with old tax returns. It was a document I had read only once, in the middle of a sleepless night, while my children slept in their beds. Earlier that day, on the phone, I had begged Danny to appeal, to push for a new trial, but he said no. He just wanted to be left alone. I told him I would appeal it myself. But Danny was adamant. He said if I filed an appeal without his approval, he would never speak to me again. What a thing for a son to say to his father. What a choice for a father to have to make. In the end I had agreed. What good was a live son if I couldn’t talk to him? I reasoned that the execution itself would take years to carry out, and during that time I could convince Danny to file his own appeal. I could fix the things between us that had been broken.

  We’re not all put on this Earth to do what’s right.

  I pictured my son, underweight, his body bruised, sitting across from a bearded psychiatrist. He’d recently pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree. The motions for and against his psychiatric evaluation had taken weeks to ready and debate. So he’d had time to think about what he wanted to convey. He’d had time to consider his crimes. Now he was being given the opportunity to explain, and this is what he offered: We’re not all put on this Earth to do what’s right. What did it mean? Did my son really believe he had been destined to kill another human being?

  I bent my knees and tried to
empty my mind. In my hands the driver felt like a surgical instrument, a scalpel meant to excise thoughts from my head.

  You know, Hitler was a monster, but by being a monster he gave the world the opportunity to do enormous good.

  Hitler? Why would Daniel invoke the name of the greatest monster in the history of the modern world? Did he want to be seen as a defender of the Holocaust? A Nazi? He had also mentioned Charles Whitman. Was there a strategy at work here? Was the boy trying to find his place in the history of violence? To rank himself on a chart of evil?

  And what had he meant when he said his parents just didn’t seem that interested in me? Is that what he really believed? That he had been a bore to us, an afterthought? Didn’t he know how much we’d agonized about his custody? How we’d watched his moods and debated his progress? Didn’t he know his mother and I used to speak several times a week, unraveling every childhood funk, every incident at home or school?

  I mean, my dad never really felt like a huge part of my life. And now, I don’t know, I guess I felt like one of those exchange students, you know? When you go to France or something, and they put you with a French family. That’s how it felt.

  I thought about my own memories of this period. Danny was fifteen when he’d come to live with us. Fran and I had done everything we could to make him feel at home. We’d put the boys in a single room and given Danny his own bedroom. We’d planned extra outings and designed family activities to include him. Every night we sat together at the dinner table and shared stories of our day. We allowed Danny to babysit the boys. We gave him responsibilities. We gave him praise.

  And yet, if I am being truthful, though I remember this as a happy time for us, it was also an especially busy time for me at work. I had just been made chief of my department at the hospital. I worked late almost every night. So there was no way I could have had dinner with my family every night. Strange how that idea had cemented itself in my mind—of the Allens as a happy, intact family. The truth was, I saw Danny mostly on the weekends. It was Fran who fed him, who took him to school and picked him up. She’d had more of a relationship with Danny than I’d had. This wasn’t something she ever chastised me for—Fran wasn’t the type to scold—but in the months after Danny arrived she had encouraged me to make more time for him. And that summer I had, turning down a lucrative lecture tour in order to take Danny camping in the Adirondacks.

  Early one Friday afternoon in June, I packed up the Range Rover—tent, sleeping bags, folding chairs—and Danny and I set off for the wilderness. My father had been a lifelong camper and had, in the years before his death, taken us camping numerous times. There was something about the chill of the midnight tent and the smoky taste of a campfire that made me feel closer to him. It was a memory I cherished, and one I hoped to impart to my own son—believing foolishly that a few great experiences could outweigh the paucity of time we had spent in each other’s company over the last seven years.

  In the car on the way up I did most of the talking. I began by telling Danny about my day, the patients I had seen that morning. That led to a larger discussion of my role as a doctor and how I had come to choose the field when I was Danny’s age. I talked about the setbacks I had suffered early on—a psychology-rotation fiasco that taught me I had no business analyzing the personalities of others, a long year I spent fulfilling an ob-gyn internship—and how the subsequent crisis of faith (did I even want to be a doctor?) led me to the study of rheumatology.

  Somewhere around Albany I realized that rather than simply making conversation with my son I was trying to teach him who I was. As if I were a job applicant and he the employer. As if we were on a blind date, and I was determined, even desperate, that he like me.

  But, of course, this is not what family is. Familial bonds are not created through the transfer of information. They are forged through experience over time. They are the sum of Potty Training times Sick Days, of Nights Spent Sleeping in the Same Bed times Knee Scrapes Kissed in Playgrounds. The intimacy of parents and children is not based on data as much as it is on proximity. Case in point: I was probably ten before it even occurred to me ask where my father went when he left the house in the morning other than “to go to work.”

  Instead, my father was a voice (low and resonant), a smell (woody and earthen). My father was a feeling, a sense of security transferred from his body to mine when I put my arms around his neck. The details of his life were irrelevant. He was an extension of my body, as I was of his.

  I felt this intimacy with Wally and Alex. Their runny noses were my runny noses. I felt no more compunction wiping their asses than I did wiping my own. Through years of interdependence I had become attuned to the rhythms of their breathing, the movement of their limbs. Because of this I could easily tell when something was wrong.

  The truth is, a fifteen-year-old boy whom you spend less than thirty days a year with is not your son. Not in the same way as a boy you have tucked in every single night of his life. You share none of the inherent intimacy, the ability to inhabit the same space thoughtlessly, to drape an arm or leg over him as you watch TV together on the couch, to literally take food that has fallen from his mouth and eat it yourself.

  Instead what you have is an awkward synergy. The expectation of a familial bond without the actual bond. This had never been more clear to me than it was on that trip.

  “It seems like you’re doing well in school,” I said, trying to change the subject, “settling in. Are you liking it here okay? With us?”

  He shrugged. Danny had never been the most talkative kid, and now he was fifteen, the official age of sullen silence. Perhaps he saved all his expressiveness for others, I thought. But who? Kids his own age? Teachers?

  “Are you talking to your mom?” I asked. “Calling her?”

  Another shrug.

  “She’s not thrilled I’m here,” he said, something I knew to be true. Danny and my ex-wife had had a series of fallings out in the last year—about skipping school, lying, staying out late, the classic teenage triumvirate—after the last of which Ellen had screamed something along the lines of “You hate it here so much, try living with your father.” And much to her surprise, Danny picked up the phone and called me. Two weeks later he was moving in with us.

  “This is the closet,” I said, showing him around his room, as if he were a visiting space alien who had never used a closet before. “You can hang your clothes in here.”

  I was nervous. The night Danny had called Fran made lasagna, and after dinner we played Rock Band on the kids’ Wii. Sitting there, holding hands with my wife, watching my sons jump around in front of the TV, I’d had one of those rare “life is good” moments. I was forty-five years old. It had taken me all that time to find the perfect balance between work and family, between ambition and relaxation, but it felt like I’d finally reached it. And then the phone rang.

  “It’s Danny,” Fran told me, coming back from the kitchen, the receiver in her hand.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He told me he’d had it with his mom. That he wanted to come live with me for a while. I looked at Fran and the kids, our sacred family unit, at home, at peace. Did I have a moment of doubt? A flash of reluctance? I would be lying if I said I didn’t. Balance had been achieved, and with Danny moving in would come a new dynamic, a different equation. And yet hearing his voice on the phone I also felt sadness, guilt. He was my son. The boy I’d left behind. I wanted him to feel what it had taken me forty-five years to find—a sense of contentment.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “We want you here. I’ll buy you a ticket in the morning.”

  Now, setting up our tent in the woods of upstate New York, I watched my firstborn son. He had been a late bloomer, waiting to break five feet until he was thirteen. His hair was marine short and called attention to his ears. He had deep-set eyes and elegant long lashes. Left to his own devices, Danny read books about explorers and other survival tales. He couldn’t do his math homework,
but he could tell you just how many of Ernest Shackleton’s men had survived their eighteen-month odyssey after their ship, the Endurance, was frozen in an ice floe (all twenty-eight).

  Danny liked tales of men climbing mountains, of lone explorers setting off into jungles on trips from which they’d never return. He was, it seemed, a collector of outcast narratives. Looking back it seems clear that even in youth he saw something in the lives of these men that he identified with—an impulse to go it alone, to strike out for undiscovered lands. What strikes you when you read about the lives of explorers is that they were often literally strangers to their children, their wives. They would set off for years at a time, coming home only to raise money for another mission. They chose the camaraderie of the journey over the bond of a family.

  Daniel, too, it seemed, was uninterested in traditional family life. We had instituted a nightly dinner rule when Alex and Wally were two, believing it was important for the entire family to sit down at least once a day and share a meal. But in the year he lived with us, Danny missed at least three dinners a week. There was always an excuse. He signed up for after-school activities. He joined a band. And sometimes he was home but simply chose not to come downstairs.

  This was one of the things I tried to address with him as we prepared our evening meal. It was late June, and the last of the sun’s light was beginning to fade just after eight. The night before I had marinated lamb chops in rosemary and lime. We cooked them with kidney beans from a can over the roaring campfire.