The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  And even if I’d stayed, there’s no way of knowing if Danny would be a substantially different person as a result, that events would have unfolded differently. Because it was equally possible that his inability to have meaningful relationships was chemical, not experiential, his impulse to buy weapons at gun shows and drive for weeks on end, talking only to his car.

  The problem with alternate histories is that they provide no real insight into the lives we live today.

  “Come on,” I said, trying to be playful, “you and me? We’re never gonna get old.”

  She smiled sadly.

  “We already are,” she said.

  On June 16, a year to the day after the assassination, Murray surprised me by showing up in Colorado on his motorcycle. It was time to take the great American road trip, he said. The idea had come to him like a stroke in the night. His face was sunburned in a goggle pattern. There was a skinny blonde with him.

  I was standing in the kitchen, eating a sandwich, when he knocked. For a moment, seeing his grinning face I had a complete sense of displacement. Who was I? Where was I? What day was it? I opened the door. Murray—in leathers—handed me a large manila envelope.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a bomber jacket.

  “What are you—” I said.

  “I like the haircut,” he said. “And the new wardrobe. You look very rural, very ex-military, middle America.”

  I touched my head. I had gotten used to the new sparser me, with my crew cut and my dress-for-less wardrobe. But now I realized how strange I must look to someone seeing it for the first time.

  “This is Nadia,” Murray announced, moving past me to get to the fridge. “Nadia this is Paul.”

  Nadia smiled. She gave a little wave. Murray told me she was a Russian immigrant who spoke very little English.

  “She’s got her green card,” he told me. “Although there’s a good chance it’s fake. She hangs around with some pretty skeevy guys.”

  As he spoke I became aware of the package he had handed me. It was a nine by fourteen envelope. It weighed about a pound.

  “What’s this?” I said, holding it up.

  Murray was rooting around in the fridge for something to eat. He looked over.

  “That’s the journal,” he said. “Danny’s journal.”

  I felt all the blood leave my face. I stared at the envelope he had given me. It was as thick as a paperback book. I reached inside and pulled out a hundred loose pages. The top sheet was a photocopy of a notebook cover. Written on it were three letters: CAC. Carter Allen Cash.

  Seeing the name, I felt the room start to spin. I took a shaky step backward. Nadia put a hand on my arm to steady me.

  “Where did you get this?” I said.

  “Guy I know at Justice,” he said, putting a bowl of pasta salad on the counter. “I hit them with an FOIA and threatened to sue. It showed up out of the blue last week.”

  He peeled back the plastic wrap and started eating from the bowl with his fingers. I thumbed through the pages. My son’s handwriting stared back at me. Seeing it made me light-headed.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “I looked through it. There’s no smoking gun. He doesn’t write Must kill Senator Seagram a thousand times. Or Rode train with black ops conspirators. There are no drawings of decapitated men or oversized animal penises.”

  “So what is it?”

  “A journal. He started it in Austin, but he goes back and writes about his time in Iowa, too. The stuff on Montana is pretty hard to take, the time he spent digging into Seagram’s life, visiting his childhood home. Reading it now, in context, knowing what he did. Honestly, some of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

  I stared at the pages. I had gone to see Danny by myself for the first time three weeks ago. After Alex developed night terrors, we had decided to stop the family visits and give the kids time to get settled. I promised Fran that I, too, would take a break, but I hadn’t. At the prison, I’d passed through the metal detectors, raised my arms for the wand, emptied my pockets, and took off my shoes. I’d stepped through iron gates and thick metal doors until I was in the waiting area. It was about half full.

  I found a plastic chair, sat, aware that people in prison waiting rooms don’t like to look each other in the eye. The truth is, we don’t want to acknowledge why we’re there, the crimes of which our loved ones are capable. It’s not embarrassment. It’s shame, deep and biblical. So we keep our eyes on the floor. We listen with envy to the careless laughter of children, who have not yet learned to feel the way we do.

  When it was my turn, I took my seat in the narrow visitation cubicle. The Plexiglas in front of me was crisscrossed with metal wire. When I’d first started coming here with the family I carried hand sanitizer in my pocket. But one day I realized that there was nothing I could catch in prison that was worse than what I already had, which was a convicted murderer for a son. So now I didn’t bother.

  After a few moments, a guard led Daniel in. He sat across from me. He was pale, and he had spent the last six weeks growing a beard. It was a young man’s beard, patchy in places. He did not have the capacity to grow a great beard. He was a fair-haired kid with a young face. The beard gave him the appearance of a small-town meth addict.

  “It’s time,” I told him.

  “Time for what?”

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  He stared at me dead-eyed.

  “If you did it,” I said. “If you killed him, I need to hear it from you.”

  He stared at me. I realized I was sweating. There were men with truncheons guarding the exits.

  “I don’t have any answers for you,” he told me after a long silence.

  “Danny.”

  He rubbed his nose angrily.

  “You know, it’s okay if you want to come here, if you want to see me, but I’m not going to talk to you about those things. I’m not going to explain myself.”

  “Daniel.”

  He looked at me. What could I say to cross this gap between us? To convince him I was on his side?

  “I know about Hoopler and Cobb,” I said. “The men on the train. If they were involved … if they made you do this …”

  He closed his eyes.

  “We’re done here.”

  Without opening his eyes, he signaled for the guard to come get him.

  “Wait,” I said, panic in my voice.

  He stood, eyes still closed.

  “What did they promise you?” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Don’t come here again.”

  The guard approached. Daniel turned to leave.

  “Daniel, please,” I said. “Daniel.”

  I watched him disappear through the metal door. I sat there as long as they let me, hoping he would come back. But he didn’t.

  The next day I called in sick. I sat in the waiting room for an hour before a guard told me that Daniel wasn’t coming out. The day after that the guard at the gate told me that my son had asked that I not be allowed to visit him. I didn’t care. I drove to the prison every day for two weeks just to be turned away. I sat in traffic. I braved inclement weather. I listened to hate radio, to classic rock, to NPR. I drove to ADMAX so often I saw yellow lines in my sleep. But Daniel refused to come out of his cell. Every day I told the guards to tell him that I’d come. I did it so that he would know—I was his father. I wasn’t going to give up on him. I had made so many mistakes. I had let him ruin everything, but I was still his father.

  The clandestine nature of these visits, their increased frequency, began to feel like an affair. For the first time in my life I understood how it was that a man could take a mistress. It wasn’t the sex. It was the transgression, the act of doing something you knew was wrong. By doing so, in many ways you cease to be yourself. A man builds a life. He starts a family. He loves his children. He likes his job. But one day he meets a woman, and despite
all common sense, he begins to pull his life down brick by brick. Who is that man? Is he the same man who built that life? Or is he another man? An imposter?

  Is he Carter Allen Cash?

  Leaving ADMAX, I drove north in my used Jeep. I stood on the driving range and tried to drop my ball on the 150-foot tee, the 200, the 60. I interlocked my pinkies. I slid the covers from my drivers. I picked dirt from the heads of my irons.

  I called Murray from the pay phone.

  “We have to find Hoopler,” I said. “He’s the key.”

  “Short of joining the CIA,” he said, “I’m not sure what else I can do. The guy’s a ghost. Literally. Meaning he may not even be alive. Cobb’s body was dumped in a culvert. Hoopler could be at the bottom of the ocean.”

  I ran uphill in the heat of the day, breathing through my mouth. At school I kept sporadic office hours. I encouraged my students to e-mail their questions to me. I would answer their e-mails at two or three in the morning, explaining the holes in their diagnostic philosophies, encouraging them to rethink a particular set of symptoms. Insomnia had become just another word for bedtime. After everyone else had gone to sleep, I sat on the back patio and watched the moon shift slowly across the sky.

  If my son wasn’t going to give me answers, I thought, I would have to find them for myself.

  And now they were here.

  In the kitchen, Nadia stood smiling at us, uncertainly. She had yet to fully enter the room.

  “Soda?” she said hopefully.

  I thought about the word for a moment, how it could possibly be relevant to the conversation, and then snapped back to reality.

  “Of course,” I said, moving to the fridge. “I’m so sorry.”

  She took the soda and smiled again.

  “Spasiba,” she said.

  “Isn’t she great?” Murray said, his mouth full of pasta. “I met her at a nightclub. She’s from Minsk. She’s studying cosmetology in Queens. I asked her if she wanted to go to California. I’m not sure she understood we’d be driving.”

  The journal felt like an anchor pulling me down. I laid it on the counter.

  “I don’t think I can handle this,” I said.

  “Put it in a drawer,” he told me. “Burn it. I just wanted you to see it. To know it’s there. For peace of mind, but also, it could help with the appeal, if you decide to go that way.”

  He bit down on a cherry tomato and a stream of seeds squirted onto his jacket.

  “You ever ride a motorcycle, Paul?” he asked, wiping at the stain. “Scares the shit out of me, but I do it anyway. Why? Because I’m a man. Or at least that’s what I need women like Nadia to think. God bless those girls. I’d forgotten how easy it is to get a twenty-six-year-old to take off her clothes. You don’t even have to ask. It’s like a sport to them. What do they care about commitment? Marriage? Last night this chick rode my dick so hard I think she snapped it off.”

  I looked over at Nadia, embarrassed, but if she understood what he was saying she gave no sign.

  “Should I read it now?” I asked, after a moment.

  “Not my call,” he said. “I just wanted you to have the option.”

  CAC. Looking at the initials, I realized that this was not my son’s journal. Daniel Allen. It was his, the other man, Carter Allen Cash, the man my son had become. If I read it would I understand any better the journey that my boy had taken? Would I understand the moment he disappeared? The reason?

  “What’s going on in here?” Fran asked, entering through the kitchen door. Her cheeks were flushed from the outdoors. Instinctively, I opened a drawer and stuffed the pages inside. Murray saw me do it but betrayed nothing. Fran threw her car keys on the counter, gave Murray a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “We have silverware, you know.”

  He shrugged, mouth full.

  “I’m eco-friendly,” he managed. “Think of the kilowatts saved, the water conserved.”

  Fran studied Nadia, who smiled winningly, and made a small cheers motion with her soda can.

  “Who’s this?” Fran wanted to know.

  “That’s Nadia,” I said, helpfully. “She’s Russian.”

  “Did you offer her a chair?” Fran asked.

  I stared at my wife, flummoxed by the question. She smiled patiently at me, but I could see worry in her eyes. Murray had long ago stopped being a source of good tidings in our house. He opened the fridge, shoved the nearly empty bowl of pasta salad back inside.

  “Like I told Paul,” Murray said, “I just decided one night. The great trek. New York to California. I’m doing it. Tennessee was beautiful. Who knew? Next it’s the Southwest. Utah, the Grand Canyon. I showed Nadia our route, but all she knows is that we’re going someplace hot to stare into a giant hole.”

  Fran considered a retort, but instead she reached up, touched her ear. The Bluetooth activated.

  “I’m working on those reservations now, Mr. Colby,” she said, exiting into the dining room.

  Murray wiped his hands on a dishrag.

  “She seems happy,” he said.

  “I’m trying.”

  He took two sodas from the fridge, put them in his jacket pockets.

  “Well, we should hit the road. I told the Russian we’d eat at this sushi place in Vail tonight.”

  I nodded. “You’re more than welcome to … to stay,” I said. “A few days. Whatever you want.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “No,” he said. “This is your new life. You look good. Fit. I’m glad to see it. But I’ve got no place here. I’m just a bad memory. But I wanted you to have, you know, the thing.”

  I felt panicked that he was leaving me here with the journal.

  “I may come to New York next month,” I said.

  “Cool. Call me. We’ll go out. Nadia’s friends with everybody south of Fourteenth Street.”

  I showed them to the door. Nadia handed me back the soda can. “Bye bye,” she said, and gave me a wave.

  At the door, Murray hugged me. His body felt lean and strong, like a wire.

  “My suggestion?” he said, quietly. “Put it on the barbecue and spray it with lighter fluid. There’s nothing in there you don’t know already.”

  “But that’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

  I stood by the open door long after they were gone. I could hear the sound of dogs barking somewhere in the distance. A wind struck up, making the grass shiver.

  Fran came up and put her arms around me.

  “Did you know he was coming?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “They didn’t want to stay, at least for dinner?”

  “No. He said they were gonna have sushi in Vail.”

  She smiled and shook her head, then kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m going to go for a run,” she said.

  It took me a long time after she was gone to work up the courage to open the drawer that held my son’s journal. I had to sidle up to it, moving sideways across the kitchen under the auspices of getting a glass for water. The onus of the journal was too great. Its power to destroy my life. I stood for a while with my hand on the drawer pull. There was an invisible line in front of me. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. If I opened the drawer, if I read the journal, I would have to abandon all pretenses that I had moved on with my life.

  Inside that drawer, quite possibly, was the end of my family. The end of everything.

  But it also held the truth.

  I opened the drawer.

  The name stared up at me. Carter Allen Cash.

  I closed the drawer. I wasn’t ready. But I couldn’t leave it there. It felt wrong, obscene to even keep the document in the house. I opened the drawer again, and grabbed the papers. I hurried out to the car and hid them in back, slamming the hatch quickly, as if to keep something from escaping.

  For the next few days, wherever I went, whatever I was doing, I felt the journal in there, calling to me. I thought about driving s
omewhere and reading it, but the truth was, even that felt too close to home. I was like a man planning an affair, looking to cover his tracks—except in this case rather than cheating with another woman, I felt that by reading the journal I would be cheating on my new family with my old one.

  I tried to ignore it, to forget it, but I couldn’t.

  So I invented a reason to leave.

  A few months earlier, I had been asked to present a lecture on Kawasaki disease at a medical conference in Austin. I’d declined, but now I decided to attend the conference anyway. It felt like fate. Austin was a place my son had spent time. A place that was, arguably, pivotal in his transformation. I would go and read the journal there. I would take one last trip and try to exorcise the obsession, to satiate it, and then cut it off like a limb that has turned black and begun to stink.

  And so, ten days after Murray’s visit, I stood in the bedroom and packed a suitcase. Early the next morning, Fran drove me to the airport. We talked about how the rain gutters needed cleaning. She asked if I would be back in time for Alex’s soccer game on Friday. I assured her I would. I said it was only two days. She said she hated it when I was gone. She never knew when to go to bed. I told her to go to bed at eleven. We kissed in the drop-off zone and she half jokingly suggested a quickie in the parking structure. I told her I didn’t want to miss my flight and opened the door, retrieving my suitcase from the back.

  The flight was quick, just over an hour. I could have driven, but Fran said she didn’t want me on the road for that long. At the Austin airport I sniffed the air. I was looking for subtle changes, an indication that this place was different somehow from all the other places I had ever been. My driver met me at baggage claim. He took Highway 71 to South Congress and headed north. We crossed over Lady Bird Lake, and he pointed out how every night at dusk from May to September millions of fruit bats emerged from under the Congress Street Bridge, billowing like a cloud of smoke into the sky. He dropped me at the InterContinental Hotel. A bellboy took my suitcase.

  In my room, I lay on top of the bedspread and stared at the ceiling. It felt dangerous being here. I had been doing so well. I had been keeping it under control, keeping my two halves separate. By coming here, by bringing the journal, I had broken my promise. To Fran, my kids, myself. I was a liar now, a keeper of black secrets.