by Noah Hawley
I told her I was coming home. That I just had one more stop, and then I would put it all away. I would come back to them, and be the kind of husband and father they deserved.
After I finished there was a long silence. I stood in a gas-station parking lot watching a cornfield shiver in the wind. It was noon exactly. I was a man who wanted nothing more than to make amends, to fix what he had broken, and to learn to live with the things that were beyond repair.
And then, after an endless silence, she said one word:
“Okay.”
And in that moment I knew we would survive.
“I love you,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know you do. We love you, too. Come home soon.”
I climbed back into my rental car and started the engine. On the radio, the DJ said, “This one goes out to everyone who’s ever missed someone.”
He played “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. I rolled the windows down and let the warm air rush over me.
The Kirklands lived on Lackender Avenue, at the end of a long gravel driveway. I climbed from the Ford, stepping out into the midday sun, my back protesting after hours of sitting. After spending the night at the airport I needed to go for a run, to stretch. Instead I walked to the front door and climbed the creaky wooden steps. And then Bonnie Kirkland was standing in front of me in her blue kerchief. I told her who I was, the father of the boy who had lived over their garage for three months. She told me she knew just by looking at me.
“You have his face,” she told me, and invited me in.
We drank sweet tea at a small wooden table between two doors. A ceiling fan spun lazily overhead. The sky outside was cornflower blue. The kitchen windows were open and a light breeze blew in through the screens. I was still wearing my gray suit. It was all I had. My suitcase was at the hotel in Austin, abandoned. There was nothing in there I would ever need again. I asked Bonnie how long ago she’d been diagnosed with cancer.
“Last fall,” she said. “Around the time your boy pleaded guilty.”
It was pancreatic cancer, she said. The doctors were not optimistic. They had removed a tumor and given her two courses of chemo and radiation, but pancreatic cancer is notoriously fatal. Only 5 percent of patients live for five years. Most die in months. I told her I knew a world-renowned oncologist who’d had success with focused radiation.
“I’d be happy to call him,” I told her.
She shook her head. “It is what it is,” she said. “Going to New York isn’t going to change that.”
“No,” I said, “but there are new treatments being developed all the time. Clinical trials.”
She thanked me, but insisted she had made her peace with it.
“It’s a funny thing. I think Ted is scareder than me. I’m determined to embrace it. I’d like to have a May death. May’s a good month for those kinds of things—weddings, babies, funerals.”
“People are always more optimistic in the spring,” I said.
“I find I’m seeing things differently now, patterns in the corn. The ground smells sweeter. I’m noticing textures, the way the shower curtain feels on my fingertips, the way a raisin feels on my tongue.”
We heard footsteps on the stairs and looked over. A girl of about twenty appeared.
“Dr. Allen,” said Bonnie, “this is my daughter, Cora. She dated your boy for a bit at school.”
Cora was a pretty girl with broad shoulders. What they used to call a farm girl. It was a strange thing to watch Cora realize who I was, to do the math: Dr. Allen plus father of a boy she used to date. When she added it up, her normally open face shut down quickly, anger coming into her eyes.
“You can’t be here,” she said. “We don’t want you here.”
I stood.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Cora,” Bonnie snapped. “Don’t be rude. We don’t treat people that way in this family.”
“But, Mom,” she said.
“No,” said Bonnie. “That boy was a good boy. I don’t care what they say he did. And his father has shown us the kindness of a visit. If you can’t be civil, then please go back upstairs.”
Cora kept her eyes on me, the way you watch a snake so it won’t slip into the shadows and come at you from a different angle.
“The doctor said my mother needs to rest,” she said.
“I won’t stay long,” I told her. “I just needed to see this place, to meet your family. I have a family, too, a wife and two young boys. Separate from Daniel. I didn’t want to leave them to come here, but I had to. The not knowing is worse. I had to see the place, to meet the people who took my son in. But I promise, I’m only going to stay as long as it takes me to drink this tea.”
I touched my glass, holding her eye. I could see fear in there but also great sadness.
“You stay as long as you like,” Bonnie said. “Cora, why don’t you get some tea, and join us?”
For the first time Cora looked away. Her mouth was a straight line. “No,” she said. “I’m going out.”
She grabbed her car keys off the counter, took two steps toward the door, then stopped, turned.
“He was a lie,” she told me. “You thought he was just lost, but he was a lie. And we believed him.”
“I know,” I said. “But he’s sorry. He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in him. He didn’t do this to hurt the people he loves.”
“Why else would he do it?” she said, as if I was stupid, and left.
I stood in silence for a moment, listening to the whir of the fan.
“She’s wrong,” Bonnie said. “He was a sweet boy.”
I looked at her. The thing about chemotherapy most people don’t realize is it’s not losing the hair on your head that makes you an alien, it’s the eyebrows, the lashes. Without these markers, the face becomes something other than human. Some people, women mostly, choose to draw their brows back on with a makeup pencil, but Bonnie had left her face raw. It was the sign of someone who had surrendered her vanity, who had come to accept the direction her life had taken.
“Thank you,” I told her, sitting. “No one has said anything nice about my son in a long time.”
She stirred her tea.
“Cora feels responsible for Daniel coming here,” she said. “She says she exposed us to him, like the boy was some kind of flu.”
“You said he just showed up one day,” I said.
Bonnie nodded.
“We thought he was lost, a city kid looking for directions. But he told Ted he wanted a job, and then he said he knew Cora. Looking back, I guess it wasn’t that smart to take him in, a strange kid from another part of the world, but back then it seemed only Christian.”
“I didn’t even know he’d dropped out,” I told her. “For maybe three weeks, until the dean called to ask why Daniel hadn’t been in class.”
“With Cora we prayed she wouldn’t turn into one of those terrible teenagers they warn you about. We were lucky.”
“No,” I said. “You raised her right. Daniel’s mother and I, we got divorced when he was young. He spent his childhood flying back and forth between us, like a tennis ball. I didn’t think it bothered him that much, but clearly …”
She coughed into a napkin. With each cough color came back to her face, but it was only temporary.
“You never know with kids,” she said. “My daddy used to hit me and my brother. It was expected back then. Normal. You spoke out of turn, you got the belt. You broke curfew, you got the belt. I never felt damaged by it.”
“He was a good worker?” I asked. “My son.”
“He was. Conscientious, reliable. And he got along real good with the Mexicans, which surprised us. Well, not surprised, but they’re a pretty close-knit group. Sometimes I’d look out the window and they’d all be out back horsing around. It made me feel good, to think he was fitting in, that maybe he’d finally found a place. It was so obvious he was looking for that.”
The kitchen door opened and Ted Kirklan
d entered, kicking his work boots off on the rough rope mat.
“Hello,” he said, surprised to see a stranger at his table.
“Honey, this is Daniel’s father.”
The smile died on Ted’s face, but he recovered quickly.
“Well, think of that,” he said.
He wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck it out.
“Ted Kirkland,” he said.
We shook. His hands were rough, notched like old wood. I wondered what he thought of mine.
Bonnie got up to get Ted a glass of tea.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“Hush now,” she told him. “How was work?”
“They sent us the wrong boots again,” he said, washing his hands at the sink. “Third time this month. I’m beginning to suspect that Lambry hired that girl for her looks, not her brains.”
Bonnie put another glass of tea on the table, sat heavily. Ted dried his hands on a towel and sat next to his wife, putting a protective hand on her arm. I watched them for a moment, a man who had loved his wife for forty years, a wife who would be dead in months. I could see from his face that he didn’t know how to let her go, and it was destroying him.
“Listen,” I said, “I wanted to apologize.”
“For what?” Ted asked.
“For my son. For that moment when you turned on the TV and saw his face. For realizing the kind of boy you’d invited into your house. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with what he did. If I have. And I wanted you to know that his mother and I, we never suspected he was capable of that kind of … violence. If we had, we would have kept him home. We would have watched him closely, instead of losing track of him, which is what happened.”
I found I couldn’t look at them. I wanted it to be true, what I said, but I wasn’t sure. After all, hadn’t we known, deep down, that any child left unsupervised was going to get into trouble? Isn’t that the point of parenting, to watch them closely, if only to ensure the child knows they are loved?
“Mr. Allen,” said Ted, “I appreciate your coming here. I can only imagine the kind of burden you’ve been carrying around, but you don’t have to apologize to me or anyone. Your son did what he did. Him and only him. People blame their parents for everything anymore, but it’s just an excuse. Your son was a grown man, not experienced, but old enough to know better. This was not a schoolyard lesson you forgot to teach him, unless you never told him ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
“No,” I said. “We told him that.”
“Well then, there you have it. He was a smart kid. He had a good handshake and a ready smile, and he was strong where it mattered. I’ve known a lot of men in my life, and your son struck me as one of the better ones.”
Next to him Bonnie had started to cry, not dramatically, but with quiet sadness. She may not even have realized she was doing it.
“We begged him to stay,” she said. “At least until Christmas. He seemed happy here, and I didn’t understand why he would want to leave. Why he’d want to go someplace he didn’t know anyone, where nobody cared about him.”
“I think that was where he was from,” I said. “He grew up on airplanes. I don’t think he ever felt settled or safe. We tried, but divorce is a kind of hypocrisy, and kids are smart. They know the difference between the life you promise them and the life they have.”
We thought about that for a minute. I thought about my son in his cell. Why didn’t he ever complain about the food, or the treatment, or the fact that he was trapped now, waiting for the footsteps that would walk him to his death? Unless he felt he deserved these things. Unless he believed he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
“Well, if you won’t let me apologize,” I said, “at least let me thank you. You took my son in. You were good to him, and he loved you for it. Maybe more than he loved his actual parents. And I’m glad for that, glad that he found two people he knew he could rely on.”
Bonnie looked at Ted. She had an expression on her face, a pleading look. Ted nodded, go ahead.
“He called us,” she said. “The week it happened. Maybe two days before.”
I tried to process this. My son, who, at that point in his journey, I hadn’t spoken to in weeks, had called Ted and Bonnie Kirkland two days before he murdered a man. “What did he say?” I managed.
“He said he was in California. He’d been all over, Texas, Montana. He told us he’d seen the spot where that lady tried to shoot President Ford in Sacramento, which I thought was weird. He said he was good, except sometimes he forgot to eat. I told him we all missed him. I said Cora would be home in a few days and maybe he should come back for a visit. I told him the Mexicans asked about him. He thought that was great. He asked me to tell them Me cago en la leche from him.”
“What does it mean?”
“I told Jorge that Daniel had said it, and he started laughing. He said it meant something like ‘I’ve had bad luck,’ except not as polite.”
I’ve had bad luck. Was there meaning there? Or just a joke?
“I told Daniel he had to remember to eat. Did he need me to send him some more cookies? He said no. He’d be okay. He said he was in Los Angeles. I knew his mother was there, so I made him promise he’d call her. I told him that all mothers worried about their children. He didn’t want to be a bad son. He said he would. I told him a little bit about how things were here, which was the same. Ted was working too much. Cora was doing good in school.”
“Did he say anything else? Anything about …”
I couldn’t finish, but I didn’t have to. Bonnie shook her head.
“No. He said he’d been doing some roofing, that he was bunking with some Mexicans from the job site. And then I heard him cover the mouthpiece and talk to somebody else. Just a few words, and then he came back on to tell me he had to go.”
“Do you know what he said?”
“No. It was something like Just a minute. I told him to call me next week when Cora was home. I said she’d get a kick out of talking to him. He promised he would. And that was it.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head. Her eyes were droopy. It was clear the conversation had taken a lot out of her. Ted noticed.
“Why don’t you go into the living room and lie down?” he told her.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I knew what tired was until this.”
I watched her look over at her husband. It wouldn’t be long before she stopped getting out of bed. Her strength was leaving her day by day, her will.
“You should eat more ice cream,” I told her.
“Will that help?”
“No, but it’s time to do the things you love. Do you understand?”
A beat. She nodded. I could tell from her expression that she did. Death. I was talking about death.
“I don’t,” said Ted. “What does he mean?”
She patted her husband’s cheek. Her look said it all, and I could see him swallow hard.
“I’m going to go and let you rest,” I said, standing.
Bonnie took my hand.
“It was good meeting you,” she said.
“I’m glad. Please tell your daughter that I said goodbye.”
I pulled my hand back, but she held on.
“Tell your boy,” she said, “tell him I’ll be waiting. Tell him not to be afraid. We are all of us going someplace wonderful, and he won’t be alone much longer.”
I nodded. There were tears running down my face.
Walking me to the front door, Ted said, “You know, she sold all her guns after it happened.”
“Her guns.”
“She collected them. Bonnie took Daniel shooting a few times, out in the country. She believes everyone should know how to handle a firearm. After he killed that man she said she couldn’t look at them anymore. She wanted them out of our house. So I packed them up and took them to a gun show, made almost ten thousand dollars. I wanted to use the mon
ey to buy a new front loader for the store, but Bonnie said no. She said we had to give the money away. So we gave it to Greenpeace.”
He opened the door. The bright Iowa sun blinded me for a moment. Ted put his hand out.
“Get home safe,” he said.
I nodded. There was so much I wanted to say, but he was not a man who wanted to talk about these things with strangers.
“Make her comfortable,” I said. “And then, afterward, change everything. You won’t be the same once she’s gone.”
He nodded.
“She’s the best person I ever knew,” he said.
Outside, I climbed into my rental car, with its bitter cigarette stink, and fumbled for the keys. Tears were pouring down my face, and it was all I could do to put the car in gear and drive away, wheels spinning gravel. I drove until I couldn’t see anymore through the tears, and then pulled over to the side of the road and wept for the first time in years, truly wept, a man in a car that was not his own, in a state to which he had never been, parked on an anonymous stretch of road, weeping, trying to catch his breath, making animal sounds, beating the hard plastic of the steering wheel.
When it passed, when I became aware of other sounds, of a world outside my own grief, I found I had parked beside a willow tree, next to a long stone wall. I got out of the car. The sun was hanging on the edge of the horizon. My legs felt weak. My arms were heavy. I had a jagged, swollen feeling in my throat. The willow stood beside a small cemetery. Grave markers stretched out in a lazy rectangle below a gently sloping hillside. The afternoon sun threw long shadows against the thick green grass. Looking at the gravestones, I knew that this was where Bonnie Kirkland would be buried, in the cemetery that had stood near her house for a hundred years. For her, death wouldn’t be that long a journey after all. A mile, maybe, a short walk down a gentle road.
I thought of my son on his bicycle riding past this place, the wind in his hair, his face tan, his body lean, his soul fat with the loam of good work. I pictured a smile on his face, a smile he didn’t even know he was wearing. They would execute him soon, six months from now, December 14, a week before Christmas. A Wednesday. He would be led down a long hallway in an orange jumpsuit. Prison guards would lay him on a table and slip a needle into his arm. I would be watching through glass from the next room. I would stand as he entered so he could see me, so he would know that I was there, that now, in this final moment, I was where I should have been all along. By his side.