The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  He had been unable to enter the room. And though for months following he had persisted in these painful vigils—had persisted through the autumn and winter in spite of the FOR SALE sign that had appeared in the yard, timing his sporadic visits from his motel rooms so they wouldn’t correspond with the open houses and private showings conducted by Marc, the real estate agent—they had done nothing to soothe his loss. And though he had called Tammy at her new condo, had begged her to please just meet him for dinner, for coffee, she had refused, had found or was fighting to find some way to blame him for what had happened. If only he hadn’t been so demanding of the girl. If only he hadn’t insisted that it was time to give tough love a try. Their arguments over the phone had reached climactic crescendos, knocks on the walls and, on one occasion, on the door of his motel room—the owner, come to throw him out—and so he had taken to those long aimless drives in the Stingray, out into the Everglades or south along the Keys, only to find himself arriving always at the end back in Coral Gables, calling up Tammy to plead with her some more while he drove the streets of Emma’s hometown whose every block was lined with buildings that reminded of her. The Montessori school. The gymnasium where she’d trained. Venues of a past life robbed of their significance and leading him along the memorized series of turns toward home, parking two blocks away and watching the shadow of the FOR SALE sign in the rearview while Tammy’s sobbing escalated. She was crying now, bawling, she couldn’t go on. And it was at this point that she’d handed the phone over to Marc, had put Marc on the phone to tell GB what was what, to tell him about them, about how they were coping.

  Driving north now along the interstate in Michigan with his brother and his daughter’s dog in the passenger seat, he remembered the desolate silence of that night, the moment he’d pressed a button on his cell phone to hang up on Marc, stepped through the shadows and moonlight of what had been their street looking over both shoulders, unlocked the front door with the key they did not know he still had and entered the silver pool of the vestibule on the six-month anniversary of his daughter’s disappearance to find—there on the bare echoing tile beneath the chandelier—the letter that had changed everything. The letter whose message had somehow given him the clarity to sleep—twelve hours of the deepest sleep of his life, curled up on the hard floor of the vestibule. The letter that had made him awake the following morning in that empty house with a new certainty, had made him dig through drawers for the pads of paper Marc kept there for jotting down numbers, for quick mortgage calculations, had made him open up his heart and pour out a reply that was like the loosening of four decades, had made him drop this reply into a blue mail collection box and return then every morning for three weeks, abiding breathlessly, grateful for this new anticipation, for the way it so willingly and conveniently replaced the other. And now, exiting at last at this Michigan city he’d never visited, its streets silent on a Thursday evening, he remembered the feeling when at last it was there, resting on the tile just like the first one had been. The second letter, dropped through the mail slot at the end of its six-thousand-mile journey. The second of what had since become an even dozen letters now stored in the knapsack in the trunk next to the bat bag; an even dozen letters from his half brother, Max, in Alaska, that had picked him up from his sprawling grief and dragged him north to New York City, across Pennsylvania and Ohio and now along these empty small-city streets in search of a phone booth, hearing in the rapture of this silence his brother’s voice, or maybe Marc’s, or maybe Tammy’s or Emma’s, or maybe his own, asking himself just where he thought he was going. Just what did he think he was doing here? A reply whispered under his breath, inaudible in the windy hush of the blanketing night.

  I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re doing here.

  ANNABELLE SANCHEZ-NGUYEN WAS IN THE sixtieth hour of a couch-bound vigil next to the phone when she heard the doorbell.

  It summoned her out of a half sleep populated by nightmarish visions and made her roll off the couch, tripping over the blankets. She had to navigate the narrow pathways, dodging the accumulation of almost twenty years spent within these four walls, too much furniture and junk, the whole house a tawdry museum of memories, photos on end tables and forgotten gifts and keepsakes. In the kitchen, she heard Dat rising, heard him rustling his newspapers, the ice in his martini clinking as he responded to both the doorbell and the sound of her stirring. “Let me get it!” Their daughter, Julia, had come in from Chicago two nights ago, and she too could be heard in the upstairs hallway, closing the door on the bedroom that still contained the decorations of her adolescence though she’d been gone for four years, trotting across the hallway and then down the stairs with a clamor recalled from bygone days. “Who is it, Mom?” Still half asleep, Annabelle stumbled toward the front hall, heard herself asking the same question, a random vocalization of her anxiety though Dat had not yet made it to the door and could not possibly know the answer. “Who is it?”

  The place was a mess. It was not just the last three days. Over the years they’d become lax about keeping the house clean, had gone from proud homeowners to taking it for granted, so much clutter that Annabelle could not help but notice the look of not-quite disgust on Julia’s face when she’d come through the door and given them both reluctant hugs. Six months ago they’d let go the cleaning woman they’d hired twelve years before, had determined that, with both the kids gone, they would combine to keep the place neat and swept and vacuumed and dusted themselves. Since then they’d already marveled at the accretion of half a year’s worth of lint and debris in the corners of the hardwood floors, at the stale smell the place had taken on over the hot summer, windows shut and air conditioning cranking, an atmosphere of repose about which the last three days had made Annabelle hyperaware and scornful.

  She had given up on watching the television some hours ago, though it still rambled on in the background like some overly talkative house guest. She’d determined that the mechanism that brought the whole world to every household was nothing but a torture device, could bring her nothing but more anxiety and reveal to her nothing so specific or important as what was happening with her only son, David, in his first week of his freshman year at NYU, able to see the entire terrible scene from his dorm room into which they’d helped him move only two weeks ago, lugging boxes up cramped staircases and dumping them on the floor, all three of them doing their best not to cry when he’d walked them to the subway that would take them to JFK. In the three days that had passed since the unimaginable had happened, they’d received only one brief phone call from him, full of static and with shouts and car horns in the background, and though they’d called his cell repeatedly and waited by their phone for a response, there had been nothing more. Julia had done her dutiful best at first to take her mother’s mind off it, had made tea and tried to get her to do crosswords—their old standby—but Annabelle had resisted, had known she was being difficult but had remained catatonically planted in front of the television that showed only the same images over and over. When Julia had finished the crossword and inconspicuously made her way upstairs, Dat had come in for a few minutes, had sat on the recliner next to her, which was as close to each other as they ever got these days, had watched the footage with her and offered his running assurances. There was probably just a problem with the phone lines. David would call again as soon as he was capable. They would hear something any minute. He was doing it again. This thing he still did sometimes on the nights he’d awake to find her seated across the bedroom on the window seat, looking silently out at the street. He was trying to get her to explain, trying to reassure her, when all she wanted was to be left alone. Annabelle rested her head back against the couch pillow and closed her eyes. After a few minutes, she got what she wanted. She listened as he stood and made his way back out to the kitchen, where he had his own television. She heard him settle down into the hard chair and flip through the channels.

  At one point she’d thought Dat was the perfect man for her:
a quiet, hardworking, bookish type who never boasted but formed a solid soil in which she could thrive, a gentleman who held doors and brought her snacks and chocolate and flowers, a kind, protective type who always took her at her word and rarely sought anything deeper. She’d been amazed, and strangely pleased, that first night they’d met all those years ago, at how easy it had been to lie to him about herself, surprised at how self-preservation had made her a whiz at inventing narratives and passing them off as reality to anyone who bothered to ask. She had responded to a flyer on a telephone pole in the Somerville neighborhood where she’d been staying, twenty bucks and all she had to do was spend an afternoon at a lab looking at television screens and answering questions. She had not realized at first, when the unsmiling graduate student asked her if she wanted to go get a pizza, that he was asking her out. He’d seemed so diligent and single-minded that she’d thought at first it was merely a continuation of the experiment, and so as they’d stepped outside and walked down the street to the pizza parlor she had made up a story about being in art school, a silly lie conjured on the spot because who the hell was this kid scientist and what reason did she have to tell him anything resembling the truth? What reason did Annabelle have to disclose the information that she had ended up here because California had seemed not far enough away and because one of her old college friends had offered up a sublet spot, a place to crash in the slant-floored back bedroom of a triple decker on Winter Hill?

  She had thought that would be the end of it. But he had surprised her with his persistence, and she had surprised herself with her willingness. So as things had progressed in their tame and nervous way Annabelle had slowly begun to consider words and phrases such as fate and meant to be. Perhaps it was impossible not to begin to associate any fleeting sense of happiness with a serendipitous forever when you were coming from a place like the one she was coming from. Or perhaps it was the story of Dat’s own life, which he’d related to her on their second date: an adoption initiative in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, five thousand Vietnamese children brought to the US and seven-year-old Dat Nguyen plopped down in a middle-class suburb of Syracuse. A story related with an unassuming honesty that made Annabelle cringe just to think of the lies she’d told him, a sense of shame filling her when she’d felt him move bashfully against her for the first time, his arm settling around her shoulders in a way that felt more friendly than romantic, yet also disarmingly endearing.

  They’d been seeing each other for a month when she finally told him the truth, had brought him over to her sublet for the first time and sat him down on the twin bed in that creaking back room and confessed to him that the art student stuff was bullshit, Dat’s face calm and unflinching while she’d spilled upon him the story of what she’d really been doing up in Alaska. And though she had thought while she was saying all of this that he could never possibly want to be with her after he’d heard what she’d done and had done to her, he had again surprised her with his impassiveness. “I can be your second chance,” he’d said to her, and brought his arm around her again, more confidently this time.

  Now, twenty-odd years later, here they were. Two recent empty nesters in a house turned dusty by neglect. A son away at college in a city that would now fill her with fear every moment he spent there. A daughter who lived two states away and grew irritated any time Annabelle asked her when she was coming home again. (“It’s not home for me anymore, Mom. Chicago is my home now.”) A ringing doorbell and all of them responding with shouts, impersonal and distracted, from separate rooms in the way that had become typical over the years. A strange race to the front door where Annabelle knew already they’d find a police officer, hat in hand. Or a neighbor, having gotten the story first in the strange way their neighbors sometimes did. But now that she’d arrived in the hallway, now that she stood at the bottom of the stairs with Julia pausing on the landing above her—“Mom? Who is it?”—Annabelle found that she could almost feel that baseball bat in her hands, could almost feel the constant cold of that cabin and the shadows that had moved through it.

  It was Julia who helped her to her feet, saying, “Mom, what the hell?” with her typical mixture of frustration and concern. But the men were there quickly too, Dat with his hand on his forehead and his face painted with worry, the two men who’d been standing in the doorway when Annabelle had come out into the hall appearing above Dat’s shoulders, faces mysterious but familiar, the sound of a dog barking behind them. She had not really fainted. It was not so much an act as it was the sort of automatic response that had begun in her childhood, way back in sun-blazed Simi Valley, a little girl’s reaction that had progressed throughout college long after she’d known it was wrong—or not so much wrong as simply something a grownup shouldn’t or wouldn’t do. She wished now she could take it back, having realized that it was her momentary appearance of unsteadiness, leaning against the banister with one arm supporting her as she settled down gently on the staircase, that had mitigated whatever awkwardness might have prevented Dat from inviting the men inside. Because he couldn’t just send them away while his wife was sitting in a heap at the foot of the stairs, could he? And they could hardly just leave without trying to make themselves appear useful, coming in to offer assistance as Julia guided Annabelle back to the blanket-strewn couch and made her lie down with her eyes closed. Nor could they refuse Dat’s offer to head on into the living room and have a seat while he fixed his wife a glass of water. And could he get anything for them while he was at it? A beer? The glass of water with a bendy straw procured for Annabelle and a beer in a bottle for the one in the baseball uniform, who sat perched forward on the ancient broken glider in the corner while the other one with the glasses and the sweat suit and the trench coat refused Dat’s offers for a chair to be brought in from the dining room and sat cross-legged on the floor with the chocolate lab asleep against his hip. Annabelle said they were old friends. Old friends from a past life. And she looked at them both for the first time, looked them directly in their eyes. Then she made a great effortful display of sitting up on the couch, Dat leaning forward from his recliner and Julia from the far couch cushion to ask if she needed help.

  Of course, Annabelle knew who these two men were. It had taken a moment to convince herself, but she had known the instant she saw them that they were the adult versions of the two boys she’d once known as her stepsons, whom she’d once driven out into the desert east of LA to visit their mother, whose father she’d followed all the way to Alaska and with whom she’d spent those years she’d been running from when she’d met Dat, the characters who had populated that story she’d confessed to him (and only him, even all these years later) on that night in the back bedroom in Somerville. What a strange group they made, Annabelle thought, looking around the room. But the circumstances gave them enough to talk about, or at least things to say—the television mumbling on in the background providing the most awful icebreaker of all time. Dat broke the initial silence to inform their two guests at great length of the story of David while Julia interrupted to correct and corroborate, her gloominess having vanished the instant it was no longer just her and her parents.

  “We were just there,” the one in the baseball uniform said, and then explained how they’d come directly from New York, speaking with a tense vagueness about their last three days in the car, their crawl across Interstate 80 at fifteen yards an hour, his eyes on Annabelle as if waiting for her to interrupt, waiting for her to tell him he was saying too much. Dat was inquisitive as always, asking his pensive but benign questions about their routes, playing the role of the Midwesterner that he’d learned so well, Julia butting in to ask for details of the scene they’d left behind, digging for gory particulars as always, at which point the bespectacled man in the trench coat, rocking slightly, spoke up to tell them that it wasn’t what anyone thought, that none of this was what anyone thought it was. The rest of them went silent for a moment, waiting to hear what might come next. But he lowered his eyes and returned
his silent attention to the dog, gently patting its head, and Dat took up the conversation again with more of his polite questions, his courteous chitchat, reaching over to retrieve Annabelle’s empty glass, to fill it at the sink and return with another beer for the baseball player, who seemed to Annabelle simultaneously desperate to speak and unwilling to divulge. Or maybe he’d simply understood what she had said earlier and was trying to remain under the safe heading she’d given him. A friend from a previous life.