The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  The television droned on. The old grandfather clock she’d dug up a decade ago at some decrepit yard sale refused to divulge the correct time. When the man in the trench coat, still seated on the floor, seemed to have dozed off, Dat stood up and said he’d get some blankets. There was the couch and there was the air mattress. The two of them could decide. Julia stood and followed him upstairs to help, and for a moment Annabelle sat numb, realizing that it was just the three of them, she and her two former stepsons and a moment of avoided and then forced eye contact, GB leaning forward in the glider, elbows on knees and a nearly empty beer bottle held in both hands, the label torn and removed, Jamie alert and looking at her now through those thick glasses that distorted and magnified his black eyes, even the dog awake and watching her. For an instant they hovered there, all three of them poised, seemingly, on the verge of saying something, of trying to access their shared past, of trying to break this uncomfortable freeze of uncertainty in favor of a moment of recognition and acknowledgment. Jamie ran a hand through his wild hair. GB’s eyes drifted up and off to the left, the sign of someone preparing to speak honestly and from memory. From the heart. His mouth opened, but all Annabelle heard was the phone ringing.

  It was David. It was her son in New York City, wondering why in the hell they’d been so worried. He’d called and said he was fine, hadn’t he? Yes, they said, but they’d lost him. The phone had just cut out. The tension that had built and then slowly alleviated and then built again was immediately relieved by the voice of Annabelle’s son on the phone, though he was clearly dazed and exhausted, barely capable of answering their questions. There were three phones in the house, and listeners were dispatched to pick up the various lines. GB declined, sitting back in the recliner with what appeared to be relief. Jamie headed out to the kitchen with Dat though he didn’t contribute much more than a cryptic question or two. When the phone call ended—when they’d finally finished expressing their thankfulness and when David had told them he had to go (“Seriously, Mom, I can’t talk much longer.”)—Dat set about inflating the air mattress and Julia set up the blankets on the couch and then they headed upstairs together with Annabelle while the guests remained in the living room in front of the television. In their bedroom, Dat placed a hand on Annabelle’s shoulder—that same friendly, endearing touch from their second date—and then sat down on the bed to take off his shoes.

  “You did fine, darling,” he said. “You did just fine.”

  This was what life was like with Dat. This was what he provided. A blanket of protection that did not exactly keep you warm though it did keep you comfortable, or at least allowed you to feel hidden from the things you feared were still out to get you. He had proven a respectful man, attentive when he needed to be, and if their own relationship had gone through the loss of passion that was common enough at their ages, there had remained throughout a calm comfort between them. Annabelle could look around this house, with its keepsakes and corridors of memory, and feel something like contentment. “I can be your second chance,” he’d said to her all those years ago. The sort of thing men said all the time but never meant. But Dat had meant it, had done what he could to help her transition between the life she’d left behind and the one he hoped to help her begin. It had been his idea that she contact Max and Maddie, and it had been Dat who had consoled her after she had received the full brunt of her son’s fury, a fury that she had expected and knew she deserved, though it still leveled her. It had been Dat who had comforted her again after the trip to Vegas, after the shock and strain of seeing her daughter again had proven too much, after all the things she’d hoped to be able to say to Maddie had gone unsaid, her desire to make amends or at least speak of it in a way that might prove productive not strong enough to overcome the strange mix of resentment and postured acceptance she and her daughter seemed doomed to show each other. Then had come Julia and a series of phone calls to Maddie that had gone unanswered. Then had come Dat’s full-time appointment at the university, nearly simultaneous with the news that Annabelle was pregnant again, David born just one month after they’d bought this house that over the eighteen years since had become a home. Then had come occasional phone calls from Maddie, her voice slurred, her intentions uncertain. When Julia had grown old enough to start answering the phone, to start asking Annabelle who Maddie was, and why she kept calling, Annabelle had struggled to decide what to do next. In the end, she had not had to do anything. The phone calls had stopped on their own. And though she had quickly gone from wishing they’d stop to wishing they’d start up again, Annabelle was never able to pick up the phone herself, could not face the daughter whose future and whose present she could not help but feel to blame for.

  How do you leave behind a life? Annabelle had asked herself this question often in the years that had passed, had imagined the horrified looks neighbors and friends would give her if they knew about it, if they knew her secret history. But the answer was simple. The answer was you found a new one.

  Still, beneath it all was a constant regret, a private compulsion that made her feel the need to look back on those years, a sorrow that returned to her, later that night, as she climbed out of bed—quietly, so as not to disturb Dat—and stepped over to her window seat. She had become, somewhere along the way, a keeper of things. She was a hoarder, as evidenced by the cluttered living room, the countless keepsakes and souvenirs that adorned all the rooms like a layer of memory. But she was also a keeper of secrets. There was a linen closet upstairs—the same closet that Dat and Julia had retrieved the blankets from earlier—and it was in this linen closet that Annabelle had discovered, one day not long after they’d moved in here, almost two decades ago now, that there was an additional drawer way in the back, a drawer that seemed invented for purposes of concealing things not to be accessed lightly. That day all those years ago, with Julia in her playroom and David across the hall in his crib, and Dat two miles away at office hours or crossing the quad to a classroom, Annabelle had known that this would be the place where she’d hide everything, the place where she would put every memento or detail she found about that old life: the collection that had begun with the little crayon-written note from his first wife and had grown to include newspaper and magazine articles about him, the rare letter from Maddie, a postcard of Alaska she’d seen once and felt compelled to cling to. She would take these little pieces of that old life and tuck them away in here, a compartmentalization of the heart. A cramped little space at the back of a closet to store the past in a world that forged inexorably forward. A quiet place to go back and stay for a bit while you fought to maintain the appearance that you were moving forward, that you had left it behind.

  Sometimes, late at night, when she sat at this window seat looking down on the street where they’d lived for the last eighteen years and the side yard, she would see images from the past. She would see Julia and David diving in leaf piles in the yard, or bundled up in layers and trudging through the snow of a lost Christmas Eve, on their way downtown with her to last minute shop for Dat. She would see a giant field behind a tiny cabin in Alaska, a hospital waiting room where she sat looking up at a television positioned high on a wall, the view out a bus window on way her south to Anchorage with one child left behind and another departing for a parallel life. She would stare out this window and watch thirty years and more play out in an instant while her husband’s deep breaths issued behind her. She would look out through saddening eyes until the details of the yard and the street blended into nothing more than a colorful pastiche, like something hanging on a wall in a museum, and only then would she be able to fall asleep, would come awake in the morning still twisted on the bench seat, her cheek cold where it rested against the glass, her neck stiff.

  It was a shock, at first, to notice him out there. A form materializing out of the shadows of this scene she knew so well, a figure standing next to one of the stately elms across the street while the dog sniffed at the fire hydrant. Reflexively, she backed away from th
e window, ducked behind one of the curtains though he was not looking up at her, though the lights in the room were off and from the street her little perch would appear as nothing more than another darkened window. He hesitated for another moment, then tugged gently on the leash and started off through the darkness, Annabelle’s heart suddenly racing.

  In that moment downstairs, when they’d been alone together, the first thing she’d felt was fear. A fear borne of guilt and shame but also that they might blame her or expose her, that their reasons for being here might not be benevolent. But as they’d sat there, the three of them, the tension like something hard and frozen between them, she had seen that they had no clear idea what had brought them here either. They seemed as lost in this moment as she was, not vengeful specters from her past at all but more like trapped ghosts wandering, looking for a way to escape, guided by some force they couldn’t understand, no different from the forces that had once swept her to Boston and then to this little college town in Michigan where she’d helped Julia and David with homework and tended to them when they were sick and gone to their school plays, had cooked Thanksgiving dinners and made doctor appointments and watched the decades of her second chance spin by through the late-night transparency of this window seat.

  She looked over her shoulder, saw Dat still fast asleep in the bed. Looked back out to the street, but the shadow of the man in the cloak was gone.

  She had no idea what she was going to do with them tomorrow, but the strangest thing was she wasn’t worried about it. Two decades of fretting and trying to conceal and justify this secret thing inside her had somehow been alleviated by these two men appearing on her doorstep and sitting awkwardly in her living room for a few hours. All these secrets and betrayals, these selfish acts produced in the simple engine of need—they were only what they were. They were nothing more. If anything, the years had dulled their edges, had made the space around them safe for something other than regret. Perhaps there was a value to the past, Annabelle thought to herself. Perhaps it was not always something to be feared, full of repercussions to be anticipated and dreaded, an artifact to be tucked in a hidden cabinet and forgotten. Perhaps you could learn to live with it instead of spending your life running. Seated there on the window seat, looking out over their suburban street, Annabelle Sanchez-Nguyen felt her body shudder and the tears well up, but what she felt this time was different. It was not sorrow or guilt. It came from the same place, but it was deeper and more complicated. It was something like courage. Something like love.

  She knew she still had Maddie’s number around here somewhere. In fact, she knew exactly where she’d kept it.

  THE SNAKE WAS RESTLESS.

  One hour before dawn, and he was prowling the streets of this small city, accompanied by a leashed dog he didn’t remember acquiring. The houses looked so dark at this hour, tucked far back on shadowy lawns in a way that felt strange for someone so used to the claustrophobia of New York, neither taxi horn nor nighthawk shout to be heard. He was trying to piece it all together, the tangled webs of engagement and loyalty that had revealed themselves on this onerous and confounding mission. The debriefing held at the suburban home occupied by the three low-level operatives masquerading as husband and wife and daughter had introduced new avenues of tension and uncertainty, had made the Snake question where one lie ended and another began, where they overlapped and contradicted. And the meeting he’d had afterwards—the meeting from which he’d now fled along these streets in a fluster of confusion, trying to find his way back—had made him question everything he’d already begun to question.

  He’d snuck away after midnight, just long enough after the phone call had come in from the senior investigator back in the city—or rather, the teenage kid they’d commissioned to serve as his mouthpiece. They’d led the Snake to a sequestered quiet room and forced a cordless phone into his hand and there was the voice of the kid, relaying the messages in a code the Snake recognized immediately, telling him to locate the first guidepost that had been concealed in the high grass of a fire hydrant across the street. Informing him that he should be at the indicated location by half past one. To make sure he wasn’t followed. The Snake had waited another hour, ready for any last-minute surprises, and then snuck out the backdoor with the little clock on the microwave showing it was close to one in the morning. Plenty of time to make it across the city.

  The boy on the phone had been using an older code. But the directives, once he located them, had been clear enough, had led him along residential streets until they began to give way to dark buildings of cinder block and concrete, weedy lots like glades with cracked pavement and regions of shattered glass, disused roads pockmarked by potholes and adjacent to the fetid river. Though it was night the moon was high over the line of trees across the water and reflecting, illuminating the green rusted metal bridge that loomed up ahead and then took shape beneath his feet, the Snake entering a parkland by an unlocked gate and climbing a hill, then continuing down a short, steep decline into a wet ravine cloistered by weeping willows and sprawling oaks, a one-lane road of gravel and dirt lit occasionally by the dull watery light of arc lamps, the asphalt undulating at its edges with roots and age, a mist lowering into the ravine so that the Snake heard the footsteps before he saw their source. The click of firm, expensive shoes up ahead seeming to generate out of the silence, materializing in step with the sound of the dog’s leash as it jostled.

  The Snake stopped in his tracks and stared straight ahead at the shadow that had formed fifty feet away in the fog. The shape of a man and, now, a voice cutting through the moist air.

  “What’s with the dog? That ain’t one a them bitin’ dogs, is it?”

  The Snake didn’t know whether to walk forward or wait. He didn’t know whether to lie or run. The figure approached slowly through the mist, his expensive shoes echoing, a stride the Snake recalled though it had been decades, a posture somehow both confident and reluctant, as if trying too hard not to slouch. “I know that dog,” he said. “That’s GB’s dog.” And the leash slipped from the Snake’s grasp, the dog rushing away as if drawn by some primal magnetism, crouching at the man’s feet to be scratched behind the ears, smiling with snout held high. “Come on,” the man said. A subtle nod of his head back toward the mist that had revealed him. “I want to show you something.”

  The Snake felt for the shank in his pocket but it was gone. Of course he had known this could be dangerous. Had known as soon as he’d stepped out into these unknown streets that he was on enemy territory, that the advantage he possessed always when these meetings took place in the city—the advantage of being able to duck away through the undergrowth and disappear toward the lesser-known exits—was gone here on this winding path that seemed to descend endlessly through this forgotten slice of parkland, leading down and down until the man paused up ahead, the dog stopping abruptly while he seemed to get his bearings, stepped over to the woods and peered through the trees. “Ah,” he said, looking back at the Snake. “Here we are.” He stepped up onto the embankment in his expensive shoes and suit and disappeared, the Snake hustling to follow so he wouldn’t lose him, but there was no need. As soon as he’d climbed the rise of land he could see it, a clearing opening up perhaps thirty feet ahead, the man standing at the mouth of the dense overgrown woods and gesturing the Snake forward.

  “Remember this place?”

  The huge field behind the cabin was awash with wildflowers and they stepped out into it together, through the drift of an Alaskan breeze scented with snowmelt and isolation. Against a stool that rested where the yard gave way to the untamed field was the rifle, an old box of ammunition resting in the grass. “Now you remember.” The man removed his suitcoat and tie and pegged them to the clothesline, retrieved a pack of smokes from the inside pocket of the coat and ignited one with his Zippo, the cigarette clenched between his lips as he crouched and reached into the ammo box.

  The Snake was perplexed, the dog beside him panting and grinning. “D
o you still live here?” he asked, and the man responded with a pff sound. Their voices seemed to echo unnaturally. “Heck no,” the man said, finished laying the shells across the magazine and slid the bolt. “This bit in Alaska is long ago wrapped up. Finished up that pipeline and stood on the pier at Valdez and watched the first tanker cruising out into Prince William Sound with a ticker tape parade going on behind me, and you know what I felt? Not a moment of satisfaction. Well, maybe a moment. Took a sip of some cognac someone was passing around and said to myself, ‘What the hell’s next?’”

  He raised the rifle and pulled the trigger. The shot sent a violent tremor echoing across the field, reverberating all the way to the distant mountains and back; then it was swallowed up by the deep silence. The man stood with the rifle still raised, watching. He lowered it and handed it to the Snake. “I guess you’re probably wonderin’ what I been up to, huh?” It wasn’t really a question at all, though it carried the implications of one. The Snake stared at the rifle, glanced toward the cabin expecting to see little faces glaring out at them, but there were none. The cabin was decrepit, boarded up, clearly abandoned. The man had sat down on the stool now, arms resting on his knees, an old beer can in one hand. “I headed down to Texas for a while, but I ran into some trouble down there. Too smart for my own good, you might say. Dumped it all and headed up to Nebraska. Now I’m thinking about buying this place out in the country. You may have thought you were rid of me that day you marched off south from Fairbanks. Off to the military. Well, I let you go. Just like your brother, you were seventeen and had everything figured out and what was I supposed to do? Chain you to the furnace? I guess the military must not have worked out so hot, judging by you’re wearing civvies and your hair’s longer than a girl’s.”