The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  She had removed her sandals, rested her bare feet on the side-view mirror, and when GB’s voice had grown strained from having to shout over the noise of the top-down Stingray, she had begun to talk about herself, had spoken, winningly at first, about her own life. How she’d gone to Northwestern, had turned her back on her parents’ wishes that she attend the university where her father taught, their pleas and veiled guilt trips that she continue to live at home with them—as if that were an option that would have resulted in anything other than her killing herself in about two seconds. How she had fallen in love with Chicago, had gotten a job not in her field, which was art history (“Stupid, I know”), but at one of the high rises downtown. Whoring herself to corporate America. Not that she cared. It had paid for her Honda and the brownstone she rented on the North Side, near Wrigley, which she shared with her friends Renee and Chloe and Kate. But here her tone had begun to change; her voice had grown softer so that GB had to lean slightly toward her to properly hear. It seemed Renee’s “issues,” which were spoken of with air quotes and not expounded upon, were not as easy to put up with on a daily basis as they were when she only saw her on the weekends. And Chloe was a total slut and Kate was not much better. Or maybe it had nothing to do with them. Maybe it had more to do with her own life, what she had meant for it to become and what it actually had become, how it had gotten messed up somewhere along the line. Not drastically—she wasn’t some drug addict or something—but that it had spun down to a speed at which she wasn’t sure she could ever be happy.

  GB listened from the driver’s seat as she delivered circuitous and at times difficult-to-follow narratives concerning the foibles of a twenty-something living on the North Side of Chicago, working in one of the big office buildings downtown. The long gossipy lunches in airy chic ballrooms within walking distance, returning leisurely to her cubicle for two more hours of coffee and browsing the net before she rode an elevator ten stories down to the underground parking garage, scanned her card at an upright automated booth, and drove off into the urban afternoon, annoyed at the low-hanging sun, feeling parched and spent, as if she’d just spent the last eight hours as a corpse and awoken to find her real life somewhere far up ahead. It should’ve pleased her, she’d thought, having finally attained the freedom—both financial and physical—she’d always been missing. But she’d arrived to find it empty, her life still not satisfying, did he know what she meant? The days were long when they were spent always, without fail, in an office chair behind a computer screen, getting up to use the restroom and taking every detour you could think of to avoid the heavy plop of touching back down in your leather and vinyl tomb. It was like she couldn’t find anybody that really understood her, the conversations during lunch and after work—at dive bars and bistros, guzzling microbrews—these conversations were clever, entertaining, but never resulted in her feeling anything deeper. The lonely rides home along Lake Shore Drive (half drunk, half asleep, sometimes with some barely known person in the passenger seat giving distracted directions to his or her apartment condo townhouse) were just the inadequate daily coup de grace of a perpetually mundane existence that left her craving something, like ice cream after a salty meal, comfort after all this chilled camaraderie. She was sick to death of the daily grind, bored out of her skull and starving for something different, something that lived far beyond the narrow parameters formed in that house where she’d grown up with its small rooms and the quiet street outside, the dreams and future they’d tried to train her to cling to, the timeline they’d thrown out before her when she was a little girl that had become bunched up like a long runner in a hallway over the years, leaving her confused and capable of responding to that confusion in only one way—by imagining that something more glamorous and real was waiting for her in some parallel life if she could just find the means to arrive there, if she could just stumble upon the moment or the person who could help her break out.

  He started, looked down to see that she’d reclined herself across the seat, was now lying on her back with bare feet still jutting from the passenger side window, the back of her head resting in his lap while she looked up at him, her slim body barely fitting in the narrow space between the seats, threatening to throw the shifter out of gear. He reached forward to protect it—and in his haste, his hand brushed one flattened breast, making her smile up at him. He tried to say he hadn’t meant it, but she was already grinning wickedly, had already raised up to steal a kiss while he fought to keep his eyes on the road, was running her hands along his waist and thighs. Unconsciously, he let up on the gas. He’d been in the process of passing an eighteen wheeler when she’d rolled over in his lap and begun these movements that had filled him with something close to dread, his mind and libido worn thin after all the coffee and booze, after four nights with little to no sleep, four nights of spending every ounce of his energy keeping track of his brother and trying to avoid dwelling on where they were going, trying to forget the confrontation that rested at the far end of this journey and the wreckage he’d left behind. Now the eighteen-wheeler was several lengths ahead on the right, cars beginning to pass him in the right lane with drivers looking at him with exasperation, Julia having lowered her feet to the floor and still waiting for him to respond to her efforts. He wanted to ask them how they thought their driving performance might suffer if they had such a creature in their lap, wanted to ask her why she didn’t just give up. Still, she’d fought against the obvious reality as if it constituted a challenge that would define her. With disbelief she wrestled with him, and he with something between shame and sorrow. Then she stopped moving, her head still in his lap, and lay there silently while they motored past the junction with I-96, past the eighteen-wheeler still puttering along in the right lane, GB accelerating as if it might return her to the enthusiasm she’d shown him earlier, as if it might bring back the woman he’d briefly been able to listen to as she spoke about her life and the girl it had allowed him to imagine. He wanted her to scream at him and throw punches so he could feel what she was feeling and respond to it, wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, to take on the role of consoling father that he so dearly missed, to run his fingers through her hair but not in a dirty way, just as a continuous reminder of his presence, ready to provide what she needed to survive.

  He touched her face and her husky, whispering voice strained up at him. “Don’t.” Then she rose primly and scrunched herself in the passenger seat. GB whispered, “I’m sorry,” but she ignored him. He whispered it again, louder, but she ignored him still. He said it a third time, his hand creeping toward her, and this time she turned to face him.

  “Don’t.”

  IN THE DREAM, HE’D BEEN driving. A scene so little removed from the actuality of these days passed that it had been almost real, the girl next to him no longer the grown-up daughter of his ex-stepmother but his own little Emma, his beautiful, funny daughter who—before she’d gotten to that certain age—had been his biggest fan in the whole world, who’d been waiting for him at the front door every time he came home from scouting trips to smother his face with kisses and ask him to let her ride on his back like a palomino, whose gymnastics meets he’d attended with a pride almost overpowering and in whose aftermath he’d climb down the bleachers to hug her in the glow of her perfection. His lovely daughter Emma who’d done everything with her father, who would’ve ridden to the ends of the Earth with him if only he’d asked, who’d been the one sympathetic person when—on a day he still remembered in her tenth year—she had returned home from gymnastics practice with her mother to find him sitting at the foot of the stairs, face in hands, unable to speak.

  It had been Emma, on that occasion—not his once-beloved wife Tammy, who’d been running late for an appointment—who’d sat with him and hugged him and gotten him to tell what happened, who’d convinced him to give up the information that a phone call had come from someone calling himself the County Coroner of San Bernardino, California, who’d heard then for the first
time—eyes wide, as was her way—the story of her grandmother, locked away in the remote desert for thirty years. It was his dear Emma, whom he’d that night elevated from the status of golden child to goddess, who’d encouraged him to fly out to California to take care of the body. Yes, of course, she’d come along. Oh, Daddy, of course! Yes, I have a meet this weekend. But so what? This is more important. I want to go along with you. I want to be there with you, Daddy, to help you say goodbye to your mommy. It was Emma who’d talked to Tammy upon her return, who’d kept GB’s temperamental wife from flying off the handle when she imagined the expenses that would be incurred for plane tickets for two, who’d convinced her mother that it was a must that she, Emma, get to go along. GB, listening from the other room, heard his daughter’s voice lower to a whisper as she attempted and ultimately succeeded in persuading her mother. The plane tickets had been secured by phone, and it was none other than his perfect daughter Emma who’d listened to him with bated breath as he’d gone on and on in the car on the way to the airport, checking the bags, reclining together in the darkened first class cab of the 747 at cruising altitude, stepping along the corridor at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas and driving the rental car south from the city along the McCullough Range, he drinking coffee until his head spun, she being spoiled with milkshake after milkshake from fast food restaurants along the interstate, whatever she wanted. She was the one sitting with him, smiling at him, trying to keep him sane while the high sun glared off the windshield and made his head ache.

  The body was in San Berdoo, at the county coroner’s office, San Bernardino County stretching all the way from the outskirts of LA to the Nevada line, encompassing the entire Mojave and, though it was a four-hour drive from the city he barely remembered growing up in, the place where his mother had spent the last thirty years. Yet he’d determined, and had told Emma, who’d agreed as she always did (Whatever you say, Daddy) that their first stop must be there, at the Santa Jacinta Home for the Mentally Ill. I have some things I need to clear up with them, he’d told his daughter. Some things I need to resolve. It didn’t add up. All the information he’d been given—right from the time when the phone had rung and the words of the county coroner had made him bolt awake (Am I speaking with Mr. George Benjamin Hill the Second? And are you in fact the oldest son of one Ms. Mary Hollister-Hill?) until the phone calls he’d made to the hospital—none of the information he’d been given made any sense. They said they’d found her in the same chair she spent all her mornings, coffee resting on the windowsill where it always rested while she looked out the window at the desert, a sixty-year-old woman, eyes still open, though glazed, who’d expired, seemingly without pain or fear, from natural causes.

  Natural causes?

  Then why, GB had asked his daughter, who shook her head obediently in response, ponytail swaying, was the county coroner involved? He’d never heard such phony horseshit—pardon my French, sweetie—as the line of bull they’d tried to give him, that all deaths of state hospital patients necessitated an autopsy, that the coroner’s office had sent a deputy out into the desert to attend to the body and have it transported back to the office, that there was really no reason for him to be suspicious, that they had been through this before and truly appreciated his feelings but that it was natural causes and everything had been done by the book, and did he wish for them to ship to him any personal belongings of his mother’s or simply throw them away?

  Throw them away?

  Even through his grief, it had moved him to see his daughter react to his storytelling, the way she half giggled as her daddy’s voice grew more urgent in recounting the phone conversation to her in the car, any story he told first and foremost an entertainment for Emma. Don’t you dare throw them away! I’ll be out to retrieve them on my way to the coroner’s office! He couldn’t imagine what belongings his mother could possibly have, but he’d be damned if he was going to allow them to destroy them, these so-called doctors, these so-called public servants who’d been doing God knows what while his poor mother had been growing lonelier and lonelier out there in the desert. He’d be damned if he was going to let them dispose of the last remaining vestige of the mother he’d tried to visit—oh, he had tried to visit her several times, only to be insulted by smug voices on the phone telling him he had to make an appointment. An appointment to see his own mother! Telling him that after all this time they were worried it might “confuse” her, telling him that they just wanted to make sure she was ready for the “shock” of it. For he had to admit, they’d said, that several years had passed with nothing. He had to admit that this was something he maybe should’ve thought of a long time ago. And so he’d tried to come up with ways to move her east, to remove her from that sadistic hovel only to be foiled by stalwart insurance companies and fake doctors who said they knew best when really they knew nothing at all. Knew nothing about his mother and certainly knew nothing about him, about the various complications that had kept him away. And so now he’d be goddamned if he was going to let them hide the evidence of what he’d convinced himself was the truth, of what anybody with half a brain could see was true: that his mother, thirty years after dragging a knife across her throat right in front of her two sons, had finally gotten up the gumption to try again and, despite the people being paid to see otherwise, had succeeded in finishing the job.

  And this—he said to his daughter, rotating the road map in his lap, trying to navigate while he drove this empty aisle through the desert, his daughter chewing on the straw of a long-empty milkshake, rubbing her fingers on the inside of the paper sleeve that had contained her fries, licking the salt from her fingertips—this screw job by those so-called fucking shrinks (pardon my French, sweetie) this was why they’d been forced to fly into Vegas rather than LA, this was why they’d been forced to spend a whole day trying to find their bearings in the desert, nearly running out of gas, filling up at a lonely pond of asphalt somewhere outside Needles—his daughter curled up in the passenger seat, asleep—asking directions of a toothless man wearing overalls in ninety-degree heat in January who spit tobacco juice on his own asphalt and said he had no idea where such a place might be.

  Nobody knew where it was. He wondered how in the world Annabelle had found it all those years ago. It was as if the place existed only in the voices of people on telephones, was part of some fourth dimension that the hot wind and sand swallowed up during the day and revealed only for five-minute intervals, like sunlight through pinholes in pagan monoliths. It was Emma, beloved Emma, picking at a cheeseburger—years before anyone could have predicted her aggressive vegetarian days, years before it seemed possible she’d one day have nothing to say to her father—who’d pointed out the tiny sign he otherwise would have driven right past at another perpendicular intersection of two desert roads among reservations, who’d unbuckled her seatbelt in anticipation of the serious energies required for them to successfully locate and arrive at their destination, to crack the riddle of the sands, both legs up on the passenger seat and pointing out the ancient building as it rose out of the horizon.

  There it is, Daddy! Look! There it is!

  A pastel fortress on the dunes, though it was not remotely that solemn place he recalled or imagined. It was no longer freezing inside; the employees no longer wore jackets and sweaters; there seemed to be more and better lighting; the people were nicer. The woman at the front desk did not tell him to log his name and have a seat like the receptionist at some overworked physician’s office; she recognized his name immediately and told him to come with her, then led the way—introducing herself to Emma, talking enthusiastically about her own daughter’s gymnastics career—to the top-floor hallway that didn’t seem so dismal to GB, the bars removed from the door leading to the balcony off the hallway, improved security having made obsolete such precautions. Yes, the woman said as she scanned a card at the door, the Santa Jacinta Home had become not such a bad place over the years that had passed since GB had last had a chance to visit. Y
our mother, I’ll go so far to say, was happy here. Content, at least. She even told me a few weeks ago that life had been okay to her.

  The room was devoid of life. All that remained of her time here was a box full of little sculptures and a few paintings she’d done years ago, shiny desert scenes that seemed realistic enough. They’d destroyed it, he’d said to Emma in the car an hour later, the girl looking through the box at what remained of the grandma she’d never met. I can understand you being fooled by their lies, honey. I almost bought it, too. But it’s all false. They’re covering it up. Covering up the fact that my mother committed suicide in their hospital right under their smiling fake happy noses.