The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  The old man had had a stroke, and though the doctors at the hospital in Tulsa had spoken hopefully of his already startling recovery, Amelia June Simonton-Smart had known immediately that too large a part of him had perished. They’d never seen a stroke survivor who had retained such control of his motor skills, had found his bed empty the first night only to locate him marching obstinately along the halls, had found him in the bathroom in front of the mirror with IVs dangling from his arms, one side of his face twisted in a scowl. On the other hand, his cognitive skills had born the full brunt of the damage, and though anything was possible—so they said—it seemed likely he would remain in this stricken cocoon for whatever interval remained of his life. He could still form thoughts, the doctors had told her, could perhaps imagine the words that would give them substance, but he could not speak and probably never would again. Which meant that the next-to-last memory Amelia would possess of his voice would be the confrontation they’d had the previous Monday evening, the day she’d spent pacing the long halls of the mansion she’d called home for the past four years, the evening she’d gathered the courage and stepped to the double doors behind which his oval office overlooked the south lawn, had entered to find him seated at his desk, the curtains behind him pulled against the flanks of reporters who’d parked their vans right there on the grass beyond the hedgerow, and had listened while he attempted to win her back, while he wept and confessed to her that it was all true, that everything she might have read in the papers or seen on the television—all the monstrous tales of his company run amok, of financial disaster like never seen before—was all true. And that, yes (tears in his eyes and a catch in his voice), these were dark times, but that he had a plan for the recovery of the company and their lives, a plan that would bring Jacob back from wherever he’d disappeared to and restore their lives here on the three-hundred-acre horse ranch, that he would not give in to these people out in their yard, that he had never given in to anyone and didn’t plan to start now.

  Looking back, she thought she could detect in his voice already the slurs and inconsistencies that might have warned her of what was to come, his voice not so precise and his movements herky-jerky, his fist that struck the table quivering, as if some essential circuitry in his brain had corroded. The way he stood up, half stumbled to the window and threw the curtains open, revealing the lawn bedecked with lights and movement, men sprinting up from the shadows to stand beneath them and snap photos of this figure she still couldn’t believe was the man she’d briefly acknowledged as her father. Arms spread as if basking in his own shameful publicity. She’d fled the room, had searched for and eventually found Jake alone in his closet, sitting on one of the shelves playing his videogame, had tried to hide in there with him, to take comfort from their solidarity, only to have him shrug her off and march out into his room and from there into the hallway, leaving her holed up in her bunker away from the world, practicing the same angry distance he’d shown her since his father had vanished, since Jacob had intimated to Amelia on a Friday night two weeks ago that something awful was coming, something that would take him away for a while, the two of them talking in bed in a way Amelia had known was bad. Jacob was one who fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, unless he wanted to have sex, in which case he fell asleep immediately following his orgasm. He always slept on his side, curled up. When Amelia had seen him lying on his back, hands joined atop his chest in a false pose of comfort, she’d known he had something bad to say.

  The next day he’d been gone, their son downstairs on a Saturday morning, sitting cross-legged on the rug in the middle of the living room floor, playing his handheld videogame with his laptop singing music in front of him, face-to-face with the dark mirror of the television that he hadn’t turned on yet, waiting for his father to arrive so they could watch Saturday morning cartoons together (their one weekly activity), she having to come in and make the boy understand that it would not be happening today, that his father had to go away for a while, but that she would watch cartoons with him, if he wished, a conversation that had turned the boy to a venomous little demon who wanted his daddy, who didn’t want to watch TV with his mommy, who punctuated each word with a punch to her chest as he screamed, I … want … my … daddy!

  As Amelia June Simonton-Smart crouched in her son’s closet, she thought that if it weren’t for fathers, women could raise sons worth knowing, worth respecting. If it weren’t for fathers, sons might grow up to be loving, secure, gentle, thoughtful, nonviolent people. If it weren’t for fathers, mothers might get a chance, and if mothers got a chance, kids might not all be so wayward. Her own situation, for instance. Why had she driven all the way out here? Why had she spent so much time and energy? Why had she been so fixated—at a time when she should have been preparing to go to Swarthmore; she’d gotten in, after all—why had she been so intent on finding her real father? Was it because the one she’d known, the one she’d grown up calling Dad, had failed her? Had she thought that next to that imposter, her real father could not fail to appear striking, rich, good-looking, and successful? Instead, he’d been old, stiff, stodgy. He wore cowboy hats and looked ridiculous. His arms were too long, accentuated by the long-sleeve dress shirts whose cuffs he refused to unbutton and roll up. To other women he somehow came off as charming, had them laughing in seconds; to her, he could barely get out a sentence, was cautious, insecure, was terrified of her, as if he’d known the instant he’d met her that she bore some distorted understanding of him that—if discovered—could bring him down. Of course, this had not been her intention, had never been in her mind when she’d driven out here and surprised him at work in front of all his board members and fallen in love with his CFO, the young genius with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. She’d meant to get to know him and, in the process, find out something about herself, had meant to blow into his life like a stray breeze—like a character in a Kerouac book—and blow out again before he knew it, leaving him wanting more. She had never imagined herself staying here for four years, settling down, getting married and pregnant (and even if these events had taken place in Vegas, they still had taken place, they hadn’t stayed in Vegas as was generally promised). She hadn’t planned to become a wife or a mother, hadn’t meant to find herself four years later still living in the east wing of this immense mansion in a suite that—at eighteen, single, armed with a credit card and an empty summer—had seemed palatial; that now seemed overrun with Jake’s toys and Jacob’s dirty clothes, remnants of the man she wanted to forget, reminders of the life she couldn’t.

  She’d awoke, still in the closet, the following morning, her entire body stiff, and had stepped along the lush and columned hall beneath chandeliers to the sweeping staircase, had descended to find the house empty, the limo gone, the phone ringing and an unidentified voice on the other end telling her that her father—that toppling tower of a man she’d last seen only twelve hours ago standing with arms spread before a window and a dozen photographers scurrying on the lawn—was in a hospital room in Tulsa, in critical condition, recovering (so said the frazzled voice on the other end of the phone) from a massive stroke.

  It had taken her half a day to put it all together, to figure out all that had happened while she’d slept, curled up in her son’s cramped bedroom closet. He’d run away. Had stood in front of the window the night before promising he’d find a way to make things right, then had gathered his belongings while she slept, had taken her only son and absconded, leaving her to deal with the mess. Had somehow gotten the limo past the reporters and on the road to the airport, where he’d boarded a flight with the boy to God knows where, a flight that might be landing right now, halfway across the globe, the two of them vanished for good, had it not been for the other thing that had happened while she’d slept, the spectacle with which she’d been inundated the instant she’d turned on the television and that had resulted in the all-flights-grounded command that had foiled her father’s attempts to flee.

  She’d set
out that same afternoon. While the rest of the country was glued to their televisions or out buying flags, she’d packed up her BMW for the four-hundred-mile trip south along the interstate between Omaha and Kansas City without even a road map until she’d picked one up for a buck seventy-five from a gas station fashioned from a trailer in a dusty used car lot. Four hundred miles across the empty plains of the heartland to pick up her son and the father she wished she’d never found, through the lengthy flats of western Missouri and the Ozarks to a place called Oklahoma, a place she’d never visited and hadn’t planned to, though she’d heard him reference it several times as his birthplace, the place he’d fled decades ago to begin the life that had stretched from California to Alaska and now was ending here, in a hospital bed right back where he’d started. She’d noticed the difference as soon as she’d seen him, had been taken first to her blue-eyed son seated in a dim lounge down the hall from his grandfather, settled on a couch from which the nurses told her he’d not budged, had been sitting for the past twenty-four hours, barely eating, barely sleeping, reluctant to speak, fixated on his handheld videogame and staring at his laptop. A doctor had sat her down in an adjacent room, had explained to her all that she could expect from a victim of such a serious stroke, suffered just as his plane had been forced into an emergency landing in Tulsa, a situation that her son, sitting across the hall throughout this explanation, had witnessed in its entirety. The doctor had told her that she should be ready for an individual completely incapable of taking care of himself, should perhaps consider hiring professional assistance, to which she’d nodded as if intending to consider it. In fact, she’d determined immediately that this would be her course of action, for she had no intentions of staying in Omaha another month, another week, had felt while on the road—even on these rinky-dink interstates—that necessary pull of travel, had felt the urge to leave it all behind, an urge Jacob had suppressed in her for four long years. An urge that—with him gone, seemingly for good—she knew she stood no chance against. An urge she wasn’t sure why she’d fought in the first place.

  For three days she’d sat around the hospital, listening to the dismal words of doctors and waiting for them to set him free, for them to tell her it was okay to take him back to Omaha and the ranch, three days during which she’d watched fifty hours of television, the news coming in from the wreckage, search parties still digging for survivors, her father’s name suddenly absent from the headlines, eradicated as if he’d never existed, his fifteen minutes of unwanted fame made irrelevant by a group of terrorists with box cutters, staying up late watching newscasters on endless loops, looking across an empty hospital waiting room at her son, who seemed not to have noticed a thing: not his grandfather in his stale blue bed, not the country turned upside down. Not a thing.

  The return trip had been arduous, made on this Saturday in September, the late morning sun as they headed northeast on the Will Rogers Turnpike coming through the window of the car to land on her father’s sallow face, the boy in the backseat as always immersed in his own world, Amelia June Simonton-Smart carrying on a conversation with a man the doctors had told her may or may not understand a word she was saying. And his reactions were no accurate gauge of his comprehension either. He seemed to grin constantly, this man of seventy who suddenly looked his age and then some, would smirk as she tried to explain to him her desire, her need, to get out, to do something with her life, her plan to remove herself from the domesticity she’d somehow found herself married to these last four years, though it had never been what she wanted. Her plan now was to travel, she told him, to take the boy and travel. It didn’t matter where. As long as it was far from Omaha, far away from Washington, DC.

  She’d spilled this out to him, unwilling to look at his reaction. Then when she’d finished—when she’d unloaded in her oblique way all the resentment she’d decided to heap upon him—she’d heard a chuckle escape his lips, had looked over to find the old man laughing. They’d warned her about this, had told her he might laugh at inappropriate times, might cry without provocation, had told her that it had nothing to do with emotions anymore, that it was just faulty mechanics, synapses gone haywire and firing randomly. She’d watched him laugh and had fought back the urge to laugh herself, had heard Jake in the backseat giggling and shot a glance in the rearview at the boy she hadn’t heard laugh since his father had left, his face puckering up in mock seriousness when he noticed her watching.

  Two hours later the old man’s mindless laughter had been replaced by tears. It was afternoon by that point, the three of them having entered the southwest corner of Iowa, only an hour away, the sun having flipped sides and now shining through the windows on the driver’s side, Jake lying down in the backseat, taking a nap when the noises began in the seat next to her. She’d feigned ignorance, had pretended that she didn’t hear him, that she didn’t notice the looks she’d at first thought were an attempt to get her attention, but that she soon realized were part of some search for an explanation. Why am I crying? he seemed to be asking her, a question for which she had a hundred answers and no response. It was out of these tears, out of this great purging of whatever synaptic patterns still lingered in his brain, that had come the words they’d told her would never come, the words that constituted his final attempt at communication, spoken as they crossed the Missouri at Council Bluffs and Omaha, the old man pointing up ahead at the cluster of high-rises in the downtown half a mile from the river, pointing unmistakably—though at first she denied it, imagined it impossible—gesturing persistently at the building that had been his, a grunt turning to a word: Office! And then the word becoming a sentence, a request: I want to show the boy my office!

  That was how she’d come to spend the remainder of that late afternoon in the hallway on the top floor of the high-rise from which her father and her husband had conducted their vague business, restless and pacing, her uncertainty at just what was going on behind his closed office doors making her take time-killing measures. Up and down the elevators for no good reason at all, stepping out onto random silent floors into an atmosphere of palpable guilt, the whole building an empty tower of apprehension, a sense of indelible filth that was still with her hours later as she drove them out of the parking garage and into the night, the man and the boy and the city gone quiet, exiting off the brightly lit interstate to the surface roads leading back to the horse ranch. Amelia June Simonton-Smart wanted to ask the two of them what they’d done, what sort of information had passed between them. The headlights sliced through the fog that had collected in these lowlands above the river. The gate was still unlocked and now ajar, though she didn’t pay it any mind. She was too busy thinking about the man at her side and the boy behind her. She was so preoccupied with these thoughts that she didn’t notice the blue Buick parked along the side of the road in front of the main stable until she saw a form emerging out of it, a form she at first took for Jacob before realizing it was a woman, a figure she then took for some crazed media person until she’d seen the disheveled clothes, the scraggly hair, the pale skin and dark eyes of a gaunt wraith, racing out in front of the headlights with both her palms held up to them, telling them to stop.

  MADDIE HILL HAD BEEN SITTING in the driver’s seat of the Buick with her forehead resting against the steering wheel when she’d seen the headlights approaching in the side-view mirror. She had put the keys in the ignition ten minutes ago, but she had not yet been able to turn them to start the car. She had not yet been able to do this thing she was going to do. It has to be them, she thought. It has to be GB and Jamie. Who else could it be? The whole place was deserted, the surrounding pastureland and fields so dark and featureless that she’d thought—at first, when they’d pulled off the main road an hour ago and drove along the narrow path between two fence lines—that they were in the wrong place. She had thought this until Max had directed the car on the wide turn around the copse of trees that shielded the property from the road and she had seen the expanse of it opening up before
her.

  It was huge. Too immense for description. Not just the house but the grounds that surrounded it, the twelve-foot brick wall with the single wrought-iron gate Max had been surprised to find unlocked, the narrow road extending between lampposts toward the far-off mansion. Of course she’d recognized the white-painted sandstone and the Georgian style, columned and centered by portico, a low row of hedges and fountains bracketing the lawn, large trees and a rose garden. And of course she had heard stories of this marvel her father had built, features on television programs about the households of the extravagantly wealthy, stories that had been passed along and reiterated by the journalists and gossip-mongers like Prince Dexter in whose faces she’d occasionally been forced to spit when they showed up on her doorstep in search of a story, in search of anything. She’d stared senselessly over the grounds as darkness fell, Max maneuvering the Buick along the arcing dirt road that led to the house, his eyes predatory over the flat landscape of fenced-in fields—empty, all of them, but for the rare gelding that raised its head to watch them—the windows in all the stables and outbuildings dark, the entire three hundred acres abandoned, though the white walls of the main residence reflected the growing harshness of the stars, the moon.