The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  One of these days, I’ll come home and tell them that I’ve found something, that someone has agreed to hire me. And then we’ll have to face it for real. Then she’ll know for sure that her forty-three-year-old daughter has moved in with her, and we’ll be able to face together the fact of what we are: two women living calm, boring, redemptive lives in a college town in Michigan. We’ll go out shopping and go to dinner together. We’ll sort the mail on the kitchen table, provided I ever bother to get mine forwarded. We’ll settle in and maybe watch some TV, maybe take trips together. Mom says she’s always wanted to see Italy.

  Sometimes, alone in the house, or taking little walks down toward the river, I think back to those five days I spent with my brother, five days immersed in his rage and the paralysis it created in me. I think about what I might’ve said and how a stronger person might have made a difference. I try to think of ways I might’ve stopped him or made him reconsider. But then I think about the person I was then and the person I am now. Two years clean and sober. I think about how other versions of myself—the girl I was in Alaska, the woman I became in Vegas—might have been in that house with him, with all of them. And then I think maybe that’s why I was there. So I could see that car approaching along the driveway and run out in front of it before it could get any closer to that mansion and what was inside it. If I had followed my instinct in Denver and fled back to Vegas, if I had bought a train ticket instead of getting back in the Buick with him, would I still be here today? Would Amelia and Jake?

  And then, inevitably, I think of him. I try to picture him as he moves about that beach house in Monterey, windows open to a breeze and the sound of the surf, his attendants with whom he has come here not around, having stepped out to buy them all some late dinner, or bottles of wine—for reports indicated that he was alone when his death took place, that they had returned at some time just after midnight to find him lying in the bed, on his back, calm and composed, hands joined on his chest. Standing on the riverbank, I try to imagine what might go through his muddled mind as he steps around that airy beach house; if he thinks at all about what he might say, if he could say anything, to any or all of us. I wonder, as I watch him turn out the light in the living room, carry his tumbler over to the kitchen and place it in the sink, step in his robe back along the hallway to the bedroom, to what extent, even now, he allows himself to realize all he has achieved and all he has ruined. As he lies back on the bed—hands joined over his chest as he looks out the French door leading to the deck and down a few wooden steps to the beach and the tide a hundred feet away—I wonder if he hears the front door opening, his handlers searching for him, if any of these things register. If, in his confused state, he thinks for a moment it might be one of us. I wonder if he lives to hear them coming through the door and into the bedroom, if he hears them saying his name. Or if he has by this point left his body, is watching now from afar, from the ceiling, or from the wind-tossed air above the ocean, watching not for their reaction, but to see how the whole ceremony is coming off. Whether or not the moment seems worthy.

  I place my hand upon the blown glass doorknob of what is now my bedroom in my mother’s home. It opens with a whine, though I try to do it softly. I step into the dark room. I sit on the bed and think about views and reality, the little lairs where children grow to become human beings. I think about lives and dreams, and what happens when you stop trying to live with a capital L. I try to decide if it’s a blessing or just another compromise to settle for nothing more than existing.

  “IT BEGINS WITH A DREAM,” Amelia says to her five-year-old son, their eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror. He’s seated in the back seat, belt buckled, playing his handheld video game while the chocolate lab they call California rests its gray face in his lap.

  “A dream and a tank of gas,” says Julia from the passenger seat. They smirk at each other. It’s their attitudes that will make them successful.

  “I don’t know what it is we’re gonna find out here,” Amelia continues, ostensibly speaking to her son, though he seems otherwise engrossed and Julia hangs on her every word. “But I promise it’s gonna be something worth finding.” They turn up the music, sing along with songs both current and old, sing with hope and with irony, with laughter and an irreverent sort of sincerity. Amelia turns down the radio and tells a story of her wayward youth while Julia rolls down the window to the let the wind toss her hair. It’s a story perhaps unsuitable for a five-year-old, but Amelia has vowed that above all she will be communicative, will not visit upon her son the sins of her own parents, the quiet they leveled upon any act of individuality, the stern looks of disapproval. She will be friends with her son in the same honest and equal way that she is friends with Julia, will be able to talk with him about anything, will kill early on any sense of discomfort and awkwardness, will allow him to feel like he can come to her with any concern, problem—anything—and expect her to treat him not as a subordinate but as a human being, a beloved friend, a trusted confidante. She thinks it is the old silence of her parents’ way that has caused all the trouble she’s seen. She and Julia have spoken of it often: the outdated methods of child-rearing, left over from the days when your kids existed mostly to be your farmhands and only half of them survived anyway. She has vowed that this will not be the way with her Jakey. They’ll go to the beach together, all three of them. She’ll look so young that people will mistake her for his sister. They’ll enjoy each other’s company and also their private bond, the bond of a mother and a son uncomplicated by the existence of a father. When he’s old enough to ask, she’ll tell him he doesn’t exist. That he never did. “You’re an immaculate conception,” she’ll tell her Jakey. “You’re the most perfect child in the world.”

  When the sun goes down they find a Day’s Inn just off the interstate. It’s not the most attractive place, but they lie down on the bed with a bottle of wine and turn on the television to watch their favorite shows; it’s a Thursday night, must-see TV night, her blue-eyed boy next to her and Julia on the other bed, playing on her laptop and laughing loudly but distractedly at the shows. Around eleven, when Jake has dozed off, sleeping with his mouth open the way his father used to, they go outside for their only cigarettes of the day. They are quitting together, have almost managed it, have cut down to just one measly ciggy a day each.

  How it calms her! It never fails to. Julia sits down in the grass while Amelia walks slowly out into the cool evening of the great plains, stands on the verge of somebody’s corn field, listening. Opening up her senses. If someone saw her, no doubt she’d be in trouble. No doubt they’d give her some Smoky the Bear line. In America, you’re always trespassing on somebody’s shit. But she’s not bothering anyone. She’s a young girl—she’s not even twenty-four yet! On her way across the country to a better life. The one she’s seen on TV. She may not be a college graduate, she may not have made it to Swarthmore yet and may never end up going, but she’s seen enough that she knows where she’s headed. Knows what it takes. She’s street smart. She may not have a diploma but she has ambition and a five-year-old son to keep her honest and a best friend to keep her smiling. Out West nobody will know her, and there’ll be plenty of room for one more young girl yearning, burning to make it in the world. To fix however many generations of screw-ups by men. To begin again with a new emphasis. A woman’s touch.

  It’s a start.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my agent, Matthew DiGangi, my editors, Maxim Brown and Cal Barksdale, and the rest of the team at Arcade and Skyhorse for helping to bring this book into the world. Thanks also to my friends and fellow writers at Debut Authors ’19 and Authors ’18 for sharing the journey and providing advice and encouragement. Kathleen Rooney and Martin Seay offered early and enthusiastic support for this novel, and for that I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. My heartfelt thanks also to Chip Cheek, Laura van den Berg, James Scott, Kelly J. Ford, and Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice—and others I can’t name yet at the time of this writ
ing—for their kind words and generosity. For long friendships and help along the way, I’m grateful to Evan Speice, David Lubert, Pepe Abola, Shannon Derby, Katherine Covintree, Robert Arnold, and Melanie Ramsey. Most of all, thanks and lots of love to my family, all the Millers and Charlesworths et al., but especially my sister, who kept the faith when I was at my worst; my father, who bears no similarity to the eponymous patriarch of this novel; and my mother, whose nightly readings from The Once and Future King in my sister’s bedroom a million years ago started all of this.