The Guilty One (13 page)

Ron checked his watch, again. A few minutes after the hour. The line moved steadily, all but the last few visitors inside the building. Ron got out of the car and walked slowly through the lot. In his pocket, change jingled. He had brought nothing for Karl. Deb brought things to share with him, clippings from magazines and photos she printed out on a little printer she'd bought for that purpose. She deposited money in his commissary account. Within the narrow parameters of what could be brought and given, she did it all.

Ron took his place at the back of the line. No one would try to talk to him now; everyone was focused on the person they had come to see, anticipating. Ron wondered how many of the others were here out of a sense of duty, and how many truly wanted to be here. What if it was your wife? How would he feel, visiting Deb here? But of course that example was ridiculous, because Deb would never do anything that would land her here. And even if she did, no one would ever suspect her, no jury would ever convict her.

Ron felt the familiar dizziness from the senseless cycling of his thoughts. Could he say that Karl had ever
seemed
innocent, the way Deb did? The way, to Ron's best guess, he himself did? It was an accident of fate that there was something about Ron that invited trust. It was part of what he'd once jokingly called the Isherwood Plan for World Domination, one of the skills he'd talked to Karl about when he thought he was grooming him for a career like his own, an asset he could transfer like the firm handshake and the unwavering eye contact.

But Ron had done little to deserve the respect he commanded without even trying. As an altar boy at Divine Savior in Sacramento forty years ago, Ron had pushed his luck any number of times. He lied in confession, he convinced the other boys to drink the communion wine; but the trick—of not blinking, of neither smiling nor frowning, the sincerity that Ron could produce on command—this was not something he could teach the others.

Take this place, for instance. When Ron reached the registration counter, he waited for the guard to look at him more sharply after he said his name. But no. The guard was indifferent, incurious. Ron went where he was told, sat in a row with the others. The prisoners came out one at a time. So many of them were smiling, so many of them looked like they'd longed for this moment, been buoyed by their anticipation.

But look, there was Karl.

Deb had told him that Karl had put on even more weight, but Ron wasn't prepared for his son's appearance. It wasn't just a five- or ten-pound weight gain, a little softness under his jaw or around his waist: Karl had easily put on twenty pounds, and he looked slack and puffy, his skin grayish and dull. (
Lardo!
—Magnus's voice echoed in Ron's mind, though that was the nickname reserved for poor Keith, the least athletic of the Isherwood boys.) Karl's eyes, roaming the faces of those waiting, found Ron, and stopped. But there was no joy, no lightening of his expression. Karl's hand went to a spot on his face and scratched. Acne, or a scab. Ron felt the urge to turn away—to leave. This was a mistake—he wished he hadn't come, but what would people think of him if he walked out now? Until this moment, he had believed he could justify his decision not to visit in the intervening months: it was just too hard; he needed time to heal before he could prepare himself to renew his relationship with Karl. Deb must have recognized the fear in him even then, but she had accepted every excuse he offered her; she didn't judge, or at least if she did, she kept it to herself. “When you're ready,” she said when Ron had first announced that he wasn't returning—and she'd said it again as recently as last week, perhaps with a little less conviction.

“What are you doing here?” Karl slumped into the plastic chair, his arms clattering onto the table that separated them like logs dumped from a bucket. Up close, Ron could see that it was actually a rash that his son had been picking at, red and angry-looking, along his hairline on one side of his face.

“I came to see you,” Ron said.

“Well, no shit, obviously. I just wondered why. Why today, of all of the time I've been here. Is today special? Because it doesn't really feel any different to me.”

If Karl chose his words to wound Ron, he succeeded. Well, that was a revelation, right there. You ask yourself, after your son has been ripped from your home and accused of something unconscionable, if you can ever be hurt any more profoundly; you come to believe that the protective scrim has been worn clean away, that the light burning inside you, exposed to the elements, has sputtered out.

But it isn't so. You can still hurt. It never leaves.

Ron breathed with care. In, out; in, out. He let the seconds tick by while he formulated what to say. His mouth tasted bad, despite the gum he had been chewing on the drive down.

“Karl,” he finally said, trying to hold his son's gaze and settling for staring at his mouth, which was compressed and angry. “I tried to kill myself the other day. I went to the bridge. The Golden Gate. I stood on the little platform on the side and looked down at the water. I really believed I would do it too. Well, I'm sitting here with you so obviously, I didn't. But what's important, what I really want you to understand . . .”

At this point, the thread of the narrative became lost. What was it that he had hoped to communicate, to offer his son? Some message about love, about sacrifice, about what Ron had been willing to do. Except that he hadn't been willing to do much at all: he'd tried to pay a debt in worthless tokens.

“. . . is that I believed I was about to jump,” Ron finished lamely, a lie that would have to stand in for the much more complicated truth. “And the last thing I did was I called Mrs. Vacanti.”

But the name didn't sit right. Karl was no longer a boy—despite his doughy softness, which had the effect of making him seem younger. He was incarcerated with men and so, in Ron's mind, he should be treated like a man, and as such he wouldn't call other adults “Mr.” or “Mrs.” as a child would.

“I called
Maris
,” Ron corrected himself, his voice firming. “I wanted her to know. I was trying to even it up, see, for what you did. Trying to pay for what you did.”

“Is that why you're here?” Karl asked, in a voice so bored and devoid of emotion that Ron, startled, looked him in his glazed and indifferent eyes. “You drove all the way out here to try to make me feel
guilty
?”

This wasn't going the way Ron had planned. Not that he had a plan . . . but he had a need. He'd envisioned speaking urgently, in a voice low enough that only Karl would hear, in the din of the visiting room; finding some common thread to which they both could hold fast; but now Ron understood that what he'd expected and hoped for was to devastate his son, to crush him with his words, with the sacrifice he'd almost made. In here, Ron couldn't strike Karl, shake him, or even tower over him; he had never had the opportunity to express what was inside him, all the fury and disappointment in his son.

That was what he needed, the feeling of his fist connecting with Karl's jaw, blood streaming from his nose. The shock of recognition in his body, the tingling urge to clench his fists, to throw Karl to the ground, to reduce him to snot and tears, a blubbering mass of regret and self-loathing. He wanted for Karl to feel everything Ron himself had felt so often at the mercy of his own father. That he was garbage. That he was a blight on the world.

“You
don't
feel guilty?” he challenged Karl. His voice had turned to a snarl; a roar barely contained. The rage doubled back on itself, intensifying. Ron had been denied any say in what happened, in what Karl had done not just to Calla but to him and Deb, to their family, to all of their futures. But look at him, puffed up and insolent, his mouth shining wetly, and what looked like gel stiffening in his hair. Was that what he used his commissary money on—hair products? While Calla's bones warmed under the summer earth after her first wretched winter alone in her grave?

“So you still don't believe me,” Karl said, misery tingeing his voice, the first sign of emotion he'd shown during the visit. “It's still never occurred to you that I might be telling the truth, Dad? Not even once?”

Ron slammed his fist into the table before he could think. A guard stepped forward, Karl jerked back—finally a reaction!—in alarm. Ron's hand stung, the blow had jarred all his bones up and down his arm. “All right, all right,” Ron muttered to the guard, holding up his hands in apology. “Sorry.”

The guard glared at him, folding his arms over his chest. But Ron had heard the sound of his own voice, had felt the coiled, trembling excitement of rage, and he knew that in these moments he had become just like his father. Even when he backed down, when the guard stopped him, he aped his father's behavior when—it didn't happen often—for reasons known only to himself, Magnus had given Ron a reprieve, let him go without a whipping.
All right, all right
, he'd say.
Get lost, you piece of shit. Don't let me see your face around here
. And Ron would run away, his heart pounding, grateful every time to escape, even though he knew he could never really escape his father.

“Every day I try to find a reason to believe you,” he said to Karl. “
Every
day.”

“Why can't you?” Now, finally, Karl was looking him in the eye. “I get letters, you know. Like, at least five every week. People who believe me, that I didn't do it. Do you know there's a website?”

“Of course I do!” He would have shouted again, but he was mindful of the guard's watchful eye. “Your mother showed me. It's practically all she does—” He wanted to blame Karl for that too, for Deb's single-minded devotion to something that left no room for him.

“Well,
I
haven't seen it. We don't get Internet.”

There was a quality to his petulance that reminded Ron of when he'd been just a boy, eight or ten years old, called out for not doing his chores or sassing his mother. And it was this that softened him, deflating his momentary anger like a stuck balloon. He remembered why he was here and girded himself for it.

“Listen. Son. There's been a—”

“Don't change the subject.” Karl's face had gone red and blotchy. His hands twitched on the table. “There are people in this world who believe me. Who don't think I'm a monster. But you've always . . . you've always acted like I was a piece of shit. Before this. When I was just a
kid
. Always.”

Ron gaped. “I never . . .”

“Dads are supposed to . . .” Tears threatened, and Karl practically punched himself wiping them away. “You were supposed to be there for me. To think I was . . .”

He stared helplessly at Ron, and deep inside Ron understood, because hadn't he once looked at his own father the same way? Magnus was supposed to come to his games and cheer when he had a hit and brag to his friends, to put his report cards on the fridge and his drawings on his bulletin board at work, to call him his little buddy, to tell him he was—

The shame, as old as his very bones, billowed.
To tell him he was proud.
Ron would have never admitted, not then and not now, that it was the one thing he'd longed for more than anything—his father's approval. And now he saw his son losing the same battle with his own shame.

I did love you
, he tried to say,
I was proud of you
, but his mouth wouldn't move and the words wouldn't come.

“Forget it,” Karl muttered harshly. “Fucking forget it. What is it you want?”

And now, of course, the paralysis loosened and Ron managed. “Your mother asked me to come and talk to you. Because there's been a, maybe an opportunity. You know about Arthur Mehta.”

Karl's eyes flickered uneasily. He looked away, took a couple of breaths, and when he spoke again his voice was steadier. “Yeah. Mom said he was arrested for drunk driving.”

“Right. Yes. And now your mother and her, uh, some people who are interested in your defense are looking into an appeal. There are a couple of attorneys—”

“I don't want to appeal.”

Karl bit off the words like shotgun rounds. He pushed himself back slightly from the table and sat straighter in the chair, folding his arms across his chest. Ron started to respond and Karl said it again, stonily: “I'm not appealing.”

The arguments Ron had assembled fell away. For the first time, and he didn't know how the two things connected, he was unsure of his son—not just his guilt or innocence, but whether he had been reading him right at all, ever since Calla went missing. This conversation was pulling him in so many directions, with so many emotional traps and hazards, and he was struggling just to stay focused on why he was here at all.

“Can you,” he said carefully, aiming for the detached tone he used in negotiating, as much to distract himself as to sway Karl. “Can you share with me what you're thinking? About the appeal?”

Karl looked up at him. “Dad,” he said, and his voice cracked. “
Shit
.”

He seemed to shrink into himself, like someone anticipating a blow. Ron's defenses gave way and he longed to reach for his son, embrace him—but Karl had been the one living here, the one who'd learned the rules, lived them, and he stayed rigidly still as Ron reached for him and then dropped his hand. This rule, above all else—could they really expect people to sit here docilely, cramming truckloads of stored-up emotions into a few tortuous moments, and not touch? At the county jail, inmates were allowed two hugs, one on arriving and one at the end of the visit, and the guards were exacting and parsimonious about it: no covert gropes, no extra time, no kissing. And even so, Ron had come to crave the quick, glancing hugs that Karl endured and he delivered only reluctantly. Would he have tried harder, if he'd known what waited? That for the next seven years he could not touch his son?