The road is empty because where we’re headed, no one wants to go. My son Roark sits in the back, earbuds blasting, tuning me the hell out. He’s not happy about this four-hour drive, and neither am I. If someone told me a few months ago that I’d be making this trek, I would’ve slapped them across the face and shouted, “Lies,” but life is a tricky one, and I learned early on it could give you whiplash with how much it changes. I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor, I was wanted by the F.B.I. at the tender age of twelve. I’ve seen death and someone’s guts oozing out of their stomach. I’ve shot a person, been shot at, all in another lifetime that feels like a nightmare. I worry that Roark is traveling down this same dark and twisted path.
He started with smoke bombs, fireworks…innocent kid stuff. Aren’t we all mischievous as teens? We only crave a rise out of adults. So what if he left a live crab in the bathroom that pinched a boy’s ass? Or a Whoopee Cushion under a teacher’s chair? Or mutilated a frog as a present in a bully’s lunchbox? That was the first instance his mom, Melinda, rang me up. She and I are—well, now we’re far from fights where dishes used to be flung. We’ve been divorced longer than we’ve been married, and Roark mostly lives with her. It’s for the better. Writers don’t make great parents. We’re too devoted to our characters as surrogate children. And crime writers especially. I spend my days conjuring up fifty ways to hide a body. Makes it difficult to find sympathy in wiping away tears when a toe gets stubbed.
So this trip was her idea. A bonding experience. The open road before us with nothing to do but impart my wisdom because dead frogs in lunchboxes had now turned to grand theft auto. He broke into his Earth Science teacher’s car. Don’t even know how. She had a dinosaur of a sedan, and he hotwired it off a TikTok video he saw and went joyriding around town. The cops got involved. How he managed to avoid juvie is a mystery. But the next time, he won’t be so lucky.
“Aaron,” she said, pushing him toward me in her front yard. A strand of hair had escaped from her bun, and I longed to put it back into place, but we were far from that ever happening again. “He’s all yours.” She threw her hands up, her face pinched like her nose was being used to juice a lemon, and retreated inside, slamming the screen door. If Roark didn’t get his act together, he wasn’t welcome in her home anymore.
He shoved his fists into his hoodie pockets and bumped into my shoulder as he passed by.
“Jesus, you got old,” he said.
My fingers traveled to my newly whitened beard, that seemed to have sprouted overnight. It began with a phone call a few months back. An inmate at the penitentiary. A return to my past. I’d kept my hellish upbringing at bay for many ignorantly blissful years, but I always knew that one day, I’d be forced to confront it again. And so here we are on this empty road passing by cow farms without another car in sight while I think of what to say because it’s been so long.
He was eight when I fully left. My latest thriller was primed to blow up, and they sent me on a massive tour. Not Stephen King levels, but close. Enough that my publisher paid my way. I never came back. Things had already turned sour between Melinda and me, and my relationship with Roark was non-existent, even when he was young. I fell in love with my publicist, and we got drunk off of life, spreading our carnage through Europe. Then she left me for a new, hot debut author, and now I find myself back in the States with Melinda telling me that it’s “my turn to parent for once.”
I catch his eyes in the rearview and point to my ear, gesturing for him to remove the buds. He looks at me like I’m sewage and plucks one out.
“What?”
“What are you listening to?”
“What The Fuck?”
“Roark, work with me. That’s a normal question.”
“What The Fuck? is the name of the band.”
Touché, I nod.
“I was thinking we could listen to something else.”
He raises one skeptical eyebrow, his sigh clogging up the stuffy car. He plucks out the other bud.
I’m taken aback by how much he looks like my father, Barry. His curly hair, like a helmet, wild eyes, and a smile that seems to forever drip toward a smirk. Fucking Barry, making his generational mark in appearance and criminal deceit; his DNA just too strong.
“We could listen to my first book,” I say, my fingers hovering over my phone where the audio version is ready to play. “The Memoir.”
“What the fuck?” he says, that smirk tormenting me.
“You could be in juvie right now.”
His eyes glide over to a cow in the distance, mooing away. I bet he wishes he could trade places.
“Stealing your teacher’s car. What the fuck were you thinking?”
He rolls those eyes. “She deserved it.”
“No, no one deserves it.”
He rips off a cuticle as I wince. “She was always calling on me in class.”
“Yeah, Roark, that’s what school is.”
“No, like, when she knew I didn’t know the answer. To make me look stupid.”
“You gotta do your homework,” I say, the words foreign on my tongue. “You gotta study.”
I know I sound foolish. When I was his age, I was casing banks, far from a good pupil in front of the class, leaving an apple on my teacher’s desk.
“Being bad, acting out,” I say, tripping over these gems I manage to unearth. “It may seem cool—”
“No one says ‘cool.’”
“Okay. It may seem fleek.”
He forms his fingers into the shape of a gun and mimes shooting himself. The goosebumps along my arms go into overdrive.
“It won’t get you anywhere.” I cough, quieting my chills. Guns—even imaginary ones—have a tendency to do that. “What do you want to be?”
“An outlaw,” he says, that smirk in full force. Silence eats up the air, a sparkle in his eye. “Like you.”
Now, my guts are seeping out of my stomach. I’m crawling through broken glass, begging for a reprieve. That’s how it feels.
“What do you know of that?” I ask, carefully observing his reaction.
“Wikipedia,” he says, and that ends that.
“But you don’t know the whole story,” I say, struggling to swallow.
“I got the gist.” A lightbulb clicks on in his head. “That’s why you’re taking me today. To see—”
“Your mom thought we could bond.”
He makes a gagging motion, and for once, I agree with his assessment.
“She’s afraid of me,” he says, like he’s proud.
“You’re damn right she is.”
“So now you’re stuck with me.”
There’s a quiver to his voice, as if deep down, he fears being unwanted. He’s loved unconditionally. I’d take a bullet for this kid. But do I like him…? Jury’s out on that one.
“My book,” I continue, beaming. I can’t help it. My first baby, the one that shot me to the bestseller list. That paid for a beach house in Miami, even his ridiculous private school in Texas. My others had been minor successes, all fiction. None quite hit the zeitgeist like that nugget of truth, readers salivating for a window into what made my family tick. How I’d been paid by my publisher in innocent people’s blood. “I think you could learn from it.”
He makes a jackoff motion and spews imaginary spunk my way.
“Jeez, Roark. C’mon.”
He’s laughing now, a rare occurrence, so I’ll let his crudeness slide. He likes to poke the bear—and I get it, I was the same. My genes, my blood, in so many ways too.
“Will you stop talking if we listen to it?” he asks, his laughter sounding now like a machine gun. Rat, tat, tat. Ha, ha, ha.
“Yes, Roark, yes, I’ll stop talking.”
“I lied,” he says, sucking at his thumb now where he ripped off the cuticle. “I never read your Wiki page. You’re a mystery to me.” He turns back to the cows. “You’re not that important.”
“I deserve that,” I say, meaning only to think it, but honestly, he deserves to hear it out loud. When things got rough, I fled. I was a coward.
“Well…” he says, stretching out the word. “I know what he did.”
The chills come back. He, meaning Barry, my father, my scourge.
“How can you forgive him?” Roark asks. No smirk anymore, dead serious. It’s good to see he at least has an intact soul.
I never stopped loving Barry. That’s the truth, even when I swore him off. Even when so many years passed that we’d be unrecognizable to one another. A boy’s first hero can never fully fall from their high. They were worshiped too greatly. At least, that’s what I tell myself, even after he shattered my heart a thousand ways.
I couldn’t answer Roark. I’d never fully forgiven Barry, carrying around that anger like an extra limb all through adulthood. Middle-aged with grey in my beard, still with daddy issues. Staring at Roark, I pray he won’t be the same.
“Your great-grandmother,” I say. “My mother’s mother lived most of her life as an Orthodox Jew. Everything the woman did revolved around Hashem. I remember sitting with her on a plastic-coated loveseat after all the shit went down, after my family…” I took a deep breath, exhaled a cloud of sadness. “’Boychick’, she’d said. She called me that. ‘Boychick, Judaism teaches that because humans have been given free will, they are responsible for their own actions.’ She wagged her ancient finger at me. ‘If they commit an action which is wrong, then they must seek forgiveness. Forgiveness can only be accepted by the victim. This is teshuva, repentance. According to the Talmud, God created repentance before he created the physical universe.”
For this, Roark stays listening, something I’ve said, keeping him rapt. His mom’s a Christian, so I hope there’s something magical to hear about Judaism, this other half of him.
“I believe we become whole once we accept teshuva. I’m seeking this ability, Roark. I’m trying.” I choke on the last word, a budding tear waiting to spill. “I can’t carry it with me anymore, this cancer—you get it?”
“What The Fuck?” he says, about to pop back in his earbud, fooling me all along that I thought he could care.
“Hand it over,” I say, reaching for the buds. I leave them on the dashboard. “We got over four hours to go. Best get comfortable. This is my cautionary tale.”
Through the rearview, he crosses his arms, but it’s an act of show. That glimmer in his eye has come back. For he idolizes outlaws, and none held a candle to us, the great Gimmelmans.
I push play as my voice from thirty years ago fills up the car since the publisher tapped me to narrate the book to bring in all the possible dough.
I steel myself as he and I travel on the way-back machine to hell, keying in the coordinates to our final destination: United States Penitentiary, Beaumont, Texas.