19

Nothing more from Robin yet. But then, she probably figured there was no need. She probably thought what Katz and everyone else thought about me. Wild-headed freak. He’ll do anything. Let him run the rushes and see what he shakes out.

And they were right. But who cares? I thought. I had nothing to lose by pestering an old man about a patient he’d had thirteen years ago. If Katz was telling the truth, Cunningham was probably ripe to confess, privacy be damned. He was retired anyway, and like Katz he could always deny we’d ever spoken, chalk it up to the delusions of a selective amnesiac alkie shut-in who spies on his neighbors for fun.

I showed at Cunningham’s address at two in the afternoon. I’d gotten up—actually, more like sobered up, I hadn’t slept much—earlier than usual. With the help of some bracing chemicals, I showered, shaved, and made myself generally presentable as the kind of guy you could spill your sins to on your doorstep on a serendipitous Thursday afternoon.

What the hey? I bet you’d be surprised how many people are sitting at home alone day after day just waiting for some white-shirt-wearing do-gooder with a bowl haircut and a face as bland as a boiled egg to show up as if by God and take your past from you like a backpack full of bricks and just walk away with it.

I was going to do that for Dr. Simon Cunningham if he would let me. Present myself, like the great saving Mormon man (without the magazine and the spiel), and make myself the receptacle of his bad conscience.

How could he refuse?

I walked up the concrete walk, over the lawn-serviced lawn, past the oxidized birdbath and the knee-high sculpted Cupid with bow, all wavy hips and baby tits, gone pumiced and gray with the rain. I saw the mold tinge on the north side of the house, and the blanched exposure on the south.

I ran my hand over the modular white stucco wall, and I rang the irregular bell. It sounded like a water bird drowning, or landing, or abortedly taking off. A frantic beating of wings and splashing and a strangled squawk. An outdoorsman’s novelty gag, I guessed, like the talking bigmouth bass. Get a chuckle every time.

I was forever ringing bells on doorsteps, or having them rung. The same day over and over again, and I’m on either end. Ring. Answer. Ring. Ignore. Ring, ring, ring. Tell me your troubles, I’ll tell you mine. Babble, chatter, make meaningless noise. Punctuate the time, and the awkwardness of the transitions. You and me and everybody else, coming and going, a world of cars and stoops and living rooms and nothing in between.

Is this how they envisioned suburban life when they built here? All of us going from couch to garage to parking lot, to cubicle to parking lot to store, to garage to home theater? None of us ever walking more than a hundred feet, and never dressing for the weather because we aren’t out in it long enough to care.

Did they expect us to be fat, agoraphobic cave dwellers who never mingle or play out of doors, never stroll or loiter or happen on each other by chance, except possibly through the intercession of our dogs? When they built these pods and segues of modernity and plastered them with the promise of a dream, did they know how stunted they would make us? How deformed?

Generic, yes. Unoriginal, sure. They planned for that and wanted it. We all did. We do.

And so you know as well as I do how it went, at first, meeting Dr. C.

The details hardly matter.

The man and his home, the furniture and the decor, what he looked like and how we shook hands. It was all exactly as you’d expect. The same. He was a retired pediatrician. Fill in the blanks. Kindly, glasses, cardigan sweater, duck hunter, teetotaler, grandfather of three.

What did I care anyway? What do you?

He could have been a caterpillar smoking a pipe or the witch behind the wardrobe, and I could have been the Grand Inquisitor or a hole in the ground. It didn’t fucking matter. He was a mouth that said these words and I was the ears that heard them.

He told me what I needed to know, and he did it because, like me, he didn’t give a tinker’s anymore what happened to him, and he thought he deserved what was coming.

He led me into his study. The club chairs, the side tables, the desk. The diplomas, the snapshots, the taxidermy. On stands, in frames, and on the walls. And that groggy gray light of a lake-effect afternoon, coming in low through the dirty, too small casement window.

I told him what I was there for. I told him about Katz’s tip. I didn’t have to say much.

“I should have been stripped of my license,” he said when I’d finished.

No intro, no explaining needed. He was ready as guns and bursting with it, and then I knew that it was all coming out. Every bit. And I wouldn’t have to do a thing to ease it.

“You see a lot of things as a physician, Nick,” he told me. “Even in a small family practice. And most of the time you are bound to be silent. What is said, what passes between a doctor and his patient is as sacred, as protected as what passes between a parishioner and his priest. But a child—a child cannot speak for itself. Not really . . . Their bodies are a complete mystery to them, like something separate, unattached, and they come into your office so frightened and surprised by the things that just show up, that just happen to them, and they don’t know why. Injury, trauma, sickness are confusing. They have no causes or consequences associated with them. They are just events, just more time passing, some discomfort, and maybe the introduction of instruments or substances they’ve never seen, never imagined. But none of it means anything intellectually. Only emotionally, and even then, only dimly in the present, as something like a sore throat or a sick stomach, that they wish would go away . . . And then when it does go away, it’s gone. Forgotten in the eternal present.”

He smiled tightly.

“Except, of course, that it isn’t. It isn’t gone. It exists somewhere, stored away. Influencing. Because like every other thing that happens in childhood, no matter how small, it remains. It gets recorded in every detail, and it composes the person who ultimately becomes the adult.”

“The child is the father of the man,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, it was just something my mother used to say. It’s from a poem.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Well, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I’ll have to remember that.”

He seemed then to drift away into his thoughts, as though sifting through them for the right thing to say. He was silent for several minutes, and then abruptly, he said:

“HPV. Do you know what that is, Nick?”

“No, Doctor. I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Human papillomavirus,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, still not knowing.

“Robin Bloom presented with the human papillomavirus. HPV.”

This is not what I came for, I thought. He’s gone. I’m going to get a list of childhood ailments and a watery stare. Yes, yes. Robin Bloom. I remember. Let me see. She had mono and strep, too.

“She presented with HPV at twelve years of age,” he said, fixing me with a look that was clearer than my own, and piercing. “Do you understand what that means?”

Twelve years of age. He put the emphasis on “twelve.” Why was the age so important? Too young? Too old? No idea. His eyes were waiting for an answer.

I shook my head.

“HPV is a venereal disease, Nick. You must have come across it in college or somewhere along the way. It’s practically the common cold of sexually active young people. It generally causes warts and sometimes other growths to appear on the genitals.”

“Uh. Look. Wait—” I groaned, putting up my hand. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“I don’t care whether you want to hear it or not,” he growled. “You’re going to hear it. All of it. I have never said this to another human soul since the day I said it to Anita Bloom, and I need to say it. I need you to hear it.”

He looked blankly at the floor, and added, in an almost automatic way:

“Robin Bloom had—”

He broke off for a moment, overcome, then resumed in a choked whisper:

“—warts on her vulva.”

He paused again.

“And,” he continued, “she had them clustered in and around her anus and rectum as well.”

“Oh, Christ. Please, Doctor,” I said.

“Listen,” he shouted. “All you have to do is listen.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

He waited.

“Please go on,” I said again. “What did you . . . What was the treatment?”

The red faded from his face. He seemed able again to focus on the facts.

“Usually you burn off the growths with liquid nitrogen, but that frightened Robin too much. So I gave her a topical solution instead. Something you’d apply twice a day.”

“And this cleared them up?”

“I assume so, yes.”

“What do you mean, you assume so? Didn’t you follow up?”

“No,” he said loudly, curling the word firmly on his tongue. “No,” he said again, more quietly. “I did not.”

He fell silent again, the back of one hand pressed tightly against his mouth. Then, abruptly, he cast the hand wildly in front of him.

“Don’t you see? That’s the point. I didn’t follow up, not with Anita Bloom, and not with anybody else. I didn’t report what I’d found to the authorities, which is what I should—what I was legally bound to have done.”

He fixed me again with the piercing stare, then closed his eyes wearily with a nasal huff of self-disgust.

“And that’s why you say you should have been stripped of your license?” I said at last.

“Yes. That and more.”

“And why didn’t you report it?”

“I’ve tried to answer that question hundreds of times myself—thousands. Why? Why? Why? . . . There are so many answers, and none that justifies what I did. What is it that people say? There’s a reason for everything, but not an excuse. I have a lot of reasons, but no excuse.”

I felt the familiar pang of self-pity.

“At least you have reasons,” I said. “I’d give my health, my soul, my house, and everything else I could think of to have those. Knowing why means a hell of a lot more than you might think.”

He shifted in his chair, seeming to relent slightly at this.

“You mean about your parents,” he said.

“Yes.”

He nodded knowingly.

“I guess what I’m telling you, son, is that knowing the reasons doesn’t free you from the pain or the guilt or the shame. Not at all. And while I realize that I may seem to be speaking from a position of privilege in the sense that I have more reasons than I know what to do with, and you have none, I can only tell you that it doesn’t help. It only gives you something else to chew on and to run through your brain over and over again. It’s just more ammunition.”

“I can see that,” I said. “You’re as torn up as I am. But it doesn’t matter. Even if what you say is true, I still feel as compelled as ever to know why what happened happened, and I’ll do almost anything to find out.”

“You’ll accept any substitute,” he offered.

“Yeah, I guess that’s right. If I can know something, solve something about the mystery of Robin Bloom, I can—I don’t know—feel some relief. Maybe not in the end, once I know, but now, while I’m searching.”

He considered this.

“Yes, searching can be very distracting. But then, one way or another the search comes to an end, and you’re left again with the past, still there, just as it was before. Unchanged. I have lived with the past, with this piece of the past for so long.”

He sighed heavily.

“Isn’t it strange, Nick? Here you are looking for relief, yet perhaps all you can do is give it. I have waited for so long to tell this to someone. I didn’t realize that fully until just now. But it’s true. I’ve been waiting for you, or someone in your shape and with your purpose, to hear my confession. And now at last you are here, my merciful ear, and not at all as I expected you.”

“Really? What did you expect?”

“You know?” he said. “I really have no idea. Just not you, oddly enough. Not the son of a man I golfed with. I guess you didn’t know that, did you? Your father and I golfed occasionally, not that that’s so surprising in these parts. All the doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs golf at the same club. Always have done. They’re bound sooner or later to bump into each other’s tragedies, whether they know it or not.”

He chuckled softly.

“The most innocuous, lackadaisical of sports—hardly a sport at all—and yet the things that have been said on golf courses . . . I suppose they’ve shaken the world, haven’t they? All those presidents and their coconspirators, all the power brokers divvying up the world between them, all tooling around like overgrown babies in their toy cars and chasing a tiny dimpled white ball around in the grass. Puts it all in perspective.”

He chuckled again and shook his head at the irony of it. He picked up a small lacquered pillbox lying on the side table by his chair and examined it closely, as if for the last time. I thought he was going to hand it to me and tell me that it held some special significance for him or for me, or maybe for Robin Bloom. But after a few moments he put it back on the table and left it there.

“By the time she brought Robin to see me that day,” he said, “I had known Anita Bloom for thirty years. I knew what she had been through with her daughter Karen’s death, or I knew what little she would share with me, and what I had observed. I had been invited to a memorial service they’d held for her. Anita was a very devout and private person, an innocent person. When Karen died, she was so bewildered, so thrown back, because she had never had any contact with that world before, the world of drugs and overdose and runaways and crime. She didn’t know how it killed people. She didn’t know that a dark shadow lay just on the other side of the white picket fence. She had no idea.

“And somehow, even after Karen’s death, she managed to keep an awareness of that dark world at bay. She went on living in a dream, and I think she wanted to keep that dream world alive for Robin. She thought it was the best thing she could give her.

“That day, when I told her what I had to tell her about Robin, about the HPV and what it meant, I knew she’d had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t a case of domestic abuse. I knew John Bloom, too, and he was as drawn into and invested in her dream world as she was. He hadn’t done this. He hadn’t known. I’d have bet money on that. A lot of money.

“No. I looked into Anita’s eyes and I saw that she was as horrified as I was—and absolutely ignorant as well. She broke down right there in my office and begged me not to say anything to anyone. Not because she didn’t want to help Robin or protect her. She wanted that more than anything. But to acknowledge that Robin had been molested, possibly raped—well, that would have shattered the world she was trying to maintain. It would have shattered her. She would have broken into a million pieces under the strain. It was too awful to face.

“And so, I told myself that it was okay to let Anita and John handle it themselves, privately, because I told myself that whoever had done this awful thing was not living in that house. Robin was not in danger in their hands. They could and would protect her. Withdraw. Hide. Whatever it took.”

He fixed his eyes on me guiltily.

“Now, you may say that circumstances had already made it clear that they couldn’t protect Robin, that they had failed in that already. And you would be right. But I wanted to believe in them and their made-up world— No, that’s not quite true.”

He paused and thought. Then, seeming to land on the avoided thing, he added:

“I didn’t want to hurt them anymore. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. And so, I suppose, without quite knowing it, or wanting to know it, I sacrificed the welfare of that little girl, just as her grandparents had and did, to protect an illusion of safety and the fragile sanity that went with it.

“And I have had to live with that for thirteen years, not a single day of which has passed without a painful reminder of my role in what ultimately happened to that poor child.”

He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.

I burst in.

“Listen, Doctor. I’ve come here, as it turns out, to do more than listen. I hadn’t intended to tell you this, but there’s something I want you to know, and I think it will help.”

He looked up with just the barest glimmer of hope in his eyes. Then he dampened it and his eyes were dull again with the years of ceaseless self-recrimination.

I stopped for a moment and wondered. Is this what Robin would have wanted? As angry as she was? If, in her eyes, her mother was to blame for seeing the evidence and explaining it away, wasn’t the doctor even worse? Wasn’t he the arch-criminal in her memory? Wouldn’t she want him to go on suffering to the end, to be deepened also by his grief, for as long as guilt would last?

Or was I being too hard? Was I being too naive? I was struck suddenly by another passing thought. Had Robin known that I would come here all along? Had she set me on this course purposely, dropping the single word—evidence—and then the linking pronoun—you, the same thing that happened to you—into the lap of a man who wanted nothing so much as to solve his own mystery? Did she know? Had she forgiven? And did she want this kindness for the doctor, after all?

I couldn’t puzzle it out, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t care. I was going to tell what I knew. It was the right thing to do.

“Doctor,” I blurted, “Robin Bloom is alive.”

His face didn’t change.

“She’s alive and well. I’ve spoken—I’ve corresponded with her.”

Again nothing.

His eyes moved back and forth slowly from one corner of the room to the other, but seemed to see nothing, as though he had hold of a difficult idea and was following it through to its end. At last he said:

“I know.”

I thought I had misheard.

“What?”

He fixed his eyes on me.

“I know that Robin Bloom is alive,” he repeated sternly.

“But . . . then how—?”

He smiled bitterly.

“I told you. Knowing won’t release you.”

He paused, waiting for this to sink in.

“Do you know, Nick?” he said curiously. “How very strange. Right now, you look just as Anita looked that day. So startled. So innocent. You really have no idea, do you?”

He ran his palms along his thighs vigorously, as though to warm or wipe the sweat from them.

“Well, why should you?” he said. “I have the missing piece.”

The smile faded from his face, replaced by a furrow of sympathy in his brow and a small twist of regret on his lips.

“What was it you said?” he asked. “The child is the father—something?”

“The child is the father of the man,” I repeated wearily.

“Yes, that’s it. The child is the father of the man. That’s very good. Very good.”

He half smiled again.

“The Robin Bloom that lay on my examination room table that day thirteen years ago—almost to the day, I would wager—that Robin Bloom is the mother of the Robin Bloom you’ve just met. She knows all her secrets. She remembers everything.”

“I’m not following you,” I said. “I don’t see how—”

He looked again at the small lacquered box on the table, picked it up, and held it.

“Why is it,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “that we always think life is preferable? . . . You know, I’ve always argued fiercely with my colleagues over that point. Medicine is polluted—positively wrecked—by this notion of life at all costs. Life almighty. As if it were the opposite of harm. Keep the patient alive.”

He lifted his arms above his head.

“Save!”

He dropped his arms with a slap.

“But save what?” he said. “We never ask ourselves: Save what? What is the thing, the creature that we are saving? . . . So Robin Bloom is alive. You say that as if it could cure. But the Robin Bloom who is alive—who is that person? How is that person? That is the relevant thing. Should I feel exonerated by her life? By the fact that she is living, when she is corrupted so thoroughly by the past? When she is the very miscarriage of her own disease?”

He clutched the lacquered box tightly in his fist, as if he meant to crush it, and winced. Then he replaced it once more on the table. He opened his hand, revealing a whitened palm and the angry red hexagon the box had imprinted there.

“I did not expect it to be you,” he said again. “You see, this is so marvelously done, really. I will have my confession but no relief, and you will have your reason and no relief. She has seen to that.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I know you don’t, son.” He sighed. “Neither did I until just now. But you will understand, and you will wish that you did not.”

He stood then and crossed the room to the desk on the far side by the window. He opened a small drawer and took out a piece of paper.

“I received this in my mailbox—no postage, just as it is—three days ago.”

He crossed the room again, slowly, and handed the paper to me.

It was yellowed with age, but uncreased, as if it had been kept in a sleeve or between the pages of a book.

The top of the page had the logo of the Twin Pines Country Club, two pine trees flanked by the letters TP on one side and CC on the other, and beneath that, the club’s sanguine motto: “Where the grass is always greener.”

As my eyes moved down the page, I recognized it as a scorecard for a game of golf. I’d never actually seen one before. As many times as I’d been to Twin Pines Country Club as a child and adolescent, I’d never once been on the golf course. I’d always been on the tennis courts or sitting by the pool.

But it was clear enough. Hole, par, handicap.

On the left-hand side of the card, the players’ names were written by hand in pencil.

Simon Cunningham. James Walsh.

It was dated June 16, 1997.

James Walsh.

It was jarring to see my father’s name on a piece of paper like that after so long, a piece of paper that he had no doubt touched, that might have once borne—perhaps still bore—the marks of the oil or the salt on his fingertips.

I raised the card to my nose.

Just paper. Old paper. And dust. The dust made largely of the flakes of other people’s skin.

“You said you used to play golf with my dad,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “I did.”

“So?”

“Yes, so? That’s exactly what I thought until you showed up at my door today asking about Robin Bloom. Until you showed up. Not just anyone. You. And not just anytime, but now. Unlucky thirteen years after the fact.”

“But you said you thought it was almost to the day—the day of her exam. The card is marked the sixteenth. Today is the twenty-ninth.”

He laughed.

“I don’t remember the exact date, of course. Only the month. It was a beautiful June day. I remember that because I remember looking out at the sunshine glaring off the glass of the parked cars in the lot and thinking that it was going to be a gorgeous night for our party. My wife and I were throwing a party for my colleagues, as we did every June for thirty years. I remember I kept staring out at the sunshine so that I wouldn’t have to keep looking into Mrs. Bloom’s face, and I remember berating myself for thinking about something so selfish and mundane as our party and the weather while I was telling a mother that her child had probably been sodomized right under her nose. I got very drunk that night. Drunker than I had ever been. Damn near killed myself. I was throwing up for days. Haven’t had a drink since . . . Yes, it was a day in June. That much I’m sure of.”

He sat down again heavily in his chair.

“The name and a day in June, and then you,” he said. “What else could it possibly mean?”

He paused, waiting for this to penetrate.

I waited, too, for the information, so long in coming, to break through.

But why a card? Why this card? This was a clue for me, not for him. So what? What was it I’d missed? I looked again. I looked not just at the date, but at my father’s name written next to Dr. Cunningham’s, and a few notes, presumably about the course, that were scribbled on the bottom and sides of the card.

James Walsh.

I read it again and again. James Walsh. James Walsh. James Walsh. Like knocking on a door, or calling into the dark without an answer. I stared. I echoed. I heard my father’s name repeated. I looked at the nonsensical shorthand at the bottom of the card. And then, finally, I thought I saw. I thought I saw and then I saw. It came into focus slowly, landing on my brain as a thought. Not just the name, but the script itself. My father’s name and the notations were written in his handwriting. His slightly more sloped—or as I had once thought, more drunken—version of my own handwriting, perhaps scribbled in the dark.

It was his hand for certain.

The same hand, the blemished hand that had written those terrible poems on those faded pink pieces of paper.

“You know it now,” the doctor said with conviction. “I can see it in your face.”

I nodded, but I hardly knew what I was saying.

“She must have . . .”

I looked at him for confirmation.

“Yes, she must have taken it from his pocket.”

“The left-hand breast pocket,” I said flatly. “Next to his wallet and his comb.”

Dr. Cunningham frowned.

“I’m sorry, Nick. I’m so very sorry.”

What happened to you? I thought again.

What happened to you?

And then again I heard the knowing answer.

The same thing that happened to you.

Nick, she’d said, you know nothing.

And then he.

He’d said.

I told you.

Knowing won’t release you.

But still, I’d said, I don’t understand.

And he again.

I know you don’t, son, but you will, and you will wish that you did not.

I’m sorry, he said.

He said he was sorry.

Sorry.

But what did that mean?

To be sorry.

What did it ever mean when you were an accessory to the harm?

“You’re sorry?” I shouted suddenly, brandishing the paper. “Then why did you show this to me? Why? You could have kept it from me. You could have kept your ridiculous silence.”

“Because, Nick. Don’t you see? It was her or me. She contacted you, yes? She led you into the trap. She led me, too. But when I realized it only just a short time ago, I also realized that this was the better way. It’s part of my penance. I owe you—I owe her that. It’s only right that I be the one to tell you. You were going to know one way or the other. I knew that as soon as you said she was alive. I knew that she’d been in touch with you, just as she had been in touch with me, and that it was all playing out, piece by piece, just as she had planned it, as I said, almost to the day. How long do you think she thought it would take you to make your way to me through Jonathan Katz? How quickly can desperation follow a trail? She knew exactly. And honestly, I think she was, in some tortuous way, trying to soften the blow.”

“What, by having me listen to every clinical detail of what my fucking father did to her?”

“To have you understand slowly, because there was so much.”

“God. You sound just like her.”

“Well, then I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You’re right? Right about what? That I’m the last to know? Yes, I get it, finally. I get it. You’re right about that. But you’re wrong about one thing.”

“I’m sure I’m wrong about a lot of things,” he said. “If I knew before you, it was only minutes before, when I realized that it was Robin who’d left me the golf card. Until you showed up, until you said she was alive, I’d had no idea who could have planted that or why.”

“It wasn’t the date or the name that she wanted me to see,” I blustered on angrily. “Or not just that. It was the handwriting.”

“The handwriting?”

“Yes. It’s my father’s handwriting.”

“On the card?”

“Yes. On the card. But not just there. I’ve been getting things in my mailbox, too.”

“Ah. Well, there you have it then. We are each only half informed. What things?”

“Things like your card. Things that didn’t make any sense until just now.”

“What things, Nick?”

He sounded alarmed.

“Notes,” I said. “Love notes. Poems. Whatever. Sick shit that he wrote to her then. All this time I thought it was me. I thought the handwriting was mine, and I’ve been forgetting so much lately, I thought the notes were mine, too. Or I thought somebody was messing with me, playing a prank. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. It’s just more of her evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m here. She told me there was evidence. Evidence that her mother saw. Evidence of what was happening to her. I thought she meant physical evidence. Literally. On the body. I thought she was being hit.”

“What did she say that made you think that?”

“Nothing. I guess that was just the worst I could imagine.”

I laughed.

“Quaint, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said sadly. “No.”

He squinted, as if reading his answers from a prompt that he could barely make out. His voice, his thoughts were slow to catch up.

“Violence is what you know,” he murmured. “It’s where your mind goes.”

He hesitated again, removed his spectacles, wiped them, and replaced them on his face.

“It’s where she knew your mind would go,” he continued, sure of the line now. “It’s the place where you two cross paths in me, ironically.”

He nodded.

Yes, he was onto it now.

“I saw that, too, in my practice,” he said. “Kids who’d obviously been hit, and hit by their parents, the parents who brought them to see me. I knew that look. The look of the guilty party. That’s why I knew that Anita Bloom hadn’t known, hadn’t even conceived of the possibility of what had happened to Robin. That’s also why I knew that look in you, Nick. Just now. That look of not knowing, of not understanding. Do you see? That’s why it was better for me to tell you the truth, for you to hear this from me. I was wrong before. You will have some relief, after all, if you let yourself, and perhaps so will I.”

He leaned forward in his chair, his fingers long and lean, outstretched, parallel, as if holding something light and fragile for me to take.

“Listen to me, Nick. Listen. I have it now. All that I needed to tell you, all perhaps that Robin, by her own double-edged means, meant for me to tell you. Your father did this. Yes. He did. There is my confession. What I saw. And there is his, in the card and in the pages you have seen. It happened. I can attest to that now just as you can.”

He molded his hands around the malleable bulb of air between them.

“But,” he added, his voice stronger and firm, “and this is the part you must hear. You are not your father. You will never be your father.”

He enunciated this next part very slowly and deliberately:

“Nick, you don’t have it in you.”

I snorted derisively.

“Oh, and you know that for certain, do you?”

“I know it as well as I know anything, yes. You are innocent of this—this crime. You are innocent of all your father’s crimes. They are not yours by inheritance, or implication, or anything else. And especially not by temperament. You are your mother through and through, Nick. Her words, her ideas, her love for everything refined that makes people worthy of anything. And you are only as guilty as the rest of us, no more.”

“All my father’s crimes,” I repeated. “Where is the end of them?”

“Here!” he shouted. “Right here!”

I lurched in my own chair, startled.

“You must stop this now,” he said more softly. “This—” He searched for the word. “Self-torture.”

He collapsed then, exhausted, his hands limp against the arms of the chair, his head fallen back, eyes closed.

He was done. There was nothing more to say, even if he’d had the energy to say it, which, by the look of him, I doubted. His lips had gone pale, the lids of his eyes were parchment thin and spider veined. All the verve of revelation had gone out of him, and he could barely muster the breath to mutter good-bye as I stood to go. He looked at me once more with pity and exhausted sympathy, rolling his wan, hollow-templed head to the side and raising weakly the first two fingers of his right hand in farewell.

I hated Robin then.

I hated her more than I hated my father.

More than I hated myself.