THE NIGHT THEY CAME FOR HIM, RICHARD LAY IN the four-poster bed, thanking God his father hadn’t died there. The bed, like so many objects in the house—certain doors, certain windows—was built out of associations. And, as I imagine it, Richard had time that night to be grateful that the bed with the spade-shaped knobs was not his father’s deathbed, but still the place where he remembered his mother and his color-by-numbers and the press of Melissa’s teeth. He had time to wonder how it was possible that he had so many loving memories of a place he also hated.
He had time because the knock on the door didn’t come until just after three a.m. After my father destroyed the radio in the kitchen on Seachase. After I retreated to my own bed to follow Voyager past Pluto. But Richard knew none of this.
I imagine his hands still smelled faintly of salty blood. When he’d returned home from the Memorial Day dinner two nights before, he’d thrown the Donald Duck suitcase in the corner by the back door. The smart thing would have been to pack, to leave town immediately, but he resisted doing the smart thing the same way one resists waking from an interesting nightmare.
He couldn’t shake the memory of the faces squashed around our dining room table. He remembered the scrape of chair legs, the table seeming to explode before him. He’d resorted to such a melodramatic gesture because, just once, he wanted to look at the men and women seated around that table without feeling jealous.
But it didn’t work. In the moment, as glass splintered and brine seeped through the tablecloth, he saw the fear on our faces. We were defenseless, terrified. Yet he still wanted to be sitting in one of our chairs instead of standing at the head of the table. He still wanted to be one of us, hating Richard Gaunt, vowing revenge.
So I imagine that when he hears the knock he goes to the door in his bare feet, shirtless. The hall light is on. The porch light is off. Outside three men stand, puffing smoke in the shadows.
“A little late at night for this,” Richard says. He can’t help himself. Looking at them, he feels the old hatred return. He smiles even though he doesn’t feel like smiling. “But then, not much reason to be up early, is there?”
“We want to talk about that.”
“Take your shoes off,” Richard says. “The carpets.”
The men kneel and unlace their boots. My father looks up at Richard. His cheeks are white, and the skin under his eyes is swollen and purple. “Do you want to put some clothes on?” he asks.
Richard shakes his head and leads them into the living room. He pulls the chain on an antique lamp with a square glass shade that was once his mother’s. The three men sit on one plaid sofa, in nearly identical postures, elbows on knees. They exchange glances, as if they haven’t yet decided who will speak or what they’ll say.
Sam clears his throat. “Richard, what you did the other night, what you said you were going to do, we can’t let you.”
“Wait.” Richard raises his eyebrows as though he is confused, as though he is really as clueless as Sam thinks he is. “Why?”
“Why?” Sam asks. “Why?”
My father puts his hand on Sam’s knee, silencing him. And then, in carefully chosen words, he explains why. He explains the economics of it first, the cost of the ships and the gear and the licenses, and he explains the infrastructure for bait and fuel built over a hundred years of fishing. He explains Forks, down the coast, and how it’s been gutted. And he explains Port Townsend to the east, and how the old diners and shops have become boutiques for tourists selling expensive junk and wine. And he explains what has been sacrificed over years and years, lives and lives. And of course it’s Richard’s decision, but, if he has any doubts at all, why not just put everything off until after king season when an entire year’s money has been made?
Richard has imagined this conversation. He dodged their calls and fled to New York because he’d imagined it. And even though my father talks for a long time and says many things, his tone, and the way his hands stay perfectly in place on his knees, say something else, say that he knows Richard understands it all already and just needs to be reminded.
But it’s too late. Richard wants to listen, wants to tell them he understands, that he agrees, but he can’t. He just can’t. He has no choice but to do everything he can to hurt and embarrass them. “Is that all?” he asks.
My father takes a breath and closes his eyes. “Most,” he says quietly.
“Then that’s all,” Richard says. “Go home. I’m tired.”
They don’t move at first; they just exchange bewildered glances.
“Okay, Don,” Sam says, standing up. Even in socks he’s still huge, looming in the dim light. Don doesn’t move. His hands seem stuck between his knees. My father’s eyes are closed.
“Good. Now the rest of you get up and go,” Richard says.
The command seems to jolt Don awake. He puts his hand in his jacket pocket and pulls out—with an expression on his face suggesting he has only just found it there—a black revolver. The gun looks comically large, like a stage prop. Don holds it in his right hand, the one with the index finger shortened at the first knuckle, and points it experimentally at Richard.
Before he can stop himself, Richard begins to laugh: Don, with his shortened finger, won’t be able to pull the trigger. Richard puts up his hand as if to ask for a moment to collect himself, but he knows he won’t be able to stop. He puts his hands over his face. If he looks at Don again it will only get worse. He knows how insane he must seem, but better insane than afraid.
Then Sam strikes Richard with his open hand, just below the ear. The blow sends him to the ground as pain splinters through Richard’s eyes.
“Wait,” my father says. Richard gets to one knee. Don is still pointing the gun, but looks as though he isn’t sure how it works. Sam towers over Richard, breathing hard. He’s put the hand he used to strike Richard in his pocket. His face seems far away, just a collection of shapes, deconstructed.
My father takes a step toward Sam and then a step back and then a step toward Don. “Give it to me, then,” he says.
Richard gets to his feet but stumbles into the lamp next to the sofa, the glass shade shattering under his weight. He expects the room to go black, but the bulb remains intact. The gun goes off next: a thunderclap, a flash of light above the naked glow of the lamp.
The three men are looking at one another as if they’ve just woken up and are wondering how they’ve arrived in such a strange place. The gun dangles from Don’s left hand; he looks like he wants nothing to do with it. Richard scrambles to his feet, still hearing the shot in his mind.
“Are you all right?” Sam asks. Richard isn’t sure whom Sam is talking to. Sam reaches for the gun. Richard feels glass digging into his feet and tears surging for his eyes as he runs for the kitchen, turning out the lights as he goes. He feels the advantage of the darkness, knows that no matter how much time the men have spent in the house they won’t know the corners and turns that have been burned in Richard’s mind since childhood. He can get away.
Through the back hall, into the dining room, into the kitchen. He knows the kitchen door opens onto the screened-in porch where he sat with Melissa, and the screened-in porch opens onto the backyard, the hill sloping into the forest where Jamie and I lay on our backs smoking cigarettes the day Richard’s father died.
Maybe Richard didn’t want Jamie and me to know what our fathers were capable of, but people like Richard, people like me, don’t do much to spare others. We spare ourselves. And so I imagine this is what he never told Jamie and me: that he could have gotten away. All he has to do is run.
He can get away, but he imagines himself, shoeless, shirtless, running down the bluff, crying for help. He sees himself knocking on doors, on dark windows. He sees eyes in the peepholes and dim faces in the glass. Smiling. He hears the laughter. Cruel laughter, spreading from house to house to house faster than he can run. He sees himself sprinting in bare feet, covering his naked chest with his arms. He sees himself pass two Safeway clerks smoking in the mouth of an alley. They begin to laugh. He sees himself pass two old women walking an old white dog. They begin to laugh. He sees himself pass two police officers, their bicycles leaning against a bench on the boardwalk, their eyes longingly turned to the sea.
There isn’t a soul for miles in this town he has known his whole life who won’t see the justice of this moment. To put his startled face to their startled faces and watch as they slowly begin to understand what is happening—he can’t do it.
As he runs he remembers his father standing at his dresser in the bedroom. He remembers watching him from the four-poster bed as he stuffed a duffel bag, packing for Alaska. He remembers thinking, You have to ask, you have to ask. “Can I come with you?” He remembers his father sitting him down at the dining room table, remembers being held in his gray gaze as he said, “Not this year. And not ever.”
He remembers the sloped necks of the clear glass bottles containing the model ships that his father treasured, that his great-uncle labored over. And he remembers the satisfaction of breaking glass and the blood streaming from his big toe because he’d forgotten to wear shoes.
But he doesn’t remember feeling disappointed, and this he can never tell another soul. He’d heard stories of Alaska his entire life. They were incomprehensible and terrifying. They were irreconcilable with his life of Christmas mornings, baseball games in tall-grass lots, television, and soft sheets. This future, this responsibility, had loomed on the horizon as the price to be paid for his comfort. And when he learned that he didn’t have to go, he was relieved, but also so ashamed of this relief that he felt his own bones and guts go as rigid and breakable as the glass bottles.
He is halfway down the hill now, the forest in sight. He slips, falls, struggles back to his feet, slips again, and lies still in the wet grass.
Sam reaches him first, skidding to a stop. He puts his foot on Richard’s naked shoulder to hold him in place, but there’s no need.
“He’s here,” Sam shouts. Richard watches the moon tear the clouds like a saber. First Don, then my father, arrive at Sam’s side. My father holds the gun against his leg, his lips white in the moonlight.
“Here?” he asks.
No answer. Richard squeezes his eyes shut.
“Here?” my father asks again.
“Yes, here,” Sam says.
“He’s not moving. Is he even awake?” my father asks.
“What’s the difference?”
“Richard,” my father says. “Can you hear me?”
He bends down, and Richard can smell the coffee on his breath, the sleeplessness. “Richard?”
But Richard refuses to answer. He refuses to open his eyes.
Then my father punches him in the stomach, a diamond-hard, punishing jab. Once, then three more times. Jab. Jab. Jab. Each punch is a private explosion. Richard squeezes his eyes shut tighter. He feels the barrel of the gun against his jaw. It feels so much smaller, so much less dangerous, than it looks.
Richard only wants it to be over, but my father’s voice softens. “Richard. Why am I about to do this to you?” Richard tries to roll away, not to escape from my father but from the question. The foot on his shoulder holds him in place.
“Explain it to me. How can you make me do this to you?” My father is nearly pleading. “Do you know what you’re making me do?”
It’s too bad, Richard thinks, that of all the senses, sight is the only one you can just shut off. If only he could blow out his ears now, if only he could spend just a few seconds in silence on the soft grass.
“Hank,” Sam says, and Richard can hear panic in his voice. Rough fingers grab his jaw and turn his head back. “Come on,” my father says. “Tell me.”
“Hank,” Don says, “I don’t think . . .”
“We can’t wait,” Sam says.
“Fuck. Look at him crying, though,” Don says.
Richard tries to sit up, but the foot holds him flat. He wants to shout one sentence. That’s it—one sentence—then they can shoot him. I’m not crying, how could I be crying? My eyes are shut. But, as he opens his mouth, a sound comes out that he will hear in his head for months to follow. It’s hollow, empty, wordless. It reeks of a fear so naked, so indecent, that my father pulls the gun away, as if in alarm.
AS I LEFT DON’S BUNGALOW, I imagined telling Jamie, the expression on his face, the disbelief, the envy. Don wants to let him go. He wants us to help him let Richard go. I started running once I reached Fir Street, imagining the next day, the chain undone, limp as snake-skin on the orange shag. As I ran, I became not myself but Richard, running from Don Brooke. I saw his escape in the crystal vision of my inner eye, the bus speeding away, a last peek through the tinted window at the two boys standing in the street, not daring to wave.
But instead of returning to the Norths’ I turned on Seachase. I stood under the yellow fist of a streetlight, feeling a sickening buzz in my chest, telling myself not to go in. But I did go in. I flung my jacket on the kitchen table, flinching when the revolver, still in the pocket, struck the Formica. In the basement a slab of light jammed the crack beneath the studio door. Inside, Richard sat reading on the bench. He was wearing the crown, the spikes now wilted, the tissue dark with sweat.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“You’re still wearing that?”
“Oh,” he said, and took the crown off, “just trying to cheer up.”
“He wants to let you go,” I said.
Richard put the book down and leaned toward me. His face was so pale that even his smile couldn’t bring life to it anymore. “They want to let me go?”
“Just Don,” I said. “Jamie and me too.”
“When?”
“The day after tomorrow. We have it all planned. But maybe sooner, maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” He touched his tongue to his lips. His voice, when it came, was hoarse and low. “He’d do that? You’d do that?”
“We told you already,” I said.
“I didn’t believe you before. I just didn’t.”
He was right not to have believed us. Don had made it all real and not just to Richard. Before, Jamie and I had been two kids playing at something, but suddenly it felt as though we could actually saw the chain, we could actually lead Richard into the kitchen and out the back door. For the first time I believed, in my core, that we could do it, and Richard believed too.
“But you have to swear, like Jamie said. You have to promise,” I said. “You have to promise never to come back here. You’d have to give up everything and never come back. That’s the condition.”
They weren’t my words, but I felt the power in them. Richard’s expression changed. Had he forgotten? He was escaping back to life, and in life there is always an almost or an except.
“Have a cigarette with me, Cal,” he said.
I leaned toward the flame that flickered from his hand. “You can never come back. You’re dead, you know?”
“I want to leave. I just want to leave, that’s it.”
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“Do you want to find out?” he said. “Do you want to go with me?” We both laughed.
“Really,” I said. “Where?”
“Anywhere, I guess. I’m still trying to imagine it. I didn’t think I’d have the chance.”
“But what do you think?” I asked. “Try.”
He frowned at me and turned up his palms. “What the hell? Can you give me more than ten seconds to decide that? I’m not sure I know what I’ll do. Or where.”
“Sure. Sorry. I’m excited, that’s all.”
I sat down, and we smoked like two old friends. We didn’t need to talk. There was no music on the turntable. And, in the silence that followed, I heard Jamie’s and Don’s voices in my mind. Richard’s been waiting for an excuse to leave Loyalty Island all his life, Jamie had said. But that wasn’t true. Richard never wanted this; he never knew what he wanted, Don had said. That wasn’t true either. People like Richard, people like me, always know what we want—we just don’t know who wants us.
“There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you,” I said. “Did you really plan on selling everything, selling the company, like you said on Memorial Day? Could you really have done it?”
“You’re asking that now?” But he didn’t seem angry, only amused.
“When else will I get the chance? Jamie and I have money on it.”
A lie, obviously. I’d asked the question because I was looking for some hope, some excuse to deny what I knew to be true. Once we let Richard out, all he had to do was find a cop on a bicycle, but that wasn’t the risk. I was convinced that he couldn’t face police and lawyers and insurance companies and Sam and my father. I believed him; he really did just want to leave.
But then I imagined a black lip of highway running south, Richard stepping off the bus in San Francisco in the middle of the night and walking through a deserted downtown. Light clinging to skyscraper windows like beads of sweat. His old name, his old life, yellowing. He can’t stay in San Francisco long. So, east along Interstate 80, the sky enormous, blasted with a buckshot of stars. He crosses into Wyoming, then Nebraska. In Des Moines the air is so cold that it seems to break against his mouth like glass. He could keep going, but he’s already gone to Salt Lake City and Omaha and Des Moines unwanted. Can he face Chicago, Cleveland, and New York unwanted too? Loyalty Island will still be there. What will keep him away? A promise he made while chained to a wall?
I wanted to believe that if Richard actually could have sold everything, then we could trust him never to return. If he could have stayed away then, maybe he really could stay away now.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said, as if the only surprise was that I hadn’t asked sooner. He lit another cigarette. “It’s funny what people are capable of and what they’re not. Three months ago I never would have thought your father could’ve thrown me in here. And fifteen minutes ago I never would have thought Don Brooke would let me out. Why even bother thinking about it at all? There just aren’t answers, except to a few things.”
Richard must have known that there was no bet with Jamie, but I wonder if he knew I would have believed him no matter what he said.
“Did you?” I asked again, wishing I was already back in Jamie’s bedroom, Richard’s escape set, the future written. All Richard had to do was nod his head, say one word: yes.
But he said, “How could I have?”
The orange carpet was dirty with ash, the thick shag worn down. I noticed for the first time the long line the chain had drawn across the baseboard. This wasn’t the room my father had built or the room my mother had run to. It was Richard’s. Just as I wasn’t the person they’d made anymore, I was Richard’s. All I could do was ask the least important question. “Why didn’t you tell them?”
Richard shrugged and shook his head, as if to say that there was no way to know, as if to say that if he did know, absolutely everything would be different. I stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. We didn’t say much more, and eventually Richard put Nefertiti on the turntable. He sat on the floor, legs outstretched, head tilted back so that his black hair fell across the bench in waves. Now and then, he hummed a few bars of the music. I sat, smoking until my mouth stung, and when the record ended I stood up to leave. “Tomorrow,” I said, “or the next day. You’ll go, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go. I’ll see you then.” They were the last words I ever heard him say.
I locked the studio door and dropped the key in the dryer. The furnace was off, the basement quiet. At the top of the stairs I clicked shut the door and stepped into the dark kitchen. I remembered the smells of my mother’s cooking and was suddenly starving. The refrigerator was bare except for the old bottle of French’s mustard. I unscrewed the cap and took a heaping fingerful, then a few more. The mustard was somehow both watery and crusty; it made my stomach hurt almost instantly. I left the bottle open on the counter and went to the kitchen phone and dialed the number stuck to the wall with yellow tape.
It rang three and a half times before a woman’s voice answered, which surprised me.
“Pacific Cannery,” she said.
“I need to get in touch with Henry Bollings,” I said. “It’s important. This is his son.”
THE PHONE RANG around four in the morning. I was on the couch in the living room, not quite certain how I’d gotten there.
“Cal?” my father said. “What? What is it?”
I didn’t say anything at first. I’d fallen asleep, and I was still half dreaming, still hearing the soft chords of “Lotus Blossom.”
“Cal?”
“They want to let Richard go,” I said. And to make sure I’d gotten the words right I said them again. “They want to let him go.”
THE NEXT MORNING I replaced the key in the case under the grill as my father had instructed, and walked back to the Norths’. The good weather had held, and the few clouds in the sky looked warm and wrinkled. I felt tired and dirty, but not guilty, not yet. I walked, following my father’s words like a path.
“Who knows about this?” he’d asked.
“Don,” I said, “and me, and . . .”
“And?”
“Jamie North,” I said. “He followed me one day. I had to tell him. But nobody else.”
At first the only response was white noise. Static and crackles. I’d taken my shoes off—out of habit—and I felt the cold floor.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“I have to go,” he said. “Leave and don’t come back. Promise me.” “I promise.”
“I have to go.” Then, in a voice that ached for sleep, he added, “Cal? I’m sorry you had to make this call.”
When I returned to the Norths’, Jamie was standing at the kitchen counter drinking hot chocolate. He was wearing gray corduroys and a red sweater with a curly-shoed elf crocheted over the heart. His hair was matted and messy as an angry sea. Either he’d just gotten up or he hadn’t slept at all. He put the mug down too fast, and hot chocolate splashed over the counter.
“I was about to look for you at the house,” he said. “I had to lie to my mother. Where have you been?”
“I haven’t slept all night,” I said. I wasn’t sure if this was true, but I felt like it was.
I don’t know what Jamie saw on my face, but his smile dimmed. “What’s wrong?”
The question seemed meaningless. All I really felt was an insane jealousy because I’d had to betray him and he hadn’t had to betray me.
“We’re on for tomorrow, right?” I asked. “I’m exhausted. Let me just rest up.”
I went upstairs and crawled into the bottom bunk. When I woke the windows were dark. The overhead light was on. Jamie sat hunched at his desk, over an open notebook and two steaming cups. The room smelled like chocolate. The phone was ringing downstairs.
“How do you feel?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, better,” I said.
He was still wearing the elf sweater. He saw me looking. “Present from Nana. I just wanted you to see what you missed yesterday before I burn this thing. Of course I’ve had it on for about twelve hours now. Where were you? You’ve had some sleep now. Where were you?”
His voice was high and tight. The sheet I lay on smelled like him. The corners of the Jaws poster glittered with new tape. The phone was still ringing. I had no idea whose voice would come out of my mouth, no idea what it would say.
“I was with Don,” I said. “They know it was us.”
Jamie must have been preparing for bad news, but still his face nearly came apart. He blinked, as if trying to beat back the panic. “Don? How did he know?”
“Richard must have told him,” I said.
The phone stopped ringing. I felt the first waves of guilt as it occurred to me that the ruts left by this falseness would last forever. There had been no reason to make Jamie think that both Richard and I had betrayed him.
“No, it’s just a guess.”
“It’s a bad guess,” he said. “Why would Richard do that? Why didn’t you tell me? We have to go, we have to get him out of there now.”
“We can’t,” I said. Jamie’s nose had started to run. I shook my head, kept shaking it to keep from having to look up at him. “We can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
I could never hope to explain what I’d done, but I didn’t need to, at least not to Jamie. He could see it in me. And the worst part was that, as he rose to his feet, his hair and nose messy, the elf sweater tight across his chest, clearly knit for Jamie’s size of a year before, he looked upset but not surprised. And I could see, without having to ask, that I’d never be forgiven. “Will you just take that sweater off?” I said. “You look so stupid.”
He didn’t answer, and I closed my eyes. Betty North’s melodious voice called from downstairs.
“Jamie,” she said. “It’s your father. He needs to speak to you.”