Fourteen

Gray September clouds scudded across the sky as I drove west on the Mass Pike toward Pittsfield. The road had shifted from being broad and straight into more of a mountain pass. The Pike’s builders had blasted their way through mountains, leaving gouges in the rock alongside their two-lane road.

A brown sign told me that I had reached the Pike’s highest elevation at 1,724 feet—highest at least until Route 90 got a bit higher in Oacoma, South Dakota, at 1,729 feet. I imagined the Pike stretching through New York, skirting the Great Lakes, plunging through Chicago, and shooting across the plains and mountains until it reached Seattle.

I passed under the Appalachian Trail footbridge and toyed with the idea of staying on this road, ignoring the exit, and driving on to a new beginning in the West. I would ensconce myself in the Seattle high-tech scene, visit the Sox when they came to town, and get far away from unwanted family entanglements. I’d be free.

I fiddled with Pandora on my Droid, setting up a Soundgarden channel and wondering what it would be like to live in the city that produced this music. Settlers founded Seattle at the time when Boston was planting the Public Garden and launching the Swan Boats. It was literally a new place. I’d trade the Public Garden for the Space Needle and the Red Sox for the Mariners.

With that, the fantasy of running away broke up. I’d never leave. After driving for two hours, I hit Exit 2, pulled off the Pike, and started north on Route 20—the same Route 20 that went past the Global Defense Systems plant where Dad had often worked.

The stretch of road that wends its way from the Mass Pike through Lenox and up into Pittsfield cuts through a swath of terrain called the Berkshires. The Berkshires are the place where people from the Hamptons go for summer vacation. The New York rich spend their summers hiking, antiquing, eating at expensive restaurants, and listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.

Driving through Lenox to meet John Tucker’s mother, I didn’t see the allure. Lenox looked like a long stretch of two-lane highway that had never developed the economic density to support a strip mall. Car dealers, motels, and fast food restaurants peppered the road in stretches where small third-growth trees hadn’t reclaimed the soil. The vacationer’s paradise must have been hidden from me, which was fine because I wasn’t vacationing.

I entered downtown Pittsfield and wondered how often my dad had made this drive. He worked at the Pittsfield plant two or three days a week for years. I drove past the Colonial Theater, with its three stone arches and iconic columns built into the façade. Had he attended cultural events? Had he visited the Berkshire Museum and marveled at the model stegosaurus on the front lawn, or had all of this just been backdrop for a commute from a motel to the GDS plant?

I approached the center of town. The GPS lady in my Droid told me to take a right at what remained of the town green. It was now a long paramecium of a traffic circle. Even so, Pittsfield’s stately grace suggested that it had been dropped through a wormhole from the ’50s. It had a bank that looked like a bank instead of a McDonald’s, its yellow stone and detailed architecture suggesting security instead of convenience. It had a stone church alongside the green, instead of the white wooden church that was traditional for New England.

The GPS lady took me to Copley Terrace, Cathy’s street. I followed her directions and stopped my car as Cathy’s big purple Victorian house came into view.

Two cars were parked in front of the house—one in the driveway and one on the street. The screen door on the porch swung closed, and I realized that someone had just driven up in the second car. Perhaps it was some sort of sick interventionistic ambush. Was Cathy gathering a circle of unknown relations who would sit me down and spring a new family tree on me? My heart accelerated as my stomach twisted. I didn’t need more family surprises.

I parked five houses away from the Victorian. I had imagined that this would be an unpleasantly intense lunch around a kitchen table. We would eat tuna fish sandwiches on white bread toast and Cathy would tell me the story of John Tucker, perhaps including the tale of how she’d met my father. Perhaps not. It would be a one-on-one revelation. But now someone else was invited to the party, and the scene got darker in my mind.

I saw two of them looming over me as I sat in a darkened living room on a soft couch. They were explaining some twisted fact of my birth that threw my identity into crisis, which perhaps included a genetic history of wasting diseases to boot. My heart started to thunk in my chest as I imagined the scene.

My hand grabbed the key in the ignition. I could either twist the key and run, or put the key in my pocket and face the truth. It lingered and I watched it, fascinated, as my hand decided that the key would go in my pocket. I would face the truth of my existence.

I got out of the car, locked it with a beep of the fob, and walked down the tree-lined street past white Victorian houses in various states of repair, toward the bright purple nexus of my history.

The car in front of the house, a Ford Taurus, clicked as it cooled. Its interior displayed the generic cleanliness of a rental. Who would rent a car to come visit Cathy? Did they even rent cars at Pittsfield’s airport? I turned up the walkway, past the autumn remnants of the black-eyed Susans lining the path. The stairs creaked under my weight. I stood on the porch, gazing at the doorbell in its golden metal dome on purple paint. I pulled open the screen door, and the large glass window in the pink front door shattered as gunfire blasted my eardrums.

I stumbled back on the porch, slammed my kidney into the banister post, and spun down the steps, sprawling through the flowerbed and across the lawn. Gunfire flashed and blasted away inside the house.

I lay on the grass, my brain vapor-locked into inaction. I was between whoever had that gun and the car parked in front of the house. I was an unarmed obstacle to escape. Two shots rang out from the back yard.

The shooter had already tried to kill me. I needed to move. Turning and running down the street seemed like a good way to get shot in the back. Lying on the lawn looked like a good way to get shot in the chest. I got my feet under me and scrambled to the side of the house away from the driveway, pushing and clambering my way through dense rhododendrons. I crept toward the back of the house and peeked around the corner into the back yard. A crumpled pile of clothes, hair, and blood lay on the grass.

A car started at the front of the house. I turned and pushed my way through the bushes to get a look at the shooter, but the rhododendrons defeated me. By the time I reached the front lawn, the Taurus was far down the street and making a turn on to Route 9. I hadn’t even gotten the license plate.

I crossed in front of the house, stepping through the flowerbeds on both sides of the path. I crunched up the gravel driveway, past an ancient Toyota Corolla, and into the back yard.

Cathy Byrd lay on the grass, two bullet holes in her back, blood seeping from her chest into the lawn. She had been running but hadn’t made it out of the yard. I knelt and leaned close, hoping to hear a breath from her parted lips. There was none. Her hair shifted in the breeze as her dead eyes stared at a beetle climbing a blade of cut grass.