The closer I got, the more I itched to pull over, take the Colt out of the spare wheel well, load it with the cartridges I’d taped under the driver’s seat and ride with the gun on the seat next to me, where I could see it, where it would keep being real. It wouldn’t be long now.
Oberlin was still the same sleepy town with the blinking traffic lights, the towering trees with limbs that arched over the road. On my previous visits it had been snowing, and now a light, stinging rain hit with little pings against the windshield. Maybe the weather was always bad in Oberlin, like a dark cloud hovered directly over its city limits. The streets were quiet, the town hunkered down for the night.
On my phone, I’d looked up the address of Jerry Saenz, Robert’s brother, and used satellite imaging to zoom in on 1804 Morgan Street—a white house with turquoise shutters, a gravel driveway and a detached garage. Jerry had taken in his brother after the incident in North Carolina; he’d even assigned him a route for his trucking company. I was banking on the fact that Jerry had taken him in again, that Robert Saenz was right now sleeping under his roof. If not, I’d keep going until I found him.
The possibility that he could be so close—only a few blocks from where he’d killed Daniel—sickened me. He’d killed my son and gone to prison, and in the logic of the justice system, he got to go right back to where he’d come from, as if he were simply completing a loop, closing a circle.
Morgan Street was something people in Sacramento couldn’t imagine—no sidewalks, quarter-acre front lawns, no fences clearly delineating the neighbor’s space from your own. If you had a kid, this would be the place to throw a ball after dinner, with a few other kids from the block joining you, baseball gloves at the ready. It would be criminal, I decided, to live here and not throw a ball with your kid on summer evenings. I would have done this with Daniel every single night if I could have torn him away from the piano. I noted the mailboxes along the road—some of them cutesy, with hand-painted vines snaking up the posts, and little flowers and butterflies and frogs painted on the mailboxes themselves. Happiness lives here! they screamed. I read the names as my headlights illuminated them: The Severins. The Omgards. I slowed in the 1800 block, although I had no intention of stopping yet.
There was nothing fancy about 1804 Morgan Street, which had grass from curb to porch, rather than expensive concrete or stone work. A commercial flatbed truck was parked in the driveway, Saenz & Co. Short Haul printed on its side in block letters. I felt a crushing hate, like a weight on my chest. Wouldn’t I be doing the world a public service if I prevented Robert Saenz from ever, ever getting behind the wheel again? Someone else should have done this years ago—his brother, a police officer, the district attorney, a relative of the woman who died in North Carolina. Jail time didn’t work—and who was there to monitor him, constantly, from getting behind the wheel? No one had stopped him from taking the corner too fast and clipping the speed limit sign that killed Daniel; I was the only one who would stop him from doing it again.
I looped into the countryside and back into town, slowing again as I passed 1804. The house itself was dark, except for a single light on the porch. I took a quick inventory: the same white siding that used to be sold on Sears infomercials; dark trim around the windows; an empty planter box; those bright, out-of-place shutters; plastic chairs stacked seat-to-seat on the front porch, out of commission until summer arrived. I allowed myself to look at the apartment over the garage, my heartbeats reverberating like a snare drum.
Robert Saenz was up there—I knew it. Of course he was—would anyone plunk their two-time murdering parolee brother in the main house? Above the garage, he was out of earshot and eyesight.
At the end of Morgan Street, I turned left, heading back through town. There were few other cars on the road, although I passed students walking closer to campus, their collars up, wearing the sort of knitted hats that my students in California had worn to be cool, rather than to protect against the cold.
I realized with a jolt that I had passed the spot. It was unmarked, a stretch of sidewalk along a road like any other, where people walked every day, not thinking that someone—that Daniel Owen Kaufman—had died there.
I was flooded with déjà vu; it was this moment—or close to it—that I’d envisioned from the roof of the cafeteria, looking over the campus where I’d spent the better part of twenty years. I’d seen myself in Oberlin, making things right, making things final.
At the same time, it was as if I was reviewing my life in a selective editing mode. The phone call in the middle of the night. Skip. Daniel’s body at the morgue—that pale scar on his abdomen. Skip. The box with his cremains, so insubstantial. Skip. The night I’d followed the stranger in the parking lot and ended up in the bar. Skip. Kathleen packing her clothes, leaving not even a single pilled sweater or flattened pair of slippers behind, her message clear.
Skip.
The gun in my hand, Robert Saenz dead on the floor.