GETTING HUNTER OUT OF THE HOUSE WAS DIFFICULT. HE didn’t talk or listen to John. Brennan had to intervene, bringing socks and shoes to her brother, whispering in his ear—promises, threats, entreaties—before he finally huffed and started to dress. John stood at the door to their room, hand wound tightly on the neck of the doorknob until Brennan came over and took his hand and led him to the front door.
“I’ll bring him, Dad,” she said.
He stood at the door for a while, waiting. He barely breathed; the concentration required to stand still negated all other thought, reflex, mental function. If Hunter didn’t turn the corner to the hallway in the next five seconds, either John’s heart would stop beating or he would rampage through the apartment until he found him and dragged him by the arm to the door, blind to his son’s tears and deaf to his screaming until, in the elevator, he would squat down level with Hunter, stare into his eyes, and insist that he be silent or “else,” all the while, Brennan silently standing off to the side, until after a moment, she would insert herself between them and place her hands on each of them and John would tremble like a pile of rubble on the edge of collapse.
It didn’t come to that. Three seconds later, Brennan turned the corner, dragging her brother by the hand. The two of them stood before John, but Hunter wouldn’t look at him.
“Ready, kids?” John asked.
“Yes,” Brennan said.
Hunter kept his eyes on his sneakers. “I don’t want to go.”
The urge to slap Hunter pressed at John’s throat like vomit. If he could swing the door open, get into the elevator, the nausea of rage would pass. He opened the door, slamming it into the wall. The kids started and backed away.
“Let’s go,” John said, waving the kids past him.
Hunter was the first out the door.
The three of them stood in silence on the elevator ride down. Calvin, the doorman, was in the lobby.
“We’re going to the park,” Brennan said to him. Hunter waved.
“Have fun, kids!” Calvin said. He and John did not acknowledge each other.
Once outside, the kids raced ahead toward Central Park. John trudged behind them. The humid air was a wet towel pressing on him, lightened occasionally by an intermittent breeze. It was the first time he’d been alone with the kids since the end of his trial a month earlier.
The day before, Jane had opened the door to the office. She didn’t enter. John stared at a blank pad he had taken out with the aim of listing contacts to begin calling about finding work.
“I have to work tomorrow,” Jane said. “The sitter’s at a wedding.”
John waited for her to say it.
“Can you watch the kids?”
“Of course. They’re my children, too.”
There was a brief pause where they each waited for the other to speak further. Jane broke off first, closing the door behind her. John returned to staring at the blank pad.
Hunter refused to hold his hand when they crossed Central Park West. Brennan grabbed him by the wrist and held it against Hunter’s squirming. Once in the park, Brennan and Hunter followed the path from the entrance to the first fork, before looking back at John for direction. He shrugged and waved indeterminately. Hunter looked to Brennan, who took a path leading away from their usual playground. The kids sprinted along the paths, climbed boulders dumped by glaciers during the last ice age, and chased each other through grassy patches. John followed. Brennan did not once turn to see if he was there; she could have wandered for hours, never checking until she needed water or food, at which point she would simply turn around, believing fully that John would be standing behind her ready to find a hot dog cart. But Hunter engaged in a fumbling countersurveillance. He wouldn’t make eye contact with John or let his gaze rest on him as he looked around, but he found excuses to stop to fidget with his sneakers or sit on a bench for a moment or even run a circle around a tree in order to be able to ensure John was still following.
Roughly an hour after they entered that park, they found themselves at the Bethesda Fountain, the nearly hundred-foot-wide structure on the south side of the Lake. Brennan and Hunter ran a wide circle around it before they sat on the benches lining the walls of the Terrace and waited for John to catch up.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Brennan asked.
“Wherever you’re taking us.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Brennan said.
John looked around, trying to figure out a place to go. Buildings rose above the canopy of the park in every direction. To the south, stairs rose to Terrace Drive, which passed over a walkway to the Mall. People wandered in and out of the Terrace with no apparent destination.
Still looking around for an idea, John asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Away,” Hunter said. The boy who had spent the last hour—the last month—avoiding any contact with him stared him in the face.
“Where?”
“From here.”
“From the park?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to go home?”
“No.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to guess, Hunter. Just say where you want to go.”
The last few words came out in a growl, a vibration like a dam cracking—the imminence of destruction. John didn’t raise his voice, but a couple nearby turned to stare. John ignored them. Hunter pushed himself off the bench and walked away. He didn’t look back before stepping off the red brick of the Terrace onto the black asphalt path leading to the east side of the park. In a few seconds, he would lose sight of Hunter. Brennan jumped up onto the bench.
“Daddy, he’s leaving.”
John waited for Hunter to decide how far he was going to take it.
“Daddy?”
Hunter disappeared around the bend. Brennan grabbed John’s hand and tried to pull him along to follow, but she couldn’t make him move. She let go and ran after Hunter, looking back over her shoulder, trying to keep both in sight. As she crossed onto the asphalt path, she began shouting her brother’s name. As she reached the point where the path wound and she would lose sight of him, Brennan looked back to John, eyes dazzled with tears.
“Daddy! Please!” And then she raced out of view.
The nearby couple walked away, eyes on John. The man—an older guy with thick glasses—said, “You’re going to lose your kids.” His wife pulled him away.
Everyone on the Terrace was moving except John, who remained as still as the statue atop the fountain. Seconds passed. John wanted to believe he was still because he was proving a point, but the truth was he was scared that if he chased Hunter, he would beat him when he caught him.
A minute passed. The children were old enough to know how to return to the fountain, or even find their way home if they needed to. What if he let the kids go? Or if he walked into the Lake and slipped beneath the still green water? Could their lives be any worse off? He had no illusions about the long-term prognosis of his family life. The end of the trial hadn’t changed the malignancy festering in their home since even before his affair. If he left, would it sever the transfer to his children of all of his flaws and mistakes he’d made? Would his family be more whole without him? Over time, would they pretend that he’d died, maybe in some tragic accident? He imagined Brennan catching up to Hunter, their fear when they realized that John had not followed them. If he wasn’t there when they returned, would they find a policeman or aim for the west side of the park and navigate home from there? John bet on the latter—because Brennan would want to avoid getting John in trouble with the cops.
Five minutes elapsed before the kids came back into view. They stopped at the edge of the Terrace, holding hands. Hunter remained ready to run. The children were tiny mirrors of himself, of Jane, of their marriage. Their mother passed her nature directly to them with her immunities, first in the womb, then by her breast, finally in song and touch and breath. His influence passed into them like radiation—a perverse nourishment of fear and anger, but also resolve and courage. Not that John believed he had those qualities, but because the kids needed to develop them in the face of his faults.
The urge to hold them, to embrace them and crush them to his chest, surged upon him. But he recognized this emotion as a weakness, so instead of smiling and waving Brennan and Hunter over and catching them up in his arms, he nodded to them and tilted his head toward the path they had come down. The kids relaxed slightly, an exhale and separation of hands, and walked in the direction that John indicated.
It didn’t take them as much time to walk home because the kids didn’t play as much. Brennan first tried to get Hunter to race her across a patch of grass to the top of a boulder, but Hunter shook his head and moped along. Later, somewhere in his introspection, Hunter found inspiration for a game he proposed to Brennan, but she flatly rejected it. They each wanted to complain to him about the other, but when they turned to do so, they’d jerk their heads back in the face of his glares. They settled for casting angry looks at each other. But near the edge of the park, they encountered a college student walking a puppy. They petted it as it ran around their ankles and jumped up to lick their hands. The rest of the way to their building the kids spoke to each other again in rushed sentences about the kinds of dog they wanted and what they would name it.
A few doors down from their building, John spotted Calvin linger-ing by the door, watching them approach. Two men stood farther up the street on the sidewalk chatting. Calvin glanced their way. Brennan pulled on John’s hand until he looked down at her.
“Thank you for taking us to the park today, Daddy.”
Why was she thanking him? It had been a shitty trip. But John gave her hand a squeeze.
He looked up again as the two men approached. One produced a camera and snapped pictures of John and the children as they walked to their building. The other held a microphone attached to a portable tape recorder hanging from a shoulder strap.
“Mike Mullens, New York Post. Can I ask you a few questions?”
Hunter and Brennan stopped walking, confused. John, his focus on Mullens, bumped into Hunter’s back and grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling. He should have recognized Mullens. His column had repeatedly pushed the theory that John committed the murder.
“Keep walking, kids,” John said.
“How are you adjusting to life now that the trial is over?”
The kids were not moving. John pulled Brennan by her hand while pushing Hunter forward by the shoulder.
“Did the jury get it right?”
Twenty feet from the door.
“Is there anything you want to say to her family?”
Ten feet.
“How did your wife handle the news about Jessica DeSalvo?”
He was at the door.
“How did you explain the trial to your children?”
That would have been the last question if Calvin had held the door open for them as John expected. Instead, Calvin had retreated into the building, leaving the heavy door closed behind him. As John fumbled to open the door, Mullens kept shouting questions while the photographer snapped photos.
“What are your plans for the future? Do you think people like you deserve to get their lives back? How did you feel playing with your children in the park today knowing that Jessica DeSalvo is dead?”
John finally wrenched the door open and shoved Hunter through. He still held Brennan’s hand, but now it was in front of him, about shoulder height, and she was nearly dangling from his grasp. The last question chased them through the door: “Do your children think you killed Jessica?”
He barely noticed Calvin as they waited for the elevator but heard him slip back outside before the elevator arrived.
In the elevator, Brennan finally spoke. “Daddy, you’re hurting me.”
John looked down and realized that he was crushing her hand. He let go of her and Hunter.
When they got into their apartment, Hunter stalked off to his room. Brennan collapsed on the couch. John slunk into his office, sank into his desk chair, and lowered his head to his shaking hands. He wanted to claw at his own burning face. He thought of the chef’s knife in the kitchen. German steel, sharp enough to cut a ripe tomato into neat slices without squishing the insides all over the cutting board. He decided that he would start in their guts—Calvin, Mullens, the photographer. If he was fast enough, they wouldn’t know what was happening until they were already mortally wounded. The shock would put them on the ground, and then he would cut their throats. He had to go soon, before the reporters left. But if he could waste enough time, staring into the black at the back of his eyelids, maybe the rage would pass, and they all could continue to live. Even as that thought shot through his mind, John knew it was a lie. His life was over—had been for some time. If he hurried, he could take some measure of revenge on his way out. He began compiling a list in his mind—the order of the murders. But first, he had to attend to those downstairs.
Resolved, John opened his eyes. But Hunter stood in the doorway. He regarded John a moment, then stepped into the room and closed the door.