CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

There’s a peephole in my dad’s front door, a glass pupil about the size of a squirrel’s eye. I suppose the builders thought a burglar might show up on the front step and push the doorbell, hoping to be let in.

I sensed movement in the interior of the house, and the little glass hole darkened. Peepholes, with their fish-eye lenses, turn even a harmless visitor into a goofy, swollen cartoon. Maybe I should have waited, I thought, imagining my father asleep in a darkened bedroom.

“He’s in the back,” Cindy said, as soon as she opened the door. Not hello, not good morning. A hairbrush in one hand, her feet planted, like she didn’t want me to come in.

I hesitated in the dining room, smoothing my hair back under the beret, straightening my skirt, a woolen garment with about thirty pleats. Dad had an assortment of plaid mufflers, tartan neckties, and every time he came back from golf in St. Andrew’s, he brought me a wool sweater or a skirt, good heavy tweed, but not my style.

My clothes didn’t go with the backpack I set in a corner of the dining room, under a work of art I didn’t recognize, a blue figure dancing. I made sure my backpack was upright. I didn’t want it falling over and crumpling the letter zipped into a side pocket.

“Can I get you anything?” Cindy was asking. It was mid-morning, approaching lunchtime, but I wasn’t hungry. I looked a question at her, and she made a minute shake of her head: she didn’t want to say. Or maybe she meant: How would you be doing—after a weekend in jail?

“Jack got him released by supper yesterday,” Cindy said. “Bail was set at two hundred thousand dollars—hardly anything in a case like this. And you know what he told me, the first thing he got home?”

I played along with her, telling her no, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a report of jail brutality, and I was wondering how my father had posted such a large amount of cash.

“He said he was taking me to New Orleans, to eat nothing but gumbo.”

She said this with pride, but with an undertone of fatigue.

“Gumbo gives him a stomachache,” I said.

Dad’s backyard had turned out pretty much as he had envisioned it. A Japanese man named Eiichi, an expert in sand and rock, drops by weekly to pick up the slender fingers of bamboo that have drifted onto the sand, one by one, tucking them into his hand.

But that’s the trouble: bamboo flutters, ever moving. Even the slightest wind blurs the gentle lines the gardener has combed into the sand. My father’s swimming pool was designed by an award-winning pool visionary. It has a charcoal gray bottom, with hewn slate flagstones at poolside. But the back garden is crowded, a Jacuzzi seething quietly, a sauna like a log cabin. Too much, you think, walking out to find a place out of the sun. Too much to look at. There is a putting green off to one side, the grass razored short and firm, a single hole at one end.

Dad stood surveying it all, wearing white slacks and leather sandals, the ones he had custom made in Florence. A golf club, a putter, glittered in his hands. His yellow shirt was so new you could see the folds in it, fresh from the package. I expected him to look a lot different, but he tucked in a loose shirttail, adjusted the crease in his pants, quietly impatient, knocking a ball all the way to the cup.

At one end of the putting green a stone frog is parting his mouth, a little fountain of water playing into a metal bowl. The Santa Rita jail suicide watch means that every fifteen minutes a county officer peers in at each inmate, twenty-four hours a day. My father didn’t look weary so much as pale. Dad didn’t hear me coming, and then just before I reached his side I made a little coughing noise.

“Champion!” He let the putter fall. But it was one of those moments when you wonder how the hug is going to go, where his chin will fit, where your face will end up, whether to settle for a hug, or maybe to add a kiss as well.

His voice was very quiet, telling me I looked good. He held me tight, and then held me at arm’s length, taking in the view of my face.

“Why the sad face, Champ? Look me in the eye.”

I was looking.

“I kept thinking of you, all the while, Champion,” he said, feeling in his voice. “It kept me going, I want you to know that. The image of your face in my mind.”

I hate tears, the way they suddenly decide it’s time for the show, the dancing waters, and nothing can stop them.

“I know, it’s hard,” he said, “even for a strong person like you. This is hard for all of us. I want you to be patient with me because I have something to say to you.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I began, but the words came out strangled. Some things I don’t want to hear.

He put a shhh finger to his lips. “Listen to me. Are you ready to listen?”

I couldn’t make a sound.

“Just nod your head. You can do that, right? Move your noggin a little bit for me? There you go, the amazing human head. Good. Now don’t talk for a second.”

He had used some of the bay rum I had given him for his last birthday, January 3. He had always hated having a birthday so close to the holidays. It had cheated him out of a lot of bikes and electric trains over the years, he used to joke.

“Keep this in your mind, at all times, Bonnie. Remember these words, no matter what you hear, no matter what you read.”

My eyes had stopped leaking. The frog fountain was loud, bright peals of water.

He said, “I didn’t do any of this.”

Before I could protest that he didn’t owe me any kind of explanation, he continued, “You can’t be still for ten seconds while I tell you the truth.” He was gentle, but it kept me quiet, standing right where I was.

He spoke slowly. “What is happening to me, and to my family, is absolutely unjust.”

He paused, studying my eyes, how the words hit me.

“I want you to know that,” he said. “You think I don’t have to come out and say it. It embarrasses you, to hear me say I’m innocent?”

I steadied myself, breath in, breath out.

“I won’t remain silent about this, Bonnie. Because there are a few true things in life. Only a few. The sun comes up in the morning. It sets in the evening. The earth is round.”

His parents used to make a living delivering trailers up and down California, working out of an asphalt lot in El Cajon. Trailers of every size and purpose, dwelling places on wheels, on-site offices for construction sites, trailers full of equipment for traveling rodeos. The Chamberlains pulled three hundred thousand miles a year, towing someone’s rolling stock.

“And one other true thing: and you know what I’m going to say. You know, don’t you.”

He waited until I gave him a sign with my eyes. He touched the palm of one hand with his forefinger, saying softly, with a deliberate cadence, “I am, in every way, absolutely innocent.”

“I know,” I said, when I could talk. “I never doubted you.”

“Doubted me?” he said, seizing on that one word.

“I never did.”

One heartbeat, two, three.

Then he gave me his smile. “Thank you, Champion.”