“You get used to this,” Deuce said. “You remember this place. You remember how small and lonely it is, and then,
next time you feel like shaming me, maybe you’ll opt to take another route.”
“You think I wanted to be here?” Richard said. “This wasn’t my choice, Dad. You put me in this position.”
“That’s your excuse?” Deuce said. “That it wasn’t your
choice
? You’ve decided to live your life blaming others, Richard; that’s your big
choice
. If this is your path, then I’m not afraid to say that you won’t be missed.”
A cop came up then, roused by Deuce’s rising tenor no doubt, and unlocked Richard’s cell. By the time Richard had collected his personal effects—a wallet on a chain, Doc Martens, and a Swiss Army knife he’d received for his fifteenth birthday all sealed nicely in a plastic bag—his father was long gone.
And yet, after all these years, after all the fighting, after trying to forget his father, after being arrested at least thirty more times, each arrest earning a bullet point on the sports wire, here Richard was, face-to-face with his father, and he still had nothing to offer, not even a decent burial.
Walking through the Forest Lawn Cemetery on Saturday, his father’s urn tucked under his arm in an insulated Trader Joe’s shopping bag along with the will, Richard couldn’t help but notice how many of the people he saw actually appeared fairly happy. Of course there were a share of people crowded in the distance around mounds of fresh dirt who were unquestionably sad, but the people Richard encountered as he worked his way through the maze of gravestones in search of his sister’s seemed to be uniformly in good spirits. Richard counted at least a half dozen family picnics, several bounding dogs, and at least one full-scale birthday for a young child, balloons and clown included.
So Richard wasn’t terribly surprised when he encountered three older Mexican men sitting in folding chairs around the gravestone just adjacent to Amy’s. They had a small radio that was playing Tejano music at a respectful level, a cooler filled with bottles of beer, soda, and sandwiches, and an arthritic-looking golden retriever that managed to look quite at home lying across the grave. Richard tried not to make eye contact with anyone, not even the dog, but as he passed, one of the men waved at him and smiled, so Richard sputtered out a quick, “How you doing?” hoping the man would just nod in response.
“Blessed,” the man said.
“Happy to hear it,” Richard said. He tried to keep walking, but the man—he couldn’t have been less than seventy, and years in the sun had turned his flesh ruddy and thick—stood up and motioned Richard over to the cooler.
“You like a beer? We have plenty.”
“No thanks,” Richard said, though he dearly did. The other men were just as old, maybe a year or two separated each of them. Richard looked at the gravestone and saw that it read:
Manuela Rios, Devoted Mother, Sister, Wife. 1910–1972. Now and Forever In God’s Hands
. Thirty-five years Manuela Rios had been dead and still there were people who cared enough to throw a little fiesta for her. Richard doubted anyone would bother to do likewise for him, at least not those who knew him now. When he looked back up, all three men—and the dog—were staring at him. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he mumbled, because he couldn’t figure out what to say, having never attended a picnic on top of a corpse, but the three men didn’t seem to hear him or, if they did, didn’t bother to react. Of course not, he thought, it’s been thirty-five years! It’s not a
loss anymore, it’s a fucking fact. He wasn’t sure precisely when loss stopped being simple sorrow and turned into a condition of your existence, but he was beginning to suspect that it was something like an undertow and that he wouldn’t be aware of it until he was far off to sea with no way of getting back to shore.
The man motioned toward the elaborate marble headstone only a few feet away. “You here for Amy Charsten?” the man asked.
It was so weird hearing Amy’s name come from this man’s mouth, the way her entire life had ended up as two words uttered by a stranger in a cemetery. Amy was proud of her name, proud that she was the only woman alive who had it, proud that she’d found a man who didn’t care that she’d decided to keep it when she married, and now that was all that was left of her. Whatever was underground wasn’t his twin sister, Richard knew, because he was still alive and he was part of her, was her, could have been her.
“She was my twin sister,” Richard said. “I haven’t made it out here before, but I felt like it was time.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Well, her husband say, you know, if I see you here call him and he’ll call the cops. He even gave me a photo.” The man reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and from there retrieved a folded picture and handed it to Richard. It was actually a photo of Amy and Richard sitting together on the swing Amy had on her back porch, except that Amy had been dutifully sliced out of the frame. Or, more like it, Richard had been sliced out. Richard remembered precisely when it was taken: Thanksgiving, 1999. He’d just gotten out of jail the day before, and Amy had graciously taken him into her home in the gated compound in Calabasas. The next day,
Amy presented him with the keys to his apartment and, she said, “a new lease on life.” They’d both laughed at the silly pun, and for a few moments they’d just been brother and sister again. It was one of those memories he’d latched onto after her death, looking for some deeper resonance.
“That’s me,” Richard said and attempted to hand the photo back.
“No, no,” the man said. “You keep it. We’re here every week, you know, just being with our mother, and we don’t see Amy’s husband but twice since the funeral, so we say, you know, maybe we’ll call the cops on him for not being here more, that’s what we should do.”
Richard just nodded. When all of this will business was settled, he’d get in contact with Jeff, his brother-in-law, and just tell him how it was all a mistake, one of a series of terrible mistakes, one that ended up being the culmination of all the worst decisions of his life. He’d do that. In fact, he decided, he’d give Jeff half of everything. Maybe two-thirds. Maybe he’d give him 90 percent. How much money did he actually need? Not $250 million, certainly. Not even $25 million. He might give 99 percent to Jeff, just take the yacht and some scratch for food and beer. And then what? A life of leisure? Yes. Yes. He’d earned that.
Hadn’t
he earned that? Hadn’t he suffered enough to live out the next fifty years in relative comfort? Wasn’t it his time?
But before he could even dwell on that possibility, Richard found himself slumped over and sobbing, the Mexican man patting him gently on the back, telling him it would all be okay, that it gets better, that it can suffocate you unless you handle it, but Richard wasn’t even sure who he was crying
for. What was he doing here? Why had he bothered to bring his father’s ashes? What did he think he’d accomplish? That he’d place Deuce’s ashes next to Amy’s grave, he’d spread out the will, and the three of them would just hash it out until someone came up with a way for Richard to claim his inheritance? He would have been better off bringing in Tarot cards and a fucking shaman.
It was all out in front of him, though Richard couldn’t accurately pinpoint what “it” was. He thought it might be something about getting what was deserved, something he’d earned, something he’d value for the rest of his life: the opportunity to
try
on a new skin, a new life, push forward into the sunset of existence with an idea that there was equity in all of the failure. For nearly two decades he’d believed that his father had cursed him that first day in the cell in Manhattan Beach—a cell he’d recall as the nicest one he’d had the pleasure of drying out in—but now things were starting to filter out into clearer focus.
You won’t be missed.
It wasn’t a curse, Richard understood now, it was a premonition. There was always a loophole.
Eventually, the Mexican men must have determined that Richard needed to be alone with his sobbing, because they quietly packed up their beer and folding chairs and left him alone in the damp grass at the base of Amy’s grave, where he sat for a long time reading through Deuce’s will, slowly realizing that the loophole was right where it should be.
Richard often thought of his mistakes as being like falling into and out of love. When you were deep in with someone new, figuring out what felt right and shit, everything was electric.
It’s all sex in public places, boozy nights, and secret-telling. But actually being in love, sustaining love, is a fucking bear. It’s taxes and phone bills and excuses and lies and degradation and where do you end up? Regretting everything, trying to piece together how you could have ever made such a foolish decision as to whom to love and trust. At some point—and Richard felt he’d crossed a precipice in this regard—you decide you do not want to be defined by your worst mistakes.
The unfortunate thing, Richard knew now, standing shirtless in the backyard of Deuce’s childhood home in Sarasota, spreading red clay across a swatch of AstroTurf, was that it took him thirty-five years plus ten long days and now, well, a single night to figure out how to break the cycle without falling off the bike all together. What was deserved ultimately was what one already had.
Trying
had only reinforced in Richard the sense that he could steal identities and apply them to himself any old time he pleased without any regard for karmic ramifications or simple, unmitigated guilt.
Richard didn’t love his father, was content that he probably never would, but he did love his twin sister, Amy. As he shoveled the last bit of clay into place and then tamped it down with the back of the spade, he tried to think of how it was for them when they were kids, how when they were little they looked so much alike that strangers always thought Amy was a boy, too. He remembered small things that weren’t significant but had somehow hardwired into his brain. Eating Pronto Pups and saltwater taffy together in Seaside, Oregon, and giggling about . . . what was it? Some joke they used to tell each other, he recalled that, something about corn dogs and taffy that they’d turned into a riddle of some kind. Anointing
each other charter members of the Creepy Crawly Club for their stealth ability to break into and out of the kitchen after bedtime. The way Richard used to sneak into Amy’s room at night when he couldn’t sleep and would lie on the floor beside her bed and replicate her breathing rhythm until he, too, fell asleep.
Richard was already aware that he’d begun to forget aspects of his sister. Sometimes he would stare at himself in the mirror and try to imagine that he was his sister, that he was the one who’d died, and what would she be feeling? They were the same person, cut from the same piece of whole cloth, and yet they’d been separated over the years by inertia. She always in motion, he always at rest. And now, inexplicably, it had flipped. All that was left of his sister was himself, and Richard felt a debt to that.
Amy’s last words for him hadn’t felt like the stuff of epiphany, but he realized now, as he walked down the first base line he’d painted in painstaking detail on Major League quality AstroTurf, that he’d count them as the first sign of a newfound hope.
Stop fucking up
. He would do that. He would. He
will
, he thinks. He
will
.
Richard conceded, however, that Amy might have approved of this last bit of criminal activity—breaking into and vandalizing a home he didn’t own and never would—since the result aimed for a greater good, if only briefly. He even purchased the supplies himself, did all the measuring, made sure the dimensions matched exactly, and even went beyond what was probably strictly needed to meet the conditions of the will so that, if his father chose to haunt this space, he could sprint from home, down to first, and make the turn toward second into perpetuity.
It was nearly midnight when Richard finally looked at his watch, which meant that Deuce’s law office was probably long closed and all the Calvin Woodses of the world were already at home living their separate lives, and it wouldn’t be until tomorrow that they realized Richard Charsten III had pissed away an empire.
Richard went out to his rental car and retrieved Deuce’s ashes and a change of clothes from a duffle bag in the trunk. He set Deuce down on home plate while he silently changed into a suit and tie, along with a pair of reasonable dress shoes he’d purchased at Target before flying to Sarasota. When he was dressed, Richard wet a black pocket comb with his tongue and managed to get his hair into the semblance of a part. He wasn’t sure if he should say something while he spread his father’s ashes down the first base line of the Seattle Kingdome, or if he should remain in solemn silence, but he figured, if appropriate, words would come, or thoughts would come, and he would make them last.
Other Resort Cities
T
hree days after she gets back from Russia with Natalya, her adopted daughter, Tania knows that she’s made a mistake. It’s ten in the morning and they’re walking through the new New York, New York Casino, Tania pointing out how the faux Statue of Liberty out front is
actually
half the scale of the real statue, how when Tania’s ancestral family first came to America, they
actually
came right past the Statue of Liberty, too. How the casino floor is
actually
a replica of Central Park, right down to the trees and the piped-in bird noises.
Seventy-two hours into their new life together and Tania has already run out of conversation topics, is now making things up as she goes along, this word “actually” creeping back into her vocabulary for the first time since the year she spent lying to everyone. How old was she then? Sixteen or seventeen, though she could have been fifteen or eighteen. It may have been longer than a year. It may have
actually
been a period. Back then, she lied because she had nothing else to say, nothing interesting whatsoever, and frequently told stories to her friends about
actually
spending a year in England when she was ten, or how her real father was
actually
Walter Cronkite, because it was better than simply being someone’s second daughter.