H
ayden had often asked about his father, from the time he was old enough to understand that most of the other kids had one. When he was very small, I avoided the subject by telling him that I’d fill him in when he was old enough to understand. But you know kids; they get old enough long before you want to admit it. At that early stage, I might’ve actually intended to tell him the truth.
Right after Randy was convicted and sent to prison, he made several attempts to track us down. Letters would arrive at my mother’s house, never addressed to me, but always
to Hayden. I told Mom to throw them away without opening them, but of course she opened and read them. She said they gave her the shivers; Randy wanted to establish a relationship with his progeny. He claimed to have a legal right. And he may have been correct.
So I changed my name and moved across the country. Hayden didn’t even know he was once a Mosley. By the time he was three, it had become obvious to me that the truth was exactly what I could never allow him to know, or at least not until he could handle it. I mean, how could you make those words come out of your mouth:
Your father was a killer who defiled and murdered a dozen human beings?
I had to tell him something, though. He was constantly falling into step behind adult men whenever we went out in public, reaching out to grasp the hems of their coats at the grocery store. I could see his eyes narrow when he saw fathers toting their kids on their shoulders while we were out at the park; he even seemed transfixed by men scolding their kids publicly in restaurants.
Eventually, my evasions sent him into tantrums. So, God forgive me, I improvised. I told him that he did have a father, but that his father had done some very bad things that made it impossible for Mommy and Daddy to live together anymore. I said his father stole money from people; I explained why stealing was wrong. I said his father was a dangerous man who would never be a part of our lives. I could see the deep wound in my son’s eyes. I knew it was better than the reality.
Then came that story I saw on CNN, about how another convict had attempted to kill Randy and instead been killed.
The next time Hayden mentioned his father, I sat him down and told him that there had been an incident in the prison where his father was being held. I told him his father was dead.
I’d meant to do better. I thought it would end the conversation for good. But even as I told The Lie I could hear the searing bitterness in my own voice. I hoped it would deflect any further questions, and it did, but I could hear him crying in his bed that night. And I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him. Always I had wondered:
Do those shots fired in our front yard in El Ray echo in his prememory?
He wasn’t even a year old when it happened, but somewhere he must have retained it, down there wherever dreams come from. He’d always been a light sleeper, and he often talked in his sleep, too, child gibberish I could not understand but which nevertheless gave me chills up the back of my spine as I lay alone and awake and restless in my own room next to his.
Of course I knew that he would find out the truth at some point in the future. Of course I’d always acknowledged, to myself, that there would come a day, perhaps when he was in his late teens or even early twenties, when he would say to me, “Mom, I know that story you told me about Dad was a load of crap. I want you to tell me the truth.” And by then he’d have developed into a stable, wellbalanced person, able to cope with the shock of the reality
without it forever skewing him or tainting him beyond repair.
But Charles Pritchett and the local media had decided, without my input, that today would be that day, and never mind that I was not prepared, not ready by even the most tortured definition of the concept of readiness. Never mind that my son wasn’t ready, either.
T
he school bus stop was a block from our house. Usually Hayden was under strict orders to go straight home and lock the door until I arrived from work. Lately, he’d been hanging out at the McPhersons more often than not, but today I parked my car at the curb and waited for the bus to drop him off. After overhearing the discussion in the ladies room at work, I went ahead and took the rest of the day. Jim had told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to see me back in the office for at least a week. He had told me to call him anytime I needed a sympathetic ear. He’d tendered both his home and cell phone numbers and I dutifully keyed them into my cell.
The bright yellow paint on the bus did little to disguise its prior history as conveyance for the NC State Bureau of Corrections; the school system bought a fleet of them from the state last year at bargain prices, and the vehicle had one of those blunt, ugly noses that looked nothing like the buses we rode when I was a kid growing up in Oregon.
They hadn’t even bothered to remove the mesh cages from over the windows, perhaps thinking it would keep the children safer in case of an accident. The effect was unsettling, though: sterile functionality crossed with overt restraint.
The doors opened with that pneumatic hiss. Seven or eight kids clambered off, hefting backpacks too large for them, a couple of girls cutting a streak down the sidewalk past my car, talking in excited tones about what Kevin did in third period. Another lone kid disembarked, talking into a cell phone. He couldn’t have been more than eight. Still no sign of Hayden, and my throat closed up a little. But here he came, last off, listing side to side down the three steps, so obviously dejected that it was like he was having a hard time keeping himself upright. My heart clenched, seeing that gait, knowing what it portended even before he lifted his head and I saw the snot streaks down his puffy cheeks.
The bus driver watched him a moment, then looked up and spotted my car at the curb, me opening the passengerside door and calling for Hayden to come on. The driver kept staring at me even as he pushed a button and the bus doors closed.
“Hey, champ,” I said as Hayden climbed in beside me. He used both hands to pull his door shut. I told him to buckle his seat belt and he did so, moving like a robot. All my tears had dried up in my throat.
Be strong now if you’re ever going to be, he needs you worse than you need anything, you’re all he’s got and if you go to pieces there’s no one else around to pick them up, there’s no telling what the long-term damage might be
… “How’s it going?”
He faced me across the seat and his eyes were as cold as I’d ever seen them. Bottomless black glass. I swallowed and forced a smile and drove slowly back to our house. As the garage door was closing behind us, I turned to reach for his hand but he was already on the move. He had his own house key at the ready. He was through the door and up the stairs and gone before I could even retrieve my laptop bag from the backseat.
I found him in his bedroom, lying facedown on the comforter, crying helplessly. The curtains were closed and the only light came from the screen saver on his Junior PC, a soft blue geometric pattern that pulsed and twisted in place. I sat and stroked his hair. I began, “Baby—”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said into his pillow. It was very nearly a scream. “He’s alive, and he’s not just a robber. What everyone at school was saying about my dad, it’s all t-t-true?”
No defense left. “Yes.”
He turned over and his expression was very grown-up, which is always a disorienting thing for a parent to see on their child’s face, but in this case it was worse, it was awful, because it was the very countenance of betrayal. I supposed that if he were an adult, this exact same expression would render him childlike in its nakedness. I couldn’t help it, I felt the hot tears constricting the back of my throat and I swallowed thickly. His glare was pitiless. “You told me Daddy was gone. How could you lie about that?” he managed. “Yuh-y-you told me not to ever lie.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry.” I pulled him close and he allowed
it but his arms remained limp at his sides. How many times could my heart break? How much longer could Randy—imprisoned and sterilized behind the meanest steel—keep doing this to us? “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Daddy
killed
people? For no reason?” He pushed away from me and repeated the second question.
I said quickly, “There’s never a reason. Listen, Hayden, because this is important. Your father is a very sick man. You remember how sick you were when you got the chicken pox, back when you were in play school?”
He nodded solemnly.
“Your father wasn’t sick like that. He was sick in his mind. I didn’t realize it when I met him, because he pretended not to be sick, and it’s easier for people who are sick in their minds to hide it than it is for people who are sick in their bodies. There are no sores or anything that would tip you off. He pretended to be just like everybody else, but really he wasn’t. I didn’t find out until years later, and by then I’d had you and I couldn’t do anything to take back what your father had already done. I stopped him from doing it to anybody else, though, because I called the police as soon as I realized.”
I heard echoes of my defense to Charles Pritchett, sounding just as lame.
Not my responsibility, not me, how could anyone expect the person who lived day by day with the madman to know anything about who he really was, his true nature? I mean, you can’t hold me to such a standard, it’s simply unrealistic, it’s too much
…
But this was my son, and in this horrible moment of clarity I understood that what I had owed him all along was
nothing less than the sad truth. “I was afraid of him, sweetie. I was afraid that if I let myself understand how sick your father was, and what he’d done to other people, then I’d have to give you up, along with everything else we’d … I’d worked so hard for. And later on, when you would ask me about him, I knew that I was afraid of what he might do to you if he ever got the chance, because he was so sick, and I thought it would be better for everyone if you thought he was gone.”
He was holding himself at arm’s length, watching me carefully with that betrayed face. But he’d stopped sobbing, and was attentive, trying to evaluate these concepts of insanity and personal responsibility. Usually, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting these abstract kinds of ideas across to a seven-year-old. I realized suddenly that this was the first time he’d ever caught me in a lie. He would never ever look at me again in quite the same way as he had this morning. I could still remember the first time I caught my parents lying. My lip trembled. I swallowed and took a deep breath. I focused.
“Honey,” I said, “you remember how when that mean boy stole your baseball in first grade last year, and your teacher asked who did it, and the boy wouldn’t admit it but she found it hidden in his backpack anyway?”
“Brian Carter.” My little man was all serious absorption now. Waiting to see if what I had to say would be in any way independently verifiable.
“Brian, right. Well, you remember how I told you that stealing was bad but lying about it was worse? And how if
he would have just admitted it then the teacher might not have punished him?”
Hayden nodded.
“Well … I told myself that if I didn’t tell you the truth about your dad, it might not hurt your feelings so much. No one wants to know something like that about their parents, and I hate your dad for doing it to us, I will hate him until the day he dies, and that’s the truth.” Hayden’s mouth had fallen open; he knew “hate” was a bad word. I
re
focused. “I only meant to keep you from getting hurt. But you see how the truth came out anyway, just like it did when Brian stole your baseball? It’s always like that, which is why it’s always better to tell the truth in the first place, even if it’s something bad. I know I didn’t do that, and I know I let you down. I’m sorry. I was wrong to do it. From now on, I promise you I’ll do better.”
I could see the doubt, the almost crafty calculation running in tandem with his wounded confusion.
She’s lied to me all my life, how can I believe her now? What else has she told me that isn’t true?
My coin long spent.
It was spooky, his silent assessment. I tried to salvage some degree of face, truly desperate that I might not be able to regain his faith. “How many times have I lied to you before?”
“I don’t know, now.”
“Fair enough. But you remember how I told you that Mr. Donahue down the street was breaking the law when he was watering his yard during the drought last summer? And you didn’t believe me, because you said he was too nice and
too old, and it was only water. But then you saw the police come and he argued with them and they gave him a citation?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And how about when I explained that the boy on
Hey, Simon
wasn’t really lost in the woods but that he was just an actor on TV? And then he came to the mall and signed autographs and you got his. I told the truth about those things, right?”
“Okay,” he said. “I get it. But that’s not really the same, Mom.”
“I know.”
“And Ashton at school said that if Daddy was a criminal then I was going to be one, too, because it’s generic.”
I bit down on the quick flush of anger that came along with that tidbit, and made a mental note to have a word with Ashton Hale’s mother the next time I saw her. Assuming that she would still deign to speak to me. “I think Ashton meant ‘genetic,’ honey, and I’ve told you before not to listen to that boy. He’s wrong, as usual. Genetics are the physical traits that mommies and daddies pass down to their kids. Plenty of kids have one bad parent or maybe even two, but they turn out fine when they grow up. And some parents who are good have bad kids. Genetics means you might have the same color hair or grow up to be the same height as your parents, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to act like they do. That’s
always
your choice.”
I remembered my mother tiptoeing around my father’s infidelities. I remembered her lying to herself, and to me.
“Do I look like him?” Hayden asked.
And he stumped me with that one, because of course he did. Hayden got my fine brown hair, and if the baby fat didn’t melt away he’d be stuck with my chipmunk cheeks, but everything else on his face was pure Randy. The sharp chin, the brown eyes almost black. The olive skin and a quick smile, too toothy for comfort when he was faking it. A certain way he cocked his head when he was trying to figure something out.
“Not so much,” I said.
“Do you have pictures?”
“I threw them away. Now listen to me. What your father did was bad, the very worst thing a person can do. And he did it more than once. He lied to me and to everyone else but eventually he got caught and the police punished him by locking him up in jail. He’ll be there for the rest of his life, and he’ll never get out again.” I thought about trying to explain state execution and decided we’d probably covered quite enough for this afternoon. I knew what I was about to say and part of me flinched away from it even though I could see Randy there in Hayden’s eyes, plain as day—
oh
,
no
—and I was almost talking to him now, denouncing the father through my little innocent one. “I think it’s what he deserved. Most other people think so, too.”
“But if he’s sick, why can’t he just get better? Can’t the doctors do anything?”
“There are some things that the doctors can’t fix, Hayden. And I could’ve forgiven him for his sickness, except he
never even tried to get well. He knew the sickness made him do bad things but he never tried to stop. So you shouldn’t think about him, as much as you can help it. I know that Ashton and some of the other kids at school might bring it up, but you’re just going to have to do the best you can to ignore them. Soon they’ll find something else to talk about and you’ll still be the same sweet guy you’ve always been. You’ll never be like your father, okay? I promise.”
I must have had some credibility remaining, because his tears came back full force, and this time he was the one leaning into me, encircling my neck with those skinny, perfect little arms.