The chatter and merriment of Eric and his damsels was carnival music on a battlefield. They came down a path through the gardens, one of them on each of his arms. I would have Katie pick one for him. It was time for Eric to settle down and get married. Whichever of the two was the grandfather’s favorite.
Eric saw us watching.
“Don’t you have anything else to talk about?” he asked, bright as a star himself, and one of the girls giggled.
“No.”
“I’ll get a ride home later. You don’t have to wait.”
“We need to go.”
“Is Fred still here?”
“He’s already left.”
He understood. The girls did, too. They disengaged and tittered and grinned, but they understood that there was enmity, and a barrier had been erected. Eric said his good-nights and the three of us walked around the house, not even through it, to our car.
Despite the cool parting, Eric was enthralled. We let him jabber in the back seat.
“Genevieve is leaving for Washington in two weeks. She’s going to intern with her grandfather. Madeleine’s going back to Paris to graduate school.”
So perhaps Genevieve would be the one. Neither Katie nor I felt like talking.
And when we were home, about the last thing I wanted was to watch myself and Bill Idiot Sandoff, four feet high. But Eric was bouncing off the walls, and Katie was curious, so off we trooped for the viewing of the interview.
My thoughts had petrified. That moment of Katie’s gasp and the senator’s hatred was unmovable, and I couldn’t reach any other moment.
Eric diddled with the technology and I had a brief hope that the attempt had failed. But no, the brain that knew little of life knew much of video recording. There was a flash and a frozen image. My stomach turned.
“There you are!” Katie said. For her, this was comforting, this vision of her and my glory, and her tension from the evening dissipated into the humming air.
“I’ll find the start,” Eric said. As he searched for the beginning, split-second contortions battered the screen, rapid frozen images of my face smiling and shredded. I closed my eyes. This was my outside showing the fragmented reality of my inside, and I couldn’t watch.
“There.” Now it was Bill who was frozen, mouth gaping. Eric settled back into his chair and pushed the button. “Here we go!”
The mouth moved and words came out, but the static inside my head was too loud. Broken questions and disjointed answers crumbled into heaps of words and there was no place for my ears to put any more.
I tried to concentrate. He was talking about someone. “… we found a warm and open man, comfortable with his power and wealth. But there is no mistaking that he recognizes the responsibility that he has inherited along with his riches. He has moved decisively to right what he considers the wrongs of his father. Now he is the silent center of the political hurricane that is sweeping through the highest levels of state government. While investigators are only beginning to unravel millions of dollars of illegal bribes and fixed bids, and three very high profile murders, Channel Six’s exclusive interview sheds some light on Jason Boyer.”
Not Jason Boyer. Someone else. Someone responsible. Comfortable with power and wealth.
There is nothing silent in my center! I can’t do it anymore. I can’t play this game.
The Jason in front of me smiled. He was comfortable. He was responsible. It wasn’t me. It isn’t me! Look at him, at the truth of him. Arrogant, lying-more than any of the rivals he is casting down to set himself up higher. Ruthless. I know him. There is no center at all. Everything in me rose up against being that person.
The four-foot head continued. “Will you be meeting with Senator Forrester again?”
“Yes, actually. Katie and I will be visiting with him this evening, at his request. I hope we can have some reasoned discussion. The last thing we need just now is hot tempers and baseless accusations.”
It had ended. Katie squeezed my hand and put a little kiss on my cheek.
“I am so proud to be married to that man,” she said.
She hadn’t forgotten what she had seen at the Forresters’. The interview had put it in context for her, though, as a use of power rather than a clash of personalities. She was comfortable with that.
Eric said, “You should run against Forrester. You’d kill him. What did you talk about, anyway?”
“We had some differences,” I said.
“Who won?”
“Only time will tell,” I said. “Good night.” I couldn’t even imagine when I would ever sleep well again.
30
I was up early Sunday. The house was still dark when I left.
Katie called me an hour later.
“Jason! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You saw my note?”
“Yes. But I was worried.”
“I want some time to think,” I said.
“Because of last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “They’re terrible people. Whatever you have to do, they deserve it.”
“I hope not. Someday I might get what I deserve.”
“Don’t do that! You always turn my words against me.”
“No, not against you-against me.”
“Last night you said that you were your father’s son. That’s not bad, Jason. It’s why we are where we are.”
“Getting born into some family is a pretty random thing.”
“But it’s what makes you who you are.”
“Then why don’t I like it?”
“I can’t argue with you, Jason.”
“It’s okay. I can argue with myself just fine. I don’t need someone else to help.”
“I wish I could help.”
How I wish you could. “Just give me time.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Decide.”
There was a long enough pause after that, that I wondered if the connection was breaking up.
“But I have decided,” she said finally. She was breaking up, not the connection. “You’re scaring me. You make me feel like everything’s built on sand.”
“It is. I can’t fix it, Katie. I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t, either,” she said.
I told her I’d call later.
My father’s son. I leaned back in his old wooden desk chair behind the old wooden desk, among the books that were never read and the globe that was never turned, and the son was the father.
Had he ever asked the questions?
Had he found answers, or had he learned to live without them?
The windows looked out over the gardens and lawn. It was all just starting to fray a little from lack of care. The sky was still clean and tended.
What a beautiful Sunday morning. Five weeks since Katie and Eric and I had sat at our breakfast table in shock at Melvin dying the night before. Now I was the one who had died the night before.
How much longer could I go on like this? I would either accept my fate to be Melvin or kill myself, and they were both the same thing.
But I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t live with this confusion in my soul-it would be only a matter of time before I would drive myself off a cliff to escape the questions.
It was real, that I would kill myself. All the money and power- that was what it was trying to do, however it could. It would kill. That was its real goal. Melvin, Angela, Grainger-it had killed all of them. Katie, Eric, Fred, Bob Forrester, Harry Bright-they were all mortally wounded. And when I looked at it, I knew the answer.
So it was that I made my decision, life or death, and I chose to live if there was any chance left that I could.
I locked the door of the mansion behind me and then I was standing next to my car. I didn’t know what I’d actually decided, only that I had.
Where was I going? I couldn’t go to Katie, not yet. I wanted someone who knew what I meant and could help me.
Nathan was only one man I knew who had somehow escaped the sting and poison. I set my course back toward the city.