UNCONDITIONAL
by
Blake Crouch
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Blake Crouch on Smashwords
Copyright 2011 by Blake Crouch
Cover art copyright 2011 by Jeroen ten Berge
All rights reserved.
PRAISE FOR BLAKE CROUCH
Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Highest possible recommendation.
BOOKREPORTER
Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I've read in years.
DAVID MORRELL
UNCONDITIONAL is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information about the author, please visit www.blakecrouch.com.
For more information about the artist, please visit www.jeroentenberge.com.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
* * * * *
unconditional
“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.
“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.
“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it is.
“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…
“What?
“Want me to read this now? While you watch?
“You’re just like all of ’em, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.
“Ain’t I right?
“No?
“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”
My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.
In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?
I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October afternoon. The light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to appreciate what I had.
When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once someone’s little boy.”
I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it is killing me.
I wanted everything for you, son.
I still do.
You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can still love you, how, even though you took everything from me, you’re still all that I have.