Daniel Palmer - Helpless

The other kid kept on running.

It was every man for himself, same now as it was back in his day.

Tom recognized the boy—a senior at Shilo High School named Matthew. Matthew was holding a can of beer in his hand.

“Where’s Jill?” Tom asked.

Matthew said nothing, probably too scared to speak.

“Where’s my daughter?” Tom asked again. Tom turned his flashlight to shine it on his own face. He wanted Matthew to see the seriousness of his expression.

“She was hanging out at the ledge,” Matthew said, with each word wavering.

“Are you driving?”

“No.”

“Good,” Tom said, ripping the beer can from Matthew’s hand before crushing it.

Tom walked toward the ledge. He heard several more loud splashes. In the moonlight, he saw a silhouetted figure standing near to the quarry’s edge, facing him. As he approached, Tom knew it was his daughter.

“What are you doing?” Jill shouted.

Tom shone his flashlight on Jill’s face, fixed in a hateful sneer. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She didn’t look wet.

She hadn’t been swimming.

He got close enough to smell her breath. He didn’t believe she’d been drinking, either.

Tom shone his flashlight into the impenetrably dark water below. The kids down there were easy to spot. Their white skin glowed brighter than the moon. They were treading water, hoping to avoid detection.

“Get out of the water and get home!” Tom shouted. He followed their movement with his flashlight beam, knowing they were swimming for the water’s only exit. It was safest to jump from the place where they did—the water here was the deepest, no jutting or shallow rocks, either. Sunken railroad ties represented the only real danger here. A good leap outward ensured any jumper that they’d safely clear the lethal obstacle below. But the twenty-five-foot quarry wall was too sheer to climb back up. With luck, these kids were smart enough to keep towels and dry clothes where they’d be getting out. Tom doubted any of them would return to the Spot to dry off.

“You are totally embarrassing me,” Jill said. “Please go away. Now!”

“You need to come with me,” Tom said, keeping his voice calm, but determined. “Now.” Tom put his hand on Jill’s shoulder, but his daughter shrugged it off with a quick and violent jerk.

“Get your hands off me,” Jill snapped at him. “Leave me alone.”

“That’s not an option.”

“You can’t make me come with you.”

“I’m still your father.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t live with you anymore. Remember?”

“Where is Mitchell?” asked Tom.

Jill sighed in disgust. “I don’t know,” she said. “He probably took off when you scared everybody away.”

“Listen, from now on Mitchell Boyd is off-limits to you. His father’s dangerous, and I don’t want you anywhere near that family.”

“You can’t make that decision for me,” Jill said, shaking her head. “You can’t.”

“You have to trust me on this, Jill. It’s not safe for you to be with him.”

“Why should I trust you?” Jill said in a voice steeped with exasperation. “I don’t even know you. For all I know, you did have something to do with what happened to Mom. And you know what else? I think you are sleeping with Lindsey. I can’t trust you and won’t. Ever!”

Tom’s thoughts flashed on the whiteboard still in the Oak Street house living room—more specifically on the square around the word trust, which Jill had redrawn.

It was time, he decided. It was time.

The Spot was now completely deserted. A symphony of nighttime forest creatures buzzed in a cacophony of sound. Off in the distance, Tom could still hear the sound of kids swimming to get away. Sparks crackled and burst skyward from the fire.

“You’re right, Jill,” Tom said, nodding his head while biting on his lower lip. “I haven’t given you enough reason to trust me. But if you come with me right now, I’ll tell you why your mother hated me so much, why she tried to come between us.”

That got her attention. Jill looked as though she might burst into tears.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I need you to trust me,” Tom said, resting his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. This time, she didn’t shrug it away. “For your safety, you’ve got to believe me when I tell you to keep away from Mitchell Boyd. I have good reason.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I’ve been keeping a secret from you, Jill. A secret your mother and I never wanted you to know. It will explain everything. Why Kip Lange was in the woods that night. Why your mother hated me so much. And probably why somebody is out to destroy my reputation.”

Tom pulled the faded yellow armchair in front of the couch where Jill was seated. His stomach spun a few nerve-rattled cartwheels. He knew what had to be done, but that didn’t make it any easier. To keep Jill safe, she had to learn to trust him.

“What I’m about to tell you is going to shock you. I’m not proud of what I did. But I had my reasons. I’m not expecting you to understand completely. But I need you to listen with an open mind. Deal?”

“Deal,” Jill said.

His daughter’s eyes were owl-like, wide, and intently probing.

“Even though your mother and I never officially broke up after high school, I didn’t see or hear from her for ten years. I was focused on becoming a Navy SEAL, and that’s all that mattered to me. Then my unit was sent to Germany to conduct a series of training exercises. It was a few years before September eleventh, and our combat deployments were few and far between. Your mother was living on that base. We reconnected and fell back in love, or so I thought.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Jill asked.

“A shooting took place while I was living on that base. One of the lieutenants, a guy named Stan Greeley, was attacked in his home and shot several times. The military police found Kip Lange inside Greeley’s home. Lange had been shot twice in the leg and once in the shoulder and couldn’t walk or even crawl away. They arrested him on the spot. But the MPs never recovered his gun.”

“I don’t understand. What does this have to do with Mom?” Jill asked.

“Be patient. You need to know all this. Lange was deported back to the States, where he was going to face court-martial. Greeley had been gravely injured and was in a drug-induced coma. I had only a few days left before I was scheduled to fly home with my unit, so your mother and I tried to make the most of what little time we had left. On the day I was to leave, your mother showed up at the airport with a crate in the back of a truck she had borrowed. She asked me to bring the crate home for her.”

“Why?”

“She had a limit to how much stuff she could bring back, and I didn’t. With rank comes privilege. She opened the top of the crate and showed me a couple bottles of a German beer we both liked, and told me to call her when I got home so we could have a toast together. The rest of the crate was really densely packed, but I caught a glimpse of some of the other things inside—dishes and souvenirs and…”

Tom pointed to the cuckoo clock mounted on the living room wall.

“Ugh! I hate that clock,” Jill said.

“But that wasn’t all she had packed in that crate. Security and customs, even for military transport, weren’t like they are today. The guys working customs knew me. We joked around together. So when my team was getting the plane ready to fly home, they made only a cursory inspection of what we were bringing home with us. Like I said, with rank comes privilege.”