John Hart - Down River

“Are the police still here?”

He shook his head. “They hung out for a long time, but it’s like I said, Grace isn’t really talking. I think they’re out at the farm, Robin and some guy named Grantham. He works for the sheriff. He’s the one asking all the questions.”

“The sheriff,” I said, feeling the emotion move into my face: the dislike, the memories. It was the Rowan County sheriff who’d filed the murder charge against me.

Jamie nodded. “Same one.”

“Wait a minute. Why is Robin involved in this? She works for the city.”

“I think she does all the sex cases. Some kind of partnership with the sheriff’s office when it’s out of her normal jurisdiction. She’s always in the paper. That Grantham, though, don’t let him fool you. He’s only been around for a few years, but he’s sharp.”

“Robin questioned me.” I still could not believe it.

“She had to, man. You know what it took for her to stand by you when everyone and his brother wanted you strung up. She almost got fired for it.” Jamie shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. “You need me to go in with you?”

“You offering?”

He didn’t answer, just looked embarrassed. “No problem,” I said, and turned away.

“Hey,” Jamie said. I stopped. “What I said before, about being glad to have a front-row seat… I didn’t mean it. Not like this.”

“It’s cool, Jamie. No sweat.”

I went in through the double doors. Lights hummed. People looked up and then ignored me. I rounded a corner and saw my father first. He sat like a broken man. His head hung loosely and his arms wrapped around his shoulders as if they had too many joints. Dolf sat beside him, very erect, and stared at the wall in utter stillness. The skin beneath his eyes had pulled away in pale, pink crescents, and he, too, looked reduced. He saw me first, and twitched as if caught doing something he should not.

I stepped farther into the waiting area they occupied. “Dolf.” I paused. “Dad.”

Dolf pushed himself to his feet and rubbed his hands on his thighs. My father looked up, and I saw that his face looked shattered, too. He held my eyes and straightened his back as if will alone could reconstitute a broken frame. I thought of what Robin had said, that my father wept when he heard that I’d come back. I saw nothing like that now. His fists were white and hard. Cords stretched the skin of his neck.

“What do you know about this, Adam?”

I’d hoped that this would not happen, that Jamie had been wrong. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t be smart with me, son. What do you know about this?” He raised his voice. “About Grace, goddamn it.”

For an instant I froze, but then I felt the palsy in my hands, the disbelief that made my skin burn. Dolf looked traumatized. My father stepped closer. He was taller than I, still wide through the shoulders. I searched his face for reason to hope and found nothing. So be it.

“I’m not going to have this discussion,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you damn well are. You’re going to talk to us, and you’re going to tell us what happened.”

“I have nothing to say to you about this.”

“You were with her. You kissed her. She ran from you. Don’t deny it. They found her clothes still on the dock.” He’d made up his mind. The calm was a veneer. It wouldn’t last. “The truth, Adam. For once. The truth.”

But I could tell him nothing; so I said the only thing that still mattered to me. Knowing my father and what would come, I said it.

“I want to see her.”

He lunged for me. He caught me by the shirt and slammed me against the hard hospital wall. Every detail of his face was plain, but mostly I saw the stranger in him, the pure and crushing hatred as the last of his faith in me fell away. “If you did this,” he said, “I will fucking kill you.”

I didn’t fight back. I let him hold me against the wall until the hatred shrank into something less total. Like pain and loss. Like something in him just died.

“You should not have to ask me,” I said, removing his hands from my shirt. “And I should not have to answer.”

He turned away. “You are not my son,” he said.

He showed me his back, and Dolf could not meet my eyes; but I refused to be made small. Not now. Not again. So I fought the overwhelming urge to explain. I stood my ground and, when my father turned, I held his eyes until he looked away. I sat on one side of the waiting area and my father sat on the other. At one point, Dolf made as if to cross the room to speak with me.

“Sit down, Dolf,” my father said.

Dolf sat.

Eventually, my father climbed to his feet. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. “I need some unspoiled air.” When the sound of his feet faded away, Dolf came to sit beside me. He was just over sixty, a hardworking man with massive hands and iron hair. Dolf had been around for as long as I could remember. My entire life. He’d started on the farm as a young man, and when my father inherited the place, he’d kept Dolf on as the number two man. They were like brothers, inseparable. It had always been my belief, in fact, that without Dolf, neither my father nor I would have survived my mother’s suicide. He’d held us together, and I could still remember the weight of his hand on my narrow shoulder in the hard days after the world vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder.

I studied his uneven face, the small blue eyes and the eyebrows dusted with white. He patted my knee and leaned his head against the wall. In profile, he looked like he’d been carved from a hunk of dried beef.

“Your father is a passionate man, Adam. He acts in the moment, but usually calms down and sees things differently. Gray Wilson was murdered and Janice saw what she saw. Now you’re back and someone’s done this to Grace. He’s worked up. He’ll get over it.”

“Do you really think words can make this right?”

“I don’t think you did anything wrong, Adam. And if your father was thinking straight, he’d see it that way, too. You need to understand that when Grace came to me, I had no idea what to do. My wife left when my own daughter was young. I knew nothing about nothing. Your father helped me. He feels responsible.” He spread his palms. “He’s a proud man, and prideful men don’t show their hurt. They lash out. They do things they eventually regret.”

“That changes nothing.”

Dolf shook his head again. “We all have regrets. You do. I do. But the older we get, the more there are to carry around. That much weight can break a man. That’s all I’m saying. Give your old man a chance. He never believed you killed that boy, but he couldn’t just ignore the things his own wife said.”

“He threw me out.”

“And he’s wanted to make it right. I can’t count the times he wanted to call you, or write you. He even asked me once if I’d drive to New York with him. He said there were things to say, and not all things should be trusted to paper.”

“Wanting is not the same as doing.”

“That’s true.”

I thought of the blank page I’d found on my father’s desk. “What stopped him?”

“Pride. And your stepmother.”

“Janice.” The name came with difficulty.

“She’s a decent woman, Adam. A loving mother. Good for your father. In spite of everything, I still believe that, just as she believes what she saw that night. I can promise that these five years have not been easy on her, either. It’s not like she had a choice. We all act on what we believe.”

“You want me to forgive him?” I asked.

“I want you to give him a chance.”

“His loyalty should be to me.”

Dolf sighed. “You’re not his only family, Adam.”

“I was his first.”