Son of Destruction

45




Walker


Maybe some deep, unsuspecting part of Walker wants to get caught but it’s unlikely, given the care with which he circumscribes his life. More likely he’s played out his string, trailing young Dan Carteret night and day without stopping for more than the rudimentaries, running hard last night and all day and into tonight, blindly rushing along on no sleep, on exhaustion compounded by intolerable tension and aching grief. Although he refuses to acknowledge it, Walker Pike is strung out on hours of following without being seen, taut and driven because he does not know how to do what he has to without hurting anyone.

In fact he isn’t sure what he has to do, but that’s not the hardest thing. The hardest thing is being this close to his son without showing himself, even when he most wants to speak to him. With no idea what he would say if they did talk, because they are strangers and he’s afraid to find out what said son, the baby he, OK, the child he walked out on, would have to say to him.

Or maybe he’s sitting out here in plain sight because he is flat-out exhausted.

Unless it’s the function of geography.

At night on Coral Shores it’s harder to follow a man without his picking up on it. Bright moonlight defies him. This is, furthermore, a tight community where solid citizens hunker down at home after dark, particularly on Sunday nights when the nesting instinct strikes. All partied out after the weekend, they hole up in front of the electronic fire, snug and sanctimoniously self-satisfied.

There’s nobody on the streets but Walker Pike and the man he is following.

Inevitably, the kid will pick up Walker’s headlights in his rear view mirror; he’ll notice that when he turns, Walker turns. They’ve already come close; that rented tin can almost nicked him back there on the circle. He had to lay back and run with his lights off for several blocks, until the driver was done stopping to see if Walker would pass him, and fed up with screeching around corners to trick the driver keeping pace with him. Out on the barren peninsula road even a blind monkey would know that he was being followed.

Better get there first, Pike, if you hope to control what goes down out there when the kid comes charging in to storm Kalen’s house.

Walker will wait for him outside Orville Kalen’s dream house. It’s easy enough for Walker to find – not because he’s local, but because this is not the first time he’s been here, parked outside. Never mind when that was, or what Walker Pike considered when he stopped in front of the gleaming modern house one night not that long ago, riveted and trembling with suppressed rage. Shattered, he hit the gas and scratched off while the enemy he most wanted dead was still alive. Correction. Still safe.

Unlike the northerner from the real world, who will keep cross-hatching Coral Shores until he hits the right road, Walker goes like an arrow to the end of the peninsula. Out here, planting is sparse. Scrub pines and travelers’ palms cling to sandy dirt that blows across the city’s poshest piece of real estate same as it did in the white trash neighborhood on Pierce Point back in the day, when Walker and Wade lived with Pop in four rooms above the garage.

In denser neighborhoods on Coral Shores where Walker Pike never comes and certainly would never be invited, homeowners have trees and topsoil, tons of sphagnum moss and fertilizer delivered by the truckload. Gardeners roll out sod richer than Persian carpeting and set down plants like bric-a-brac, whereas Pierce Point families cemented over front yards to get rid of sandspurs, or battled nature with rye grass and supermarket shrubs doomed by the sandy soil before they patted dirt over the roots. Like the others in his part of town, Orville Kalen had all the right things trucked out to garnish his expansive Sixties modern house at the nether end of Coral Shores, but without constant attention nothing lives long, not even a man with all the money in the world.

When you die, they die.

There are days when Walker wishes that he could.

Kalen is home, right where Chaplin dumped him yesterday – yes, Walker knows. Over the years, he kept track. All that money made Kalen lazy and self-indulgent. Careless about how he got what he wanted. At this hour he’ll be staggering from bed to the fridge and back to bed with an overloaded plate, unless he’s sprawled on those greasy sheets with a freshly opened fifth, stupefied. First prize, he has choked to death on his own vomit, but that kind never dies. The rangy kid from New London will find the place; it is inevitable. He’ll bang on the door and something terrible will come down.

What Walker is most afraid of: fire.

He has to stop the kid before he gets close enough to knock. Until then, he waits. He cuts the motor and glides in next to the house. Yes he’s exposed, but his son won’t see Walker parked in the shadows with his lights off, at least not right away. Walker needs to be where he can see him coming. My boy.

Given who he is and the line he has walked with such vigilance, Walker Pike is far from careless, but sometimes you just. Get. Tired.

He closes his eyes but does not sleep. Exhaustion greases the ways and instead Walker recedes into reverie, slipping away from solid ground as smoothly as a newly launched ship; he is adrift now although he doesn’t know it, that’s how bad it is.

Put it to too many hours behind the wheel. He is stretched to the limit by proximity and the need to keep his distance. All those years keeping them safe. Lucy. The boy. He loves them so much!

‘Don’t give your heart to anyone,’ Pop said to his sons after their mother ran away, ‘look what it made of me,’ and Walker took it to heart.

He took it to heart and didn’t let go until he followed Lucy Carteret to Huntington beach that night for no known reason except that she was lovely and she didn’t know he was alive. As far as she knew, he was just the guy who fixed her grandmother’s car, a necessary piece of the infrastructure, but he was his own person by that time, with a real life three thousand miles away from Pop’s garage and the judgmental society of Fort Jude. She didn’t need to know.

She smiled at Walker without seeing beyond the smudge on his face or the grease on the coverall. He wouldn’t tell her that he’d been called home from Cambridge during exams because Pop was in the hospital. Wade phoned him, sobbing; he had to come. Nor did she have to know what the old man said to him that same night, tossing in the bed with his belly swollen and the toxic whites of his eyes the color of Betadine from the years of drinking that did in his liver and brought Walker home from MIT.

Pop was drunker than shit when he said it, Walker told himself, then and now. That damn fool pint of Jack Daniels on top of what the hospital was giving him; didn’t they frisk his friends before they let anybody in to visit him?

Pop was dead drunk when he said that terrible thing to me, Walker told himself resolutely; Pop didn’t know what he was saying; Pop was disconnected and raving. He was out of his mind with pain and alcohol and heavy duty meds compounded by whatever was in the IV flowing into him.

That night Pop raged for hours and Walker discounted it. Overturned, he took it for what he thought it was, but truth will always find you. The words followed him out of the room like a plague of hornets. Then the old lady died and for all these years he has wondered.

Were you trying to warn me, old man?

‘Walker, watch out! I see it!’ Wallace Pike rose up out of the bed in a surge of blankets like a shark attacking. Words came out of his face in a spray of spit and alcohol fumes. ‘It’s in you too.’

‘What is, Pop? What is?’

‘It’s in you, I can see it.’

‘Pop?’ He shuddered: bad memories. Certain fires. ‘Pop?’

The old man gargled words but couldn’t spit them out. What were you trying to tell me?

At the time Walker thought it was sheer agony that unhinged Pop and set him to screaming; he asked, ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Hellfire,’ Pop howled like a man running ahead of a pack of demons and it came out like vomit, ‘the flame!’ He thrashed and bellowed until the nurses came and shot him full of downers; his flame died and the next day he forgot.

By the next day, Walker was in love with Lucy Carteret.

It still mystifies him because the fact of it is so profound: that a man can fall in love in a single night. That it can happen in a flash. They went to the same school but Walker didn’t know her. He finished Fort Jude High a year ahead of his class; there was no reason for her to know him. If you didn’t play sports or do any of the stupid things that kept all those fresh-faced, privileged Fort Jude insiders at school for hours after the last bell rang, you could spend three years there without knowing anyone. Walker went home after school to work for Pop. He didn’t mix with people outside the classroom. He didn’t much want to. Even before the trouble, Walker kept to himself.

At MIT he was a new person. Dean’s list, all that. Easy among people as smart as he was, and there were many. Then Wade phoned. His baby brother took on like Pop was on his deathbed, which wasn’t exactly true. Wade’s ‘emergency’ put Walker right back where he started, in the Pierce Point Garage, finishing the job Pop was doing the day he went belly up in the grease pit.

Lucy came in on his first morning. ‘How soon can you have it back?’ Shredded jeans on her, tie-dyed T-shirt, which was big that year, she was dressed just like everybody else but not. Diamond studs in her ears – her dead mother’s, he learned later; that nice-girl hair held back by prescription sun glasses – how does Walker know? There’s not much Walker doesn’t know. She apologized, the way you would to any man who was doing a job for you, ‘It’s my grandmother’s. She always expects things back yesterday.’

It was graduation week. Turned out this was Wade’s big emergency. He couldn’t deal with Pop because it was Senior Week; he was too busy out at the beach, carousing. Walker said, ‘When do you need it?’

She gave him a nice, indifferent smile. ‘Um, tonight? I’m going to the beach and she won’t let me out of the house until she gets her car back.’

‘Right,’ he said. He did not say: senior houseparties – not Walker in his old man’s coverall, with his hands filthy and his face thick with sludge. Not Walker, who knew as well as anyone what houseparties were, but had never been to one. Not Walker, looking the way he did. Pop was replacing a cracked block when he took queer and Wade rushed him to the E.R.; he had to finish the job.

There was no way she could know who Walker Pike really was. Not that day. ‘If you could do it by six . . .’

Why was she so anxious? You’d think it was her first beach party. He pretended to mull the estimate. In fact, he was taking her in – not the face, not even the body. He was absorbing the truth of her: the intelligence. The touching vulnerability. ‘Six o’clock, no problem. Ride you home?’

‘No thanks.’ She gestured to the road outside. Walker saw that redheaded Chaplin kid out front, idling in his father’s car: brainy Bob Chaplin, he noted. Safe as houses. Apologetic smile. ‘I have a ride.’

Walker drove to the beach that night anyway. In case.

Houseparties, what was he expecting? He wasn’t sure, but he knew what happened to Jessie after one of those things; it ate at him. He pulled her out, but too late. His heart told him to watch out for this one. No. He had to see her. He had to let her see him when he looked like himself, not like a greasy swamp bunny in Pop’s big old coverall. He would never walk into a private party even with an invitation, but everything opened up on the last night of Senior Week. The parties merged for the big bonfire on the beach. All creation would be down there on the sand, partying. Walker hated himself for knowing those things about matters he had moved beyond and could care less about, but he had to go.

On Huntington beach in a crowd that size Walker could lurk without having to explain himself; he could take all the time he needed to scope out Lucy Carteret and watch her from a distance; he would lay back until it seemed like the time was right. Then he’d invent a reason to speak to her. She probably wouldn’t recognize him right away, all cleaned up and looking fine. When he reminded her who he was she’d be surprised. She’d thank him for getting that grandmother’s car fixed in time. Then he could ask where she was going to college in September and the conversation would start. She’d have to ask him where he went. Then he could tell her he went to MIT, which even people down here admitted might be as good as Duke.

Driving out to Huntington beach that night Walker wrote dialog in his head. It’s where all his best conversations take place.

The party wasn’t hard to locate. From the causeway he could see the bonfire staining the night sky. He turned off on beach road and left his car on a side street. He walked the half-block to the path over the dunes where high school seniors and hangers-on chattered like monkeys, going back and forth from the beach. There were too many; they might ask who he was, or what he was doing here if he ran into them, so he stopped short of the path and started up through sawgrass and sandspurs, climbing the steepest part of the dune. When he reached the top, the spectacle stopped him cold.

The party sprawled on the beach below.

He couldn’t make himself go down. There was Walker Pike, all cleaned up tonight and looking pretty good in his white linen shirt and faded cutoffs, with his sandy hair washed until it shone, combed wet and pulled into a pony tail, in preparation. Why could he not go down there on the sand like a normal person, walk into that crowd and find the girl?

In Cambridge, Walker had no problem going out and showing himself to the people. In Massachusetts, it was easy. He was lean and handsome and good at what he did. Reclusive as he was in high school, he had changed. MIT turned him into a good talker – better company, he supposes. They got what he was saying. All those smart people with no crippling preconceptions. In that world, Fort Jude dichotomies did not pertain.

Now he was back home, poised at the crest where he could study the people on the sand. He stood there for a long time, scanning the crowd, looking for Lucy Carteret until his feet went to sleep and his muscles twitched as the sand shifted under him. A term on the Dean’s List, headed there again this spring, work-study job in Computer Science, the chairman wanted him to go on for an advanced degree, and he was still reluctant to go down there on the beach. The hard-packed sand was swarming with the cream of Fort Jude society, a distinction he hated as much as he hated this town. He couldn’t bring himself to penetrate that mob of heedless drunks and acid heads who knew Walker Pike as Pierce Point trash, if they knew him at all.

Bad idea, Pike. This was a bad idea. He turned to go.

He would have, too, but the angry snarl of a motor filled the street below. Walker wheeled to see what it was. Then he jumped aside as a Jeep rolled over the curb, aimed up the path through the dunes. Howling, the driver came on, and to hell with anybody who happened to be coming up from the beach. To hell with everybody, they could get the f*ck out of his way. Near the top the Jeep foundered, wheels spinning. When he recognized Bellinger’s Wrangler, Walker’s heart seized up, and that was before he saw who was at the wheel. The car wasn’t the only thing he recognized. Memory told him where this would end. Rehearsing the future in a spasm of nausea, he saw it all. Hulking Brad Kalen was behind the wheel, filthy-drunk and fueled by rage, hollering at the others to get out and push the f*cker, get moving you sniveling a*sholes, I smell p-ssy down there.

If Walker thought Lucy would be safe tonight, he was a fool. Like an obedient footman, Bob Chaplin – the kid he thought was Lucy’s protector tonight – jumped out of the Jeep like an obedient lackey and put his shoulder to the car, along with the others. Walker should have acted then; he should have yanked Kalen out of the Jeep and throttled him on the spot. He should have shaken him until his ears bled but before he could shout, the Wrangler belched and started moving. Chaplin jumped in with the others as it pitched over the crest and headed downhill, hurtling out of Walker’s reach.

The despicable bastard Walker had to pry off of Jessie Vukovich that time went roaring down on the crowd with sand flying and music blaring out of the speakers and his main men screaming as he aimed for the heart of the party.

The Jeep breached the crowd and everybody scattered. Walker started to run. As he did, he spotted the girl he knew he was in love with dancing with her lacy shirttail flying out from her long body, white lace skimming the white bikini. Lucy let go of some boy’s hand and spun out, laughing. Oblivious. She was oblivious. Walker saw that his beautiful, stupid girl was stoned out of her mind, loose-limbed and weaving in front of the fire with her arms flying and her mouth open to the skies. Then he saw her whirl at the sound of her name and he saw her wave, laughing. Like a fool she trotted over to the Jeep, flattered and ignorant. He saw Kalen laughing and waving.

He shouted, but he was too far away. He ran, but it was too late.

Walker died. He saw the future, and it was vile. The night he pulled Kalen off Jessie Vukovich, Jessie sobbed all the way home. Dripping bloody snot, she explained, ‘You only get in because there are others in the car. You think you’re safe.’

Crafty in the way of stupid people who know how to get what they want, Brad Kalen used his buddies like inflatable state troopers when he went stalking, propping them in place before he made his move to signify that this would be a safe ride. Then – how many times has this happened? He knew how to lose his buddies along the way; either he was too selfish for a gang rape or they weren’t the type; Walker didn’t know, any more than he knows what binds them to him. He did know where the bastard would take her to do it because they had both been there before. Walker was pounding back over the dune, running for his truck before Kalen and his cohort left off grinning for Bethy Bellinger’s camera like rock stars and helped Lucy into the Jeep. Walker knew, if not to the minute, how long all this would take and he would damn well get to Land’s End before Kalen did.

This time, he wouldn’t f*ck up. He would be there in time to stop it.

Which Walker did, springing on Kalen before he could get that flimsy shirt off Lucy although, God, he had already hauled off and split her lip with his fist. Even tonight, Walker doesn’t know why he didn’t shout or throw something or figure out how to warn the girl before it came down. He should have plowed into Kalen the minute he nosed that Jeep into Lands End Road and stopped. Maybe it was Pierce Point wariness – cops would assume he was the offender – or maybe he was waiting for the son of a bitch to convict himself. You fool. Either way he still grieves over the pain his waiting caused her. Whatever ate Walker up evaporated when Kalen pushed her down and started pounding; Walker was on top of him, snarling and dragging him off before Lucy understood what was happening to her.

‘What are you doing,’ she cried, and Walker didn’t know whether she was talking to him or her assailant. ‘What are you doing!’

He dragged Kalen’s bloody hand out of her tiny white bikini pants and beat the living shit out of him, noting with satisfaction that there was no way they could get false teeth into that blunt, brute face of his in time for him to make that big smile for the graduation-day group photograph. He kicked Kalen over onto his face and left him in the sand. Too rough, Walker, he realized when he saw how the girl looked at him, shrinking, terrified and sobbing.

‘Oh, please,’ he cried, holding his hands out to her like a plaster St Francis.

‘Oh,’ Lucy sobbed, covering her mouth.

‘I had to.’

She looked into her hands and saw blood. ‘Oh, oh!’

‘I had to stop him.’

Her wild face was just now coming back together and she did not back away. Lucy came back into herself in stages – aware and thinking. When she could speak she acknowledged this in a voice so low that he had to guess at the tone, ‘You had to stop him.’ Then everything lifted. ‘You did!’

Then, with Kalen laid out in the mangroves like an eviscerated shark, Walker hugged her close, crying, ‘I’m sorry, I am so goddamn sorry,’ because he was afraid that he had in fact f*cked up, just not in the same way as with Jessie Vukovich. Then Lucy bowed her head and leaned into him, so he could feel her lips moving on his chest and he felt the warmth of her mingled blood and wet breath through his shirt as she said loud enough so that there would be no question, ‘I’m sorry too.’ He wouldn’t kiss her – that torn lip – but he wrapped her in his shirt and took her home, riding along with the extraordinary sense that his life was about to change. It was, just not the way either of them in their wildest feat of clairvoyance or naked intelligence could possibly imagine.

Yes he was in love with her. He knows she was in love with him too, which is why he tried so hard with the old lady and how his heart broke afterward.

The next day she was gone. ‘Up north,’ he was told by the smug old woman when he went to ask for Lucy at her house. Mrs Archambault filled the doorway with her tidy permanent wave and perfect choker pearls and fixed glare. Why are you here?

‘She’s on a trip,’ she told him in that cold, flat tone she kept for people who came to cut her grass or repair broken windows. That sneer: Yard men.

‘I need to see her.’ He meant, I need her.

Then she looked at him and said, in a voice that tore him in half and made tears choke Walker Pike, who never cries, ‘Did you do that to her? Did you?’

‘No,’ he shouted. He was still shouting when she slammed the door on him. ‘Dear God, no!’

Like she would believe anything he said.

Well, f*ck her. They were both home over Labor Day Weekend, Lucy with all her bruises healed and only a small white scar on the lip because while Walker struggled with Kalen, the bulky drunk struck out and clipped his captive again with the back of his hand, tearing it with his ring. Now she was home.

His brother Wade was the social one so he knew who was in town, and when. Walker phoned the house. She muttered, afraid of being overheard. Colluding. His heart sank. The grandmother would never approve of him. That night Lucy came out to meet him on the waterfront across the street from the Fort Jude Club. The old woman thought she was inside, at the big party. They rode out to Land’s End; it was something they had to do.

They parked near the spot. They got out. They had to, given her pain and his determination to save her again and again. Without discussing it, they walked out on the strand where the mangroves were thick, studying the sand until they found the place. They didn’t do anything; they just stood, looking. For a long time they were silent. Then she turned and started back to the car.

He touched her cheek. It was one of those things.

Immediate and sure. No transaction needed. It fell into his hands like a gift.

They loved each other: she loved him. She was starting Radcliffe. Perfect.

In Cambridge they were equals, close and getting closer in love. They saw each other some nights and every weekend; they saw each other whenever they could. Walker thought they could be together on Thanksgiving weekend in Fort Jude, but Lucy went back to her grandmother’s and he went home to Pierce Point.

‘I’m so sorry. Grandmother.’ Her face told him the rest.

He cried, ‘If I could only talk to her!’

‘Not yet,’ Lucy warned and she was begging. ‘Just not yet.’ It was Wednesday of the long weekend. She touched his cheek. ‘Pick me up at the club. She’s running the Thanksgiving dance – Friday night? She’ll be too busy to notice.’ She saw his face. ‘Please, hiding is only for a little while. She just doesn’t need to know.’

His heart staggered. ‘So nothing has changed.’

‘Not yet.’ She touched his lips, sealing them. ‘Not yet.’

He picked her up outside the club just the way he had on Labor Day weekend. The ballroom windows were ablaze. Another big party that she could leave without being noticed. They drove to the beach; it was what they did. She’d booked a room. They made love for the first time.

Walker thought: Now. Everything will be different.

Coming in on the causeway, she had him take the Fourth Street exit. Walker said, ‘Why?’

‘Please, just drop me in Pine Vista?’

‘Why, Lucy? Why should I do that?’

Her face went eight ways to Sunday. Her voice was so low that he could barely hear. ‘I told her to pick me up at Bobby Chaplin’s house. She thinks he’s OK because his great-grandfather started the Fort Jude Club. It’s crazy, but I had to tell her something.’

Like a fool, he pressed for reasons. The more she tried to explain, the worse he felt and the more he pressed.

Finally Lucy pushed him away with both hands, crying, ‘I can’t let her find out about you and me!’

The bitch found out anyway. Somebody saw them coming out of the Laughing Gull Motel and phoned the house. Lucy never told Walker what went on between her and the old woman at the end of that long weekend. She came to his room in Cambridge, ashen. ‘I love you. She and I are done.’

It wasn’t only the old woman. The society stood between them. Walker said, ‘And Fort Jude?’

‘Hush. I’m never going back.’

Didn’t he take her into his arms and hold her tighter than ever then, and didn’t he love her even more?

He and Lucy were together in Cambridge all that spring. They made love in Walker’s cubicle in the cold cement block dorm at MIT and because he loved her so much they were careful, so very careful. Just not careful enough. In May, he gave her his mother’s ring.

When he slipped it onto her hand, she flinched. ‘What’s this?’

‘I love you. It’s time.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, but she didn’t take it off.

‘Please!’

‘I can’t,’ she said, and his world crumbled. ‘I just can’t.’

‘Why?’

Emotion reamed Lucy out and left her transparent. Everything showed in her face. Her choice and the consequences, what he was and who she was. Her voice was low; he could barely make out what she was saying but he could not deny that she’d said it. ‘I won’t let her hurt you!’ The next words came from some dark place that Lucy had never let him see. ‘You have no idea what she can do.’

‘She won’t hurt me.’ Walker was desperate. Angry. ‘And she won’t hurt you.’

God help them both, she was crying. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let her. I’m out of there, I’m done with all that.’

Why did it kill him, knowing how much this cost her?

In Cambridge he and Lucy could be anybody they wanted, but Fort Jude was another story. He hated that she cared what the city thought; it ran in her blood. Without telling her, he drove to Florida to confront the old lady. Lucy was pregnant. They would be married. She would have his baby and Mrs Lorna Archambault, pillar of Fort Jude society, would damn well acknowledge it.

What Walker will never know is why old Lorna left her front door unlocked and ajar that night, or what she was waiting for.

He let himself in and went upstairs to the room where she sat with the television blaring. The door was closed. He could have left; the TV was so loud that she’d never know. Instead he knocked. Like a prom queen the woman inside lilted, ‘Harold, is that you?’

‘No Ma’am,’ he offered in the cultivated tone that pleased people in Cambridge. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but.’

‘Hal?’

‘It’s Walker Pike, Mrs Archambault. It’s about your granddaughter.’

‘At this hour?’

‘I’m sorry. I came about Lucy.’

The voice went cold. ‘Lucy is dead to me.’

You bitch! ‘It’s urgent.’ He opened the door.

The old woman was sitting right where he thought she’d be, commanding that recliner like the evil queen on her brocade throne. Regal bathrobe. Monograms on the purple slippers. Lipstick. Salon blue curls and massed diamonds on her knobby hands. That look. Everything about her telegraphed contempt. Oh, it’s you. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Lucy and I are getting married.’

‘Oh. No. You’re not.’ She spat questions like poison darts. Walker did his best. Everything he offered made her angrier. Never mind what she said that set him off. It was vile. Never mind what Walker spat back. She used every word she had to revile him, pushing, pushing, ‘She’s an Archambault.’

‘F*ck that,’ he said finally, ‘she’s having my baby.’ It was all he had.

‘In hell.’ She coughed it up like blobs of phlegm. ‘I’ll get it reamed out of her.’

‘No.’ He was controlled. Drawn tight and vibrating with rage. ‘You’ll never see her again.’

Fuming, she rapped the wooden claws of her brocade chair with such force that her diamonds left scars. ‘I’ll file charges. I’ll see you in jail.’

The sound that came out of Walker then left him white and shaken. The terrifying words. ‘I’ll see you in hell.’

He said it more out of grief than anger although inside he was blazing with it. Rocking with hatred, murderous and stricken, Walker fled the place before he lost control and hurt her.

So in fact Walker may have done it; decades spent pondering and he still doesn’t know.

How could an unwitting kid like him suddenly set a woman on fire? With no matches, no flaming torch, only his consuming rage in the room between them, with nothing to strike sparks on but the hatred that consumed her, had he actually done this? She was smoldering before he cleared the city limits, although it would be hours before Walker knew it.

Nobody saw him come or go.

There was nothing going on in the darkened house behind him that Walker could see in his rear-view mirror. Still he left Fort Jude pursued by a sick, bad feeling. The encounter left him feeling soiled, corrupted by emotions like sparks that ignited somehow, filling the room behind him. Furious, he tried to outrun his rage. Anger kept pace, but whether it was his or hers, he is still not certain. He hit the accelerator hard, hurtling away from the house, but the anger followed, with guilt sniffing at its heels. In the dark street behind Walker Pike, something happened. He didn’t see it, but at the exact moment his gut twisted.

Knowledge went through him like a tremor along a fault line.

He drove straight through to Boston.

By the time he got there it was all over the news.

The Globe carried photos courtesy of the Fort Jude Star.

Walker locked himself in his room at MIT, reflecting. So that’s what I am.

Lucy telephoned; she called and called but he was too deep in self-disgust to pick up the phone. Recognition came in stages. It marked him to the bone. Lucy knocked on his door, crying out, but he sat there like a figure cast in bronze, the image of what he had become. The son of destruction. She went away. For a long time he kept to his room, riven and terrified.

Before that night Walker Pike lived safely on the fringes but he was in it now, body and soul; he had no name for the power that rocked him.

He couldn’t begin to know what it meant, he only knew that he was dangerous. What he was, or what he was becoming put him outside society. He loved her so much! He couldn’t see her again. Not if he loved her and wanted to keep her safe. It moved and terrified him to care so much about a woman, and to be afraid to be around her for fear it would happen again. Whatever I did. His body shook to the foundations as certainty took hold. He was afraid for Lucy’s safety and the safety of the child he knew he would never see, and that was the end of them as a couple. Walker. Lucy Carteret.

He had to let her go.

Walker let her go because he saw what he was, and it was terrible. The knowledge and the potential. That kind of thing doesn’t happen just once. What kind of monster sets an old woman on fire without touching a match to her? What awful power does he have, that made him destroy another human being without getting close enough to light a fire?

He had too much to tell Lucy, too much he couldn’t tell her. To keep her safe, he telephoned. It almost killed them both. ‘I just want you to know, I love you.’

‘Did you do it?’ Her voice shook.

I love you and I always will. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you murder her?’

‘I love you, and I have to go away.’

‘Did you?’

He wanted to say he loved her at least once more; he knew it would be the last time, but the words seized up in his throat and he choked, ‘Forgive me, I have to go!’

He left for a year to take the job his department chair had lined up for him with Sony in Tokyo. He sent money to her at Radcliffe. It was the only address he had. Somebody rubber-stamped the envelope: NO FORWARDING ADDRESS and sent it back. Back in Cambridge, he went to see the Radcliffe registrar. With Walker sitting across from her, visibly distressed, she broke precedent and told him Lucy dropped out of college. Nobody knew where she went, the dean told him with a judgmental scowl. She was having a baby. He left Lucy to save her life. Its life.

That should have been the end of loving her, but it wasn’t. Some things don’t end.

He loved their baby too. He loved them both but given what he was, he walked away from them. He had to. For years Walker slouched along alone, miserable and shaggy. He went inside his work to hide.

On bad days he thinks of himself as the sea captain in the story Pop loved to tell back when he and Wade were small. The captain’s wife promised to keep a candle in the window until his whaler came back into port. Instead his ship went down with all hands on board, and he was reported lost at sea. The widow mourned, but finally she gave up hope and remarried. Pirates plucked the captain off a desert island – not dead! Joyful, he headed home, looking for the candle in the window. The house was bright but his candle was gone. When the long-lost husband looked inside he saw his wife, his children at the hearth with another man sitting in his chair, a nice, happy family gathered around the fire with their heads bent in the golden light. His heart blazed and then died.

For her sake, he turned and walked away.

For her sake he lived on other people’s happiness, glimpsed through lighted windows at night.

Walker became that person. He never went where Lucy was, but he kept track. He located her in New London; he knew their baby was a boy; he knew when she married Mixon; he’s never followed because he can’t let her be with him or come anywhere near, but he kept track. Dear God, has he kept track.

It was hard. He loved her. He missed them to extinction, but he managed. He managed until that freakish night when the kid turned five and he weakened and sent the clipping, as though one day he would find it and know. Walker left Lucy Carteret to keep her safe – to keep them safe – but he sent the clippings, trying to explain. He sent them because from the brain he was given to the whorls in his fingertips, this boy was his, and he should know.

But, God. What is he? What kind of monster abandons his only son?