At first, he didn’t know where he was going. On the road, his fingers gripping the wheel, the car stinking of his sweat, he screamed when people cut him off. He smoked cigarettes down to the nub and immediately lit new ones. A child stuck her tongue out at him as a minivan passed, and he felt the urge to run the car off the road.
And then, all of the anger seeped out of him, a slow leak from a tire. Was it really the worst thing that someone believed in him? Was it really the smartest thing to run from her? He thought about what Joanna had said more than a year ago, that acting like an asshole was easier because people had fewer expectations of him. It was what he was doing. It was what that spook kid had done, too.
And then he began to wonder what his brother was doing. And his mother, knocking around in that big house, passing under that picture of Charlie Roderick Bates. He wondered what his apartment had been converted into, and if the same rusty patio furniture was on the back deck, and if his mother was planting the exact same configuration of flowers in the garden, re-creating her childhood anew every spring. It wasn’t with nostalgia that he thought about this, not at first, but more with weary guilt. All this time, he’d told himself that they probably weren’t wondering about him, or if they were, it was in a tight-assed, bitter sort of way—look what we did for him, and this is how he repays us, the piece of shit. But all of a sudden, he wondered if they weren’t as cruel as he thought. And he wanted to see that house. See if it matched up to the house in his memory and his dreams, so everything would make sense again.
They had expected more from him, though. That was what Scott also began to realize, driving back to the East Coast. That was the thought that had begun to trickle in uninvited. It was in the secret his father had made him keep. It was in the silence he’d made him promise to fulfill.
His father had found him the day Scott had seen them together, after Bronwyn had left. “It’s not what you think,” he’d tried to explain.
But Scott knew what he saw. There had been the silence in the room, serious and intimate. There had been their expressions when they turned and saw him standing there, for he’d been too stunned to slip away unnoticed.
“Please,” his father said, crouching down next to Scott’s bed, curling his finger tight around the wooden bedpost. Scott’s room had been filthy, boxers strewn everywhere, drawers flung open, rotting food in the trash can, but his father hadn’t complained. He probably hadn’t noticed the mess at all. “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said. “It’s not something I can explain. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”
In the end, Scott didn’t do it to please his father. He told him as much, too. He did it because there seemed nothing worse than his mother finding this out. His brother, too. He wiped it from his memory, pretending he’d never seen it and it hadn’t happened. But it forced him to wipe away his father, too.
You can have any of your father’s clothes, his mother had said. And, he was a good man. She didn’t know. She had never known. And that was partly because of him. His brother had never known it about Bronwyn, either—although he wondered if Charles had finally found out, the day Scott left home. Joanna had suggested they were meeting, and then there was the look on Charles’s face when Scott crossed his path at the house. The look that the rug had been pulled out from under him. Everything he thought was true was suddenly suspect.
There were countless times Scott wondered if he should have just said something, if it was worse that he was keeping it quiet, if perhaps this was why he was given all he’d been given—all the leeway, the suite, the car, the spending money. Then again, he’d willingly taken it. He’d willingly been a part of his father’s lie, though he didn’t have to. He could have left a long time ago. Just like he could have sloughed off the identity they’d pinned on him, from whatever guidelines and whatever sources, so early on. They assumed what they assumed about him partly because he’d let them. Partly because it was easier to. But he might have had a choice.
Roderick was only a few miles away from the motel, so after Scott took a shower, changed, and watched a few hours’ worth of crap television, he finally felt that he was ready to go. It would be a trial run, he decided, a drive-by. He got into the car and started the engine. Every inch of the road was familiar, every leaf on the trees. When he rounded the turn toward his house, he held his breath. The trees blurred past. There was the farm with the split-rail fence and the endlessly identical white woolen sheep. There was the little red house set precariously close to the road, the one Scott and Charles used to joke about in the back of the car that would get mowed in half if a car accidentally swerved into it. And then, the light hitting the tops of the trees, the road curving just so, and there was the big black mailbox.