17
Gideon woke in a hospital bed, the room dim and cool around him. For an instant he was lost, then remembered everything with perfect clarity: the morning light and Adrian’s face, the pain of being shot, and the feel of an unmoving trigger. He closed his eyes against the disappointment and listened to the voice that rose from the corner of the room. It was his father, who was quiet at times, but not always. Gideon heard the mumbling and the disjointed words and wondered why he felt such sudden pity. Other than the pain from being shot and the bed in which he lay, nothing had changed since the night he’d set out to kill Adrian Wall. His father was still useless and drunk, and talking to his dead wife.
Julia, he heard.
Julia, please …
The rest of it was all mumbles and mutterings. Long minutes of it, then an hour. And all the while Gideon lay perfectly still, feeling the same strange and poignant pity. Why was it like that? The curtains were pulled so it was dark in the room, his father more a shape than a man. Long arms around his knees. Shaggy hair and jutting elbows. Gideon had seen the same shape on a thousand nights, but this was different somehow. The old man seemed desperate and harder and sharp. Was it the mumbled words? The way he said her name? The old man was … what?
“Dad?”
Gideon’s throat was dry. The bullet wound ached.
“Dad?”
The shape in the corner went quiet, and Gideon saw eyes roll his way and glint like pinpricks. The odd moment felt more so for the length of it. Two seconds. Five. Then his father unfolded in the gloom and turned on a lamp.
“I’m here.”
His appearance shocked the boy. He was not just disheveled but gray, the skin hanging on his face as if he’d lost twenty pounds in a few days. Gideon stared at the deep lines on his father’s cheeks, the crueler ones at the corners of his eyes.
He was angry.
That was the difference.
His father was hard and bitter and angry.
“What are you doing?” Gideon asked.
“Watching you and feeling ashamed.”
“You don’t look ashamed.”
His father stood and brought a stale smell with him. He hadn’t bathed. His hair was greasy. “I knew what you were going to do.” He put a hand on the bedrail. “When I saw the gun in your hand, I knew.”
Gideon blinked, remembering his father’s face, and the crown of flowers in his hands. “You wanted me to kill him?”
“I wanted him to die. I thought for a minute it wouldn’t matter how that happened, whether you killed him or I did. When I saw you with the gun, I thought, well, maybe this is right. It was a flash of a thought. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But then you ran and were gone so damn fast.”
“So you do hate him?”
“Of course I do, him and your mother.”
There was the anger, and it wasn’t just at Adrian. Gideon ran the last hour in his head: the way his father had said her name over and over, the thrust of it like a blade. “You hate her?”
“Hate is not the right word—I loved her too much for that. That doesn’t mean I could forgive or forget.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You shouldn’t. No boy should.”
“How could you hate her? She was your wife.”
“On paper, maybe.”
“Stop talking in riddles, okay!” Gideon rose up in the bed, pain spreading under the bandages. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his father or expressed his own frustration. But so much of it was inside him, the filthy house and poor food and distant father. Mostly, though, it was the silence and dishonesty, the way his father drank himself stupid, yet had the stomach to curse and groan if Liz came by to help with homework or make sure milk was in the fridge. Now, he was talking about on paper as if he were not some kind of paper man, himself. “I’m fourteen years old, but you still ignore me when it comes to her.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. You turn away if I ask about what happened or how she died or why you look at me sometimes like you hate me, too.… Are you angry that I didn’t kill him?”
“No.” His father sat, and none of the tension left him. “I’m angry because Adrian Wall is alive and free, and your mother’s still dead. I’m upset that you’re shot and in this place, and that, when it came down to it, you were the only one of us with the courage to look her killer in the face and do what needed doing.”
“But, I didn’t do anything.”