“That’s not the point, son. The point is you had the gun, and I’m just the chickenshit who let you take it. Adrian Wall stole everything from me that ever mattered. Now, look at you, all shot through and small, and somehow bigger than I ever was. And why is that? Because I saw you with that gun and went weak inside for all of ten seconds. Ten goddamn seconds! How could I not be bound up and turned around and choking on the kind of anger that comes from that?”
Gideon heard the words, but thought they were bullshit. His father had half the night to stop him. He could have gone to the prison, gone to Nathan’s. “And my mother?” he asked. “What did she ever do to make you mad?”
“Your mother.” Gideon’s father turned his face away, then pulled a bottle from his pocket and drained a third of it. “When things got hard between us, we’d go to the church and pray. No reason you’d know that, but we did. If we argued about money or you or … other things. We’d kneel and hold hands and ask God to give us strength or commitment or whatever the hell we thought we needed. We were married in that church, and you were baptized there. I always figured if one place could fix us, then that’d be it. Your mother disagreed, but she would go to humor me. Goddamn.” He shook his head and stared at the bottle. “She’d kneel at that altar and say the words just to humor me.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Then, I’ll say one last thing and leave it at that. As much as I loved your mother and as pretty as she was…” He shook his head and drained the bottle dry. “The woman was no kind of fucking saint.”
*
After the run-in with her father, Elizabeth left Channing at the house and pointed the old car at skinny roads that ran wild into the country. It’d been like that since she was a kid: confrontation, then speed, sometimes for hours, and more than once for days. The next state. The next county. It didn’t matter. The wind felt good. The engine’s scream. But no matter how fast or how far she drove, there was nowhere to go and no white tape marking the end. It was the same empty escape—the same race—and when it was done, Elizabeth’s world was no more than her father claimed, just violence and the job and her fascination with Adrian Wall. Maybe he was right about that life. He’d called it pointless once, an embarrassment of lightless rooms. She was thinking of that now, of decisions and the past, and of the only child she would ever conceive.
*
It was nine at night when she told her parents the first real lie: “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
Her father looked up from the kitchen table, and the notes he’d made for Sunday’s sermon. “Good night, Elizabeth.”
“Good night, Father.”
Such words had been said all the nights of her life. Dinner and homework, his lips dry on her cheek. A week had passed since she’d told the truth of what had happened at the quarry, and supposedly there was peace between them. She didn’t see it, though. She saw his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the way he’d told his own lies, saying, “Prayer and contrition, young man. These are stones in the path to God’s right hand.”
Elizabeth watched her father return to his notes. First gray was in his beard, hair thinning on the crown of his head.
“Come here, baby girl.”
Elizabeth went to her mother, who was warm and smiling and smelled of bread. The hug she offered was soft and long, so complete Elizabeth wanted to fall into it and never leave. “I don’t want this baby.”
“Hush, child.”
“I want the police.”
Her mother squeezed harder and spoke in the same guarded whisper. “I’ll talk to him.”
“He won’t change his mind.”
“I’ll try. I promise. Just be patient.”
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
Elizabeth pushed away because her own decision was so suddenly hard inside her she feared her mother might feel it.
“Elizabeth, wait…”
But, she didn’t. She pounded the stairs, went to her room, and squeezed her legs together until lights were off in the house. When the time came, she went through the window and onto the roof, then down the great oak that had shaded her room since before she could speak.
A friend with a car waited at the end of the drive. Her name was Carrie, and she knew the place. “Are you sure about this?”
“Just drive.”
The doctor was slick skinned and Lithuanian and unlicensed. He lived in a trailer at the bad end of a bad trailer park and wore his hair long and parted in the middle. His front tooth was gold, the rest of them as shiny and brown as old honey. “You are the preacher’s daughter, yes?”
His eyes moved up and down, gold tooth flashing as he pushed a damp cigarette into the center of a narrow smile.
“It’s okay,” Carrie said. “He’s legit.”
“Yes, yes. I helped your sister. Pretty girl.”
Elizabeth felt a cold ache between her legs. She looked at Carrie, but the doctor had his fingers on her arm. “Come.” He moved her toward the back of the trailer. “I have clean sheets, washed hands…”