Son of Destruction Read Free

didn’t know who he was, but things were good. At least they were done with Burt.
    Lucy went to court and got her old name back. Carteret. They took the birth certificate to probate court and got his name changed to match. He became Dan Carteret, and it suited him fine. He still didn’t know who his father was, but he went along all right, not knowing. Lucy went back to work on the sub base; she started as clerk typist and advanced to office manager. She looked better than she had in a long time and Dan started doing better in school. They did fine together, just the two of them. The house was quieter with Burt gone, and they let things relax to the point where magazines sat on the coffee table every which-way and you could no longer bounce a quarter off beds made so tightly that it was hard to get back in at night.
    There would always be the central question, but Lucy had said everything she intended to say and he loved her well enough to let it pass, at least for now. For his mother’s sake Dan Carteret went along not knowing who he was. He finished high school and went to college outside Chicago not knowing; his mother loved him well enough to let him go to California to look for work. He hugged her hard, saying, ‘I’ll come back for Christmas.’
    ‘Don’t worry about me.’ She tightened the hug and then broke it with the little push that means goodbye. ‘It’s your life now.’
    That first year was hard: no time, never enough money. He was waiting tables, writing spec scripts because in Los Angeles, everybody hopes. He wrote for one of the free weeklies. He even sold a couple of stories to
the
L.A.
Times
magazine – a way in. Three or four Christmases went by – she was celebrating with a nice new man, his mother told him when he phoned; she said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m happy. Do you know I’m teaching myself to paint?’ She said, ‘Have a great life,’ which he continued to do, not knowing who he was, really, or how Lucy was. By this time it was tacit that she wouldn’t talk about the father, and he wouldn’t ask. They loved each other that much; they understood each other that well, and he went along fine, not knowing. Dan was going along all right, not knowing whether when he went in on Monday, he’d still have his marginal job at the incredible shrinking
Los Angeles Times
because there was always something else that he could do. He was going along all right, not knowing who his father was, what he meant to her or what went wrong. For Dan Carteret in his twenties, not knowing was like the weather. A condition of life.
    He went along fine, not knowing, until it became clear that not knowing was
wrong
because he didn’t know Lucy was sick until they called from the hospital to tell him to come, she was sinking fast.

2
Dan
    Lucy was one of those people who claimed she never got sick, which he believed, until now. She was critical – cancer, stage four and moving fast; it was time to put the central question. When they phoned, she was too far gone for him to press her on names, places, details from her past, but he didn’t know that.
    He flew home on the redeye, too anxious and disrupted to sleep. He and Lucy had a lifetime of unanswered questions hanging between them, but this one knifed him in the heart.
Oh, Mom. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?
She’d just say what she always said:
I wanted you to have your life
. He had to walk into that hospital and fix this. He had to badger and charm them into producing the right specialist, the right protocols, and she’d get better.
    Then they could talk.
    By the time he raced into her room, Lucy was beyond questions. She couldn’t speak, not really. She just beamed, shaking with joy at the sight of him. Grieving, he took her hands; she was too flimsy to hug. If there really had been a new man in her life, he wasn’t anywhere.
    There was just Lucy, shining.
    Her mouth was working and he leaned close, the way you do for a deathbed