Son of Destruction Read Free Page A

confession:
Who is he, Mom?
If she won’t tell you now, she’ll never tell you. Even when she knows you love her too much to ask.
    She struggled to produce sound, but nothing came out. Dan bent closer, closer even, knowing it was much too late to pour out his heart; all he could do was close his hand on what was left of hers and keep murmuring – with love, ‘It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK.’
    Listening. It was too late but he listened hard. He could smell death coming out of her mouth, and there was no way to push it back; it wouldn’t matter what miracle drug they fed, infused or injected, she’d never get out of that bed. She couldn’t even speak, but she tried, God, she tried. He loved her, so he tried to smile and pretended that she’d spoken and he understood.
    It was awful, watching her try.
    He nodded as if words had come out and they made perfect sense. He said, ‘Yes, Mom, uh-huh,’ smiling, smiling, but he didn’t fool her. She pulled him closer so he could hear what she was trying so desperately to say.
    Finally he did. This is what Lucy Carteret had saved all her strength to tell her son. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
    It was awful seeing her like this. ‘Me too.’
    They said they loved each other.
    You love her and you say so, even though you can never forgive your mother for certain things. The way she put him off that night on the porch, when he asked the biggest question in his life. All she said, in a voice that floated away was,
Just a boy I thought I loved
.
    All these years later, it was still a puzzle and a mystery; she was afraid to tell him. She made him promise not to ask. It was too late to ask her why.
    She tried to lift her hand, but she couldn’t; she was so sick, so thin, she was almost transparent. He begged her not to go.
    She said what they say in the movies, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
    Then she died.
    Like that! Part of Dan Carteret was gone.
Oh, Mom!
    And, next? Words exploded in his head – the response he’d cobbled when she made him promise never to ask about his father:
As long as we both shall live.
    She thought he’d promised, he knew he’d lied. She was gone.
OK then.
    He is free to search.
    Lucy didn’t leave him much to go on. The few things she’d said that night, when she first told him the truth. She loved the guy, she admitted it! Still did. Love like that doesn’t vanish without a trace.
    It will be in that jewel box she was so anxious to protect.
    The little wooden chest surfaces when he goes through her empty apartment, padding thoughtfully through the silent, abandoned rooms. He finds it in her bedroom closet, stashed behind books on a shelf he used to be too small to reach. It’s tough, going through the things she kept: bangles and mismatched earrings, his high school class ring, important papers and at the bottom items from the deep past, souvenirs of the life Lucy had before Dan was imagined and they ended up living here.
    He runs his fingers over raised initials on the little gold football, a cheap high school trinket that his mother cherished or she wouldn’t have kept it for so long: FJHS. OK. Tonight, he’ll type FJHS into the Google search box along with her maiden name, the first step in a global search for Lucy Carteret’s lost life in the years before she married Burt Mixon, who made her so anxious and sad.
    Here’s the picture she kept: five jocks snapped on a beach, waving and grinning like fools – a fading Polaroid that he turns over in his hands like an old friend. Wait! Here’s a second one: a black-and-white of Lucy in her teens, smiling for the camera in spite of the glare. At her back, a Spanish stucco house sprawls under a row of tall Australian pines – some builder’s idea of castle, with a grand stairway and two fat turrets. She’s wearing a little white T-shirt that breaks his heart and – what? That corny gold football hanging between her breasts. Did his father take this? Why did she hide it for so