Son of Destruction Read online

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lucy sighed. It was so sad. ‘He wouldn’t want you to know.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ His head came up so fast that his neck snapped. ‘He wrote to me.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Her expression told him he was right.

  ‘You tore it up.’

  Stabbed in the heart. ‘I’m sorry! I had to protect you.’

  ‘What else did you tear up?’ He knotted his fists to keep from shaking her. ‘Marriage license?’

  ‘There wasn’t one.’

  ‘Funeral notice? Passport?’ If only he’d known what to look for that awful day when he was four, he’d know! I know ways of hunting for things that leave no trace. The treasures she kept hidden made no sense to him at the time: a newspaper he couldn’t read with photos she would not explain, gold football, old jewelry, empty plastic shell – diaphragm case, he understood at fifteen, but not back then – night school BA from Connecticut College – he and Burt wore suits to the graduation – and, what else? ‘My birth certificate?’

  ‘I would never do that.’

  ‘Why not,’ he said bitterly. ‘You trashed everything else.’

  ‘Not that.’ For a minute out there on the back porch they were like two kids squaring off. You flinched. No, you flinched. Then her face crumpled. ‘Oh, honey, that would make you a stateless person. I wouldn’t do that to you.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘Of course.’ She sighed. ‘It’s on file in Town Hall, you can get a copy any time you want. You might as well know. I had to tell them something at the hospital, so . . .’ Oh, didn’t she take a long breath then, and wasn’t the voice she finally managed so thin when it came out that she sounded like someone else. Long breath. ‘I told them it was Burt.’

  ‘Son of a bitch!’

  ‘I did what I had to.’ Lucy had a strong, sweet face – too pale, but with those beautiful eyes. They loved each other, that was understood. She’d brought him up doing what she thought was best for him, that too was understood. She wasn’t being cruel. She was doing the best she could.

  ‘If I have a father he has a name, so, what? What’s his damn name? At least you can tell me that.’ When she didn’t answer he took her arm. It was too thin. Even in the heavy sweater, she was rattling with the cold. Was she already sick, all those years ago? He doesn’t know. That night his voice was so thin and shaky that he hated it. ‘If you loved me, you’ll tell me.’

  ‘I love you, and I can’t.’ She looked up with tears streaming.

  ‘Won’t!’

  ‘Won’t, then.’ For the second time that night, she surprised him. ‘I won’t tell you and you have to promise not to ask.’

  Oh, Lucy. What are you afraid of? ‘Mom . . .’

  ‘I’m trying to keep you safe! Now, promise.’

  ‘Why do I have to . . .’

  This popped out in spite of her. ‘Because he wouldn’t want you to know!’

  ‘Mom!’

  Then Lucy’s fingers closed on his so tight that the nails dug in like little teeth. She was struggling to frame an agreement but she had run out of words. ‘Please!’ she cried finally, out of such grief that the implications silenced him.

  For a long time they stood just there, Dan with his back stiff and chin jutting, until she jerked him into a hug. He resisted but she pulled him close. They stood, rocking. With her face buried in his chest – When did I get this tall? – his mother wheedled, ‘And you have to promise not to look for him. OK?’

  There was a technical term for the answer Dan made her then, which he didn’t learn until he was in college. Let her think he was giving her what she wanted. ‘As long as we both shall live.’

  ‘Ever.’

  The sound Dan came out with then, that let them end the clinch and go inside, could have meant anything. Because they had to survive the moment, she took it as a yes. He’d managed his first broad mental reservation.

  He still 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 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 l
eft 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 long?

  Instinct tells him this isn’t all she was hiding. Troubled, he runs his fingers around the box, feeling only a little guilty because the silk lining shreds at his touch. Here. A scrap of newsprint from the paper he thought she’d destroyed before he learned to read. Well, now he can read: Spontaneous Human Combustion. Holy crap! He jumps, as if she’d just set her hand between his shoulders: It’s all right, love. I’m here.

  The initialed football, the snapshot. This. He feeds FJHS into the search engines, triangulates with spontaneous human combustion. Fort Jude at the top of every first page, the Florida city where – bingo: there have been three grisly, unexplained deaths by fire in the last fifty years. And, my God, the image search produces the stills that so terrified him as a kid. The crime scene photo of that bedroom slipper with a foot still in it, standing like a solitary bookend on the floor underneath the recliner where she died. He broadens the search, surfing obsessively because on the Web, everything leads to something else and in its own way, it insulates him from the ache in his belly, just below the heart.

  He kept clicking; he struck gold at howstuffworks.com, where Stephanie Watson wrote about spontaneous human combustion at length.

  Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object – in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person – bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source. The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris ‘went up in ashes and smoke’ while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work ‘De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.’

  Although Lucy was sad more often than she was happy, she didn’t live the kind of inner life that needs bizarre crimes and freaks of nature to explain itself. Unless. What? Dan is tortured by unanswered questions. What does this have to do with us? He browsed obsessively, lingering at this unsigned entry on unexplainedstuff.com and picked up later by a half-dozen other sites:

  In December 1956, Virginia Caget of Honolulu, Hawaii, walked into the room of Young Sik Kim, a 78-year-old disabled person, to find him enveloped in blue flames. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, Kim and his easy chair were ashes. Strangely enough, nearby curtains and clothing were untouched by fire, in spite of the fierce heat that would have been necessary to consume a human being.

  He should be packaging, storing, doing last things before he locks the door on his mother’s life. Instead, he trolls the Internet, gleaning details. At theness.com, a Dr Steven Novella pushes him into murk and confusion – hey, this is an MD putting his reputation on the line – when he says:

  . . . Believers often cite as evidence the fact that a body has been completely reduced to ash, except for the ends of the arms and legs and sometimes the head. But there is a good explanation for this phenomenon. It is called the wick effect. The clothing of victims can act as a wick, while their body fat serves as a source of fuel (like an inside-out candle). The burning of the clothes is maintained by liquefied fat wicked from the body of the victim, causing a slow burn that can nearly consume the victim and resulting in the greasy brown substance often coating nearby walls.

  Except for the ends of the arms and legs . . . The foot and the chair. The clipping. Another of those things she kept hidden but preserved: her secret, in code. As his mother tore the paper out of his hands that day, she smacked him hard. He reads on and on, chapter, verse, feeding on details, until he comes to himself with a shudder. OK, lady, what does this have to do with us?

  Did she really leave Fort Jude because old women go up in flames for no known reason? He doesn’t think so. Once, when she let herself talk about her life before New London, Lucy told him she’d rather die than go back there, ever.

  Which she did.

  Die, and she left orders. He will throw her ashes into the Atlantic thousands of miles north of her home town. What came down there, he wonders, what was so bad that she had to go? Trouble in her family, or was it something worse? He won’t find the answers in his browser. He slams his laptop and turns to the pictures she kept.

  If he stares at the house behind Lucy for long enough, will he see her parents grouped behind the leaded windows, snapped in black and white? Are they still in there? Would the
y come out and talk to him? He doesn’t know. In fact, there’s a lot he doesn’t know. When he was a kid he wanted to go live inside that picture, hang out on the beach with those five happy guys, laughing and not giving a fuck. The problem is, they don’t look carefree to him now; they look sinister and guarded.

  Stupidly, he sits, half-waiting for a sign from his mother, but the dead don’t leave messages, right? Reason, Carteret. Think. One these dudes has got to be my father, he thinks, why else would she keep this thing?

  The hell of it is that he could stare into those faces and never know which one; he could feed the Polaroid into a scanner and enlarge it, he could analyze every facial detail down to the last pixel and still not know, but Dan does know one thing. He’ll hunt down the careless, grinning bastard. He will, and when he does, he will damn well shake him until the truth falls out.

  3

  Lorna Archambault

  Don’t ask me how it happened, don’t think you know what it’s like. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Did you quit gossiping or leave off gawking long enough to wonder how it felt to burn alive, with your heart splitting and a furnace in your fundament?

  Or were you too busy surmising? Was it all about the phenomenon, and did you give me a second thought, or were you only scared because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you? Do not send your children to visit my grave, ladies, and leave me the hell out of your little lectures on playing with matches.

  I know you despised me, and you know what I thought of you.

  Poor Lorna. Nobody knows what happened, but everybody knows what she looked like at the end. It was in all the papers, on TV, those pictures! How humiliating for a proud woman like her.

  In this town, extraordinary things come down – Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds – hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like that. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch, but these things happen to outsiders, not people you know, although our mayor did get struck by lighting on the eighteenth hole.