False Memory

“You remember my dad, I’ll bet.”

“Dr. Holden Caulfield, professor of literature.”

“He’s a real bastard,” Skeet said.

“They all are. She’s attracted to bastards.”

Skeet slowly raised his head, as though it were a massive weight elevated by a complex system of powerful hydraulic lifts. “Holden Caulfield’s not even his real name.”

Dusty braked at a red traffic signal and regarded Skeet with skepticism. The name, identical to that of the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, seemed too pat to have been an invention.

“He changed it legally when he was twenty-one,” Skeet said. “Sam Farner was his born name.”

“Is this stoned talk or true talk?”

“True,” Skeet said. “Old Sam’s dad was a career military man. Colonel Thomas Jackson Farner. His mom, Luanne, she taught nursery school. Old Sam had a falling-out with them—after the colonel and Luanne finished putting him through college and after old Sam got a scholarship toward his master’s degree. Otherwise, he might’ve waited to have his falling-out, until his folks ponied up more tuition.”

Dusty knew Skeet’s father — the false Holden Caulfield — and knew him far too well, because the pretentious bastard was his stepfather. Trevor Penn Rhodes, Dusty’s father, was the second of their mother’s four husbands, and Holden Sam Caulfield Farner was her third. From before Dusty’s fourth birthday until past his fourteenth, this self-styled blue blood had ruled their family with a lofty sense of divine right, and with enough authoritarian zeal and sociopathic ferocity to earn praise from Hannibal Lecter. “He said his mother had been a professor at Princeton, his father at Rutgers. All those stories…”

“Not biography,” Skeet insisted. “Just his cooked-up resume.”

“Their tragic death in Chile?…”

“Another lie.” In Skeet’s bloodshot eyes was a fierce light that might have been vengeance. For a moment, the kid appeared not sad at all, not drawn and gaunt and ruined, but full of a wild and barely contained glee.

Dusty said, “He had such a tremendous disagreement with Colonel Farner that he wanted to change his name?”

“I guess he liked The Catcher in the Rye.”

Dusty was amazed. “Maybe he liked it, but did he understand it?” Which was a dumb question. Skeet’s father was as shallow as a petri dish, culturing one short-lived enthusiasm after another, most of them as destructive as salmonella. “Who would want to be Holden Caulfield?”

“Sam Farner, my good old dad. And I’ll bet it hasn’t hurt the bastard’s career at the university. In his line of work, that name makes him memorable.”

A horn sounded behind them. The traffic signal had changed from red to green.

Resuming the drive to New Life, Dusty said, “Where did you learn all this?”

“To begin with — on the Internet.” Skeet sat up straighter, and with his bony hands, he smoothed his damp hair back from his face. “First, I checked out the faculty emeritus at Rutgers, on their website. Everyone who’d ever taught there. Same at Princeton. No one with his parents’ names had been professors at either place. His invented parents, I mean.”

With an unmistakable note of pride in his voice, Skeet recounted the tortuous route he’d followed in his search for the simple truth about his father. The investigation had required concerted effort and considerable creative thought, not to mention sober logic.

Dusty marveled that this fragile kid, ravaged by life as well as by his own addictions and compulsions, had been able to focus sharply enough and long enough to get the job done.

“My old man’s old man, Colonel Farner — he’s long dead,” Skeet said. “But Luanne, his mother, she’s alive. She’s seventy-eight, lives out in Cascade, Colorado.”

“Your grandmother,” Dusty said.

“Didn’t know she existed till three weeks ago. Talked to her on the phone twice. She seems real sweet, Dusty. Broke her heart when her only kid cut them out of his life.”

“Why did he?”

“Political convictions. Don’t ask me what that means.”

“He changes convictions with his designer socks,” Dusty said. “It must have been something else.”

“Not according to Luanne.”

Pride of accomplishment, which had given Skeet the strength to sit up straighter and lift his chin off his chest, was no longer sufficient to sustain him. Gradually he slid down and retreated turtlelike into the steam, the wet smell, and the soggy folds of his loose rain-soaked clothes.

“You can’t afford all this again,” Skeet said as Dusty drove into the New Life Clinic parking lot.

“Don’t worry about it. I have two major jobs lined up. Besides, Martie’s designing all kinds of hideous deaths for Orcs and assorted monsters, and there’s serious bucks in that.”

“I don’t know if I can go through the program again.”

“You can. You jumped off a roof this morning. Hell, getting through rehab should be a piece of cake.”

The private clinic was in a building styled like the corporate headquarters for a prosperous chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants: a two-story hacienda with arched loggias on the first floor, covered balconies on the second, too precisely prettified with royal-purple bougainvillea, which had been meticulously handwoven around columns and across archways. Perfection had been sought so aggressively that the result was a Disneyesque artificiality, as if everything from the grass to the roof were stamped out of plastic. Here, even the dirty rain had a tinsel glimmer.

Dusty parked at the curb near the entrance, in the zone reserved for patient admissions. He switched off the wipers, but didn’t kill the engine. “Have you told him what you’ve learned?”

“You mean good old Dad?” Skeet closed his eyes, shook his head. “No. It’s enough I know it myself.”

In truth, Skeet was afraid of Professor Caulfield, nee Farner, no less now than when he’d been a boy — and perhaps with good reason.

“Cascade, Colorado,” Skeet said, pronouncing it as if it were a magical place, home to wizards and gryphons and unicorns.

“You want to go there, see your grandma?”

“Too far. Too hard,” Skeet said. “I can’t drive anymore.”

Because of numerous moving violations, he had lost his driver’s license. He rode to work each day with Fig Newton.

“Listen,” Dusty said, “you get through the program, and I’ll take you out there to Cascade to meet your grandma.”

Skeet opened his eyes. “Oh, man, that’s risky.”

“Hey, I’m not that bad a driver.”

“I mean, people let you down. Except you and Martie. And Dominique. She never let me down.”

Dominique was their half sister, born to their mother’s first husband. She’d been a Down’s baby and had died in infancy. Neither of them had ever known her, though sometimes Skeet visited her grave. The one who escaped, he called her.

“People always let you down,” he said, “and it’s not smart to expect too much.”

“You said she sounded sweet on the phone. And evidently your dad despises her, which is a good sign. Damn good. Besides, if she turns out to be the grandmother from Hell, I’ll be there with you, and I’ll break her legs.”

Skeet smiled. He stared wistfully through the rainwashed windshield, not at the immediate landscape but perhaps at an ideal portrait of Cascade, Colorado, which he’d already painted in his mind. “She said she loved me. Hasn’t met me, but said it anyway.”

“You’re her grandson,” Dusty said, switching off the engine.

Skeet’s eyes appeared to be not just swollen and bloodshot but sore, as if he’d seen too many painful things. But in the ice-pale, sunken wreckage of his gaunt face, his smile was warm. “You’re not just a half brother. You’re a brother and a half.”

Dusty cupped a hand against the back of Skeet’s head and pulled him close, until their foreheads touched. They sat for a while, brow to brow, neither of them saying anything.

Then they got out of the van, into the cold rain.