I heard her thrashing in the water behind me, her small arms working furiously to catch up to me. I stroked hard until my fingers grazed the sand below the water.
“You haven’t asked me about my client,” she said, catching me sooner than I’d anticipated.
“Sharp observation, Darcy.” I stopped paddling, slid off the board, and stood next to it, maybe twenty yards from the sand, the water just below my knees. “I’m not interested.”
She pushed off her board, fell awkwardly into the water, then bounced up to her feet. She shoved her rental angrily toward the shore and put her hands on her hips. “Ask me who my client is.”
I put a finger to my chin like I was thinking, then pulled it away. “No.”
“I’m not going away until you ask,” she said.
She had the feel of someone who would back that statement up, nipping at my heels as I tried to kick her away.
“Christ,” I said, reaching down to my ankle and unstrapping the leash. “If I ask, will you go the fuck away?”
“Yeah.”
“Even when I tell you that I’m still not interested? You’ll go away and no more of this shit?”
“I promise,” she said.
“I heard that once already.”
“This time I mean it,” she said. “If you want me to go away, I’ll go away.”
There was something in her demeanor that suddenly made me realize I didn’t want to ask the question. She seemed supremely confident.
But I was stuck.
“Who is your client?” I asked.
“My client is Russell Simington,” she said.
The name meant absolutely nothing to me. “So?”
Darcy Gill folded her arms across her chest, casting a long, thin shadow across the shallow water. “Russell Simington is your father.”
THREE
I walked out of the ocean, the board tucked under my arm and Darcy Gill chasing behind me.
“Did you hear me?” she asked, coming up to my side.
“I heard you.”
“Your father is on death row.” “I don’t have a father,” I said.
“Spare me the Movie of the Week drama,” she said, keeping pace. “I know you don’t have a relationship with him. But he is still your father.”
I trudged up the sand, stepped across the pavement of the boardwalk, and set my board down behind the small retaining wall that bordered my patio.
I turned to Darcy. “I didn’t even know his name until you just said it. I don’t know that this guy is my father.”
“Your mother is Carolina, correct?” she said, dropping her rental board against the wall.
I didn’t say anything.
“He told me where to find you,” she said. “He told me who your mother is. I checked you out. He got your birth date correct. He is your father, whether you want to believe me or not. And he is scheduled to die.”
The temperature was in the high sixties, but I fought off a shiver.
I sat down on the wall. “He knew where to find me?”
Darcy nodded. “He knew your address by memory. And your mother’s.” She paused. “And you would have no way of knowing this, but you look a hell of a lot like him.”
Something lurched in my gut. I’d never known a thing about my father. Knowing my mother had nearly done me in. She’d never brought him up, and I’d never asked. There were veiled references on occasion, but nothing strong enough to start a conversation. I’d done fine without a father and, over the years, that independence had only grown stronger and quashed any fleeting curiosity I might have had in learning anything about him.
“Who did he kill?” I asked, trying to get my thoughts in order.
“Two Mexican nationals,” she said, sitting down next to me. “Five years ago. He shot them point blank in the back of the head, hands tied behind their backs.”
“Sounds like a guy I really want to meet.”
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “You can find out the facts pretty easily, so there’s no point in it. He’s a hard man. He’s comfortable in jail. He’d been in before this conviction.”
I didn’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, it didn’t matter. I’d never met him, never spoken to him, and never touched him. The only influence he’d had on my life was my having to give an embarrassing answer when people asked where my father was.
