“We never had much to say to each other,” he told me and then pressed on with his story. In Montreal, he walked past a police station to check the wanted photos. His was there. He knew he shouldn’t stay, and yet he couldn’t help but stare and feel the weight of his errors. He hadn’t stripped away anything, become light or free. There was no frontier left that he could cross to start again. His crimes had followed him through so many fake names and temporary addresses, making their way home.
✴
DURING A HEAVY snowfall, I called him from home and asked if he remembered the flowery card he’d received at the post office when I was a boy—the card my mother had joked was from his other family.
“I don’t,” he said, “but maybe it was from the girlfriend in Salt Lake City. She had a son.”
“A son?”
“She was pregnant when I went to prison, but she never visited me. She sent photos. The boy looked a lot like you used to. But then she married another guy, and they had a kid. I saw a picture of both kids. The other one was really ugly. Anyway, I stayed in touch for a while after I was deported. But I realized there was no point in it. The kid had never known me. He had another father, so I let him live his life. Maybe she sent the card. I don’t know.”
“You never wanted to meet him?” I asked, but there was nothing to feel about this unknown brother—no space now even for regret.
“No, he was named after the fake name I used back then,” he said, as if with that name he hadn’t been the same person, and so this wasn’t his son. “But that woman was pretty angry. When I was in prison, she found out that she hadn’t known my real name, and she changed the kid’s name to her new husband’s. Is there really such a thing as a fake name? I mean, we make them all up. One’s as good as another, right?”
Outside, the moon shone through thinning clouds, illuminating the white forest. The snowstorm was ending.
“You know, I was reading about angels the other day,” he went on, his voice growing soft. He described an article about a Florida couple who met a beggar in front of their house. The beggar asked for food or money, and they gave him a sandwich and twenty dollars. A month later, a black man with blue eyes came to their door and gave them a winning lottery ticket. He said they’d lost it. They never bought lottery tickets and told him so, but he showed it had their names on it.
I was having a hard time listening and said the story sounded sketchy.
“It was in the newspaper,” he told me. “They don’t put bullshit in the newspaper. This is all true stuff.”
He talked about miracles, ghosts—the time when he was a boy and saw his grandfather. Years later, after my mother had taken us to the US, he’d seen his own father standing at the foot of his bed one morning, his hair and skin so dark he seemed a figment of the dawn. Light was just coming through the windows. It was his father as a young man.
“I’d hated him,” my father said, “but I felt at peace then. I blinked and he was gone.”
Though I tried to listen, I was thinking of something else.
“Is André your real name?”
He cleared his throat and said yes.
After we hung up, I just sat. There was tension in my chest, and my head was feeling cluttered. Maybe I’d been studying too much or had too little contact with other people. My mother and I didn’t speak often, and I’d been distant from my brother and sister for years.
I put on my hiking boots and two long-sleeve shirts, and then went out. I began to jog a forest path that was no more than a white trace through the trees.
Cold air stung my lungs as I gained speed, enjoying the slip and plunge of my feet. The moon shone over the evergreens: the white shelves of their branches, the naked maples limned with snow.
I found a rhythm, and as I moved, I saw dozens of characters, stern or hopeful faces—the men who’d taught my father crime, or his partners, his girlfriend, the inmates he’d fought, his family, Bernard and the others whose names I didn’t know. I was furious that he’d kept so much from me—and at myself, for all that I couldn’t say. I wanted to ask him more, to find words to reveal his past and infuse him with a breadth of fallibility and simple need.
✴
AFTER HIS ARREST in Miami, he had one opportunity to escape. He’d refused the plane in hopes of this, preferring the trip cross-country in the police car. The two cops took turns at the wheel, more miserable than the convicts in the back. There was my father and occasionally one or two others along for a leg of the ride, shuttled between jails just as my father was being returned to California so he could stand trial. They ate at diners, used public bathrooms, all the while handcuffed and guarded. After lunch one day, as one of the cops paid, my father took a paper clip off the counter from next to the cash register.
In the backseat of the cruiser, he sat in the middle, the convicts on either side holding the edge of a newspaper so they could all read. Using it as a shield, he began picking his cuffs. The convicts looked concerned, but with the radio on and the windows cracked, my father was able to whisper that if they ratted him out he’d kill them in their sleep. Both were on his
