A Quiet Vendetta

How much money he gave Max when the cab finally drew to a stop near the gates of the park Hartmann didn’t know. It could have been his life’s savings and he wouldn’t have cared. He even left his bag behind, and Max came after him, thrust the thing into his hands, and then stopped to watch as he charged across the grass towards the bandstand.

By the time Ray Hartmann reached his agreed rendezvous point with his wife and daughter it was thirteen minutes past four.

The bandstand was deserted.

Hartmann stood there, pale and drawn, covered in sweat, his bag dropped at his feet, everything inside him tightened up like a fist, ready to explode at the slightest provocation.

He swore three or four times. He scanned the people nearby. He started walking one way, and then he turned and walked the other. He saw a child with a woman, he opened his mouth to speak, and then he realized the child was a boy and the woman was old and gray-haired and walking with a cane.

He backed up against the cold concrete base of the bandstand. He felt his knees giving beneath him. He felt the sting of tears in his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was trip-hammering like it intended to overload and stop and send him crashing to the ground… and sometime later someone would find him and call the police, and the police would call the emergency services, and they would come down and find him dead and cold and stiff and…

Ray Hartmann started to cry. He went down on his knees, his face in his hands.

This is what you get for everything you didn’t do, his inner voice told him. This is what you get for being a lousy father and never paying attention, and never helping Jess with her schoolwork, and drinking when you said you wouldn’t. This is what you get for being a loser, born and bred, and no matter what you do now you will always look back at this moment and beat yourself to death about it, because this is everything that your life will ever be, and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can do about it…

And then there were footsteps, the sound of someone running, and for a moment he paused, instinct like radar tuned to every sound around him, and Ray Hartmann looked up, and through his tear-filled eyes he saw her…

‘Dadddeeeeee!’

EPILOGUE

He stood up slowly.

He surveyed the faces before him. He took one step forward and gripped the edge of the lectern.

It’s not here for notes, he thought. No-one brings notes to say what they have to say here. They put this here so there’s something between you and them… something for you to hold onto if you feel you’re going to lose it. If you feel just like I feel now…

‘Hi,’ he said.

There was a murmur from the gathered ensemble of people. Men, women, young and old, dressed every which way, nothing similar between them, except one thing, and that was something you could never see, and in most cases would never have guessed, but they were all here for the very same reason.

‘Hi,’ he said again. ‘My name is Ray.’

And there are times when he finds it hard to believe that he ever jeopardized what he possessed, as if only a crazy man could have failed to recognize what was here.

They came back at him then, a chorus of acknowledgements and nods of approval.

‘My name is Ray. I am a father. I am a husband. I am an alcoholic, and until a few months ago I was drinking.’

And there are times when he looks at his own reflection in the mirror and asks himself if he ever really knew himself, or anyone else for the matter.

There was a murmur of sympathy, and then beneath that a ripple of applause, and Ray Hartmann stood there, his heart beating, and he waited until the crowd had settled down before he spoke again.

‘I blamed my wife, I blamed my job. I blamed my own dad because he was a drunk too. I blamed it all on the fact that I lost my younger brother when I was fourteen years old… but the truth of the matter, and this was the hardest thing of all, was that I was the only one to blame.’

Time, he knows now, does not heal. Time is merely a window through which we can see our own mistakes, for those seem to be the only things we remember with clarity.

Again there were murmurs of consent and agreement, and once again a ripple of applause that spread through the crowd.

‘Some time ago I went home to New Orleans, and there, again because of my job, I met a man who had spent his life killing people.’

Jess speaks to him, and in her voice is the same feeling, the same emotion that she always possessed. She does not care to remember the time he was away, as if that was merely a blip on the heart monitor, and now it has passed it can be forgotten so easily.

Ray Hartmann paused and looked at the faces watching him. He wanted to be outside in the car with Carol and Jess. He wanted to be anywhere but here, but he knew, knew with all of his being, that this time he was going to keep his side of the agreement.

‘See it through, Ray,’ Carol had told him. ‘See it through this time… start it and finish it, no matter what it takes, okay?’

And he watches Carol. This is the girl he fell in love with, the girl he married, and in her he finds everything that he knows he could ever want, and in some small way he believes he will spend the rest of his life measuring up to that.

‘And I listened to this man, and despite all the terrible things he had done, all the lives he had destroyed, there was one thing that he taught me. He taught me that the strength of family is the only thing that can really see you through.’

In the early hours of the morning he will wake, and there will be a sound within, and the sound will be something like a heart beating, but now it is not the heart of a frightened and desperate man; it is the heart of a man who believed he had lost everything, and then somehow retrieved it.

Later. Christmas Eve.

Ray Hartmann stands in the kitchen doorway.

The phone rings.

Carol is out back somewhere bringing groceries in from the car.

‘Jess!’ Hartmann calls out. ‘Can you get the phone, Jess?’

‘Aw Dad, I’m busy.’

‘Jess, please… I gotta help your mom with the groceries.’

He listens for her footsteps on the stairs, and when the phone stops ringing Ray Hartmann walks through the kitchen to the back door and takes a bag of groceries from Carol. He sets it down on the worktop, and then he pauses as he hears Jess’s voice from the hallway.

And the heart beats with a cautious sound, as though there are still a great many lessons to learn, but his eyes are open, his mind is willing and, if anything, he has learned the greatest lesson of all: that of humility, that he was not always right, that the complexities of life cannot be avoided or negated or denied.

‘Jess? Who is it, honey?’

Jess doesn’t answer.

He leaves the kitchen and walks towards the front of the house, and then he slows as he hears what she is saying.

It is the same world now, and yet somehow different.

‘I don’t know… of course I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a surprise.’

She is silent for a moment.