“I watched every game,” he said.
This was news to me, but I remained silent.
“I was there for every game. At least every home game. I always sat in the back rows. How did you get so goddamn good?”
“Must have been all those special moments we spent playing catch in the park on Sunday afternoons.”
“There are some things I regret in this life,” he said. “Not being a father to you is one of them.” He reached inside his pocket and removed a pouch of photographs. “These were taken on the last day your mother was alive.”
Something froze within me, as if my stomach had suddenly been dropped into a bucket of ice. My father, the great Cooper Knighthorse, detective extraordinaire, set the packet on the table.
“I loved her the best way I could, Jim.”
“Why are you giving me these pictures?” I asked.
“Because I want you to see her happy. I want you to see us happy. We were trying, Jim. I was trying.”
“You were trying to fuck anything you could get your hands on.”
If I shook him, he didn’t show it, although the corners of his lips quivered slightly. His pale eyes stared at me.
“We’ve all made mistakes, Jim. There’s something else in the pictures.”
“What?”
But he didn’t answer me. Didn’t even acknowledge my simple question. He simply looked at me a moment longer, stood, then walked out of my office. He shut the door carefully behind him.
I stared at the closed door for a long, long time.
24.
I didn’t worry about locking the office door after my father left. I could give a shit about the hitman. I had my Browning on the desk in front of me. Woe to anyone who walked unannounced into my office at that moment.
The packet of photographs was yellowing, the flap torn. On it was a little boy blowing soap bubbles with the word KODAK inside a particularly large bubble. The packet wasn’t very thick, containing perhaps twenty-four pictures in all. I had never seen these pictures, and, in fact, did not know of their existence.
I poured myself a cup of coffee with extra cream and sugar.
Heat seeped through the porcelain cup and scalded my palms, but I kept them there, feeling the heat, ignoring the heat, unaware of the heat.
Lifting both hands, I took a sip. Tasted the coffee, but didn’t really taste it. Same fucking routine.
I was ten years old when I found her dead. She had bled to death all over her new bedroom set. My father and I had gone to pick up a pizza and rent a movie. I was the first through the front door, carrying the pizza box, excited because my father was in a particularly good mood.
Once inside I called her name, told her the pizza was here and to get it while it was hot. The light was on in her bedroom, but there was no movement, no sound. I set the pizza box down on our dining room table, was about to open it when my father told me to get my mother first.
I headed down the hallway separating the dining room from the master bedroom, calling her name. There was no response. I slowed my pace when I saw her hand lying on the floor. Her hand was completely covered in something red. At first I thought it was a red glove. A wet, gleaming glove, although it wasn’t entirely wet. Only parts of it were. It was blood, and it was drying rapidly, congealing over her hand.
I stepped through the doorway and into a nightmare. Blood was everywhere, sprayed across the entire room. It reached everything, touched everything, infused everything. She was lying on the wooden floor in a great puddle of it. Her pink nightgown was soaked. Face-down, her head turned away, looking beneath the bed. The last thing she had seen in the world was a box of my childhood clothing. She kept the box because she always wanted another baby. The box read: Jimmy’s Stuff.
There was a bloodied hand print on the box where she had reached for it.
25.
I opened the packet and removed the small pile of pictures. A quick count gave me twenty-two in all.
On the last day of my mother’s life, I had been at Pop Warner football practice, and then later at a friend’s house for a pool party. I know now my parents had used the opportunity to renew their marriage and spend some quality time together. My mother wanted us to be a happy family. She wanted my father to take an interest in me, rather than viewing me as an obligation. She had gotten pregnant at a young age, and they had married in their late teens. They were not in love.
Early in the marriage, my father joined the military and spent much of that time fighting in secret wars. I would learn later that he was an expert sniper. Expert and deadly. Apparently, my own marksman skills with a gun had been inherited from him. When he came home from his various assignments, flush from his recent kills, he was never really home. He was restless and horny as hell. I had caught him in various parts of town with different women, once in the backseat of our car parked around the corner of our house. I had thrown a brick through the window and scared the hell out of them. I stood there defiantly as he looked up at me through the window. He never said a word about it, never apologized, and had the window replaced the next day.
At first glance, you would never believe that the smiling couple in the picture were unhappy, or that the man with the pale blue eyes was a trained killer or that the woman would only have hours more to live. They were both happy and carefree, hugging and waving. They could have been on a honeymoon.
The majority of the pictures were at the Huntington Beach pier, just a hop skip and jump from my condo. In one picture my mother was sticking her slender backside out seductively toward the camera. My father zoomed in on it tightly. I found myself smiling. They were flirting with each other, and it was nice to see. It was perhaps the most fun I had ever seen them have with each other. For that alone, I was thankful my father had given me the pictures.
He was wearing jeans, carpenter’s boots and a yellow T-shirt that said JEEP across it. My mother had on a red blouse, jean shorts and leather sandals. Her legs were slender and naturally tan. Her hair was dark brown and cut short. Her features were slender and sharp. Full red lips and deep brown eyes. She looked like Audrey Hepburn, only prettier.
There were pictures of them along the pier, next to a statue I didn’t recognize, standing next to two young men, one of whom was holding a freshly caught sand shark. In that picture, my mother secretly giving my father rabbit ears behind his back.
I went through all of the pictures, my heart heavy and sad. I never recovered from her loss. Mother’s Day is hell on me, and I often go into seclusion. How does one replace a mother’s love? I lived briefly with an aunt and uncle and they did their best to give me love and attention, but it wasn’t the same.
So what else was in the pictures?
What was I missing? What had my father seen that I was missing? Of course, the fact that he had seen it with no prompting was an irritating thought at best.
I went through the pictures again and again, almost setting them aside. Then I found it, and my mouth went immediately dry.
I carefully removed the three photographs and placed them in chronological order on the desktop before me. I noticed my hands were shaking. I linked my fingers together to stop the shaking. I’m not sure it worked.
The first in the series of three pictures was of my parents and the two young men with the sand shark. In the second, my mother was alone and waving to the camera, all smiles, enjoying my father’s company for the first time in a long time. Beyond her and up the pier a ways, the two young men with the sand shark were walking away. The brunette dangled the shark over one shoulder, while the bleached blond was looking back toward my
