meadows that were now bald, grassless tracks of suburban housing. I traced names: cousins, co-workers, people he’d lent money. I found them living in back rooms, asylums, basements, old hotels. I found them dead, as well, wild boys and dancing girls reduced to names carved in gray stone.
I lost track of time. Hours glided into days, weeks into months. My father’s trail, never warm, and mostly fanciful, grew cold, and in the end I was left with a list of names and dates and places that were no more able to guide me to him than the random scribbling I might read from a bathroom wall.
In the end, you will find your way.
It was the older detective who’d said that to me as I’d sat, dazed and unmoving, in the rainy driveway that night. But now, when the words returned to me, I realized that they were carried on a different voice, the one which had guided Rebecca before me, and which, after so many years, so much brutal evidence, still dared to suggest that something didn’t fit.
It was easy to find him. Swenson, after all, was not hiding from anyone.
A woman met me at the door. She wore a green dress dotted with small white flowers, and her hair was pulled back into a frazzled reddish bun.
“My name is Steve Farris,” I told her.
It was a name she clearly recognized. She stepped back and eyed me with a keen vigilance from behind a pair of large, tortoiseshell glasses.
“I guess you want to see Dave,” she said.
I nodded. “Is he here?”
“Sure he is,” the woman said. “He can’t get out anymore.” She stepped away from the door. “Come on in,” she said. “He’s in the back.”
I followed her down a short corridor, then into the shadowy bedroom where he lay. His condition seemed worse than Rebecca had described. Propped up by three large white pillows, he sat in a small metal bed, his lower body covered by a worn, patchwork quilt, the air around him little more than a cloud of medicinal fumes. There was a cylindrical orange oxygen tank at his right, and as I entered, he drew its yellow plastic mask from his mouth and watched me curiously.
“This is Steve Farris,” the woman said.
Swenson nodded to me, then swung his head to the right, as if trying to get a somewhat better look at me.
“You need anything, Dave?” the woman asked.
Swenson shook his head slowly, his eyes still leveled upon me.
The woman walked over to his bed, drew the blanket a little more snugly over his stomach, and disappeared out the door.
During all that time, Swenson’s eyes never left me.
“The son,” he said finally in a breathless, ragged voice.
“Yes.”
He motioned for me to take a seat near the bed, then returned the mask to his mouth and took in a quick, anxious breath. The face behind the mask was pale and ravaged, though his green eyes still shone brightly from their deep sockets.
“Rebecca thought you might come by here,” he said, after he’d withdrawn the mask again.
“She did?”
He inhaled a long, rattling breath, lifted the mask again, then let it drop. “She said there were things you might want to know.” His pale skin seemed strangely luminous in the gray light, as if a small candle still burned behind his eyes. But it was the eyes themselves that I could still recognize from that moment he’d turned to face me so many years before, those same eyes settling quietly upon me as I’d sat stunned and silent in the back seat of his unmarked car.
“Smart woman, Rebecca,” Swenson said shakily, his head drifting slightly to the left. “Very smart.”
“Yes, she is.”
The green eyes bored into me, a young detective’s eyes, swift and penetrating, but now embedded in a slack, doughy face. “What do you want to know about your father?” he asked.
It was a question which, as I realized at that moment, had never actually been asked of me, and which I’d never actually asked myself. What
“I want to know what really happened,” I told him. “I want to know exactly what my father did.”
“That day, you mean?” Swenson asked. The mask rose again, the great chest expanded beneath the patchwork quilt, then collapsed. “November 19, 1959,” he added, as the mask drifted down and finally came to rest in his lap.
He’d said the date not to impress me with his memory, but to suggest how it had remained with him through all the passing years, how he’d never been able to rid himself of his own, gnawing doubt, the persistent and irreducible presence of something in that house that didn’t fit. And yet, at the same time, he seemed reluctant to begin, as if still unsure of where it might finally lead.
“My father had planned it for a long time, hadn’t he?” I said.
Even as I said it, I saw our lives dangling helplessly over the fiery pit of my father’s dreadful calculations. One by one, it seemed, he’d weighed the separate elements of our lives and deaths. Like a Grand Inquisitor, he’d heard the evidence while staring at my red-robed mother from the smoky fortress of his old brown van, or tinkering with his latest bicycle in the chill dungeon of the cement basement. One by one, we’d come before him like prisoners naked in a dock. Day by day the long trials had stretched on through the months, until, in a red wave of judgment,
