Son of Destruction

2




Dan


Lucy was one of those people who claimed she never got sick, which he believed, until now. She was critical – cancer, stage four and moving fast; it was time to put the central question. When they phoned, she was too far gone for him to press her on names, places, details from her past, but he didn’t know that.

He flew home on the redeye, too anxious and disrupted to sleep. He and Lucy had a lifetime of unanswered questions hanging between them, but this one knifed him in the heart. Oh, Mom. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? She’d just say what she always said: I wanted you to have your life. He had to walk into that hospital and fix this. He had to badger and charm them into producing the right specialist, the right protocols, and she’d get better.

Then they could talk.

By the time he raced into her room, Lucy was beyond questions. She couldn’t speak, not really. She just beamed, shaking with joy at the sight of him. Grieving, he took her hands; she was too flimsy to hug. If there really had been a new man in her life, he wasn’t anywhere.

There was just Lucy, shining.

Her mouth was working and he leaned close, the way you do for a deathbed confession: Who is he, Mom? If she won’t tell you now, she’ll never tell you. Even when she knows you love her too much to ask.

She struggled to produce sound, but nothing came out. Dan bent closer, closer even, knowing it was much too late to pour out his heart; all he could do was close his hand on what was left of hers and keep murmuring – with love, ‘It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK.’

Listening. It was too late but he listened hard. He could smell death coming out of her mouth, and there was no way to push it back; it wouldn’t matter what miracle drug they fed, infused or injected, she’d never get out of that bed. She couldn’t even speak, but she tried, God, she tried. He loved her, so he tried to smile and pretended that she’d spoken and he understood.

It was awful, watching her try.

He nodded as if words had come out and they made perfect sense. He said, ‘Yes, Mom, uh-huh,’ smiling, smiling, but he didn’t fool her. She pulled him closer so he could hear what she was trying so desperately to say.

Finally he did. This is what Lucy Carteret had saved all her strength to tell her son. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

It was awful seeing her like this. ‘Me too.’

They said they loved each other.

You love her and you say so, even though you can never forgive your mother for certain things. The way she put him off that night on the porch, when he asked the biggest question in his life. All she said, in a voice that floated away was, Just a boy I thought I loved.

All these years later, it was still a puzzle and a mystery; she was afraid to tell him. She made him promise not to ask. It was too late to ask her why.

She tried to lift her hand, but she couldn’t; she was so sick, so thin, she was almost transparent. He begged her not to go.

She said what they say in the movies, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Then she died.

Like that! Part of Dan Carteret was gone. Oh, Mom!

And, next? Words exploded in his head – the response he’d cobbled when she made him promise never to ask about his father: As long as we both shall live.

She thought he’d promised, he knew he’d lied. She was gone. OK then.

He is free to search.

Lucy didn’t leave him much to go on. The few things she’d said that night, when she first told him the truth. She loved the guy, she admitted it! Still did. Love like that doesn’t vanish without a trace.

It will be in that jewel box she was so anxious to protect.

The little wooden chest surfaces when he goes through her empty apartment, padding thoughtfully through the silent, abandoned rooms. He finds it in her bedroom closet, stashed behind books on a shelf he used to be too small to reach. It’s tough, going through the things she kept: bangles and mismatched earrings, his high school class ring, important papers and at the bottom items from the deep past, souvenirs of the life Lucy had before Dan was imagined and they ended up living here.

He runs his fingers over raised initials on the little gold football, a cheap high school trinket that his mother cherished or she wouldn’t have kept it for so long: FJHS. OK. Tonight, he’ll type FJHS into the Google search box along with her maiden name, the first step in a global search for Lucy Carteret’s lost life in the years before she married Burt Mixon, who made her so anxious and sad.

Here’s the picture she kept: five jocks snapped on a beach, waving and grinning like fools – a fading Polaroid that he turns over in his hands like an old friend. Wait! Here’s a second one: a black-and-white of Lucy in her teens, smiling for the camera in spite of the glare. At her back, a Spanish stucco house sprawls under a row of tall Australian pines – some builder’s idea of castle, with a grand stairway and two fat turrets. She’s wearing a little white T-shirt that breaks his heart and – what? That corny gold football hanging between her breasts. Did his father take this? Why did she hide it for so long?

Instinct tells him this isn’t all she was hiding. Troubled, he runs his fingers around the box, feeling only a little guilty because the silk lining shreds at his touch. Here. A scrap of newsprint from the paper he thought she’d destroyed before he learned to read. Well, now he can read: Spontaneous Human Combustion. Holy crap! He jumps, as if she’d just set her hand between his shoulders: It’s all right, love. I’m here.

The initialed football, the snapshot. This. He feeds FJHS into the search engines, triangulates with spontaneous human combustion. Fort Jude at the top of every first page, the Florida city where – bingo: there have been three grisly, unexplained deaths by fire in the last fifty years. And, my God, the image search produces the stills that so terrified him as a kid. The crime scene photo of that bedroom slipper with a foot still in it, standing like a solitary bookend on the floor underneath the recliner where she died. He broadens the search, surfing obsessively because on the Web, everything leads to something else and in its own way, it insulates him from the ache in his belly, just below the heart.

He kept clicking; he struck gold at howstuffworks.com, where Stephanie Watson wrote about spontaneous human combustion at length.

Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object – in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person – bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source. The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris ‘went up in ashes and smoke’ while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work ‘De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.’

Although Lucy was sad more often than she was happy, she didn’t live the kind of inner life that needs bizarre crimes and freaks of nature to explain itself. Unless. What? Dan is tortured by unanswered questions. What does this have to do with us? He browsed obsessively, lingering at this unsigned entry on unexplainedstuff.com and picked up later by a half-dozen other sites:

In December 1956, Virginia Caget of Honolulu, Hawaii, walked into the room of Young Sik Kim, a 78-year-old disabled person, to find him enveloped in blue flames. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, Kim and his easy chair were ashes. Strangely enough, nearby curtains and clothing were untouched by fire, in spite of the fierce heat that would have been necessary to consume a human being.

He should be packaging, storing, doing last things before he locks the door on his mother’s life. Instead, he trolls the Internet, gleaning details. At theness.com, a Dr Steven Novella pushes him into murk and confusion – hey, this is an MD putting his reputation on the line – when he says:

. . . Believers often cite as evidence the fact that a body has been completely reduced to ash, except for the ends of the arms and legs and sometimes the head. But there is a good explanation for this phenomenon. It is called the wick effect. The clothing of victims can act as a wick, while their body fat serves as a source of fuel (like an inside-out candle). The burning of the clothes is maintained by liquefied fat wicked from the body of the victim, causing a slow burn that can nearly consume the victim and resulting in the greasy brown substance often coating nearby walls.

Except for the ends of the arms and legs . . . The foot and the chair. The clipping. Another of those things she kept hidden but preserved: her secret, in code. As his mother tore the paper out of his hands that day, she smacked him hard. He reads on and on, chapter, verse, feeding on details, until he comes to himself with a shudder. OK, lady, what does this have to do with us?

Did she really leave Fort Jude because old women go up in flames for no known reason? He doesn’t think so. Once, when she let herself talk about her life before New London, Lucy told him she’d rather die than go back there, ever.

Which she did.

Die, and she left orders. He will throw her ashes into the Atlantic thousands of miles north of her home town. What came down there, he wonders, what was so bad that she had to go? Trouble in her family, or was it something worse? He won’t find the answers in his browser. He slams his laptop and turns to the pictures she kept.

If he stares at the house behind Lucy for long enough, will he see her parents grouped behind the leaded windows, snapped in black and white? Are they still in there? Would they come out and talk to him? He doesn’t know. In fact, there’s a lot he doesn’t know. When he was a kid he wanted to go live inside that picture, hang out on the beach with those five happy guys, laughing and not giving a f*ck. The problem is, they don’t look carefree to him now; they look sinister and guarded.

Stupidly, he sits, half-waiting for a sign from his mother, but the dead don’t leave messages, right? Reason, Carteret. Think. One these dudes has got to be my father, he thinks, why else would she keep this thing?

The hell of it is that he could stare into those faces and never know which one; he could feed the Polaroid into a scanner and enlarge it, he could analyze every facial detail down to the last pixel and still not know, but Dan does know one thing. He’ll hunt down the careless, grinning bastard. He will, and when he does, he will damn well shake him until the truth falls out.