Son of Destruction

5




Dan


To find out about the past, you have to go there.

Dan reduced his mother to ashes in a brass box, sealed and weighted as requested, and rented a boat so he could drop her in the Atlantic off the beach at Misquamicut, where she used to take him when he was a kid. She hadn’t asked him to say a few words as the box with her in it plunged into the ocean, but he did. Never mind what he said over her. It is between them.

He did what you have to, the sad, necessary things. Filed insurance forms and settled with the funeral home. Cleaned out the apartment. Without her, the rooms were so empty that in a way it was a surgical strike. Goodwill took most of the furniture and useful small objects. He rented a storage locker for the rest. Met with her lawyer and closed up the house. His week is up, but he and his mother aren’t finished.

All his life, Lucy lived as though history began when she had him. She pretended there was nothing before life in New London, and he loved her well enough to let it go, although he didn’t, really.

He’s been carrying it all these years, and all these years later he’s found the hidden keys to Lucy’s life before Burt. She kept them in her jewel box, like notes that she wrote to him, but was afraid to send. Now that she’s safe from whatever she was afraid of, Dan is free to track down the answers to questions he promised not to ask. He’s in Fort Jude.

It was a gut decision: no questions, no regrets. It made itself. He didn’t quit his job, exactly, but he did call the office. His boss didn’t say yes or no because it wasn’t a question. He said, ‘Remember, your mother can only die once.’

There are so many ways to parse this that he can’t bear to start.

Dan Carteret doesn’t want to kill his mother all over again; he just wants to put this thing to rest. He’s here to strip mine her past and pull his father out.

With its flashy neon and artificial palms flanking fancy wrought iron benches, Fort Jude is nothing like New London – or Los Angeles, for that matter. It’s more like downtown Oz – real palm trees and plastic flowers in cement tubs line Central Avenue, with flowers in pots hanging from the ornamental lamp-posts, and mosaic obelisks marking the major cross streets. There’s so much cosmetic architecture here that it’s hard to tell the difference between what is and what used to be. Brash new buildings compete with old hotels tarted up with false fronts like gaudy party masks. Dan skims the facades like a speed reader, looking for places Lucy would have gone. He wants to walk into her past and figure out what went wrong and why she tried so hard to obliterate Fort Jude.

This is not the time for a Holiday Inn, Marriott, Sheraton, any of your anonymous, clean places. It’s not like he expects to run into his mother in the lobby, he just wants to stay somewhere that she might have come. He’s looking for a hotel with a history, where the homefolks meet for drinks in late afternoon – people his mother might have hung out with, the ones who were born here and stayed here, so that they segued from backstory into now without feeling a thing. He’d like to slide down the bar, all, Hi, I’m new here. Smile and make them like him, which he’s good at, even though he grew up pretty much alone. If he can make friends, maybe one of them will point him to Lucy’s old neighborhood. They might even know the house. Otherwise, he’ll have to go through Fort Jude street by street, block by block in his rented car, matching tree lines and front porches to the ones in his mother’s snapshot until he finds the place.

It takes him two passes to find it, but the Flordana is perfect. Never mind the wrought iron fence surrounding the overgrown courtyard and the gingerbread trim bolted to the long front porch. Behind its Victorian facade, the Flordana is straight out of the 1920s, blunt and flat-footed and sweet. At odds with the false front is the Art Deco sign, blue neon winking at him from behind faded plastic ivy: FLORDANA HOTEL. Set back from the street, the hotel crouches between hulking office blocks like a nice old lady forgotten on the sofa at a high school party, wedged between two jocks too stoned to notice.

It’s all cool until he parks and gets out of the car. It’s hotter out here than he thought. It’s . . . He doesn’t know. In the courtyard he gets an attack of the dry swallows: gulp. The tiled porches are green with moss. The cement courtyard has a tired, dingy look. As if this is too little, and he got here too late. Get over it! he tells himself. Don’t get weird and don’t pin any hopes on this. What does he think, that he can flash a snapshot of his mother and real Lucy will fall into his hands, buried secrets and all? That somebody will say, ‘Why, that’s Lucy Carteret, do you want to see her house?’ Not really. He’s a little crazy right now but he is, after all, a reporter. Was. Gulp.

Check in. Scope the place on the web before you start. This is no big deal. It’s just the beginning.

But what if she and his real father actually came to the Flordana, like, after the prom? Or she stood out front waiting for her bus home from her summer job, praying he would come by in his car. Unless he parked and tugged her inside the Flordana, and she got pregnant here. Don’t, a*shole. Her lover could have been a night clerk or a waiter in the hotel coffee shop. Unless he . . .

Just don’t. Hope eats him up from the inside. He’ll walk in and find me. Be here. Would they know each other? He thinks so. It will play like a movie: Father. Son! Wait. The faithless shithead has a lot of explaining to do. Stupid, he knows, but losing people makes you stupid. Reporter, remember. You make your living finding out. Work this like any other story. Hit the right link and it will open up. Chapter. Verse. What happened to Lucy here. What’s so terrible about it, and who his people are, really. The begats.

It lodges in his throat: the begats.

Other people take family for granted, but then other people have photos of people who look like them posted somewhere, letters, birthday cards. Family trees. A chunk of Dan Carteret is missing. It isn’t just the no father that Lucy tried so hard to erase. It’s the gap ordinary mothers fill with particulars: where she’s from, who your grandparents are. What life was like before she got married and had you.

Stop that!

The woman at the desk is either a lot older or a lot younger than Lucy. She’s so carefully put together and made up that it’s hard to tell. Jointed silver fish dangle from her ears, very Florida. So’s the aggressively blonde hair. She looks fit in her frilled tank top, although the wrinkles in the tanned cleavage give her away. Full mouth. Nice smile. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I need a room.’

‘Lucky it’s the end of the season.’ She could do a commercial for those teeth whitening strips. ‘Take your pick.’

Rumpled after the long flight, wrecked by the week of last things and sweating through the back of his khaki coat, Dan realizes that gross as he looks right now, she’s coming on to him. ‘The cheapest, I suppose.’

‘Business trip?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Jessie.’ The grin says he must look pretty good to her, or that she thinks she’s younger than she really is and he’s older than he looks, unless it’s just her way of adding some color to the day. ‘Now, what shall I put down?’

He doesn’t know.

‘You don’t look like a tourist.’ She means, What are you doing here? ‘If you’re here on business, you get our special rate.’

Words pop out. ‘I’m down here on a story.’ Why does this lie make him feel so much better?

‘You write books?’

‘No Ma’am. For my paper.’ Like a person here on real business. Smile for the lady, she believes. So can you. ‘The Los Angeles Times? A story for the magazine.’

‘Cool. What about?’

He isn’t sure. ‘If I tell you, I lose my job.’

‘So I should put down business,’ Jessie says.

Dan doesn’t answer. He’s thinking hard. There’s some reason he burned out searching the web details on the human fires. Three old women. Here. Cool! Here’s his readymade rationale; two words and he’s justified. ‘Research trip,’ he says, grinning. ‘Preliminary research.’ Just saying it makes him feel better. As a matter of fact, it’s a terrific story, he was just too fried to see it. Like a visa to this strange country, Lucy’s fragment of newspaper justifies his presence here. ‘Now if I could have my key . . .’

She isn’t exactly holding him hostage, but she hasn’t started checking him in. ‘What are you researching?’

‘Just an old story.’

‘Ooooh,’ she says, fishing. ‘We have a lot of old stories here.’

‘It’s a kind of a mystery.’

‘We have a lot of those. Which one?’

‘I. Um. I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet.’ The story shapes up in his head like one of those great unwritten novels – the kind writers only talk about in bars because by daylight, they evaporate. He frames the pitch: FORT JUDE, TOWN OF HUMAN FURNACES. His big break.

‘I said, which one?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Not Ma’am.’ She has a very sweet grin. ‘Jessie. Which mystery?’

It’s been a long week. There’s no logic to it but he can’t be here at the desk much longer. He just can’t. ‘An old one,’ he says, finishing with a warm smile that he hopes will be enough.

It isn’t. ‘Oh,’ she says, all faux naïve, ‘which one.’

‘Spontaneous human combustion!’ Why does that embarrass him?

‘Oh, that old thing. Lorna and Mrs Keesler and that other lady.’ Nice grin. ‘You know, there are books.’

‘I’ll find a new angle.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘I have to. It’s my job.’ He slaps his wallet on the counter: business as usual. ‘Now if you’ll just.’

‘We’ll put you down as business,’ she says smoothly, scrawling in the showy red leather register planted like a stage prop on the marble counter next to the brass telephone with its standing mouthpiece and a receiver that you have to point at your ear. ‘But I need to know how long you’re going to be in town.’

‘Good question,’ he says.

‘There’s a rate break if you rent by the week.’

With grin that doesn’t quite come off, he repeats the line written for him by the boss he probably no longer has. ‘For as long as it takes.’

‘OK then.’ She makes a tick next to his name. ‘Now, print your name in the book while I run your plastic. Folders with maps and tourist attractions over there in the rack. Nice handwriting.’ She hands back his card. ‘I have you on Five. Anything else I can do for you?’

‘Not right now, not that I can think of. Well, one other thing.’ He takes it and turns to go. Then need overwhelms reason and he pulls out his picture of Lucy, snapped in front of her house. ‘So. Can you tell me where this is?’

‘Sure,’ she says, now that his card has cleared. Leaning over the counter, she shifts position, letting out a wave of sunscreen and perfumed deodorant compounded by body heat. ‘Always happy to help.’

‘I mean, this house?’ She’s squinting so he slides the snapshot closer adding, ‘For. Uh, an architectural piece?’

That blind, vague smile tells him that she’s one of those women who can’t see without glasses but is too vain to put them on. Handing it back, she rests her knuckles on the counter. ‘Sorry.’

He says, ‘About . . . Old Florida?’

‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ She shrugs, rearranging her cleavage.

What is she, coming on to me? Damn, all his statements come out with question marks. Damn, he should have slept on the plane. ‘So. You don’t know the house?’

She isn’t looking at the snapshot, she’s watching him. ‘Not really. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘So,’ he says, ‘I have this other picture?’ Knowing she’ll need glasses he says tactfully, ‘The faces are pretty small.’ He slides it across the counter.

She may not recognize faces, but she knows shapes. Jessie slaps on her glasses and looks again. Dan is too distracted to pick up the change in her as she says, carefully, ‘No, I don’t know these people. From the looks of the car, that’s from the dark ages. I’m a lot more recent than that.’ She takes off the glasses with her foxy, jagged grin.

‘OK then.’ He puts it away. ‘If I can just have my key?’

Odd. It’s like a study in stop motion photography. Woman, arriving at a conclusion. Click. Click. Click. Let’s get this done. She pulls a big brass key off the hook. ‘Room 51. I’m alone at the desk today. You can find it, right?’

‘Yes Ma’am.’

She does not say, It’s Jessie, please! She dismisses him. ‘OK then.’

‘OK.’ Dan lingers just long enough to be sure she’s done with him. What did I do wrong? At the elevator, he turns and looks back. Jessie is doubled over the register, squinting at his entry. Then he sees her reach for the glasses again. As the elevator doors open he sees her snap open her phone. The woman who could have cared less about the snapshot stabs a number with her fingernail. She looks up with a sweet, distracted smile just as the steel doors snap shut on them.