Why have I come here?
In my childhood memory, there are so many different versions of my father. There’s the handsome young soldier in uniform, a picture in a frame beside my mother’s bed. There was the stranger on the video calls that we took on my mother’s old laptop, cuddled together on the bed. There was the hulking, exhausted man who came home and was either in bed, or slouched in front of the television most of the day. He had haunted eyes, looked at me with a kind of despair. He frightened me. There was the man who taught me how to hunt, how to fish, how to garden, how to prepare food for winter, how fire a gun, use a crossbow. He was quiet and careful, gentle, wise. I loved him. There was the monster who hurt my brother, and mother—beat them, screamed at them, and finally killed them. I hated him. I still do. In my heart, he remains unforgiven.
I endure the questioning and search, the pat down by a young female prison guard who is way too pretty and young for her uniform and her job, the hunt through my bag. The process is rote, done a thousand times. The space is gray and cool, my journey punctuated by the sliding and clanging of heavy metal doors. The deeper I go, the more I want to turn around.
This was a mistake.
Shit.
Jax was dead set against it. She’s all about cutting off the dark past—don’t go back, don’t look back. Maggie declined to offer an opinion, said the decision was mine alone. In the end, it was Jones Cooper who urged me to do it. Monsters only have a life in our imagination. The light of day reveals us all as the same flawed, broken soul trying to survive in this world.
Finally, I am escorted to a booth where the seat across from me is empty, a thick glass divide separates the two spaces.
I don’t blame myself, not anymore. But I do take responsibility for what happened that night. I called the police, reported the stockpile of weapons. I was a child and I set unforeseen events in motion, though really I was just trying to save us. I thought that they would come and take him away. I didn’t know how things would unfold—none of us do, even as grown-ups.
There were so many other things that might have happened, though. I could have let Jay kill him; I could have killed him—in the woods while we were hunting. It would have been simple enough. He trusted me. I could have killed him that night, but my aim wasn’t true and my heart was weak. And so because of a call I made, my brother and mother were killed, our home, such as it was, was destroyed, my father went to prison to serve two consecutive life sentences, and another monster—Adam Wilson—was born. I went to stay with Miss Lovely. More violence in college with a boy I thought I loved. Finally I found Jax and her family. I built a life. Found a calling, a way to heal through helping others.
For a moment, the man in front of me looks like a stranger. I think there’s been a mistake, that they’ve brought the wrong man. He’s so slim, I can see the knobs of his elbows, the press of his cheekbones. He’s clean-shaven. But then I look into the eyes of this old man and find my father. His gaze is clear and kind, a stormy green-gray that evokes my brother. Off him wafts the unmistakable aura of peace. He picks up the phone beside him, a warm smile on his lips, as if he’s been waiting for me all his life but is not surprised to see me. I hesitate before I pick up the phone. The receiver smells of disinfectant.
“Hello, little bird.” His voice crackles over the line.
“Hi, Dad.”
“It’s been a long time. You’re beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m not embarrassed when the tears come. I let them fall.
“I don’t expect your forgiveness,” he says, leaning forward. He is nothing like the man I remember; he is frail, eyes knowing, with the quietude of a monk.
I haven’t come to give him my forgiveness. But sitting here in a glass box, I find something within myself I didn’t expect for my father who did so much wrong, whom I have hated and feared. I’ll never touch him again—never feel his arms or hold his hand.
Dear Birdie, I can’t find my way to forgiveness. Because how can I forgive what he has done to others? He robbed me of my family, my childhood, my happiness. But he robbed Jay and my mother of their lives. It’s not my place to absolve him of his crimes. To know that he’s found peace, a path forward, does not comfort me. Because why should he have that when Jay and Alice are gone, when I have suffered so much because of his actions?
He presses his hand to the glass. And it takes me a second, but I do the same.
We are separated by the things he’s done. But I can see his journey. How he, too, has suffered. How damaged, how broken he was by the world of men, by war, by his own inadequacies as a husband and a father, as a man.