“But your father wasn’t a monster,” I say. “A killer.”
“There are all kinds of monsters. People inflict all kinds of pain.”
That’s very true. I know it well.
“Anyway,” he goes on when I stay silent. “I went to see my father before he died. In my mind, he was this behemoth, you know. This giant pain giver. A towering person, with hands like paddles and this face distorted in rage. I was scared. Even though I was a middle-aged man, had a son of my own, I was shaking when I went to see him.”
He walks around from his desk, and sits heavily on the other end of the couch. I turn toward him.
“But in the end, he was a tiny sliver of a man, barely a bump in the bed, pale and bald, with just this whispery voice. I sat next to him—for a while. I looked through this photo album he had by his bed. Weird. He left my mom when I was a kid. We never heard from him again. But this album was filled with pictures of me—in my football uniform, at my police academy graduation. There was even a wedding picture. Turns out Maggie had been sending him pictures of me over the years. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘I’ve made mistakes. I’m sorry.’”
We both sit a moment, the words hanging on the air.
Jones clears his throat, leans forward onto his thighs. “Too little, too late, of course. But still. There was something healing about that. That he was just a man who made mistakes, who didn’t know better, whose own father probably beat the crap out of him.”
I look down at my hands. I don’t want to see the pain on Jones Cooper’s face.
There’s music coming from somewhere above us, a heavy rock riff through the floor. “Your father. He was—sick,” Jones says.
“I know.”
“I’m not saying that you can or even that you should forgive him. I’m just saying that he might have some words for you that would help you not just run from the past, but resolve it. Understand it. Come to terms.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?”
What would I say if Wren Greenwood wrote to Dear Birdie?
Dear Birdie,
I can’t forgive my father for killing my mother and my brother. I’ve been hiding from that horrible night, from him, from myself ever since.
I’d tell her to face down her demons, including her father. I’d tell her to confront the past and take back her name. Funny how I can never take my own advice.
“I hear he helps other people now,” says Jones. He rises and walks over to the window, plays with a latch that seems loose.
“What do you mean?” There’s a constriction in my throat, my chest.
“He’s like a prison preacher now.”
“You’re telling me that he’s found God.”
“He’s found something,” he says. “He gives a mindfulness and meditation class. He advises. He counsels death row inmates.”
The idea of this twists in my center. He should be dead. My mother and my brother, they should be alive. He shouldn’t have this chance to redeem himself by helping others.
“How do you know this?” I ask.
“I keep tabs on the people I help to send away, the people I help, my clients. I like to know how things unfold.”
“Do you keep tabs on me?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says.
He turns to face me with an easy smile, folds his arms around his middle. The light coming in from the window reveals how he’s aged more than I thought at first glance—the lines on his face a little deeper, a slight sag at the jaw. He’s still good-looking, though. For an old guy.
“My judgment in your case,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t make the right decisions for you. We broke the law. We stole a girl’s identity. We forged paperwork. It was wrong.”
Regret. It comes for all of us sooner or later. What might have been. What we might have done differently.
“You did what you thought was right. I know that. And it was right. I wasn’t dogged by media, or stalked by fans of mass murder, or hunted down by true crime podcasters. As far as everyone knows, I died that night. And in a way I did. Anyway, I chose. I wanted a new name, a new self.”
“But you were just a kid. You weren’t really able to make an informed choice.”
“So, if you’d followed protocol, then what? I’d have gone to foster care. An uncertain fate if ever there was one.”
He bows his head, keeping his eyes down.