29.
At the height of his power, my father had a sailboat—a hundred-foot Hallberg-Rassy—that he namedChasing Sunshine. I still have some of the detritus from it: personalized paper cocktail napkins, a deck chair with my name on it, an orange-and-yellow-striped life preserver.
My father was never happier than when he was at the helm of that ship. I think he knew that it helped people to overlook those personality quirks of his that I’ve mentioned previously; he was a man who saw what he wanted and took it, and if you could get over his methods, there was a lot of fun to be had in sharing the spoils. We cracked open many a lobster tail onSunshine’s deck, floating in bright-blue Caribbean waters and romancing various twentysomethings. The setting more than made up for my father’s favorite joke: Watch the boom doesn’t knock out those new pearly whites, kiddo, they cost me a fortune!
We set sail onSunshineto enjoy the best of what life has to offer, and so it struck me as particularly tragic that that’s where my father died.
It was the pesky 401(k)s again, and the secretaries and the lawyers and now the federal agents who wouldn’t shut up about them. TheSunshine’s crew had taken the dinghy to shore for the afternoon, and it was just the two of us left onboard when he finally lost his nerve. My father sat sweaty and wilting in his swim trunks, his fat stomach rolling down onto his thighs, and asked me—with a straight face—for the names of those consultants I’d mentioned way back when I still had all my own teeth.
I like to think that if I’d had more time to prepare, the ending might have been different. But he scared me, frankly, with all his talk about the angry mob of employees that would come for him, and for me too. At this eleventh hour he wanted to appease them, even if that meant backing down from all his plans and dreams with his tail between his legs. He wouldn’t hear that it was too late to come clean, that it was better to keep this thing rolling forward, dishonest as it was, until it righted itself with new investment. No matter what I said, I knew that I was powerless to make him stay the course he’d set. (Not a mistake I’ve ever repeated.)
It was a disgusting thing to witness, this change of tack. You know what they say: In for a penny, in for a pound; the captain goes down with the ship! The captain ofChasing Sunshinewent down without it, though, I’m sorry to report, and they never found his body.
30.
Mack
As soon as he opened the door to them, Mack knew that he was going to prison. He could easily picture the iron bars slamming in his face; the sloppy beige food he would eat; that bar of soap forever out of reach in the treacherous communal shower. For all his procrastinating on his novel, Mack had been blessed with a writer’s imagination, and so by the time the two police officers stepped into his front hall, he had already worked his way through to how his daughters would grow to hate him, just as he had hated his own incarcerated father. Mabs and Gigi would callously reject his attempts to help them (ha—as if he’d have any money to send them!), and then the circle of life would be complete.
The cops were a man and a woman, and underneath their navy winter jackets they had guns and handcuffs. Mack saw officers like these two every day—on campus, around town, in traffic, in Starbucks—but this was the first time he’d ever been sickened at the sight of them, afraid enough to really consider his answer when the female asked if they could come inside for a minute to talk.
She did all the talking. As Mack perched on the sofa, trying to ignore Hailey lurking in the basement stairwell, the cop broke it to him:
“Mr. Evans, it’s always tricky to make a visit like this,” she said, and Mack felt vomit rise in the back of his throat. “I can tell I’m missing a lot of information. Maybe you can fill in some of the blanks for me.”
She was baiting him, playing dumb. This was just likeLaw & Order, and Mack saw that he was doomed. He had never meant to hurt anyone, had he? He had been out for a walk and thought his cigarette—hisjoint, ugh—was out. Obviously, it wasn’t, but he was pretty sure, if he remembered rightly, that he’d hadno ideathat it wasn’t. Now he would spend the rest of his life making restitution.
This is what he was going to say to her, and he almost believed it was the truth.
Except what if the teenager, whose name Mack now knew, what if fifteen-year-old Kyle Cavenaugh had actuallydied? What if these two cops were here to accuse Mack ofmurder? For the life of him, he hadn’t been able to work out how badly the kid had been injured. He couldn’t find anything about those third-degree burns that Gerry Baptista had mentioned, though for the past few days Mack had thought of little else. He had been woken over and over by dreams of melting skin.
Now he couldn’t think of a single word to say, and the female officer looked very disappointed with him. Mack couldn’t even remember what she’d told him her name was, not two minutes ago.
She tried again. “What I mean is, Mr. Evans, is that it’s really only you who knows what happened. From the information I’ve been given and the statements we’ve taken—”
Statements. Mack imagined these two at fifteen-year-old Kyle Cavenaugh’s bedside as he choked out his last words in front of his devastated parents. The living room went fuzzy, until all at once everything came back into focus: “I can’t see that there’s been an actual crime here,” the female cop was saying. “At least not one that we are interested in pursuing, believe me. Misconduct maybe, but we don’t deal in that.”
“Oh,” said Mack. “Okay.”
The woman sighed heavily over the chatter coming through her partner’s radio and gave Mack a long stare. She pushed her hair back with shiny fingernails. “Look, I’m gonna be honest with you: we don’t have a ton of time for stuff like this. You probably know as well as I do that we’re only here because the college wants to cover its ass.”
“Yes,” said Mack.College,college,college...His brain was pounding against the sides of his skull; his heart was pounding in his chest. How could these two not hear the drum of his nervous system?
“Now, I’ve interviewed Ms. Ewing, and she has told us that despite the rumors that have circulated, there was no sexual contact of any kind between the two of you, which I’m sure you’ll say is correct, right?”
“Yes,” said Mack. “Correct. Of course that’s correct.”
“But opening your home to students, plying them with alcohol—it’s not a good look. It makes people think the worst of you, and then we get dragged in. That’s how I get Ms. Ewing’s father on the phone to me telling me you were partying with his teenager, and he doesn’t think that’s cool, even if she does. It’s not cool, you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” said Mack.
“And then the rest of these kids get all riled up, and the dean is coming at me, telling me to charge you with improper fraternization. And you know what? There ain’t no such thing. It’s a waste of our time.”
“I’m sorry,” Mack said. “It’s just I—” What he wanted to explain, finally, was that he, Mack, had had a professor once who’d taught him to toast Milton with whiskey, who’d sent words like rockets into Mack’s brain at parties that lasted till five in the morning, who’d shown him and probably hundreds of other adoring undergrads that this life of knowledge was what they wanted, instead of huge houses and fancy cars.
“Well?”
“Never mind.” The rules had changed; even Mack could see that now.
