Gabriel is a monster.
Love,
April
Thirty-Five
Summer
SUMMER SAT ACROSSfrom Reg Sharkey at his kitchen table, her digital recorder between them, listening so intently that she often forgot to blink, to breathe. “He was your son.” She said it for the second time, just to make sure she’d heard him correctly. “Gabriel LeRoy was your son.”
“Yes. His mother, Linda, and me. We went to high school together. We never quite lost touch.”
“Did you ever visit him?”
“Once, when he was a little boy. He had this funny way of talking. This lisp. He asked me for a doggy...”
“Did he know who you were?”
“No, of course not. I had a little girl at home at the time. My Katie. She was just a baby.”
Summer gritted her teeth. She’d just had the strongest urge to call Quentin. Put him on speakerphone and get him in on this. Then she’d remembered. “So, you thought Linda had called,” she said. “But when you showed up at your meeting place. The Arco station—”
“She wasn’t there, no. The two of them were. Gabriel and that girl. I didn’t see them at first. It was crowded at the station. We were at the pump when they... when they got out of their car.” Themorning light streamed through the kitchen window, beams of it, infested with dust motes. There was so much dust in this house. So many old, neglected things. “It’s funny, you get into these situations when you’re young,” Reg said. “You know they’re wrong and they’re dangerous, but you think, ‘Just this once. Just for a little while.’ But then a little while becomes a long while and all of a sudden, you’re no longer young. It just feels normal, this dangerous thing you’ve been doing. It feels like it will go on forever.”
Summer’s mouth was very dry and her eyes ached. It all wore at her, the cobwebby remains of the scotch, the lack of sleep, the crying. She longed for a glass of water, but she didn’t want to interrupt Reg’s train of thought by asking for it. This was probably the best interview she had ever done. If only Quentin were around...
“You thought no one would ever find out about the affair,” she said. “Even though Linda’s husband left her because of it.”
“He wasn’t going to tell anybody. He was probably more ashamed about it than we were and besides, I think he was looking for an excuse to leave.”
Those dust motes. Like angry little ghosts. “Okay,” Summer said. “So when you got that call on Father’s Day, you thought it was Linda, wanting to meet.”
“What’s that expression? No bad deed goes unpunished? And the longer you keep doing it, the worse the punishment is.”
“It’s ‘no good deed,’ actually. No good deed goes unpunished. It’s sarcastic.”
“Oh. Well, add that expression to the list of things I’ve been getting wrong for much too long.”
“You were at the gas station, waiting at the pump. When did you first notice your son?”
“Not until he started shooting. An old man went down. Then the woman with him. A Mexican lady in a white pantsuit. I think shewas his nurse. Then somebody else. A young woman. It was like... some kind of sick dance. One body falling after the next. The sound of the gunshots. I turned to where the sound was coming from and there he was. I looked at the girl. I begged her to get him to stop shooting. My daughter. My little Kimmy... She dropped her plastic horse...”
“Did you recognize Gabriel?”
He stared at his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I saw his face and I recognized him right away. Even though I hadn’t seen him since he was a little boy. He looked...”
“Yes, Mr. Sharkey?”
Reg dragged the back of his hand across his closed eyes and stared up at the ceiling and said it very, very softly. “He looked like me.”
“Do you want to take a break?”
He nodded. Summer was glad for that. She needed a break too.
Summer pulled two glasses out of the cupboard, plastic ones with the Anaheim Angels logo on them, both of them as dusty as everything else in the house. She rinsed the glasses, dried them with a kitchen towel, and filled them with water from the tap. The kitchen towel was clean and white, with little strawberries across the bottom. It looked as though it had never been used, and it was hard to imagine Reg Sharkey doing anything with it, that delicate piece of cloth in those scarred, meaty hands. Summer imagined the towel was part of a set his wife, Clara, had bought, before their kids were even born.
When she returned with the glasses, Reg took his quickly, but instead of drinking, he held it to his forehead. “Hot in here,” he said. Although it wasn’t. For all its dust and old appliances and ’70s décor, the place had a good, strong central air-conditioning, which had been turned up high enough to ease some of the pain of Summer’s hangover. She gulped her water, until her glass was nearly empty while Reg watched her, waiting.