Chapter Four – Reunion

He looked exactly the same as he had looked when he left the house in handcuffs ten years ago. Only when he crossed the room and sat across the table from me was I able to see the grey strands peppering his dark hair, the only indication of the time he had spent behind bars.

“Reid.” It wasn’t really a greeting, more like a statement of fact. Like he thought to himself, Reid is here. Ten years gone, and now he is here. That is all.

The sound of his voice shook something loose inside me. Should I be mad at him? I mean, he was the reason our lives had fallen apart. The man across the table was why I had no friends growing up; it was because of him that I learned to become invisible.

He sat across me silently, as if he could only say the one word. I looked at him; his face was open, inviting. I realized that he was waiting for me to speak, giving me the chance to control to conversation.

“Dad.” I tried to keep my voice as level as his had been, but my emotions betrayed me. In an instant, I was leaning across the table, and we were hugging as best we could with the cold plastic separating us. We held each other until my back grew stiff from the awkward angle, then we let go and sat back down.

He coughed. I shuffled my feet. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk to your own father, but what could I say? He had missed more than half of my life. There was no way we would be able to fully reconcile, to make up for all the time lost in the tiny amount of time we had today. So I skipped the catch-up and jumped right to what I wanted to know.

“Why?”

I know he knew what I was talking about, but still he said, “Why what, Reid?”

“Why did you do it, dad?” My voice caught in my throat, but I continued, “why did you kill that man?”

He sighed, and for the first time he looked old. Not just a couple-streaks-of-grey old, but worn-down-tired old. His face was drawn, his eyes pained. He dropped his head into his hands and gripped his hair in tight fists.

I was just beginning to think he wouldn’t answer me when he looked back up; his eyes were red-rimmed. “She was only nine,” he said. “My baby girl was only nine years old and he ruined her. He took her childhood, her innocence. He took her life.” Tears spilled down his cheeks. He made no effort to stop them, letting them splash on the table.

My blood ran cold, and everything began to click into place in my mind. Why Dawn had suddenly stopped playing. All those years of her wearing sweaters and long pants even in the summer time. Then her high school years when she flaunted her body and reveled in the attention of men. My sister had never been the same since dad left, and I always thought she had been changed in the same way I had. I always thought it was his leaving that made her the way she was. Never had I considered that the change in her was what made him leave.

I didn’t know what to say. How would I be able to look at Dawn again without revealing that I knew her secret? Nausea began to take seed in the pit of my stomach; bile rose in my throat. The edges of my vision blurred in anger.

“Good.” My voiced sounded hard even to myself. “It’s good you killed him then.”

Was that a shadow of a smile I saw play across my dad’s features? “I am up for parole next month,” he said, “I think your mama might come to testify even.”

“That’s great, dad!”

He laughed. “I am up for parole, Reid, but there ain’t no way they are letting me out of here.”

I stared. “Why not? You did your time. Any parole board will side with you when they learn why you did it.”

“I know how it works, son. They will ask me if I feel penitent for what I did. And I don’t think I can lie about that.”

The guard motioned for us to wrap things up. I hadn’t know how close I was to the end of visiting hours when I showed up. I stood to leave, but before I went, I had to know one more thing.

“Do you regret it, dad?”

He smiled and pulled me into another cross-table hug. “I regret leaving you and Dawn and your mama. But I will never, ever regret what I did. That man deserved to die.” He paused. “I did the world a service.”

When I got home, I ignored my mama’s calls from the kitchen, wondering if I wanted any dinner heated up. I couldn’t face her right now. My mind was buzzing with activity.

My dad was living proof that you could kill a man without feeling any guilt. He had done it. Could I do it too?