Sole Possession

by Bryn Donovan

  The older man met his eyes again at last. “So she told you I’m your real father.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  David felt as though the floor had fallen out beneath him. That he, in his chair, just hovered in empty space. “What?”

  “She didn’t tell you that.” Mr. Willingham’s green eyes looked contrite.

  Green eyes. Like his eyes.

  “Holy shit,” David said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  David cleared his throat. “How do you know he wasn’t my father?”

  “She and Gordon hadn’t been together for, what, maybe three years when she had you. He had other women. A couple of times he tried to push himself on her, but he was too drunk…you know.”

  David recoiled at the thought of that man forcing himself on the pretty, sensitive-looking woman he’d seen, not only in one terrifying vision, but also in the comforting old photograph he had of her.

  “Besides, just look at you, you know?” Mr. Willingham gave him a wistful smile. “And now more than ever. When I first saw you a few weeks ago, I swear it was like looking in a mirror at myself, except thirty years ago. It was spooky.”

  “You two were having an affair,” David said. He stated the obvious, but Jesus, it was a lot to take in. His hands shook, as though he were a boy rather than a grown man.

  Mr. Willingham nodded, his face drawn in concern. “I shouldn’t have told you. To know that your mother wasn’t faithful, that your father isn’t really your father—it must be really upsetting.”

  “Upsetting?” echoed David. He laughed. “It’s fantastic.”

  “It’s—what?”

  David loved it. His mother, treated so badly, actually getting to enjoy herself in her short life. His father, the consummate cheater, getting cheated on.

  His father not being his father at all. He was just Gordon Girard, rich, mean, dead guy. David could hardly understand why Mr. Willingham had expected him to be upset by this news, knowing what kind of man Gordon had been.

  He said to Mr. Willingham, “You have to tell me everything.”

  The man nodded toward their coffee cups. “Let’s get refills. This could take a while.”

  * * *

  By the time John Willingham had started working at the Evanston house, Gordon Girard had already fallen out of love with Katherine, if he’d ever been in love with her in the first place. The gardener heard from the housekeeper that things were bad and soon had the opportunity to observe that for himself. Sometimes Mr. Girard shouted at his wife; mostly, he ignored and avoided her. In the evenings he usually went out with business associates, another female, or both.

  Willingham often took long lunch hours, reading. When he worked late, Willingham told himself he made up for those long lunch hours. In truth, he just wanted the chance to talk to Mrs. Girard, a tall, shy brunette with a kind smile. For the first month or two, their conversations consisted of nothing more than comments on the garden and the weather.

  One May evening when it started to rain, Willingham cut down the blooming peonies and brought them to the house. “They’ll fall apart if I leave them out in the storm,” he told her. “I hate to see them beaten down.”

  The way she smiled when she took the flowers from him made him realize that she liked him as much as he liked her.

  She came outside to talk to him as he finished up in the garden. She was reading, of all things, Anna Karenina, and it turned out to be one of her favorite books.

  Talks in the garden became a ritual whenever her husband went out in the evening, which he did most of the time.

  “You might not believe it, under the circumstances,” Mr. Willingham told David, “but the times were together…we were really happy. In spite of everything.”

  They talked about books, growing up, music. She shyly sang him a song she’d composed but had never written down. And they talked about her disappointment in her marriage.

  Katherine had married Gordon Girard after dating him for just a short while. He’d charmed her when she first met him, soon after her parents died in a car crash.

  For a while, Katherine thought maybe she was the problem in the marriage, that she wasn’t attractive or clever enough to sustain his interest, or that she provoked his anger by doing stupid things. She came up with tortured reasonings for his behavior and complex strategies to somehow make things better.

  Mr. Willingham’s attentions helped her see the problem was really quite simple. Her husband was a bad guy.

  When the friendship gave way to an affair, they always went to a motel some distance from the house. Set away from the road, with the parking lot in back, it made the perfect location. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean and anonymous, and that was good enough.

  “I don’t understand, though,” David said. “Why didn’t they divorce? They hated each other.”

  “Before me, she thought she could make it work,” Willingham told him. “It was hopeless, but she was young…besides, she hated the thought of failing at a marriage.”

  “She wouldn’t have been failing.”

  “You’re telling me?” He took a drink of his coffee. “After we became involved, she talked to him about divorce. He was furious. He was sure if they did, she would get the house. She told him she didn’t want it, but he didn’t believe her. He said she would sic the lawyers on him.”

  Girard gave his wife a black eye and told her that if she brought up divorce again, he would kill her. She believed him.

  Willingham, who’d never been a violent man, suggested that he kill Girard.

  She talked him out of it. He could go to prison. A young man, desperately in love, Willingham didn’t even mind the idea of making a sacrifice to liberate her.

  But when she became pregnant, it suddenly didn’t seem like such a good plan to him, after all. If he did get convicted, it would be hard on her to raise a baby alone.

  Girard started being nice to her again. If he’d been too drunk on the couple of recent occasions he tried to have sex with his wife, he’d also been too drunk to remember his failure later. Katherine had excellent care for her pregnancy.

  Willingham and Katherine began saving money. Once the baby was born, they would leave, no forwarding address. Willingham had a brother with a wife and kid in Ohio, and they could stay there ’til they got on their feet. They’d get the divorce to go through. They didn’t give a damn about the man’s money.

  “But then you were born, and right after that…well, you know.”

  Willingham stayed on at the house, too much of a wreck at first to do anything else. Even when he pulled it together again, he wanted to see David as much as he could.

  At first, Girard appeared to like his son. “It seemed as though things were good for you, so I never said anything. You were being raised like the crown prince. Later on, when you weren’t a baby anymore, I knew he would sometimes get mean, and I would think about running off with you. But it’d just scare you, and I’d probably go to jail. So I told myself at least he wasn’t beating you.”

  “No,” David said. “That started later, after you left.”

  Mr. Willingham stared at him. “What?”

  “Eh, like I said before, he was an asshole.” David made a gesture of dismissal.

  The older man’s mouth stayed open. “God damn it,” he whispered. Then fury blazed in his eyes. “Tell me what he did.”

  David looked away. Why the hell had he even mentioned it? The last thing he’d wanted to do was upset Mr. Willingham more. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It sure as hell does matter.” The man’s voice sounded rough. “You were just a boy. You should have had someone to protect you.”

  Unexpected emotion tightened David’s throat. He had never sought pity, not from anyone, but now someone from his past—no, his father, his real father—talked about him as though he were worth protecting. It nearly undid him. Or rather, it mended something very broken in him, though the healing hurt.

&nb
sp; “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know,” he told his father. He attempted a grin. “Anyway, I’m fine now.”

  His father shook his head. “You’re a good man, successful. I’m so proud of you, David. I can’t even tell you.” I am going to lose it, David thought. “I swear I don’t know how you turned out as well as you did.”

  “Good genes?” David suggested.

  To his relief, the older man chuckled. “Yeah, that’s it.” He sobered. “Shit. I should have kidnapped you.”

  David tried to imagine what that would have been like for him, as a child: to have the gardener hustle him into the car one day and drive away to God knows where. Even as young as he’d been, he probably would have experienced it as a welcome escape and an adventure. “I think it would have been a good plan,” he said, smiling. “But not the jail part. It would have been hard not to get caught.”

  “True. And at the time I figured you were still better off there. I wouldn’t have had anything…and you had more money than God.” He shook his head. “Ah, you were a great kid, though. You were always so smart. You smiled just like Kathy. It killed me, you know?”

  David looked down. “You said the other day that you had to leave. That it was driving you insane.”

  “Yeah. After a while I couldn’t take it. In that same house. Thinking about murdering Girard. Thinking about Kathy all day, every day.” His eyes misted. “I was going to try to make her happy, David, I swear. I was going to do everything I could.” He took a shaky breath. “But I know now I didn’t have enough to offer her. So she took the other way out.”

  David was stunned. Overwhelmed by the whole story, he’d forgotten to explain the truth about his mother’s death.

  The man seemed on the verge of losing control as he said, “And now I think if it hadn’t been for me, she would still be alive. Maybe if she’d met someone else—”

  “She didn’t kill herself,” David blurted out.

  “What?”

  “He killed her. My—Gordon killed her.”

  His father rested his hands on the table as though the room swayed. “How do you know?”

  “She told us.”

  The older man just looked at him.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I did talk to her. I mean, think about it. She told me about you.”

  “No. I—I believe it. Of course he did.” His father shook his head. “She always seemed so hopeful about her and me running off together, starting a new life…I was devastated to think that she’d decided it wasn’t worth it, after all…but she didn’t give up hope.” He looked up at David again. “Gordon did it.” His hands curled into fists and murder was in his eyes.

  David understood that this man, who had always been so kind to him, was perfectly capable of violence if it were justified. Gordon Girard was lucky he’d died before John Willingham had found out.

  “She’d fallen asleep in the bathtub,” David said, pained by the details, but grateful to his core that he could tell his father the truth. “He slashed her wrists. Made it look like a suicide.”

  “I should have killed him.” His father’s voice rose. “I knew I should have!”

  “You didn’t know,” David quickly reassured him. “You had no way of knowing he would go that far. Anyway, he’s dead now, and I’m guessing he’s in hell, if there is one.”

  The older man looked at David for a moment, and then he groaned. “Ah, David, I messed everything up. I didn’t have any kind of life to give you…but I left you in the hands of a child abuser, a murderer? It’s lucky he didn’t kill you!”

  The tears in the man’s eyes alarmed David. “But I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  His father swiped a sleeve over an eye, impatiently, as if he had an itch. “I wish I could’ve been better,” he told David, looking much older. “I didn’t think much of myself at the time. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “At least you were nice to me.” Mr. Willingham was the one male adult in his young life who paid attention to him and treated him well. “It made a difference, you know.”

  “I thought about telling you the other day,” he said. “About all of it. I mean, it’s such a relief to finally have it out, I’ve got to admit.”

  “Yeah, I bet.” David couldn’t imagine carrying around a secret like that for so long. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t seem like the right time or place. I hadn’t seen you in so long, and your girlfriend was there. Plus, I didn’t want to just be selfish.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  His father snorted. “Sure, it would make me feel better, but what about you? I was scared it would hurt your opinion of your mother. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would’ve been unfaithful if she’d had a good situation. Or even a bearable situation.”

  “No, I get that. I’m glad she got to be happy at least a little.” David’s heart ached to think of her tragic life. I love you, she had spelled out on the Ouija board. How he wished he could know her. Maybe, if Morty were right about heaven, he would get a chance, after all. If he even managed to go to heaven. With the darkness that brewed inside him, he couldn’t be sure.

  But since Gordon Girard wasn’t really his father, didn’t that make him free?

  “And now that you know…I don’t expect anything from you.” His father shook his head. “It’s got to be a disappointment, having someone like me for a dad.”

  “No. Are you kidding?”

  “It’s all right,” he said, holding up his hands. He seemed to think his son protested out of politeness.

  David wanted to hug him or shake him, “Think about it. I find out that instead of being conceived out of this miserable, loveless marriage, I was born because two people loved each other. And I find out that my father isn’t a hateful monster, but someone I always liked pretty well.” As he put this into words, his heart warmed. “You tell me how disappointed I am.”

  His father raised a hand, hesitated and then patted him on the shoulder.

  David told him, “You know, not only was my father an asshole, he apparently came from a long line of assholes. And now I find out they have nothing to do with me. I’m not one of them.”

  “You wouldn’t have been, no matter what.”

  * * *

  Andi almost didn’t answer the door. In the middle of mopping the kitchen floor, she wore a baggy tee shirt and sweat pants with white smudges on them from when she’d repainted a dresser from Goodwill.

  She looked through the peephole and saw David. Oh, man. She hated to have him see her look even grungier than she did when she was working. But she couldn’t not let him in.

  “I’m a mess,” she said as soon as she opened the door. “I’m in the middle of cleaning.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s good.” He didn’t seem to be quite listening as he smiled at her.

  “You seem happy,” she said, curious, as she gestured for him to come in.

  “What? Yeah. I just got back from talking to Mr. Willingham.”

  Andi knew he liked the man. Maybe he was making a fast recovery, and David felt relieved. “How’d it go? Did you tell him about what your mother said?”

  “Yeah.” David plopped down on the couch. “Andi, he loved her. They were having an affair.”

  “Wow.” The more he learned about his family history, the wilder it got. “Well, I wouldn’t blame your mom too much. Your dad was horrible.”

  “He wasn’t my dad. Mr. Willingham is.”

  She sank down on the couch next to him. “What?”

  Fascinated, she listened to David recount his conversation with the gardener, telling her all he’d learned about the man’s relationship with David’s mother.

  “It’s so sad for them,” she said. “Poor Mr. Willingham!” She took David’s hand. “No wonder you’re so happy. You know your mom wasn’t totally miserable. And you always liked Mr. Willingham.”

  “That’s not even all of it.” David’s green eyes were wide, unguarded. “
My whole life I’ve been worried about being like that guy. Like Gordon Girard. And looking into the history of this house, the family…it made it even worse, you know? I mean, finding out my father—Gordon—wasn’t the only asshole in the family. I started thinking it was a family curse or something.” He smiled at her again. She could get used to all that smiling, she thought. “It wasn’t even my family.”

  There was something wrong with the house, though. It made Carlos turn violent, and David, too.

  “What?” David asked.

  “Nothing. I’m so happy for you. So, do you think you and Mr. Willingham are going to be, like, father and son? You know what I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe? He said right away something about how there didn’t have to be anything like that. But that was crazy. I like the guy.” She saw another thought strike him. “He mentioned his sister and her kids once…I guess I have an aunt. And cousins. He might not want me to meet them, though.”

  “He probably would. They wouldn’t have to know your mom was married at the time.” She laughed. “I should have known. Now that I think about it. You guys look a lot alike!”

  David chuckled. “He said that too.”

  “No, really. When he first came to the door, I almost thought he looked familiar.” She shook her head. “Maybe you’ll even do something with him at Christmas. That would be nice, right?”

  He looked skeptical. “I never do anything at Christmas.”

  “But you could start! You have family now.”

  “Who knows?” He smiled a little again.

  Andi sighed. “Well, this is all pretty amazing. I’m glad I let you in.”

  “Why would you not let me in?”

  “Because I look horrible.”

  “You worry way too much about that,” he said. “You never look horrible.”

  “I should at least throw away these sweat pants.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

  “See, even you admit that.”

  “Well, yeah, we have to throw them away right now,” he said, reaching over and pulling at the waistband.

  “Hey!” Andi objected. “We’re not supposed to do that.”