Finding Her Dad

by Janice Kay Johnson

  A whole lot about Lucy was still a mystery, and he couldn’t afford to forget that. Winning this election was important to him. Staying in office once he won was important. He had to be very careful about getting involved with a woman with secrets. Allowing his dick to do his thinking wasn’t an option.

  What bothered him as he reversed out of the lane and drove away was the ache that settled beneath his breastbone. That felt like something more than lust.

  Asset or detriment? Edie had asked, and Jon knew he had to have a firm answer before he got in over his head.

  THE SUNDAY EXPEDITION to Mount Rainier was a big success. The late-August day was perfect, the sky a vivid blue. One small puffy cloud clung to the snow-covered cone of the volcano, as if irresistibly attracted.

  During the drive up, Sierra was animated company in the backseat, chattering unselfconsciously and exclaiming excitedly at every sight. Jon flicked an occasional, bemused glance at Lucy. She could relate—living with a teenager had taken some getting used to on her part, too.

  The nice weather and the fact that summer was nearly over meant they weren’t alone at Paradise; it took a while to find a place to park in the huge lot. They saw a few climbers setting off up the mountain, laden with heavy packs and ropes and ice axes. Lucy knew they would climb to Camp Muir halfway up and spend the night in the hut or in small tents set up on snowfields before leaving for the summit well before dawn the next morning. She had a bad feeling she’d find herself trudging up the mountain come next summer.

  Unless, of course, Jon lost interest in his daughter before then.

  But she didn’t want to think about that. No. What she didn’t want was to believe he’d do that.

  They wandered into the National Park Inn, built in 1916, and then took a two-mile hike on the Nisqually Vista trail. Despite the number of people around, the terrain was so vast that there were moments when it seemed as if they were alone and could savor the sight of the vast, cone-shaped mountain above them, the smaller, jagged peaks around, the vivid shades of green contrasted with rock and snow.

  “Too bad it’s not earlier in the year,” Jon commented. “The avalanche lilies are spectacular when they’re in bloom.”

  “Mom and I never came up here,” Sierra said.

  Jon tipped his sunglasses down his nose to stare in credulously at her. “You grew up damn near at the foot of the mountain and have never driven up here?”

  Sierra shrugged awkwardly. “Mom wasn’t that much into nature.”

  Lucy made a face. “I have to admit I haven’t made the effort to get here in…I don’t know, three or four years at least. If you have out-of-town guests maybe you bother, and otherwise you don’t. Which is dumb, when it’s so spectacular.”

  Jon shook his head. “I try to make it up at least once every summer. One year with a couple of friends I hiked the Wonderland Trail that goes all the way around the mountain.”

  Sierra wanted to know about avalanche lilies, and marmots, and why the glaciers were retreating and what caused crevasses. And why was climbing Rainier dangerous when there weren’t any precipices to cling to by fingertips, and how come all the signs about not stepping off the trail?

  Lucy was able to drop back, only half listening. She was content watching the two of them, Sierra animated, all but shimmering with happiness at being the center of her father’s attention, Jon answering her questions with seemingly unlimited patience.

  He was impressive in his well-cut suits, but it struck her that they were a sort of disguise, a civilized veneer on a man who was more obviously rugged and powerfully built—more elemental—in today’s jeans, well-worn boots and T-shirt. Bringing up the rear as she was, she surrendered to temptation and tuned out their conversation entirely, focusing instead on the easy flex of muscles as he walked, the alert way his head turned at the slightest sound, the V his close-cropped hair formed at his nape. She loved his neck, strong but not overmuscled, the beard-shadowed line of his jaw, the rough sound of his laugh in response to something Sierra said.

  He glanced back to be sure she was still with them, and he must have read what she was thinking, because his pupils dilated and he paused midstep. They stared at each other. Lucy swallowed. But then Sierra, having noticed she’d gotten a couple of steps ahead, said, “Dad?” in puzzlement and he turned to his daughter.

  Lucy pretended her cheeks were warm from the exercise, not from a combination of lust and embarrassment at being caught gawking, but she knew better.

  Eventually they found a picnic table and had lunch. Lucy found herself blinking sleepily in the sun, letting the conversation and the voices of other nearby picnickers buzz by her as if they were no more than the splash of water in a creek.

  “Sleepy?” Jon asked in a low, amused voice as they walked to their car, Sierra trailing.

  “I’m afraid I’ll conk out during the drive home.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Sierra’s finally winding down, too.”

  His gaze followed hers. “She seemed to have a good time.”

  Lucy could hear his uncertainty and said firmly, “I’m sure she did. This was a great idea, Jon.”

  “I’m glad.” He laid his big hand on her shoulder and squeezed, then let her go and turned to say something to Sierra.

  Lucy quivered even from such a brief touch.

  Once in the car, Sierra sank low in the seat, put in earbuds and turned on her iPod. When Lucy looked back at her, she seemed absorbed in her music and the view out the window.

  “Tell me something I don’t know about you,” Jon said unexpectedly.

  The question sounded deliberately casual. So deliberate, Lucy knew it wasn’t casual at all. He might be trying to disguise his determination to know everything about her, but that’s all it was—a disguise. Or was she just being suspicious?

  Maybe to be perverse, Lucy said the first unimportant thing that came into her head. “I hate cooked spinach.” She shuddered. “And cooked cabbage, and Brussels sprouts.”

  He gave a low chuckle. “Interesting, but I was thinking of something more profound. And, by the way, I’m not fond of any of those foods, either.”

  That was a dumb little thing to give her a quick squeeze in the region of her heart.

  Something more profound? My mother is in prison. No. Lucy didn’t even have to debate whether she ought to say that.

  “I was a preemie,” she said. “Just under five pounds. I had to stay in the hospital for my first two weeks.”

  “Really?” A smile came and went. “You never did grow much, did you?”

  “I resent that,” Lucy said with dignity. “I’m not that small. Only a couple of inches below average. You’re the one deviating from the norm.”

  “True enough,” he said agreeably. “Did you have health problems because of being a preemie?”

  “Breathing, I guess. That’s why they kept me in the hospital. I had asthma when I was a kid, too, which might have been associated with it. But fortunately I outgrew it.”

  From what she’d read, she had probably been born prematurely because her mother was a heavy smoker in those days. She might have used drugs when she was pregnant, too. Lucy had never asked her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  “Your turn,” she said, instead of saying, I went into foster care the first time when I was fourteen months old.

  Jon was silent for a surprisingly long time. Lucy looked at him curiously. She’d expected some humorous fact: I asked a girl to marry me when I was in kindergarten. Instead he said abruptly, “My father broke my arm when I was six.”

  “What?”

  Muscles spasmed in his jaw. “I told him I hated him. He slammed me into the wall of the garage.”

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  The glance he gave her was cautious, as if he needed to see her reaction. “I wanted you to know that my child hood wasn’t sit-com pretty. We had a nice home and money. I love my mother. But my father was a son of a bitch, and I got so I hated his guts.”

&n
bsp; “Did you?” She was asking, and yet not. Did anyone ever truly hate a parent, however much they deserved it? Or did anger and hate stay tangled in a child’s desperate wish for love? Would he understand her complicated feelings for her mother?

  Jon sighed and moved his shoulders, as if trying to ease tension. “I spent years trying to win his approval. I’m sure that’s normal. Not until I was in high school did I ever tell anyone that my father was physically abusive. Certainly not adults, but not my friends, either. It was our little family secret.”

  “Your sister…?”

  He shook his head. “He was easier on her. She was his baby girl. Maybe it was only that I was male. I don’t know.”

  “And your mother…” Lucy hesitated over how to ask this. “She let him?” She didn’t have to wonder any more about the strain she’d sensed between Jon and his mother.

  “She left him after he broke my arm. Took Lily and me. He had to talk her into coming back, and she insisted on counseling. He never broke a bone again, and I think after that she mostly convinced herself that his pounding on me was his form of tough love. Or she pretended she didn’t know. I’m not sure.”

  Lucy nodded her understanding. After a moment she reached out and lightly touched his hand, wrapped tight around the steering wheel. He let go, leaving the other hand on the wheel, and gripped hers. Neither of them said a word for what had to be five minutes.

  “That was probably more than you wanted to know,” he said finally.

  “No. I’m glad you told me. To tell you the truth, the Leave It to Beaver perfection made me nervous.”

  “Because of Sierra?”

  She saw him glance in the rearview mirror, then smile slightly. Apparently Sierra was continuing to shut out the adult conversation.

  “And me.”

  “You?”

  She might have had the courage to tell him some small part of the whole if she hadn’t read a quote from him in the Dispatch two days ago.

  Do I believe in cutting off a thief’s hand? No. But I also don’t believe in apologizing to the thief because he’s had such a tough time finding a job, patting him on the back and sending him out to steal again. Criminal behavior deserves swift, inevitable and harsh consequences. Talking about punishment as a deterrent has gone out of fashion. That’s a shame.

  She had almost been able to hear the impatience in his tone. Lucy had to wonder if forgiveness was in his vocabulary. If only she could talk to him about her mother, about the anger that was doing battle with love inside her, but she couldn’t. She was so afraid she knew which side he’d come down on.

  So, rather lightly, she said, “Telling each other one profound thing per date is enough, don’t you think?”

  He took his attention from the road for a moment. She felt his quick assessment. “What is it you don’t want to tell me?”

  “Today was supposed to be fun.”

  There was a momentary silence. Finally he said, “You’re right. We’ll call it good.”

  When traffic became heavy, Jon let go of her hand. Lucy balled it into a fist and pressed it against her stomach. It tingled from his touch. Holding hands with him hadn’t been only physical, not for her. She’d felt connected, as if worries and comfort had flowed back and forth.

  Of course, that was all in her imagination, and she felt sure he hadn’t felt any such thing. Although…he hadn’t wanted to release her hand. She’d been able to tell.

  When he dropped them off, Sierra thanked him very nicely for taking them and said, “Yeah! Cool!” when he suggested a hike another weekend.

  “I can’t get away long enough to go camping,” he said, “but we can do that next summer, too. Maybe you could bring a friend.”

  “Do you have an RV or something?” Sierra asked, wide-eyed.

  He laughed. “Nope. I believe in doing it the old-fashioned way. No television, no microwave, no refrigerator. I have a tent. Sleeps six. I could set up a smaller tent for myself, so you three could have privacy.”

  “I’ve never been camping, either,” Lucy admitted. These plans for next summer made some big assumptions. The important one was that Sierra would still be living with Lucy. Had Sierra noticed? Did that mean Jon had no intention of seeking custody or convincing his mother or sister to take Sierra in? Was that good or bad?

  “One more thing to look forward to,” he said with a nod. He gave Sierra a one-armed hug and Lucy another kiss on the cheek, then left.

  The front door open behind them, Lucy and Sierra lingered on the porch. Sierra watched him leave, a pensive expression on her face.

  The girl’s voice emerged very soft. “Do you think he’ll really take us places next summer?”

  Lucy could tell what she was really asking. Will he still be around? Will he still want to see me?

  She hesitated before answering, not wanting to lie. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Sierra nodded, ducked her head and went inside. Lucy followed.

  JON WAS FRUSTRATED by his inability to break away for most of the next week. An ugly triple homicide consumed some of his time. He had to trust the investigation to his detectives, of course, but he was on the hot seat when days passed with no arrest.

  A man and his two sons—the boys twenty and seventeen—had been gunned down in their own home. Initially there didn’t seem to be a drug connection. The father owned an automobile body repair shop. The house was in a respectable neighborhood. The mother was out of the picture—remarried and living in Iowa. The younger boy was a good student who played football for his high school. He’d had practice that afternoon, in fact. Jon had toured the crime scene after the techs were finished with it and noticed the filthy uniform spilling out of the hamper in the bathroom and the cleats lying by the door from the garage. The father probably made him take them off so he didn’t scar the floor. The kid had number thirty-one on his shirt. That was one of those details, irrelevant to finding the killer, that always struck Jon as poignant. Things that made the victims real, human. The investigators needed to get to know the victims as people, but had to keep their distance, too, for their own emotional well-being. Easier said than done. Every so often, every cop let something at the scene slip under his guard. A toddler’s blankie, blood soaked. A family’s terrified dog huddled behind the sofa. A grocery list that would no longer be needed posted on the refrigerator. It could be anything.

  After a day or two the focus turned to the older son, who had been something of a screw-up in school. Supposedly he was attending the community college part-time, but he’d skipped summer quarter and during the spring quarter he’d ended up with a C-in one class and an incomplete in the other. He’d gotten fired from two recent jobs for anger problems. Rumors surfaced that he was involved with a gang.

  Members of the police gang unit, also under Jon, and the investigators worked together and, six days after the murders, arrested two rival gang members. The community was shocked. People expected this kind of thing in the inner city, not in the family-friendly neighborhood of a town with fewer than twenty thousand residents.

  Jon had to cancel a couple of campaign appearances, but Edie was rubbing her hands together in glee at his increased public presence, especially after the arrests were made. Every time he stepped to the podium to talk at a press conference, Jon was torn between his need to come across well and his distaste that he was, in a way, taking advantage of other people’s tragedy to win an election. He kept seeing that stained football uniform half-hanging from the laundry hamper, and wondered if the school would retire the kid’s number.

  Friday night he called Lucy. He sat in his recliner in the living room, an unopened beer on the end table within reach. He hadn’t turned on the TV even though he’d intended to watch the Mariners likely get creamed by the Detroit Tigers. Some impulse had made him reach for the telephone instead.

  Once he identified himself, Lucy told him, “Sierra’s out with friends.”

  “I mostly wanted to talk to you, anyway.” He couldn’t say I wasn
’t thinking about Sierra at all. “I kept hoping this week to get away long enough to bring lunch to your store again, but no such luck.”

  “I’ve seen you on the news. What an awful thing.”

  “Yeah.” Ruthlessly he repressed the memory of the bloody crime scene. “At least there weren’t any little kids involved. That’s the worst.”

  “I can imagine.” She was quiet for a moment. “Did you used to work in Homicide?”

  “Yeah, eight years. It’s grim, but fascinating. This week I’ve had a few regrets that this case wasn’t mine.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the downside of being promoted to administration. Sometimes I think about what drew me to law enforcement in the first place and realize I’ve left it all behind. No more Lone Ranger riding in to save the frightened woman being assaulted. No more saving anyone. And I liked detective work. The puzzle, putting the pieces together, doing interviews and reading people. Figuring it all out. There’s an adrenaline rush when you’re in a dangerous spot, but there’s a different kind when all those pieces click together.”

  Softly Lucy said, “Aren’t you still figuring it all out? And now you’re not saving people one at a time, you’re making us all safer.”

  “Am I?” he asked, not necessarily liking the bleak tone he heard in his voice. “This has been a hell of a week.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I kept finding myself pleased because I’d be on television again. Thinking about how I look, about the impact on the polls, instead of the victims.” Shocked, he stopped. What the hell was he doing, laying himself open like that, especially to a woman who wasn’t willing to bare herself to him? And yet he kept going with a final admission. “I haven’t liked myself much this week.”

  Jon tensed, waiting for her reaction. What was he trying to do, make her dislike him?

  No. Not that. He felt a different kind of shock when he realized that he wanted—needed—her to see the real him, not the noble image he was presenting to voters.

  “You’re not being fair to yourself,” Lucy said. “Of course you have to think about things like that. You’re running for office, partly because you want to do good. Think about it. It’s not really any different than any working person, half focused on a job at hand and half on what the boss will think. We all have a voice running in the back of our heads that’s saying, if the customer gives me kudos, maybe I’ll get that raise I’ve been wanting. Thinking that way doesn’t mean we don’t want to do a really good job, and that we’re not doing the best we can. I’ve been ashamed of myself a few times. I remember once when a cat I’d anesthetized died on the table. I was shattered, trying to figure out if I’d done something wrong. His owner was this sweet old lady who adored him. Calling her was horrible. I was heartsick, and I felt guilty. But the bigger worry was that I’d be in trouble with Dr. Rosario, who owned the practice. I was up for a raise and didn’t want a complaint to jeopardize it.” She paused. “Why would you expect to be any different? You can’t tell me this week you weren’t thinking about the victims, too.”