Trouble

I lean back in my chair, relaxing into my cool grin. “Be thankful for that glass. Striking me now would be your last mistake. Now answer my question.”

Our eyes clash and hold. We’re locked in a silent battle for a moment, two… three…

Until he sits back with a chuckle. “Looks like you got a bit of the old man in you after all. Is that what’s got you worried? Afraid you’ll turn out like me? Don’t want to give up your fancy suit, your cushy lifestyle? Don’t get cocky, boy. Half of you is me.”

I turn his words over in my mind, thinking about what they mean.

Perhaps there was a time when this man wasn’t a feral beast. Perhaps if that part of him had been stronger, I might feel a kinship. As it is, my insides are empty as a ghost town, and I have nothing for him but contempt.

Standing, I slide my palm down the front of my blazer. “I don’t see anything I recognize here.”

I tap on the door, and a guard appears to open it. Stepping into the hall, I pause when he calls after me. “You’re no better than me.”

“Actually, I am. I just needed to see it.”

* * *

I’m speeding down the Interstate from Providence, turning east and following the highway farther out to the coast.

After I settled my adopted father’s estate, I swore I’d never return to this strip of land on Aquidneck Island.

When I was a kid, Drake avoided all activities on the island. He didn’t go to parties or host dinners. His castle-like manor was as silent as a tomb.

It wasn’t on Bellevue Avenue, where the Gilded Age mansions of the Vanderbilts and the Astors were located. He preferred a remote location farther south, where we were completely isolated.

Every year, when the America’s Cup would come to town, I’d stand on the roof as the people gathered to watch the sailors race around the coast.

He would be in his study admiring his latest find, and I would gaze down, longing for the world happening around us.

I was a lonely church mouse, wandering his cavernous cathedral, caring for my father when he’d had too much to drink or simply fallen asleep in his chair clutching his gold, then reading myself to sleep.

The day after his lawyer read the will, leaving all of it to me, I got to work. I sold the mansion and almost everything in it. I had a few treasured items he’d allowed me to play with as a child. The rest was gone, and I had enough money to buy the island.

Turning the car into the cemetery, I follow the path slowly past the historic monuments. A life-sized statue of an angel covered in a green patina sits between two headstones, and I know I’m on the right track.

Drake had no family, but I found a deed to a plot in this esteemed burial site as I was going through his things. I took his urn and had a marble headstone fashioned for it.

He didn’t leave an epitaph, so I installed a black granite obelisk with his name and dates engraved on it. When I see it, I park the rental car and step out, walking slowly to the quiet stretch of bright green grass.

The landscape is perfectly manicured, and seagulls cry in the distance. I stop at the place where I planted his remains and read the marker, How terrible it is to love something death cannot touch.

It seemed like an appropriate epitaph. In life, he clung to things he could never take with him, and ultimately, he died the way he lived.

Alone.

Like me.

Standing in front of the black stone, I think about what drove me here. Up until this point, I told myself I wasn’t like this man. I did engage in human contact. I had carefully selected friends, I held a job, and when the need arose, I would have a woman in my bed.

When I kissed Joselyn’s lips and gazed into her eyes that morning, I had a startling realization—I wanted to be the man she believed me to be.

With that realization, the loneliness of my childhood, the self-preservation instinct that kept me safe from the crushing pain of my mother’s rejection, my father’s dysfunction, and Drake’s narcissism, yawned wide like a black hole. I didn’t know how to be that man.

In my arrogance, I convinced myself I could accomplish anything, but lying in that bed, I realized my carefully constructed rules were a façade covering the truth. I don’t know how to touch, to care like a normal human.

“Why couldn’t you have given me that?” My voice is quiet, and I don’t really expect an answer.

I don’t expect closure here in this quiet field.