The Shadow Catcher

“She told me Pop came home that day and told her what he’d seen. How he’d seen a car parked on the road and stopped to see if someone needed help. Got out of his car. And saw…”

Please don’t say this, I am thinking.

“…a man. Hanging there. And…”

Shut up. Stop speaking now.

“…his legs were kicking.”

I close my eyes.

“…his legs were kicking and my father told my mother that he only stood there. He couldn’t move. He stood there. Couldn’t save him…and he didn’t know how he could live with that.”

We sit together for a while in silence.

“Our fathers…” I begin to say, but stop. “He left you for thirty years.”

“—and your father didn’t?”

“How did you…what reason did you give for him?”

“What reason did you give?”

We wait the question out in silence.

“Didn’t you ever ask yourself…why?” I finally ask. “I mean: he left. Your father left. You and your mother. Weren’t you tempted to wonder if they were ever happy? — your parents?”

“—what does it matter?”

“I think it matters.”

“I think if you think it matters: then, sure. What choice do you have, but to convince yourself that they were happy?”

“Your father still wears his wedding band.”

The Colonel holds his eyes closed a few seconds, then he opens them.

“What was he doing there?”

“—my father?”

“—from Pennsylvania. What was he doing there? In Virginia. In the Park.”

He liked to drive, I try to explain. It helped him think. “He went there once. With my mother. They went there on their honeymoon.”

When they were happy, I almost add.

He stares at the model helicopter.

“Will you go to see him?”

“Pop—?”

Imperceptibly, he nods.

“I drew a map, in case.”

I hand it to him.

“—you drew me a map.”

“To the hospital. To show which entrance you should take.”

“—but you drew me a map,” he repeats and, for whatever reason, my drawing makes him smile, and that smile, I see, is dazzling.

I get there before him to find that Lester isn’t waiting in the hall, so I slip inside the room where Curtis Edwards lies, not so much to see him or to commune with him in any way, but to see if Lester’s with him.

But once inside the room I’m captured by the silent reverence, a sanctity around his body. How small he is. I hadn’t noticed his frailty when I first looked at him a day ago — perhaps because I hadn’t seen the pictures of his former self, robust and smiling for the camera, the shadow of his son’s smile, I recollect. But now the man who made his son light up seems but a shadow, too, a frost of white beard, dusting of fresh snow, across his chin, his blood blue beneath his skin, his lips and fingers fringed in indigo. He is barely breathing and it takes a conscious effort on my part to convince myself that beneath his eyelids there is life. I stand and gaze at him awhile before I realize someone’s watching me from across the room and turn to see Lester in a chair beside the windows on the far side of the second, vacant, bed, so still he’s almost invisible. I go to stand beside him.

“Have you been here all night?”

He nods.

I touch his shoulder.

“You’ve done a good thing.”

“So have you,” he says and inclines his head to point in the direction of the door.

The Colonel has come in.

I had not intended to be present at the moment when the Colonel sees his father but now Lester and I are trapped by the choreography of circumstance and we both freeze, stop breathing, as the Colonel’s gaze barely acknowledges us before focusing on the body of his father.

The Colonel has put on a jacket since our meeting in his office, he’s in full dress uniform, and I can’t help noticing his shoes, those military-issue shoes that always look too shiny for normal use. At over six feet tall he seems to take up all the space beside the bed and he stands at what I have to call ATTENTION for what seems like several minutes until, slowly, I see his edges blur, his sharpness soften like an image in a camera lens deliquescing out of focus.

“Pop—?” he carefully whispers.

Leaning in to look at him, he places both his hands on his father’s legs beneath the blanket.

“Pop, what did you do?”

He waits, as if for an answer.

“What did you do with your life?”