False Memory

insisted. “Just his cooked-up résumé.”
    “Their tragic death in Chile?...
    “Another lie.” In Skeet’s bloodshot eyes was a fierce light that might have been vengeance. For a moment, the kid appeared not sad at all, not drawn and gaunt and ruined, but full of a wild and barely contained glee.
    Dusty said, “He had such a tremendous disagreement with Colonel Farner that he wanted to change his name?”
    “I guess he liked The Catcher in the Rye.”
    Dusty was amazed. “Maybe he liked it, but did he understand it?” Which was a dumb question. Skeet’s father was as shallow as a petri dish, culturing one short-lived enthusiasm after another, most of them as destructive as salmonella. “Who would want to be Holden Caulfield?”
    “Sam Earner, my good old dad. And I’ll bet it hasn’t hurt the bastard’s career at the university. In his line of work, that name makes him memorable.”
    A horn sounded behind them. The traffic signal had changed from red to green.
    Resuming the drive to New Life, Dusty said, “Where did you learn all this?”
    “To begin with—on the Internet.” Skeet sat up straighter, and with his bony hands, he smoothed his damp hair back from his face. “First, I checked out the faculty emeritus at Rutgers, on their web-site. Everyone who’d ever taught there. Same at Princeton. No one with his parents’ names had been professors at either place. His invented parents, I mean.”
    With an unmistakable note of pride in his voice, Skeet recounted the tortuous route he’d followed in his search for the simple truth about his father. The investigation had required concerted effort and considerable creative thought, not to mention sober logic.
    Dusty marveled that this fragile kid, ravaged by life as well as by his own addictions and compulsions, had been able to focus sharply enough and long enough to get the job done.
    “My old man’s old man, Colonel Earner—he’s long dead,” Skeet said. “But Luanne, his mother, she’s alive. She’s seventy-eight, lives out in Cascade, Colorado.”
    “Your grandmother,” Dusty said.
    “Didn’t know she existed till three weeks ago. Talked to her on the phone twice. She seems real sweet, Dusty. Broke her heart when her only kid cut them out of his life.”
    “Why did he?”
    “Political convictions. Don’t ask me what that means.”
    “He changes convictions with his designer socks,” Dusty said. “It must have been something else.”
    “Not according to Luanne.”
    Pride of accomplishment, which had given Skeet the strength to sit up straighter and lift his chin off his chest, was no longer sufficient to sustain him. Gradually he slid down and retreated turtlelike into the steam, the wet smell, and the soggy folds of his loose rain-soaked clothes.
    “You can’t afford all this again,” Skeet said as Dusty drove into the New Life Clinic parking lot.
    “Don’t worry about it. I have two major jobs lined up. Besides, Martie’s designing all kinds of hideous deaths for Orcs and assorted monsters, and there’s serious bucks in that.”
    “I don’t know if I can go through the program again.”
    “You can. You jumped off a roof this morning. Hell, getting through rehab should be a piece of cake.”
    The private clinic was in a building styled like the corporate headquarters for a prosperous chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants: a two-story hacienda with arched loggias on the first floor, covered balconies on the second, too precisely prettified with royal-purple bougainvillea, which had been meticulously hand-woven around columns and across archways. Perfection had been sought so aggressively that the result was a Disneyesque artificiality, as if everything from the grass to the roof were stamped out of plastic. Here, even the dirty rain had a tinsel glimmer.
    Dusty parked at the curb near the entrance, in the zone reserved for patient admissions. He switched off the wipers, but didn’t kill the engine. “Have you told him what you’ve learned?”
    “You mean good old Dad?” Skeet closed his eyes, shook his head. “No. It’s enough I know it myself.”
    In truth, Skeet was afraid of Professor Caulfield, née Farner, no less now than when he’d been a boy—and perhaps with good reason.
    “Cascade, Colorado,” Skeet said, pronouncing it as if it were a magical place, home to wizards and gryphons and unicorns.
    "You want to go there, see your grandma?”
    “Too far. Too hard,” Skeet said. “I can’t drive anymore.”
    Because of numerous moving violations, he had lost his driver’s license.