Shame

liquored up. I was a precocious little bastard.
    “There was a storm that night, a bad storm. I rode it out sitting in a huge pecan tree in our backyard. The wind blew, and the rain poured down, but I stayed up in that tree. No one knew I was there. I heard so much up there: my parents making love, and then their arguing, and then their fighting. I heard him strike my mother. I heard her cry out in pain, and I hated him almost as much as when I had heard her cry out in pleasure.
    “But for once, I could get back at him. I’d heard something up in my tree, something I knew was big. Small pitchers havewide ears. I knew who Shame was. Everyone did. He was the Bogeyman of my school. Mother never came out directly and announced that my father was Shame, but I knew from what she said that night. His guilt didn’t matter to her. She loved him and tried to talk with him, tried to get him to stay in Eden, but he wouldn’t think of it. He all but admitted who he was, and he taunted her with that knowledge and told her that he didn’t love her, that she was only convenient. He killed her in a thousand little ways.
    “Later that night, when both of them were asleep, I came down from the pecan tree. The two of them hadn’t even noticed my absence, had never checked on me. I’d had time to do a lot of thinking up in my tree. And practicing. I talked back to the storm, but I didn’t use my own voice. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I called the Sheriff’s Office, and I made my confession in my grown-up voice, my father’s voice. ‘Come and get me,’ I told them. ‘I’ll be sleeping off a little booze.’
    “I was the only one awake when the authorities surrounded the house. I could hear their footsteps. I knew they were taking up their positions. And then all of a sudden everything happened. Doors got thrown open and windows were broken and people were shouting, and three men were grabbing my father, and I was watching the whole thing.
    “No one took any notice of me—except my father.
    “As they were throwing the handcuffs on him, amid all the craziness of the moment, he looked at me. Our eyes met, and it was like we were the only people in the room.
    “I heard the officers asking him about it. ‘Why’d you confess, Shame? Why’d you call us up?’ And he answered while looking at me. ‘Because it was time to give it up.’”
    Elizabeth reached out a hand, touched his wet cheek.
    “Bastard,” said Caleb. “Bastard.”
    She wasn’t sure if he was talking about his father or himself.
    “No one ever suspected,” Caleb said. “Not even my mother. That night I probably would have told the officers what I’d done, except for that moment that had passed between us, and the understanding that had come with it. His eyes had warned me, had told me I could never tell. Being the son of Shame, he knew, would be bad enough. But it would be even worse to be known as the boy who engineered his father’s death. Who betrayed him. He spared me that stigma. The son of a bitch protected me. And what was worse, he never held it against me that I betrayed him. The last time we talked, he even told me he was proud of me.”
    Caleb reached for his coffee cup, tried raising it up, but couldn’t. He covered his eyes with his shaking hands. Between hiccups, he said, “How—could—a—fuck—ing—ser—i—al—mur—der—er—act—so—no—ble?”
    So that’s it, thought Elizabeth. And now she was crying as well. For so long it hadn’t made sense. Gray had been protecting his son. He had been given a role to play, the killer who wanted to die, and he had never deviated from it.
    No more ghosts, Gray, she thought. No more ghosts.
    “You didn’t kill him,” said Elizabeth, “you saved him. You offered him his only chance for redemption. Before you made that call, his life was already over. And it was wasted, so wasted. He knew what a terrible person and a terrible father he’d been, but you gave him an opportunity to do the right thing. It was his way of showing you that he cared. I know it’s hard for you to see it, Caleb, but what you did was the best possible thing for him. It saved him from killing again, and it was a chance for him to do right by you, his only chance.”
    “I killed him.”
    “He killed himself.”
    “I don’t think you understand, Elizabeth. Maybe you better get your tape recorder out, or bring out your pen so you can take some good notes.”
    “Why?”
    “For the rest of the