Free Unconditional by Blake Crouch Page A

light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing
soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all
the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced
questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as
the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to
appreciate what I had.
    When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man,
drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my
disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time
I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once
someone’s little boy.”
    I cannot separate the man you are now from
the boy you were then, and it is killing me.
    I wanted everything for you, son.
    I still do.
    You never experienced the gift of children,
and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can
still love you, how, even though you took everything from me,
you’re still all that I have.
    When you were a child, I didn’t tell you
about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait. In the same way,
let’s forget all that’s happened in the past, and let me just be
your Papa for the four and a half hours you have left to live. When
they strap you down, please say your piece to the families of the
victims, but then find my eyes, seek out my face, and if you hold
any shred of love for me, take comfort in my presence.
    The night of your birth while your mother
slept I walked you up and down the hospital corridor, your tiny
heart racing against my chest. I sang into your ear, told you that
no matter what happened, I would be your Papa.
    Always.
    And I stand by that still.
     
    The young man behind the Plexiglas turns over
the last page of the letter and stares into the scuffs in the
table. Through the walls, you can hear metal doors closing, bolts
sliding home, the distant voices of the guards. He doesn’t look
anything like a monster. Rather, an IT guy. Wire-rim glasses.
Scrawny and slight. Five-seven in shoes with generous heels.
Five-six in the prison-issue flip-flops. He’s had a recent
shave.
    The old man startles when he reaches up to
unshelve the phone again.
    For a long time, they both just breathe into
the receivers, and when he speaks, his voice is soft and southern
and contains a raspy, blown-out quality, as if he spent the last
four years screaming.
    “That’s all you got to say to me?”
    As his father nods, he can see the long,
blanched line of scarring across the old man’s throat, and he feels
a flicker—not remorse, not regret, just some unidentified emotional
response, alien because it’s rare.
    “I heard they had to cut out your
voicebox.”
    A nod.
    “And you won’t use one of them speech
enhancement devices?”
    Shake.
    “Hell, I wouldn’t either. I don’t want to
speak for you, but I would think not having to talk to assholes has
a bright side.”
    His old man breaks the slightest smile.
    “So you aren’t going to ask me? That’s not
why you came?”
    A look of recognition passes across his
father’s hazel eyes like the shadow of a cloud, and the old man
shakes his head.
    “You just came for me. To be here for
me.”
    The young man is quiet for a long while. He
gathers up the pages of the letter and reads them again. When he
finishes, he stares at his father, feels the tremor he’s been
fighting for the last two days sneaking back, and he has to sit on
his right hand to stop it.
    “I want to do something for you now. It ain’t
much but it’s all I got to give. You remember the big Magnolia tree
I used to climb in the cemetery? That’s where Mom is. Underneath
it.”
    A sheet of tears begins to shimmer across the
surface of his father’s eyes.
    “I can’t tell you why I did what I did to
her. To you. So if you came to hear where I put her, now you heard,
and now you can leave and quit pretending and I won’t hold it
against you.”
    His father lowers the phone and leans in
toward the scratched-up Plexi.
    Mouths, I’m not going