Free The Good Atheist by Michael Manto Page B

to let her be. I went into a bedroom, pulled a blanket off one of the beds, and covered her up, carefully tucking it in around the edges. Then I went back into the kitchen and made a second pot of coffee before returning to my reading.
    When I finished the last letter, I was convinced they were from my father, but they left me with more questions than answers. The picture of my father that emerged from the correspondence was completely different from what I’d been told by my mother. There was no mention of another woman, and there had never been a car crash. And he was in hiding from the Tolerance Bureau. That much was apparent. There were no concrete references to places or people. The letters seemed to be very carefully composed not to give any hint of his location.
    And in some of the letters he would mention a major event in my life, such as my engagement and marriage to Selene. Apparently Dad and Grandpa had been keeping track of me, probably using one of the many social websites. This raised a host of questions: why didn’t he or Grandpa contact me? Sending me a message on my social page would have been easy enough. But they both chose to keep tabs on my life remotely, using the web, without ever contacting me.
    It was also apparent that my father had become a Christian. He spoke often of his faith in Christ, which he said sustained him in the difficult conditions of his life. Clearly my mother had lied to me, big time. My father had not died in a car crash, and there had never been another woman.
    I wondered why he’d become a Christian. He was an intelligent, well-educated man. An astronomer, a man of science. He was not the kind of person to indulge in superstitious nonsense. He’d never spoken to me about God, but then religious instruction of minors was illegal and carried some stiff jail time. Both my parents had been very devout atheists, volunteering at the local temple, joining in neighborhood watches. It didn’t make sense.
    I set the letters down on the coffee table and got up from the couch. It was still pitch-black out the windows, and very late. But I couldn’t go to bed, not yet. The question consumed me, and tired as I was, I felt obsessed with the need to know why my father had come to believe in God.
    You can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. Electric light from the den filtered through the frosted panes of the door into the living room. It seemed to me that the answers I wanted could very well be in there. Somewhere in this cottage.
    Jorge had said that my grandfather had moved up here seventeen years ago – which would have been around the same time Dad disappeared. It was very likely that my father had spent time up here, likely read many of those same books in the den. My grandfather had gone to a lot of trouble to acquire those books, since paper books were rare and religious books in particular, having been banned for years, were now extremely difficult to find. I could safely assume that my grandfather considered them important and worth the risk of keeping, and therefore likely to be representative of the Christian faith. Certainly the Bible I had found in there would be.
    Maybe reading those books would help me understand my father’s thought process and the reasons he might have become a believer.
    And that was just the books in the den. This was a good-sized cottage, and a careful search might turn up more clues. Something that might indicate what had happened to my father and where he was now. A photo, an album, a souvenir, files on his computer – anything.
    I came to see the cottage as a vital link to my father, and therefore to my own past. Very likely the only link I had to finding him.
    I went into the den. Selene was still fast asleep in the chair with all the lights on. She’d made a good start in sorting the books, organizing them by subject matter in neat stacks on the floor. Many of the religious books were packed into some plastic crates she’d found in