Caine's Law Read Online Free Page B

Like he’d been dead all along, but once in a while he’d forget long enough to dream he was still alive. Or maybe the dream was that he’d died the way he wished he could have: that he’d given his life to protect her.
    I have failed people I love. Failing them
destroyed
me. What it did to Dad … I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine.
    I know why he took it, though. Why he didn’t kill himself and skip forty years of living death. I figured it out a year or two after I got him sprung from the Buke and moved him into the Abbey with Shanna and Faith and me. I figured it out from seeing how he looked at me.
    Mom would come to him like Banquo’s ghost, and he’d go dead … and when he’d come back, there’d be this look. When he looked at me. After awhile I realized where I knew it from. I recognized the look because when I think about Faith, I see it in the mirror.
    Every time he’d drag himself back from that dead place, he was making a promise. Not to me. That look in his eyes came from silently reminding himself that no matter how crushed he was, how helpless and sick and
guilty
he was, even if I denied him and spit on him and cursed his memory … there was still the thinnest shaved-bare chance that someday there might be something, no matter how small, he could do to help me. There might even come a day when I’d actually need him. The look was him swearing to himself that if such a day should ever come, he would be there. No matter what it cost him.
    He’d be there to save me.
    Even if I never needed saving. Even if all his endurance, all his suffering, if the rot chewing away his brain and the guilt clawing through his heart turned out to be for nothing. Even if there was never one goddamn thing he could ever do.
    Because there would always be that chance …
    Dad in the Mission District Labor Clinic, on his feet, a barbwire tangle of fury and terror. Because he saw in front of him a bad man. A casual killer who takes lives the way most people take showers. Dozens of lives. Hundreds. A man who could slay faster than Dad could blink, and for less reason. Knowing that any slightest twitch might, without warning, drop his bloody corpse on the waiting room floor, he had something he thought was worth dying for.
    He got in front of me.
    In that one long stretching eyeblink of violence gathering like a thunderstorm around us, the clinic’s inner door opened behind the old guy, and one of the practitioner’s aides stuck his head out. “Laborer Michaelson?”
    The old guy turned like he thought the aide was talking to him, but of course the aide was talking to Dad. And me. The old guy just pushed the door a little bit farther open and walked on through. I’m not sure Dad even noticed him go.
    Like the old guy said, we had problems more serious than him.
    “Yes? I’m Prof—Laborer. I’m Laborer Michaelson,” Dad said. “How is she?”
    “Can you come with me, Laborer?”
    All the anger drained out of Dad and didn’t leave anything behind to hold him up. He swayed a little and caught himself by grabbing my shoulder. “I’m here with—this is our son …”
    “It’s very crowded back here, Laborer. Your son has to stay in the waiting room.”
    “You can’t let … we can’t even go in together …?”
    But I knew the look on the aide’s face. I shrugged out from under Dad’s hand and sat back down on the bench, because I could already tell what was coming next.
    “Maybe after you come out, Laborer,” the aide said. “Sorry.”
    Sorry. Yeah.
    It is only now—
literally
now, as I compose these words on the far side of decades that feel more like centuries—that this finally strikes me as incongruous. That Dad could stare violent death square in the eye without so much as a blink, but couldn’t stand up to a goddamn nurse’s aide. At the time, it was obvious. Natural. It was the primary lesson of my life.
    You can fight a threat. You can’t fight the way things