was more complicated. We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives. I couldn’t recognize my self-deception then. I was still in a state of prolonged shock from a marriage that had endured a tragedy—or more accurately, failed to endure one—then spiraled into divorce as my professional life entered the stratosphere, but I see it now.
I came home because of a woman.
She was only a girl when I left home, and I, a confused boy. But no matter how relentlessly life tried to beat the softness out of me, to encase me in the hard, brittle carapace of cynicism, one pure thing remained alive and true: the half-Jordanian, half-Mississippian girl who unfolded the secret joys of life for me was so deeply imprinted upon my soul that no other woman ever measured up to her. Twenty-eight years of separation had proved insufficient to kill my yearning to be near her again. Sometimes I worry that my mother has known my hidden motive from the start (or maybe only sensed it and prayed that she was wrong). But whether she knows or whether she remains as ignorant as I was on the day I finally gave in, I took a leave of absence from my print and TV gigs, packed up my essentials, and made a white-knuckled drive south to test Thomas Wolfe’s most famous dictum.
Of course you can go home again, answered my pride. At least for a little while. You can do your filial duty. For what man who thinks of himself as a gentleman would not? And once that duty is discharged, and Himself is dead, perhaps you can persuade your mother to return with you to Washington. Truth be told, I probably knew this was a forlorn hope, but it gave me something to tell myself, rather than think too deeply about the unsolvable problem. No, not my father’s situation. The girl. She’s a woman now, of course, a woman with a husband, who is probably my best friend from childhood. She also has a son, who is twelve years old. And while this knot may not seem particularly Gordian in our age of universal divorce, other factors ensure that it is. My father’s plight, on the other hand . . . will inevitably resolve itself.
I sound cold, I suppose.
I don’t say that Dad bears all the blame for his situation. He endured his share of suffering, God knows—enough to cure him of religion for life. Two years before he married my mother, he lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash. As if that weren’t enough, when I was in the ninth grade my eighteen-year-old brother also died in an accident, a tragedy that struck our town like a bomb dropped from an invisible height. Perhaps losing two children in succession broke my father. I could understand that. When my brother, Adam, died, it was as though God reached out and switched off the lights of the world, leaving me to stumble through the next two years like a blind man unable to adapt to his new affliction.
But “God” wasn’t done with me yet. Twenty years after Adam’s death, I lost my two-year-old son—my only child—in the most domestic of accidents. I know what it means to be broken by fate.
I do, however, still function.
I work sources, write stories, go on CNN and MSNBC to comment on the issues of the day. I even make speeches for $35,000 a pop (or I used to, before I moved back to my third-world state and sent my market quote into irreversible decline). The point is I suffered, but I got on with it. That’s what I was taught to do—by my mother, of course, not my father. Also by Buck Ferris, the archaeologist and scoutmaster who stepped in after my father opted out of his paternal duty and did what he could to make a man of me. After all my success, Buck figured he’d accomplished that. I’ve never been sure. If I do prove it to myself one day, he’ll never know. Because sometime last night, Buck Ferris was murdered.
Buck’s passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that’s the way these things generally start. A death provides a convenient line of demarcation, kicking off the familiar tableau of investigation, the assigning of guilt, the determining of punishment. But beginnings are complex things. It can take decades to determine the exact chain of cause and effect that led