The first thing he does, once the prison gates swing shut behind him and he stands on the street a free man, is seek out his daughter. It’s only natural—Abigail is the center of his universe, the sun around which his whole world revolves. Her presence in his life is as basic a need as air.
The feeling, of course, is not mutual.
Abigail does not hate her father; a soul like hers is too gentle, too pure for something as vile as hate. But waking up to find that he’d killed in her name had changed something irrevocably between them, had opened a rift that neither she, for all her kindness, nor he, for all he aches, can ever hope to bridge.
She’s 58 years old now, and a mother with two children. Her sons are 24 and 22, and he has never met either of them. It’s for the best , he thinks, as the payphone begins to ring. His kind of love only seems to bring pain.
The second thing he does, once the strained smiles and open unease that meet him at Abigail’s house become too much, is buy some flowers.
Asphodels, for peace after death. White chrysanthemums, for grief. Red spider lilies, for bidding a final goodbye. “Visiting someone?” the cashier asks. Pulling some wrinkled old bills from his wallet, Callaghan just nods.
Sunset View Cemetery is a lovely place, all lush green grass and coastal breezes. Plodding through the rows of graves, he wonders if he’ll come to rest somewhere half as nice when his time comes. Somehow, he doubts it.
The headstone he’s visiting is an older one, three decades of exposure worn into its flat face. Age has not lessened its simple elegance, though; it has been lovingly tended.
TADASHI HAMADA
2011-2032
Shined so brightly, gone too soon
Robert Callaghan’s stiff joints ache as he kneels in the grass before the grave and sets the flowers down. He is 82 years old. His hair has gone white, his hands are gnarled and liver-spotted, and his eyes have seen so much. His life has been a long, winding, often painful affair, riddled with setbacks and losses and awful mistakes. But it is his life, and he got to live it.
Tadashi did not.
“Was it worth it?”
The boy’s aunt had asked as much, once. Years and years ago, when Callaghan’s sentence had just begun. There had been no anger in her eyes, no spite; her face was etched from marble, her gaze as cool as stone. She’d looked at him in his orange jumpsuit and tiny cell and seen nothing , a sad little man with nothing left. He hadn’t answered her, then.
“I saw it as a sacrifice,” he tells the grave, in a voice that is reedy and thin. “A trade. A life for a life.” He’d had to. Abigail was alive and Tadashi was dead—joy and guilt had warred like beasts in his chest. He’d needed it all to make sense. But human beings are not machines, blessed with problems that always have straightforward answers, and blood is never spilled neatly; as he’d watched the world go by from a cell and the shame in his daughter’s eyes became clear to him, Callaghan’s surety had wavered.
“I would do it again,” he admits. “For her. To bring her home.” Bringing her home hadn’t been his intention, all those years ago. If he’d known she was out there, if he’d cared to look, it would have been. But he’d been angry, so angry back then, so blinded by rage and hurt. He’d wanted revenge, at any price. That his quest for it had ended with Abigail safe was merely a whim of fate. If that was what it took, though, he’d do it a thousand times.
“But if there was a way…a way to save you both…” he forges on, and his eyes are shut now, closed against the light of a beautiful, shining world he will never know, a world where his family is whole and the boy who’d called him his mentor so proudly is making his own name immortal. It’s a world like the sun—it hurts to look at. “…I won’t ask you for forgiveness,” he states, once his throat is not quite so tight. “I can’t.” He has no right, and even if he did, Tadashi cannot give it. “But I want you to know that…that I never meant for you to get hurt.”
Not that it matters. He’d been willing to hurt others, had tried his damnedest to kill when it suited him. All the terror and pain he’d caused make his words now empty. But Callaghan is selfish, and he needs to say them anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks. “I…I’m sorry.”
But the boy is asleep beneath the earth, and does not hear him.