34
The Substance of Things
I didn’t feel particularly brave as I approached my father in the Chapel that
night. I saw my role as reconnaissance: I was there to relay information, to
tell Dad that Shawn had threatened Audrey, because Dad would know what
to do.
Or perhaps I was calm because I was not there, not really. Maybe I was
across an ocean, on another continent, reading Hume under a stone archway.
Maybe I was racing through King’s College, the Discourse on Inequality
tucked under my arm.
“Dad, I need to tell you something.”
I said that Shawn had made a joke about shooting Audrey, and that I
thought it was because Audrey had confronted him about his behavior. Dad
stared at me, and the skin where his lips had been tightened. He shouted for
Mother and she appeared. Her mood was somber; I couldn’t understand why
she wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“What exactly are you saying?” Dad said.
From that moment it was an interrogation. Every time I suggested that
Shawn was violent or manipulative in any way, Dad shouted at me: “Where’s
your proof? Do you have proof?”
“I have journals,” I said.
“Get them, I’m going to read them.”
“I don’t have them with me.” This was a lie; they were under my bed.
“What the hell am I supposed to think if you ain’t got proof?” Dad was still
shouting. Mother sat on the sofa’s edge, her mouth open in a slant. She
looked in agony.
“You don’t need proof,” I said quietly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve both seen
it.”
Dad said I wouldn’t be happy until Shawn was rotting in prison, that I’d
come back from Cambridge just to raise hell. I said I didn’t want Shawn in