Did you ever have one of those moments where you looked at your parents and you could say with complete conviction that they were proud? Like they show in the movies. They just have this certain look on their faces and you smile to yourself thinking, yeah, I put that there. I made myself something in their eyes. And even if you hate your parents, just down and out can't stand them, you get that feeling. It's always there when you see that look.
My mom had that look when I graduated from the police academy. Boy, I just about busted out of my uniform, knowing that I had done something truly good and right in her eyes. I felt that finally I was living up to my father's name.
And I've met some whom if told that my father had committed suicide, would say that I wasn't living up to what he was, I was pushing him away. I was forging my own path. No matter what my father did, he was my father. I loved him, I looked up to him. I was going to live up to him.
It was late. The exact time escaped me, but all I knew was that it was late and that meant we were closer to that deadline we had. The deadline we had to meet, or rather, the deadline we had to beat because if we didn't, we'd have two dead boys and a hopelessly broken mother. So none of went up to the crib.
We had a case once where we had three days to find a girl. That was about two, three years after I came up to New York. Compared to then, we had all the time in the world, but I knew it wasn't. And I didn't know what was happening to those boys, but I was determined to believe the worst. In that way, I could motivate myself when sleep threatened to take over.
"You sure his alibi checked out?" Fin asked me again.
"Well, we never really know, now do we?" I sighed. "Wife said he was home all night."
"And she was awake to keep tabs on him?"
"A couple months ago, she found out he was having an affair with one of the other teachers. She started marking down the mileage on their cars at night and again in the morning, to make sure he didn't go anywhere."
"Smart woman," Elliot said.
I snorted. "Yeah, lot of good it does us."
"So you want it to be the teacher?" Fin retorted.
"No, but if it was we wouldn't have to look anymore, now would we?"
That stopped the conversation and I felt their eyes on me as I leaned back over my files, trying to find something. I ignored it, but the paper slipped out of focus whenever I tried to make something out of nothing. Instead, I pictured Joann sitting alone on her couch, devoid of tears simply because all day had been spent crying them out. Most strongly came a picture of her looking through a photo album, wondering if she'd ever see her kids again.
My father never gave me much to go on when it came to what he wanted me to do in life. Of course ,there were the obvious, like get married, raise a family and lead a good and honest life. Like he had. Well, up until the end, before he died. He wasn't honest then. But that's besides the point, in a way. He always had this regret that I could never understand. It permeated his happiest hours and he wallowed in it during his most melancholy moments. It seemed as if I would never figure it out.
Then one night I caught him crying downstairs, all alone in the living room. I think I was around eight or nine. I can still picture it, picture him. I had asked what was wrong and he had told me everything. I didn't understand that, just like I didn't understand that regret.
After he died, I figured it out. And that is my regret. That I never knew while my father was alive. Maybe it would have saved him.