The Signal

Some fathers leave their sons an inheritance. Mine left me a cipher.

I was ten years old the last night I slept in that house on 41st Avenue, though I didn't know it yet — nothing that Tuesday announced what it actually was. Twelve years ago I drove to a facility in Texas to watch my father die, still trying to find the man who used to run alongside my bike with his hand hovering an inch off the seat, promising he wouldn't let go. I never found him. I found the other man instead — the one the case files and the documentaries and the message boards argue about, the one who borrowed the Zodiac's ciphers like a costume for something that was never really about the Zodiac at all.

I'm forty now. I have a daughter of my own, eleven in October, and a wife who's spent eleven years loving a man with a locked room inside him and never once asked for the key.

This is the story of a San Francisco fog, a bus stop on Taraval, and a woman who sat down next to a stranger in 1987 without knowing what she was choosing. It's the story of a detective who's called me every few years for thirty years, for reasons that were never really about the case. And it's the story of the year I finally decided my daughter deserved to know exactly where she comes from.

Some doors don't stay locked forever. Some signals take thirty years to receive.